NUTCRACKER
by
SHANA ALEXANDER


 Also by Shana Alexander

VERY MUCH A LADY

ANYONE'S DAUGHTER

TALKING WOMAN

SHANA ALEXANDER'S STATE-BY-STATE GUIDE

TO WOMEN'S LEGAL RIGHTS

THE FEMININE EYE

 MONEY, MADNESS MURDER.  A FAMILY ALBUM

A DELL BOOK

 Published by

Dell Publishing Co."  Inc.

I Dag Hammarskjold Plaza

New York, New York 10017

For Kirk and Scott Thompson, and Joyce

Back cover photos:

Frances Schreuder Copyright 0 1983 by Heather Nelson

Larry Schreuder dated 12/20/79 courtesy of Bethlehem (PA)

Police Department

Marc Schreuder Copyright 0 1981 by Wide World Photos

Copyright (c) 1985 by Shana Alexander

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher,
except where permitted by law.  For information address: Doubleday &

Company, Inc."  New York, New York.

Dell' TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co."  Inc.

ISBN: OA40-16512-1

Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

January 1986

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Kirk and Scott Thompson, and joyce
Contents

Foreword 1

Part One Overtu res 11

Part Two The Family 35

Part Three The Boiling Up 133

Part Four The Boiling Over 191

Part Five The Closing In 255

Part Six The Closing Down 331

Afterword 421

Index 434

 -Florence 0880 tEdna Clara 0119o.

Idaho-igw) Jack Craig

Jewel (1883) Frederickjohn (iggi.

Utah-sqfill) marnied Mildred Fliffier- BUr

Roy 0 887) Bernard Briggs (i8q3-96o)

Ruth

Lloyd (1893) Floyd Samuel (1$94-1943)Don

Beatrice (Aunt Sea) Roberts Horion (1897) Willett (1869-1847)

Otis (1899) Mary Genevieve (1898-1962) mar ned Sept.  9, ipojames
(lark

Franklin James (i".  Utah-1978.  Utah) married Oct.  ji, 1924
BercrikeJewen

Bertha Mae (eqoS.  Canada104) -edjunt 16.  1926 Anic

Meril Berk

Emma Marie (i(jo7, Canada)

Richard Grant (igio.  Canada- i9s i)

Rev.  Daniel jewett (Baptist Minister)

President, Central College, Pella.  Iowa if loo Vi-aNv) married

Priscilla Kimball 3 dau Ithters

Francis (Frank) Wi niel Jewell (1841, l0wil-1924"Calif) James William
RoIx-ras married married i88n, Sanbut it.  ltnia Harriet Frances
Detweiler Jacy Arahclla DavisRithard'travis Kiadshaw (1833, Oihio-i84
)2) 1 .9) (1859-'411

r- 1'aniclJcwetl FlorclicLx)vc)John

Franklin Bradshaw Emma Briggs (1876-1956) (1881.  Iowa)(1869,
Utah-1941.  Utall) (1870.  Utull-1923, Utah) married Aug 14, iqui, Neb.
married jan 3u.  j899, l'iviv, Vtah

William Jewell Berenice JewettFranklin

James Bradshaw (tSee above) (1904- (May 12, 1903April 3,1903JUly
23,1978, Utah) married Oct.  31, 1924, Ogden, Utah

Robert Bradshaw Elaine 131rad shaw

Marilyn Bradshaw Frances Bernice Bradshaw (Aug.  10.  19v7-Junc 25,
1966) (March 14, 1931( JUly6,1929- (April 6, ig.j8married Sept.  13,
195 6, Calif.  married jq6o, N.Y.

Mason DrukrnanRobert McMillan Reagan 2 - (1!)23"Maxwell Oliver
DrukinanSamuel Albert Drukrnan (June 6, 1962June 25, '958- )

Vinoriol Gentile FFrederik ~ h reuder ()~)27, italy- (1(.)2t)"I loll
and ?na?TiC(jja~j.  9, 195 9, New, Yiark, N.Y married Feb.  2, 1969,

New York, N.Y

Lorenzo Gentile Marco gentile-im-,

Schreuder (Feb.  6. iq6o, New York, N.Y.- (ICC.  21, 10.460, New

York.  N.Y.- (April to, 1473, New York.  N.Y.

A.K.A. A.K.A.

Lawrence Schreuder Marc Schreuder

A. K. A.

Lawrence Bradshaw Foreword I HAVE BEEN ACTIVE as a writer and
journalist for nearly forty years.  But the number of great reporters I
have run across in that time would make, as they say, a slim book.
Without question, the top man on my list would be

Tommy Thompson.

In October 1982 I was in my Long Island kitchen when Thompson, the best
friend I then had in the world, made one of his frequent Sunday calls
from his home in Los Angeles.  Since we were both professional writers,
these chats began with the ritual greeting of our trade: How's the book
going?

Tommy chided me for not yet having sent him galley proofs of the one I
had just finished.  I told him a set was already in the mail.  He would
surely have it in a day or two.

"Pamper me," Tommy said.  "Dig up another set, and send it to me in
Texas first thing tomorrow morning."  He was catching a plane to
Houston that night, and had just reserved "the most expensive suite I
could get in the fanciest new hotel in town."

"I've decided I can use a little pampering," he said.  "The doctors
here now think they've found cancer cells in my liver,"

I knew that Tommy had suffered intermittent bouts of hepatitis for many
years; I remembered when he had first contracted it in New York after a
"routine" blood transfusion.  His experience since then, he told me,
had suggested that doctors didn't really know very much about the
liver, and therefore he had "made up my mind to fight" this latest
diagnosis.

"But I think I can fight it better from Houston, where I know
everybody," he said.  "They've got all kinds of wonderful new
diagnostic procedures down there, some of them not very pleasant.  So
what I've decided to do is check into this incredibly expensive hotel,
then go to the hospital every morning and let them give me the works.
But at night I go back to my fancy suite, order myself up a glorious
dinner, put on my new silk pajamas, and climb into my king-size bed.
Then all I'll need is a really great book to read.

That's where you come in."

Oh, shameless Tommy!

I knew that when he mentioned "knowing everybody" in Houston, Tommy
wasn't talking about all the rich and powerful real-life Texans he'd
described in his blockbusting book Blood and Money.  Nor was he
thinking of his recent, even more successful Houston-based novel,
Celebrity.  The book he had in mind was Hearts, an earlier bestseller
Thompson had written soon after leaving his staff job at Life magazine.
Hearts is a meticulous account of the ferocious mano-a-mano between
Houston's two world-famous heart surgeons, Dr.  Michael DeBakey and
Dr.

Denton Cooley.

The book was the product of a year-long, relentless investigation by

Thompson of big-money miracle medicine as it had come to be practiced
in his native state in the early 1970s, and from the day it was
published,

Hearts had assured its author permanent folk hero status throughout
the

Houston medical community.

Tommy had been a hero of my own since the late 1950s when I first saw
him scrunch his big frame down behind an office typewriter and, not
even breathing hard, start tapping out a story on deadline, captions
and headlines included, at Gatling-gun tempo, all of it word-perfect
the first time out.  It was a nerveless performance, the journalistic
equivalent of a high-wire front somersault without a net, especially
dazzling to a stammering writer like myself, Queen of False Starts.
Much later I learned that I was a kind of heroine of his.  That was the
time he called to say he hoped I wouldn't mind that he'd used me as a
model for a character in his first novel, "suitably disguised," he
hastened to assure me, "as a gorgeous, six-foot-tall, redheaded
playwright."  Come to think of it, it was the one time I can remember
Tommy sounding nervous.

I gave him my queenly permission.

Back in the glory-struck heyday of Life magazine-the 1950s and early
ig6os-Tommy and I had worked side by side for a decade, star writers on
the richest, biggest and best mass magazine in the world.  It was a
great adventure, a nonstop journalistic carnival, and while it was
going on we tended to think of those times as our own best days as
well.  It was Tommy who had had the courage to jump ship first, an act
most of the others on staff viewed as equal to leaping blindly from the
first-class deck of the

Queen Mary; and it was he who had encouraged me to jump next, and had
held out his hand.

By that time, unknown to each other, both of our personal lives had
begun to unravel.  Whatever glorious voyage we were on must have seemed
less than glorious to our spouses, and certainly it had stirred up the
home lives of three young children-his two sons, my daughter.  It was
only long after our divorces were accomplished that Tommy and I could
laugh about our early, painful days as single parents-the children's
beach picnics we had organized, and the Thanksgiving and Christmas
"family feasts" we had staged at Hollywood's most expensive
restaurants.  The three kids, rebelling against our softheaded
sentimentality, usually behaved like unbearable brats, attacking where
it hurt most: the tender guilt zone that lies below the belt line of
every divorced parent.  But the kids survived, and out of it all had
grown a rock-sturdy devotion between Tommy and myself, mostly unspoken,
but rooted nonetheless in the deep heart's core.

"I think I can probably win this fight," he was saying now on the
telephone.  "I certainly intend to give it my best shot.  But whatever
happens, Shana, I feel absolutely certain that you and I have already
savored all the best things life can offer.  We've been every place,
we've seen every thing, we've covered all the best stories, and we've
met the most interesting people of our times.  We've had the most fun.
How could life get any better than it's already been?"

Tommy's casual conversation that afternoon, I realized later, had been
more carefully prepared than it appeared.

Tommy never read my book; I doubt he even got it.  Liver cancer was
already fighting him back.  Three weeks later Tommy Thompson, 49, was
dead.

It was five months after that before the promotion tour of my book
brought me back to California.  I telephoned Tommy's sons and suggested
they come round to my hotel for lunch.  An hour later, two young men
filled my doorway, each one even taller and more rugged-looking than
their father had been.

We went downstairs and ordered lunch in the familiar El Padrino Lounge,
where Tommy and I had shared so many lunches long ago.  The room was
jammed, and when I remarked that the service seemed slower than it used
to be, one of the boys said, "I'll go find out what's holding things
up."

How like the father!  I thought, as I watched the son extricate himself
from our booth, politely but firmly shoulder his way past several
startled waiters and busboys, and stride directly out into the hotel
kitchens.  When Tommy said find out, he meant that he would personally
find out.  He would go there himself, and ask questions, and look
around.  There was no place he feared to go, no question he was too
respectful to ask, no gambit he hesitated to use to find out whatever
he thought he needed to know.  He was totally unselfconscious about
this extreme directness-I remember my own astonishment at hearing Tommy
inquire of a billionaire we had just met precisely how much money he
had.  Yet Tommy's manner, his charm, the utter sincerity of his wish
and need to find the answer, and his persistence and energy and
resourcefulness in digging for it had made him a reportorial force
impossible to resist or long deceive.

His sons had the same easy manner, the same good-natured charm.  I had
not seen Kirk or Scott Thompson since their weedy, impossible teenager
days; lunch was turning into a very agreeable surprise.  Over coffee
came a bigger surprise still.  "We've been talking a lot lately about
Dad's new book, the one he'd just started on before he died, and we've
decided that you are the person Dad would have wanted us to turn over
his notebooks to.  He would have wanted you to be the one to write
it."

Only the very young, and very loving, could ever be so certain what the
dead "would have wanted," I thought, fumbling for my sunglasses.

Tommy Thompson was Fort Worth born and bred, the older son of a high
school principal and a high school English teacher; his younger
brother, Larry

Thompson, became one of Houston's most capable trial lawyers.  I don't
know whether Tommy would have had the patience to study law.  His taste
was for speed, action, adventure, drama.  He had put his talents, his
energy and his great generosity into the service of taking the reader
along.

He called himself a "born headline junkie," and recalled as a boy
sitting on the family front porch before dawn waiting for the paperboy
to arrive.

He had started his own newspaper at eight; edited his high school
newspaper even though he had to quit the football team to do it;
majored in journalism at the University of Texas, graduated with honors
in journalism in 1955, and become the star reporter on the Houston
Press and the youngest city editor of a major daily in the country by
the time he was twenty three years old.

Then and later, Tommy was quite simply the best reporter anybody had
ever seen.  He was extremely surefooted, always racing and always
setting new records.  And, like every natural-born reporter,

Tommy was eternally convinced that the story he had just stumbled upon
was the best one yet.

One morning in the spring of 1982, in Las Vegas, where Tommy was then
living in order to do research for his new novel, he had picked up the
newspaper, at dawn as usual, and read about a murder case in nearby
Salt

Lake City.  Nearly four years after the shooting down of a rich old man
in a seedy old warehouse, two suspects finally had been arrested and
charged.  One was the victim's seventeen-year-old grandson.  His
accomplice was his mother, "a Manhattan socialite."  She was still in
New York City, fighting extradition.  The boy was in custody in Utah,
where his trial was about to begin.

Thompson put down the newspaper, picked up the phone, and reserved a
seat on a flight to Salt Lake.  Then he called his publisher in New
York and said that, with the publisher's permission, he was temporarily
putting aside his new novel in favor of what he knew best: true-life
crime stories.  Yes, he was sure he had just found the best one yet.

When Tommy found the news item in the paper about the upcoming trial,
he not only knew he had to write a book about it, he knew the title:
Mama's

Boy.  Tommy was right.  That was the best possible title for what the
story then appeared to be.  But many things have happened since.  Two
months after the first trial, perhaps sooner, illness forced Tommy to
stop work.

More than a year passed before the story's climactic trial.  There
would turn out to be three of them.  The third one was Mama's own.

By then the story had not just moved forward and expanded, it had
changed shape.  Its color and texture were different.  The focus had
altered.  And so the present book is not a continuation of Tommy's
book.  Nutcracker is my book, reported and written by me alone, in my
way, in accordance with my particular interests.  But it could never
have come about without

Tommy's interests, Tommy's instincts, Tommy's love and counsel and
example over more than twenty years; without the confidence and tact
and skill of Tommy's family, his friends and publishing associates.
Most important, part of the work is built on a solid foundation of
Tommy

Thompson's original notes.

These arrived on my doorstep one morning in early summer, j983, firmly
tied up with tape in several directions in an accordion-pleated
lawyer's file.  Inside it were all of Tommy's trial notes, and a score
of individual interviews typed up by Tommy on his beat-up

Olivetti the night of whatever day he wrote them down.  Later, when I
had an opportunity to compare his typed notes with the trial
transcript, I realized that Tommy's extraordinary aquamarine eyes had
not missed a single legal curlicue in some exceedingly strange legal
proceedings.

Engrossing though it was, the story seemed maddeningly incomplete. 
Yet, as soon as I had untied the file and begun to read, Tommy had me
back where he kept all his readers: in his lap, held there securely for
as long as it might take him to tell the tale.  He had had millions of
us as readers, and a very few fortunate ones of us had him as a friend.
Now I felt triply bound to him: as a reader, as a friend, and as a sort
of trustee.  As time passed and I dug deeper into the story, I came to
feel like Scheherazade.

Tell us a story, he'd said, handing me the opening pages.

Before I do that, I want to add a word about my own working methods.
In

August 1983 I wrote to the "Manhattan socialite," Frances Schreuder.  I
told her that I had agreed with a publisher to write a book about her
and her family, and had begun work.  I said that I'd be in court in
Utah the next month when her trial began, and requested a meeting
beforehand.  The book would be my third attempt to describe in full
what happens when someone gets caught in the public eye while at the
same time embroiled in that clanking, overworked, unpredictable
machinery we call "the criminal justice system."

I did not expect my letter to result in a publishable interview.  Like
the subjects of the previous books, Patty Hearst and Jean Harris, she
was a criminal defendant on the eve of trial.  I wanted her, and her
lawyers, to know my own ground rules for undertaking projects of this
kind.  Under separate cover I sent her a copy of my last book, and
settled down to await a reply.  Eventually the certified and registered
letter was returned unopened.  I don't know what happened to the
book.

But on my first day in Salt Lake City I got an opportunity to declare
my intentions to her eighty-year-old mother, Berenice Bradshaw.  Thanks
to

Thompson's notes, I had recognized her sitting in the courtroom during
pretrial hearings, and that evening I found her in the phone book.  She
invited me to come right over.  It turned out she had admired both
Tommy's books and my own, and had even sent her daughter a copy of my
latest one.

Could this be the reason I felt so drawn to this sprightly old woman? 
I don't think so, but I mention it now in view of the way things turned
out later.

An honest book about a real person pleading Not Guilty to a real crime
can only work one way, I explained to her: It must be my book, not
yours, not your daughter's.  so no agreements in advance, no payments,
no promises of any kind.  I hope you will cooperate, because that will
probably make it a better book, and it will certainly make my own job
easier.  But I intend to write the book either way.  At this point I
usually remind the almost certainly hostile lawyers and clients that
people are powerfully attracted to certain true-life crime stories, and
books about the case are inevitable.

I will try very hard to understand what happened, and get the story
straight.  So she can cooperate, in hopes of making the inevitable
better, more accurate, more comprehensible--or she can stonewall. 
Since I find this hard-nosed approach impossible to carry off in
person, I normally resort to doing so by letter.  But in Berenice
Bradshaw's case, that was not necessary.  This lively lady could
scarcely wait to tell me about herself, her family, her troubles, and
to introduce me to as many of her lawyers as possible.

We spent much of the next two weeks together, while her daughter's
lawyers were making pretrial motions and a jury was being selected.
Quite properly, the press was barred from these voir dire proceedings.
By the time the lawyers had picked a jury, Berenice Bradshaw had told
me the story of her life, given me her own and her husband's
"autobiographies" to read, shown me her house, her family photo albums,
taken me on a picnic and tour of her old neighborhood, and invited me
to a Sunday brunch she was giving for her lawyers and their wives on
the eve of trial.

The morning her trial began, Frances Schreuder pressed a crumpled note
into my hand: "Confidential.  Please tell NO ONE.  I am in room #5or at
the

Marriott HoteL You must understand what I'm suffering.  Where can you
be reached?"  She was registered at the hotel under an assumed name.  I
called her that afternoon.  As she requested, I told no one, including
her mother.

We spoke several more times by phone but could not meet while her trial
was in progress.  She mistrusted her lawyers, she said, and feared
their disapproval.  Every day after court during the seven day trial I
called her mother.  As a potential witness, Mrs.  Bradshaw was barred
from the courtroom, and was avid for a running account of the struggle
taking place behind Judge Baldwin's locked doors.  After the verdict,
Frances Schreuder invited me to her locked hotel room where we spent
one very long afternoon together.

Eventually I was able personally to interview at length almost all of
the people who appear in this book.  With the exception of Frances
Schreuder's young daughter, all names are real.  Many valuable sources,
however, talked to me on condition that their names not appear.  Some
were being protective of themselves or others; some were fearful of
retribution.  In all, more than three hundred people helped me to
accumulate the information that appears in these pages. 
Understandably, a number preferred to speak anonymously, and I must
thank them in like fashion.

Of the others, I must thank first my tireless and caring editors, Sam

Vaughan and Jim Moser, and my literary agents and dear friends Joy
Harris and Robbie Lantz: without the unflagging support and various
navigational skills of these four people, this book could not have come
about.

Invaluable expert help was rendered to me by Alec Dubro, Dr.  Erika
Freeman, the Honorable Betty Friedlander, Abraham Halpern, M.D."  Betty
Prashker,

Richard Stoney.  Great assistance was received from Ann and Fred Hart
and

Jean Smart.  There would quite literally be no manuscript without the
many meticulous professional attentions of Millie Becerra and Kathy
Alexander, my ever brave and honest first reader.  The unflagging
encouragement I received along the way from Maya Angelou, Ann
Bronfirian, Richard Craig,

Gloria Jones, Mary and John Lindsay, Kennett Love, and Jean Harris was
a source of continual wonder and nurturance.  Most of all, I thank
Eleanora and Michael Kennedy and Laurel and Wray Bentley for assistance
personal and professional beyond measure.

The past two years of researching and writing have been variously a
trial, an adventure, a workout, and what is called on talk shows a
"growth experience."  Endings are always harder than beginnings.
Getting out of something is always harder than getting in.  The only
way out of this one for me was to write my way out.

So here it all is, Tommy: The story of Mama's boy, and of Mama.  And of
her other children, and of her parents, Granny Bradshaw and Gramps, and
of the

Bradshaws' other children, and of all the friends and enemies, cops and
judges, psychiatrists and lawyers--more than forty of those-who play a
part in the tale.  Part One

Overtures THE GREAT GOLD HALL ablaze with lights, the red velvet seats
alive with children ... rows and rows of children's faces, all
upturned, a Christmas candy box of nougats, cherries, caramels,
peppermint creams, and almost all of them the shining, scrubbed faces
of little girls ... delectable would-be ballerinas, brushed and shining
and trembling.  For one month every year during the holiday season,
such is the impression looking down from the balcony into the orchestra
section of the New York State Theater at Lincoln

Center when, night after night and every matinee, the New York City
Ballet puts on its Christmas classic, The Nutcracker.

Lights darken, noises dim, Tschaikovsky's overture pours fourth in
creamy swirls of sound, audible Nesselrode.  The gold curtain pleats
upward in damask swags to reveal a gay party in nineteenth-century
Germany-mothers in hoop skirts dashing, mustached papas, daughters in
ball dresses, little boys in velvet suits-all rushing happily about the
stage, bowing, curtsying, whirling with glee.

A crooked old man enters, leaning on a stick.  The children flock
around him.  He is Herr Drosselmeier, and he has brought to the party
with him a very special Christmas gift, a magic nutcracker.  Soon he
will tell them a story about it, an elaborate and cracked tale first
penned by E. T. A. Hoffman: that is his nutcracker suite.  But first he
distributes nuts, real nuts, to the eager children.  In the Balanchine
staging, a restaging of the master's own dream of magical childhood,
seven tiny girls in mauve pantaloons cluster around the old man's
knees.  In fact they are seven infant ballerinas, rigorously chosen,
the creme de la creme of very young students at the ballet school which
trains many of the dancers who will one day join the Company's corps de
ballet, one of the best the world has known.

The seven child ballerinas tease, plead, twirl, cajole.  The candy box
of audience children holds its sweet breath.  To which one of the seven
will Herr Drosselmeier present his very first nut?  The child
ballerinas themselves do not know.  Indeed, they have made it a game, a
very secret game, just between themselves and the gnarled old man.
Which one will he choose tonight?  they wonder as they dart
enchantingly about.

Lately, though, the game has gone flat.  Lately he always chooses the
same dancer.  He always gives the first nut to the tiniest one of them
all.  She is a grave child who never smiles.  She is eight years old.
Her name is

Ariadne.  AT SIX FORTY-FIVE Sunday morning, Berenice Bradshaw heard
the ancient

Ford pickup cough and gargle in the driveway and knew her husband was
leaving for work.  Mrs.  Bradshaw was seventy-five years old, and
slightly deaf She did not actually hear the old man leave his small
room just across the hall from her own, or run his tepid bath.  She did
not hear him do his thirty-one pushups, or stir up his breakfast of
oatmeal with evaporated milk, or hack off and brown-bag the chunk of
her meat loaf that would become his lunch.  But she knew he had done
each of these things.  The Bradshaws had moved into the bungalow on
South Gilmer Drive one April day in 1937, and every single morning
since then Franklin Bradshaw had followed precisely the same routine,
Saturday and Sunday mornings included: 15,055 tepid baths, 15,055 pots
of oatmeal.

Franklin Bradshaw would not return home from the disheveled old
Bradshaw

Auto Parts warehouse, hard by the Union Pacific railroad tracks, until
after nine o'clock.  Time was when he did not get home from work until
ten or eleven or even midnight, but he was seventy-six now, and lacked
the energy he once had.  By the time he came home she would have eaten
supper and be down in her small split-level basement office, pasting
snapshots into her photograph albums or working on her genealogy
charts.  He would warm up his own supper: more meat loaf, which she had
prepared for him during the day, and Jell-O with fruit, and perhaps a
homemade bran muffin.

While he ate, he would read his newspaper.  15,055 copies of the Salt
Lake

City Tribune.

Weekdays or weekends, year in and year out, the routine never varied.
So on this particular Sunday morning, July 23, 1978, when she heard
Franklin's old blue Courier truck starting up, Berenice Bradshaw did
what she had done on so many other identical Sundays: she rolled over
and went briefly back to sleep.  At 8:30 A.M. Mrs.  Bradshaw got up and
went down to the basement to awaken her seventeen-year-old grandson
Larry, who was spending the summer with his grandparents.  She warned
him not to be late for his ten-thirty flying lesson out at Skyhawk
Aviation, near the Great Salt Lake.

Larry was never easy to awaken, and this morning it took longer than
usual.

Larry had worked at the warehouse with his grandfather the evening
before, the only time this summer the boy had set foot down there.  The
rambunctious

Schreuder grandsons, Larry and his brother Marc, were not popular with
the other employees.  Last year, after the two sixteen year-olds had
spent the summer working at Bradshaw's, some employees had threatened
to quit.  That was why this summer Granny Bradshaw was paying $3,500
for Larry to take flying lessons instead.

A few minutes past ten o'clock Mrs.  Bradshaw's doorbell rang.  On her
front porch was a police officer accompanied by a Mormon elder and Doug
Steele, manager of Bradshaw Auto Parts and her husband's oldest friend.
She asked them in and the elder told her to sit down.  He knelt down
beside her.  "We hate to do this, Berenice," he said.  "We've had a
tragic accident.  It concerns your husband ..."

"I don't understand."  She turned to Doug Steele.  "What's he trying to
say,

Doug?"

"Berenice, Frank's been shot.  He's been killed."

"Oh, my God!  My God!"

"Now, help us out, Berenice.  I know you've got some tranquilizers
around here.  Where are they?"  Steele brought the pills and some water
and Mrs.

Bradshaw calmed down somewhat and the policeman said it looked like a
robbery.  The cash register was open, Frank's wallet and some coins and
credit cards were scattered on the floor.

"W,hat'll we do, Doug?  What'll we do?"

The grizzled manager put his arm around her heaving shoulders.  "We
have to reach out for the family now, Berenice.  Get hold of the
girls."

All day long Mrs.  Bradshaw, assisted by her grandson, tried to reach
her three married daughters, two in New York City and one in Oregon.
But this was July and a Sunday.  Nobody was at home.  It would be past
midnight before she spoke to them all.

At 5:45 P.M. Mrs.  Bradshaw and Larry went down to the Hall of Justice
to give their statements to the police.  No gun had been found, they
were told, and there were no witnesses, no clues of any kind.  The old
man had been ambushed, shot in the back.  It could have been anyone.

"I believe in capital punishment, so help me," Mrs.  Bradshaw said. 
The widow answered all the police officers' questions.  She told them
her daughters' names and addresses.  She described her husband's work
habits, his business, his employees, "all very, very fine ... wonderful
men .  - ."

They asked about her husband's will.  She had not yet had time to took
for it, she said.  "Nothing but callers and phones all day."  But she
thought a copy was somewhere in her basement files.  "I've seen it ...
but my family didn't like it, and he didn't like it.  And so it is
still there, but nobody likes it."

"Was your husband a rich man?"

"He told me we were poor."

The murdered man was far from poor.  Bradshaw was by training a
geologist who in 1929 had been shrewd enough to go into the auto parts
business at the dawn of the cross-country motoring era, and to set up
shop at the edge of the worst stretch of automotive badlands between
the Atlantic and the Pacific.  One store soon became a chain, and the
stores pulled in a small river of cash.  Bradshaw was determined to
sequester every dime from the hated Bureau of Internal Revenue.  Over
the years his money had been quietly and extremely wisely invested, and
reinvested-first in the stock market and in the successful chemicals
company he founded, but finally and most extensively in federal oil and
gas leases on the public lands which constitute seventy percent of the
state of Utah.  When he had leased as much land as the law permits a
single individual to hold in a single state, 200,000 acres, he branched
out to other states.  Slowly, and almost invisibly, Bradshaw built up a
one-man archipelago of oil and gas rights that spanned every state
between the Mississippi River and Hawaii.

Because of the 200,000-acre limit, the leases were held not just in his
own name but in the names of his wife, his children, his
grandchildren.

It had all been done in a very low-key manner, and by the time of his
murder the old man owned twenty-eight automotive stores and unknown
millions of acres of oil land.  Single-handedly, he had accumulated the
largest estate ever probated by the state of Utah.  His net worth was
estimated by the Salt Lake City Tribune to be at least $60 million, and
some knowledgeable sources said that, when all was counted, the figure
could exceed $400 million.

THE FUNERAL could not be scheduled until noon on Wednesday.  The day
after the murder, Monday, July 24, was Pioneer Day, the biggest holiday
on the Mormon calendar.  It commemorates the arrival of the Mormons,
after years of hardship and persecution, in Zion, the Promised Land,
and on that day the entire city shuts down so the Latter-day Saints can
attend the big LDS parade up Main Street to the Mormon Temple.

One of the handful of people to go to work on Pioneer Day was Dr.
Serge

Moore, Medical Examiner of the State of Utah.  He commenced his autopsy
of

Frank Bradshaw at nine o'clock Monday morning and finished about two
hours later.  The old man had been 9hot twice, both times at fairly
close range.

One bullet had entered the middle of his upper back, the other the base
of his skull.  Either would have been fatal.  The killer had used
hollow-point, copper-jacketed Remington-Peters ammunition bullets whose
copper-sheathed nose peels back on impact into equal segments, like a
lily.

The damage was fearful.  The back of the skull and brains had been
blown away.  Police photographs of the scene, which the surgeon kept
beside him for orientation as he worked, were almost surreal.  On a
worn and dirty floor, a skinny old man lay on his back in an attitude
of terror.  A penumbra of bright blood hal oed his head and shoulders.
His mouth was stretched wide in its final scream.  His lower plate had
come loose and dangled in the mouth opening.  The eyes, also open, were
wild.  The arms were up flung in surprise or fright, but the open palms
bracketing the gaunt gray face at ear level were in an attitude of
benediction, and long strands of gray-white hair floated out across the
surface of the crimson puddle.  The agitated, red-edged figure
resembled a sixteenth-century cardinal painted by El Greco.

But the portrait's ecclesiastical quality stopped abruptly at shoulder
level.  The body on the dusty floor was dressed in a ragged orange polo
shirt with penguins on it, and cheap black and-white-checked trousers.
The front pockets had been pulled inside out.  From the neck down it
looked as if some elderly derelict had wandered into camera range,
collapsed, and died.

Dr.  Moore sealed the two bullets into plastic bags to turn over to

Homicide, cleaned up, and went home to get ready for the big parade.
WEDNESDAY JULY 26 broke bright blue and blazing, another furnace-like
day of desert heat baking the high Wasatch Valley.  By eleven o'clock,
an hour before the service, the large parking lot at Eastman's Evans &
Early mortuary, finest in town, was completely filled with the kind of
sturdy,

Detroit-built automobiles favored by Frank Bradshaw's relatives,
friends and employees.  These people, and their children, now sat
sweltering and quietly fanning themselves on rows of pale blue folding
chairs.  For the first time any of them could remember, Bradshaw Auto
Parts was closed in the daytime.

As more and more mourners arrived and overflowed the main chapel,
attendants seated them in a backup funeral parlor where they could at
least hear the service over loudspeakers.  Even the first arrivals, in
the main chapel, had nothing much to look atno casket, no altar, just
the stiff floral tributes massed at the front of the long, blue room,
and a small wooden lectern.  When it was time to begin, the immediate
family members would be seated in a blue-draped semiprivate niche off
to the left, shielded from the larger public view.  Organ music played
softly.

Marilyn Bradshaw Reagan, the eldest daughter, had planned her father's
memorial service, reviewing with the undertakers the many available
options, choosing the details she and her mother preferred, always
mindful of certain tensions within the larger family.  The Bradshaws
are an honored

Mormon dynasty.  Franklin Bradshaw was one of the ten children born to
John

Franklin and Emma Briggs Bradshaw between 188o and igio.  The family
homestead was in Lehi, a pioneer Mormon settlement a few miles south
of

Salt Lake City, and from there Bradshaw uncles and cousins had
prospered and branched out variously in banking, real estate,
insurance, and farming.

As the youngest and last surviving brother, Franklin had inherited the
position of family patriarch.  But Frank was not much like his
churchly, conservative brothers.  He rarely attended family weddings or
funerals, let alone regular Sunday services.  He did not wear holy
undergarments.

Certainly Frank Bradshaw did not tithe ten percent of his earnings to
the church.  He was in fact known as something of a tightwad, a man who
toured his auto parts empire by Greyhound Bus, a man who preferred to
re outfit himself, when it became absolutely necessary, at the
Army-Navy store.

It is questionable whether he believed in the beautiful life eternal,
life everlasting, which is the foundation of the Mormon faith.  His
wife

Berenice said not; that he had just pretended to go along in order to
keep peace within the devout Bradshaw clan.  Bertha Beck, his deeply
pious baby sister, said she knew better.  "He told me he looked forward
to meeting

Mother again!"  she huffed.

Certainly Franklin Bradshaw would have approved his wife and daughter's
decision to have him cremated, that being both the most efficient and
cheapest way to deal with an autopsied corpse.  But the choice was
viewed with disfavor by the Bradshaws.  The entire edifice of the
Latter-day

Saints' belief rests on the certitude of a Second Coming, and as
daughter

Marilyn said later, "Whereas you don't have to have a body to come back
to, it's considered definitely better if you do."

Most of the delicate problems in planning his memorial stemmed from the
fact that Frank Bradshaw had married outside his faith.  Idaho-born
Berenice

Jewett Bradshaw was regarded by the Bradshaws as a gentile-the Mormon
term for all non-Mormons.  Her husband's family, though always polite,
had never fully accepted her.  Berenice, serene and proud in the
knowledge that her own ancestors were HuguenoM and that she was a
direct descendant of

Maximilian Jewett, a Yorkshireman who had settled in Rowley,
Massachusetts, in 1638, did not particularly care what the Bradshaws
thought of her.  Her outspoken scorn for their religious views made
that clear.  "They believe the sky up there is all full of little
invisible angels!"  she would hoot.  But she had bitterly resented the
sermostracism accorded her children when they were growing up in Utah.
To punish small children for their mother's intransigence was unfair
and cruel.

It was nearly noon.  Marilyn Reagan waited with her mother and two
sisters in the stuffy family anteroom.  On the whole, she was pleased
with the way things were going.  The ivory-colored programs had been
nicely printed up, and the hired soloist would sing her mother's two
favorite hymns.  Berenice had studied voice before her marriage, and
her children often heard her singing and accompanying herself on the
family upright: "Oh, I come to the garden alone, While the dew is still
on the ro-oses ... And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He
tells me I am His own ..."

But all that was long past.  Franklin and Berenice Bradshaw had had
four children.  The firstborn, Robert, had died twelve years ago, and
long before that his three sisters had scattered to lead their own
lives.  Even the old parlor piano was long gone ... After the hymn,
Marilyn had asked her father's kindly cousin Wayne Hacking to be the
first speaker, followed by Franklin's handsome young nephew, Craig

Bradshaw.  When Craig was finished, the soloist would sing "Going
Home," and then the bereaved family would hasten back to Gilmer Drive
to receive the numerous condolence callers who were expected.  Aunt
Bertha Beek was at the house now.  She had volunteered to stay behind
to answer phone calls and set out the many platters of food.  Aunt
Bertha didn't mind missing the funeral.  She already felt very close to
God, and to her brother Franklin.

She certainly didn't need any memorial service to remind her of either
one.

All of the roast meats, salads, casseroles, pies, cakes, cookies and
punch had been contributed by the dead man's employees and their
families, more than one hundred and fifty people.  They had asked to do
this as a way of expressing and dealing with their own grief.  Working
for the old man had been like being part of a big family, and many
employees had been with him more than twenty years, some more than
thirty.  Frank did not pay much, but he always had time to listen to
their problems.  He found summer jobs for the kids who needed them, and
pregnant women knew that whenever they were ready to come back to work,
Frank would have held a place for them.  As they sliced and kneaded and
basted and garnished his funerary foods, many wondered what the boss's
home would look like.  Since none of the Bradshaw daughters had been
married at home and the Bradshaws did not entertain, it was going to be
the first social event at Gilmer

Drive that anybody could recall.

The organ music reached a crescendo, died away, revived again-the
signal that the service was about to begin.  Lynx-eyed Craig Bradshaw
looked like one of the unflappable Mormon males who are often used by
the Secret

Service to guard the President.  But right now Craig was uneasy.  His
Uncle

Frank had always told him, "Craig, remember that the most important
thing in life is your family."  Yet when he had dropped over yesterday
to Gilmer

Drive to pick up some pointers from Frank's family on how they would
like to hear him eulogized, they had mentioned everything but what a
good husband and father he had been.  That subject, they had made
clear, was just as well avoided.

A side door in the blue niche opened silently.  Frank's immediate
family was coming in now, the women first, the men following, and all
of them walking as stiffly as playing-card figures.  Leaning forward
slightly,

Craig could see them from his front row seat.

Frances, the youngest daughter, entered first.  She was forty years
old, with a stocky, boyish body, dark hair, intense eyes, and a Lily
Tomlin face.  Yesterday, meeting her for the first time ever, he had
found her "striking-looking, but not attractive."  Today he could not
see her features, but thought her oddly dressed.  She was clothed head
to toe in black.  "Even a hat!"  he would say later.  "With a big veil,
and long black gloves.  We just don't do that.  I don't mean LDS.  I
mean Utah people don't do that."

Mrs.  Bradshaw came in next.  Craig was glad to see Berenice "looking
okay."

Bright blue sunglasses hid her eyes.  But her curly gray hair was
freshly waved, and her heart-shaped face composed and impassive.  Then
Craig noticed her hands.  Her grip on Frances's black-gloved fingers
was so tight that the old lady's freckledi suntanned hands were
milk-white at the knuckles.

Elaine Drukman, the middle sister, was truly petite, by far the
smallest of the four women now seated in the front row.  She was also
the only daughter who resembled her mother.  She had the same
in-the-bone prettiness, and tightly curled Orphan Annie hair.  But she
looked worn, even weatherbeaten, compared to the older woman.

Marilyn Reagan was amply proportioned, moon-faced, and bespectacled.
Not so much as baby Frances, but more than middle sister Elaine,
Marilyn bore the family's genetic hallmark, the powerful, slab like
Bradshaw jaw.  She reminded Craig of a kindly head nurse, and he
thought it a great pity that

Marilyn was childless.  She seemed to him to be the warmest and most
motherly of the four women.  Craig had no idea how carefully Marilyn
Reagan had prepared herself for the inevitable day of her father's
death, no idea of her years of daytime work as a paralegal specialist
in wills and estates, no idea of her twelve years of night-school study
of inheritance tax law, no idea of her long, quiet campaign to be named
executor of her father's estate and one day to replace him as
owner-manager of the Bradshaw empire.

In the second row of the niche, behind the four bereaved women, sat the
men-a son-in-law and three of the four grandsons.  The man was Elaine's
husband, Mason Drukman, a slender, high-domed, good-looking -Oregon
professor of political science He sat squeezed between his two hulking,
bushy-haired sons, Sam and

Max Drukman, ages twenty and sixteen.  Marilyn's husband, Robert
Reagan, was not present.  He was a lawyer employed by New York City to
work on family court cases, and had felt compelled to remain behind in
New York City.

Frances Schreuder, the youngest daughter, had no husband; she was twice
divorced.  Her first husband had been Vittorio Gentile, an Italian-born
pearl importer and the father of her two teenage sons, Lorenzo and
Marco, now known as Larry and Marc.  Larry was here today, seated with
his two Drukman cousins.  Like them, he was dark-haired and powerfully
built, but large, staring blue eyes gave his face a softer aspect.
Again, there was no mistaking the famous Bradshaw jaw.  Marc had been
asked to stay home in New

York City and look after his baby sister.

Frances's second husband, Frederik Schreuder, had been Dutch.  Several
years after their divorce he perished in a plane crash.  But he had
given Frances a daughter who was the jewel of her existence, her reason
for living.  The child was the greatest joy of Berenice Bradshaw's life
as well-her first and only granddaughter.  The little girl was now
barely five years old, far too young for funerals, so Frances had left
her at home in the care of her half-brother, Marc.  Her name was
Ariadne.

Cousin Wayne had finished speaking.  It was Craig's turn.  "I have
heard it said that each of us, as we walk through the sands of time,
leaves some kind of mark," he began.

Five minutes later he was reading the Twenty-third Psalm, all six
verses, and then it was over.  Out in the sweltering parking lot, Craig
noticed

Frances Schreuder one more time.  Cousin Wayne was holding tight to her
black-gloved hands and telling her how very much she reminded him of
her dear, dead father.  He could not see her face, but from under her
black cloud of veil, mascara flowed like lava down her ashen cheeks.
UTAH IS UNIQUE among the fifty states.  It is literally a church-state,
a theocracy inside a democracy, and Salt Lake City -heart of the
church-state-is a holy city just as Mecca is.  Understanding this is
key to understanding what happened to Franklin Bradshaw, happened both
before and after the old man was found lying dead on the floor of his
warehouse with two bullet holes in his back.

In Utah, the American melting pot is un stirred Three out of four
people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful
sanctuary "behind the Zion Curtain" because of religious persecution.
For a nation that boasts it was founded on principles of religious
freedom, the treatment of the Mormons has been harsh indeed.  Only
African slaves and native Americans fared worse.  Before they reached
their Promised Land, the

Saints were tarred and feathered, lynched, massacred.  They were
hounded and mercilessly ridiculed by fellow Americans from the same
Nordic and

Anglo-Saxon Protestant backgrounds, from the same families, the same
blood.

The memory lingers.  Xenophobia is endemic here.

But Mormonism is more than a religion.  "To get the feel of what the
Mormon church is all about, you have to see the Mormon church not as a
church in the ordinary sense at all, but as a society-a society and a
culture that is built around religion.  "

The society and culture that has evolved behind the Zion Curtain is not
just unique among religions of the earth, it is uniquely American. 
What other nation could support a faith at once so fundamentalist and
so optimistic as to preach eternal life, eternal marriage, eternal
chastity and-fortunate under the circumstances----eternal upward
mobility?

* University of Utah history professor Sterling McMurrin, dean of
Mormon intellectuals and former U.S. Commissioner of Education, quoted
in the

Denver Post Special Report, "Utah: The Church State," Nov.  21-28,
1982.

The first revelation came to the young farm boy Joseph Smith in 1820,
when

God and Jesus spoke to him in a grove of trees outside his home town
of

Palmyra, New York.  Two years later the Angel Moroni appeared in his
bedroom, and led him to the hill of Cumorah where he found hidden a
Bible made of solid gold plates-the Book of Mormon.  Here too the angel
gave him the magical stone spectacles, the Urim and Thummim, which
enabled Smith to read and to translate the plates' "reformed Egyptian"
hieroglyphics into

English.  They told the wondrous story of a band of Hebrews who, in

B.c."  had made their way to the New World and become the aboriginal
forebears of the American Indians.  After Christ's crucifixion He had
visited His American flock, and He now promised Joseph Smith that if
the people would return to the simple gospel ways of the early
Christians, God would return once more and guide His flock with divine
revelations here in the latter days.

The spectacles disappeared, but Smith translated further revelations by
staring at a magic "seer stone" he held hidden in his hat while scribes
on the other side of a blanket wrote down what the young prophet said.
Smith's original Mormon doctrines were modified by later prophets, in
particular

Brigham Young, and zealous missionary work began.

The new faith scrapped the concept of original sin and replaced it with
the more American idea of man's eternal perfectibility.  "As man is,
God once was, and as God is, man may become."  Hence divinity is
progressive.  Gods, angels, and men have progressed to different
levels.  God

Himself-Themselves?-was once a man; Jesus is a kind of older brother.
(Devils exist too.  They are rebellious spirits, cast out for all
eternity.

Eternal vigilance is essential since a hundred devils exist for every
living man, woman, and child.)

The Mormon belief system unites curiously American pairs of opposites.
A relish for the dog-eat-dog practices of the marketplace goes hand in
hand with the stern obligation to "Help thy neighbor."  Saints do more
than tithe at least ten percent of their income; they entirely look
after their own.

No Mormon need worry about food, housing, or medical care.  The Mormon
belief in the sanctity of the family coexists side by side with the
Mormon doctrine of blood atonement: certain crimes-adultery, apostasy,
murder-are so evil they can be paid for only by the shedding of the
sinner's own blood.

Once one accepts the notion that the soul never dies, and that even the
dead may be baptized and thereby forever saved, it becomes urgent to
find out who one's ancestors are.  All one's ancestors.  Theoretically,
at least, it should be possible to trace them back to Adam and Eve.
Mass proxy baptisms of the dead take place regularly in the
subterranean baptismal fonts, borne on the backs of twelve oxen, that
are housed in the basement of every Mormon temple.  By io84 the church
had built forty-seven temples around the world, including twenty-two in
the United States, seven in Utah.

The urge to locate these ancestral legions of literal "lost souls" has
made the Mormons into fanatic genealogists.  The Salt Lake City skyline
is dominated by two structures.  One is the Mormon Temple, which shares
a huge, ten-acre-square block amid lavish gardens with the
glitter-domed auditorium of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  This Temple
is the symbolic heart of the entire church and, like all Mormon
temples, entirely off limits to Gentiles.  It is a structure to make
pharaohs weep-huge, six-spired, fantastically turreted and built of
deeply crenellated black stone.  Its finial is a giant gold-leafed
statue of the Angel Moroni blowing his heavenly trumpet out across
majestic, snow-capped peaks.

The other building, a towering white marble skyscraper, is open to
all.

This is the World Center for Ancestors, an ever expanding genealogical
library with the capability of listing on microfiche the name of every
person who ever lived on this planet.  Well over a billion names
already are on file here.  Carloads of new, or rather old, birth and
baptismal records collected by the faithful from churches and town
halls around the world arrive daily.  Library visitors are taught how
to look up and record their own family trees, using the library's five
hundred microfilm reading machines available for public use.  Mormonism
is at once newfangled and extremely archaic, a form of compute raided
ancestor worship in modern, polyester dress.

In Mormon society and culture, highest values are placed on hard work,
thrift, clean living, obedience to the elders and, above all, on the
importance of the family.  The best-known Church rubric is "No Success
Can

Compensate for Failure in the Home."  Mormons perceive the family as a
quasi-sacred entity which must be protected from the evils of
society.

Good for the family are plenty of group work, group play, and plenty of
(marital) sex.  Music and dancing are also good, and Salt Lake has long
been renowned as a cradle of American ballet and symphonic arts, as
well as for its Mormon Tabernacle Choir.  Bad for the family in equal
measure, and regularly denounced from the pulpit, are premarital sex,
abortion, the Equal

Rights Amendment, homosexuality, pornography, and women who work
outside the home.  These attitudes have given Utah a divorce rate only
one third the national average, and a birth rate double the norm.

Mormonism is a male religion, a dream of prophets and patriarchs. 
The

Saints are organized according to strict patriarchal principles, and
sternly watched over by white-bearded elders who have renounced
polygamy relatively recently, for reasons less doctrinal than
political-not because polygamy is intrinsically such a bad idea, and
perhaps it is not; but because the federal government declared it
illegal.  Still, it might be remembered that once you renounce
monogamy, eternal chastity in marriage is a less drastic idea.

Joseph Smith declared Blacks the children of Cain, "cursed by God,"
and, until 1978, any trace of Negro blood made one ineligible for the
Mormon priesthood.  Women still are ineligible.  Women and Blacks
aside, the religion is extremely democratic.  Any male convert over age
twelve has a chance not just to enter the priesthood, but to better
himself spiritually, to progress through this life and the next until
he actually reaches the status of a god himself What the faith offers
his eternal wife-formerly read "wives"-beyond the attractions of being
a god's wife, is not spelled out.  Finally, as in every male tribal
group, be they Mormons, Masons, college fraternity brothers, or
cannibals in New Guinea, the church has plenty of secret rites and
closed doors the whole mumbo jumbo of Keeping

Others Out.  Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.

One last thought: In a society and culture devised by old men sealed
for eternity into marital chastity, even serial marital chastity, the
essential male-female bond may remain the one between husband and wife.
But the essential male-female tension, the trilling wire in the blood,
becomes the one between Susannah and the elders, between father and
daughter.  IT IS MORE THAN five years after Franklin J. Bradshaw's
death.  At long last the murderer has been found, tried, and
convicted.

"No clues," the cops had said the day it happened.  There were clues,
but not the kind police usually look for.  The clues were hidden within
the dead man's family.  To a degree they had been covered up by the
family.  Franklin

Bradshaw's family---as utterly, achingly ordinary a family as one can
imagine-would appear to have nurtured at least one, and possibly two,
or maybe even three criminal psychopaths: a mother and her two sons.

The mother's trial is to begin today, Tuesday, September 6, 1983.  The
sons already have been sent to prison, one of them for murder, one for
attempted murder.  Having convicted one son of the crime, the State now
contends it can prove that it was his mother who forced him do it.  Her
motive was money.  She feared her father was about to cut her out of
his will.

The defense will challenge the State to prove its appalling contention.
It will assert that this mother, far from being her son's accomplice,
is the innocent victim of a monstrous family frame up It will portray
her son as a kid vicious enough to shoot his grandfather in the back,
then rifle his pockets; a boy so evil that when finally cornered, he
would attempt to lessen his punishment by blaming his own mother.

The proceedings will finally get under way at nine o'clock, the morning
after Labor Day.  It is the first day of school."  and eastern visitors
out walking down Main Street early on this bright morning, away from
the Mormon

Temple and toward the Hall of Justice, are struck by the extraordinary
numbers of children on the streets.  Shoals of children, mostly blond,
flow along the avenues, the smaller ones in arms, in strollers, or
toddling behind very young, hand-holding parents.  Brigham Young had
begun laying out his city of Zion on the very day of his arrival here,
and the major thoroughfares are eight lanes wide, that being the space
required for an ox cart to make a U-turn.  Oxen, unlike horses, cannot
be taught to back up.

Salt Lake City is acutely aware of its origins, and breathtaking in its
setting-a long, green ribbon of valley between barren deserts at the
foot of mighty mountains beside the Great Salt Lake.  Numerous
monuments decorate the broad intersections on the promenade between the
temple and the courthouse.  One bronze tableau depicts an entire Mormon
family pushing a handcart across the plains.  There are huge statues of
honeybees, and sea gulls, creatures which became part of Mormon
iconography by helping the first families of settlers to survive in the
wilderness.  Most memorable are the many idealized sculptures of boys
and girls in stone and stucco and marble and bronze; so many children
abound that the visitor half expects to come upon the Pied Piper
somewhere up ahead.  But at the end of the line of statuary, at the
foot of the courthouse steps, there is only a grim reminder erected by
the Elks Club, the one unsentimental monument in view: a polished
granite scroll with the Ten Commandments deeply incised in black
stone.

The Criminal Courts Building is a standard postwar municipal structure
of landscaped glass and concrete, cozy as an airport.  The third-floor
courtroom is small, round, windowless, bright blue, and air-conditioned
to bone-chilling temperatures.

The most interesting-looking man in the room is Mike Rosen, chief
defense attorney.  He has a deep tan, pale hair, perfect teeth,
gorgeous profile, stocky body, cocky air, and a strong Brooklyn
accent.

He is from the New

York law firm of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, headed by the brutally powerful
Roy

Cohn.  Cohn himself will not appear.  He never does.  He always works
behind the scenes.  How or whether he will manage this in Utah is
unknown.  So far, the Cohn office has unspooled a creative series of
delaying tactics which has stalled the proceedings against its client
for over a year, not an inconsequential achievement in a case wherein
the victim, his wife, his cronies, friends, and enemies had all
attained the biblical age of three-score years and ten.

As the trial begins, no one really knows how strong a case the
prosecution has.  The prosecutor himself is not sure.  His two key
witnesses have been granted full immunity in return for their
testimony, a circumstance which will allow the defense to make much of
the issue of "reasonable doubt."

The strongest corroborating witness against Frances Schreuder could be
one of her sons-both their names are listed among the more than fifty
potential prosecution witnesses-unless it can be shown that the son is
also an accomplice.  The law does not permit one accomplice to
corroborate another.

The slim old lady sitting alone over there, smartly dressed in navy
blue dotted swiss, hiding her face behind big blue sunglasses -surely
she must be the defendant's mother.  Berenice Bradshaw is a Mom cut
from the lid of a Mother's Day candy box.  She is eighty years old, and
when she first stands up she lists slightly, and shuffles more than she
walks.  She is a bit deaf too.  But behind her spectacles is a
heart-shaped Claudette

Colbert face, tanned and well preserved, framed by thick and curly gray
hair.

On campus at the University of Utah, where Frank Bradshaw first noticed
her, Berenice Jewett was considered a good-looker, and she is still
astonishingly pretty for a woman of her years.  How extraordinary that
this otherwise average old lady, looking like a paper cutout of Mrs.

Middle America, should find herself in such a wild predicament-waiting
for the curtain to go up on a murder trial where she is at once the
widow of the deceased, the mother of the defendant, the grandmother of
the perpetrator, and the bank roller of the entire legal carnival.

On the eve of trial, Berenice Bradshaw has toted up her legal accounts
and found she now has more than thirty lawyers on her payroll.  The fee
for the trial about to begin is a cool million dollars, payable in
advance.  It has been paid.

Two points of law are important.  The first is the matter of "aiding
and abetting."  Like most other states, Utah considers anyone who aids
and abets the murderer to commit the crime to be just as guilty as the
person who actually pulls the trigger.

Pecuniary interest is also an issue.  Utah, like most other states,
regards murder for profit as a more heinous crime than murder committed
in passion, whether that passion be love or hate.  To convict Frances

Schreuder of first-degree murder, the prosecutor will have to show that
she had a "pecuniary interest" in directly soliciting her father's
death.

On the other hand, if the defense can show that Frances lacked
pecuniary interest, they can get the charges reduced to second-degree
murder, not a death-penalty offense.

Utah is unlike all other states in its attitude to capital
punishment.

Not just three fourths of the people but ninety percent of the
officeholders and public officials in Utah are Mormons, more or less
commit ted--depending on the level of their orthodoxy to the old

Mormon doctrine of blood atonement.  This is why Utah retains the
firing squad as one method of execution.  The majority of Utah's
citizens do not merely approve the death penalty, they demand it, the
state religion demands it.  The situation has made people in Utah
especially touchy about charges of barbarism.  In the wake of Utah's
last big murder case, the Gary Gilmore circus, such charges were
particularly stinging, and in response the legislature modified the law
so as to grant every person charged with a capital crime a two-phase
trial.  In Phase One, guilt or innocence is determined in the usual
manner.  If the verdict is guilty, Phase Two determines whether or not
the death penalty shall be imposed, or whether life in prison is
sufficient punishment.  Phase Two is essentially a referendum on the
defendant's moral character.

Utah offers those persons who do receive the death sentence a final
choice: lethal injection instead of the firing squad.  The state used
to offer a third choice, death by hanging, but so few people chose the
gallows that some years back this option was dropped from the menu.

It is well to remember that a murder trial is not a window onto
reality.  It does not show what actually happened.  A trial is a
carefully constructed play for a carefully selected audience twelve
people.  Rather, it is two plays.  Neither is "true."  Neither is
"complete."  Each is a version of reality, very heavily edited.  After
the final curtains-the two summings-up by the opposing lawyers-jurors
are invited to vote their preference.  To put it another way: trials
are designed to exclude as much as to include information.  The one
about to begin will exclude plenty.

The prosecutor gets to his feet and begins speaking quietly.  He
explains to the jury that the murder in question occurred more than
five years ago.  His evidence will focus not on the individual who has
already been convicted of the crime, but on the person who ordered the
execution, his mother.  The defendant sits beside her lawyer, her back
to the courtroom.

She is a small woman, expensively dressed in silk and camel's hair,
with chopped black hair.  As the county attorney describes the events
leading up to the death of Franklin Bradshaw and the ultimate arrest
and conviction of his grandson, the defendant appears to be gazing
steadily at the jury except when she makes notes on a legal pad with a
gold-and-ivory pen.

"This is a woman driven by greed," the prosecutor concludes.  "And
power.

And the desire for money ... a woman who would destroy virtually anyone
who got in her road, who blocked her access to money.  This is a woman
who ordered her own son -her own flesh and blood-to kill her own
father."

Mike Rosen walks coolly to the podium.  He introduces himself, spells
out the name of his law firm, walks back to the table where his client
sits and, standing directly behind her, places a protective hand on
each shoulder and says, "I represent this human being.  I represent no
one else .

"Okay, now I am going to try to scare you.  But what you are going to
do here is probably the most serious thing you have ever done in your
lives, outside of your own family ... This is a capital case.  They are
going for the death penalty in this case.  But ... before they can do
that, before they can put Frances's life on the line, they have got to
convince each and every one of you individually that they have met
their Constitutional burden, their burden which never shifts-never-and
that is proof beyond a reasonable doubt."

He points to the empty witness chair.  "That's where it's coming
froml*'he snarls, as if the chair were a poisoned well.  But "Frances
Schreuder as she sits here today is as innocent as you, me, His Honor
and Mr.  Jones ... Her presumption of innocence protects her like a
coat.  Only if they prove it does her coat come off.  Remember her
plea: Not Guilty.  Those are magic words in this country.  Those magic
words say: Hey!  Those charges-I say no!

You prove it!  That's America ... That's what this trial is all
about.

Will the system work?  The system works when you get twelve people, and
a judge who gives you the law, and a defense lawyer who is not going to
quit until the truth comes out ..."

This high-voltage Brooklyn lawyer is very different in style from the
drawling Utah prosecutor.  How will his intense manner go over with
these jurors?  Their faces-seven women, five men are attentive,
carefully composed, as unrevealing of their feelings as the statues in
their streets.

"The prosecutor told you there was tension in the family.  Of course
there was tension in the family!  Qj'course there were problems ... I
ain not going to stand up here and insult your intelligence and say
that a family, with brothers or with sisters, and with wealth-there are
no problems!  Would they be a human family if there weren't
problems?"

A silence.  He wants the full attention of his audience of twelve.  One
of them had, himself, expressed the matter best, the lawyer says,
during the intensive voir dire questioning which took place last week
out of public view.

"Look, Your Honor," the prospective juror had said, "you can pick your
friends.  But you sure can't pick your family!"  Part Two

1017~lr -t ve Family ... AT THE START, THE Bradshaws could well have
graced the cover of The

Saturday Evening Post.  If Norman Rockwell had run across them in 1938,
say, the year of baby Frances's birth, he would have been tempted to
set up his easel right in the middle of Gilmer Drive.  Big, handsome,
talented, athletic Franklin Bradshaw was a Dad who had put himself
through college on a football scholarship, and in his junior year had
up and married the prettiest girl and best dancer on campus---eloped
with her, in fact, on

Halloween.  By 1939 he was doing very well as an auto parts dealer, the
business he'd had the foresight to get started in ten years before.

Wasatch Chemical, the wholesale company he had set up while still in
college, was prospering too, and he had begun to speculate-modestly, of
course-in the stock market.  Dad and Mom now had four sturdy-looking
young children, all well-dressed, nicely behaved.  Robert Bradshaw,
their first, was twelve, very big and strong.  Marilyn had just turned
nine, Elaine was seven, and cunning little Frances was still in her
bassinet.  Except for the baby, the children all took piano and
tap-dancing lessons.  Their pretty mother made a lot of their clothes,
cooked all the meals, kept a very neat house, even played the piano.
The children helped her out, doing whatever chores suited them best.
Marilyn, named for her mother's favorite movie star, the gorgeous
Marilyn Miller, was turning out otherwise.  The child "could not learn
to hip pity-hop," said her mother.  She was chunky and solid, a
Bradshaw, not a Jewett.  But she was proving a wonderful "other mother"
to the other three children.

The family scene Norman Rockwell might well have chosen was the

Bradshaws' annual preparations for the Shirley Temple Look-Alike
Contest at the neighborhood movie house.  Mother would be cutting out
and sewing pink Shirley Temple dresses for her daughters; big Robert
would be helping in some comical way; and even the baby would be
somehow involved.

The daughters would have been coiffed in Shirley Temple curls,
carefully tied up in rag strips by their beaming Mom.  That not one of
these toothy, square-faced kids looked the least bit like the adorable
movie moppet-a fact of life obvious to everyone but doting Momwell,
that would be the artist's gentle joke.

There were cracks in the portrait of course, cracks in the real family
picture, as there are in every family.  But Norman Rockwell would not
have seen these~ or would have chosen to overlook them.  Bob had
started having epileptic seizures by then, and Marilyn was trying to
care for him on her own, holding him down on the basement floor by the
old zinc sink, sitting on him until the fit passed, so he wouldn't hurt
himself.  Elaine had already suffered her first bout with rheumatic
fever; in two years she would be stricken again, be confined to bed for
the next two years, and emerge a permanent heart cripple.  Baby Frances
often refused to go to sleep.  Sometimes she howled all night.  When
the neighbors complained, the entire family-mother, father and three
children-gathered around the infant's crib and sang to her for hours on
end.  Berenice had had some sort of nervous breakdown after Frances was
born, crying and refusing to come out of her room for months on end.
Franklin was so busy with his stores, he didn't come home until late at
night, and he left before daybreak.  Much of the care of the newest
Bradshaw was therefore left up to the older children.

But no family is without problems, stresses, skeletons, ghosts of one
kind or another, and in truth the Bradshaws were no worse than the
average family, and a lot better than many.  Yes, Berenice was lonely
and overworked.  Yes, Franklin had become a workhorse, cold, reserved,
seldom home.  But half the wives in America felt lonely, weary, and
unfulfilled, many of them with far more cause than Berenice Bradshaw
had.  Doubtless half the husbands felt lonely too, if the truth were
known.  But generally speaking the truth was not known.  Generally
speaking, nobody saw the cracks in the picture, or nobody talked about
them or acknowledged them in any way.  Least of all Franklin and
Berenice Bradshaw.  Like millions of other Americans, most of them
perhaps, the world according to Norman

Rockwell was the only world the Bradshaws ever allowed themselves to
see.

And when the cracks in the picture began to widen, and spread, and
deepen into fissures, the Bradshaws continued not to see, until, little
by little, the members of the family began drop ping through the cracks
in the picture and tumbling into the boiling chaos that lay just
beneath the painted surface.

Who were Franklin and Berenice Bradshaw?  Where did they come from?
Seldom has any family not of royal blood been so fully documented.  He
was the product of a devout Mormon background, a religion based on the
study of one's origins, and she was a dogged genealogist, a woman who
sought solace and distraction from the dreary present in the study of
the tangled skein of bloodlines that had brought her here.

Each one of them wrote an "autobiography."  Each sent out family
newsletters.  Ordinary letters also were exchanged between daughters
and parents and grandchildren as the family grew.  Even the unfortunate
son

Robert wrote a few.  And all of it, every scrap, was saved.  If the
members of this warring family share one common trait, it is that they
all seem to have been born with the instincts of pack rats.  For all
the Bradshaws, the function of their vast correspondence was not merely
to exchange news: their letters were also political instruments in the
ongoing factional struggles within the family.  A secret copy of a
letter to one family member was often posted to another, with
instructions to read and burn.  Nobody burned anything.  All was stored
up, proof of erstwhile love or past grievance; or stockpiled perhaps as
ammunition for future battles as yet unformulated.  Its precise purpose
scarcely mattered.  What mattered most was to save it.

Mother and daughters each kept file boxes, hatboxes, shoe boxes, and
strongboxes full of saved-up family correspondence.  As for Franklin's
dilapidated, block-square building on West Pierpont, over the ve ars it
had come to warehouse much more than auto parts.  It was also the
enormous personal storehouse of a man who single-handedly operated two
sprawling business empires, one in auto parts, the other in oil
leasing.  Moreover, he was a man who long ago had become caught up in a
terrible, shameful family feud which family members managed, by and
large, to keep concealed from public view but which burned along
underground for decades like some coal-mine fires-impossible to
extinguish, impossible to see, snaking along on its own timetable,
feeding on the buried veins of its own fossil fuel, until the day when
finally it blew sky high.

Stacked up in Franklin Bradshaw's musty storehouse, among all the auto
parts and parts catalogs, were geology texts, mining surveys, personal
papers, letters, family archives, old magazines and newspapers in
bundles, legal papers, canceled checks, and financial records of every
variety.  Instead of ordinary file folders and filing cabinets, the old
man put documents into salvaged used mailing envelopes held together
with rubber bands or string, and filed them in old orange crates.  And
some items, the really precious ones, were tucked away among the auto
parts themselves.  So that amid the seeming rubble, in hiding places
that only he knew about and often-increasingly-forgot about, were
negotiable stock certificates, oil leases, securities of all kinds,
important legal papers, copies of his various wills, loose blank
checks, and an uncounted but not inconsiderable amount of actual
cash.

Berenice Bradshaw personally typed out an autobiography that takes 142
pages to cover the past hundred years.  Franklin's book covers more
ground faster.  Both books employ the bland style and pastel shadings
of greeting-card writers.  The effect is first charming, then
numbing.

Franklin's story begins with his maternal great-grandfather, Samuel

Briggs, born in 1826 in Nottinghamshire, England.  At the age of twelve
the boy was sent down to work in the lead mines, and as quickly carried
out again, overcome by poison gas.  Too ill to work, he was idling in
the village street when some visiting Mormon elders arrived from
America, preaching the new faith and describing the wondrous advent of
the Angel

Moroni six years earlier in Palmyra, New York.  Young Sam heard,
believed, and made up his mind to escape Nottinghamshire for the
Promised Land as soon as possible.  At the end of his long life, by
then a respected Mormon elder himself, Samuel wrote that "It was just
borne upon my soul that the things those men were saying was correct. 
I have never had occasion to doubt it from that day to this."

Although Samuel, fourth among ten children, was the only one of his
brothers and sisters to leave England, once he settled in Zion he
fathered five sons, staunch Mormons all.  Samuel was twenty-three when
he and his wife, Hannah Dean, arrived in New Orleans in 1849.  They
moved upriver to St.  Louis, Missouri, then farther on to Council
Bluffs, Iowa, and finally to a region so wild it was known only as
Upper Crossing of

Keg Creek.  Here their first son, Samuel Briggs, Jr."  Franklin's
grandfather, was born in 1851.

The young family struggled on, farming and cutting wood, trying to
raise enough money for the westward journey to the

Promised Land which Brigham Young finally had established, only four
years earlier, in the barren valley at the foot of the mountains beside
the

Great Salt Lake.  Samuel managed to build his family a covered wagon,
but after the difficult joinery work had been completed, no blacksmith
could be found in those remote parts to "iron it."  A visiting Mormon
elder,

Apostle Ezra T. Benson (of whom more elsewhere, in another dynasty's
archives), advised the couple to be of good faith and to abide; God
would ensure that all who wished to see Zion would find ways.  In swift
time an itinerant blacksmith appeared, and "together with a company of
Saints,

Samuel and his family commenced their journey across the plains,
traveling by ox team over the trackless desert, endangering their lives
many times being subjected to the wild savages and stampeding
buffalo."

Once settled in Lehi, Utah, Samuel tended his stock, cut wood, fought
the

Indians when necessary, was always upright and devout and steadfast in
his temple work, and eventually attained the rank not only of elder but
high priest.  At age forty-three he was married to Emma Thomas, one of
five children in a Mormon family which recently had emigrated to Utah
from Wales.  At this point in the chronicles, Hannah, his first wife,
disappears.  Since there is no mention of her death, it appears that

Samuel's union with Emma was a polygamous one.  Certainly it was
fruitful.

This couple had twelve children, of whom the eldest, Emma Briggs, would
become Franklin J. Bradshaw's mother.

The matriarch on Franklin's father's side of the family-that is, the
ancestor of the Bradshaws-was Mary Wagstaff, eldest of eleven children
in Bedfordshire, England, who in 1833 married one William Bone.  Like
the

Briggses, Mary and William Bone were baptized into the new faith by

Mormon missionaries visiting from America.  They sailed from Liverpool
in 1854, traveled by train to Nebraska, and by ox cart across the
plains to

Salt Lake City in 1861.  Mary eventually brought over her old mother,
Mary

Bethsheba, who was buried in Lehi at the age of 101.

Mortality was dreadful in the great trek; orphan children were
commonplace in the Promised Land.  Passing through Nebraska, the Bones
picked up a nine-year-old orphan boy, Richard Travis Bradshaw, born in
1845 in Cheshire, England.  Richard was raised in Lehi by the Bone
family, and he married one of the daughters, Mary Ann.  This young
couple both died in their twenties, leaving three more orphan Bradshaws
to be raised in the Bone household.  The middle child, John Franklin,
eventually married Emma Briggs and became Franklin J. Bradshaw's
father.

At the age of ten, the young orphan boy ran away from home.  Shortly
before, there had been a celebrated spiritual experience within the
Bone family.  One day Mother Bone and a daughter were doing their
washing when they received a visitation from .1 one of the three
Nephites-prophets of old, who are still living on this continent."

These three Nephite brothers, also known in Mormon folklore as "the
peripatetic immortals," appear frequently.  They are benign figures
with flowing white beards and hair, considered to be the spirits of
three of

Christ's twelve apostles who elected not to join Jesus in heaven right
away, but rather to await the Second Coming roaming the earth and doing
random good deeds.  They appear and disappear to the faithful without
warning, and the one who knocked on the Bone family's door on washday
was in the guise of a limping man with a stone in his shoe.  The women
invited him in.

What happened next is described most fully in "Pleasant Recollections
of

Granny Fowler."  The author, the younger sister of the runaway orphan
boy, was at the time of the visitation a fifteen-month-old baby lying
in a basket on the floor.  When the visitor took off his shoe to remove
the stone, the women saw that his foot was transparent.  When they
offered him breakfast, he told them he did not live by earthly food.
"You do not believe me, do you?"  he said.  "But I will give you a
sign.  You will live to see your apple tree blossom out of season."
Then he disappeared.  A few years later, after Granny Fowler's parents
had died, Granny Bone used to take the three motherless children "out
to see the apple tree that blossomed out of season.  It verily came to
pass as the gentleman said it would ..."

John Franklin Bradshaw, the orphan runaway, was twelve when he got his
first job, herding sheep in Montana for eight dollars a month.  At
night it was so cold the rivets in his overalls stuck to his skin.  For
food there was only dried-out flour and water paste cooked in a fry pan
and smeared with molasses or grease.  But nothing would persuade him to
accept charity or return to the stern household of Grandfather Bone. 
At fifteen he became a cowboy, breaking horses in Nevada.  He worked on
the railroad; for a time he mined gold.  He homesteaded in Idaho, and
finally, by the time he had built himself his own log cabin there, he
was eighteen years old.

"I now felt I had the cage but not the bird," he wrote.  Longing for
the genuine home life he had never known, he began to correspond with a
Lehi girl he could remember only faintly-the gently reared Emma Briggs.
In 1889, when Emma was eighteen and John Franklin Bradshaw was
nineteen, they were married.  They had ten children, of whom seven
survived.

Franklin J. Bradshaw, born in Lehi in igoi, was the youngest of their
four sons.

John Franklin Bradshaw in his lifetime would make and lose several
fortunes.  But by the time of his death, in ig4i, he had become Lehi's
major banker and a prosperous farmer and landowner.  Emma and John

Franklin began their married life in Lehi.  In 1903 a group of Mormon
polygamists fled to Alberta, Canada, to escape religious persecution in
the States.  John Franklin wanted to join them, taking along his wife
and five young children.  Utah already was running out of grazing land,
and

Alberta was said to be a stockman's paradise.  He persuaded Emma to "go
pioneering" by making her a promise which they each considered
generous: if she would "give him ten years in the wilderness," he would
build her the finest house in town when they returned to the civilized
splendors of Lehi.

Emma readily agreed.  Neighbor women warned of the hardship ahead, but
she replied that she had married a diamond in the rough, "and I don't
think my diamond is fully polished yet."

All the family memoirs throughout this period speak with greatest
enthusiasm of the coming of electricity, indoor toilets, radios,
movies, automobiles with isinglass windows and the other wonders of
twentieth-century life.  These people grew up with America, worked very
hard, and greatly loved their toilsome lives.  What is noticeable too
in these gentle billows of prose is a uniformly sunny-minded outlook.
The golden glow of nostalgia burns away all remembrance of muddle,
disorder, madness, despair.  Everything happens for the best.  God is
always good.

Family closets contain no skeletons.  Truth has become permanently
sanitized.  An immaculate eternity is assured.

Emma Briggs Bradshaw lasted only seven years in the hellish Canadian
winters before her health broke and in ign forced the family to return
to Lehi three years ahead of schedule.  Franklin built her the fine
house anyhow, on land bought from Grandmother Briggs, who was by now
well into her twenty-seven-year widowhood and firmly established as
Lehi's reigning matriarch.  John Franklin had his fine house decorated
with genuine hand painted murals executed by an itinerant French scene
painter.  He bought for his wife the second motorcar in Lehi, a
Cadillac with folding chairs in the back.  He even took her to

Southern California during the harsh Utah winters.  Still her health
continued to decline.

Emma always hoped that her youngest son, Franklin, would go on a Mormon
mission.  But now the football coach at the University of Utah was
telling the boy he was sure he could get on the varsity team.  Franklin
promised his mother that if she would let him play college football
first, he would do his missionary duty after graduation.  She agreed,
and in gratitude for his pledge bought him his first automobile.  The
relationship between Franklin and his mother appears to have been
extremely affectionate and close, as it was also with his grandmother
and with his sister Bertha, younger by three years.

In 1923 Frank was a strong, good-looking college athlete and an
outstanding student.  He had graduated first in his class in high
school and, now a junior and a geology major, he continued to be
extremely serious about his studies.  That year his mother died of a
heart attack at the age of fifty-two.  His Granny Briggs died the
following year.  Frank was one of the fifty grandchildren she left
~behind.  The death of these two women left the young man feeling
doubly bereaved, and literally homeless.  Then his father remarried,
this time choosing a stern forty-year-old spinster, Sylvia Bushman.

Had not these events occurred in close succession, Berenice Jewett
might not have had a chance.  Berenice, a pretty, popular, fun-loving
coed at the university, had suddenly become hell-bent on matrimony. 
Her parents were moving on to California so that Berenice's mother
could pursue her voice studies, and her vivacious only daughter was
determined not to go along.  The only way she could stay behind was to
get married.  She cast about for the most desirable prospect.

Frank Bradshaw was attractive and well-mannered, a good dancer, and
popular with his fraternity brothers.  He came from a respected family
and appeared to have a good future.  But he had little interest in
girls, and certainly no thoughts of getting married.  He had given his
varsity football sweater to his kid sister,

Bertha.  Many years later he told her, "Bertha, I never even once asked
a girl out the whole time I was in college.  Know why?  They always
asked me!"

"But our home was all broken up.  And Berenice was attractive.  Not a
raving beauty, but attractive," says plain Bertha Bradshaw Beek.  "And
she went to work on Frank."

As Bertha tells it, Berenice Jewett was extremely persistent.  Frank
said he wanted to finish school before taking a wife.  Berenice told
him he could continue studying after their marriage.  Franklin
protested that he wanted to be established in business first.  "You can
still marry me and do that," she said.

Franklin finally gave in.  But in the manner of his yielding to
Berenice's demands, he set a pattern and flavor to their relationship
which would endure to his death.  When Berenice wanted something, she
would keep at her husband, worrying him "like a dog with a bone," he
often said, until he found it easier to say "yes" than to resist her
any longer.  So eventually he almost always did say "yes."  Soon his
"yes" would turn out to really mean yes-but."  So that when Berenice
finally "won" whatever it was that she wanted so badly, the victory was
a hollow and bitter one that never brought her the satisfaction she had
hoped for.

On October 31, 1924, Berenice and Franklin got into the new car his
late mother had given him, and they drove thirty-four miles to Ogden,
Utah, where they were married, without rings or attendants, by a
justice of the peace.  Franklin drove his bride straight back to
campus, dropped her off at her sorority house, and returned to his
fraternity to spend the night.

Except for Berenice's parents, they told no one of their marriage. 
They continued these living arrangements until Franklin Bradshaw was
graduated the following June.

The young couple moved first to California, then Oregon and Idaho,
and

Frank tried his hand at several jobs before returning to Salt Lake City
in 1928 and going to work for National Auto Parts Association, the
largest in the country.  In the next year of dealing in fuel pumps and
fan belts, mufflers and spark plugs Frank Bradshaw saw America's
future.  He saw that it was all on wheels, that people had gone
car-crazy, that they loved to peer under the hood and crawl under the
chassis and try to fix it themselves.  He saw a lifetime's future in
auto parts and, having put in a year studying how the new business
worked, he was ready to go into it on his own.  He borrowed the money
from his father and chose Provo, forty-one miles south of Salt Lake
City, as his first location because nobody else yet had.  He decided
that he and

Berenice would live over the store, not only for economy but so that
when necessary he could literally offer a stranded motorist
twenty-four-hour service.  "Quality and Service Come First" was his
policy from the beginning, and he would willingly get out of bed at
midnight to go downstairs to wait on a customer.

The man who knows the story best today is Doug Steele, Frank's employee
and oldest friend.  A couple of years after Frank's murder the family
sold the business, but Steele stayed on as manager.  A stocky,
pink-faced, white-haired, crinkle-eyed and kindly man, close to sixty
now, he is still down there all day and every day, just as Frank was.
His door is always open and the electric coffeepot outside it is never
allowed to cool.  "Nineteen twenty-nine was a bad year for most things,
but a helluva good time for an auto parts store," Steele recalls,
tilting back his chair.  "People were busy buying cars and they liked
to work on 'em.  In those days a lot of axles were getting broke, and
people had lotsa problems with clutches and transmissions.  Frank was
right there.  He had a large stock, bought from NAPA, and he grew quite
rapidly."

The store generated cash.  Bradshaw invested it in the stock market.

"Frank was shrewd.  Did his own research, Stuck to basics: pay the book
value.  Buy 'em out of favor, don't follow the crowd.  Buy low, sell
high."

The Depression notwithstanding, under Bradshaw's stewardship his auto
parts business continued to grow.  Then came World War II.  "People
were unable to buy new cars, so they tried to keep the old ones
together with glue and spit.  You could sell anything you could get
hold of.  Frank did real good.  And smart?  With Frank, you approach
the border of genius.  Talk about being a good businessman-why, Frank
wrote the book!  And foresight!

He could not only look down-the block, he could look around the
corner!

He had vision."

By war's end Bradshaw's inventory was all paid for, and within a few
years he had stores in thirty-one locations up and down the state.  His
business was organized into seven basic corporations with independent
divisions, a structure modeled after General Motors' separate
Chevrolet,

Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Cadillac divisions, "so if there was a problem
at one end, it wouldn't hurt the other end."  One division, All Car
Parts, was set up deliberately to discourage others from entering the
auto parts business in towns where

Bradshaw already had a monopoly.

The Utah lieutenant-governor's office, where the state's corporate
records are filed, lists nineteen Frank Bradshaw-related
corporations.

Early papers filed as far back as ig4o show that he did have some
partners, mostly family members, but that Bradshaw himself always
retained the majority interest.  His mulish independence is apparent
too;

Bradshaw was cited by the state every year for failure to file annual
reports as required by law.

What Steele calls vision early led Bradshaw to diversify.  While still
in college, he and a partner had started Wasatch Chemical, a company
that bought bulk chemical products-fertilizer, cleaning solvents,
antifreeze-by the carload, and knocked them down into smaller lots to
sell to consumers.  By the time Wasatch sold out to Mountain Fuel in
1969, it had become one of the largest independent chemical companies
in Utah.

Franklin's father had started American Savings & Loan, which prospered
first in Utah and then boomed in the Mormon stronghold of Hawaii.

Although Frank was a stockholder of the company, its president was his
eldest brother, Frederick.  When Frederick died, control was passed
along to other Bradshaw brothers and to their sons.  The members of the
younger generation eventually developed what Frank called
"expansionitis" and, finding themselves with insufficient capital, they
issued more and more stock until the company became "a plum ripe for
the picking."  In 1973 Dan

Ludwig, the reclusive Florida billionaire, quietly bought up the stock
and took the company away from the family.  It was one of the few times
the Bradshaws were ever bested in a business deal, and it had taken the
richest man in America to do it.

Like his father, Franklin Bradshaw always had a special fondness for
mining claims, and he held them both in Utah and Canada.  As a young
man in college, he had worked summers in the gold and silver mines at
Park

City, now a ski resort, and had become fascinated by the science of
precious minerals.  But the major source of Franklin Bradshaw's fortune
was oil leases.  His original interest began with a desperation born of
success.  "They wouldn't have said it that way then, but Frank 'n' them
was makin' too much money in auto parts," says Steele.  "They needed to
reinvest to alleviate the seventy percent tax bracket they was in." The
move succeeded in reducing the taxable income and eventually made
Bradshaw his fortune.  At his death, although it could never be proved,
many Salt Lake oilmen believed him to be the largest individual
leaseholder in the United States.

Bradshaw's multimillion-dollar auto parts empire may have been
organized like General Motors, but its corporate headquarters looks as
if it had been organized by a set decorator for haunted-house movies.
The crumbling facade of the block-square warehouse appears untouched,
even by a paintbrush, since Frank bought the place more than half a
century ago.

It is located on the faded, peeling, decaying industrial edge of Salt

Lake in an area of warehouses, tire dealers, paint companies, small
factories.  The Bradshaw block on the south side of West Pierpont
Street has a row of old pickup trucks parked below the loading dock out
front.

Rotting stone pier-, hold up the elevated bare wood sidewalk.  Scuffed
wooden steps climb steeply to an old yellow painted wooden door with
bleary signs: PUSH and OPEN.  The door's bottom boards are raggedy, as
if rats had been gnawing them.  The wood is splintered by thousands of
kicks administered by the stout boots of the hurrying, hard-handed,
thrifty workingmen who were Frank Bradshaw's customers.

In a city less honest and well policed than Salt Lake, the security
problems in operating a business like Bradshaw Auto Parts would be
insurmountable.  The warehouse serves as a distribution depot for the
chain of stores, and at any time contains an inventory Of $750,000 to
$1,000,000 worth of readily disposable items.  The huge, dilapidated
building has a total of ten doors-five on the front facade, five at the
rear.  All the doors are individually locked, most of them padlocked
from the inside.  During the workday one or two doors are left
unlocked, as fire exits, the open padlocks hanging on the hasps.  The
remaining doors, except of course the front door, are closed during the
daytime, open padlocks dangling, so that doors can be opened from the
inside by employees whenever necessary to receive or ship merchandise.
Frank

Bradshaw's first act every morning was to unlock some of these
padlocks.

At night he closed them.  During the day the keys were tossed casually
into a drawer in the managers' desk.  Only he and his two top men,
Doug

Steele and the late Clive Davis, had keys to the outside lock on the
yellow front door.

Inside, the place smells of auto wax and rubber and grease and oil, and
it has the old-fashioned air of a run-down country general store. 
Parts Spill out of boxes, and harried clerks and customers in
mechanic's coveralls paw through stock catalogs with greasy fingers. 
Each morning at a little before Too, Frank Bradshaw used to park his
old Ford truck, climb the steep steps to the platform sidewalk outside
his offices, unfasten the lock on the beat-up door, and retrieve the
money bag he had hidden the night before in one of the thousands of
boxes of auto parts stacked along dozens of cluttered, crowded aisles. 
The bag normally contained about $300.  His system was faster and safer
and easier, he said, than taking the cash to a bank each night.  He
tended the counter himself for the early customers.  When his employees
came in at eight o'clock,

Frank went next door to his "oil office," a small, bleak room which he
shared with his faithful country-girl secretary, Nancy Jones.  It
looked an unlikely place for the stewardship of millions of dollars.
The only decoration was a bowling trophy once won by a Bradshaw
employee.  The boss sat at a battered old schoolmarm's desk.  Piled on
top of it were the orange crates, with their vivid labels still
intact--Queen Bee and Santa

Anna-into which he had stuffed his geological maps and land surveys. 
He busied himself most mornings poring over these papers, seeking to
determine the worth of particular pieces of land.

At the rear of the immense warehouse he had another desk with a swivel
chair so broken that nobody but himself could sit in it.  "You had to
plant both feet firmly on the ground to keep from falling off,"
old-time employees joked.  Back there Frank had other makeshift files,
mostly in shoe boxes, and an old U.S. Army war surplus Royal typewriter
on which he often typed his own correspondence.  At night, after the
other employees went home at seven o'clock, Frank would lock the doors,
hide the money bag, and then work another three or four hours, alone,
in his front office next to the street.  Friends and mechanics and
customers all knew to rap hard on his window and Frank would be happy
to unlock the door and sell them the needed part.  He had set up the
original inventory, and knew every part in the place.

Franklin loved to supervise his small engine-repair business down at
the far end of the raised sidewalk.  The shop fixed things like chain
saws and lawn mowers, and Frank seemed to enjoy leaving the abstract
world of stocks, maps, and oil leases to run next door and caress a
carburetor or a magneto.  Several times a day he looked in on doings at
the shop, and he always ran there and back as fast as he could go.  The
old man was a health fanatic.  He toted around bottles of dark brown
Karo syrup which he swigged for energy and pep.

He gobbled wheat germ and vitamin tablets.  He did not smoke, and be
sipped at a cocktail perhaps once a year at a geologists' convention.
During his autopsy, the surgeon commented that the old fellow had a
healthier heart and lungs than some men half his age.

Bradshaw was often called miserly, but it might be more accurate to say
that he had no interest in, and got no pleasure from anything money
could buy.  Mostly, he was frugal with himself He saw no sense in
taking a plane if he could take a bus; in taking a bus if he could
walk.  When his watch was stolen in a burglary some years before his
death, he saw no sense in replacing it.  He had no use for the
high-priced attentions of doctors, lawyers, and other "professionals."
He was a loner, self-made and self-educated, who believed he could
already do most things better than other people, and what he did not
know he could learn.  One of the few purchases he allowed himself were
self-help books with titles like How to Be Your Own

Doctor, and How to Draw Your Own Will.

Two things he did not begrudge money for were education and medical
expenses for members of his family, though he considered medical
attention for himself an utter waste.  And he did not object when
Berenice began to travel.  When she became the travel agent's best
friend, moving in ever wider orbits, signing up for every cruise folder
on the counter, he paid the bills gladly.  He even reminded his wife
that she should always invite her fellow cruise mates out for dinner in
a restaurant one night, and not to forget to leave a solid ten percent
tip.

Nor was Bradshaw stingy with his employees, especially where his time
was concerned.  When he died there were 155 people on his payroll, and
few if any complaints.  He had set up a generous retirement fund, and
employees could borrow against it to buy a car, or for other needs.
Although salaries were not high, employees could make a good living if
they worked as hard as the boss.  He gave every kid who wanted one a
job; all four of the Steele kids had worked at Bradshaw's while they
were growing up.

"All four of Frank's children worked down here too, when they were in
high school," says Steele.  "Oh yes, the girls too.  They all knew the
place Yery weIL But the three daughters left town for good as soon as
they finished high school, and Bob

Bradshaw went into the service at seventeen.  "There was obvious
tension in the home.  Frank was a very private person, a very proud
person.  He never showed his emotions, wouldn't reveal his soul to
anyone.  But, listen: once in a while he'd break down and talk to me.
Because he had to have someone to talk to.  He'd spend eighteen of his
twenty-four hours down here!  Who else was he to talk to?  Heh, heh.
One time he said to me, "Doug, be careful.  A man works his ass off and
he dies young.  Then his wife finds a younger man and spends all the
money.  Six months later she says, What was the name of that guy I was
married toT "

Long before the end of his life, Frank Bradshaw had taught himself to
control his feelings the way an Indian fakir controls pain.  He was an
austere man who cared nothing for creature comforts, for culture of any
sort, for any of the "finer things of life."  He didn't care what time
it was.  He didn't even care what he ate.  He read nothing but geology
and oil texts, newspapers, news magazines and financial statements.
Most of these he read on Sundays, in the public library, for free.
Whatever his vices, they were not of the garden variety.  He did not
chase women.  He abstained from tobacco, alcohol, gambling, even
catTeine.  He did not play cards, nor did he have other hobbies.  His
only play was his work.  Franklin Bradshaw was an almost pathological
workaholic, a loner, in no ordinary way gregarious, although always
entirely available to his employees and customers alike.

Yet he did have a diffuse family feeling: strong ties of blood to
other

Bradshaws, concern for his daughters, and-most of all tender feelings
toward his grandchildren.  If Franklin Bradshaw, by all modes of
measurement a "hard man," had one weak spot, that was his deep fondness
for his four grandsons.  It would prove to be, literally, his fatal
weakness.

As for Franklin's wife, no one would seem to have had deeper family
feelings, longings, yearnings, attachments-not the most devout
Mormon-than

Berenice Jewett Bradshaw.  She is a woman who will organize her entire
life around her family, who will fight the aching loneliness of her
present family life by writing a detailed, one-hundred-year history of
her past family life, and who ultimately will sacrifice all on the high
altar of motherly and grandmotherly devotion.

Berenice Bradshaw began composing her "Autobiography" some time in the
late 193os, as a diversion from the struggle to raise four children
almost singlehandedly.  By the early forties she had set her work
aside, too exhausted by the rigors of living her life to find energy to
write about it.  Then, in the late fifties, all her children grown and
gone-feeling drained anew, emptied this time by her own sense of
emptiness-she got out her old typewriter, found the old pages, and
resumed work, as if reaching for a sense of having lived a life through
the very act of setting it all down.

She is a patriot and contrives for the "Autobiography" to span one
hundred years, 1876 to 1976, so that it will coincide with and help to
celebrate the nation's Bicentennial.  The work's main character does
not appear until 1903, when Berenice Jewett is born in Sioux City,
Iowa.  The early pages are based on a memoir by Fred Daniel Jewett,
Berenice's father, which she persuaded him to write in his later years.
Fred had been raised in Denver, where his mother died just as the boy
was finishing high school.  A few months later he met pretty Florence
Roberts, a student at the Denver Conservatory of Music.  One moonlit
night on

Florence's parents' front porch, as Berenice tells the story, the young
couple impulsively decides to get married.  The next day Fred borrows a
horse and buggy, they cross the Missouri River into Nebraska, hunt up a
judge, find a red-shirted, overalled farmer and his wife to serve as
witnesses, and tie the knot that will join them forever.  Driving back
to

Iowa in the rain, the newlyweds meet an Italian traveling with a
dancing bear.  They pause "to watch the bear dance in the rain.". This
one fleeting moment of gaiety behind them, their story descends at once
to the level of gritty struggle on which it will thereafter remain.

One sentence after the bear, Fred writes that "The old grind began, no
honeymoon, no money."  He clerks in grocery stores, toils in
meat-packing houses and labors for a cigar maker.  Berenice is their
first child.  Three years later, in i9o6, her brother Bill is born.
Berenice picks up the narrative in her own voice in the spring of igog,
just as the little family is heading west to Idaho.  Her father has
hatched a harebrained scheme to find some cheap farmland and raise a
quick-cash crop of cantaloupes, potatoes, and beans.  As a woman,
Berenice Bradshaw can be realistic; as a diarist she habitually reaches
for rose-colored glasses along with her pen.  She describes life in the
open fields with no shelter but a raggedy tent, parents and children
toiling seven days a week from sunup to sundown only to be wiped out at
market time by a price drop that leaves them still deeper in debt, as
"a rewarding family experience."

Berenice's earliest memory is of standing with her toddler brother on
the soft, high banks of the "large and treacherous" Snake River roaring
behind their parents' house.  Pregnant Florence notices the children
and makes "a frantic dash the full length of the long lot and grabbed
us for fear the banks would cave in and carry us to our death in this
wild, dangerous stream."  When Florence's third child is stillborn,
five-year-old Berenice and little Bill are told by their father that
"the saving of our lives caused the loss of our baby sister."  Father
makes a little wooden box and buries the infant under an apple tree in
the backyard.

The family moves on to Eagle, Idaho, and a house so poorly built "you
could throw a cat out the cracks."  Fred earns fifteen dollars a month
as a general-store clerk.  His wife and children gather spilled coal
from the railroad tracks for fuel.  Then Dad is caught.  taking home an
overweight sack of sugar and loses his job.  He finds work in a
slaughterhouse but is too "kind and humanitarian" to "relish working in
this atmosphere of killing."  He winds up as an accountant at a music
company in Boise, commuting from Eagle by streetcar.  The reaction of
his wife, the former belle of the Denver Conservatory of Music, to her
grim new existence is nowhere mentioned in this book.  But twenty years
later, the same tale of impulsive marriage followed by lengthy,
withering regret will be recapitulated by the Jewetts' daughter
Berenice, and Franklin Bradshaw.

Berenice describes a happy small-town girlhood filled with barn dances,
sleigh rides and box socialt.  "We made our own good times instead of
depending on outside activity or sitting glued to a television set as
folks are doing today."

Berenice's forebears are distinguished chiefly by their longevity.  One
paternal great-grandfather, the Reverend Daniel Jewett, an Iowa Baptist
minister and college teacher, lives eighty-two years; Grandpa
Detweiler, a druggist, dies at eighty-three.  The sons of these men
each lives eighty-three years.  On her mother's side is Granny Tacy
Arabella Davis

Roberts.  Tacy dies at ninety three and is the most beloved figure in
the book.  Tiny, fierce, and high-spirited, she has six children and
plays a major part in raising her only granddaughter, Berenice.
Florence,

Berenice's mother, is Tacy's eldest child; Tacy's youngest daughter,
Beatrice, is only six years older than her granddaughter.  To
Berenice, her "Aunt Bea" always seems more like an older sister, and
the children become lifelong best friends.  Half a century later, when
Berenice

Bradshaw, now seventy-nine, finds herself dodging subpoenas from a
Salt

Lake County Attorney, the pike she chooses to hide out is the home of
her eighty-five-year-old Aunt Beatrice Horton, in a remote fishing
village on the coast of Maine.

Berenice was not just tenderhearted Tacy's first grandchild.  She was
for twenty-one years the only granddaughter in the entire clan.  As
such, she was passionately and uncritically adored.  When Berenice's
narrative gets around to describing the arrival of her own only
granddaughter, Ariadne, the same intensity of devotion is focused, like
sunlight through a magnifying lens, on one single little girl.
Ariadne's middle name, it will turn out, is Tacy.

The story has something of the flavor of Our Town.  Ordinary people are
born, live, and die in unremarkable ways.  Life is hard.  Women tend
children and men work at whatever jobs are available.  But instead of

Thorton Wilder in bond, the reader gets ladies' magazine vanilla.

Whatever individuality may once have marked the characters has been
scoured away, either by the limitations of the biographer or by her
careful sense of propriety.  People all wear their Sunday best in her
numerous family photograph albums, and all appear in their best light
in her narrative.  It renders them uniformly respectable and dull. 
Save for

Florence's early music study and Berenice's later voice lessons~ no one
is involved even marginally with the arts, or with any form of
intellectual endeavor; there is no awareness of the outside world of
events, or the inner world of imagination.  Unlike the Bradshaws'
writings, not even religious zeal enlivens the pages.  After a while,
one longs for a transparent foot to appear in the doorway.

Berenice spends long, exuberant periods in the care of Grandmother
Tacy.

When Aunt Bea turns fourteen, she invites her friends over for a
slumber party.  At midnight the giggling girls sneak downstairs to make
a freezer of peach ice cream.  As soon as the teenagers leave their
bedroom, Tacy and eight-year-old Berenice tiptoe upstairs and "french"
the empty beds with frogs and slime and cold spaghetti.  The evening
ends in a riotous pillow fight, a glorious swirl of feathers in
lamplight with little

Bere nice and her diminutive grandmother triumphantly holding the
fourteen-year-olds at bay.

But by the age of twelve, Berenice is back living with her parents and
brother in an apartment in Salt Lake.  Her mother works full-time as a
saleslady in an elegant department store, a job that enables her to
keep herself and her daughter always fashionably dressed.  "Mother
liked fine clothes, and Father was a stingy man."  When Florence is
hospitalized with a grave but unspecified illness, Berenice comes home
after school to wash the breakfast dishes and start the dinner, then
wash the evening dishes.

She cleans the entire house on Saturdays and does the laundry in the
bathtub.  She is dutiful and does these chores without being asked. 
But in her memoirs Berenice confides that she felt "robbed of girlhood"
and abandoned by her mother, just as her own daughters will come to
feel.

In high school, once again living with her grandparents, Berenice
blossoms.  She is lovely and lively and, thanks to Florence, "always
the best dressed."  Soon she is "swept off her feet" by Arthur Tuck,
the school's very handsome "prize catch."  The summer after Arthur's
graduation he proposes to fifteen-year-old Berenice "in a most
dramatic, romantic way, just like they do in the movies."  But first he
must fulfill his destiny as a college football hero.  (He is such a
superb all-round athlete that he once takes thirty-two first places at
the Oregon State

Track Meet and achieves immortality in Ripley's Believe It Or Not as
the "one man who won an entire track meet.")

Time and space are not kind to the lovers and they drift apart.  "Fast"
sorority girls pursue the football star.  Finally "the worst" happens
when

Arthur, en route home from a track meet in Belgium, stops off in Salt

Lake to visit Berenice.  The sweethearts go hiking in the mountains.
While they are gone, her mother already in the habit of snooping in her
husband's pockets-rummages through Arthur's clothes and finds an
unmailed envelope addressed to another girl.

"Being curious and having that mother instinct of wanting to protect
her own," Berenice writes, Florence steams open the letter, "writes
off" a copy and, saying nothing, hides her handiwork under the shelf
paper in her daughter's bureau drawer.  The epistolary time bomb does
not take long to explode.  When Berenice discovers the copied love
letter in her mother's hand, addressed to an unnamed girl, she locks
her door and cries for an entire day and night.  Then she sends Arthur
a sarcastic note and never hears from him again.

"A broken love affair is very devastating and it took me several years
to get over this," she reports.  But though she cries for Arthur every
night, she conceals her true feelings from everyone, and spends hours
alone practicing her piano.  Between mother and daughter, the subject
is never mentioned.

Oppressed and excluded by the clannish.  Mormons who predominate at
Salt

Lake City's public high school, Berenice transfers to Westminster, a
small, strict, private Presbyterian junior college.  Once more she is
popular, active, something of a "flapper" and frequently involved in
"daring" escapades.  She graduates in a beautiful dress of "orchid
georgette, all ruffled," made by her mother, long white kid gloves and
a large-brim leghorn hat trimmed with lilacs.  The photograph shows a
willowy, darkhaired young beauty with a ravishing smile.  She enrolls
in the University of Utah, takes a business course but is disinterested
in studying, very fond of music and dancing, and frankly out for a good
time.  The year is 1922.

The book portrays her father as sweet and kind but "very stingy."
Berenice is like her mother, more grasshopper than ant.  The other men
are seen as likable but ineffectual.  Grandpa Roberts, Tacy's husband,
reminds Berenice of Andy in "Amos 'n' Andy": "He always had a big deal
on or a scheme where by he was going to get rich over nite but they
always fell thru.  He slept from deal to deal."  Later in the story,
when the multitudinous Bradshaws appear, both sexes are portrayed as
imperious and smug, people who accept the hospitality of others as
their "due" and treat Franklin's young wife-as they do every young
female -as a slavey and semi servant

Amid the Bradshaws, Berenice is a Cinderella with no hope of a glass
slipper.  She has already found her prince and is married to him. 
Their first two or three years of married life are times of genuine
hardship.

Berenice and Franklin hopscotch over the western states in a series of
broken-down automobiles, looking for work, living in mining camps or
cheap hotel rooms, or tenting in public camp grounds.  They wander
across Idaho,

Montana, Washington, sometimes sleeping in their car, sometimes pawning
it, often going without food for several days.  Franklin works in a
Tacoma smelter until his lungs ache; together they toil as migrant
fruit picker.

The grimness of their lives is unrelieved.  Berenice feels
responsible.

"Franklin thought he was marrying a breadwinner, but I turned out to be
a liability."  At times she succumbs to crying jags which, under the
circumstances, do not seem unreasonable.  Once they find shelter in an
abandoned building during a heavy downpour.  They have partially moved
in when they discover "the ground covered with green slimy creatures
that look like dill pickles with legs."

Although Franklin's father is the influential president of the Bank
of

Lehi and both of Berenice's parents are employed, "we never wrote any
of our problems to our parents.  For all they knew we were just on a
gay jaunt, taking in the sights and having a whee of a time."  But with
cold weather coming on, the forlorn pair heads south to California
where both sets of parents happen to be spending the winter.  Franklin
is dressed in a half-burnt overcoat he has used to put out a fire in
their car.  His shoes are mended with cardboard and string.  Ashamed,
the bank president buys his son new clothes.

But "my appearance didn't touch his pocketbook," so Berenice must wait
for new outfitting until they arrive in Los Angeles.  "It seemed so
good to be with my parents and the Roberts clan once more.  They were
'fun' people to be around.  Franklin's people were religious, their
customs and outlook on life were very different .  My people were free
from ritual living, no inhibitions.  They were clean, honest people and
loved life."

Berenice gets a department-store job and one day glimpses Rudolph

Valentino.  Franklin drives a truck.  But he sees no future in Los
Angeles and after six months decides to return to Utah.  Berenice would
have preferred to remain, but "I was married and my place was with my
husband."  In Franklin's version of this story, confided late in his
life to a trusted daughter, he realizes by now that he has been
inveigled into marriage with a fundamentally frivolous woman and tries
gently to leave

Berenice behind.

In the summer of 1926, the tar on the California-Nevada desert road
literally bubbles in the heat, and Franklin patches twenty one blowouts
in one boiling afternoon.  After a three-day journey they reach Lehi
and find fresh garden fruits and vegetables arrayed on the family
dinner table.  For a time, this all-Mormon community again seems like
the

Promised Land.  Bradshaw relatives help find Franklin a job, and let
them rent a family-owned house.  But winter comes, the barn turns out
to be rat-infested, and at night huge rodents jump against Berenice's
back door.  Visits to the privy become a heWsh ordeal.

The one member of Franklin's family who is kind to Berenice is his
sister

Bertha.  Both young women discover they are pregnant, and spend the
winter happily stitching baby clothes.  A Bradshaw relative decides to
earn extra money raising poultry, and soon the muddy yard outside
Berenice's house contains two thousand chickens; a half-dozen manage to
fly inside each time she opens her screen door.  When her labor
commences, Franklin drives her to the hospital, but then goes home to
help his parents.  Berenice is furious that he is not with her at
midnight, August jo, 1927, when Robert

Jewett Bradshaw is born.

As always, Franklin responds to fury with further withdrawal.  When the
next three children are born, he will arrange for his relatives to
drive

Berenice to the hospital and to bring her and the baby home.  Of all

Franklin's failures as a husband, nothing angers his wife so much as
his indifference at these times.

Florence arrives to help Berenice care for the baby and is appalled at
her living conditions: a coal stove, no indoor plumbing, the two
thousand chickens.  Then Franklin's stepmother drops in with a full
bushel basket of peaches and plums which she wants the younger woman to
can.  She has not even brought Mason jars.  At this Florence blows up
and, with

Franklin's blessing, shepherds her daughter and new grandson back to
the comforts of Southern California.

Franklin gets a job in the copper mines.  Berenice and baby rejoin him,
the ordeal begins anew: no running water, no paved streets, no comforts
of any kind.  Bob is an irritable baby who cries a great deal. 
Franklin decides to spend the summer prospecting, and leaves his wife
and son with the senior Bradshaws.  Berenice learns she is expected to
do all the housekeeping in the big home, prepare Sunday dinners for any
Bradshaw relatives who drop in, wash up the dishes and-after all
that--entertain the guests at the parlor piano.

Her Cinderella existence worsens with the onset of her second
pregnancy.

As soon as Bob can walk, he starts wandering away from home.  Their
house has a deep irrigation canal on one side of it and railroad tracks
on the other, so his frazzled mother ties him in the front yard with a
strong rope.  Robert continually wriggles free and disappears.
Neighbors criticize the frantic mother for roping a little boy.  "I
tied him up because I loved him," she says.

Franklin has by now completed his year-long self-apprenticeship to
National

Auto Parts, analyzed the future of the business, borrowed a little
money for inventory from his father, and is ready to set up shop for
himself.

Since no auto parts stores exist south of Salt Lake, the family moves
down to Provo.  Six weeks later Florence arrives for the birth of her
second grandchild; Franklin is once again busy minding his store.  The
new arrival,

Marilyn, is plump and healthy, although "I can't honestly say she was
beautiful.  I never thought my babies were beautiful."

A year passes.  "All signs inform me another baby was 'in the basket."
By now the family is living above the store, and the one bedroom
contains a double bed and three cribs lining the walls.  It is 1931.
Franklin's money is split between two banks, one in Provo, the other in
Lehi, and both banks close in the same week.  The family is once more
destitute, and soon there will be five mouths to feed, and hospital and
doctor bills to pay.  Berenice daily sieves vegetables and scrapes beef
for baby food.  She reckons she has now literally washed diapers every
day for nearly five years.  When her devout Mormon neighbors object
that she is ignoring the biblical injunction to observe the Sabbath,
she says, "The baby does the same thing on Sunday it does the other six
days."

Bob is still wandering off, now with chubby Marilyn toddling behind.
One day when Berenice is "huge with Elaine," and her two children have
not been seen since early morning, she loses her temper and goes
hunting.  Finding the children in a candy store, without their
tricycle, she takes a stick and "whams Bob every step of the way
home."

After this she is "so disgusted" she never goes searching for Bob
again, just waits for him to come home.  "When I quit looking, he quit
running away.  Bob was always a sweet boy, never did naughty things
like other boys .  But he was hard to raise.  He was five years old
before we could get him toilet-trained.  One day Franklin put him in
the bathtub and took the broom to his behind.  Another time we went up
the canyon on a family picnic.

Bob messed his pants.  Franklin took his clothes off and ducked him in
the cold mountain stream.  When I think of all the cruel things we did
to that boy trying to toilei-train him, I just shudder.

"Those were trying days, three small children to care for.  It was
work, work, work.  I loved my children dearly.  I did everything I was
told to do by the doctors for their health and wellbeing.  I did not
neglect them, ever.  They were three of the cutest children and got
prettier every day.

Bob was absolutely handsome."

Passages such as this one begin to have a defensive sound.  Berenice's
voluminous family photo albums, each one neatly pasted and labeled in
white ink on black paper, show page after page of ordinary-looking
children and adults in typical box Brownie situations: sunbathing,
graduating, sitting on ponies, admiring new cars, gathered around

Christmas trees.  Nobody is especially "cute".  Everybody is squinting
in the sunlight; the children are weedy or tubby-looking, the men are
large, strong, and rugged, their women decidedly plain.  The only
exception is

Berenice herself.  She is a knockout.

In Los Angeles Florence dies of a stroke, at the age of fifty-five, and
is buried in the family's Masonic plot at Forest Lawn.  As soon as they
are alone, Fred Jewett asks his daughter, "Well, honey, what do you
think has happened to her?"

"Nothing, she is just where we put her, in the ground.  People are
always talking about going someplace when they die.  I don't know where
there is to go.  I do not believe in any form of life after death here
or anyplace else.  It is ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the end."

By 1934 Berenice has joined the Provo chapter of the Eastern Star.

Eventually she will enroll in Job's Daughters, the Daughters of the

American Revolution, the Daughters of Armorial Ancestry, the Huguenot

Society, and as many other hereditary orders as she can locate.  She is
not by nature a clubwoman.  These activities serve more to relieve her
aching loneliness, and to affirm her own identity among these Mormons
by whom she feels overwhelmed.

In 1935 Berenice brings all her children down to the Provo Tonsil
Clinic and has three pairs of tonsils snipped at once, according to
prevailing medical fashion.  Elaine falls ill with rheumatic fever. 
Not realizing the seriousness of the illness, Berenice takes her
children to visit her parents in San Diego and rents a seaside cottage.
"We thought we were doing the right thing by giving Elaine this
exposure to sunshine and play.  The result of our ignorance and the
doctors' failure to advise us left Elaine with a damaged heart for the
rest of her life."

Twice a week Berenice drags the children to dancing school.  Faithfully
she sews costumes, has metal taps attached to Robert's shoes, ties up

Marilyn's hair into corkscrew curls, and rehearses everybody in
"Animal

Crackers in My Soup," all to no avail.  The children are hopelessly
untalented.

BY 1937 Franklin is eager to open a second store, in Salt Lake City,
and compete with the big-time auto parts dealers there.  He tries to
move his family into a dilapidated one-bedroom bungalow in Salt Lake
which the

Bradshaws already own but Berenice is adamant, and for once her
father-in-law is on her side.  Instead they buy the two-bedroom dream
house on Gilmer Drive.  Berenice is eagerly looking forward to moving
her daughters out of the parental bedroom, where they now sleep (Robert
occupies his own closet-size room in the rear) and to the freedom, by
autumn, of having all three of her children in school for at least part
of the day.  But by autumn Berenice is dismayed to discover that, seven
years after Elaine's birth, she is pregnant once again.

"I had three babies in three and a half years.  I had four babies
before

I discovered what was causing it."

Berenice describes her family's first Christmas on Gilmer Drive as "the
bleakest I have ever known."  The Depression is causing Franklin to
work even later at night, and he is saving a bit more money by eating
only two meals a day.  "Franklin was so on edge that winter, he was
horrible to live with."  On Christmas Eve, with her last fifty cents,
Berenice buys candy for the children's stockings, a doll for each
daughter, and "a cheap little red wagon" for Bob.  When Franklin sees
the toys he berates her for not waiting until after Christmas, when
they would have been half-price.

"Expecting a baby under these conditions was almost more than I could
bear," she says.  "I wanted to die many times."  But the other
children, now ages seven, eight, and ten, are thrilled to have a baby
sister and

Marilyn becomes known in the family as "Other Mother."  There will be
times in the baby's first years when she is left entirely in Marilyn's
care.  After the delivery of Frances Bradshaw, Berenice goes into a
kind of blue funk, and spends six months weeping and refusing to come
out of her bedroom.  Before Frances is two years old, Elaine is ill
again.  One day her teacher sends a note home saying Elaine has been
falling down a lot, and "fidgeting" so badly she distracts the other
second-graders.  A doctor says this is "St.  Vitus' dance," associated
with a serious recurrence of rheumatic fever.  The only treatment is
complete rest.  The child must be kept entirely in bed, even for meals,
and carried back and forth to the bathtub and toilet.  For two years
her education is supervised by a visiting teacher, but her
twenty-four-hour care is split between Berenice and Marilyn, who is now
ten.

"Elaine remembers being alone much of the time," says Marilyn today.
She sat in bed working on her collection of expensive "Storybook
Dolls."

These were the Ken and Barbie dolls of their day, although larger and
more lavish.  Elaborate sew-it-yourself doll clothing could be bought
to suit the dolls' fairy-tale characters, and Elaine made dozens of
silken gowns, satin cloaks, velvet capes, pearl -embroidered Juliet
caps, beribboned doublets; she stitched wimples, veils, peignoirs,
embroidered waistcoats, satin breeches.  These are the very same dolls,
says Marilyn, which today stand side by side, untouched, a ghostly
company of fairytale princes and princesses, cramming the top shelves
of Ariadne's closets.

Marilyn knows about this from Berenice, who gave Elaine's old dolls to
her granddaughter.  Elaine and Marilyn have never seen these closets.

In her "Autobiography," Berenice scourges herself for not recognizing

Elaine's symptoms in time to prevent permanent heart damage.  Her
guilts reawaken sorrowful memories of her stillborn baby sister, after
the episode on the riverbank.

Berenice wistfully recalls her own childhood fun with Tacy's children,
"sitting around the big old table with a dishpan full of popcorn
playing games."  She tries this with her children.  "All they did was
fight.  I thought to myself: Okay, they don't know any better, and they
will never know any better.  And I never tried the second time."

While Elaine is still bedridden, "Bob's health began to show signs of
future illness."  This is a reference, her book's only one, to Robert's
increasingly severe epileptic seizures which had commenced at
puberty.

And now that she desperately needs domestic help, none is to be
found.

Unemployed women have gone to work in wartime defense plants.

Frances has been particularly difficult to care for since birth, even
harder to put to sleep than Robert was.  At times neighbors hear the
Bradshaw family singing loudly late into the night.  In fact they are
all-parents and three children--sitting in a circle around the crib
attempting for hours on end to sing the fretful baby to sleep.  Today

Berenice will acknowledge that "Frances was always trouble to raise.
She was my caboose," she sometimes adds, "and many's the time I wished
I could have given her back."  But she says this with a rueful grin.
Then she adds,

"But I'm needed.  That family really needs me," and she smiles.

In her book she is less forthright, more sentimental, more self
pitying

"All this time Franklin worked from early morning until late at nite,
seven days a week," Berenice writes of the family's World War II
years.

"The children were my complete responsibility and care ... Sundays I
would watch the neighbors go off in their cars with their families and
picnic lunchm I had a car.  I could have put my children in and gone
off.

But what fun or amusement would there be for me to take three small
children and wander off somewhere?  ... Just more of the same.  No
freedom or pleasure for me.  Many a Sunday afternoon for years I would
throw myself on the bed and cry.  Cry for someone to show an interest,
to relieve me of my constant burden.  In the last fifty years I have
cried enough tears to float a battleship.  The well has dried up now
but the emotions are still there."

This said, Berenice files away her "Autobiography" and does not touch
it for the next seventeen years.  She resumes writing on August 17,
1959--Granny Tacy's one-hundredth birthday-and she now invites Franklin
to read over her account of their family's early years.  He is not
impressed.  "You didn't make it happy," he tells her.

"But it wasn't happy!"  she replies.

Berenice is somewhat more inclined than her husband to call a spade a
spade.  She acknowledges two or perhaps three "nervous breakdowns," the
term both she and her daughters use for her spells of deep anxiety or
despair.  Franklin, with his increasing distaste for doctors and for
any frailty of mind or body, will say only that his wife is "an
over-nervous person."  Whatever the label, the depressions she
describes during her seventeen-year silence all seem linked to her
feelings of inadequacy to the task of trying singlehandedly to raise
four children, two of them seriously ill, in what she experiences as a
bleak and emotionally hostile climate.

The first "breakdown," after Frances's birth, would today be termed a
post-partum depression.  The second occurs in 1942 or 43 when

Berenice begins to experience "nerve exhaustion."  She fears that the
walls of buildings are about to fall in on her; she is afraid of
smothering.  She dreads closing her eyes at night, tired as she is, for
fear of dying in her sleep.  Franklin must spend hours sitting up with
his wife, trying to dispel her terrors.  She shops around for medical
help but doctors find nothing specifically wrong.  They recommend less
stress, so Marilyn and

Robert are sent off for a year to a boarding school in southern Utah.

Elaine, now recovered, is able to return to the neighborhood public
school, and Frances is old enough to begin nursery school.  To her
mother's surprise, she is considered a model child, perfect in every
way.  "This struck me as phenomenal as she wasn't that easy to live
with at home."

At the doctor's suggestion, Berenice resumes her voice and piano
lessons, and even for a time sings with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
She also began making regular visits to a local spa for whirlpool baths
and other forms of hydrotherapy-a regimen she still continues.  Within
a few months she is feeling quite her old self again.

As soon as Frances is old enough, the child begins to assert a fanatic
determination to be independent of her mother.  Shortly before her
ninth birthday, for example, Berenice is secretly planning a surprise
party.

The surprise is on Berenice when she learns Frances has found out and
called every potential guest to tell them the party has been
canceled.

Just as Berenice had once given up trying to prevent Robert from
running off, and later given up making popcorn, she now vows that she
will never again try to give Frances a party.  In fact, the
mother-daughter relationship will develop into a kind of lifelong
surprise party and Frances will find continual new ways of surprising
her mother with bad news, thirty years of frogs and slime and cold
spaghetti.

A 1946 family outing to Yellowstone Park is not a success.  Franklin,
the fanatic early riser, becomes infuriated by the children's
late-sleeping habits, which he blames on Berenice.  He demands they all
return home at once, but his wife contrives a stop en route at the
restored Wild West town of Jackson Hole, and introduces her older
children, now ages nineteen, seventeen, and fifteen, to the delights of
saloons and gambling dens, while eight year-old Frances is left sulking
in the car.  Domestic hostility sizzles through the pages of Berenice's
one-sided account:

Franklin was chasing around town so I took MY 3 oldest into a cocktail
lounge where they sipped their first liquor cocktail.  They took to
liquor like a fish to water.  They were ready for 14 seconds" when
their father showed up.  Our next excitement was at the gambling
tables.  Bob wanted to stay in Jackson Hole and be a dealer in "Black
Jack."  The next day we were on our way back to Utah.  The kids said.
"Do we have to go back to that Sunday School State?"  Life in Jackson
Hole was right "up their alley."  This was the only trip our family
ever went on together.

The senior Bradshaws make a conscious effort to find a congenial
pastime, and take up square dancing.  Although they make a few friends
and even have their picture in The Deseret News as First Square Dance
Couple of

Utah, the idea sputters and dies in the cold winds of their
relationship.

Berenice says her husband enjoys dancing with the other women, but not
with his wife, "so ... he would yank me around over the floor.  We
would fight all the way to the dance and fight all the way home.  About
what I don't remember."

By the time Frances is in the fifth grade at the neighborhood public
school she is studying music, and is prey to hostile teasing attacks by
the Mormon majority.  When the other kids gang up on Frances, Berenice
tears off her apron and rushes down to the principal's office to defend
her youngest.  She makes it clear she considers such confrontations not
rightfully a mother's responsibility but a father's, especially when
the father is himself LDS.  But Franklin of course is never around. 
The two older girls are by now attending the University of Utah, and
Robert has disappeared from the narrative.

Berenice begins to travel in ever widening circles as her children
leave home.  Eventually her travels will take her by bus, rail, plane,
and ship all over Europe, the Far East, and South America.  She will
float the canals of Venice and Bangkok, hike the streets of London and
Milan, window-shop in Rio and Amsterdam, sail on cruise ships several
times the length and breadth of the Atlantic and Pacific, clamber over
the pyramids of Mexico, the Andes of the Incas, and the Great Wall of
China, flight bag over her shoulder, camera around her neck.

She does not much care to visit churches, or landmarks.  "I've seen
enough cathedrals and museums to last me the rest of my life!  What I
like to see is people.  I like to see how people livel" she exclaims,
as if desperate to find some working models and patterns for family
life.

On September 13, 1956, in San Francisco, Elaine marries Mason Drukman,
a former fellow student at San Francisco State, in the Unitarian
Church.

Franklin refuses to attend the wedding, perhaps because he disapproves
of his daughter's marrying a Jew.  Berenice is very much on hand,
chirping cheerfully about the beautiful bridal gown, about Marilyn and
Frances in their specially made bridesmaids' dresses of green silk, and
the small champagne reception which follows.

But the family wedding that really pleases her, and inspires an
ecstatic three-page "Dear Family" letter afterward, will come two years
later, when

Frances gets married.  In the interval, Berenice has a third nervous
collapse.  It happens in 1957, on her first tour of Europe:
Gibraltar,

Greece, Rhodes, Turkey, Naples, Pompeii, Capri, Rome-the whole tourist
insalata, all in thirty one days.  She cannot get along with her tour
mates, informs the others that she is not continuing on with them to
Spain, gets back to New York flat broke, taxis to Marilyn's apartment,
and is embarrassed to have to ask the driver to wait while she borrows
ten dollars from her daughter to pay his fare.  "Altho I was not aware
of it at this time I was going thru a nervous breakdown.  Whatever else
leads her to term this episode a "nervous breakdown" must be read
between the lines.  But by now her narrative has made abundantly clear
that the Bradshaws are not a family to face up squarely to either
emotional problems or physical illnesses.  Berenice tends to become
agitated and ineffectual; she feels powerless to handle matters and
demands more support from her husband.  Franklin concludes that his
wife's restless fluttering is the cause of the trouble, rather than the
result.  His letters repeatedly accuse her of unnecessarily "working
up" other family members.  He reminds his daughters frequently that
their mother is "an over-nervous person," but this is the farthest he
will go in acknowledgment of her genuine distress.

Franklin's own solution to each new family crisis is to retreat further
into the cluttered recesses of his warehouse.

In December 1958 Berenice is thrilled by the sudden news from Frances
that she plans to be married January 9 in St.  Patrick's Cathedral on
Fifth

Avenue.  The groom is Vittorio Gentile, a refined and moneyed European
businessman.  Franklin again says he will not attend.  Frances,
unperturbed, invites Uncle Chubb Horton, husband of Aunt Bea, to come
to New York and give her away.  She orders up a frightfully expensive,
custom-made white satin coat and lace mantilla.

Marilyn gets busy cutting and stitching the taffeta gown she will wear
as her sister's maid of honor.  Vittorio arranges a wedding supper at
the

Colony Restaurant and polishes up his Mercedes-Benz.  Berenice, who has
at once offiered to pay for everything, shops for a new dress and, as a
wedding gift, shines up her entire stock of "family silver"-in truth, a
series of pitchers and trays which she and Franklin have received over
the years at Christmas from grateful Bradshaw's employees.

Berenice Bradshaw seems nothing short of ecstatic at this sudden turn
of events.  "Thank God!"  she exclaims when she telephones the good
news to her first-married daughter, in San Francisco.  "Now all our
troubles with

Frances are over!"

"No, Mother," says Elaine.  "They're just beginning."

Once they left Salt Lake, the Bradshaw daughters developed into very
different sorts of women.  Elaine, the invalid, became a pitiless
realist,

Marilyn a sort of sentimental pragmatist.  In her apartment high over
West

End Avenue in New York, matronly Marilyn Bradshaw Reagan seems today a
fifties housewife caught in a time warp-a grieving female Hamlet in

Butterick Pattern dress.  She really enjoys making her own clothes and
scrubbing her kitchen floor.  She is slow-moving, myopic, sorrowful.
Though she and Berenice no longer speak, she still yearns with little
hope that someday a reconciliation will occur.  "The bottom line is:
she's my mother, and I have a lot of feeling for her ... and some of it
is mixed!"

Elaine today is tough and dry-eyed.  Life has burned away all illusion
and sentimentality.  When still young, she made a life-or death choice
to put her family behind her in order to survive her family.  But
though she rarely saw him, Elaine Bradshaw Drukman was probably the
woman who loved

Frank Bradshaw most deeply of them all.  When he was murdered, her
heart literally broke.  She is alive today because of a porcine
transplant.  In ig8o at Stanford University the heart valve of a pig
was implanted in her chest.

The elder Bradshaw sisters do resemble one another, and their mother
and grandmother, in one respect: each is the stronger partner in her
marriage.  It is not that Robert Reagan and Mason Drukman are weak men;
rather, they seem less vivid than their wives.  Among

Bradshaws, the female bird always has the showier plumage, and the
louder if not the sweeter voice.

While Frank Bradshaw was alive, Marilyn was a paragon of dutiful
daughter ship She visited her parents often and wrote home regularly.
She worked as a paralegal by day, and took courses in tax and estate
law by night, preparing herself for the time when she hoped to take
over her father's business.  Frank Bradshaw never discouraged his
daughter's dreams; for eleven years he paid her tuition fees.  He
continued to pay them even after Frances loudly asserted, to her
parents and later to their lawyers, that never but never would she
tolerate any such an arrangement.  Frances believed that childless
Marilyn's real purpose was not to help her parents but to cheat her
sisters, and ultimately to deprive the grandchildren of their rightful
inheritance.  Frances charged that Marilyn was motivated not by
daughterly devotion but naked greed.

The murder that split the Bradshaw family apart in 1978 also brought
the two older sisters back together.  Their mutual resolve to nail
their father's assassin was now an alliance of spirit, a telephone
alliance, and a far cry from the old days on Gilmer Drive when all the
Bradshaws had lived close as flies in a bottle.  After tiny Elaine's
catastrophic second attack of rheumatic fever, she had been permanently
installed in the sunny corner room that had once belonged to her
parents.  Franklin and

Berenice and baby Frances now all shared the other small bedroom, which
had formerly belonged to the girls, and Marilyn moved down to the
basement with Robert.

"I was Other Mother in those days," Marilyn recalls.  "I would come
home from sixth grade and B.J. would give me the instructions for
dinner and be off to her hydrotherapy thing-I remember she told me they
had a 'big whirlpool with a hammock in it' at one of the local
hospitals."  At home, the life of D.J. (for Berenice Jewett) began to
feel like the whirlpool without the hammock: an unwanted and demanding
new baby, a nervous breakdown, then severe illness for her children,
first Elaine, then Robert.

Very early one morning Marilyn heard a crash and thud outside her room,
and found thirteen-year-old Robert unconscious on the basement floor,
breathing heavily and racked by convulsions.  She shouted for her
parents and together they watched as the fit subsided.  A few minutes
later Robert awakened, as from a deep sleep, seemingly unaware of what
had happened.  Certainly twelve-year-old

Marilyn was unfamiliar with epileptic seizures.  Evidently her parents
were equally ignorant, and perhaps they were also too ashamed to
consult a doctor about their son's attack.  For a long time, his care
seems to have been left entirely to his younger sister.  "What was to
be gained by telling the folks?"  she says today.  "There was no
need."

Since Robert was too big for her to move, she looked after him wherever
he lay.  She would hear the crash, leap from her bed, wet a cloth and
put it on her brother's forehead, watch him get red in the face and
froth at the mouth, and wait for the seizure to end.  Years after she
had grown up and moved to New York City, the slightest noise in the
night made her sit up wide awake at once, fearful that Bob was about to
have another attack.

At first Robert's seizures occurred two or three times a year.  His
sister noticed that they seemed to coincide with the days when Robert
had an important appointment, and she thought his fear of keeping
appointments might be what brought them on.  Soon they were happening
more often.  At the start of World War II, Bob managed to enlist in the
Navy's V-12 program.  But doctors at Great Lakes Naval Training Station
discovered his disability, and within sixty days he was given a medical
discharge.  Robert's attempts to serve his country are still tenderly
recalled by his family.  His mother and sisters dwell on his postwar
achievements as a Boy

Scout troop leader at the Unitarian Church, and as an electronics
instructor in the Utah National Guard.  Marilyn shows visitors
Robert's

Navy middy blouse, lovingly stroking the scarcely worn blue fabric as
she speaks about what a wonderful cartoonist her brother was, and
recalls his sweet nature.  "He was a really nice guy.  My husband liked
him too."

All of the Bradshaws have trouble sleeping, and as teenagers Robert
and

Elaine used to take long nocturnal rambles together through the quiet
neighborhood streets.  Thoughts of her troubled brother, his kindness
and goodness, his intelligence and his terrible suffering can still
make her weep today.

What none of the Bradshaws like to talk about, and perhaps do not
understand, is the progressive disorganization of Robert's mind.  He
spent the last eighteen years of his life in and out of mental
hospitals, diagnosed as an incurable schizophrenic.

In 1952, a prefrontal lobotomy was performed on Robert Bradshaw at
Utah State Hospital.  Afterward the doctors told his family, "We wish
we'd had him sooner."  Marilyn believes this statement gave her mother
"false hope" that Robert had once been "curable," but that the family
had waited too long.  What Marilyn thinks the doctors meant to convey
was that had they had him sooner, "they might have been able to improve
him on medication-the current medication."  (Robert's type of frequent
grand mal seizures are rarely seen today.  The widespread use of
Dilantin has rendered them medically obsolete in this country, like
rabies or polio or smallpox.) "But I don't think they would have ever
been able to get him into a productive life."

Marilyn herself believes that Robert suffered from "self-induced
epilepsy."  This has caused her to conclude that each time he suffered
a seizure, "he was in fact giving himself his own shock therapy."
Since, prior to his lobotomy, "Bob had had bad shock therapy," he was
thereafter "in an un treatable situation ..."

The Bradshaws' overall medical ignorance is surprising, though perhaps
not unusual for its day.  No one in the family seems to have had
rudimentary first-aid knowledge.  Marilyn never did learn that it was
important to put something in her brother's mouth during a seizure to
keep him from biting his tongue.  Long after Robert was a grown man,

Marilyn recalls, "they had to trim his tongue because the edges had got
so ragged."

None of the Bradshaws except perhaps Elaine appears to understand what
prefrontal lobotomy entails: it severs the most highly developed
portion of the brain from the rest and, in effect, amputates "feeling."
The procedure is irreversible, and today is castigated but not alas
outlawed for the cruelty and grossness of its assault.  The technique
was employed in the late nineteen forties and early fifties by some
large state mental hospitals as a last-ditch method, after
electro-convulsive shock therapy had failed, to render chronic mental
patients easier to handle.

When lobotomy was first being considered for Bob, a preliminary
psychiatric examination was required and Doug Steele drove him up to

McTeigh Hospital, in Ogden.  After he was examined, Doug was invited
into the doctor's office alone.  When Doug identified himself as
manager of

Bradshaw Auto Parts, "This psychiatrist almost fell outa his chair.  He
sez: My God!  Why do they put you in this position?  This is the mother
and father's role."

Frank Bradshaw could never face his son's problems.  When the lobotomy
was decided on, Berenice had to sign the permission papers.  Doug
Steele understood something of how Frank felt.  One of the Steeles' own
children has suffered several nervous breakdowns, and "Right to the day
we die, the wife and I know we're gonna take this problem to our
graves.  But at least we've faced it.  Frank was a genius in business.
But he sure didn't meet the problem with Robert head on.  I think every
time he tried to face the problem in his own way, he'd have cinders
thrown in his path by Berenice.

She'd always be workin' against him ... and talkin' everything over
with

Frances!"

But in truth neither Bradshaw parent could really face it, and each
looked for reasons to blame the other, and in matters of family
blamesnianship there is no such thing as a statute of limitations. 
Says Berenice today,

"Franklin was a coward ... Franklin would never stand up for his
children.  Never!  When Bob was in junior high, the teacher called on
him, and because he took his time to get up, the teacher came back and
knocked him to the floor.  But would Franklin go down there and talk to
that teacher?  Nope!"

"I know the trauma Frank went through with Bob," Steele says.  "One
time I remember the phone rang at home, and it was Frank.  Berenice was
out of town.  He said, I'm having problems with Bob.  Can you come down
and help me,

Doug?  I'm afraid he'll get violent.  I went down there, and Bob was
almost out of control.  And, oh boy, he was big!  Bigger'n Frank-six
feet four, two-thirty, mebbe two-forty pounds.  So I told Bob I'd like
to take him for a ride.

"Far as Bob ever hitting anybody, or hurtin' anybody, I've never seen
that.

It was just he'd get so agitated, he'd be screaming, working himself up
against Frank.  And that time Frank got scared enough of him, h?  felt
he couldn't handle him alone.  ]Mat's the only reason he called me.  We
took him down to City and County Hospital that time, got him admitted
to the psycho ward.  "

Franklin preferred to communicate with his son by letter.  But Berenice
went to see him regularly every two weeks for eighteen years.  Robert
eventually was unable to care for himself, his seizures occurred every
few days, and doctors had told the family that release was out of the
question.  Each time his mother came to visit, Robert pleaded with her
to let him come home.  His

"Dear Dad" letters speak repeatedly of his determination to"
cut-myself-loose-from-my-Mother's-skirts," as his father continued to
recommend, and of his plans to set himself up in the auto parts
business.

"Another look at the situation also tells me that I have never been
independent since I can remember!  How's that for training a boy to
become a man?  ... As Mother can tell you, about all I have in this new
room of mine is a bed, some post-cards on the wall, no place to hang my
clothing, and some pictures of a complete Chrysler engine (part by
part) which I study till I think I am about to go nuts!
(insensible)."

If Berenice Bradshaw had had "false hopes" for Robert, Robert too had
false hopes.  He once walked away from the hospital and hopped a
freight train headed east.  When he was apprehended, in Wyoming, he
explained to the authorities that he had been on his way to New York
City "to help Frances."

Says Marilyn, "That was the one way he knew to be useful to Mother."

Franklin's hopes were even less realistic than his wife's.  He
gradually convinced himself that-despite his son's tragic history -if
only he himself could take a crack at disentangling Robert from his
mother's apron strings, he could still "straighten him out."  Only a
few years before Robert died,

Frank Bradshaw confided a new plan to Doug Steele.  He said he wanted
to move his son to an apartment in "a little hotel, half a block away
from here, get a room there himself, and work with Bob day and night.
He said if

Bob could only be with him all the time, Frank could get his thoughts
straightened out!"

"My husband could not accept illness," Berenice says.  "The
psychiatrist told him he couldn't face reality.  He would take my son
for a walk around the block thinking that was going to cure him.  And
when my son died, my husband said, "Don't tell anyone."  Don't tell
anyone!  I said, "Look, he's not a dog."  "

Officially, Robert Bradshaw died bfa heart attack.  His death
certificate lists "idiopathic [of no known cause] epilepsy" as a
contributing cause of death.  But Elaine believes that what really
killed her brother was the lobotomy, because it "had killed all his
passion, his feeling."

Robert Bradshaw had left instructions to turn over his body to the

University of Utah Medical School.  Berenice Bradshaw had saved her
son's cartoons, his military discharge papers, his Boy Scout medals,
his certificate as an electronics instructor and other mementos, in a
locked briefcase.  Eleven months after his death,

as Memorial Day approached, she became concerned that Robert had no
grave, hence there was no place to display the flag to honor his
military service in World War II.  She seemed to want to arrange some
kind of burial.

"Robert had died at the VA Hospital," says Marilyn, "and the Medical

School still had his bones.  Mother wanted them.  She went down to see
Dad at the warehouse.  She had done all her fieldwork, she had got her
package together.  But then Dad shot down the idea."

"He's dead.  I thought we were through with all this," Franklin said.
But

Berenice could not let go.  She wrote to other family members,
soliciting more aid and advice.

"I believe in living memorials, not dead ones," Marilyn wrote back. 
She never received a reply, she says, and her mother was left with a
locked briefcase to which she used to point sorrowfully and say, "This
is all that remains of Bob."

In her "Autobiography," Berenice would write:

June t966, on Father's Day, Franklin and I visited Robert at the
Veterans hospital here in Salt Lake City.  We took some ice cream and
the three of us sat on the lawn and had refreshments.  He was in good
spirits.  One week later, on June 26, at 9:30 P.M. the Veterans
Hospital called to tell us our son had just passed away.  He went to
his room to lie down and just went to sleep, never to awaken, a heart
failure.  A memorial service was held in the Unitarian Church.  Marilyn
and Bob came home and helped us in our grief with the final plans.
Robert was 38 years old, had spent the last 18 years in and out of
hospitals.  His poor health was a source of heart ache to us, and the
saddest cross we had to bear.  he was a dear, sweet son, loved by his
family and friends.  His hopes and suffering had come to an end.  "0
death where is thy sting and grave thy victory"?  The sting is in the
hearts of those who loved-and stand in silent bewilderment and anguish
for a life that has vanished and the victory belongs to Mother Nature,
that selfish individual who demands a return of all that she gives.

This is his obituary.

Guilts about their children haunted both Bradshaws.  They responded in
different ways.  Franklin withdrew more and more from his family.  "The
really sad thing," says Marilyn, "was going down to that warehouse to
talk to Dad, and realizing that that was his home, and that was his
family."

Berenice's guilt moved her in the opposite direction.  She began to
share her troubles indiscriminately with anyone who would listen.
Eventually she became a hopeless, helpless emotional flasher.

Frances Bradshaw seems to have been born with an instinct for turning
her parents' guilt to her own advantage.  In return perhaps for the
pain of knowing she was unwanted, the gods had rewarded her with the
powers of

Moloch.  For whatever reason, Frances from infancy seemed positively to
flourish in a hostile environment.  She was like brine shrimp that live
only in the waters of boiling geysers.

Before she is a year old, Frances has her entire family huddled
together around her crib singing lullabys.  By the time she is three,
her technique is refined.  To hear the sisters tell it, twelve year-old
Marilyn gets home from school and starts cooking dinner.  Berenice goes
out to shop, leaving

Elaine in bed contentedly working on her Storybook Dolls, and baby

"Frankie" playing happily on the kitchen floor.  But as soon as they
hear

Mom's car turning back into the driveway, Frankie begins to howl.

Mom rushes into the kitchen with the groceries, demanding to know
what's the matter.  Frankie whimpers that Marilyn has been teasing her
again.

Berenice snatches up her injured darling to her breast and furiously
punishes wicked Marilyn.  She does not seek Marilyn's side of the
story.

Marilyn gets no chance to explain that Frankie had been happy, or at
least silent, until they heard Mom's car.

"Mother would accept Frankie's word for everything, " Marilyn says.
"And she's still doing that.  "

"Frances as a child was extremely strong-willed," another family member
recalls.  "She always wanted to be the center of attention and she
early found ways of doing so.  She simply threw herself on the floor
and kicked and screamed until her mother gave her whatever she
wanted,"

Frances says all this is just wicked-sister talk.  In fact, her younger
sister was in the bedroom and had no idea what was going on.  Her older
sister was a sadist who invariably shut the baby up in the closet the
moment the mother left the house.  That's the reason she screamed so
loudly as soon as she heard the returning car.  Her older sister made
her life hell.  When she was six, Marilyn drowned her pet kittens. 
When she was getting dressed for her first school party, Marilyn crept
into her room to whisper how ugly she was.  Someone should write a book
about the horror story of her childhood, Frances often says, and call
it Sister Dearest.  "It would make Mommie Dearest read like Grimm's
Fairy

Tales."

Whatever the truth of these childhood allegations, none would deny
that

Frances all her life has been a difficult person for others to deal
with.

To say "yes" to Frances is an invitation to be steamrollered.  To say
"no" to Frances is to invite such dire consequences that few in her
lifetime have dared utter the word.

Frances herself has no difficulty saying "no"; that is her habitual
response.  When she does say "yes," a price tag is attached.  These
traits date back to childhood.  Franklin once visited her bedroom for a
rare father-daughter chat.  His purpose was to tell her how "hurt" he
had been by her indifferent grades at the end of her freshman year at
East High

School.  He knew she had the brains to get all A's.  If only she tried,
she could graduate at the head of her class, as he himself had done.

Frances promised to try harder if he would reward her with the kind of
college education she wanted; she had no interest in following her
parents and sisters to what she saw as the humdrum University of
Utah.

She wanted an Eastern education at a top quality women's college.
Franklin agreed: If she got the grades, he would pay to send her East.
It would prove a Faustian bargain.

Franklin Bradshaw kept all his feelings to himself, his anger
especially.

Whenever the Bradshaw children had to be punished, Berenice would be
the parent who got upset, although Franklin was forced to administer
the punishment.  "Dad was not abusive or even really angry," says
Marilyn.

"She would scream and yell at us and get all worked up and then, when
Dad came home, she'd get him worked up.  Then she'd make him punish us
while she stood around wringing her hands and looking pitiful.

"The only thing that really made Dad angry was when Mother got upset. 
I understood him," she adds.  "I never felt any resentment toward
him."

Elaine Drukman lacks any odor of sanctimony.  She is probably the most
clear-seeing person in this tormented family.  She believes she has

ESP, and hears a kind of "ping" whenever someone tells a lie.  "An
alarm bell goes off," she says.  As an example, take her famous 1952
meeting with

Vice-President Nixon.  On the mantel at Gilmer Dqive are two
photographs: a last portrait of Franklin, made only months before his
death, and a 1952 picture of Elaine shaking hands with Richard Nixon.
Berenice shows the picture to visitors to indicate that, before meeting
the liberal minded

Drukman, her daughter was politically unblemished.  But Frances says,
"My sister married a Communist."  And Elaine says, "My politics are
more radical than my husband's."  In 1952, it is true, she did belong
to the Utah Young

Republicans, "But the moment the Great Man walked in, my alarm bells
went off.  I felt: That man is in a different reality from other
people.  Ever since, my mental picture of Richard Nixon has been a man
who walks through life holding a mirror before him, seeing no one but
himself, hearing nothing but his own voice."

The image fits her sister Frances equally well.  By now, in fact, it
fits every member of this by-hatred-possessed family.

Elaine today is a small, harrowed-looking woman with a harsh, nervous
giggle.  Traces of beauty remain, and she has moments of touching
tenderness when she speaks of her father, her brother, her sons.  She
and her husband have led lives of serious political commitment.  Mason
taught political science at Reed College, in Oregon, and together they
were active in the anti-Vietnam war movement, and later published a
magazine dedicated to exposing political corruption in local politics.
They opened their own experimental school when they could not find one
they deemed suitable to educate their sons.  Sam and Max are both
graduate students now, and also teachers of art and music in northern
California.  The Drukmans have never earned much money.  Mason for
several years has been at work on an authorized biography of Oregon's
late senator, Wayne Morse.

When her Drukman grandchildren were younger, Berenice used to visit
fairly frequently, happy to baby-sit and to help the family along
financially, though not without pointing out to her daughter, "You
would manage to find yourself the only poor Jew in America."

In the mid-seventies, dismayed with American foreign policy and
afflicted with a sense of political burnout, the Drukmans moved to New
Zealand where for three years they edited a magazine dedicated to the
cause of enlightened consumerism.  But the Wellington climate is harsh,
the wind blows without letup, and the intense homesickness-of the
teenage sons, and eventually of their parents, brought the family back
to the United States just a few weeks before Frank

Bradshaw's murder.

Elaine believes her parents had an unbearable marriage between a woman
who didn't really want children and a man who very much did.  Although
her father was not a practicing Mormon, his values were Mormon values.
Her mother was a woman born before her time.  Both of them were tragic
figures, but her father had an out: he could substitute his success in
his business, bury himself in his work.  Her mother didn't have that.

Elaine saw her father as a man with a distinct feminine side, as being
very tender, very loving, but somewhat timid and inclined to back off
if he felt that asserting himself would hurt someone else.  He was
assertive in business because he had to be.  He was the youngest of
four sons, and among

Mormons primogeniture rules.  His oldest brother inherited his
presidency of

American Savings & Loan.  Franklin had to earn his own success.

Mason Drukman says, "Frank was not a mean man, and not a cruel man. 
But he us extremely one-dimensional.  Unless you were conversant with
oil or with auto parts, there was just not much you could talk about
with him.  And he was extremely remote.  He wrote letters to his
daughters in the third person."

Marilyn says her parents "did not dislike each other, they hated each
other!  We didn't hear much fighting.  Not even talking.  But we heard
the silences.  Long, long silences.  And Mother was suffering.  So she
began putting all of her affection into Frances.  Hugging and kissing
her, sitting her on her lap when she was eight, nine years old.  We
were all adult children by then, teenagers.  We knew Frances was too
big to be sitting on

Mother's lap.  Mother was using Frances, as a companion, just the same
as

Frances later used Marc.  But then Mother would have a bridge party for
her lady friends, and she would tell Frances: Now this is for my
friends.  You can't come.  And she would shut Frances out.  Frances
would have helped her get ready for the party ... and then she would be
sent away.  It was a case of a lonely woman using a little child for
company.  But she never understood."

Frankie Bradshaw came East to Bryn Mawr College in 1956.  Her
schoolmates were a remarkably accomplished, dynamic group of young
women, among them Dr.  Marina Homer, President of Radcliff College, the
writers Renata Adler, Kate Stimpson, and Eve Pell, the revolutionary

Kathy Boudin, and the TV producer Joan Shikegawa.  They included
numerous women who would become doctors, lawyers, academics, and people
in politics and the arts.  None of them can relate the woman in today's
tabloid headlines to the girl they knew a quarter century ago.  Those
who remember her at all-and a great many say they do not-recollect a
high-spirited, fun-loving, hard-drinking, hard-playing girl from
somewhere out West, someone not in the traditional Eastern preppy mold,
someone with more verve, more daring.  They mention Frankie's unusual
friendliness and high spirits, her surpassing intelligence, quick wits,
hearty laughter, her expensive clothes, gaudy jewelry, brilliant red
lipstick, and "that wonderful, great big jack-o'-lantern smile."

Then as now, Bryn Mawr was a crucible of female intellect.  In their
high school or boarding school, most girls in the freshman class had
been valedictorians or class presidents or tops in the honor society.
What one of them calls "a harrowing self-selecting process was going
on, The competition was ... well ... so unnerving, we were all a little
bit nuts."  One of Frankie's classmates, later a well-known public
official, deliberately went to classes for several months wearing the
same cocktail dress, same dead carnation corsage, tennis shoe on one
foot, athletic sock on the other.  Another girl, now a professor of
psychiatry, used to walk around campus with half her mouth painted
blue, the other half green.  Nobody said a word.

Madeleine Di Gorgonzo Fletcher, an English professor at Tufts
University, lived next door to Frankie during their freshman year and
thought her "deeply intelligent, ironic, never rowdy but with a nice
strain of rebelliousness.  She was a little zany and I liked her a lot.
A person of great gusto ... the kind who is hard to force into line.
Willful, but rather wonderful.  That's the sort of person who went to
Bryn Mawr then.

She always tremendously enjoyed herself-and one of the things she
enjoyed most was getting around the rules."

Frankie's frantic activity, her chain-smoking, the nonstop talking, the
frenzied-seeming pursuit of fun were not seen as unusual for their time
and place.  Neither was the drinking.  Indeed, heavy drinking was
considered a mark of "maturity," and Frankie was admired for her
capacity to hold her liquor, even though she was not in the same class
as her favorite drinking buddy, a woman we'll call

Diana Blue (now dead of alcoholism), who was greatly esteemed for being
able to down seven martinis at a clip and still remain sober enough to
sign in and get down the hall to the bathroom before vomiting and
collapsing in the shower.

"We all knew Frankie had a drinking problem," says another dorm mate.

"She lived in the room right next to the warden, on the ground floor,
and our whole dorm thought it hilarious, and rather wonderful, that the
warden never knew that she was always-totally drunk!"

In the late 1950S senseless curfew morals still prevailed.  Bryn Mawr
girls had to be inside their dorms by eleven-thirty at night, unless
they had dates with boys; then the sign-in hour was advanced to 2 A.M.
In the words of one girl, "You could screw all night in some guy's
car-nobody cared.  You could drink all night.  It was not considered a
crime to be drunk-if you could hold it.  Just so long as you got back
to the dorm by sign-in time, nothing else mattered."

A few things did matter, of course, including criminal activity, or
signs of real or potential mental illness.  Two psychiatrists were
available on campus, and "troubled" girls were urged to unburden
themselves.  Their option: talk it out, or get out.  See the shrink, or
face suspension and expulsion.  The chats were supposedly entirely
confidential; doubtless they were not entirely so.  Part of the role of
such doctors in any institution is to anticipate scandal and try to
make sure that if it happens, it happens off campus.

Frankie's family knew nothing of her exciting new life, and she took
pains to keep it that way.  During her freshman year, Frankie called
her

Other Mother collect on Sunday nights.  Marilyn, by then a New York
City career girl working in advertising, listened patiently as her
sister "talked about nothing for hours.  I never interrupted, I never
asked for reimbursement, I'd just listen.  If you cut her off, she'd
get mad at you."

On holidays and some weekends, Frankie "came home" to Marilyn's studio
apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street.  She insisted on traveling by
taxi, disliked walking even a few blocks, and flatly refused to take
buses or subways.  When she had a car, she parked it wherever she
wanted, undeterred by No Parking signs.

At Christmas, Marilyn took Frankie with her to visit friends in New
Hampshire and was much embarrassed by her kid sister's habits.  "She
wouldn't bathe up there because it was a strange bathtub, she said. She
had her period, and she slept with her socks on, so she really got
stinking.  She just didn't care."

The summer following her freshman year, her parents were dismayed by

Frankie's behavior in Salt Lake.  She would scarcely speak to them,
refused to answer any questions about college, spent most of her time
sullenly watching television, and put $600 worth of dents and scratches
into the family car.  Still no one stopped her.  No one said no to
Frances.

By their sophomore year, says Dr.  Helen Peemoeller, a professor of

English at Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania, "Frankie did
have a reputation for being highly emotional, even wild.  But you must
recognize that we were all neurotic then.  Probably a lot of people
would have told you I was more unstable than Frankie at the time."

When her second year of college ended, Frankie did not return to Salt

Lake.  Instead, she took a room at the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel in New
York

City, intent on "having a good time."  A week or two later, Camilla

Jones-now Camilla Jones Tatem, M.D."  director of medical services at a
hospital in New York State-was surprised to receive a phone call from a
younger girl, Frankie Bradshaw, whom she was but vaguely aware of,
mostly as Diana Blue's drinking buddy.  Camilla had just graduated and
was packing to leave for a summer in Europe before entering medical
school.

When Frankie suggested they meet for a drink, Camilla agreed, and the
two girls chose a lively bar but blocks from Frankie's hotel.  Gino
Restaurant is a venerable, much-loved New York institution: small,
deliberately un chic it is famous not only for good food and fair
prices, but for the crowd of good-looking women and moneyed men who can
always be seen three-deep at the bar waiting for a table.  Camilla
remembers Frankie swiftly striking up a conversation with a "wealthy
young man" at the bar who began urging the girls to come for a ride in
his Mercedes-Benz convertible.  Camilla was reluctant; fun-loving
Frankie was determined.

"Come on!"  she shouted.  "I don't want to go alone."

After a brief spin around town, they ended up in the man's apartment.

"Mostly they were drinking," Camilla recalls.  "I wanted to go home.

Frankie didn't."  The man began to press gifts on the girls.  Camilla
kept the chic, tweedy little cap he gave her for many years.  All the
same, she was uneasy.  The gifts "bothered" Camilla; they signaled that
"something was wrong," a signal Frankie either did not pick up or
deliberately chose to ignore.  "I couldn't reach her."

The man left the room to search out more presents.  "Frankie, we should
not be here," Camilla whispered.

"But we're having fun.  Have a drink!"  Drunk and getting drunker, in
truth slipping out of control, Frankie insisted on behaving as if
nothing unusual were going on.

Camilla went home.  A few days later, Frankie telephoned her to
describe her "whirlwind romance."  The round of nonstop drinking,
driving, eating, and sex was still going on.  She'd never had so much
fun in all her life,

Frankie said.

Camilla heard nothing more of Frankie for twenty-four years, not until
another Bryn Mawr classmate, now a newspaper reporter, called her
attention to the headline in the evening paper: SOCIALITE MOM IN $400

MILLION RUB OUT As for the man the girls picked up in the bar, he
was---and is--one of Gino's most faithful and beloved regulars, a
pint-sized pearl importer named Vittorio Gentile.

Just before returning to college, Frankie and Marilyn were both briefly
in Salt Lake.  Frankie bought a "trunkful of new clothes" and had them
shipped to Bryn Mawr.  Back in New York City, Frankie did more
shopping, and Marilyn accompanied her kid sister to Philadelphia to see
a couple of plays before Frankie returned to campus and Marilyn to New
York.  She found a letter from Berenice enclosing bills for thousands
of dollars' worth of clothing from Saks Fifth Avenue, all charged to
the Bradshaws in Salt Lake.  Did Marilyn know anything about this? 
When she called Bryn

Mawr, Frankie said the bills were for a lot of clothes that didn't fit,
and she intended to send them back to Saks.  But she never did.

"Salt Lake City clothes were no longer good enough for her!"  Marilyn
sniffs.  "The thing that's always meant most to Frankie is status, and
she was on her way."

A few weeks later, Marilyn got a phone call: her sister was being held
in the college infirmary.  Failure to obey dormitory regulations,
academic failure, dormitory thievery, charge account fraud, check
forgery, drug use, and threats of suicide all eventu-ally were
mentioned.  Bryn Mawr believed Frankie was mentally ill and required
professional help.  Since she refused to accept it, her family was now
being asked to remove her from campus as soon as possible.

Other Mother escorted her sister home to Salt Lake, and Berenice
summoned

Elaine from San Francisco to help out with this newest family crisis.

Marilyn says Frankie was suspended from Bryn Mawr not only because of a
nervous breakdown, but because "she broke the rules.  She was going to
see

Vittorio for weekends and signing out that she was staying with me. 
But she loved that school.  She used to tell me all the time, "If I
couldn't go to

Bryn Mawr, I would just die."

The Salt Lake City psychiatrist recommended that Frances enter a mental
hospital in Colorado Springs.  But Franklin was away on a business
trip,

Berenice could not bring herself to commit her daughter, and Frances
would not go voluntarily.  They found a second doctor who said he could
treat

Frances on an outpatient basis, with two or three psychotherapy
sessions a week.

"Dad came home and he agreed with Mother and Frankie."  Her sisters
were opposed.  They knew Frankie had already seen psychiatrists both in
Salt Lake

City and at college.  "Why continue the same sort of therapy which had
not worked earlier?"  they reasoned.

They went to see the latest psychiatrist and asked what the matter was
with

Frankie.  Their kid sister suffered from a "psychopathic personality
disorder which it is probably too late by now to treat," they were
told.

The Salt Lake City doctor entirely supported the Bryn Mawr doctors'
recommendation: either hospitalize Frances as mentally ill, or allow
her to be charged with the crimes she had committed--dormitory
thievery, charge account irregularities, check forgery.  It was time to
"quit bailing her out," time for someone to say no to Frances.

But for once Berenice and Franklin put up a united front.  They did
nothing at all.

Elaine was disgusted.  She determined to follow the same policy she had
urged on her parents-turn your back on Frances.  She returned to San

Francisco and for a time, until she realized such pressure tactics were
totally useless, she even stopped speaking to her mother.  As for her
younger sister, she did not see her again until their father's
funeral.

While her family wrangled over her treatment, Frankie was quite
competently plotting her own escape.  She had always functioned most
efficiently when under greatest pressure.  Now it was happening
again.

Stealthily she visited the town's best stores, bought herself yet
another new wardrobe, charged everything to her parents, and stored the
clothes in airport lockers.  She still needed cash for a plane ticket
back to New York

City.

A good source was the family stock in Wasatch Chemical, the company her
father had formed while still in college.  Frankie knew, though her
sisters did not, that, to minimize his own net worth, Franklin held
much of the stock in his children's names; probably she had acquired
the information the summer she worked in the warehouse before starting
Bryn Mawr.  She knew too that if she posted a "lost instruments bond,"
guaranteeing that "her" stock had been lost, new negotiable stock
certificates could then be issued, with no one the wiser, at least for
the time being.  Frankie called on her father's older banker brother,
Uncle Bernard Bradshaw, described the "lost" stock, and hoodwinked him
into signing the fraudulent bond.

"And all this while she was letting Mother plan a great big
Thanksgiving dinner in her honor!"  Marilyn exclaims.  But Berenice
must have suspected something was up.  She found evidence of the bond
in Frankie's purse and told Elaine.  Elaine told her father, and
Franklin blew up.  "One of the few times I've ever actually seen him do
it," says Marilyn.  "Then and there he personally took her to the
plane."

Frankie had no luggage-just three lockers stuffed with clothes in
plastic bags-and no reservation.  The airport was thronged with
Thanksgiving travelers, and the plane was fully booked.  But Frankie
threw a full-blown tantrum, shouting, "I've got to get on!  I've got to
get on!"  until the airline clerks were so embarrassed, they found room
for her.  Even American

Airlines was learning the discomforts of saying no to Frances.

It was a few weeks after that when Frances called Salt Lake City to
announce her wedding plans.  Marriage is one of the traditional options
available to a daughter in revolt against her parents.  Berenice had
married

Franklin in order to remain in Salt Lake City.  Frances was marrying

Vittorio in order to stay in New York City.

"Mother was in favor of the marriage because she thought now Frances
would get taken care of," Marilyn says.  "She knew that Vittorio lived
well.  He had a nice car.  He taught Frances to cook.

But it was a bad marriage from the start.  They had such different
backgrounds, different temperaments."  Vittorio, born in Torre del
Greco,

Italy, in the early 1930s, is shorter than Frances, and he has one
walleye.  "He couldn't be in the war because of his height and the
eye.

That's why he has had to prove himself That's why he lifts weights and
exercises.  He has psychological problems too," says Marilyn.

The fact was, Frankie and Vittorio enjoyed drinking together; then they
fought.  Yet Marilyn is certain that Vittorio did love Frances.  He was
very distressed when she left, and once their protracted and bitter
divorce was achieved, the couple got back in touch.  Frances phoned

Vittorio from time to time, and they continued to meet for lunch
occasionally, even after each was remarried.  But their marital fights
were real.  Marilyn's studio apartment was down the street from
Vittorio's place at Fiftyfourth Street off Madison.  "He'd take her out
for a fancy dinner and drinks, and drop her off on Fifty-fourth while
he parked his beloved Mercedes.  She'd be afraid to go home, and would
call me and ask if she could spend the night with me.  It happened so
often I hated to bear the phone ring after ten o'clock at night."

After one gala evening, Frances ended up in the hospital having her
stomach pumped.  During a spat, Vittorio had flushed his dinner down
the toilet, and Frances, in retaliation, had swallowed a bottle of
aspirin.

Frances certainly knew Vittorio's habits before she married him.  She
had in fact passed out in his apartment on their first date.  That he
did not then "take advantage" of her she regarded as proof that he was
a gentleman.  All the fighting was probably sexually stimulating, one
psychiatrist told the family.  She probably liked getting beaten up,
the doctor surmised, because it was the punishment she felt she
deserved for hating her father as much as she did.

The year ig6o was an eventful one for all the Bradshaws.  The federal
government announced its public oil and gas lottery, and Franklin
plunged into the complex game that would occupy him the rest of his
life.  He also devised and nearly carried out his plan to "save" Robert
by moving him from the hospital to a furnished room near the warehouse,
thus disentangling him from his mother's apron strings.  That same year
the third Bradshaw daughter,

Marilyn, got married, and Frances bore two sons, one in February, a
second in December.

During Christmas vacation, Marilyn had fallen over the balustrade of a
ski lodge in Saratoga, New York, and suffered a severe concussion.  She
awoke five days later astonished and pleased to find Frances and
Vittorio had made the long train trip to her Schenectady hospital room,
despite the bitter January weather and the fact that Frances was eight
months pregnant.  "I don't know whose idea that was, his or hers, but I
appreciated it very much."

"As the years go on, you'll notice a change in her," Frances says the
doctor told her at the time.

In consequence of her accident, Marilyn met a young, sandyhaired,
mild-mannered negligence lawyer named Robert McMillan Reagan.  He was
divorced, the father of two teenaged daughters, and a former
Assistant

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.  Eventually he
would become a trial attorney for the City of New York, prosecuting
child abuse cases for the city's family courts, and later chasing down
runaway fathers in an attempt to recover welfare funds.  Six weeks
after Reagan met the injured skier, they decided to get married, but
Marilyn had no interest in participating in yet a third Bradshaw
wedding fuss.

Furthermore, her father could not refuse to come to her wedding
celebration if she didn't even have one.  Thus Marilyn, like her mother
and grandmother before her, eloped into wifehood.

A short time later, the newlyweds visited the Bradshaws in Salt Lake

City, and Berenice made a backyard barbecue.  She learned that her new
son-in-law's father was the founder and headmaster of a Quaker school
in

Poughkeepsie, New York, and his sister was a heroic teacher of remedial
reading, now confined by polio to an iron lung.  Hence, his family had
never had much money.  "Frankly," he said, "I'm out for all I can
get."

He added that he and Marilyn had already made out their wills.

"What did he need a will for?  He didn't have anything!"  Berenice
sniffied, and concluded that this son-in-law, like her first one,

Drukman, had only married her daughter for the money.  Later, Berenice
came to believe that Robert Reagan was "squirrelly," and she told
people he had spent time in mental hospitals.  Both Reagans say the
story is entirely false.  Like the story about Robert being a fortune
hunter, and

Mason being a Communist, Frances made it up and convinced her mother.

Marilyn's marriage gave her some much needed perspective.  No longer
did she feel so continually bruised by the struggle between her mother
and sister.  Today she says, "You know, my sister's an intelligent
person.  And it's too bad to waste a life.  But by the same token she
has taken one life, and ruined several others.  I'm thinking of her two
boys.  And certainly she hasn't made Mother's life very pleasant."  But
though marriage put some space between herself and Frances, the relief
was more illusory than real.  Other Mother could not really extirpate
her sister unless she was also ready to let go of her mother-Frances
and Berenice were too tightly knotted-and this sacrifice she was still
unwilling, or unable, to make.

The Bradshaws' first grandson, Sam Drukman, had been born in San

Francisco in June 1958, the same month that Frances met Vittorio. 
Their second grandchild was Lorenzo Jewett Gentile, born February 6,
ig6o, at

Doctors Hospital in New York City.  After a solo bus trip through
Canada, her first tourist adventure alone, Berenice arrived in New York
that fall, eager to see Lorenzo and try to help out her daughter, whose
second pregnancy already was well advanced.  Marco Francis Gentile was
born December 21, only ten months after his brother.  Marilyn said,
"Larry was a love baby.  Marc was passion after birth."

From the beginning, the two boys were very difficult to manage
together.

They were noisy, unruly, hard to put to sleep, and quarrelsome when
awake.  In April 1961 Frances needed varicose vein surgery, and
Berenice came to New York again to help with her difficult, hyperactive
grandsons.

The following year she made still another trip, timing her
cross-country bus ride so she could also visit the Drukmans, who were
now expecting their second child.

Franklin remained at home, overseeing his expanding empire and also
attempting to manage the affairs of his daughter Frances by long
distance.  At year's end he concluded she had $18,000 in oil leases as
a result of his tireless efforts to "build her up a profitable oil
lease business."  But her continuing extravagances had produced a
$6,525 overdraft at her bank.

One evening in June 1963 Vittorio came home to find that Frances and
their sons had vanished.  The apartment was stripped of all its
furnishings and contents.  Swastikas, "Heil Hitler!"  and "Heil
Mussolini!"  were scrawled on the bare walls.  Later, Berenice said
they had to leave stealthily because "if he'd known that she was going
to leave, he would have beat her to death.  He's a little fellow, but
strong as an ox.  When she was pregnant with Marc, he used to pick her
up by her feet and bang her head against the wall."

When Frances decided to leave Vittorio, she again plotted and planned
her moves well in advance.  "She had everything nicely put away and
fixed so that she could leave," says Berenice.  "She had her sister
Marilyn come over, and a colored cleaning lady, and hired a van, and by
noon they had everything out of that house."

Marilyn today does not recall being present.  She only remembers being
"in on" the planning of the move.  Frances says Marilyn supplied the
maid and "drove the getaway car."

Frances says that when she was pregnant with Lorenzo, her husband
stomped on her stomach and inflicted prenatal brain damage.  Vittorio
says Frances was not a good mother.  He sometimes came home from work
and found the babies unfed, un bathed their diapers unchanged. 
Berenice says Frances was a devoted mother.  "She never neglected her
children. She could have left these two boys with their brute father
and gone off and had a good life for herself But no, she stuck it out"
Berenice says a social worker told her that "had Frances stayed with
Vittorio Gentile another year, they would all end up in a mental
institution."  Vittorio says that Berenice is crazy.

He says Frances once attempted to have her mother committed to a mental
hospital by a New York psychiatrist, Arthur M. Perlman.  Dr.  Perlman
says,

"No comment."

Frances and the boys moved first to a stifling, cluttered one bedroom
apartment at 4o East Eighty-ninth Street.  Marco and Lorenzo's first
memories date from this summer of 1963.  Marco says he recalls his
mother holding him out the window of the tenth-floor apartment to show
him something on the street below.  Both boys remember a cat named
Henry that

Lorenzo had trapped in a bottle.  They remember dumping out all their
mother's perfumes into the middle of her bed and how, when Frances
discovered it, she beat them until they bled.

Soon after moving out, Frances charged her husband with nonsupport and
cruel and inhuman treatment.  Vittorio told the court he still loved
his wife very much and wanted a reconciliation.  Frances did not.  She
said he was a drunkard, insanely jealous, and often beat up their sons,
as well as herself.  The case did not make the newspapers until she
also said that

Vittorio was "allergic to sex."  Vittorio counter charged his wife
with abandonment, and said he often went to work at 7:30 A.M. in order
to come home in midmorning and satisfy his wife's "love moods."  After
several days of titillating tabloid testimony, Judge Wilfred A.
Waltemade, of Bronx Supreme Court, said he believed all the charges and
counter charges were "greatly exaggerated," and added that both parents
demonstrated an immaturity that made them "unable to cast aside their
own selfish interests Frances says Judge

Waltemade was thrown off the bench.

Robert Reagan, a professional in the field of child abuse, says he
doubts

Vittorio ever beat his small sons, though there is no doubt he
frequently battled with his wife.  Marilyn recalls only that he drove
the children around in his car at breakneck speeds.  The fact is that
the Reagans did not see much of the Gentiles while they were married.
It was only after they broke up that Frances needed her Other Mother
again.

Just a few blocks away from Frances's new home was the Unitarian Church
at Eightieth Street and Lexington Avenue, well known then as a
neighborhood gathering place for sincerely committed churchgoers and
for particular kinds of lost souls.  The church held regular "coffee
hours" that attracted a fluctuating crowd, all of them more or less
lonely, more or less well-educated, more or less well-heeled denizens
of Manhattan's

Upper East Side.  They fell into three categories: shy people who could
be comfortable only with others of their own class, single women hoping
to meet interesting men, and well-mannered oddballs and ne'er-do-wells
who preyed on the first two groups.

Among the regular cofFee hour visitors that summer, two sisters from
Utah are well remembered.  One had "a short, mannish haircut" and
"exuded no charm."  The other was "extremely vivacious," with a broad
jack-o'-lantern grin.  The sisters got talking one afternoon to a
strange, garrulous fat man, a sometime high school science teacher
named Richard Behrens.

Marilyn met him only once again, that same summer, when she brought

Robert along to a coffee hour.  Then she did not hear from him for
seventeen years.  But between Frankie Bradshaw and Dickie Behrens
perfect friendship budded, blossomed, branched, endured.

Like Frankie, Richard Behrens was clever, articulate, eccentric,
disorderly, and alone.  Like her, he was obsessed by the moneyed
classes, and by the Eastern WASP Establishment in particular.  He had
an encyclopedic knowledge of how it all worked, who was really

Old Guard, and who was merely rich.  He knew not merely who "mattered,"
but how much.  He scanned the Social Register like a horseplayer eyeing
the

Racing Form.  He knew who was who in the best families, and how they
were and were not interrelated.  He knew who was born rich and who had
married rich and what kind of divorce settlements people made.

As a schoolteacher, he was especially sharp on private schools: which
were best, and which were second-best, and why.  He had a Salinger-like
comprehension of the preppy scene, and an O'Haralike eye for New York
clu bland He had surveyed and mapped the entire hidden terrain-Racquet
and River, Knickerbocker and Colony, Cosmopolitan and Century, as well
as Yale and Harvard.  He approached the "Society" section of the Sunday
paper like a lepidopterist advancing on butterflies, alert to precise
markings and subtle shadings.

Richard Behrens was at best a fringe dweller in the social carpet.  His
father, Herman Behrens, was a respected physician who lived and
practiced in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was known around his hospital
as "Herman the German."  But Richard's older brother, Robert Behrens,
was in a different class.  He had a distinguished war record in the
U.S. Navy and impeccable academic credentials-B.A. and MA.  degrees
from Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. earned in Europe.  He
was well married, an excellent father, and a career State Department
official who had already made a name for himself in Germany, Vienna,
and Washington as a high-level figure in the United States Information
Agency.  Those who know the family speak of the brothers as being "like
night and day."  Richard

Behrens both intensely admired and bitterly envied his brother Robert's
accomplishments.

Richard Behrens claimed he had attended both St.  Paul's and Phillips

Exeter academies, and been kicked out of both.  (In fact, he grew up
in

Jersey City, went to Blair Academy and Lafayette College.) His job
r6sum~, which he carried around with him, was four pages long.  He was
knowledgeable about cars, weaponry, chemistry, machines.  He had sold
ballistics microscopes for Leitz, written science textbooks for

Prentice-Hall, and taught science and biology at many private and
public schools.  He was an impressive applicant, but never held a job
for any length of time.  His brains and fast-talking charm worked well
at first.

But sooner or later he would become hostile or resentful, or sloppy in
his work; then he would disappear on a drinking hinge and be fired.

Behrens's ethnic background obsessed him.  He had what seemed to one
old friend "a love-hate relationship with his Germanness, and also
with

Jewishness."  He is not Jewish and fears being mistaken for such.  He
is addicted to the telephone and sometimes leaves six messages in one
day, in a German accent, from "Adolf," or "Mr.  Schicklgruber,"
brilliantly weaving some imagined Hitlerian adventure into an event
from the day's headlines.  Behrens's relationships with women, other
than Frances, were usually fleeting, and he never married.

A career woman who once dated Behrens saw Frances and Dick together
often in the mid-sixties.  "The apartment she lived in was not very
pretty, not terribly clean.  There was always a certain amount of
disorganization around Frances.  She never could quite get it together.
I felt there were a lot of loose ends in her life.  But I know a lot of
people like that.

She was quite organized in regard to her children.  Very conscious of
the 'right' schools; very, very status-conscious.  Both she and Dick
lived on the fringes of WASP respectability.  Then one of them would
get very drunk, say something outrageous, and never get asked back. 
One time I heard Dick tell the hostess her mother was a lesbian. 
Another time, with several gay men at the table, Frances launched into
a terrible tirade against faggots.  Both were heavy drinkers and liked
plenty of casual sex.

But their relationships with the opposite sex came to quite bad ends.
The live-in person was always described as 'too demanding."  The truly
steady relationship was with one another."

Behrens posed as an eccentric mit tel-European genius who knew
everything about everything-music, art, science, philosophy, the
history of psychoanalysis.  It is true he had lived for a time in
Lynchburg,

Virginia, and undergone old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalysis there. 
He worked then as a department store manager-trainee and is remembered
chiefly for being "enormously resentful of his co-workers."

Says a Virginia neighbor of the time, "Dick is always jockeying for
power, matching wits, evaluating his performance, and checking the
action."  He is like a racetrack tout whose inside dope is always
slightly screwed up.

Most important, Richard Behrens is a man seething with
resentments-against the rich, but more against the poor; against the
world, in which he found himself increasingly unable to "make it"
professionally and socially.  But second most of all, he resented his
successful brother, Robert.  And above everything, Richard Behrens
hated his father.

"Dick was always obsessed with his inheritance," recalls a longtime
friend.

"He described his father as 'a miser."  When his mother was still
alive, his father had a girlfriend on the side, and perhaps a child,
and Dick talked continually about losing his 'inheritance' to 'the
slut."  He was very much threatened by this woman and he kept saying,
"Someone should get rid of them!""

Dr.  Behrens lived in a run-down section of Jersey City, but he also
owned a house near a lake, "and Dick was forever fighting to get it,
inherit it, keep it out of the hands of 'the slut."  He talked
incessantly about the necessity to protect his inheritance by killing
his father."

Frances Bradshaw was becoming a purposeful social mountaineer,
determined to leave Salt Lake City behind, resolute about associating
only with "better" people.  She encouraged her mother's passionate
interest in breeding and bloodlines.  Membership in the Huguenot
Society was for years her proudest affiliation, and she blackballed her
own sister there in order to maintain her unchallenged supremacy in the
New York chapter.  Her husbands, both Europeans, allowed her to sustain
the illusion that she was part of some vague international diplomatic
and business community.  In fact, though brilliant, she was too
disorganized to be part of any community.  But her children were
growing up, and more and more she began to live through them.  Pushing
the children into the right schools would give them, and herself, the
social standing she surely knew she could never hope to achieve on her
own.  Frances alone would always be an outsider.  But through her
children's accomplishments, and her father's money, doors might be
unlocked to her that otherwise would remain forever closed.

As an expert on private schools, Richard Behrens had answers to her
most pressing concern.  He had a moody, excitable, eccentric
temperament like her own.  He had her tastes-for all-night drinking,
all-night talk, endless conspiring and figuring and plotting-as well as
her tolerance for extreme disorder.  He had her intolerance for fools
and for rules, and her total contempt for what both considered the
lower orders.  Most of all perhaps, he had time for Frances.  This was
a woman who was always late;

who talked incessantly, and always took an hour or more to come to the
point; whose mind raced ahead of her tongue; who had difficulty getting
up in the morning and in going to sleep at night; who could spend three
hours reading the morning papers, and two or three or even six hours on
one phone call.  Frankie Bradshaw took up a great deal of other
people's time, and Behrens had that to give her.

Like Frankie, Dickie was an outsider, an eccentric, a solitary
fantast.

Before they met one another, each had lived the lonely life of a genie
trapped in his own jar.  But a genie's purpose in life is to escape his
jar and then to serve his master.  When fate placed their two jars side
by side, each became the other's Aladdin.  Unstoppered, their volatile
imaginations arose, expanded, writhed, intertwined.

They lived in Yorkville, the old German district on the Upper East
Side, and always kept within easy walking distance of each other.  He
inhabited one of the many cheap, grimy flats that line the side
streets, and she always dwelt in ore or another of the big new
high-rises along East End

Avenue or York Avenue in the Eighties.  From 1963 until 1969, when
Frances remarried and moved abroad, she and her children had a
two-bedroom apartment at 85 East End Avenue.  When they came back to
the United States, they lived at 75 East End Avenue.  After Ariadne's
birth they moved to a

$1,000-a-month apartment at 1675 York Avenue -all in the same
neighborhood.

Berenice came to visit several times a year, and Lorenzo Frances first
son--often lived with his aunt, Marilyn Reagan.  Yet, in seventeen
years, neither the Reagans nor Berenice once laid eyes on the strange
man who served Frances as faithful adviser, companion, confidant, and
coconspirator in both of her drawn-out divorce actions; who freely
oflered her his filthy, gummy, roach-infested apartment as a repository
for items Frances wanted to hide from her mother, or from lawyers and
private investigators; the man who was her relief errand boy and
babysitter and dependable "Dear Abby" for all seasons; and who was
always known as "Uncle George" to the two "fatherless" little boys.

Not long ago, between the time he twice testified for the prosecution,
in two murder trials, and the time he put in for the $100,000 reward
offered by the family for information leading to the arrest of the
killer, Dickie Behrens sat in his favorite hangout,

the Midnite Express coffee shop on Second Avenue and Eightyninth
Street, and reminisced about his erstwhile friend.  "Frances is a
genius.  Don't underestimate her, she's very smart.  She taught me all
about the law.  She learned it from her divorces.  They said she was a
spendthrift, but I wouldn't say that in court.  She spent her money in
binges.  But she didn't own a summer house or some of the other things
her sisters did.

"She had a very smart eye for investment.  Not just stocks and bonds
and real estate.  Jewelry.  She had a sixty-thousand-dollar sapphire
ring, forty -thousand-dollar diamond earrings.  She has Chinese
paintings and carpets she bought for very little that are worth a
fortune.  She was crazy, but she wasn't stupid.

"She was manipulative, of course.  Even now I believe she has private
dicks on me.  My phone rings on weekend nights, late; I pick it up and
nobody's there.  But that's how she's always been.  Always checkin' up
on people, always trying to get stuff on everyone.

"The thing about her personality was that she was incredibly
changeable.

I'd go over to York Avenue and hear her screaming through the walls at
her children.  The whole building musta heard her.  Then I'd ring the
bell, and she'd switch!  She came to the door a different person, like
the screaming never happened.

"Did I ever sleep with her?  No.  I mean: maybe.  My memory's terrible.
She knows that.  That's why they were trying to screw me up on the
stand.  But

I never went for her.  You know why?  No tits.  That's the whole
story.

Sometimes I thought: Maybe I coulda married her.  But then I'd think:
Who needs that kinda trouble?  I was always introducing her to guys,
friends of mine.  And I wouldn't get jealous when she took them in,
shacked up with them.  I never did.  It just wouldn't have worked out
between us.  She needed a man.  But maybe she hated men-I dunno.

"I'll say it straight out: Frances was cuckoo, nuts, crazy.  But the
whole family was crazy.  Marilyn, she's a little crazy too.  Her
husband is supposed to be nuts.  She's the power in the house, and he
just does what she tells him-that's what I hear.

"Frances's lawyers tried to say that I was queer with the boys.  That
was bullshit.  I wasn't.  I'm not.  The thing about Larry was: I
couldn't tell how crazy he was.  Frances could.  She'd tell me, "I'm
scared of him."  He has this condition-I don't know what they call
it-but he barks.  Yelps.

There's a name for it.  But I was never sure he wasn't doing it just to
get a rise out of Frances.

"The whole family was crazy.  Except Ariadne.  You ever look at a
litter of puppies or kittens?  You can tell right ofF whether it'fl be
a good one or not.  Well, with her you could always tell.  She'll be
okay."

When Frances walked out on Vittorio, he offered goo a month to
support

Lorenzo and Marco.  With Berenice's enthusiastic approval, Frances
rejected the offer out of hand.  Her refusal precipitated a four-year
divorce fight during which Frances depended entirely on her parents for
financial support.  Vittorio's lawyer, Irving Erdheim, a ferocious
Grendel of the matrimonial bar, sought to prove that Frances had far
more money than

Vittorio, and that she was simply trying to harass and punish his
client by depriving him of his children and forcing him into
bankruptcy.  Frances was not just a rich man's daughter, Erdheim
claimed; she was wealthy in her own right because of the stocks and the
oil leasing business Franklin had put in her name, and in the names of
his grandsons.

The legal skirmishing involved a prodigious amount of time, expense,
claims and counterclaims, transcontinental accounting, and legal
depositions.  Her father, Franklin, repeatedly urged Frances to
compromise and settle.  "Vitro"-as close as Franklin could bring
himself to spelling

"Vittorio"-was not a wealthy man.  The costs of the convoluted
litigation would surely exceed the rewards.  Franklin's letters
strongly advised his daughter to seek work now rather than hope for
dubious alimony pie in the sky.  Gradually his advice turned into
demands, then into threats: unless his daughter went to work, or
returned to Utah, he would cut ofF her funds.  Though the tides of
battle fluctuated erratically, Berenice mostly sided with her daughter.
The one thing father and daughter agreed on was that Berenice's "help"
invariably made matters worse.

Frances was sometimes conciliatory, usually hostile, and always adroit
at playing one parent off against the other.  She remained constant on
one point: her children came before everything.  She could not return
to

Vittorio, as her father wished, because he beat the boys
unmercifully.

She could not go to work because she was too responsible a parent to
leave her sons in the care of strangers.  She could not return to Utah
because the New York courts would not let her remove the children from
their jurisdiction.  When Vittorio in desperation suggested they com
promise by each taking one child to raise, and even offered Frances
first pick, she replied that she would not "for one instant consider
splitting up my family."

Berenice backed her daughter with cash as well as moral support.  Over
the years she would gradually liquidate all her own assets-bank
accounts, oil leases from Franklin, securities she had inherited from
her parents, her fine furniture, her beloved piano-until she had
rendered herself literally penniless in her efforts to meet Frances's
insatiable demands.  Haunted by an image of her daughter and
grandchildren living in the streets and starving-a scene Frances was
most effective at conjuring up-Berenice drove herself into greater and
greater frenzies of compassion.  At some point she began secretly
plundering her husband's funds in order to keep sending money to her
daughter.  Just when this practice began is unclear.  (The matter was
brought up superficially in one trial; in the other it was kept out
completely, by pretrial agreement.  To portray the widow of the murder
victim as a little old lady driven into a lifetime of larceny by her
husband's extreme stinginess was not deemed advantageous by either
side.)

Marilyn Reagan has always been frank to say that the first forger in
the family was not Frances but their mother.  How can Berenice feign
ignorance, or surprise, at this late date, Marilyn wonders.  "Why,
Mother taught

Frances to forge, taught her by example, since she was a little girl!

Mother gave her the fundamentals-and then she just took off!"

Marilyn maintains that Berenice for years had counterfeited her
husband's signature.  "We kids all knew she forged Dad's signature from
time to time.

She'd just practice up for a little while, and then she could do it. 
It was just for little amounts at first, and not necessarily checks."

Franklin kept Berenice on a household budget Of $400 a month.  She was
also family bookkeeper and each month wrote out the checks her husband
then signed.  It was no different in most families, except that
Franklin Bradshaw abhorred credit and insisted on paying cash for
everything, including automobiles.  So, like other wives, Berenice
found ways around her bus band rules.

"What Mother would do, when I was growing up-she would charge things at
all the stores.  But if it was something big, an amount that Dad would
be surprised at, she'd pay for it on layaway.  So much a month.  Then
she'd go back each month and charge a few small items, so that the
total amount she made out the check for would be different each time,
and he never knew she was buying on credit.

"Mother taught me that.  If she told me, she certainly must have told

Frances."

Frances's four-year divorce war was fought on two fronts: in the
courts, where records are seated because of the children's tender
years, and in an extraordinary flood of correspondence by which members
of this riven family sought to influence one another's behavior, and
justify their own.  The writers often sent backup copies of their
letters to other family members, recipients shared copies of letters
they had received.

One reason for the great volume of correspondence was the old problem
of saying no to Frances.  Berenice and Franklin could never do it. 
They tried to deal with difficult Frances at arm's length, rather than
really confront her, and Franklin in his letters appears to be truly
frightened of her.

They also sought to prove to their other daughters, and to one another,
that they were really "doing something about" Frances, when all they
were actually doing was writing letters.  And checks.

All the Bradshaws communicate in a kind of double-talk wherein
oxymoronic ideas pursue one another down the page.  "I will gladly do .
- ."  means I will do most unwillingly if at all ... "I have every
intention ..."  means I have no intention.  Franklin will begin a
letter to Frances: "There is one thing I don't like to do and that is
criticize ..."  and follow it with three single-spaced pages of
complaint.  MaMyn lectures that her parents' spendthrift generosity is
"hurting Frances," when in fact her sister is thriving.  Franklin will
on occasion send Frances three contradictory letters about family
financial matters, and invite her to instruct her lawyers to use
whichever one they find most helpful.  The one writer among them who
expresses her feelings directly is Frances.  "I will never come back to
Utah" means exactly that.

A troubling letter arrived from New York in July 1964 from a
psychiatrist who had been seeing Frances.  She had been refer-red to
him by the psychiatric social worker attached to the domestic relations
court which was handling the Gentiles' divorce.  The doctor wrote to
the Bradshaws that "her need for treatment is urgent-her problems are
serious."  However, in seven of her nine visits, Frances had assured
the doctor that her mother would absolutely refuse to pay his bills,
and he now wondered about the Bradshaws' true intentions.

Berenice hastened to New York to "help."  Franklin wrote Frances urging
her to "work her hard"---as if his wife were a mule.  Frances told her
mother she had no room for uninvited guests; her mother would have to
sleep on the floor.  She did.

In January 1965 Franklin typed out another of his strange third-person
sermonettes to "Dear Francis," as he almost invariably spelled his
daughter's name.  Caspar Milquetoast could scarcely have put matters
more gently.  He said that everybody has good points and bad points;
there was no such thing as a perfect person.  He said he would tell
Frances about some of her good points and bad points "in a constructive
way."  Her "good points" were her good looks.  She was "an attractive
person."  Her bad points were that she did not keep promises, she never
appreciated the things other people did for her, she was a "poor
business lady," and, like her mother, she was nervous and high strung
"Those kind of people often make poor decisions and don't meet reality,
especially if they are the baby girl and spoiled."

The letter went on to accuse Frances of wrecking her oil operation by
cashing in securities to get money for lawyers.  When Frances did not
bother to reply, and refused to accept his phone calls, her father's
feeble riposte was to send her ten dollars' worth of free stamps.

Franklin sought solace from Marilyn, and suggested she slyly invite
"Vitro" out to dinner and grill him about his true intentions. 
Franklin offered to pay the check.

In New York, Frances and her mother decided to hire private detectives
to try to "get something" on Vittorio in order to destroy his
business.

Ultimately Berenice denounced her son-in-law to the FBI as a pearl
smuggler.  Franklin threatened to testify for Vittorio, not Frances.

Vittorio happily invited his father-in-law, whom he had never met, to
stay at his apartment rent-free.  By early April the attorneys were in
full cry, taking depositions and trying to determine the extent of the
family's Utah assets.  Upon hearing that the fearsome lawyer Erdheim
was planning to visit

Utah, Franklin suggested it would be cheaper if Vittorio came out
himself and saw first-hand the vagaries and un profitability of the oil
leasing business.

Then Franklin issued an ultimatum: unless Frances went to work, or
returned to her husband, or came back to Utah, he would cut off funds
and testify against her.  Inevitably, his threat simply set Frances to
spinning like a top with the energy of her own rage.  In one day she
dashed off three furious sc reeds It is impossible to read them without
concluding that all parties in this correspondence are lying; that all
are extracting the same promises which they are themselves breaking;
and that all are to some degree, in Frances's words, "sick in the
head," or to use her father's phrase, are "over-nervous persons."

She first threatens her father.  She will take him to court if he
repeats the vicious gossip reported to him by Berenice: that she has
been spending nights in men's apartments and is a "whore."  She is
"disgusted" that her parents would believe such filthy charges, and
also suggests that the "report from New York" is fictitious, made up by
one of her own parents.

Franklin sent a copy of this letter to Marilyn, with a handwritten
notation: Marilyn-I heard a rumor that Francis was drinking.  This
letter makes you wonder.

Frances's second letter to her father that day protested that she could
not go to work, as he wished, without abandoning her children, and
added that she refused to go back to a husband who was "mentally ill."
She warned that she would go on welfare, and in the same sentence
refused to come home to Utah and "take my children away from their
father."  She accused Franklin of ignoring the weddings of his
daughters, of ignoring his grandchildren, and of beating her.  She
warned Franklin that the New

York cops would be waiting if he dared to come to New York City and
testify for her estranged husband.  She accused her mother of snooping
and scene-making, and threatened her with banishment.  She asked Dad
not to show her letters to Mom, and swore she herself never showed her
letters from Dad to Mom.

But this was just a warm-up.  Frances as usual had reserved her full
fury for Berenice, who had just left New York for Utah.  Her mother's
sickening visits always made her want to vomit, she wrote.  Berenice
would be seared to death to go to Marilyn's house "and pull the shit
you do with me .."  How Frances longs for a mother who would be kind to
her!  Berenice doesn't give a damn about anyone's feelings but her own.
In her frenzies of housekeeping, Berenice cares nothing for her
daughter's feelings and happily throws Frances's personal things down
the incinerator She has no concern for her grandchildren's feelings
either, and tells them "to their little faces" that they were "born bad
and wicked."

Berenice tries to buy affection with money.  No wonder she has a son in
a mental hospital!  Frances's most vivid childhood memories "are of
being completely alone, listening to you talk to Yourself like a maniac
all day .  You say I married a dego [sic] and ruined everyone's life.
Who did you marry?  How many lives did you ruin?"  Berenice married an
emotional cripple, a man who cares about nothing but money, a man too
busy making more money to attend his own daughter's wedding!  The rest
of the world is shocked at his insanity!

"You say I ruined lives?  Where's your son?  You say I'm a bad
mother.

Thank God my sons aren't helplessly emotionally crippled schizophrenics
locked up for life in a mental hospital .."

The sulfurous fulminations end with an augury of violence still
thirteen years down the road: "Most fathers wouldn't talk or act the
way Dad does even if their daughter was a murderess ..."

Frances's letters have the desired effect.  Dad rushed home as soon as
possible after work and found his wife sobbing and in a complete
nervous condition, and she was still sobbing late at night "when I went
to bed .  Your mother is a very nervous high strung person, of course,
one third to two thirds of all mothers are ... It is up to the children
to understand those nervous traits ..."

His letters show Franklin to be just as manipulative as the other

Bradshaws, a man entirely unwilling to confront anybody head on.  His
family motto might be: Only Wage: Never Engage.  But his mind, too, was
racing, and when his kid sister Bertha, "the family historian," wrote
to him from California requesting some "boyhood memories," the frantic
man sat down at the old Royal in the tear of his warehouse and typed
out eleven long, single-spaced letters minutely recollecting his
rugged

Canadian childhood.  Weather reports, catalogs of farm animals, the
names of the Indian children he played with-nothing was omitted.

As usual, Berenice's tears destroyed her only temporarily.  Another
sharp jab of rejection-this time, a follow-up call from Frances: "Mrs.
Bradshaw, you are not welcome in my house.  I never want to see any of
you again!"-restored her mother to her old helping self.  She "knew"
her daughter needed her, no matter what anyone said.

For an entire year, Berenice had been begging Franklin to go to New
York, insisting that only he could straighten out Frances's financial
mess.  By now she owed $3,000 to Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as back
rent, and

Berenice's "family silver" and Vittorio's pearls were in hock.

Furthermore, as Berenice knew but Franklin did not, their daughter was
getting ready to sell her $12,000 worth of stock in the family-owned

American Savings & Loan.

"Dad would be furious if she does this, and the family here would be
terribly hurt and mad," Berenice confided to Marilyn.  She had
considered offering to buy up the stock herself, then put Frances on a
monthly allowance.  But Berenice no longer had the money, and even if
she did,

Frances would refuse to sell her stock if she knew she were to receive
an allowance anyway.  Berenice had therefore formulated a secret plan
to come to New York, without Franklin's knowledge.  She would repossess
the valuables from "loan sharks," and invisibly backstop Franklin's
efforts, since she "knows everybody" in New York, and Franklin had
never been there.  She was also fearful that Franklin's "violent
temper" might erupt if Frances defied him, and "he might beat her
too."

Begging Marilyn to "act surprised" if her mother walked through the
door, she concluded in a burst of realism: "I'm so very worried about
Frankie's condition.  You know and I know Dad does not recognize mental
illness and if she were raving mad he would say: "If she would get a
job she would be alright."  He used to walk Bob around the block and
try to talk him out of his schitsfranic (can't spell it).  We know this
is ridiculous.  He will be the last one to recognize she needs help.
This is the main reason I feel I should be there.  If you and I feel
she needs help we will have to gang up against him.  This has gone on
too long ..."

Nonetheless, it will go on for more than a decade, until it ends in
murder.  Already all the Bradshaws' patterns were well established, the
family battle lines clearly drawn, Berenice would insist to Franklin
that he must apply the pressure, that she was too weak.  But as soon
as

Franklin attempted to put his foot down and cry Halt!  Berenice would
undermine him by finding new ways to dip into the family treasury and
bail out their daughter.  So the threats were all empty gestures, the
pressure was always too little and too late, as no one knew better
than

Baby Frankie.

In a sense, it was all a game, the deadly game of family power
politics, a give-and-take of theatrical gestures, each one over blown
to its most melodramatic proportions: every teardrop a river, every
hurt feeling a mortal wound, every warning a thunderclap, and every
cherished scab picked till it festered anew.  The Bradshaws had been
playing the same game all their lives, and to some extent they knew
they were gaming.  But they could not stop; they were addicted, hooked.
Then, one day, the for-so-long imagined gun held real bullets.  And the
game was over.

Hence the Bradshaws wrote without communicating.  It scarcely mattered
whether or not letters were delivered.  Franklin's scheduled day of
departure for New York City came and went, but he did not leave.  He
continued writing letters, spinning his wheels, obsessed.  "When you
figure taxes, you have depleted my assets $50,000 in two years ..."

Three days and countless pages after he was supposed to arrive in New

York, Franklin at last sent a very firm letter, the one he "should have
written" two years earlier: there would be no more money, and no help
of any kind, unless Frances and the boys returned to Salt Lake.

He had revised his estimates, and now figured that his losses "in
economic waste" exceeded $100,000.  To Elaine he wrote that "Frances
used to put on these temper fits and run her mother for years.  I am
afraid she is putting on the same temper fits with her lawyer and
judge."

Soon Frances was writing back that she had received another eviction
notice.  Even though she had no food, both she and her hungry children
would starve to death before she would let her father force her to
leave her children.  If she were to bring the boys to Utah, as Dad
wanted, their father would be sure to snatch them back to New York, Her
children were legally wards of New York State, she claimed.  "I can say
no more.  My grief is too great, and my tears are too abundant."

Berenice was in Miami at a White Shrine of Jerusalem convention, booked
to continue on with a package tour to New Zealand, when she was paged
on the public address system and told the latest bad news.  Canceling
New

Zealand, she rushed to the rescue, paid the back rent, and was rewarded
by accusations of extreme betrayal from her husband.  Not only had she
once more "hurt" Frances, but, in Franklin's wonderful coinage: "As
soon as I give her stric orders, you buy pass me ..."

By May, Franklin was onto Frances's plan to sell her stock.  He wrote

Marilyn: "How she got these certificates I don't know unless it is thru
your mother.  Francis has used pressure on your mother before and I
have had two or three severe arguments with your mother (over-nervous
people's judgement is often very poor)."  In anticipation of the dread
Erdheim's arrival in Salt Lake City to take the

Bradshaws' depositions, Franklin was also poor-mouthing his own
business, and inflating his own labors.  "I have been trying to
increase my working hours from 16 to 20 hours but that doesn't work
out, as for health reasons a person needs those 6 hours sleep."  A few
days later he reported that

Berenice had checked with a New York court official and been told
that

Frances had never even applied for permission to return to Utah with
the children.  If she did apply, the official thought it very likely
her request would be granted.

In their depositions to Vittorio's lawyer, the Bradshaws said that
together they had given their daughter about $27,000.

Q: And did you voluntarily give these monies to her?

A: [by Berenice] Yes.

Q: And they were a contribution on your part, is that correct?

A: Well, she had to have something to live on.

FRANKLIN BRAD SHAW [interrupting] They were supposed to be paid back!

By midsummer Franklin was feeling like a badger in a hole.  He told

Marilyn he had "even threatened to beat up your mother."  To Elaine he
confessed the truth: he had slapped his wife in the face "several times
on account of her over-nervous makeup."  What upset him most was

Berenice's efforts to run the selfsame show he was proving himself
incapable of running.  "Your mother is trying to act as a father and
mother of the family which she has done for years and how we are going
to stop her I just don't know."

But Berenice did.  When Franklin hit her, in an argument over a
thirty-dollar gas bill, she marched down to the courthouse and filed
for divorce.  "I can't understand a woman putting up with it.  No
self-respect!

They'd never hit me the second time!  Never"'

After dropping the divorce action, she decided it was time to visit

Elaine.  Franklin quickly warned the Drukmans, "Whatever's on her mind,
get her off the subject as quick as possible & for heaven sake work her
hard so she is physically tired at night ... Your mother just has
pictures every night of Frances starving to death of no money."

He pleaded with Berenice that they work together as a team.  "All other
wives everyplace ... they refer the child to the father.  But not in
our family.  You have gone over my head continually now for the last 3
years."

This had merely shown Frances she need never account to her father, and
could always buy pass him for her mother, who required no accounting
whatsoever.

Franklin had decided the real reason his daughter was seeking divorce
was that she had tired of Vittorio; she wanted a more varied social
life.  He beseeched her anew to stop her spending sprees, and claimed
he had been forced to borrow all the money he had sent her in the past.
His own borrowing was at the "danger point," he said.  If she wanted
more money, she should get it from a bank, using her American Savings &
Loan stock as security.

Privately, Franklin sent his son-in-law Reagan to look into the matter
and learned that Frances already had borrowed to the limit on her
stock, and the money had been sluiced away at Saks, Tiffany's, and
Bergdorf

Goodman along with all the rest.  Worse, he discovered that Berenice
had secretly borrowed $700 on her American Savings & Loan stock, and
given that to Frances, too.

Details of Frances's domestic existence must of necessity be
reconstructed from the recollections of other members of her always
carefully locked and guarded household: children, ex-husbands,
ex-servants, Behrens, and

Berenice-her only visitors.  Not the best of sources in any
circumstances, especially these: any child's-eye view of a parent is no
more objective than the parent's of the child.  As Housman reminds us:
"The night my father got me his mind was not on me."

In this particular family, distortions and gaps in the children's
recollections may be greater than most.  By the time Lorenzo and Marco
were teenagers, mother and sons had formed a secret criminal gang, and
despite the revelations at the ensuing trials, there may still be much
to hide.  From the very beginning, Lorenzo and Marco-now known as Larry
and Marc-led extremely strange boyhoods, although neither boy appears
to have recognized at the time the singularity of his childhood
experience.

Lacking a basis for comparison, all children accept their environments
as normal.  Abused children accept their abuse.  It seemed quite normal
to these boys, for example, that for as long as they can remember,

Marc rarely left his mother's side, whereas Larry was never after the
age of four or five permitted to remain at home longer than a few days
or weeks.

To interview Marc Schreuder, as he is known today, you must visit him
at

"Resorts International," the inmates' name for the brand-new state
prison opened in j984 at Point of the Mountain, near Draper, Utah, just
south of

Salt Lake City.  The state penitentiary is a raw-new jewel of prison
architecture set behind a frizzle of barbed wire in bleakest desert
sands.

The spacious visiting room glows with the elegant colors of a Roman
afternoon: steel-reinforced cement block walls painted a tawny ocher,
an exposed network of fat round overhead air-conditioning channels
painted a beautiful verdigris green.  Several massive, near-silent
sliding steel doors, painted a deep sanguine, are operated by near
invisible guards inside a control room of black glass that appears to
contain enough electronic gadgetry to run a nuclear submarine.  Out in
the big visiting room, circular windows---cross barred and
cathedral-sized-have been set high up in the lion colored walls to
frame postcard views of distant mighty mountains and eternal snows.

Marc Schreuder is a disturbing young man, fattish, crudely shaven, very
clean-looking, dressed in short-sleeved denims.  His large, staring
bright blue eyes have the same round blankness as the great ocular
windows overhead.  He works in the prison kitchens, and his plump
forearms are scarred with burn marks.  His body is very tense: the legs
jiggle continually up and down, his roly-poly fingers busy themselves
tearing any available scrap of paper into ever tinier shreds.  His
movements are rapid, his speech jumpy.  Unlike his mother and brother,
he is on no medication.  He is always hungry, and any food that is put
on the table chocolate bars, cakes, bagfuls of pretzels--disappears
immediately.  He eats like Larry.

Wolfishly.

One feels that the one thing that truly excites him, besides food, is
money and---even more-the game of money.  Like his grandfather, he
hates to spend money but loves to play with it.  His manner is amiable,
puppy like he laughs too much, and in the wrong places.  His laughter
is one sign among many that he is not always sure when to laugh, when
to cry.  Talking to him is like talking to smoke; he conveys a sense of
non substantiality He is not just a perpetual games man not just
abused.  He is scatty, shattered, incapable of much communication
because his sense of identity seems so fractured.  He is like the
atomized, blown-away debris of a personality; the pile of dust that has
settled after Mom, and murder, blew him to psychic smithereens.  He
makes one think of Maurice Sendak's children's classic, "ere the Wild
Things Are.  Marc is both the phantasmagoric creatures of the nightmare
and the little boy who dreams them.

In the fall of 1965 Frances enrolled four-year-old Marco Gentile at
the

Emerson School, a fashionable, conservative private school just off
Fifth

Avenue which had a red-painted front door.  He went there for two
years,

Marco thought of it as "the red door school," but whenever he called it
that, his mother became enraged.  Later he learned why: other mothers
in

Central Park might think he attended the Little Red School House, a
well known progressive school in Greenwich Village.  Behrens said this
was "a

Jew-boy lower class school," whereas Emerson was upper-class.

Larry did not go to Emerson.  He was sent somewhere else, Marc is not
sure where.  "Mom said he was in a mental hospital.  She said he just
went zonkers.  Had a psychotic episode.  Lost contact with reality.
Started smashing his head against the wall.  He was institutionalized.
I don't remember the name, but it was a small, private, city place, not
a big state institution.  Some of the time he could sleep at home ...
it's like some of the time he wasn't living at home, sometimes he was
But I know

Larry was in an institution because later, when I was in second grade,
I remember him joking about it.  I remember him being obsessed with
this boy he met-Donny?  ... Johnny?  ... Danny?  ... he wrote it
everywhere.

Wrote it on the walls ... damn!  I can't remember ... "But I remember
Mom saying he was in a mental hospital.  And when he came back, Mom
said, I don't want you near him!  I was really scared, afraid Mom was
gonna beat me up over it.  She said to stay away from him because he
was 'sick in the head' and 'diseased in the mind," and if I went near
him, I'd catch it too.  It was supposed to be, like, contagious.  "

Marco was never frightened of his brother.  "I liked Larry!  This was
the problem throughout my whole childhood.  I loved to play games with
Larry.

We'd have counting aloud contests.  I'd drop out at about fourteen
thousand, but Larry could go on forever.  Or

Stratego-my favorite!  But I was scared to play with him.  Because Mom
really censured it, really looked down on him.  So it was something I
always wanted to do, but never really did."  As he grew older, he
learned to be clandestine and furtive about playing with his brother,
he says, "and when I got caught, I'd have to bottle myself in my room
till the tidal wave of the storm subsided.  Mom would be very, very
angry if I was playing games with Larry, the 'sick-in-the- head boy."

Lorenzo was referred to derisively by Frances as "the Chocolate
Treat,"

Marc says, whereas his own nickname was "Bunny Dew."  He was told
repeatedly that his older brother was "crazy, handicapped, disturbed,
and disease-brained," and that he had had to be sent away to a special
school for "sick-in-the-head" boys.  His mother terrified Marc, he
says, and effectively controlled him by repeatedly threatening that he,
too, would be sent away to "crazy school" if he misbehaved.  "She used
to scream and bellow at me, Ij'you don't behave, I'm gonna ship you to
a mental institution and never let you out!  A place where you'll be
for the rest of your life!  Or else she'd tell me she'd send me to
Papa-Vittorio-and let him beat me up."

Marc today often wonders whether he really was beaten, and if so, by
whom.  Neither boy recalls being beaten by anyone, but both have a kind
of patchy amnesia about their early years.  Larry Bradshaw, as he calls
himself today, is a young man with computer like total recall of
numbers, dates, and places, and he is honest to a fault about his
teenage history of mental illness.  But he remembers no early childhood
problems.  At times

Berenice, too, says she is unaware of any "handicap."  The Reagans,
with whom Larry later lived, say that Larry, although "difficult to
handle," was not ever in any sort of mental institution.  They add,
however, that

Frances never made any effort to treat her two sons equally.  From
infancy, she always had one favorite and one outcast.  For the first
three or four years, they say, she doted on Lorenzo.  Then,
inexplicably, she switched to Marco.  School records show that Larry
spent his entire childhood and adolescence in a series of boarding
schools, camps, and foster homes.  When he was little he was sent to
Salt Lake City to spend the summer with his grandparents.  In third
grade he was left with them for an entire year.  Marc says he was told
Larry spent this year in "crazy school."  Overall, Frances made a
sustained, deter mined effort to keep her sons as far apart as possible
as much as possible.

She tried to separate them not just physically but emotionally,
psychologically.  In this effort, too, she was successful.  Today her
sons do not really seem to like each other much, and Marc, in
particular, is exceptionally jealous of any attention paid to Larry.

Marc sometimes says he thinks his mother hated Larry because his
grandmother and Aunt Marilyn "favored Larry over me, and Mom resented
the fact.  And yet I also figured that Mom, too, favored Larry-in
certain respects.  I don't know why.  Mom expected a lot more of me,
drove me much harder.  Larry she kind of gave up on.  But then
sometimes she'd seem to respect Larry more than me.  Like maybe she
thought him, being the eldest, would be the more wiser.  I dunno.  It
was weird.

"Then, when I was in my teens and Larry was going to military school,"
says

Marc, "it seemed for a while he had a resurgence and became the
favorite again.  But most of the time she hated him.  Because he was
sick-in-the-head, like the black sheep in the family.  He was a
diseased creation-a monster."

"Larry is not handicapped," Marilyn says flatly.  "His problem is that
he would like to have his mother love him."  Larry would always do
anything his mother wanted.  "He kept trying to get back into her good
graces; he'd do just about anything for that.  I talked to him
recently.  He sounded not quite so starved for love anymore."

"I've never seen any handicap," says Bob Reagan.  "He certainly got A's
in school, later on.  When they were little, and together, they were
hard to control."  Berenice, on her frequent trips to New York, rode
the bus back and forth between her daughters' apartments.  The sisters
rarely saw each other, now that Frances was again leading the life of a
single woman.  Bob

Reagan remembers urging Berenice to let him help her out with her
grandsons' care.  "She was here, baby-sitting, and she didn't exactly
know how to handle 'em.  They were wild.  So I hit 'em a couple of
times, with my open hand, on the rear, which she ... she really doesn't
like!  There's no doubt that's what they needed.  But I got a peculiar
reaction from her.  Not only she really doesn't like it but, I give her
credit, she tells me.

Straight out."

Reagan never saw Vittorio with his small sons, but from the way
Vittorio's five children-the grown-up Marc and Larry and the three
children of his second wife-act with their father, Reagan gets no
sense that any of them ever feared the little man with the

Chico Marx accent.

Marilyn says that when the family moved to East End Avenue and the boys
had a bedroom of their own for the first time, they fought a lot, but
both otherwise "seemed all right."  She recalls having a long talk
with

Marc when he was four or five "about how sometimes parents don't live
together anymore.  But it doesn't mean they don't love )m It just means
they're having trouble living together ... And I thought he seemed to
accept that.  I'd say their behavior, outside of being rambunctious
little boys, hard to control, was okay."

But the truth seems to be that Frances had a lifetime fear that, if
left alone, Larry would try to kill Marc and might very well succeed.
She has always claimed that Larry made several such attempts on his
younger brother.  Both boys laughingly deny this, saying it is just
more of Mom's wild imaginings.  Marc says he never feared his brother.
The Reagans also deny the stories completely.  But the Reagans also
deny mistreating Larry when he lived with them, in fourth grade. 
School authorities thought otherwise.  Marc says the Reagans sometimes
pinched him till he bled.  Perhaps

Marc and Larry, like the old man who thought he could "cure" his son

Robert with walks around the block, are masters of denial.  Berenice

Bradshaw did not know what to think.  She vacillated.  Sometimes she
seemed to share her daughter's terror.  At other times, like Franklin,
she denied and covered up.  But throughout the history, one can sense
her at least trying to deal honestly and rationally with an irrational
situation.

Did Frances really believe Larry was crazy, and dangerous?  At least
some of the time she probably did.  But she also used her son's mental
problems as a further way to manipulate her parents into giving her
what she wanted; a way to prevent them from ever saying no to
Frances.

If the sons were uncontrollable, that was understandable.  Certainly no
one had ever been able to control their mother.  After she left
Vittorio, what interested her most was men.  She was dating a variety
of men, and when the boys were still only three or four years old,
neighbors told

Marilyn her sister often left them alone overnight.  By the time they
were five or six, Marilyn had reported her sister to the police for
child neglect.  Unable to reach Frances on the phone, she would go to
the East

End Avenue apartment and find the front door wide open and the place

"dirty mess."  One time the children were gone, and there was nothing
in the refrigerator.  Moments later the little boys returned eating
chocolate cake and french fries.  They had gone down to the corner
delicatessen and begged for food.  She phoned the police and took the
boys to her apartment on Sixty-fourth Street.  "About midnight, Frances
showed up.  The police had left her a note that we had the boys.  I
drove them home, and Frances made me so nervous, I scraped the paint
off her car backing out of the garage."

Then Marilyn, an extremely frugal woman, had offered to pay her sister
for the gas.  When Frances demurred, Marilyn tried to stuff a few bills
into her sister's pocket, saying, "Here.  Take it for the boys."

Frances flew into a rage, screaming, "You!  You never did anything for
the boys!"

In 1966 Frances put herself for two years under the care of a Park
Avenue psychiatrist named Herman Weiner, who seems to have encouraged
his patient to stand up to her overprotective mother.  Berenice was,
attempting to infantilize her, Frances decided.  She told Marc that
Granny had a neurotic need for "babies to smother," which could account
for

Berenice's intense dislike of the man.

Robert Reagan remembers Dr.  Weiner arriving in court to testify for

Frances, during the divorce proceedings, and Marilyn Reagan remembers
that at one point: Frances owed her psychiatrist $3,000.  "My
understanding was that her problem was inability facing reality,"
says

Marilyn.  The huge unpaid bill made her sister think it might be the
doctor who had this problem, not his patient.

That same year, in Utah, Robert Bradshaw died.  Frances later explained
to Marc that her brother had been "fed to death" by Berenice.  "Mom
said when he was in the hospital, Granny would feed him and feed him,
until finally he died because he was so fat," Marc remembers.  "It was
like a way of killing people, to smother them by giving them food."
Frances told her son she had acquired this insight from her
psychiatrist.  "Mom said it meant that Granny actually hated the
person.  And that Granny hated and despised all men, that she wanted
them killed.  And unconsciously, she was going to try to kill them!
That's one of the reasons Mom didn't want me out there in Salt Lake
later on, when I got older.  Because Granny would try to destroy me.
Because she was a man-hater."

The summer after Robert's death, Frances and her sons arrived in Salt

Lake City en route to establish residence in Sun Valley and, finally,
to obtain an Idaho divorce, simple in comparison to the tangles of New
York law.  Marco was left in Salt Lake with Berenice while Lorenzo went
to

Idaho with his mother.  By now the boys were six and seven, and both
mother and grandmother were prepared to acknowledge what Aunt Marilyn
does not: together the boys were simply impossible to handle.  It was
more than continual fighting, misbehaving, lack of normal control.
Neighbors and teachers say they did not know how to eat or care for
themselves, how to wash and dress.  They seemed completely wild.

That fall Marco entered first grade at St.  Hilda's and St.  Hugh's, a
fine private school near Columbia University run by an order of
Episcopal nuns.  The sisters soon learned from the driver of the school
bus, who had been told it by the elevator man, that six-year-old Marco
was often pushed onto the elevator still in his pajamas and
half-asleep, carrying his school clothes in his arms.  The elevator man
would dress the little boy on the way down, and later leave the pajamas
outside his mother's always locked door.  Another of the nuns noticed
that Marco was one of those children who arrived at school without
seeming to have had breakfast.  First graders like Marco were not
uncommon.  Many alcoholic or neglectful parents sent their children off
to school unwashed and unfed.

The nuns dealt with the situation pragmatically, quietly teaching the
child whatever simple elements of hygiene and nutrition he needed to
know.  But little Marco Gentile is a still-remembered special case. 
The sister who first showed him how to pour his cereal into a bowl, and
then put his own sugar and milk on top, and how to brush his teeth
afterward, got the impression that these were all techniques of which
the little boy was entirely ignorant.

In February 1968 Marco and Lorenzo were abducted from the family's
New

York apartment.  Who did it, and why, and whether the boys were indeed
"kidnapped" or "rescued" are still matters of family contention.

For once in her life-the only time anyone can remember Frances actually
had a paying job.  She was a clerk-typist at a mailing list brokerage
house, and one day she returned from work to find her apartment
empty.

Says Marilyn: "Mother decided to take the boys back to Utah without
telling Frances.  Frances came home, and Mother had left her a note.

Frances flew to Salt Lake City, rented a car, slapped Mother around,
broke some dishes, and repossessed the boys.  She sent the bill for all
of it to Dad."

Berenice admits it happened, but says Marilyn was the instigator.  "She
was the one that pressed me into doing it.  I called her the night
before, and she said, "You've got to do it.  You've got to take those
boys!"  She told me they were being neglected.  Of course, I didn't
live in New York, and I didn't know what was going on like she did.

"Frances gave me a real good cuff.  We had a lot of rough days back
then.

After her divorce, in between husbands, Frances wasn't totally
responsible.  Runnin' around in circles like a mad person.  Not down to
earth.  Things weren't goin' right ... "But Marilyn thought that family
should be put out in the street!  She was very, very opposed to any
support from me.  Kept at me constantly about it.  It wouldn't have
bothered Marilyn one bit ... in fact, she wanted to see that family put
out.  Kept telling me Frances would have to get worse before she could
get better.  Wanted Frances put in a hospital.

Course, I couldn't picture such a thing, so I would struggle all that
much harder to keep them afloat ... Frances's case is very difficult to
understand.  At times she seems so normal.  At other times she sorta
goes off the deep end."

Marilyn says it was only later that Berenice started blaming her eldest
daughter for masterminding the abduction, "only after Frances told
Mother she would never forgive her."

But Marc, who was seven, remembers something quite different.  "I'll
never forget it.  It was in the middle of the morning.  Mom had gone
off to work.

Me and Larry were just kinda wandering around the house, bored ...
and

Aunt Marilyn suddenly showed up at the door.  "Come on, kids!  How'd
you like to go to Salt La keT she said.

"I said, "You sure it's okay with Mom?"

"Marilyn said, "Sure.  It could be just for the weekend ... pack some
toys and an overnight bag, and come on, boys, let's go!"

"I remember it was a Friday, and like night when we arrived.  We hadn't
been there for so long, it was like an exciting adventure for us. 
And

Granny making the oatmeal cookies, and those good orange cakes!  We got
tucked up good in the downstairs bedroom.  Next day we did puzzles
around the house.  Granny kept saying: We'll go home tomorrow," Marc
recalls.

"But secretly, I was getting kinda suspicious.  Because I knew Mom
would be angry if I wasn't in school.  I knew she really cared about
school.  By

Sunday night I was asking myself.  How come I haven't heard from Mom?

"Then, alluva sudden, I'll never forget-Mom burst through the door!
Widsl

Kids!"she yelled.  Granny tried to stop her.  They were still right at
the front door.  Mom like slapped her aside, hard, and I heard:
"Marco!

Lorenzo!  Come on!  We're goin' home!  Pack the stufP'

"And then Mom slammed Granny up against the wall china cabinet.  And
then

Mom hit her!  All the plates started to come crash-smashing down.  Mom
had ducked around Granny, then Granny came around again, and Mom shoved
her against the cabinet and the plates started breaking, and she was
really pounding her .  , ."

Frances shooed the boys into a rented car, all the time screaming and
cursing, "How dare you take my children!  How dare you kidnap my
kids!"

The scene ended with Berenice in tears and Frances pushing the children
out the door and shouting that her mother would never see her grandsons
again.

She told her children they'd been "kidnapped" because Granny was "sick
in the head" and "desperate for a child."  Granny said it was Marilyn's
fault for talking her into acting for her grandsons' sake.  Marilyn
says the boys were indeed neglected and abused, as she had reported to
the police, but that the "kidnapping" was strictly Berenice's idea.
Only afterward did she try to shift the blame to Marilyn, in hopes
Frances would relent from the terrible retribution she now decreed.

On the office stationery that symbolized her new economic
independence,

Frances composed an extremely high-toned letter accusing her mother of
taking the boys simply out of an irrational desire to have babies at
home again.  "In line with your continual statements that you had
nothing to live for or go home to apparently my children were in a
neurotic fashion supposed to fill some sort of void in your life."

How could Berenice imagine that Frances would have fought five years to
wrest her sons away from Vittorio only to permit them to be stolen by
an even worse enemy?  Then she begins to salt the wound.  Granny can
give the children only money and material possessions.  What they
crave-the love of their mother -is something only Frances can give.  To
arrive home from a hard day's work and find that her own mother "has
chosen to deceive, lie, cheat, and sneak around and commit ... the most
horrible crime that any mother could against her daughter" will have
dire consequences.

Normally Frances would have been willing to send the children home to
see their grandparents for vacations.  But that is all finished now.
Frances and sons will soon drop from sight forever.  Letters from home
will be torn up unopened, and "you will never be able to discover where
in the world we are."

No such luck.  The instant school was out, Frances shipped both boys
off for the summer to Salt Lake City, Before Lorenzo's arrival the
Bradshaws had received a carefully worded letter from the medical
director of a New

York City psychiatric clinic and school, a licensed state agency for
the care of the mentally ill.  Were the Bradshaws aware that their
grandson

Lorenzo was "a very seriously disturbed child whose sense of reality
and of personal identity is so precarious as to warrant the diagnosis
of psychosis"?  What, therefore, is the grandparents' position
regarding the child's overdue school fees?  The school has been unable
to collect even the cut-rate price Of $48o agreed upon with Frances for
the past year's care.  She claims Vittorio is responsible for the debt,
and he has left the country.  And what about next year The present
uncertainty about his future at the school is "bad for Lorenzo and bad
for his mother."

There are further problems.  "Since his mother works," Lorenzo needs to
come home to a warm, efficient housekeeper who will provide the child
with "the nurturance ... stability and support required at the end of
our school day."  Such care is quite expensive.

Franklin took the position that he was unwilling to send another dime
to

New York, especially when just the sort of "warm, nurturing,
supportive, efficient" people the doctor ordered were standing by in
Salt Lake City.  Eight-year-old Lorenzo arrived there in sorry shape. A
medical checkup showed him to be suffering from a strep infection,
early-stage protein deficiency, an iodine shortage, mild to moderate
anemia, bad teeth.  Medications and vitamins were begun.  A dentist
went to work on his five cavities; Marco had none.  A young Bradshaw
cousin was pressed into unpaid service to help Berenice care for the
unruly boys.  Mornings, Marco was sent to play school at the Jewish
Community Center.  Lorenzo was evaluated by the chief of child
psychiatry at the University of Utah Medical

School and found to have a high IQ but surprising deficiencies in
reading and writing.

In Franklin's view, the only thing wrong with his grandson was parental
neglect.  Lorenzo was over pushy under disciplined "He wants to do what
he enjoys, and that's it."  Gramps clearly enjoyed taking the boys in
hand.

Small boys seemed much easier to deal with than difficult daughters had
been.  Every evening he talked to them about the same subjects that
interested him rivers and mountains, history and geography, coins and
money and automobiles.  He brought them down to see his wonderful
warehouse.  He taught them to spell.

The day he tried to teach them the names of all the western states,
Idaho and Colorado and Utah and Nevada, Marco learned but Lorenzo
balked.  Gramps said if he didn't spend some time each day studying and
learning things, he would fall behind the other boys, and Lorenzo
snapped back, "I can spell things that Marco canT I can spell Grandpa
and Grandfather."

"Sure enough he could, and Marco couldn't," the delighted old man wrote
to

Frances.

She wrote that she was working hard, even bringing work home at night.
She had a new boyfriend, "a member of the international diplomatic
corps," she said, and she described a man who had the same background
and credentials as Richard Behrens's brother Robert.  In fact, the man
was a Dutch national who worked at a middle-level job in a firm of
international management consultants.  His name was Frederik
Schreuder.

In Utah, the children thrived.  Lorenzo joined the Cub Scouts and went
to

YMCA camp.  Granny arranged outings to amusement parks, and backyard
sleep-outs.  Neighborhood children were always around, and the brothers
had friends for the first time in their lives.  Cramps brought home
saws and scraps of lumber, and the kids built four tree houses in the
backyard.

Bere nice went so far as to order two tons of sand dumped into her
garage so they could have their own sandpile.  She lived in a happy
flurry of housekeeping, washing, cooking, and cleaning and set up a
basement playroom filled with toys.

"The boys spend a big part of their day in the sunshine and fresh
air.

Their bodies are brown as Indians.  They have gained in weight and I
feel sure they have grown an inch.  Our lovely back yard with its lawn,
shade and large tree is simply heaven to them," she wrote.

There were darker elements to the story.  The children were as wild as
ever.

Sometimes they spent all day banging nails into the roof They tracked
the sand all through the house and broke the glass door.  None of the
other neighborhood mothers ever invited them over to play.

They were secretly shoplifting.  "My first memory of the
warehouse-stealing auto parts!"  Marc recalls.  "Little, cute auto
parts.  Like ball bearings.  I loved ball bearings!  I think Larry
initiated the stealing, because he was older, and I tended to listen to
him when Mom wasn't around."

They hid the loot back at Gilmer Drive.  One day Larry was dragging
wagon loads of sand all over the neighborhood.  "He seemed to make
friends a lot quicker than I did.  I was scared, shy, and tended to
stay only by the house.  Larry started ordering me around, being bossy.
"I want you to take another load of sand down the street to my friend's
house," he said.

"I said, "No, Larry.  I'm tired of dragging sand."  " "If you don't do
it," he said, "I'm gonna tell Grandpa about the auto parts that you and
I stole."

"I said, "Well, you stole 'em too."

"Granny heard us fighting.  She didn't know what about, but she was mad
about the sand and said she was gonna have Grandpa punish us when he
got home.  So we hid under his bed.  When he got home, she told him
we'd been bad, and then Larry told Grandpa we'd stolen the auto parts.
I remember that it was the lightest little spanking I'd ever had!"

One afternoon Marco and Larry were returning from the park,
unaccompanied, when Marco was hit by a car.  "Blam!  It seemed like a
long time later when

I woke up, because it was dark and I was under a blanket and a whole
crowd of people were standing around.  Then they took me to the
hospital, put some kind of big bandage on.  The man that hit me was
there.  He was a friend of

Granny's, and he felt so sorry and sad.  And I remember Granny telling
me, "Never, never tell Mom about this!"  She knew Mom would get
extremely angry.

That was one of the contradictions.  Because Mom let me and Larry go
anyplace alone in New York City."

Schooltime was approaching.  Frances demanded $300 a month for a
housekeeper and school fees for Lorenzo.  The Bradshaws refused, saying
the boys were better off in Salt Lake, even though they did miss their
mother.  Frances claimed the psychiatrist said the children needed to
be with their own mother, not "two old folks in Utah."  But Franklin
held all the cards.  He suggested an "experiment": leave the boys in
Salt Lake at least until

Christmas, or until Frances could "legally prove" she had the means to
support them in New York.  A Solomon-like compromise was arrived at.
Lorenzo would remain with his grandparents, Marco would be shipped back
to New

York.

When he got off the plane, he saw a tall, slender, athletic looking man
standing beside his mother.  He had sparse, gray blond hair, a narrow
face, and thin lips, and he spoke English with a faint
"Swedish-sounding" accent.

While the man went to collect the luggage, Frances whispered, "Ooh, I
know you'll like Frederik!"  Marco did like him, especially liked
driving in

Freddie's new red Delta 88 Olds, and he thought his mother was very
gushy .  they were very much in love."

At the time Frances and Frederik met, he was employed by PA
International

Management Consultants, a sleek, glossy, worldwide outfit that
specializes in all sorts of advanced technologies and in finding the
people to run them.  It maintains sixty-odd offices around the globe
from Aberdeen,

Scotland, to Wellington, New Zealand, with main headquarters in
Princeton and London.

Freddie worked in PA's Park Avenue office and lived in a small flat
in

Flushing, Queens.  Every weekend he drove to the Queens flat of his
ex-wife,

Gloria, to pick up their small son, Fritje, for his regular,
court-ordered visitation.  Even after Freddie moved in with Frances and
Marc at 85 East

End Avenue, in Manhattan, he continued faithfully to pick up Fritje,
and he often took Marco along for the ride.

Fritje was a couple of years younger than Marco, a well-behaved
little

European kid in short pants, and Marco liked him a lot.  "That's where
I first saw those big, violent scenes," Marc recalls.  "Freddie would
drive me out to collect Fritje, and I

waited downstairs in the lobby while he went up.  I always heard
yelling, screaming.  It happened five or six times.  Once I actually
saw her come racing down the stairs, her and Freddie still screaming.
But after we moved to Europe, I never saw her or Fri1je again."

One Saturday morning in February 1969 Marco and Freddie drove out in
the big red car to pick up Fritje as usual, and on the drive back
Freddie told the boys that he and Frances were getting married that
afternoon.  The wedding took place at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth
Avenue, and the only people there whom Marco knew were the Reagans, and
Fritje.  The other guests were Freddie's friends.  Berenice had
remained in Salt Lake looking after Lorenzo, who was now a happy,
normal-seeming third grader in public school, his grandmother says.
Marco, however, believed his brother was back in the state school for
"sick-in-the head boys, the place he, too, would be sent if he
misbehaved.

Frances told her family that Freddie was about to be transferred
overseas, and she was delighted with the prospect of a glamorous new
life in Europe.

But then Gloria refused to surrender Fritje.  When Frederik insisted on
remaining in New York to continue the custody battle, he lost out on
his promised new job.  Frances was bitterly disappointed.  That spring
she was twice hospitalized by her physician, Benson Shalette, M.D." 
and Frederik later dated her Seconal addiction from this time.  In
Utah, Lorenzo broke his leg skiing, and a doctor refused to treat the
boy without prior parental consent.  When Berenice telephoned, Frances
at first refused her permission.  Granny was "just trying to usurp" the
mother role, she charged.

School ended, Lorenzo returned to New York, and the Schreuders rented a
summer house on Fire Island.  Unemployed, Frederik spent a miserable
summer fighting both with his ex-wife and his present one, and trying
with little success to discipline his rowdy new stepsons.  Alone, each
boy was difficult; together they were unmanageable.  They fought
continually, though today both young men say they were merely
roughhousing.  Frances was again worried that Lorenzo might kill his
younger brother.  She had seen him try it several times, she said--once
by drowning, once by pushing his head through a pane of glass, once by
dropping him off a window ]edge, once by shoving him in front of a
subway train.

Both Larry and Marc deny the stories.  "That's Mom's para noia," Marc
scoffs.  "And Mom's hype.  Bullshit!  Poor Granny believes everything
Mom says, and half of what Mom says is exaggerations, and the other
half is a bunch of lies.  Like that time me and Larry were playing in
the ocean.  I remember it.  Pure horseplay.  But Mom interpreted it as
sick Larry, disease-brained Larryl Trying to strangle me, trying to
drown me.  We were both horse playing in the ocean!  I had no fear of
drowning.  I couldn't imagine why Mom was so angry.  And so convinced! 
She started to scream at us: Get out of the waterl Larry!  Get out! 
Don't you touch Marc!

"And that time he tried to throw me through the window that was because
he was very angry.  Larry's like Papa [Vittorio].  He's got a big
temper, and sometimes it explodes.  You don't see Larry angry often,
but when you do--watch out!"

In fall 1969 Frances took a three-week trip with Freddie to Belgium and
the Netherlands, ostensibly to look for housing once a PA job abroad
opened up.  Berenice had come East to look after Marco.  Lorenzo now
lived with the Reagans, and nightly vanquished Uncle Bob at the
difficult war game Stratego.  He had learned so much in Utah that St.
Hilda's and St.

Hugh's put him a class ahead of Marco.  Berenice told Marilyn that
Frances intended to dump Larry on the Reagans permanently when she
moved overseas.  The Reagans would not have minded, they say now.  They
felt sorry for the boy and liked having him around.

Separated in two households, the boys managed to make trouble in
both.

When Granny attempted to limit Marco's TV watching, the eight-year-old
went after her with a butcher knife.  Larry had taken to dropping on
all fours and barking like a dog.  At school, Marc imitated him, and
the barking mania swiftly spread among the other third and fourth
graders.

The Reagans tried to discipline Larry at home.  The boy complained to
the nuns that his Uncle Bob was beating him.  Was he?

Reagan comes from a family of educators and champions of children's
rights.  Marilyn today says she thinks the trouble was that

Bob was hitting Lorenzo without the child really understanding what his
Uncle Bob wanted from him.

Berenice wrote to Frances that the school was threatening to expel one
or both of her sons.  Frances rushed back from Europe, and--determined
not to be late to an appointment at school- to discuss Lorenzo's
problems-she smashed up her car, lost her wallet, and commenced what
became aday-long altercation with the crew of the moving van she had
hit.  For now she hurried on to school, where the nuns told her Lorenzo
had tried to gouge out one child's eyes with scissors, and was asking
little girls to take down their panties and show him their private
parts.

From school, Frances returned to the accident scene, resumed her
high-pitched battle, and called the cops.  They hauled everybody in to
the police station, where Frances called her lawyer.  The moving men,
now into triple overtime, were beginning to enjoy themselves.  It was
evening, and a third shift of police had come on duty by the time the
cops were able to escort the enraged woman home.  The escorting
officers then and there urged Berenice to sign commitment papers which
they had brought with them, so her daughter could be placed in a mental
hospital for observation.  Berenice acknowledged that her daughter
appeared to be "off her rocker," but as soon as Berenice agreed to
sign, Frances calmed down and the cops left.

Marco's mother had returned from Europe with wads of cash that she
carried around in her purse-a lifelong habit whenever she was flush-and
soon little Marco was helping himself to small amounts, tens and
twenties.  Thus his little life of crime, begun at age seven by
stealing ball bearings from Gramps' warehouse, marched on.

On October 31 Berenice spent her forty-fifth wedding anniversary alone
with her grandson, boggled by the systematic way in which the
eight-year-old hit every single apartment in his large building for a

Halloween handout.

One day in December Frances suddenly yanked nine-year-old Lorenzo out
of school and, that very day, shipped him alone on a plane to Holland,
where, after a six-hour airport wait, Frederik arrived to collect the
little boy.  Outrageous child abuse by her brother-in-law had forced
her to act in this precipitate manner, she said.

Frances was able to leave New York City only with Marilyn's help.  The
first time the moving and storage men-not, alas, the same crew-arrived
at her apartment, Frances was asleep and no one was able to awaken
her.

She asked Marilyn to supervise the next attempt, after her own
departure.

When Marilyn arrived, she discovered Frances had also employed an
elderly private detective to supervise everybody else.

Before she left New York, Frances sent her father a docile letter
assuring him of her intentions to repay some new loans he had made to
carry her and Frederik through the period of his unemployment.

Frances's last act before leaving the United States was to obtain a
court order changing her sons' names.  With a stroke of the pen,
Lorenzo and

Marco Gentile legally ceased to exist.  The two little blue-eyed boys
who arrived in Holland dressed in the drafty European-style short pants
insisted on by Frederik were now known as Lawrence and Marc
Schreuder.

By January ig7o the Schreuders and Marc were shivering together in

Frederik's unheated cottage on the shore of the North Sea.  Larry had
been placed in the International School at Vilstem, the Quaker-run
Dutch boarding school where he would complete fourth grade, and fifth
and sixth.  Marc moved with Frances and Frederik to a tiny apartment in
The

Hague, enrolled in the new English private school there, and was soon
top boy in his class.

Franklin Bradshaw was now sixty-eight years old and enormously though
murkily rich.  If he were to die intestate, the government would take
most of it, and Berenice for some time had been attempting without
success to persuade her husband to make a will.  She thought he was
probably too cheap to lay out the legal fees.  But this spring she
found a way.  She was planning to go on a Mormon-sponsored Far East
tour with her sister-inlaw

Bertha Beck.  They would visit the Osaka World's Fair, then see the
sights of Japan, Thailand, Singapore.  Franklin was happy to pay his
wife's way.

Reluctant to undertake so vast a journey without first setting her
affairs in order, Berenice called on an outstanding estate lawyer,
David

Salisbury, and said she wanted to make out her will.  When the document
was ready, she invited Franklin to witness her signature.  Together
they visited Salisbury's sumptuous tower offices, situated so that
occupants sit eye to-eye with the gold-leafed Angel Moroni himself.
David Salisbury is an uncommonly shrewd and persuasive man and, as his
elegant office walls attest, a Stanford University Law School classmate
of Supreme Court

Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.  By the time the

Bradshaws were ready to go home, Franklin had consented to have the
same lawyer work out a will for himself.  "I tricked him!"  says
Berenice,

Lawyer Salisbury's major concern in the spring Of 1970 was to minimize
taxes on the huge estate.  The best way to do this was to leave the
broadest possible discretionary powers to Franklin's widow.

Accordingly, the will Salisbury drafted set up two trusts, a marital
trust and a family trust.  Individual trusts were also set up for each
grandchild.  The F & B Corporation, a limited partnership with Franklin
and

Berenice as general partners, and their daughters and grandchildren as
limited partners, was set up to enable the grandparents to funnel as
much money as possible away from the IRS while they were still alive.

Under F & B, each of Franklin's daughters received income from three
irrevocable trusts.  Two of these trusts were so-called income
accumulators, with the expiration date of Trust B set ten years later
than the expiration date of Trust A. Trust C paid income only; the
principal was untouchable.  Each minor grandchild was in on Trust A and
could cash out at age twenty-one if he or she wished, And receive about
$50,000, providing that Berenice Bradshaw approved.

Frank Bradshaw signed his will April 13, 1970.  May 12 was Berenice's
sixty-seventh birthday, and she spent the day alone on Waikiki Beach.
By

June, F & B Corporation had made its first distribution: 400 shares
of

Mountain Fuel to each of the limited partners.  Mountain Fuel is a
utility company that invests in oil leases; some years earlier in a
stock swap it had bought out Franklin's Wasatch Chemical.  Mountain
Fuel was then trading for about $37 a share.  Franklin Bradshaw elected
to distribute the dividends to his daughters and grandchildren but
retain the stock certificates.  He cached these along with everything
else in the big warehouse.

Now that her children had trust funds, Frances could use the income to
pay for school, camp, and other expenses.  Eventually she would find
ways to loot the trusts themselves.  For now, summer was approaching,
and the most pressing problem was the old one of how to keep her two
boys apart.

Berenice had proposed that Larry come back to Salt Lake.  Frances at
first accepted, then decided a camp in Europe was preferable.
Berenice's invitation would only result in a long ocean voyage and
grand tour of Europe for Granny and the boy, and an inevitable descent
on the Schreuders.

Frances found good camps in Switzerland and Den-' mark and worked out
plans to have one boy away at camp while the other was home.  Larry had
become so attached to Freddie, she told her father, that he refused to
share his stepfather with Marc.  So the children had to be alternated.
And either boy got to feeling abandoned if he was sent away for more
than a few weeks at a time.

Frances offered to send her father photocopies of the high-pressure,
secret communiques she had been receiving from Berenice, and she urged
that her own letters be destroyed.  "Mother has for many years gone to
the warehouse and found your hiding places and read your personal mail
and then spread it around the family," she wrote.

When Berenice's father had died in 1956, he left her a bit of money,
which she had invested in stock held in the joint names of herself and
her eldest daughter.  They had shared the dividends until Marilyn
realized that her mother was selling off the principal to raise more
money for Frances.  It was time to claim her share of the inheritance
before Frances got it all.

She found a modest co-op apartment on West End Avenue in the Eighties
that could be bought for $24,000, and asked her mother for most of the
financing-$2.o,000.  Today the Reagans still live in the same building,
though not the same apartment.  After the murder, and the unexpected
money that resulted, they moved up to a higher floor.

When summer came, Larry was sent alone to camp in Denmark, and Marc
moved with the Schreuders to Belgium.  Frederik had finally obtained a
good job as international marketing director for Europe for PA
International.  His title was larger than his salary, however, and soon
he was writing to his father-in-law, whom he had never met, listing a
catalog of debts and mentioning that winter was coming on and there was
no money for warm clothes for the children.  In his smarmy report on
the grandsons, he wrote that "Marc too wants much attention,
warm-hearted boy that he is ..."  while "... Larry is a more difficult
boy ... still torn by his chilhood [sic] experiences and the things
done to him."

Larry's chief problem, Frederik wrote, is "that he cannot stand the
presence of Marc.  I love the boy, he knows it and thrives on it
because he too needs a daddy, yet he will sometimes try to hurt me just
out of sheer rebelliousness."  Franklin responded generously.  He
offered to continue paying his grandsons' private school, camp, and
medical bills, which came to several thousand dollars annually.  He
mailed Frances's choice Mountain

Fuel stock certificates to Belgium and told her he thought the stock
would double in value in the next three to five years, and she would be
very foolish to sell.  "But you can get a bank loan on it for $ii,000
in any country in the world."

Frances's second marriage was proving no less turbulent than her first
and followed the same pattern: a gradual crescendo of domestic discord,
interrupted by bouts of physical and mental collapse.  Frances's
illnesses were never minor, her fights with Freddie never mild.  In
Marc's memory, all the crazy scenes of malady and mayhem have gelled
into frenzied, frozen comic book panels, scratched in white on black.
He even makes comic book noises as he recalls them.  "Okay, first the
Hong Kong flu.  Mom was really sick.  Two weeks at death's door.  She'd
cough and cough.  ARRGHl

ARRGH!  She wasn't supposed to smoke, but she did, and big gobs of goo
came out.  One time she was coughing so hard this little bony thing
came out ... "Then something went wrong with her bladder line.  She'd
crawled out of bed dragging the blanket and she'd groan and pass out
and sleep in the middle of the floor.  I didn't know what to do."  The
next scene is a

Brussels hospital.  Marc arrives daily, does all his homework at
bedside, plays Stratego.  "One day I got there and saw tubes coming
out.  URK URK.

She'd had the surgery and was all doped up.  She wanted spaghetti to
go.

I went right out and got it-BLAM!  And when I came back, Mom was out
cold.

I thought: Damn!  I felt really hurt, you know?  That I'd brought it,
and she didn't even appreciate it."

Then "we were in some big old train station and Mom was late, of
course, and the train was pulling out.  The doors closed on Mom, right
on her surgery!  WHAP!  She was really screaming.  The conductor had to
pry her out."

A second kidney operation became necessary and "me and Mom flew to

London.  DRZZH!  DRZZH!  Very fine hotel.  Little old ladies fixing tea
sandwiches.  Mom was in the hospital two weeks."  Once more Berenice
came rushing to the rescue; again wallets disappeared, tickets and
passports were lost, cars smashed.  There were new sudden illnesses,
new appeals to

Franklin for emergency funds, more pleas from Berenice: "Her life is at
stake."  There was more trouble with Larry, more family fights,
frenzies, recriminations,confusions, accusations.  The parents were
still oversleeping and failing to get the boys off to school.  Only
husbands and scenery had changed.  Otherwise, the whole circus had just
moved abroad.  Soon what Marc calls "the beat-up scenes" began:
"Freddie would smack Mom around, Mom would lock Freddie out.  Then
Freddie reversed it!  Pulled a double switch and locked Mom out!"
Sometimes the "beat-up scene" staffed just Freddie and Marc.  The first
of these had occurred the summer after the wedding while the new little
family was living in an exclusive Fire Island beach colony.  Freddie
discovered his new stepson playing with matches under the living room
couch and accused him of deliberately setting fire to the rug.  "He
really beat me up.  I felt bruised all over.  To this day I say I'm
innocent.  But nobody would listen to me .. Then, after the beating,
I'd usually get locked in my room six hours or so.  I can't remember
.."

They were in Brussels, in a more elegant flat at 505 Avenue Louise,
when his stepfather caught ten-year-old Marc smoking his first
cigarette.

"Freddie just beat me all over.  Just ... damn ... he beat me
everywhere.  With those hard hands he has, he just kept on going and
going and going.  And I had to write "I will never smoke again' a
hundred times, even though Freddie himself smoked at least as much as
Mom.

"Another time Mom and me were by my bed, on Avenue Louise, and Mom was
talking to me in a really nasty way.  We'd just come back from meeting
all

Freddie's relatives at his mother's funeral, in Holland, and Mom was
whispering, Nobody liked youl Freddie caught her doing it ... and she
got real scared.  Then he started smacking her around, pushed her back
on the couch.  Started giving her little punches-DZHHH!  DZHHH1 DZHHH!
Like chewing her out, you know?  I felt sorry for Mom.  I really
did."

Frances describes such scenes quite differently.  She says Freddie
would come into the room, glance over at the boy, and ask Marc, "Should
1, or shouldn't IT' She says her husband invited her son to decide
whether or.  not she was to be beaten that day.  To punish or not to
punish was Marc's whim, she claims, and Freddie merely the
instrument.

Marc's descriptions of Mom's fights with Freddie have the same jagged,
zany comic-book quality.  He has given them titles: "The Lockout!" 
"The Double

Lockout!"  "The Beat-up Scenes!"  As Marc talks in his odd, infantile,
disjointed manner, it becomes apparent that his melodramatic stories
of

Mom's misadventures are recollected through Frances's self-pitying
eyes, not his own, and that it is all part of a script learned a long
time ago.

Quite possibly they never actually happened, or happened differently.

No matter.  By now they have become part of the ongoing Little Nell
melodrama of Mom's life, as she shared it daily, freely, and entirely
with her frightened, half-crazed sons.  The question is: Who really
wrote the script?

Was it Mom or was it Marc?  It is hard to imagine that he really "felt
sorry" for Mom, or felt much of anything, beyond his terror of
abandonment.  His feelings have congealed at a very infantile level.
The patchy amnesia-if that is what it is-keeps him from remembering
more than fragments of scenes, reflections in a broken mirror.  A
scream, an oath, a burned pork chop thrown, a door slammed, the tinkle
of breaking glass.

The Schreuders slugged it out through four furious summers in expensive
rented beach houses at Fire Island, four freezing winters abroad, and
innumerable trial separations and reconciliations.  Freddie blamed his
wife's erratic behavior on Seconal addiction, a drug that he said Dr.

Shalette, her New York physician, had told Schreuder was necessary in
order for Frances to "maintain her mental balance."

Often Frances Schreuder did seem truly unaware.  During one of her
Fire

Island summers she invited Dickie Behrens and two women friends to come
out for a day at the beach.  The trip to Fair Harbor involves a
three-hour car drive, an hour-long boat ride.  The visitors arrived hot
and famished.  The hostess seemed not to notice.  She offered them
nothing to eat or drink-not out of stinginess, her visitors thought, or
even lack of hospitality.  She was simply "out of it."  Two other
things stayed in the visitors' minds.  both women remarked that
bikini-clad Frances projected "tremendous sexiness, the real
high-voltage stuff" despite what would seem the handicap of being
entirely flat-chested.  The other thing they remember is that, all the
long afternoon, the hostess and Behrens exclusively, compulsively
discussed only one subject.  They each kept talking about their
"inheritance," and how they were going to get their hands on it.  Said
one:

"I couldn't understand why they kept saying inheritance?  Didn't they
really mean trust funds?"

After the Schreuders' third summer at the beach, Freddie brought the
boys back to Europe and Frances spent a month in Salt Lake.  While she
was still there, Franklin Bradshaw received a letter from his
son-in-law asking for still more money for the children's care.
Franklin wrote back with a counteroffer: he would take Marc, but not
Larry, off their hands for a year, "if that will force Frances to go to
work."  He also demanded an accounting of the $3,000 Berenice had
advanced Frances to cover her medical bills.

When the Schreuders came back from Europe the following summer, Larry
was still kept at cautious arm's length.  The marital fights were worse
than ever.  Frederik had taken to locking Frances out of the house
overnight, and sometimes locking Marc out as well.  This year, when it
was time for school to begin, a significant change occurred.  Frederik
returned to Europe, taking only Larry with him, and Frances and Marc
checked into a suite at the Plaza Hotel.  The Schreuders had begun to
split up.  From now on, Frances would turn more and more to Marc, and
rely on him as "the man of the family."  She began calling him her
"Strong Professor."  He was not quite twelve years old.

For a couple of months, Marc lived like a male Eloise.  He felt like
the only child of a huge, adoring family.  "Room service all the time,
and I knew all the pages and bellboys.  Pepe was my special friend,
he'd always say, "Oh, hello, Marc!  "It was just so fun there.  Knowing
everybody.  The people at the

Oak Bar, the coffee shops.  They all knew me, and I wondered why.  I
guess people all know you, if you live at the Plaza."

The day that Marc was accepted to begin sixth grade at Allen
Stevenson

School, Frances was truly overjoyed.  Dickie Behrens had advised her
that this Waspish, socially faultless one-hundred year-old academy full
of proper, blue-blaze red boys was the right place for Marc, and had
helped her fill out the forms.  "Mom was fanatic about wanting the best
for her children, especially schools.  She detested public schools,
which she said were filled with 'niggers and Jews and dirty
whiteirash."  Mom emphatically told me, on myriad occasions, that
public schools were bedlams where violence, disrespect, and any number
of foul things occurred.  Only at the best private schools could her
children get the best education, and later attend the most prestigious
private colleges."

Frances Schreuder was not a demonstrative mother.  But the day her son
was notified that he had been admitted to Allen Stevenson was one of
only three times in his life that Marc remembers his mother actually
hugging and kissing him.  These three moments of tenderness punctuate
his account of his hobgoblin boyhood like three kisses from an evil
queen.

Soon after school opened, mother and son moved from the Plaza Hotel
back to an apartment in their old neighborhood, this one at 75 East
End

Avenue.  Marc was proud to help with the moving.  "Mom said I was 'man
of the family."  She began confiding everything to me.  She'd start by
helping me with my homework ... and, well, she'd just tell me
everything that was going on.  I remember one time she was missing some
document, and she screamed to me hours and hours about this piece of
paper.  She never did that to me before.  Anything that was wrong, I
was blamed.  I was supposed to be a man.  Yet it seemed like I couldn't
do anything right.  It was very mixed up."

In this same stormy period, Frances Schreuder's longtime psychiatrist
moved away to Canada.  She turned to her twelve-year old son as a
stand-in.

Marc says, "She was always telling me how helpless she was in New York,
how people constantly were trying to take advantage of her.  So she
needed her "Strong Professor' always around with her.  Me.  Apparently
I was trying to fill her shrink's shoes, as well as Freddie's."

This was also the time that Marc began to sleep in his mother's bed.

"Freddie was gone, see.  It started that I was always doing my homework
in her bedroom.  She always wanted to monitor my homework, and soon I
just was living in there.  I didn't like to go to my room."  Soon Marc
was doing his homework in his mother's bed, then falling asleep there.
"People make sexual connotations out of it, but there was nothing!  She
would sleep on one side.  I would sleep on the other.  I was just ...
very lonely.  And

Mom practically wanted ... I mean she didn't really care.  She wanted
the comfort of having another person.  Like nearby.  Rather than me
being .  And Mom was ... She was all I had, at that point.  Larry was
away in Europe.  With Freddie.  And ... DRZSHHHH."

Marc says 1972 was also the year his mother started beating him up
regularly, thrashing him with the buckle end of a leather belt whenever
his school grades failed to meet her inflated expectations.  "Mom beat
me worse than Freddie ever did," he says, adding that his scalp is
crosshatched with scars.  Four years later, Marc Schreuder was
graduated from Allen-Stevenson School with top honors in his class.

Marc says he was also beaten for "acting like sick Larry ... or even
playing with sick Larry.  I was supposed not to go near him when he was
home.  Period.  That's when I really learned to obey Mom.  WHOOSH!" For
a moment he must stop talking.  He is breathing too heavily.  Is it the
memory of being beaten which is so upsetting, or of sleeping with his
mother, or of being forced to act like a man yet berated for being only
a kid?  Are his stories even true?  The breathlessness is genuine. But
is it caused by the stress of lying or the stress of truth?

No way to know.  How can one even be sure about the marks under his
hair?

Marc later on acquired a girlfriend who says his scalp is indeed a
network of raised scars.  But Frances says that the little boy was
savagely beaten by Vittorio, and by Freddie.  Marc was also struck in
the head by a car, and his head was pushed through a pane of glass by
his brother.  Berenice says she saw this.  Marc says it never
happened.

Marilyn says that one day

Frances called her and told her she was keeping Marc home from school
because he had had his first wet dream.  Whom and what does one believe
in this family?

In prison, Marc has taken many college psychology courses and belongs
to several psychotherapy groups.  He often ponders the nature of his
mother's illness.  Sometimes he thinks that her paranoia, her rages,
stupors, and other erratic behaviors and violent mood swings are
evidence of manic-depressive psychosis, also called bipolar mood
syndrome.  It would please him if that were the correct diagnosis,
since "that's what so many great artists have had."  It is comforting
to think of his mother in the same category as Van Gogh and Virginia
Woolf, Handel and Berlioz, not to mention Byron, Shelley, Coleridge,
Blake, Poe, Lowell, Balzac, Hemingway,

Ruskin, Goethe, and Schumann.  But if his mother was manic-depressive
all these years, he wonders why none of her many psychiatrists treated
her for this disorder.  His abnormal psychology text books say that
lithium carbonate has revolutionized treatment of this form of mental
illness.

One reason may be that his mother was never sick enough long enough.
And when the real pressure was turned on, she was always able to calm
down and behave in a rational manner.  A brilliant intellect helped
her.  So did money.  With endless money, it is not difficult to elude
the punishment society awards to ordinary sinners, nor for abused
children also to miss out on the protection and care it offers ordinary
victims.

It is hard for Marc even to think of himself as an abused child, let
alone to discuss it.  Larry finds it impossible.  Of his childhood he
says only, "It was all right.  It was okay."

Marc is quick to say he feels he "did not suffer as much as Larry.

Physically, anyway.  Maybe emotionally I suffered more.  I don't know.
I think emotionally I had a lot of abuse.  Ninety percent of my abuse
is emotional.  I couldn't say no to Mom.  It was just very difficult
for me to do.

"She was always threatening me with some kind of emotional ...
blackmail.

If I was good, she'd hold out the carrot.  She'd love me.  I was always
trying to get her to love me.  And she was very effective in turning
the cold shoulder.  If you did anything she didn't like, or that was
even socially improper, according to her ethical standards-she would
cut off the love.  And as I became older, it seems like this became
more unbearable, not less."

Locking Marc out was especially effective.  She did it over and over;
the technique always worked.  She never permitted either son, or anyone
else, to have a key to the apartment.  Only she was doorkeeper, and she
maintained absolute control.  "Just to- be out in the cold was
basically saying to me:

I hate you.  I don't love you.  It seems like, throughout my childhood,
I was always trying to get her to love me, trying to be super good do
everything super perfect And it seemed like I could never quite do
everything the way she wanted me to.  It just never came out right."

When Freddie and Larry came home that Christmas, in 1972, Frances and
Marc fled to Salt Lake.  It would be Marc's last visit to "the Lake"
for five years.  Later his Mom would tell him she did not want him
spending too much time around "sick Granny," he says.  He remembers
laboring over a history paper on the Wright Brothers over the holidays,
and Granny driving him to the public library for research.  He does not
remember confiding his unhappiness with his mother to a diary, nor
describing there the beatings with the belt buckle.  In 1977, when he
was raiding Granny's files, he was astonished to discover copies of his
old diary pages hidden among her papers.

When Marc and his mother returned to New York after Christmas, Freddie
was at home, Larry back at the Reagans'.  On New Year's Eve, after a
fight with her husband, Frances turned up at the Emergency Room of
Lenox Hill Hospital "irrational and incoherent."  She was treated with
Thorazine and kept overnight for observation.

Frances Schreuder was discharged from the, hospital on New Year's Day
1973 exhausted, ill, and six months pregnant.  Frederik was not around,
and

Berenice was off on another of her tours,

this one to Tahiti, Fiji, and New Zealand.  Marc looked after his
mother as best he could.  Her morning sickness was so severe, he
remembers, that her bed was often surrounded with "little pools of
vomit."  When Frances awakened, she would pick her way through the mess
to the bathroom.  Marc's job was to clean it up.

One afternoon she was in bed as usual when the doorbell rang.  Marc
unlocked the triple-locked front door.  "And BLAM!  He walked in!  My
first thought was: A midget Henry Kissinger!  What's he doing at my
door?  Then he said-Marco!  and I knew right away ... Oh my gosh,
here's Papa!"

The little man warmly kissed and embraced his son.  Marc could scarcely
believe it.  Ten years had passed since he had seen or heard from his
father.  Vittorio was in fact remarried, with three children, but his
new family still lived in Italy, he said, and he was on a business trip
to the

United States.

During the six weeks he stayed in Frances's flat, Vittorio did the
shopping, cooked the meals, and tenderly looked after his ex wife and
son.

As soon as Frances felt able to get out of bed, she went to Tiffany's
and ordered three hundred expensive, engraved birth announcements for
the new baby.  She bought several thousand dollars' worth of deluxe
nursery equipment and expensive handmade baby clothes.  Then it was
time for

Vittorio to go home, and she lapsed into another despair.

One night Marc was awakened by thumping sounds.  He found his mother in
the living room, surrounded by tissue paper and ribbons.  The floor was
heaped with boxes of baby presents, dolls, and other bits of the
expensive layette, and Frances was bringing more items from her bedroom
closets into the living room.

"Mom was acting very strange.  There was a thick slur in her voice and
she said, "That's right, Marc.  I'm drunk ... and I don't wanna live"

I'd never seen her drunk before.  I had seen her slurred like that,
talking in a thick, old voice from her Valiums or whatever she was
taking to sleep with, to calm her down.  But this time she kept saying
"I'm drunk!"  and carting dolls and baby carriages and stuff back and
forth.  It was like:

Ariadne hadn't even been born yet-and Mom was preparing for her
birthday party already!"

Then Marc's mom began "acting really nutty.  She started crying and
hitting herself in the stomach with a large box-wham!  WHAM!"

"Stop, Mom!"  Marc yelled, grabbing the box away.  It contained pieces
of a collapsible crib or baby carriage.  Frances cried harder, and Marc
felt she was furious with him.  He could not understand.  This was the
second time he had had to stop his mother from hurting herself.  In
all, he remembers five suicide attempts by his mother.  Another time he
came home unexpectedly and found her crying loudly in the living room.
When he asked her what the matter was, she had shouted, "I want to
die!"  and leaped from the couch to the window of the seventeenth-floor
apartment.  She had flung up the sash and got her head out before Marc
grabbed her around the waist.  "I remember dragging her back and
shouting, "Mom!  Mom!  Please don't!""

Frances several times threatened to swallow pills.  Once Marc walked
into his mother's bedroom and found her in bed "acting very strange,
crying and sobbing."

"Mom, what's wrong?"

"It's your grandmother!  I don't want to live any longer!"

"Why, Mom?  What happened?"

"I just don't!"  she snarled, and again it felt to Marc as if he were
the person she was angry at.

"Alluva sudden-I don't know why-she just jumped up and started
screaming and ran into the bathroom saying, "I'm gonna kill myself
Marc!  "And she locked the door.

"I said, "Come on, Mom I Don't do that!  Please!  "God I was just
begging and crying and screaming---crying so hard!  A disaster was
about to take place, and she had the door locked and I couldn't get
in."

Marc pleaded for five minutes before his mother silently opened the
door.

"Something told me she hadn't really done it, hadn't taken anything. 
We sat in the bathroom and talked.  I kept trying to find out what was
the matter, because I knew Mom had gone through so much with her money
problems and all.  Each time it happened I talked with her afterwards
for hours, because

I was always afraid she was gonna make another attempt.  I didn't want
this on my conscience-no way!  And besides, the idea of living without
Mom was impossible."

The suicide gestures usually occurred in the daytime, Marc says, and
they always followed a conversation with Berenice.  "I think they
happened, especially the later ones, because Mom felt she was so
helpless.  Because she didn't have control.  Gramps had stopped sending
her money.  So she had to depend on Granny.  Granny had her under her

 R

pend on Granny for money.  Or anything.  Hated it!  Because that way,
according to Mom, Granny had control.  Granny could manipulate her. 
And Mom would describe how Granny so-called deliberately used her
power.

"Mom said Granny deliberately sent little chunks of money at a time, to
keep her always begging for more.  But the real reason Granny was doing
it-I understand now-was that Mom was such a spendthrift.  Granny was
fighting to space the money out, trying to hold back so Mom wouldn't
blow it all, and so Granny would still have something left to send
her.

So

Granny was really fighting to keep our family alive!  But it took me a
long time to get that figured out."

Frances Schreuder's third child was born April io, 1973, in Doctors

Hospital in New York City.  Frederik was in Europe.  Frances called her
parents and told them she had named her new baby Ariadne Tacy
Alexandra

Schreuder.  "Tacy" appears to have been an afterthought.  The name did
not appear on the engraved Tiffany baby cards.  When the package came,
says

Marilyn Reagan, Frances tossed them away.

Marilyn's visit to Doctors Hospital recalls the advent of the godmother
in The Sleeping Beauty.  She peered at the infant through the nursery
window, congratulated the mother, silently left a gift behind, and
returned to West End Avenue.  She never saw the child again.  Asked
why, she sniff is "I wasn't invited."

A few days later, Berenice arrived in town, breathless with
excitement.

She could not wait to hold in her arms her first and only
granddaughter, her very own "tiny baby doll."

The stakes in the family game had risen sharply.

 Part Three

The Boiling

UP

 BERENICE STAYED IN New York for two months after Ariadne's birth.
When she left, Frances took up a yellow legal pad and fired off two
letters that make her previous communiques to her parents seem
sentimental.  She told her father that her mother was incompetent,
senile, disobedient, mentally ill, and so desperate to have a baby to
care for that she had become an evil demon who "turns people into
babies ... She turned Bob Bradshaw into a helpless vegetable baby ...
She, Dad, and she alone put Bob into his grave ."

She scourged her mother for even daring to "discuss my daughter, whom
you fought to have killed with an abortion," and for causing Elaine's
broken heart.  Frances's penchant for grotesque exaggeration was most
apparent in her account of Marc's sprained ankle.  "You let your
grandson rot in pain and misery ... while you went berserk ...
wallowing in self pity ..."

Berenice was lucky, said Frances, that her grandson was even alive.

During the three tempestuous years of her divorce from Frederik,
Frances's separate furies seemed to fuse, her rage at husbands,
parents, sisters, and sons all boiling up into one caldron of wrath.
Frances had begun to spend much of her time in bed, fat, angry, or
depressed.  When she felt really low she sent Marc out for a quart of
ice cream, poured the syrup in, and ate it out of the container.  She
had no money.  Frederik sent nothing, and neither did Dad.  Without her
mother, she and the children would starve to death.

The poorer and more dependent she felt, the more she ate.  As she often
said, "You have to be rich to be able to diet."

The noise of the Schreuders' three-year marital breakup was like the
grinding of icebergs.  Having concluded during her first four-year
matrimonial war that Vittorio had found himself a lawyer even smarter
and nastier than her own, she had decided next time, Erdheim would be
working for her, not against her.  As life with Frederik began to
fray,

 R

sary.  By the time her second divorce finally was granted, in the
spring Of 1976, the ferocious Erdheim had surpassed even his own
professional standards, and the thoroughly trounced and vanquished
Frederik had seemingly disappeared from the planet.  Frances described
him as an even worse crook than Vittorio; she told people that U.S.
Immigration authorities had permanently barred him from ever entering
the country.  Later she embellished the story with a description of
Frederik's death in the much publicized airport runway collision on
March 27, 1977, of a Pan Am 747 with a KLM 747 in the Canary Islands.
Neither story is true.  Frederik Schreuder is alive and well,
remarried, and living in a far-off land.  But for a decade he has found
it preferable to give the United States a wide berth.

Frances launched her attack by charging that Frederik had deserted her
during her pregnancy and refused to contribute to the support or
medical expenses of mother and child.  He had returned from Europe at
Christmastime 1973, "without even a fifty-cent toy," and dropped a
sudden karate chop on

Frances's neck as she was holding her baby.  She accused him of twenty
more assaults, several requiring hospitalization, between then and the
following

February, when she finally obtained a temporary order of protection
from family court to keep him out of their home and away from her
children.

Frederik counter charged that his wife neglected her children and left
Marc to fend for himself in the afternoons, roaming the streets,
searching for food, sitting in stair-wells alone, or sheltering in
neighbors' apartments until she returned home and unlocked the door,
sometimes as late as midnight.  She forced her son to clean the
apartment while she lay in bed.

She kept him up until one o'clock in the morning "for company."  She
had failed to teach him proper personal hygiene or bathroom habits, and
he stank so badly that neighbors and elevator men complained.  She so
neglected

Marc and the baby that both children were marked with burns from
accidents with cigarettes and boiling water.  Doctors who had treated
the children were named in the complaint.  Neighbors had several times
called police to report cries and screams emanating from the
Schreuders' thin-walled apartment.  Dates were cited.  The baby often
was left alone, allowed to fall off the bed onto her head, and allowed
to put paper, glass, and nails into her mouth.  Frances frequently
attacked Marc "and on several occasions pounded the boy senseless."

Poor Frederik.  His flights of exaggeration would prove no match for
the combined talents of Erdheim and Frances.  She composed a
forty-seven-page answering affidavit accusing Frederik, among other
things, of being a "criminal psychopath" so sadistic and vicious she
was lucky to be alive.

She described him stamping on her surgical scars, flinging her about
the apartment, tossing her over the coffee table.  "My son Marc ...
stood in horror watching his mother being so savagely abused.  My
husband continued in the presence of my son to beat me with his fists
and smash my body around the apartment until he was exhausted.
Virtually my entire body from head to toe, both front and back, was
covered with welts, cuts and bruises."  She also accused Frederik of
child abuse, of stealing from his children, of sadomasochistic attacks
on his wife and others; of embezzling funds from his employers, of
income tax fraud, tranvestism, sexual perversion, international
espionage, and a perpetual flow of green-black pus from his penis.

Frederik wrote back that his wife had been crazy since the age of six,
and he gave the court the names of a dozen psychiatrists and
institutions in the United States and abroad who had treated Frances
over the years.  He filed flurries of counter charges about his wife's
longtime irrational and abusive behavior.  He asserted, for example,
that during their first summer in Europe, at the same time that Frances
was writing reasonable letters to her parents about summer camps, she
was also filing complaints with the

Dutch police that the FBI was tapping her phone.  She believed the FBI
suspected her of clandestine romantic meetings with a Polish secret
agent.

Her complaint caused The Hague police to recommend to Frederik that his
wife be put under psychiatric observation.

He said that one Sunday morning, while the family was still living at
the

Brussels Hilton and looking for permanent quarters, Frances was picked
up by the police wandering half-naked through the streets.  The
following month, he said, after they moved to their tiny
room-and-a-half apartment at 505 Avenue Louise, his wife had become
convinced that a TV camera advertising a photography shop across the
street was really a CIA spy camera trained on their apartment, and she
refused to come out the door.  He described a Saturday morning, after a
fight at home, when Frances followed him to his office and "went
berserk, severely damaging walls, doors & light fittings by smashing at
them with the heel of her shoe ... an incident hushed up by my
company.

Around that time her French physician Dr.  Antoine Germain and his
Swiss psychiatric consultant Dr.  Will Adler strongly recommended to
her that she place herself voluntarily under observation, but she
refused."

He described how Frances attacked him in his sleep.  He had called an
ambulance ... "whereupon the police, after consultation with her
doctors, forcibly committed her to the Brugmann Clinic, a mental
hospital managed by Dr.  Ovieska and Dr.  Fayersteyn.  Struck with pity
for her, I managed to override the authorities and obtained her release
in my care ."

Frances pooh-pooh ed it all.  Frederik was just up to his old tricks,
she said.  He had behaved the same way during his divorce from his
first wife, also accusing her of being a slut, a druggie, and an unfit
mother.

Frederik had made these charges in letters in Dutch to his long-dead
mother, in Holland.  Frances had somehow acquired the letters.  She
turned them over to the court, along with her own typewritten English
translations.

Nor was Frederik ever able to break the family court's order of
protection, which barred him from the apartment as a danger to Frances
and her children.  He was never given a chance to answer the charges.

Frances outwitted him through the simple device of obtaining five
postponements of the hearing on the matter over the next nine months.

When Frederik did get a court order allowing him to visit the apartment
to collect his clothes and personal possessions, Frances threw such a
tantrum, he said, that the cops accompanying him asked why he did not
have her committed.  But by then Frederik had lost all appetite for
battle.

In contrast, Frances was in fine fettle.  She now conjured up letters
to each of her parents from her current psychiatrist, Dr.  Maxwell
Brand.

Surely he was knowledgeable about her mental health.  Originally Dr.
Brand had been the court-assigned marriage counselor for the battling

Schreuders.  Dr.  Brand now wrote to the Bradshaws that in his
opinion

Frances was not crazy at all.  Indeed, he found her to be holding up
remarkably well in a period of great stress.

Once more Franklin Bradshaw sided with a son-in-law he had never met
against his own daughter.  Secretly he sent Frederik letters of support
criticizing Frances and Berenice.  He said he did not believe in
divorce, and that Frederik was unemployed only because his daughter had
caused him to lose his job.  Franklin accused Frances of "bleeding me
of my working Capital," forcing him to take out over $100,000 in bank
loans, and actually imperiling the survival of his business.  In short,
Franklin once again tried by every means he knew to "say no to
Frances."

Frances retaliated by filing suit against her father in Utah, accusing
him of refusing to turn over to his grandsons, and to her, certificates
for stocks and bonds that were in fact their property.  Franklin
countersued, charging his daughter with a long history of fiscal
irresponsibility and unfitness, and of looting her sons' assets for her
own personal use.  Franklin said that the bonds Frances was now
demanding that he surrender had been promised her not by him but by his
wife, and over his near-dead body.  As for her claim that he owed her
an additional $8,000 in Mountain Fuel stock, he contended once more
that this had always been intended as a loan to cover other bad
debts-not as a gift and had never been repaid.

Berenice jumped into the fray.  From New York she wrote her husband
that

Frederik was an even more abusive husband than Vittorio.  Her
daughter's first divorce was the first ever granted in New York State
on grounds of cruelty to children, Berenice believed.  "But that
Frederik-he broke her jaw!"

Her Dutch son-in-law also had once shoved Berenice bodily out of her
own

Zilrich hotel room.  She had heretofore kept quiet about such
disgraceful goings on, she said, not wishing to sow seeds of marital
discord.  Now she wrote out long lists of Frances's many serious
illnesses abroad-two kidney operations, major abdominal surgery, double
pneumonia, back trouble, bleeding ulcers, knee trouble, and severe
influenza.  She wrote to her son-in-law that he had been guilty of
gross medical neglect, and she was now "fighting for my daughter's
life."  If anything should happen to Frances, Berenice warned, the
Bradshaws would hold Freddie forever responsible and "point the finger
of shame."

The maddened Frederik, like a wounded bull, made a final lunge before
collapsing in the sand.  He sent the court a long, desperate letter
describing additional episodes on York Avenue of all-night screaming
and bottle throwing that resulted in thirteen year-old Marc being
locked out five hours "and in his emotional agony defecating in the
building's hallway."  This in turn had caused the building's management
to fire off a series of Mailgrams demanding immediate intervention in
the

 R

ter by the New York City police commissioner, the health commissioner,
the three different judges involved in the case, the Society for
Prevention of

Cruelty to Children, and the Bradshaws.  Relevant documents were
attached.

His plea concluded: "I think that these are facts you should know,
your

Honor: three young children are being abused and neglected by a mother
who is out of mental control but nobody apparently cares enough to
break through legal niceties to act for the protection and welfare of
these children."

Curiously, in view of the seriousness of his accusations, Frederik
failed to file any charges.  Possibly he feared re attracting the
attention of his first wife; possibly he was as given to hyperbole as
his second wife.  In any event, by the end of the year Frances had
obtained a paper from the New

York State Department of Social Services saying they had investigated
the child abuse charges against her and found them all to be unfounded.
Much later, when Marc had grown up, he would claim that he clearly
recollected being escorted down to the offices of the Society for
Prevention of Cruelty to Children by the society's investigator, Ralph
Manzi, and questioned about his home life.  "I'll never forget, because
Mr.  Manzi was the first time Mom told me to lie to any stranger."  She
had warned him that if he told Manzi the truth, "I could never live
with Mom again.  Well, forget that!  I really loved Mom!  I loved her
and I hated her.  It just seemed I couldn't live without her."

Before it ended, in sum, the Frances/ Freddie divorce war had been
turned into another vast Bradshaw family game-like the money game,
like

Stratego-in which every member of the family played.  And as the fight
ground on, each of the players kept raising the stakes and bluffing.
Nobody ever called the bluffs: that might have ended the game.  Instead
they just re raised and kept going.

The strain on the boys during this period must have been fearful, much
worse than the first divorce fight, which they had been too young to
understand.  They both seem to have rather liked Freddie, despite his
quick temper and European ways.  He had given their chaotic home life a
certain stability.  With him out of the picture, husband less
rudderless Frances turned more and more to Marc.  If Marc was no longer
his mother's bed mate, he was still kept busy as her chief confidant,
cook, errand boy, dish washer, doorkeeper, in-house shrink, all-star
prep school achiever, and one man suicide prevention squad.

Toward the end of the '72-'73 term, Larry's Dutch boarding school had
refused to keep him any longer without payment.  Freddie told them to
send the bill to the Bradshaws and brought the boy home permanently to
the

United States.  Frances, Marc, and the baby were again at Fire Island.
Larry stayed for two weeks, happily helping feed and change his adored
baby sister.  Then he was again exiled, this time to the New York
apartment.

Before he left, the brothers had started playing a new game,
"Stalingrad," which could go on for days.  "It was a war game," Larry
explains, "and you'd gain territory.  Whoever got more of Mom's
attention got more territory.

Once I wound up with one small island in the Pacific and Marc had the
whole world."

In the fall, Freddie drove Larry out to Eastern Military Academy, the

Dickensian, decrepit and now defunct boarding school in Huntington,
Long

Island, where he would be dumped for the next five years.  Larry coped
with his increasing ostracism from his family in several ways.  He
first became an obsessive penny collector.  In the summer Of 1973, left
alone in

Frances's apartment, he took to roaming the streets of the Upper East
Side and counted about fifty neighborhood banks.  Each day he visited
as many banks as possible, and in each bank he bought a thousand
pennies for ten dollars.  He sorted through them searching for rare
wheat backs pennies minted before 1959, then returned the discards for
bills and change, and moved on to the next bank.  In three years,
working mostly summers and school vacations, he had netted some six
thousand wheat backs valued at perhaps $200.  By that time he was into
his third year of residence at EMA.

In 1974 Larry started putting out his own one-man magazine.  He called
it

The Occupier: The Family Minded Monthly.  In all, he issued about
sixty

Occupiers, one every month until December 1979.  He only stopped when
he went to prison and the right kinds of paper and ink were temporarily
unavailable.

Occupiers are one-of-a-kind documents, each one twelve or more pages.
They are hand-written, handsomely illustrated in colored inks,
emblazoned with flags of the world, and strewn with hand-drawn "ads,"
mostly for douches and maxi pads.  The articles deal with world events,
especially presidential doings--invariably seen from an
ultraconservative viewpoint-as well as sports, top-ten tunes, and the
ongoing saga of Larry's sex life.  But the primary content is a
detailed chronicle of the doings of every member of the
Schreuder/Bradshaw family.

Larry titled his magazine The Occupier, he explains, because he started
it to keep himself occupied.  Psychiatrists say it "probably helps to
tell

Larry who he is."  Certainly it is one way he asserts his attachment to
the family that keeps pushing him out.  Unfortunately for historians,
and probably for the police, the first forty Occupiers, up to midsummer
1977, were seized by Frances after Larry's arrest.  He believes she
still has them, locked away in a safe-deposit box.  But Occupiers #40
through #60, covering the years immediately before, during, and after
Franklin Bradshaw's murder, are gone for good.  They contained numerous
stories about

Larry, Marc, Frances, Behrens, Freddie, Granny and Gramps, the Reagans,
and Ariadne, and it is virtually certain that they included many
details of the murder plot as it boiled up and finally boiled over.
Larry says he kept these issues locked in a typewriter case in the
trunk of his car.

Soon after his own arrest, eighteen months after the murder, Larry's
car was stolen from a curbside parking space near Frances's and
Behrens' apartments.  The theft was not reported to police; no attempt
to recover the car was ever made.

During the Schreuders' divorce, Berenice kept herself occupied by
travel abroad and remodeling at home.  In three years she visited
Alaska, Tahiti,

Fiji, New Zealand, Oregon, Central and South America, Mexico,
Washington,

D.C."  and New York City, and by July 1976 she was rolling through
China on a tourist bus.  Between tours she made over her house, added a
safe and a sauna in her basement, and installed air-conditioning
throughout.  She kept her beloved maple furniture, the deeply ruffled
lampshades, the green wallpaper.  As a present to herself for her
golden wedding anniversary, she also bought a new car.

The car and the home repairs do not seem to have attracted Franklin's
undue attention.  But when he found out she had borrowed money to
finance these expenditures, he was horrified and repaid the loan
instantly.

Withal, Berenice did not neglect her maternal duties.  In May 1975, a
year before the Schreuder divorce became final, she sent Frances still
another 100 shares of Mountain Fuel, pointing out that she had sent a
total Of $21,000 in the past six months, and politely requesting "an
accounting."

Frances sent back a partial "accounting" and a full-throated
denunciation.  She said she felt as if her father had "purchased a
marriage."  She accused him of being such a male chauvinist that he
actually expected Frances to repay her husband's debts to her father!
She said she was beginning to feel as though she hated all men.  Her
fury increased until she sounded like a ventriloquist's dummy on
Berenice's knee: "Those two men can go rot in hell before I will pay a
penny for a debt of Frederik's!  I'll fight Dad in court until he
regrets it.  Just what do these men think?  I am paying for three
fatherless children and if

F.J.B. wants me to pay some more of Frederik's debts, he must have
sawdust in his head instead of brains."

Franklin continued quietly slaving away in his unheated warehouse.  "I
don't know whether I can take another winter down there," he told the

Reagans, so on a summer's visit they bought shelving and fixed him up
an attractive at-home office.  He never used it.  Berenice had made it
clear that his greasy work clothes and disorderly habits were not
-welcome in her tidy new basement.

By the early 197os Richard Behrens had become an intermittent
alcoholic.

When he was drinking, old acquaintances often noticed him staggering in
and out of First Avenue bars, unshaven, unwashed, muttering to himself,
dressed in thrift shop clothes and carrying other clothes in a paper
bag.

When he was dry, he worked as a substitute schoolteacher.  Behrens had
also become an active player in the Bradshaw family game, the only
non-family member to take part.  But he was careful to keep his
distance if Berenice was around, and the old lady saw him only once,
very briefly, two years after her husband's murder.

The first time Marc remembers meeting "Uncle George" was early in 1974,
when he took Frances and her son out to dinner at a little Italian
restaurant in Little Italy, near Canal Street.  "He acted very drunk, I
recall ... thick talk, unsteady movements."  Marc remembers at least
ten more meetings, most of them at modest Yorkville restaurants which
offered the German-style cooking Behrens preferred.  Frances brought
Marc everywhere, and the boy listened while the adults for hours
discussed world events and their family problems.  Frances dominated
the conversations, it appeared to Marc, talking incessantly of
Frederik's unendurable, autocratic "Prussian" ways, and Granny's
smother love."

One February afternoon Marc was home alone, doing home work on his
bed.  Freddie returned early from his office and asked Marc in a
strange, tense voice if his mother was seeing another man?  Marc
described the meetings with Behrens, which now occurred once or twice a
week.  Yes, occasionally they met in Behrens' apartment.  But no, the
two adults never went into the bedroom alone together, and they had
never asked Marc to leave.  Freddie was unconvinced.

When his mother arrived home, Marc heard screaming, slapping, arguing,
and shouting in the living room.  The next morning Frances instructed
her son to triple-lock the front door; her husband, she believed, had
keys to only two of the three locks.  That evening, somehow, Freddie
got back inside.  Mom took Marc out to a restaurant for dinner and
berated him for being a "Freddie boy," and for failing properly to
secure the door.  When they got home, Freddie had locked them out and
refused to open up despite

Frances's pounding and shrieking.  She took Marc down to her car, and
they drove around for a couple of hours, then parked in front of the
Old Dutch

Delicatessen at Second Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street, and sat with the
heater running until the battery went dead.  It was about midnight now
and extremely cold.  Frances sent Marc to a phone booth to call "Uncle
George" and ask him to bring blankets and jumper cables.  Behrens did,
but the car was also out of gas.  Marc spent a miserable night huddled
under blankets in the back seat while Mom and Behrens talked quietly up
front.  At dawn

Behrens was able to jump the battery.  At the gas station he paid;
Frances was also out of money.

Frances now drove to lawyer Erdheim's office, obtained the necessary
papers and, by afternoon, she and Marc and some cops were back at the
apartment door.  Freddie would not open up until the cops commenced
smashing the door down.  Frances and her son walked in; Freddie packed
his suitcase and left.

Frances frequently called Behrens "the old woman."  But Marc is quite
certain his mother and Behrens were never lovers, though he thinks

Freddie would have been equally jealous of the friendship either way.
In any event, after Freddie left, Frances began turning more to Behrens
as a confidant, and to Marc somewhat less.  They met only rarely in his
disordered apartment.  Usually he chose one of his favorite German
restaurants.  He smiled and said "Heil Hitler" as Frances and her son
approached.

Save for Behrens, the Schreuders and Bradshaws were now playing in an
all-family game, and the only family member who was not involved in it
was adorable Ariadne, asleep in her expensive bassinet.  The child was
adorable: pretty, quiet, utterly beguiling.  And she was asleep.  She
never showed the fretful wakefulness, the irritability, hyperactivity,
and insomnia that plagued so many others in her family.  Ariadne from
birth has seemed an enchanted, and enchanting, child.  She has
impressed everybody who has ever known her-schoolteachers, ballet
teachers, neighbors, other mothers, even other children, who can be a
notoriously cruel cabal-as an exceptionally lovely child.  It is almost
as if she is under some sort of benign magic spell, as if a genuine

Good Fairy presided over her birth.  Those teachers, schoolmates, and
others who are unaware of her troubled family background simply do not
believe it is true.  Those who do know the truth cannot understand how
she has survived it.  But from birth onward, Ariadne has seemed
entirely untouched by, or at least unmarked by, the chaos around her.
Her family life whirled along in a perpetual maelstrom, and the child
floated on the surface as peacefully and prettily as Thumbelina in her
walnut shell boat.

In August 1975 Berenice waited for a day when Franklin was out of
town.

Then she went down to the warehouse for a quiet visit with Doug
Steele.

"How much are we really worth, Doug?."

"Berenice, if Frank started spending it right now, you could not get
rid of it all in your lifetime.  You couldn't even spend the interest.
"

Flabbergasted, the old lady returned to Gilmer Drive, clumped
downstairs past her display of Hopi dolls, Greek efzoni soldiers, koala
bears, toy matadors, and Delft pottery to her little basement office,
and typed out a two-page letter to her husband.  It was Berenice
Bradshaw's personal declaration of independence.  Yet, in places, one
can detect the authentic tones of Frances, as if Granny were now the
dummy seated on her daughter's knee.  Saying nothing about it to
anybody, she tucked the sheets of paper into her husband's bureau
drawer, just as her mother

Florence had done to her many years before.  When Franklin came upon
the letter, he said not a word either, just took it down to the
warehouse and filed it away along with everything else.

Aug.  3oth, 1975 FRANKLIN:

Here are some correspondence for you to look over with this
explanation.

As I have told you I have one ambition left in these last days of mine
and that is to see that my grandchildren are raised properly and well
edicated.

We are rich people and there is no reason why we should not share our
wealth with our own flesh and blood.  The time to share with our family
is now, when they need it not twenty years from now.  The Drukman
family seem to be doing a fine job on their own.  They have never asked
for help, they prefer to do their own thing in their own way.  For 25
years money has been spent on educating Marilyn, I think she has had
her share.  We have three (3) fatherless grandchildren who need us and
our help, personally and financially.  Marc and Larry are now young
men, a critical time in their lives.  Now is the time for making the
kind of high quality men of these young boys we want them to be.  They
have no one to look after them, to support and encourage them but us.
They are looking to us for this guidance and developernent.  I'm
dedicating myself to giving them my all, my best.  The very least I can
do is finance their education.  You let them down last year (1974-1975)
by not paying their schools.  It was a desperate struggle for their
mother, with no husband and no income, to keep these boys in these fine
schools.

I finally got wise, it took a long time.  You have told me many times,
I cannot spend all my income.  With this worthwhile interest in my
grandchildren I want to share this "vast wealth" with them.  Why should
they suffer while we linger in our old age with more wealth than we
know what to do with.  Doug said to me: "You folks can't spend the
interest on your money."  What is to happen to all this wealth?  Why
can't we and our family enjoy some of the fruit of our whole-life's
labors?  We are in our 70's, how old do you have to be to "be old"?  If
I had my way we would sell everything we own and divide it up with our
families and we start living and they enjoy life a little more.  Now I
know this will never be, you will not change and how sad.  I think you
are making a big mistake

All spellings, punctuation, and the language of all family letters is
exactly as written, except for bracketed information.

not to liquidate the Auto Parts business.  There is no one to carry on
that business.  As Doug says: "After the Mr.  goes there will be a
blood-bath".  How well we both know.  How sad to let this happen when
it can be avoided by taking care of our business affairs now.  I think
everyone in the organization is wondering what is going to happen to
the business and to them personally when you die.  There is no feeling
of security with three (3) violent, unfriendly daughters waiting to
gorge the life-blood of our 5o years of work.  Think about this, are
you doing the right thing?

I promised my grandsons I would take care of their schooling.  As you
will see by the enclosed copies I have taken care of this years,
1975-1976.  You offered me $5000 for my American Savings and Loan
stock.  If you can give me $5000 for my stock you can give me $5000
without my stock.  You are choking to death in stock, still you have
your hand out to take away from me any sign of property I might own.
You don't want me to "Own anything" or have "anything" of value.  I'm
just supposed to work up to my last day for my board and room.  I
intend to change that.  My stock is not for sale.

I made a trip down to Lehi and went to the bank.  I found my signature
is as good as yours in that bank.  Also I found my bank balance to be
over $38,000.  I had four cashier checks made; one for $3800 for
Eastern

Military Academy, one for $3200 for Allen-Stevenson school, two for
$300 each for the boys some school clothes and $200 cash for myself
This leaves a balance of about $30,791.15.  I have a wonderful feeling
knowing I have done the right thing.  I intend to share my wealth and
income with those I love,

Berenice J. Bradshaw [Signature]

By Christmas Frances Schreuder was saying quite openly, "This family
can't keep going much longer, not unless somebody kills my father."  It
was said in jest, of course, and understood as hyperbole, just one more
of Mom's wild exaggerations.  They did not speak of the matter when
"Granny the bat" was visiting.  But at other times Frances and Dick
Behrens freely discussed the need to get rid of her father, and the
boys joined the conversation if they felt like it.  Murdering Dad
became the family "sick joke"; how to accomplish it evolved into a
further twist of the Game.  At home, in the privacy of the night
kitchen, there were no reservations, no constraints within the
Schreuder family.  There were secrets of course, conspiracies, and
plots galore.  Each family member had his own hiding places, spots to
protect private treasures from the ceaseless nocturnal raids of the
others.  But in one another's presence, anything could be said or done.
Nothing was taboo.

It was not necessary to close the bathroom door or the bedroom door.
The front door had triple locks.  Behind it the policy was-anything
goes.  If Mom wanted to spend the day in bed, have a thirteen-hour
phone conversation with

Behrens, stay up all night, sleep all day, or sleep two days, it didn't
matter.  Marc was old enough to get back and forth to school by
himself.  He could run down to the deli when they were hungry.  He knew
how to buy a cooked chicken, make garlic burgers feed and care for the
baby, clean house.

Frances had no friend but Behrens and seldom went out except to graze
the aisles of expensive department stores.  She never had guests, and
the door was kept locked and bolted.  Except for the baby Frances saw
no one but Marc and Behrens, and more rarely Larry and Berenice.  The
five of them rolled round and round in a closed circle, five serpents
with their tails in one another's mouths.

The Drukmans had by this time made their move to New Zealand.  Frances
had stopped speaking to Marilyn.  Her sister had misappropriated her
furniture, she said, while she was in Europe, and when Marilyn sent
Marc a card for his fifteenth birthday, December 21, 1975, with a real
wheat penny attached, Frances made him send it back.  During Berenice's
annual Christmas visits, she commuted between her daughters' warring
households.  The sisters vied silently for her favor.  Frances cooked a
Christmas dinner of stuffed bass with shrimp sauce, and Berenice could
not stop telling Marilyn how delicious it was.  She bragged to the
Schreuders that the Reagans took her to the ballet to see the annual
Christmas production of The Nutcracker.  On

New Year's Eve she and Frances and Marc and Larry sat down to play

Stratego.  As dawn broke on January 1, 1976, all four of them were
still playing the game.  As soon as Granny left, discussion of the
family joke resumed.

Berenice did not need to hear the joke to know that matters in the

Schreuder household were reaching a flashpoint.  Franklin,

however, believed he had finally put his foot down: if people in this
family want more money, He wrote, they can go to work like anybody
else.

But Berenice kept sending whatever she could, and Frances kept spending
whatever she could lay her hands on.  One spring day she lugged Larry's
collection of six thousand hand gleaned wheat pennies to the nearest
bank and turned them in at their face value-sixty dollars.

In the night kitchen, the family joke was repeated and elaborated
upon.

The family had but two choices: take Ariadne to live in Harlem, or
murder

Gramps.  "Harlem was a big subject with Mom," Marc says.  "She kept
saying that she would never let anybody make her and Ariadne live in
Harlem.  And at the same time she would say she'd rather live in Harlem
than go back to Salt Lake and live under their thumb.  Because she
would never go back to Gilmer Drive.  She would rather die than live
with Granny."

More and more Frances Schreuder was talking about her need to "control
my own life," even though a life so out of control is rarely seen.
Rather than "lose control," she said, she would kill herself.

In retrospect one can see that by the time of Ariadne's birth, Berenice
and Frances were a pair of mirrored female figures locked in mortal
combat.  Frances had become a complete parasite---entirely dependent on
her parents, increasingly on her mother, for her very existence-yet a
parasite who demanded total "control" and insisted on total
independence.

This insistence ultimately would turn parasite into parricide.

Berenice too had become a kind of parasite, dependent on her daughter
for the emotional nourishment and excitement she could not find
elsewhere.

To escape the empty drabness of her life, Berenice was more than
willing to leap into the boiling volcano of Frances's existence; she
was eager.

Thus her maternal concern became her justification for doing what she
wanted to do anyhow.  But her concern was genuine, not counterfeit.

The more viciously Frances abused her mother, the more tenaciously

Berenice clung.  Looking back at these two grappling female figures, it
is hard to tell which woman is the oak and which the mistletoe, who is
the strength and who the clinging vine slowly strangling the mighty
tree.

Only through Frances can Berenice have another baby, can she have fun
in

New York, can she live.  "Life is so different here and there," says

Berenice.  "In New

York, I have friends but no relatives.  In Salt Lake, I have relatives
but no friends."

So Frances's frenzy is understandable.  She must fight off this
"zombie

Mommie," as she sees her, this vampire who can live only on her
daughter's blood.  Hence her constant bad-mouthing of "evil Granny ...
Granny the bat .  Granny the croc ... sick-in-the-head Granny"-a
nonstop brainwashing of which Berenice is entirely unaware.  Entirely?
Perhaps not.  It might be more accurate to say that she must preserve
her "ignorance" of Frances's bad-mouthing in order to go on with the
Game.

All Frances's children appear to have been unusually attached to their
mother.  Can this be due only to their fear of her terrible wrath, to
their craven desire to please Mommie because Mommie bites?  Not at all.
Frances had an uncanny ability to be a kid with her kids, to get down
entirely onto their childish level.  She did not belittle, did not talk
down to them.  She treated them as equals.  "Out," they knew, meant
locked out, but when they were "in" with Mom, they were in on
absolutely everything.  A long noted empathy exists between children
and fools, children and the mad, children and the blessed.  Frances had
such empathy in great abundance.  The offspring of Frances Schreuder
could count on an extremely seductive as well as dangerous childhood.

On July 3, 1976, Frances typed up a rambling, fifteen-page letter to
David

Salisbury, the lawyer who had drawn up her parents' wills; she
charged

Marilyn with meddling in her parents' estate planning and of
"deliberate fraudulent misrepresentation and undue influence [on the
Bradshaws] with the intent of benefiting for herself unduly and under
false pretenses and misrepresentation at the expense of others without
my parents' full understanding, knowledge, or comprehension."  The
letter clearly shows two important facts, in a case where hard facts
are even harder to come by: (i)

Frances did have knowledge of her father's will and (2) she very much
feared he might change it to her own disadvantage.

In her letter she further accused Marilyn, "childless and always
somewhat irrationally jealous of the grandchildren," of pressuring
Berenice to provide for Robert Reagan in her will as if he were not a
son-in-law but a natural son.  Later she would accuse the Reagans of
seeking to adopt

Robert's two grown daughters from his first marriage so as to increase
their proportionate share of the estate.

Marilyn has "always had a peculiar relationship with men," and is
trying to "hold on to the love and affection" of Reagan by promising
him a share of her inheritance, Frances told Salisbury.  To avoid this
evil scheme,

Berenice, "against her better wishes," has been unfairly forced to
exclude her daughters from her own will.  Frances's anxiety becomes
clearer when she explains that Berenice is now supporting herself and
her children at a rate of $3,000 a month.

No sooner was Frances's divorce decree final, in the spring of 1976,
than

Marilyn was back in Utah trying to impress her father with her
knowledge of estate planning.  Congress had added a new wrinkle to the
gift tax law which she thought could be used to the estate's advantage.
Franklin knew better.  "Get in the truck, Marilyn," he said.  They
drove to the

University's law library, where without hesitation he put his finger on
the right page of the right statute.

"Old Dad was sure up on things," she says.  "He didn't say much because
he was always trying not to make waves.  He was living with Mother and
trying to keep things happy and ... er ... calm.  Dad was always in the
middle, don't you see?"  Her hazel eyes blink rapidly behind large,
clear plastic spectacles.  Marilyn still hoped to be named her father's
executrix, and she had providently bought herself a Salt Lake City
condominium at a good price.  She could live here more economically
than in a hotel on her visits to supervise the estate after he was
gone.

Franklin told her it was all a false hope.  "Not because you are not
competent, Marilyn.  But because your mother and your sisters just
wouldn't like it."  Rather than "make waves," Franklin elected to
sink

Marilyn's boat.

At home Marc kept house.  He was ever compliant, he says.  On the rare
occasions that Larry was home, "He was a little more recalcitrant than
me.  He'd say, "Why do I have to run down to the store twenty-four
hours a day for you?  Why do I have to be your slav eT I mean, there's
a difference between doing favors, being a helpful son, and just using
you day after day!  Mom was always quoting Dr.  Brand at us then.  Her
psychiatrist.  She'd say, "According to Dr.  Brand, I don't have to
tell you why.  You just do it!  I'm your mother and that's it!"

"I thought that was a little strange.  I couldn't imagine Dr.  Brand
would say that!  At the same time I thought: Well, damn!  I guess Dr.
Brand's right then.  I guess Id better shut up.  " So Marc made garlic
salad, cheeseburgers, chicken breasts.  "Whatever Mom would tell me,
I'd do.  Night after night we had the same thing.  She'd go out and buy
it, and I'd fix it while she read her paper or watched TV.  She could
sit in her bed cross-legged for hours, reading her papers.  Whenever
her papers were cut off, she'd make me steal papers from down the
hall."

Stealing was not odious to this young man.  In his last year at

Allen-Stevenson, he broke into and vandalized the chem lab and stole

Nikon with a 50-mm lens, a 105-mm telephoto lens, and other equipment.
Marc says Frances stole the Nikon from him and locked it into her
special white cabinet.  Marc says now that the total value of his chem
lab thievery was $200-$300.  Allen Stevenson says it cost $1,500 to
replace the equipment and repair the damage.  Berenice Bradshaw, who
terms her grandson "a born thief and a maniac for destruction," cites
the correct figure as $15,000.  She was told this by her daughter.

Whatever the amount, there is no question but that Marc is an
accomplished thief.  At home he stole from his brother, his mother, and
his grandmother with jaunty aplomb.  Tape recorders, doodads, money,
comic books, cameras, rare coins, teddy bears-a whole kaboodle of kid's
loot wound up in his secret hiding places.  Larry had his cache.  Mom
had hers.  Loot flowed as rapidly, bafflingly back and forth among the
three of them as the pea in a shell game.

Years later, from prison, Marc wrote a letter describing the perpetual
intra family shell game: "The white cabinet was an all purpose lockup,
containing mostly whatever Mom deemed appropriate to lock up at the
time, like jewelry-when she was in her paranoid mood, thinking perhaps
me or

Larry or even Granny might steal it.  Like tapes, such as those Larry
made in the summer Of '77; or my slides, like those I took during the
summer Of '77; or documentations-the cabinet contained a good deal of
such paperwork; like letters-sometimes Mom locked up letters from Susie
Coleman, if she could find them, or other documents.  [Susie, daughter
of the neighborhood delicatessen owners, was one of Marc's few friends.
They have exchanged private notes and letters for years; she still
writes to Marc in prison.

His correspondence with Susie is one of the few areas of Marc's life
which he still tries to keep inviolate.)

"I managed to secure access to the cabinet by popping the nails out of
the two panels in the back, which I did on several occasions, when Mom
left the house with Ariadne--or when I was alone and Ariadne was at
school.  The reason I continually (at least, on five or six occasions
that I can remember) entered the cabinet was because of the contents:
Most of them seemed to be [things of) mine that Mom had snatched or
stolen from me.  Sneaking into the cabinet provided me with an easy way
to determine exactly what Mom stole from me (I was always surprised by
what Mom managed to steal from either me or Larry) and let me steal at
least some of my stuff back.

"Mom's primary lockup in lour next apartment on Gracie Square] was a
closet right next to her bed secured with a Miva magnetic lock.  This
closet contained two locked red tool chests secured with two
padlocks-Dynalocks, requiring curious round keys to open them.  In
these chests were documents mostly, with some other stuff of mine, like
a rare half-dollar I found which Mom had heisted from the mailman, and
she never even told me she had it-but I suspected, because a coin that
expensive doesn't just evaporate.

"Outside of these red tool boxes, Mom kept her medications, jewelry,
important documents and letters-so Granny would not get ahold of
them-and anything else that should be kept out of either my or Granny's
hands.

"Mom also maintained a safe-deposit box at the Manufacturers Hanover
Trust

Company at Seventy-second and Madison.  The box was huge, and Mom
maintained a vast quantity of documents, newspapers, and letters in
here.  Also Mom kept stuff like tapes, slides, silver coins, and other
stuff.

"Ninety-eight percent of my stuff and a hundred percent of Larry's
stuff was vulnerable to Mom's frequent raids.  However, some time in
1976 I developed an ultra-secret hiding spot at 1675 York Avenue that
probably still exists.  I removed the panel of wood at the bottom of a
closet wall, dug out some of the cardboard insulation, and used the
tiny spot to hide mostly coins I had bought for myself, or Mom had
bought for me.  By hiding them, Morn would not either steal them back
or ask me to sell them when she was broke and penurious (which was
always).  By the time we moved [to the next apartment] I had learned
the advantages of safe-deposit boxes, and I paid for several at various
banks around Manhattan, hiding stuff like comics (which Mom loved to
destroy and destroyed on numerous occasions when was a boy); slides
(which Mom loved to steal); and other stuff which I wanted to survive
Mom's myriad maraudings."

At Marc's next school after Allen-Stevenson he would successfully loot
the chem lab, and would twice clean out the school store.  Both times
he was eventually caught; both times his crimes were minimized and
hushed up as much as possible.  Prosecution of white-collar schoolboy
crime-kleptomania and vandalism reflects poorly on the reputation of
any institution.  Better when possible to play down such pranks.

In Marc Schreuder's case it always proved possible.  At the
Allen-Stevenson graduation ceremonies, the gymnasium was packed with
parents, relatives, and guests.  Frances sat proudly in a front-row
seat, with the beautifully dressed Ariadne on her lap, watching the
blue-blaze red ninth graders parade onto the stage.  And when the honor
boys were asked to step forward and receive their special certificates
of academic excellence, Marc was among them.  Afterward, other parents
congratulated Mrs.  Schreuder on her son's brilliance, her daughter's
loveliness.  They told her how fortunate she was to have two such
outstanding children.  Not a soul among them knew she actually had
three.

That fall, outfitted in his all-new Hush Puppies, gray socks, corduroy
trousers, and jacket and tie, Marc Schreuder went off to the prep
school which Behrens had helped his mother to find at the eleventh
hour.  Early that spring, after numerous conferences with Behrens, Marc
had applied to two boarding schools and one day school: Choate and
Hotchkiss in

Connecticut, and Trinity School in New York City.  Behrens was the
acknowledged family authority on boarding schools, Frances the expert
on private schools in Manhattan.  Her personal favorite was St.
Bernard'san the best Allen-Stevenson boys went there-but she sadly
rejected it for her own son as being "a little too Jewish."  Then both
boarding schools rejected

Marc, and Trinity put him on its waiting list (and eventually rejected
him).

Undaunted, Frances enrolled Marc in the Hotchkiss summer tennis camp,
sent

Granny the bill, and when the day came, drove him up to camp in the big
red

Delta '73 Olds she had acquired from Freddie.  Although she usually got
lost on the small, winding Connecticut roads, she knew the way to
Hotchkiss.

"Uncle George" Behrens had driven all three of them up to the school on
the occasion of Marc's initial interview.

By the time Marc got home from tennis camp, Frances an- NUTCRACKER

nounced she had found a new "great school."  Her researches had
discerned a small prep school with a faculty "loaded with degrees from
Princeton,

Harvard, and Yale."  Mother and son set of for their interview at
Kent

School near the village of Kent, Connecticut.  They were several hours
late-Frances got lost again--but Mr.  Gowan took them on a tour of the
campus, interviewed Marc, and accepted him that very day.  It was
mid-August.  Three weeks later Marc -moved into his dormitory and began
tenth grade.

In Salt Lake Berenice received an emergency phone call from Frances's
attorney: the landlord at 1675 York Avenue was again threatening
eviction.  Granny rushed to New York, money in hand, paid the back
rent, swabbed and scrubbed and cleaned up Frances's disheveled
apartment.  But she stayed at the Reagans.  Frances was refusing to
speak to her.

Four days before Christmas, in anticipation of President Jimmy Carter's
new tax laws, Frank Bradshaw's accountant Herman Wood began making
distributions through the F & B Corporation and its three trusts to
the

Bradshaw children and grandchildren.  At the same time Frank's nephew

Craig Bradshaw, the upright young insurance man, learned that he had
been named without prior consultation as F & B's unpaid trustee.

Snow mantled the frozen Wasatch range, subzero winds ripped the valley
floor, and icicles fringed the draughty warehouse.  In the midst of
this savage season, Frank Bradshaw received a rare and intensely
affectionate note from his grandson Marc.  Two years later, after his
death, Berenice turned over a copy of the note to police as proof that
the boy was devoted to his grandfather and could not possibly have
wished him harm.

She made many copies and passed them out to Bertha Beck, to Marilyn,
even to casual acquaintances.  She saw the note as an icon of filial
piety, and it became a rare source of personal comfort during her
bereavement.  Much later, in prison, Marc said his mother had stood
over him as he typed it, dictating every word.

Dear Grandpa,

I hope you are feeling better today!  Generally sleep is the best cure
for any illness or des ease The longer you sleep the sooner you get
well.  The best way to get rid of a flu as in your case would be to get
really warm, under the covers.  Taking vitamins is also good for a flu
because they help you get better quicker.

If you aren't well today you shouldn't press your body on through
hardships but STAY IN BED!  If you don't, you'll become sicker than you
were before and you won't be able to do ANY work at all!  I love you

VERY

MUCH!!!  I hope you get better soon!  You are the sweetest grandpa a
boy could have!  You are the sweetest, kindest, generous, nicest, most
loving, BEST grandpa in the world!!  I I am so lucky to have a grandpa
as nice as you!

Billions and billions of hearts, hugs, lo vies and kisses!

LOVE marc!

Throughout 1976 Frances's conversation dwelled increasingly on the
family joke.  "It would come up every dayl" Marc says.  "It seemed like
she wasn't just preparing me-she was trying to prepare herself for it."
The question is: when did the boiling pot boil over?  At what point,
and how, did the longtime family joke become the working family
agenda?

By the spring Of 1977 Frances Schreuder had become preoccupied with
God.

Inspired by the wondrous goodness that Ariadne had brought into all
their lives, she had sought out formal religious instruction.  By early
June she and her little daughter were ready to be received into the
Episcopal

Church.  Granny was rhapsodic.  On the Sunday of their baptism, she
wrote to her daughter and granddaughter that she was "deeply impressed
[that] you both are taking unto yourselves a religion, especially the
Episcopal

Church.  I'm pleased [that] my dear, darling granddaughter has drawn
you to commit your lives to something inspiring, something higher than
man ..."

Despite her own lifelong atheism, or perhaps because of it, Berenice

Bradshaw confessed her envy of those who find help and strength through
religion, and expressed her passionate hope that Frances would finally
find happiness in life, "now that Ariadne has shown you the way."

Whatever her spiritual motivation, it is possibly relevant that of all
the private preschools in Manhattan, the toniest is probably

Episcopal School, at Sixty-ninth Street off Park Avenue, operated by
St.

James' Episcopal Church.  Certainly it has the most impregnable waiting
list.

Many potential students are registered at birth.  Most are not just the
children but grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of previous
graduates.  One of the four-year olds accepted by Episcopal in the
spring Of 1977, to begin school in the fall, was a golden-haired child
named Ariadne

Schreuder.

When his wife told Franklin Bradshaw the wonderful news, it triggered a
new variation on a worn theme: work cures all ills.  If Ariadne was old
enough to go to school, then she was old enough to be sent away to
summer camp.  So if Frances would also agree to send his grandsons to
Salt Lake City, she herself would be free to go to work at last.  He
offered both boys summer jobs working in his warehouse at $4 an hour.
Granny would provide free room and board on Gilmer Drive.

"Absolutely not!"  said Frances when her sons told her.  For two solid
weeks she refused even to accept a phone call from Salt Lake City. 
Marc and Larry were shattered.  The boys were dedicated consumers, avid
capitalists.  They yearned to gorge themselves on things, products, the
stuff of TV commercials.  Their longings-like everything else about
them-were infantile.

They articulated their wishes in a kind of baby talk "My real buy-buy
goal was a big ole' Nikon."  They were like giant babies gurgling for
very expensive toys.  Their notion of heaven was to be turned loose in
a Crazy

Eddie store.

"Working for Gramps was a chance to make good money.  Four bucks an
hour!  I mean-now you could buy anything!  Larry could buy ... cars! 
To me it was .  cameras!  We were just yes sing Mom to death, we wanted
it so bad."

For two weeks the Bradshaws tried every night with no success even to
get their daughter to come to the telephone.  Either no one answered or
one of the boys picked it up and said that their mother was out.  Then
one evening

Frances herself picked up the phone.  She said she was so sorry to have
missed their earlier calls.  Yes, her sons had indeed told her about
the invitation.  She thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea.  Marc
and Larry would fly out to "the Lake" the moment they finished
school.

The Bradshaws were overjoyed.  So were Marc and Larry.  The boys had
always been wild about money.  Cash and currency excited them
physically.  They liked to hang out at banks, to hear the chinking
sound of coins, to feel the heavy warmth of a pocketful of change, the
electric crackle of new bills.  They could name all the faces on all
the denominations.  And both were avid coin collectors as well as
knowledgeable readers of the financial pages.  But neither boy had ever
been given any money of his own.  Not only had they never held jobs,
but unlike their schoolmates, neither of them had ever received an
allowance.

The only way they knew to get money was to steal it.  Now they had been
offered a chance to earn it!  Visions of motorbikes-and tape decks and
TV sets---danced in their heads.

A different vision danced in Frances's head.  Did she dream it up all
alone?

Or did the boys contribute?  And what about Behrens?  Perhaps it was a
shared vision boiled up out of four fevered brains-two troubled adults,
both obsessed with killing a father to protect an inheritance; and two
unstable adolescent boys.  It was a vision of a tiny band of latter-day
Robin Hoods: a pair of bold and slick-fingered young desperadoes
directed by a female master criminal with a shadowy, part-time
F4hrer/adviser.  The gang had a name, the Good Old Schreuder Household,
or-alternatively-the Fifth Avenue

Crowd.  It had a set of written rules and a single objective: The
gang's target was a lying, sneaky, cold-blooded old miser with an evil,
addled wife.  The gang's objective was to steal as much money as
possible and to bump off the wicked old man so as to make it look like
an accident.  The money was not just for the gang's own use.  Once
their immediate wants were taken care of, the gang had a higher
purpose.  A child was in mortal danger.

Unless they ransomed her, saved her, a golden-haired little girl they
all adored was certa into be starved out of her snug home and forced to
live in

Harlem.

How much of this "vision" did each one of them really believe?  No way
to tell.  "One thing you gotta understand," says Marc today, "is that
the reason Mom was sending us to Salt Lake, and the reason we were
going there, were entirely different.  We wanted the four bucks an
hour.  Mom was sending us ... no, allowing us to go, because we were
supposed to bump off

Gramps."  Of course it would have to look like an accident.  Over the
next few weeks Frances considered and discussed several methods, Marc
says.

Dropping an electrical appliance into his morning bath would be one way
to do it.  Another way would be to burn down the warehouse.  Finally
she decided that the safest way was to lace his morning oatmeal with
sufficient amphetamines to induce a heart attack.

"Basically, Mom sent me and Larry out to Salt Lake City in the summer
Of '77 to poison him with amphetamines.  She said if we put 'em in his
oatmeal every day, eventually he'd have a heart attack."  Marc claims
he is "foggy" on how Mom obtained the "black beauties," fat black
capsules filled with tiny white beads.  "Black beauties" is the street
name for 20-mg Biphetamine capsules, made by Permwalt Company.  They
contain fillers, and it could take a cupful or more to make a lethal
dose in a pot of oatmeal.

Larry today denies knowledge of any plan to poison Gramps.  "Kill him?
I know we stole, but I never heard anything about killing him."  But he
also seems knowledgeable about the source of the drugs: "I heard Mom
and Marc went up to Harlem, or maybe Forty-second Street, and copped
'em from some black guy."

Marc says his mother always had a large supply of black beauties, diet
pills, and many other medications on hand.  He says he and Mom crushed
the drugs together, removed the stuffing from a green-cloth toy
mouse-"cute little mouse, with a tail, and everything"-and replaced it
with the crushed drugs.

This occurred in Mom's bedroom during what Marc calls "the Prelims,"
two nights before the boys left town.  "I was sitting at Larry's
typewriter, which Mom had expropriated for her own use, installed it in
her own room.

When Mom wants anything, she kinda takes it over.  She doesn't care who
it belongs to.  You don't tell Mom no.  "

Larry's old typewriter was set up on the end of the bed.  Together the
gang members worked out a list of rules to follow in Salt Lake City.
"We were a discussing it together," says Marc.  "I was just typing down
the feedback.

It was like": i.How to deal with Granny and not become brainwashed by
Granny.  2. How not to become infected by Granny's sick ways.  3. Don't
ever let Granny follow you.  4. Be sure to get up in morning and
administer dosage.  5. Be polite to her, but also be able to say no.
6.Don't eat Granny's chocolate cakes.  Don't let her fatten you UPI 7.
Don't let her domineer you!  8. Don't let her twist you round her
little finger!  9. Don't let her have you doing all her errands.

io.  Do what you want to do.  Don't let her boss you around!  n.Phone
home daily, always from pay phones, and make Progress Report to

Mom.

Marc can no longer remember every one of the rules, he says, but his
mother has a copy of the document in her safe-deposit box.  "Basically
the idea was-Mom was giving us permission to be insolent to Granny.  To
defy her!  The idea was: Granny's a very sick person.  Don't let her
boss you around.  Don't let her take you anywhere.  If she wants to
drive you down to the warehouse, and you have your own sneaky plans to
do something down there-like steal some stocks or bonds-tell her, no.
The idea was not really to make her life miserable.  We were supposed
just to be polite but stand firm."

Marc admits that this goal "somehow got lost when we got out there."

Things did not work as Frances planned because she did not have two
slick-fingered desperadoes, but two clumsy, excitable kids.  It was a
mess.  To the unsuspecting Bradshaws, it must have seemed as if a pair
of criminal Katzenjammer Kids had come to stay.

The summer passed in a nightmare montage, its lunatic cast of
characters-the elderly Bradshaws, their criminal grandsons, a ware
houseful of hard-working Mormons, and mad, manic Frances-all caught up
in a surreal tangle of larceny, hooligan ism madness, and murder.  To
disentangle the real from the hallucinatory, let alone truth from lies,
is no longer possible.  , The boys arrived in mid-June and started work
immediately.  Gramps assigned Marc to work under Doug Steele's
supervision, and apprenticed

Larry to his number-two aide, Clive Davis, the Mormon elder.  Doug put
Marc to work classifying brake parts at a desk alongside his own.  When
the noon rush came, Doug went out to the counter to help wait on
customers.  In early afternoon, as usual, he sent his fourteen-year-old
daughter-another temporary summer employee-to the bank with the cash
receipts.  Then Doug's phone rang.  The bank said the money bag was
$1,400 short.

Doug took his new assistant upstairs to an isolated spot under the
warehouse roof and questioned him alone for three solid hours; Marc
simply stonewalled until the grilling ceased.

Before anyone realized what was happening, the Good Old Schreuder

Household was in full cry: the brothers were looting blank checks,
cash, and securities from both house and ware house and sending it back
to New York in a steady stream.  Their demonic energy was fueled by a
murderous competition for Mom's approval.  They stumbled and fell over
one another in gleeful, greedy frenzy and at the same time held back as
much as they dared, both from Mom and from one another.

Their pace was so headlong, so heedless that discovery at the earliest
possible moment was inevitable.  The pattern of their thievery was
established early.  When Marc got back to Gilmer Drive with his $i,400
haul, he waited until Granny and Gramps were asleep.  Larry had gone to
a porno movie.  Marc removed one of Granny's new air-conditioning vents
and taped $500, perhaps more, inside.  He rushed the remaining goo to
Mom, who had been crying on the phone "that she needed an immediate
infusion of cash: her phone was gonna be cut off, Con Ed was gonna turn
off her lights, the rent was due.  I thought: She'll love me for
this!"

But Mom was angry.  Already Marc had tipped their mitt.  The gang's
presence was now known.  He should have been more "sneaky."  The next
night he sneaked into Granny's basement office, found a box of her
personal checks, and sent

Mom a handful.  But Larry had already sent Mom an entire brick of
warehouse checks "in a manila warehouse envelope.  He really outdid me
11

Marc, more of a homebody, cleaned out everything he could find from
Gilmer

Drive.  Larry was bolder and did most though not all of the warehouse
thievery.  Their loot in securities came to $150,000 in common
stocks,

"Martin Marietta, GE, IBM, all Fortune 500 stuff," says Marc.  "It was
hidden in twenty-five-year-old Life magazines he had secreted in his
cabinets.  Couple of bricks of $100 bills in there too.  Larry found
those.

It was like a competition that summer-who could do the best job
stealing and getting money for Mom.  It was like a game to us ..."  It
was a game of

Stratego for real, and much of the time Marc felt he was losing to
Larry.

"He was smarter than I was.  I was too attached to Mom."

One day they found $30,000 in Mountain Fuel stock certificates
belonging to

Elaine Drukman and sent them off to New York.  Frances at once set up a
false identity.  She opened two bank accounts and a stock brokerage
account in the name of Elaine Drukman, and obtained a phony Elaine
Drukman driver's license, all in preparation for cashing in the stock.
Later she would say she had learned these tricks from Richard
Behrens.

At Gilmer Drive the brothers' competition was both savage and
clownish.

Larry clicked on his tape recorder whenever he heard his grandparents
having an argument.  Marc snapped Granny's picture from behind whenever
the old lady bent over to sweep the floor or to pick up her grandsons'
dirty socks.  If his camera was unloaded, he clicked the shutter
anyway, just to taunt her.  Then, when she got angry and started
swearing, Larry switched on his tape recorder.  At summer's end the
boys returned from "the Lake" with a wealth of pictures and tapes of
the Bradshaws at home, which Frances subsequently used both to
blackmail Granny and as a bizarre form of family entertainment. 
Frances loved them so much, her sons say, that she ultimately stole
them all.

Marc and Larry seemed incapable of honest work.  When they weren't busy
looting and thieving, or triple-punching the time clock, or goofing off
and sleeping in the back of the warehouse, or tormenting Doug and their
grandfather, they hung out at porno movie theaters.  One morning the
sink in the warehouse ladies' room was discovered filled with human
excrement.

But the most fun was taunting Granny.  She did all the boys' laundry,
bed making, and housework.  No one had ever done these things for them
before.

In a way they were grateful; they enjoyed her "mothering."  But they
resented the griping and nagging that came with it.  They were used to
being ragged, dirty, and smelly, used to looking after themselves, and
in many ways they preferred it to Granny's eternal criticism.  Frances,
in their daily phone calls, encouraged her sons to defy and torment

Granny at every opportunity.  When they knew she was making a dinner
for them, they would fail to turn up to eat it.  Or they would let her
spend all day cooking, then deliberately gorge at McDonald's and come
home saying they were full.

Larry had more caution than Marc, and more sense.  Marc would do simply
anything his mother said, and he was more vulnerable to her pressure.

Midway in the summer Frances refused to communicate with Marc for two
or three weeks.  She would deal only with Larry, Marc says, "because I
was not coming through with the big stuff, so she was threatening me. 
I was having trouble finding any more stocks and bonds and stuff.  So I
wasn't calling Mom every day.  Larry kinda took over from me.  Mom got
really angry and told me, "Don't ever come home!  You can go live in
Salt Lake!"

I was terrified, really depressed by that.

For two weeks I was like in limbo.  I believed her threats, believed
she was gonna leave me in Salt Lake alone.  Forever.  That I'd never go
back to Kent.

Cause that's what she said.  That I wasn't really pulling through for
her.

Especially with the oatmeal.  It came out that we weren't really doing
it every day.  We were disobeying her orders.  She was giving orders to
increase the dosages.  And we weren't giving him any dosages at all!
But we were telling Mom every day on the phone that we were getting up
very early every morning and putting it in his oatmeal.  And Mom would
say, "How's he doin?

Tell me what he's like!  Tell me his physical symptoms!"  I'd make up
the stuff, because Larry isn't very good at that.  I tend to be more
imaginative.

So I'd say, "He seemed a little more jumpy and nervous today ..."  And
I guess I wasn't that good of a liar.  And she was getting mad because
I wasn't trying hard enough!  I wasn't stealing enough!  I couldn't
find the will.  I was being lazy!"

The fact is, Marc says today in injured tones, "I was too busy working
at

Bradshaw's, making an honest living.  Instead of stealing for her.  And
she got mad at that, making me incommunicado.  Which she knew I hated.
We got back together when I finally did find some more stocks.  At the
warehouse.

Like in another cabinet.  It was like "Okay, now you've come through
with more money for me.  Now I will talk to you again.  I will give you
love now.

Wh000oeee!"

On one point Marc is clear, or at least consistent.  "That mouse -we
never even un sewed it!  Later, after we got fired from the warehouse,
I took the drugs out and flushed them down the toilet."

Did he?  Berenice says she knows the boys tried to poison her husband's
oatmeal.  "They also tried to poison the air in his bedroom.  One night
I was awakened by a scream.  I got up to see what it was, and Marc had
gone in my husband's room and' was filling the air with something to
choke him.  I don't know what it was, but it woke him up, and my
husband was screaming, "Marc, get out of here!  Get outV "

Later that day at the warehouse, Frank vomited several times, Doug
Steele says.  Warehouse employees say that on several occasions that
summer the boss was so jumpy he could not sit still.  On Marc's own
tapes-the ones he says Frances stole from him for her own delectation,
and he stole back again--one can hear him and Larry laughing together
about the times when "Gramps was running up and down stairs like a
speed freak."

Did this really happen?  Was there a mouse stuffed with black beauties?
Did a family murder plot really exist that summer, or is this more of
Larry and

Marc's comic-book imaginings?  A crabby old lady's paranoia?  The envy
of two jealous sisters?  Maybe Gramps was running because he was an
exercise freak, not a speed freak.  One cannot know all the truth.  But
in hindsight, one truth is clear.  By August i, when the Schreuder
Household was exposed and put out of action, the raiders were $200,000
ahead.  Moreover, long before that time, certainly both Franklin and
Berenice Bradshaw knew that their grandsons were stealing them blind.
They knew that not just pilferage but major theft was occurring.  And
they knew that their daughter was centrally involved.

On the morning of August i, Frank's faithful, plainspoken secretary,
Nancy

Jones, was at her desk in the rear of the warehouse going through the
morning mail.  She opened the July statement from Walker Bank & Trust.
The

July withdrawals seemed a bit higher than usual, and she riffled
through the canceled checks.  Two checks, for $io,000 apiece, were made
out to cash and signed -F.  J. Bradshaw--a crude forgery of her boss's
signature.  She looked on the back.  Both checks had -been endorsed in
large, flowing script, "F.  Bradshaw," and deposited to Frances
Schreuder's account.  Nancy recognized the handwriting.

She hurried to the front of the warehouse and showed the checks to
Doug.

"We'd better tell the Mister right away!"  Frank was working behind the
counter when Doug and Nancy called him aside and handed him the two
checks.

"Oh my God!"  he shouted.  Then the old man burst into tears.

Franklin told Steele to call the bank.  Steele reported the two
forgeries and several smaller checks which also appeared to have been
forged, and said Bradshaw's did not intend to honor them.  He asked
that the funds be replaced.

"No problem, Mr.  Steele, we will have the monies in your account
within twenty-four hours."

But there was a problem.  Check forgery is a federal offense.  Before
the monies could be restored, it would be necessary for Mr.  Bradshaw
to sign a complaint.  The bank would be happy to send the necessary
papers down to the warehouse right now.  But this was family.  Frank
balked.

"No go, Doug," he said.  "No go."  Then, aware that still other stolen
checks, as yet uncashed, might be floating around, the old man told

Steele to close out the account and open another with a different
number.

But even now that the Bradshaws knew and suffered the humiliation of
having their employees know the truth about their daughter Frances, and
her sons, still they could not acknowledge the truth and could not
confront it.  Some combination of shame, fear, and family pride, with
perhaps an added amalgam of bewilderment and compassion, made the

Bradshaws unwilling and indeed incapable of filing criminal charges
against Frances or their grandsons.  On this point, if on few others,

Berenice and Franklin were always in accord.  The fact is that after
forged checks totaling $22,000 were discovered on August i, and after

Franklin openly broke down and wept in front of his employees, fired
the boys, and grimly instructed the bank to honor no more checks that
might be returned from New York City-a week or two later, very quietly,
he gave each boy his job back.

Larry was rehired first, to work weekends only, when no one else but

Gramps was about.  Marc was forced to wait longer.  Six years after the
murder, the memory of favoritism toward Larry still sets Marc gnawing
on ancient wounds.  He broods about "the extra hint of guilt on me, the
extra taint, "because Marc had done the original $1,400 robbery.  Even
though it was Larry who invented the way to triple-punch the time
clock, a way he refused to share with his brother, "that still made
Larry look just a little bit more honest than me, in their eyes ... And
Larry was the eldest.  And he was definitely their favorite.  So of
course they took him back before me."

But Marc had the last word.  Larry had invested the fruits of his
labors in a 1962 Impala, the first car-the first anything-he had ever
owned.  Now he intended to drive it alone cross-country to begin his
senior year at

EMA.  The Sunday night before he left, Larry drove down to Bradshaw
Auto

Parts, let himself in with pilfered keys, and stole as many tools, tool
kits, flares, and small, valuable auto parts as he could cram into
the

Impala's roomy trunk.  He went home and stowed his packed suitcases in
the back seat, parked his car in Granny's new garage, and retired early
to be certain of a good night's sleep.  At three o'clock Marc crept
upstairs from the basement where he and Larry slept and awakened the
Bradshaws.

He told them what his brother was up to,

and now Marc, Granny, and Gramps all tiptoed out to the garage.  Marc
had pocketed Larry's car keys, and together the three of them silently
unloaded the trunk of Larry's car.  Larry left at daybreak, and he did
not discover the loss until several miles out of town, when it occurred
to him that his car felt strangely light in the rear end.  That same
Monday morning, "by invitation," Marc was back at work at the
warehouse.

By the time Marc got home, Frances was spending the loot.  For $35,000
she had rented Dragon's Hall, a famous old mansion in Southampton,
Long

Island, originally built by the DuPonts.  It has three floors,
twenty-five ornately furnished rooms, a ballroom-sized library, a fully
equipped, restaurant-sized kitchen, a night-lit, palette-shaped
swimming pool, acres of landscaping, its own dock and jetty, and an
imposing entrance marked by red painted dragons on white pillars.

Frances had been careful not to tell her mother anything about the
mansion, so Granny had only bought Marc a plane ticket as far as New
York

City.  He had to do the last hundred miles by the Long Island Rail Road
and taxi, arriving at about midnight.  He was apprehensive riding up
the long driveway.  He felt he had done nothing right that summer and
expected his mother to be cold and angry.  Instead he found her
deliriously happy.

She hugged and kissed him warmly, as she had done only once before in
his life, when he was admitted to Allen-Stevenson.  This was the second
kiss from the Evil Queen.

Bubbling joyfully about her luxurious Southampton summer, Mom guided
Marc to a plush sofa in a vast living room lit by antique sconces and
decorated with dark paintings of shipwrecks and tempestuous storms.

Cantaloupe balls, caviar, and tiny toast squares had been set out, and
as his mother chattered gaily and fed him on "toasts liberally smeared
with caviar," he "got the distinct feeling that she was treating me
like a little boy who had fucked up a little bit, but all in all had
done a good job looting, stealing, insulting, and raiding his
grandparents."

The person Frances seemed to be angry at was Larry-so angry that from
the summer Of 1977 onward, Larry was locked out for good.  When winter
came on, he would scratch at the apartment door, beg, and plead to be
let in.

Frances would not open, and she refused to let Marc open it.  As far
as

Frances was concerned, Larry had officially ceased to exist.

When Larry came home on weekends from EMA, he literally had no place to
go.  Until it got too cold, he slept in his car.  Occasionally he slept
at Behrens's place.  Eventually he would be back scratching and
pleading at the Schreuders' door.  Frances was adamant.  Larry knew how
to gain admittance to the building at 1675 York Avenue, but he could
not get into the triple-locked Schreuder apartment.  Roaming the back
fire stairs, he eventually found a bare space, a landing leading to a
door to the roof, which was unused in winter.  For an entire year
whenever he was "home," weekends and vacations, Larry slept up there
like a dog, wrapped in the New

York Times and curled into discarded cardboard cartons he found in the
trash and hauled up to his hideaway.  Sometimes when Larry came
scratching at the door, Marc was able to hand his brother a few clean
clothes, a sweater, or best of all, a blanket.  But only if his mother
was out or asleep.  Otherwise

Larry was firmly and permanently barred.

What had he done?  It was more a matter of what Larry had not done: He
had not put the black beauties in the oatmeal.  He had betrayed the
gang.  As

Marc said later, "She finally got sick of Larry because Larry was
bungling everything.  He wasn't putting the st ulf in.  Turned out she
never really wanted me to do it ... she thought I was gonna bungle it.
So putting the pills in Grandpa's bowl-that was supposed to be Larry's
job."

Once Larry Schreuder "ceased to exist," Marc and his mother were alone
together, entirely dependent on one another-"like husband and wife,"
the trial psychiatrist would say.  Ariadne was left in the care of a
young and proper "English nannie" whom Frances had engaged for the
season.  She appeared to be a pleasant and refined young woman who
adored Ariadne, and she swiftly taught her the exquisite good manners
which have since impressed so many.  "Usually the nursemaid has to buck
the mother," says a former caretaker at Dragon's Hall, a person who has
observed scores of the grinding nanny-versus-mom mie power struggles
which mark the Hampton summers.  "But this girl got a free hand, no
interference at all!  And the child was very, very intelligent, talked
very well ... a really sweet little thing!  But the mother was weird.
Wacko.  You could just look at her and see how eccentric she was."

Later Marc wrote to a friend: "Mom showed me pictures of that 'nice
English nanny' without a bra on or panties.  Mom claimed that this
nanny was into pornography, and that was why she fired her.  In my
opinion, she was nice, but she did spend an excessive amount of time on
the beach toasting herself a lovely hue of amber."

A neighborhood woman was employed by the owners of Dragon's Hall to do
the housekeeping.  She had her own key and arrived at the mansion by
bicycle several times a week.  The strange tenant chattered to the
housekeeper for hours.  "She talked a lot about Eastern schools.  She
knew the 'good' schools, the 'best."  She always talked about 'the
best."  I thought: From the way she spends money, I guess she can have
the best.

But all she had was coffee and cigarettes.  I don't ever recall seeing
her eat food.  I never once saw her near the pool."

The family had no cook.  Ariadne was fed by the English nanny.  Mare
seemed to fend for himself.  No meals were ever served.  "I used to
feel sorry for her, she seemed so lonely.  She talked about getting
ready for big dinner parties.  I remember once she ordered a case of
Dom Perignon.  Another time she told me she had a date that night with
David Rockefeller."  But she never had the party.  The champagne sat
there all summer.  She tried to give the housekeeper a bottle.  The
woman knew there were no dinner parties because there were never any
dishes in the sink and no leftovers in the fridge.  Nothing.

One day Frances showed her cleaning woman a five-month-old newspaper
story about the plane crash in which her husband had perished.  He had
been very wealthy, she said, and loved her very much, and had left her
a great deal of money.

The village woman also served as "upstairs maid," and she soon
discovered that Frances rarely got out of bed.  Her closet was stuffed
with expensive negligees, but she wore the same two garments almost all
stunt her long.

"I don't think she was very clean.  She never used the tub."

Frances had let it be known that she was interested in buying
Dragon's

Hall.  The woman from the real estate office who came around to discuss
it was surprised when the potential buyer opened the door wearing "a
filthy sundress, covered with spots."

Of Marc the housekeeper recalls only that he had "an eerie look in his
eye" and spoke very little.  One day she was cleaning a leopard-skin
love seat in the library, after Marc and Frances had been sitting
there, and discovered a pair of soiled women's panties tucked behind
the cushions.  Tactfully she left them where she found them.  The next
day they were gone.

One morning the village woman was unable to open the door.

She later learned that Mrs.  Schreuder had accused her of stealing and
had ordered all the locks changed.

Before he went west in the summer Of 1977, Marc had learned from Mom to
think of Granny as "mostly bad ... but Grandpa really still seemed
benevolent, benign, fatherly ... a distant, distant figure."  When Marc
returned, Frances had turned up the heat of her rage.  Now it seemed to
Marc that she said the same words to him every day: "He's a miser and a
dirty, sneaking liar.  He is very cold-blooded.  He was never a father
to me.  He wouldn't even pay for Elaine's heart operation.  He tried to
help kill my brother Bobl "

"She'd tell me these horror stories every day about how evil he was,"
Marc continues.  "How he used his money to try to destroy people.  How
he ruined a lot of people in business, to get all their money.  And
that a lot of people hated him.  And that he hated her too.  Because he
was letting her starve.  With Ariadne.  Go in the gutter!  How he
didn't have any feelings for any one of us!"

With these words ringing in his ears, Marc was buying new school
clothes and getting ready to return to Kent to begin eleventh grade.
Meanwhile out in Salt Lake City, Frank Bradshaw had stopped speaking
almost entirely.  The boss had never been loquacious, but Doug had
never known him to be so silent as he was in the weeks after Marc left
town.

One morning when Doug Steele arrived at the warehouse, Frank handed him
a half sheet of paper.  At first glance, it appeared to have been
Xeroxed from one of the pages of his will.  It was in fact a revision
of his will which the Boss had asked Nancy Jones to type up the day
before, and it named Doug and Marilyn Reagan as co administrators of
his estate.  Across the bottom of the page, Frank himself had typed in:
" 1/3 of my estate to Berenice J. Bradshaw, 1/3 to Marilyn Reagan, and
1/3 to Elaine Drukman.And that was it.

All of it.  He had not even signed the change, merely typewritten his
initials above the added line.  Frances was not even specifically
disinherited.  Like Larry, she had simply been declared nonexistent.

Could this feeble gesture be the old man's sole response to a $200,000
rip-off?  Only this phantom fist, this poison-pen letter written in
disappearing ink?  Just as curiously, a dozen Xerox copies of the
document later turned up scattered all over the vast warehouse.

Perhaps it was a gesture intended more for his ware house family than
his real family, not meant as a show of force to Frances but a show of
guts to his employees that, despite his humiliating tearful outburst,
he did not intend to be pushed around by his bossy wife, hooligan
grandsons, and criminal daughter.  If the message was intended for
Frances, it was even more remote than one of his vague, third-person
letters of reproach.  But even this pale threat was threat enough. 
When word of his note reached Frances, it triggered her determination
to assassinate him.

Almost certainly that word was passed by Berenice, At once some sort of
murder plot began to boil.  Frank had typed out his timid threat at the
end of August.  In early September, if Behrens can be believed, Frances
already was speaking to him about obtaining a gun.  She also mentioned
looking for a "hit man."  By October he had found and introduced her to
a barroom acquaintance, one Myles Manning.  In November Frances gave
Manning $5,000 to kill her father, he says.  He took the money, but
then told Frances he had been arrested in Salt Lake City before he
could carry out his assignment.

Undeterred, Frances continued her own efforts to obtain a weapon, Marc
and

Behrens say.  New York has stricter gun laws than its neighbors, so
Behrens says she sent him to try to buy a gun in New Jersey and
Virginia.  He was unsuccessful.  Meanwhile, says Marc, Frances was
buying stacks of gun magazines and sending away for mail-order gun
catalogs.  She took Marc with her on shopping tours of sporting goods
stores.  These were gleeful expeditions which often ended in
shoplifting sprees.

When Frances was feeling good, feeling flush and high, shoplifting was
her favorite pastime, Chinatown her preferred playground.  She loved
racing through Chinese gift shops scooping up cheap tourist gimcracks.
What she took was unimportant; the fun was the act of stealing.  If her
impulse to shoplift was urgent, she would go down to the deli and filch
flavoring extracts, expensive bottles of vanilla and cherry.  Forging,
stealing, shoplifting, lying, cheating, blackmail-all were made into a
Game, all were variations on the same sport, the sport of Getting Away
with It.

Tuition was now due at three schools-Kent, EMA, and Episcopal.  Frances
demanded that Berenice pay it all.  It did not matter that Frances
herself now had more money than ever before in her life.  Unless
Berenice paid the new crop of school bills, Frances vowed never to
speak to her mother again.

So once again

Berenice's "help" consisted of forging her husband's signature to pay
her daughter's bills.  Was this demand merely another variation of
Frances's

Game, or were the new forgeries extracted as a kind of insurance?

Entrapping Berenice now in current Schreuder larcenies would ensure
that she remained vulnerable to further blackmail at some future date.
As it worked out, the forged tuition checks were to serve quite a
different purpose.

Once the tuition checks were signed, Frances had no further use for

Berenice, and she immediately severed all communications with Salt
Lake.

She forbade her children to write or to accept phone calls.  She
returned cards and gifts unopened.  For ten months Frances totally cut
the

Bradshaws out of her life.  Now they were "nonexistent."  Frances had
plenty of money.  She could live life as she chose, could drain it to
the lees without interference from parents or husbands.  She spent
thousands on new clothes, trinkets from Tiffany's, including $20,000
diamond earrings, later replaced by a pair that cost $40,000.  She paid
off thousands of dollars worth of backed-up psychiatry bills to Dr.
Brand, whom she continued to see.  She hung onto Dragon's Hall until
January, and she and Marc and Ariadne spent several long fall weekends
out at the mansion.  In New York she hired a daily maid, Jewels, to
clean and keep house, and to deliver Ariadne to Episcopal Nursery
School each morning, now that Marc had gone back to Kent.

Frances's own mornings were passed in an hours-long routine which had
to be followed in an unvarying way.  It left little time for anything
else and often made her one or two or even three hours late for
subsequent appointments.  Sometimes she was unable to get there at all.
When she awoke, at nine or ten o'clock on weekdays, the routine
required her to read and digest all of the New York Times and Daily
News before getting out of bed.  The process took several hours, fueled
by endless pots of black coffee and interrupted by the day's necessary
phone calls, any one of which might last an hour or more.  The routine
was carried out in a chain-smoking haze.  Getting through the papers in
this manner took so long that often the routine had to be interrupted
by the press of other events, in which case the unread papers were
stacked near the bed for future completion.  Breakfast, on a tray, was
two or three poached eggs, three or four or six slices of whole wheat
toast, more coffee, and cigarettes.  Now the metabolic tempo began to
pick up.  Frances had always been a "nighter,"

and as afternoon and evening wore on, the nicotine and the gi
nand-tonic, which by now had replaced the river of caffeine, induced a
state of increasing wakefulness which lasted until the wee hours and
could be extinguished only by sleeping pills, until the cycle began
anew.  Thus although Frances did not "do" anything in the conventional
meaning of the term, she was always very "busy" and almost always
late.

As much of the routine as possible-all the reading, eating, drinking,
and phoning-happened in or on her big bed, a kind of large, untidy nest
which was shared first with Marc, later with Ariadne, and on rare,
brief occasions with Larry.  Although the children had their own rooms,
they preferred to spend as much time as possible with their mother,
doing homework, reading, playing with cats and toys, or watching TV
from their own side of the bed.  Ariadne slept with her mother until
she was eight or nine and got a nightly nursing bottle as well.  Granny
did not approve, but domestic tranquility required her to look the
other way unless Frances was out of town and she was temporarily in
charge of the household.

On school days Frances had herself up and dressed in time to pick up

Ariadne.  Most of the youngsters were picked up after school by maids
or limousines, so the few parents who came in person to collect their
offspring got to know one another slightly.  Frances Schreuder is
remembered by them as extremely shy, withdrawn, "almost frightened. 
You had to really work at it to get her to talk at all."  Mrs. 
Schreuder did manage to convey, however, that she herself was a
graduate of Miss Hewitt's Classes -a

Manhattan finishing school of highest gloss.  And though she declined
to join Episcopal's PTA or participate in other school activities, she
was prompt and generous with cash gifts for any school project.  Aside
from her other ness and lack of physical allure-made the more striking
by Ariadne's loveliness-Frances is chiefly remembered for looking "much
too old to be

Ariadne's mother."  Ariadne had been born four days after Frances's
thirty fifth birthday.  She was a "late baby," just as Frances herself
had been.

On weekends Frances slept until noon, sometimes longer.  Ariadne's
favorite plaything had become a pair of Frances's old ballet slippers,
from her high school days, made of faded pink silk trimmed in white
lace.  The child took to wearing the slippers around the house.  Once
or twice Frances put

Tschaikovsky on the record player and showed Ariadne a few steps.
Weekends were also the times when Larry tried to sneak back home.
Marc's job was to guard the door.  But he felt sorry for Larry, and if
his mother was asleep or out,

Marc would sometimes let Larry in.  "Then," Marc says, "Mom would find
out he'd been here and threaten to lock me out if I did it again."

So at other times, Marc says, he would stand absolutely still just
inside the door, not making a sound, just watching Ariadne playing, on
one side, listening to his brother begging and sometimes sobbing on the
other side, and pounding some metal object against the heavy Medico
burglar-proof lock.

One time, when Frances was home, Larry pleaded with Marc for over an
hour to open the door, while Frances screamed from her bedroom, "Don't
you dare let him in!"

"Come on, Marc!  Just let me in!  Just let me get some of my stuff!
Please let me in!  Pleasel"

It was early afternoon, bright sunshine, Marc recalls, when he finally
opened the door.  Larry dashed toward their bedroom.  Frances came out
of her room shouting, "Okay, get back out!  Get back out, Larryl GET

OUTI"

Larry, in their room, was frantically tearing blankets off a bed,
grabbing pillows, coats, shoes, sweaters.  Frances was yelling, "Leave
my house immediately!"

She turned on Marc, and her voice grew low, menacing.  "Okay, Marc. 
You get him out.  Or you're locked out too!"

Marc pleaded for time.  "Come on, Mom!  Why don't you just let him get
his stuff!"

"Marc .. - I warned you

Marc approached his brother.  "Come on, Larry!  You gotta go, Larry.

Please!"  Now Marc was doing the begging, and Larry was becoming more
methodical in collecting his belongings.

"Marc, I'm calling the pol icel Frances shrilled.

"Come on, Larry, you've got to leave now," Marc whined, and he began
trying to shove his brother and his jumble of bedclothes out the front
door again while shoes and caps tumbled to the floor.

Frances decided she and Marc and Ariadne should spend Christmas
vacation out at Dragon's Hall.  When Marc got home from Kent, he spent
most of one day and night helping his mother and Jewels prepare for the
journey.

"Packing or moving is always a horrendous and excruciating ordeal for

Mom," he explains.  "She has to pack thirty dresses, ten pairs of
shoes, and all the massive bundles of paperwork, newsprint, and other
documentation she never has time to sort out, read, or throw away."

Shortly before they were ready to leave, Marc made a comment about
Berenice which enraged Frances.  She accused him of 'calling Granny on
the sneak," which he denied.  "She'd been harping on that ever since
summer," he says, accusing him of having been "brainwashed by Granny,"
and acquiring "all of

Granny's bad habits.  I had come back fat.  "Ewe, you're just like
Grannyl

Ewe!"

Marc did not think he was fatter; the kids at school had said nothing.
"But

Mom kept saying I was behaving and talking just like sick Granny, and
had picked up all of Granny's nasty, filthy habits, and she didn't want
me to live around her, if I was gonna act like sick-in-the-head
Granny."  Shouting now that he was "a Granny ass-licker" and "ball-less
wonder," Frances said she intended to punish Marc by making him spend
Christmas all alone in the apartment.  She insisted on carrying the
suitcases down to the underground garage without his help, and when all
was stowed, she and Ariadne drove off.

It was twilight in the midst of the holiday rush-hour traffic on the

Triboro Bridge when Frances ran out of gas.  Later she would blame both
Marc and Behrens.  She had left her gas tank full, she claimed, but
Behrens had pinched her car keys the night before and taken Marc out
joyriding.  Now

Frances managed to coast to a stop, two hundred yards from the nearest
emergency phone.  Leaving Ariadne in the front seat, Frances got out of
her car and darted across two lanes of whizzing traffic to a police
call box.

It was out of order.  As Frances tells the story, she was back in the
big red Oldsmobile, singing Christmas carols with Ariadne while they
waited for help to arrive when-wham!  whaml-they were rear-ended, hit
and hit again, by a drunk driver.  Ariadne was thrown to the floor.
Frances's head slammed the windshield, and she passed out twice while
the cops were extricating her from the wreckage.  "Each time I came
to," she says, "my only thought was:

Is Ariadne alive?"

Half an hour after his mom had stormed out, Marc got a call from the
police.  His mother and sister had been in a car wreck and were now in
the emergency room at Metropolitan Hospital Center, on 1st Avenue and
97th

Street--almost Harlem after all!  Marc raced uptown and found his
sister with a slight concussion and his mother with an injured back and
bruised head.  He spent the next five hours consoling Mom, talking to
cops, and scavenging the wreck to recover its precious cargo-Mom's
luggage, and literally scores of Christmas presents, their wrappings
torn and scattered.

Marc's most urgent assignment was to hire a car and driver from a
limousine service so they could immediately resume the journey.
Eventually Mom and

Ariadne were bandaged and released from the hospital; luggage and
Christmas presents were stowed aboard the limo, and everybody including
the now forgiven Marc piled in for the long drive out to Dragon's Hall.
They arrived at four o'clock in the morning.  Ariadne was fine. 
Frances wore a neck brace for a while, and the car was totaled; they
did not even bother to collect the wreck from the police parking lot. 
Frances warned her children repeatedly: never, never disclose the
accident to Berenice.  All the presents turned out to be for Ariadne,
says Marc. For his own combined

Christmas and seventeenth birthday present-December 2i-his mother gave
him what they each prized most: cash.

Larry spent Christmas in New York, alone.

The Reagans visited the Bradshaws in Salt Lake City over Christmas, and
one day Berenice caught her daughter snooping through her basement
files.

Marilyn knew all about the half-page will memorandum which her father
had

Xeroxed and spread around his warehouse, and Berenice surmised her
daughter was searching for a copy of the new will itself, as proof that
she was now co executrix and Frances was eliminated entirely. Nonsense,
says Marilyn.

When the year-end dividends of F & B Corporation had been handed out
that

Christmas, Frances and her sons, but not Ariadne, had been pointedly
omitted from the distribution.  This was sufficient proof to Marilyn
and everyone else in the family of her father's state of mind in regard
to the

Schreuders.  As for her activities in her mother's office, they simply
reflected her ongoing sense of responsibility to keep herself fully
briefed on estate matters at all times.  Nonetheless both Marilyn and
Elaine believed, and continue to believe today, that Franklin Bradshaw
had executed a new will, one which reflected his new state of mind
regarding the Schreuders.  They are convinced that someone found and
destroyed the new will on the day of their father's murder, or perhaps
the night before.

By the time Marc had gotten home from Kent for Christmas vacation, he
says, the $200,000 loot from the previous summer was almost gone.  Now
Frances was saying that-her efforts to hire a hit man having
failed-Marc himself was going to have to kill his grandfather before
the evil old man carried out his threat and starved them all into
submission.

Sometimes she wheedled; other times she raged.  Marc tried to say
nothing at all.  It was always least painful to himself, if he could
summon the fortitude, to keep silent and let his mother's emotional
typhoons simply blow themselves out.  But once he lost his temper and
shouted, "Why don't you do it!"

"I would do it," he says she replied.  "But then who would take care
of

Ariadne?  What am I supposed to do-bring her along with me?"  When Marc
said he would take care of his sister, Frances jeered, "Oh, come off
it,

Marc!"  and turned away.

In January Frances received still another eviction notice.  There must
then have been some communication with Salt Lake, because one day as

Franklin was eating his meat loaf sandwich, he told Doug Steele he had
a new plan: if the Schreuders would agree to come back to Salt Lake, he
was going to give them the house on Gilmer Drive; make them a present
of it.  He and Berenice would buy a little condominium, closer to the
warehouse.

Berenice yearned to inform Frances of all she was doing in the

Schreuders' behalf, despite Franklin's opposition.  But Frances refused
her phone calls.  She tore up her mother's letters unopened.  So Granny
began sending copies of her letters to the boys at boarding school.
Marc sided with his mother and remained incommunicado.  But lonesome
Larry wrote back.  A clandestine correspondence began.  Berenice begged
her grandson to destroy her letters, of course.  She dreaded what would
happen if they should fall into the wrong hands, Frances's hands.  But
Larry was a Bradshaw, and Bradshaws throw nothing away.  By the time
the Bradshaw case came to trial, these letters, like Granny's forged
tuition checks, had fallen into the hands of the law.

Sunday, Jan 29th, 1978

Dear Frances:

I think I have some good news for you ... Yes, at 74 I'm going to work,
for your family ... It is strange the minute I mentioned "work" he
[Dad] lit up.  I've decided you can

"catch more flies with honey than vinegar.  "I call him "the slave
driver."

I'm telling Dad you and your family need your inheritance now not 20
years from now.  I wrote to Marc and told him to have his school bill
sent to Grandpa.  We have never heard from Marc since her left here,
not even a note to thank his grandfather of his Xmas and birthday
checks.  We have had many letters from Larry and he thanks us for
everything we do for him ... . If you want to spend the rest of my life
hating me you are only hurting yourself ... . Because your financial
problems concern Marc and Larry I'm sending them a copy of this
message.  Both boys are very worried about how their family is going to
live ... All my love, Granny

Feb.  14th, 1978

Dear Larry: .  we are paying for a dead horse ... [Frances had allowed
her car insurance to lapse before the Triboro Bridge accident.] .  the
Xmas present I sent to her [came back] "unopened".  If she had taken a
club and beat me over the head she could not have hurt me more .  I
can't sleep, eat, I cry half of the day.  I believe if you boys had let
me know about her horrible accident I could have ... patched things up
I had a feeling it would take a disaster for get us back together
again, we had the disaster but I did not know about it ... I can't
understand, every time she is sick, in the hospital she refuses for me
to know until she is well.  WhyM Why, does she hate me?  ... Marc has
all the same hated feelings towards me his mother has because she has
thoroughly indoctranated him with her feelings ... . She intendes; to
turn my granddaughter against me (she told me so)

Why?  Why should Ariadne be taught and told to hate her grandmother
when she has no cause to hate me.  Her mother has poisoned her her
against her grandmother ... I'm her only source of income how can she
treat me like this ... Never once has she ever thanked me ... Larry
destroy this letter so no one with ever see it.

All my love, Granny

Monday Feb.  2oth 1978

Dear Larry:

You have been very faithful about writing to us and we appreciate it
very much.  If you didn't write we would never know what is happening
to your family ... You are our family and we are concerened about all
of you.  "Blooi-is thicker than water" and you don't errase blood
ties.

I .. We are her only source of income, without us your whole family
would perish and yet we are treated like the "scum of the earth" by
her

Your mother is causing all of you to suffer because she wants to punish
us ... Last summer was a nitemare to Grandpa and me but we are not
being revengeful or hostile instead we are digging down trying to keep
your family from sinking ... I'm never allowed in her house (the door
will be bolted shut she says), she intends to turn Ariadne against me
by leting her hear the tapes (what is on those tapes I don't know) ..

Grandpa paid her car insurance ... If you mother is ever in the
hospital again, and she will be, please let me know maybe at such a
time

I can bound some sense in her head and make her understand she needs me
Why don't you apply to the Forestry Service for a summer job?  . I
don't think you could possibly earn enough to support yourself in

MY....

Your grandfather is still working his long hours but he is ageing and
is not well.  He hardly eats anything is is getting thinner and
thinner

Larry please destroy all my letter, I don't want them to get back to
your home ... I woyld never take Marc into my confidence.  He is an
"old blabber mouth".  Tells all.  When handling family difficulties you
have to use discretion.  I'm afraid I did not use discretion in
things

I said last summer and our family fury is the result ... Sunday April
9th, 1978

Dear Larry:

I dread getting Marc on the phone, he is like "talking to a
vegetable".

Everything I ask him the answer was and is: "I don't know".  Your
mother has Marc so brainwashed he doesn't dare say "his soul is his
own."  .. He did let me talk to Ariadne once for a few minutes but she
started ca ling me "offensive names" so I hung up, I was totally
shocked

I called back a few minutes later and asked Marc who taught Ariadne to
call me names and he siad: "I don't know".  He said you boys were going
to get Easter dinner.  I said: "What are you preparing for dinner?"  He
said: I don't know" .  see what I mean about talking to a vegetable

Thursday was your mother's birthday ... Did you get the Sioo check I
sent to you for Easter?  Before Easter I sent your mother $i,000 and
each of you kids I sent $100 for Easter and vacation money.  Sent a
check for $ijoo for

Dr.  Nelson her dentist.  Last week I set her another $1,000 plus $100
check from Grandpa for her birthday and Sioo for Ariadne's birthday
which is tomorrow.  That makes a total $3,600 I have sent to her within
the month.

Never does she write or' call ... I put in 3 to 5 hours la day] at the
warehouse.  I get paid $4 an hour, that brings me in around $200 twice
a month.  Every cent, plus my zoo

Social Security I send to your mother.  I got a check from F & B for
$2,400 and every cent was sent to your family ... If it wasn't for
financing your family I would be traveling.  Your mother knows how
much

I like to travel.  I haven't had a nice trip for several years because
your family need my money and help ... I wil be 75 in May.  I keep up
my home, keep Grandpa's food prepared, clothing washed, go to the Spa
at least 5 times a week have spent a little time doing genealogy ...
Grandpa "purrs like a kitten" when I go down there to work.  He is
looking very old and so tired.  He still goes to work at 6 A,m, and
home between 8 and 9 P.m. every day ... Monday April 3rd he was 76. 
Not one in your family sent him a birthday card ... The warehouse gave
him a huge, beautiful, delicious cake ... The IRS is on our back to pay
tax on money we have given your family to live on in 1976.  Your mother
reported her income from us as a gift now the government is on our back
to pay "them" a gift tax

I think you should contact your grandfather regarding your college
financing ... Your grandfather says he does not plan to finance you and
Marc's college education.  He says you boys are to earn your way thru
college ... All these years your mother has stuck her kids in expensive
private schools and sent us the bills ... She plans to put

Ariadne in expensive private schools but she never asks us if we will

Vqv for it ... Your family does not have a dime of income coming in
except from ME ... It is incredible that your family should live in a
$i,000 apartment with all the normal monthly expenses and no one works
and yet you have no you have no income.  No one else in this whole
world lives like this.

I think your mother has had a very sad life, she has such poor health
also.  Your family is on my mind constantly.  I love Frances very, very
much I feel so very sorry for her.  I just wish I could help her
physically but she will never let me in her home ... Today is Ariadne's
birthday.  How much I would like to be there to share it with her.  I
sent her a lovely figurine from the store, cost $45 and also a check
for $100 and a lovely birthday card but I don't think your mother will
tell her it is from "Granny".  Your mother refuses to acknowledge me as
her mother.  How horrible.  Baween you and me I think she is suffering
from a mental breakdown ... She hates her parents and every relative
she has ... . Once more I suggest you destroy my letters if they get in
her hands she will only hate me more.

So for my sake see to it my letters do not get back to her, PLEASE.

[undated; approx.  April ig, t9781

Dear Marc and Larry: .  We are so very proud of both you boys, Larry
for his ROTC scholarship and Marc for the honor rolls ... . My social
security check goes right off to your mother, also my pay check down at
Bapco [Bradshaw Auto Parts) ... I earn between $400 and $5o00a month,
social security $200, and I get an oil check that amounts around $100
so this makes about $700 a month I send to your mother.  I got a check
from F & B

Investment in March for $2400 ... I tried for months to get your mother
by phone.  I called all day on her birthday [April 61, all day on
Ariadne's birthday [April io] but she never answers.  Finally one
evening last week I just decided to try once more and she answered.  I
was surprised and pleased.  She talked 1 1/2 hours ... She tells me how
much Ariadne loves her dancing.  Her dancing lesson fell on her
birthday but she prefered her dancing Lesson to a birthday party.  I'm
so pleased Ariadne has taken to dancing.  It is unusual for a girl so
young to take to an artistic activity such as dancing.  I wanted to be
a dancer ... . Now that spring is here the house needs cleaning ... I
do get in a little social life.  Sat.  I went to the "Ice Follies."

Sunday, April 26, 1978

Dear Larry: .  First we are all thrilled and pleased over your
scholarship .. It must be a great relief to you to know for the next 8
years at least your life is all scheduled for you with no financial
worries ... . Grandpa and I ... can't understand why you say you need
money for Lehigh application?  We will send you the money if you can
explain to us what you did with the other Lehigh check we sent you.

We are pleased you have a part time job.  Your mother and Marc should
be earning some money.

Grandpa and I are concerned and worried about your home conditions.  We
can't understand why your mother keeps denying you to come home .  ,

She says you eat and drink, (milk and orange juice) Ariadne's foods .
As I said in my last letter your mother is suffering some emotional and
mental problems ... She is now 4o and has accomplished nothing.

Grandpa and I have been nagging her for years to make something of
herself ... Larry I want you to know you can come to our home any time.
Our home is your home.  There is no need of you going to your own home
if you are not let in and welcomed.  Never again do I want you and Marc
in my house at the same time I will never forget the vol gular names
Marc called me ... I'm glad you admit and realize how wasteful you were
with your money last summer ... It made me sick to see you boys
throwing your money around when I knew how desporately you would need
money for the coming school year ... The vacation money I sent to Marc,
he gave most of it to his mother, I will give Marc credit he does look
out for his mother in a financial way which You don't ... . We will
send you the money for a bus ticket any place you want to go to get
work ... Your mother says the insurance company is furnishing her with
a car.  I don't think she should be driving a car.  She can't afford
the gas to run it.

All for now, Let us hear from you

Lots of love, Granny

Cut off from the Schreuders, Granny spent her free time that spring
researching her family tree in Salt Lake City's huge Genealogical
Library and traced her Huguenot roots all the way back to Charlemagne.
Invisible to Granny, life in the Schreuder's New York household had
reached a rolling boil.  Several grand designs were growing at once,
expanding and overlapping.  One day Frances was seen lunching at La
Cote Basque, one of

Manhattan's most fashionable restaurants.  Her guest, a Bryn Mawr
alumna, truthfully did not remember anybody named Frankie Bradshaw. 
But the woman had been out of college twenty years, and Frankie had
named several classmates she did recall.  Now the woman was on the
boards of several educational institutions, and Frankie had said on the
phone that she wanted to discuss her own passionate commitment to
quality education.  Her belief in stricter schools and higher academic
standards had developed, she explained, while she was living in Europe
as the wife of a wealthy industrialist.  Her husband had recently died,
and now she wanted to make certain endowments in his memory.  The
conversation was resolutely high-toned, but Frankie made it clear that
her son attended

Allen-Stevenson, and she wanted a letter of recommendation to a good
girls' school for her daughter.

The next day, calling herself "Elaine Drukman," Frances was seen
opening a checking account in an East Side branch of the
Manufacturers

Hanover Bank.  Her son Marc accompanied her.

A few days later Richard Behrens was seen in New Jersey making
inquiries about buying a gun.  Then Frances and Marc were seen in a
bank.  Together they forged and cashed a $323 IRS tax-refund check
which had arrived in the mail for Larry.  Frances was frequently seen
that spring in her psychiatrist's office.  What they discussed is
unknown, but she paid a portion of her medical bills with a forged $72o
Franklin J. Bradshaw check.

Frances was also seen at at least four Manhattan private
schools-Spence,

Hewitt, Chapin, and Brearley-making inquiries about enrolling a
daughter and hinting broadly that she would like to offer endowment and
scholarship funds to the school.

Frances dragooned her Bryn Mawr friend into another lunch, this time at
the chic cafe Des Artistes.  For two hours she debated whether the
school letter for Ariadne should be handwritten or typed, and whether
personal or business stationery created a better impression.  She had
drafted a letter which said something like "I have visited many fine
homes, and rarely have

I encountered such an atmosphere of culture and refinement as exists in
the

Schreuder family."  The friend, who had never been inside the
Schreuders' door, thought this sounded pretentious and silly, but she
too proved unable to say no to Frances.  As it had to so many others,
it seemed preferable by now to be rid of Mrs.  Schreuder by saying
yes.

Frances was next seen by the woman's Park Avenue doorman.  She had
dropped off a small package which turned out to contain an effusive
thank-you note-handwritten on fancy Tiffany stationery-and a goo
Tiffany wristwatch.

The woman telephoned Frances again, trying to say no, she could not
possibly accept.  Frances insisted until the woman decided it was
easier to keep the watch than continue the conversation.

One day Frances was seen back at Gino Restaurant, having a long,
voluble, high-spirited lunch with Vittorio.  As they were leaving,
Vittorio says,

Frances told him with a laugh that if her family was going to survive,
somebody was simply going to have to murder her father.  "I'm probably
going to have to put out a contract on him!"  she giggled as they
pushed their way out into the fine May sunshine on Lexington Avenue.

Larry graduated from EMA in June.  Behrens drove Marc out to Long
Island for the big occasion; Frances did not attend.  The band played,
cadets marched, and Larry Schreuder was the undisputed hero of the day.
He was the only graduate to win a full college ROTC scholarship for
"having demonstrated exceptional leadership potential," in return for
four years of military service.  He was also named top boy in the
school, and class valedictorian.  He won varsity letters in wrestling
and track.  He was honored as editor of the school newspaper, which he
himself had founded, and as president of the Stamp and Coin Club, which
he had also founded.  He was champion of the chess squad.  But Larry
had ridden to victory on a dying horse.  Eastern Military Academy was
by then in such an advanced stage of decay that as soon as the diplomas
were handed out and the folding chairs stowed, the school was closed
for good, shut down by New York State for over seventy health and
safety code violations.  Marc took many pictures of the graduation
ceremonies with his new Nikon, bought with last summer's stolen money.
He and Larry could hardly wait to send them to Salt Lake.  They wished
they could see the faces of their proud grandparents as they examined
the photographs.  The pictures emphasized the fact that most of his
classmates, said Larry, were "big, thick-lipped niggers, real jungle
bunnies!"  great joke on the snooty

Bradshaws, both brothers agreed, and they giggled with Behrens about it
all the way back to New York.

Granny had already sent homeless Larry a $75 Trailways bus ticket, good
for any destination in the United States.  Larry chose "The Lake."  He
had told her he had no where else to go.  But nobody wanted him down at
the warehouse.  So, within a week of his arrival, he had conned Granny
into $3,500 worth of flying lessons, a small price to get him out of
her house.  Before the summer ended, Larry had earned his pilot's
license, and had pretty well memorized the aerial topography of eight
western states.

In early July Behrens made another trip to Virginia, and was again
unsuccessful in obtaining a gun.  Ironically the easiest place to buy a
weapon would probably have been Salt Lake City.  Utah then required no
fingerprinting, no ballistics testing of new weapons, no waiting
period.

The same kind of weapon that was to be used to kill Frank Bradshaw is
readily available in K-Mart.

At about the time Behrens returned empty-handed from Virginia, Frances
compelled Marc to make three phone calls.  Inconsistencies, evasions,
and lies cloud the accounts of this period given by Marc, Larry, and
Behrens.

But three years later a massive records search by Utah authorities
nailed down certain critical airline and telephone dates.  On July 13
Marc called Jon Cavenaugh, a Kent School acquaintance who lived in
Midland, Texas, and said he was on his way to Utah to see his
grandparents and maybe to go on a hunting trip.  He might come by way
of Texas and try to buy a gun there.  "No problem," Jon said, but Marc
sounded so vague that Jon didn't really expect him to turn up.

That same day Behrens received a twcIve-minute collect call from Salt
Lake

City.  The only person Behrens knew in Utah was Larry.  "It's gonna
come down soon now," Behrens would claim Larry said.  "Wow!  I'll stay
close to home, then," he said Larry replied.

The same day, Marc talked Granny into persuading Gramps; to send the

Schreuders a last $3,000.  Their rent was now $i,u)o a month, and his
mother had received a second eviction notice.  If Gramps; would come
through just one more time, Marc promised, none of the Schreuders would
ask him for anything ever again.  Ultimately the old man agreed.  But
as if to underscore the object of his compassion, Frank Bradshaw told
his secretary Nancy Jones to draw the check in Ariadne's name.  Some of
this money would be used to buy a plane ticket and gun.

And the same day, July 13, someone also called United Airlines in New
York

City and made a plane reservation from Salt Lake City to Dallas to New
York in the name of "L.  Schreuder."  That reservation was never picked
up, nor the caller identified.  But it looks very much as if someone
was trying to frame Larry.

The big $3,000 check was cashed in New York as soon as it arrived. 
Marc says that by the time he was ready to pick up the plane ticket,
July ig, not enough money was left in the kitty to cover both it and
the gun.

Frances told him to hock his new camera and recording equipment.  He
took them down to Olden Camera, on Broadway, and raised another $300,
which he turned over to Mom.  Then he went to the Plaza Hotel, his old
home, and gave the clerk at the American Airlines branch office in the
lobby the cash for a round trip New York-Texas-Utah-New York ticket
made out in the name of

"L.  Gentile."

Young Jon Cavenaugh was away at work at his welding job July 20 when
Marc rang the doorbell of the large, two-storey house on a tree-shaded
street in

Midland, Texas.  When his mother said Jon was not at home, Marc
"expected to have a cold door slammed in my face."  Instead,

 R

naugh invited him in and started fixing him lunch.  After he had eaten,
she showed him to the guest bedroom.  Marc could not believe it.  He
had never stayed overnight with a school friend, he says, and had no
notion of normal family life.  Now, simply because he was a friend of
Jon's, the Cavenaughs were making him part of their family.  "The whole
attitude of the family seemed so genial and happy!"  he said later.  He
was surprised when Mrs.

Cavenaugh went out to do the grocery shopping.  He had assumed that Jon
ran down to the store whenever his family got hungry, just as he did.

When Jon got home from work, Marc told him he wanted to buy a gun, and
they discussed the comparative merits of rifles, shotguns, and
handguns.  Marc knew nothing about weapons, Jon could tell, but since
his friend lived in

New York City, Jon decided he "might as well" buy a revolver.  It would
be a useful item to have at home as well as on the road, Jon thought.
Since

Marc was technically underage-not, evidently, a serious matter in that
part of the world-Jon arranged the purchase through a former boss, a
gas station operator named Malcolm McPhail.  He knew a woman named
Sharla Vestal, then the wife of a deputy sheriff, Jerry Register, who
dealt in guns on the side.  On Saturday morning Marc and Jon met with
Register and McPhail in the lobby of the Commercial Bank Tower, and the
deal was indeed "no problem."

Jon and McPhail examined the weapon, and when they pronounced it good,
Marc peeled Off $175 of his grandfather's money.  Register was
surprised.  He had thought one of the Texans was the buyer.  But that
was "no problem" either, and Marc took possession of the big, new .357
magnum Smith & Wesson

"Policeman's Special" still in its original box.  "That oughta take
care of anything you run into back-packing in the mountains," someone
said.  A few dollars more, to McPhail, bought Marc a box of bullets.
The affable gas station owner instructed him how to get the weapon
through the airport security and aboard the plane: Simply check it in
his suitcase.  Marc obeyed.  He did not even take the blue-steel weapon
out of its box.

While he was in Texas, Marc says, he loved playing Monopoly with Jon's
two little brothers.  He also enjoyed the family dinners, sitting
around a real table while Jon's mother served and nice Dr.  Cavenaugh
carved.  Marc claims he knew this sort of behavior only from TV.  At
his house either he did the cooking or they had

TV dinners and takeout food, and they almost always ate in Mom's
bedroom.

"That was the one point when I really didn't want to go through with
this whole insane plan--bumping off Gramps," Marc says.  "I thought:
Wowl

Wouldn't it be nice to just stay he rel I was just fantasizing.  Boyl I
love this familyl The mother's so warm and friendly ... and the
father.

They're so nor mall The house is so neat!  Not a pigsty.  They seem so
happyl

They're having so much fun here.  GW~ I wish I could just stay for
evert

"It would just be a little fantasy.  Then I'd come back to reality. 
No, I gotta get this job done.  No, I gotta gain Mom's love back." 
Marc did stay over in Texas one extra day; he was supposed to leave
Friday evening, the twenty-first.  "Mom wanted me to have more time at
the Lake.  To prepare myself "

What does he -mean by "prepare"?  Are Marilyn and Elaine right-was
there another will?  If so, it would positively have to be destroyed
before it could fall into police hands.  A new will would not only
disinherit the

Schreuders, it would show police the motive for the crime which was
about to occur.

Marc Schreuder did not leave Texas until Saturday afternoon.  He
arrived in

Salt Lake at 9:50 P.m. After he recovered his bag, he walked out into
the desert wasteland around the airport, opened his suitcase, opened
the gun box, took out the weapon, pointed into the dark, and fired a
gun for the first time in his life.

Earlier that same evening, July 22, Larry had worked at the warehouse
with his grandfather for the only time that summer.  At about
six-thirty,

Berenice picked him up for supper and took him to the Spaghetti Factory
in

Trolley Square.

Did Larry return to the warehouse later, after Frank Bradshaw had gone
home?  Did he open the inside padlocks for Marc?

Alone, or perhaps with Marc, did he spend the night tearing apart the
old warehouse, knowing it was the last time they could quarry hidden
treasure from this disordered Ali Baba's cave?  Was this the night that
the original 1970 will disappeared from the warehouse, the will that
could not be found after Frank Brad shaw's death?  Did Larry or Marc
perhaps also find a new will one disinheriting them all---and destroy
it before they destroyed its author?  I

Marc says that when his plane landed in Salt Lake City, he took a taxi
to the motel his mother had recommended, registered under the fake name
she had recommended, and then called home collect and told her he could
not go through with it.  Their conversation lasted an hour-and-a-half.
He was crying much of the time, but Frances was implacable.  "She told
me, "Okay, Marc.  If you're not gonna do it, don't bother coming home."
She said that in a really gutter like nasty voice which I can never
forget.  "Don't bother coming home.  Me and

Ariadne will live in a Harlem tenement and collect welfare.  And the
door will be locked forever.  Doors can be opened.  And doors can be
closed.""

Marc still hears the dreadful voice today.  Remembering, he says, "At
that point in my life that was torture for me.  I was never gonna let
myself get on Mom's bad side, like Larry got on her bad side, and get
locked out permanently.  I would do anything to avoid getting locked
out then.  And it would have happened!  I know it.  To this day I'm
sure of it.  And Mom would have been evicted!  Because Gramps was not
coming through with any more money.  And I would have been blamed for
her eviction.  Blamed for every misfortune that came after that.  I was
pretty sure Mom would have hated me for ever and ever.  And I couldn't
stand that idea.  Here I had spent so many years trying to fight for
her love.  Trying to do everything just perfect, just right for her.
And here I blow it ... just because of one ... well ..."  his twitchy
voice drops.  "Just because I won't bump off Gramps.  You know?"

The staring blue eyes look down.  There is a long silence.  "I feel
funny talking about this ..."  But Marc cannot stop talking about it,
Very early the next morning, still following his mother's instructions,
he says, he taxied to the warehouse, and hid across the street.  He saw
his grandfather arrive.  He followed him inside.  "And in the
warehouse, even when I was talkin' to him, I was still thinking: God, I
have to ki .. I was still talking myself into it, it seemed like.  It
was running through my mind: Why don't I just throw this gun in the
river?  And just go home and live with Granny?

"But I just couldn't.  Just couldn't!  I said to myself.  "Mom will
never love me again.  I've gotta get with Mom."

"I was actually talking to him.  But my mind was thinking completely
different.  My mind was racing.  Trying to think of excuses.  Trying to
think of anything!  I wasn't even conscious of what I was saying.  I
could only hear my thoughts, not my voice.

"My mind said: Fuck this.  man!  FUCK THIS, MAN!  I'm gonna go live
with

Granny.  It was that clear!  But it was like a fantasy also.  Then I'd
bring myself back to reality again: I hadda do it!

I hadda do it!

"It was like, as if ... when I was doing it, as if .  I was going
through a third person.  Like I was above myself and looking down.  As
if

I was seeing all of it through a frosted glass.  I wasn't really aware
of what I was doing.  AHRRGH!  I don't know what the hell was going
through me, y'know?

"Then the voice that said, Fuck thisl I'll go live with Granny, it
got

SQUASHED.  By things like: "at happens if Mom kills herself?  Yes: Mom
will kill herself And I'll get locked out.  And I'll never see Mom
again.

Mom'll never see me again.  I can never live with Mom again.  Mom's my
only friendl ... Granny's evil.  Granny will smother me Granny will
kill me by feeding me to death.  Like she did Mom's brother.  "

Marc does not know what would have happened if his grandfather had not
turned away.  He does not recall how long they talked, nor what they
were talking about.  They stood three to four feet apart.  "But he
[Gramps] had to turn ... Because I couldn't do it in his face.  Sneaky
to the end.

I just couldn't do it

I just felt ... God!  I just felt so guilty.  If he hadn't turned
around, I never would have done it on him.  I think what I was doing .
I was desperately waiting for somebody to come in.  So I could give

Mom an excuse.  So I could say, "Well, he came in, and I couldn't do
it."

I was looking for ways to buy time, it seems like.

"But then I thought; God!  I'll get home!  AND MOM'LL WANT ME TO DO

IT

AC"11NI

"Then I thought: Okay, buy time ... and wait for Mom to kill herselfl

And this was a very real thought with me.  Mom had tried it before. 
And this time she really would.  Because she'd never live in Harlem. 
She'd never move back to live with Granny.  Ever.  She'd sooner kill
herself And

I knew that would happen.  And I knew I would not be part of her
life.

Especially after that phone call ... that phone call I'd had the night
before, from the hotel, was reeling through my head.  Still is.  I
think if I hadn't called her that night ... I'd of never done it.  That
phone call is key.  Because that call put the fear of God in me, man!
It was just like: I was gonna lose everything!  I was gonna lose Mom; I
was gonna lose everything I knew and loved.  Mom and Ariadne.  She was
everything, you know.  I wasn't willing to do that.  Wasn't willing to
have her committing suicide.  Wasn't gonna take that chance

Because she'd done it before, y'know?  G-0-DI" .  The two shots were
ear-splitting.

Marc easily caught his nine o'clock flight back to New York, he says,
the gun again checked in his suitcase.  He was very nervous, and amazed
not to be arrested at the airport.  In the air he had an intense
fantasy that Gramps was not dead, only wounded.  On the taxi ride home
from JFK, he retrieved the gun from his suitcase and put it in the
wallet pocket of his plaid jacket.

He arrived at 1675 York Avenue with less than eight dollars in his
pocket.

Mom had figured his expenses very sharply.  He went through the lobby,
past the doormen, up in the elevator.  It was about five o'clock, a hot
Sunday afternoon in July.  No one was home.  Locked out again, he went
to the deli and ate a couple of sandwiches, not because he was hungry
but because he had some vague notion of establishing an alibi.  Susie
Coleman, daughter of the owners, was a close friend.

When he got back to the apartment, Mom had just returned from Jones
Beach.

It appeared that she and Ariadne and "Tricky" had spent the day
together.

When the door opened, Marc says he saw all three of them in the foyer,
standing on Mom's zebra-skin rug, still clutching their beach
paraphernalia.  Mom had her damp bathing suit on under her clothes.
Behrens wore a funny-looking pair of shorts and rubber sandals. 
Ariadne held her little pail and shovel.

"Mom said, "Did you do it?  Where's the gun?"  I said, "Yes, I did it."
Mom said, "Oh!  Thank God!"

Then Frances Schreuder threw her arms around her son and hugged and
squeezed and kissed him hard, and this was the third kiss from the
Evil

Queen.  Part Four

-t l9e Boiling Over ... ELAINE WAS THE first daughter to arrive.
Berenice Bradshaw and her grandson Larry were waiting at the airport
Monday morning when the plane from Oregon landed at Salt Lake City
Inter-national Airport.  The newly widowed Berenice, and Elaine
Drukman, were back waiting at the airport when Marilyn landed at noon;
she had got the last seat on the seven o'clock flight out of Newark.
The sisters decided not to stay at Gilmer

Drive but at Little America, the town's newest luxury motel.  When
Frances showed up, they thought, it was best that she and her mother
have a chance to be alone.

No one knew which plane Frances would be on, so throughout that day and
evening, and the next, Berenice met every flight from New York. 
Frances was not on any of them.  She did not appear until Tuesday
evening, when she turned up at Gilmer Drive in a taxi.  Because the
flights were over booked she had flown to Salt Lake by way of Los
Angeles, she said.

She had fourteen pairs of shoes in her luggage.  When her sisters
suggested she sleep in her father's bed, Frances declined; she
preferred to share Larry's room in the basement.

Many matters needed to be discussed before the memorial service and
at-home reception the next day.  Marilyn told Frances about the funeral
arrangements.  Privately, Frances told her mother she would soon be
needing more money for rent.  Berenice warned Elaine always to watch
her purse at Gilmer Drive.  Larry was "a terrible thief."  The widow
was also worried about the future of the family business.  "We just
can't let

Marilyn take over!  We can't!"  she whispered to Elaine.

Marilyn certainly knew that her father's half-page memo making her
co-administrator of his estate was not a legal will, that it had not
been properly signed, witnessed nor executed.  Still she regarded it as
an expression of his intent.  Furthermore, she believed that a new and
properly-drawn will stating these intentions did exist.

Berenice announced to her daughters that, despite the tragic
circumstances which had reunited them all, she was happy to have her
family together once more, the Drukmans newly returned from three years
in New Zealand, both girls here from New York, and three of her five
grandchildren.  Tomorrow night, after all the guests had left, Granny
wanted to take everybody out to a private dinner, just her immediate
family.  She knew the perfect restaurant, The Jail House.  It had
private dining rooms only; you just called up and reserved a "cell."

The Bradshaw murder was front-page news, and the police were filing
reports and taking statements from everybody.  All of the interviews
were conducted by Detective Joel Campbell, a young and not very
experienced policeman usually assigned to juvenile cases.  Berenice
Bradshaw and Larry had given their statements Sunday evening.  On
Monday Doug Steele and other top-level employees were interviewed.  All
of them mentioned the Bradshaws' difficulties with the Schreuder
family, the thefts and forgeries of the previous summer, the fact that
Franklin had failed to prosecute, and that one of the thieves had in
fact come back to live with his grandparents a few weeks before the
murder.  Clive Davis, Doug Steele's right-hand man for thirty-one
years, said flat out that simple robbery could nol be the motive.  A
robber would strike in the dark, not daylight; he would strike at the
end of a business day, when there was money in the till, not on a

Sunday morning.  But the Schreuders had forged $4o,000 in checks that
he knew of in 1977, he said, and-he felt either they or an assassin
hired by them had to be behind it.  "There isn't anybody in Salt Lake
that I know of that would want to do that to Frank Bradshaw," he told
police.  Davis, who died in 1983, was a respected Mormon Elder, and his
words carried special weight.

On Tuesday afternoon Marilyn was interviewed and spoke of forgeries
totaling $20,000 to $30,000.  She said they had caused her father to
write a new will disinheriting Frances.  She termed her sister
"irrational" and advised police to "handle her carefully."

Elaine, interviewed directly after Marilyn, was the most blunt.
"Assuming that it was not a robbery," Detective Joel Campbell asked
her, "is there anybody anywhere in any situation that would want to
take him, hurt him like that?"

"Well, when I first found out how my father died, something did flash
into my head.  Because there is one person who would want to hurt
him"

"And who is that?"

"My sister Frances.  And what flashed into my head was: Oh my
God-Larry's there!"

Elaine said the Schreuders' thefts the previous summer totalled
$55,000.

She added that she suspected her mother of protecting Larry.  Berenice
had first told Elaine she heard Larry leave the house "shortly after"
Dad.

Later she changed and said the time was ten o'clock.  As soon as she
had time, Elaine volunteered, she intended to feed her mother a couple
of glasses of wine and try to force out the truth.  Then she broke down
and wept.

By Tuesday even the Bradshaw relatives were doubtful that it had been a
simple robbery.  Don Bradshaw, nephew of the dead man and president of
the family-owned American Savings & Investment Corporation, is a
personable, candid man in his mid forties His hobby is raising
cherries, and he had been high up on a ladder tending his cherry
orchard Sunday morning when he got the news.

Don and his wife Jean had been the first family members to reach
Uncle

Frank's house on Gilmer Drive.  It was 10:20, or 10:30 at most, he said
later, and Larry was at home.  The strange young man did not speak a
word but silently stalked in and out of the room "like a cat" while
they tried to comfort his grandmother.  They recall Berenice telling
them then that she had got up and made Larry's breakfast about half an
hour after she heard Frank leave the house.

By 1I A.m. Doug Steele had returned from the warehouse, where he and

Clive Davis had been scrubbing the bloodstained floor.  Other relatives
had begun to arrive.  So Steele asked Don, as a senior male relative of
the dead man-he is a son of Franklin's older brother, Frederick-to
return with him to the warehouse and help search for hidden cash.

"You know who did this, don't you?"  Steele said as they got into the
car.

But Don Bradshaw knew nothing whatsoever about the Schreuder family's
crime spree in the warehouse the preceding summer.  Bradshaw males are
stern and proud; they do not tell one another their troubles.  Frank
had never once seen fit even to mention his grandsons to his nephew
Don, no more than Don would have thought to discuss with Franklin the
suicide of his brother Jack, despite the fact that Jack had spent his
entire life in

Frank's employ.  Jack Bradshaw had always wanted to work alongside his
own branch of the Bradshaw family, in the insurance business, but his
psychiatrist advised against it.  Jack was .1 mentally troubled."  His
first breakdown had occurred at nineteen, in Africa, where he had gone
on an LDS mission to try to please his mother.  He had never got along
with his uncle

Franklin the entire twenty-five or thirty years he had worked for him
as manager of his Richfield store.  There had been several more
breakdowns, and then one Sunday morning, on Mother's Day, when he was
about fifty, Jack blew his brains out.  Such matters were best left
unspoken.

On Pierpont Street the two men parked at the foot of the loading dock
and climbed the wooden stairs to the beat-up yellow door marked "Push."
Steele had barely touched his key to the lock when the door swung
open.

"My God!"  He turned to Don, white-faced.  "I'm pretty shaky .  but I'm
sure I locked up here when I left half an hour ago!"  They were
standing just inside the door now, right in front of the counter where
Frank had been killed.  The older man seemed to be in shock.  "Don, did
I just dream that door was unlocked?"

"No, Doug.  You just put the key up to it, and it pushed open."  They
had walked in a few steps farther and were behind the counter when
suddenly

Doug said, "Hey!  Let's get out of here fast!  Now I know someone's in
he rel

A fire door was open, the one they always kept closed.

"You're really crackin' up, Doug," Don said as they retreated back out
to the loading dock.  But Steele was already hailing a passing police
car.  "I'm dead certain someone's been in that building since I left!"
he told them, and the police kept watch until Steele got a locksmith to
come over and change every lock in the place.

While the men were at the warehouse, Don's wife Jean had fixed Berenice
some breakfast and done up Larry's dishes.  Berenice had started to cry
again when she saw Frank's cereal bowl, so Jean started talking about
the

Great Reunion she and Frank would surely have.

"I don't believe in any of that!"  Berenice said.  "But we're gonna
have great problems.  Right in this house.  " She had become quite
agitated, and when Don returned, he and Jean together tried to calm her
down.  Don and

Marilyn Reagan had once been schoolmates, and he knew of her intensive
paralegal training and her efforts to help her father.  He now advised
Berenice to "rely on Marilyn."

"That seemed to excite Berenice worse," he said later.  "The girls
didn't get along, she told us, and she started accusing Marilyn.
Marilyn will take over!  SheW do what she wanm "

Don had seen Frances only once since she was a toddler.  That had been
a day, ten years before, when she had marched into the American Savings
&

Loan offices demanding to see the stock record books.  She was trying
to trace her father's stocks.  Don's older brother Blair Bradshaw was
then president, and "Blair accommodated her, had her sit down at a
desk, gave her the books.  I went over and introduced myself, but she
wouldn't have anything to do with me.  Acted like she couldn't possibly
be interested in anything I had to say."

Don was curious about her because of an unseemly letter she had sent to
his wife just after Jean was appointed regional western director of
the

National Junior League.  "You may not know me, but I'm your cousin and
I desperately want to be admitted to the New York City Junior League.
Would you mind proposing me and sending me an application?"  Since Don
and Jean indeed did not know Frances, they had no qualms about tossing
her cheeky request into the wastebasket.

Now they wished they knew Frances a bit better, so they could advise

Berenice.  They felt great compassion for Frank's widow and had no
doubt she was suffitring deeply.  But, even today, seven years after
the crime, they do not believe her story that Larry left Gilmer Drive
at ten o'clock for his flying lesson.  Cherries are a finicky fruit.
They need to be picked at the moment of maximum ripeness.  "All that
day, no matter what else was going on, I always kept one eye on the
watch," Don Bradshaw maintains.  "I always knew the time almost to the
minute.  It was Sunday, you see, my day off, and I knew that in spite
of all I couldn't wait another week.  I still had to get those cherries
picked today."

Frances Schreuder was the last member of the family to give the police
a statement.  By the time she arrived at the Hall of Justice, at
four-thirty

Wednesday afternoon, after the funeral, she appeared to be the last
person in Salt Lake who still believed Frank Bradshaw had been done in
by strangers.

Q: Okay, what have you heard about your father's death?

A: He never knew what hit him.

Q: Pardon?

A: He never knew what hit him.

She spoke of the "bad neighborhood ... pretty sleazy ... drunks on the
streets ..."  When Detective Campbell mentioned he'd heard there had
been a "bit of a problem" the previous summer, when her sons worked for
their grandfather, Frances said, "I was furious at them."  But when he
asked her straight out about the stolen and forged checks, she
implicated

Berenice.

Q: Okay.  Now tell me what that was all about.

A: No.  Because my mother has done it for years.

That night at the Jail House restaurant, Berenice was again "so happy
to have the family together," even under these circumstances, that she
brought her camera along to record the family reunion in their private
cell.

Another record, or version, of that same family reunion is provided by
a tape recording which Marc says he made about a month after the
murder, in Mom's bedroom.  Both boys are in Mom's bed.  Larry is drunk
and sleepy but wakes up when Frances begins telling her sons that
Berenice does not wear underwear.  Like many of the family
conversations Marc would choose to record, this one is preoccupied with
excrement:

mom: You ask her, "How come you don't wear panties, Granny?  Why don't
you wear a brassiere?  Why don't you wear underpants?"

"000h ... [mimicking Berenice, in a flutey voice] I like to feel
freel

Ahh-h-h-hl"

MARC: MOM ... Momf Mom, tell Larry.  mom: I don't think Larry knows.

MARC [excited]: Larry, ever hear about maxipads or mini pads by Kotex?
Well, you see, instead of Granny going to do pee-pee in the toilet, see
... LARRY: Oh, God ... MARC: She does pee-pee in these mini pads and
maxipads.

LARRY'.  You're crazy!  That's impossible!  ... mom: ... She changes
them in front of me!  ... I mean, it's aw full She pees in them and
changes them about ten times a day.

LARRY: Like a diaperl mom [gleeful]: Every time she comes to New York,
she sits on my sofa, and there's a big spot!

LARRY [incredulous]: She just pees them!  mom: I say, "Granny, what's
that?"  "Oh, just a little accident.  I forgot to change my pee-pee
pad."

LARRY [laughing]: Her pee-pee pad.1 ... Remember the time she shit ted
all over herself?

MARC [thrilled]: Where was this?  mom: At the Jail House.  The night of
Grandpa's funeral ... All of a sudden she just disappeared.  She had
Montezuma's Revenge.

LARRY: And she just splattered.  All over herself!  mom [laughing]: The
whole wall of the toilet, and everything!

LARRY [giggling]: The whole bathroom was splattered.  Totally!  mom
[gleeful]: It had to be cleaned.  She threw up, and we should clean
it!

It was pretty embarrassing ... They had to send up a cleaning crew.

When we left, there were two women in there with these huge buckets of
sterilizer, scrubbing the wallsl She had the shitsl

MARC [thrilled): You mean-she had Montezuma's Revenge all over the
damned walls?  mom: Are you kidding?  ... She hadda take everything
off.  Everything was covered with shit!  She had no clothes to wear!
She was hiding out in the car!

LARRY: It was my car, too!  And boy, it took a long time to clean the
stink!  Ugh!  Disgusting!

MARC: The smell.  The lovable smell of shit!  mom: ... Then she
couldn't find her glasses and camera ... So I had to go back in ... I
went to the bathroom.  That's when I saw the cleaning crew.  Then I
said, "My mother."  They said, "Ahw."  They said don't worry, they'd
clean it.  I said, "I'm so sorry.  My mother was a bit sick.  You know,
her husband died."

With the assassination of the patriarch, all the game plans had to be
revised.  Franklin, in his zeal to avoid taxes, had left control of his
fortune entirely in his wife's hands.  The sisters would now fight one
another for control of Berenice.  Berenice would fight to hire
professional management: she did not want any member of her family in
charge of the others.  She knew them all too well.  Once again only
Frances would get her wish.

Thursday morning, the day after the funeral, the widow and her three
daughters showed up first at the accounting firm of Peat, Marwick &

Mitchell to hear from Franklin's tax man, Herman Wood, about the
workings of F & B Corporation.  Next they had an appointment with the
bank attorney handling the estate, Stephen Swindle.  Marilyn had
prepared herself for these meetings by reviewing the nineteen-month-old
F & B limited partnership agreement.  At that point, Marilyn says,
Frances had no clear grasp of estate matters.  She simply sat beside
her mother muttering "Get a copy!  Get a copy!"  as each document was
discussed.  At one moment it seemed to Marilyn as if Frances-and
Berenice might be plotting to ask Mr.  Wood to become executor.  To
forestall this Marilyn raised the question herself.  Would Mr.

Wood be available?  Not surprisingly, the old man said no.  It is
possible that he recoiled in horror.

But the suggestion had enraged Frances.  "Where did you ever get that
idea?"  she sputtered all the way down in the elevator.  By the time
they hit the street, she had become so angry she stalked off and
returned to New York.

In Swindle's office, with Frances gone, the discussion took a new tack.
Now that their father was dead, was there some way Elaine and Marilyn
could protect their mother from Frances's constant pressure for money?
Berenice, they explained, was unable to say no to her daughter.  "is
that true, Mrs.

Bradshaw?"  the bland young lawyer asked.  He was meeting these
bereaved

Bradshaw women this afternoon for the first time.  "Would you give
Frances anything she asked?  Could you say no to her?"

Berenice thought a long time.  "No, I don't think I could."

A $3,000-a-month dependent's allowance was arranged.  Later Frances
petitioned for and won an increase to $5,000, citing heavy medical
expenses for emphysema and other ailments.  Berenice received a
$io,000-a-month allowance, and Marilyn made do with $1,500.  Elaine
took nothing for now.

Soon each would receive a $136,000 lump sum in oil money.

With Frances gone, Marilyn and Elaine and their mother had a couple of
relatively nice days together.  "Really the last good times we ever
had," says Marilyn.  "Elaine and I were talking about how are we gonna
help Mother, get her on her feet, deal with all of this?"  They decided
the best idea would be to rent her an office, "so that

Mother would have a place to put her papers," and to make clear that

Berenice's ongoing business was separate from business transacted in
and by the warehouse; that was part of the estate.  Berenice's mail and
checks would be collected where Nancy Jones, Dad's trusted secretary,
could keep an eye on them.  Marilyn would come back periodically from
New York "and help keep

Mother's records straight."  Important mail would not pile up at Gilmer
Drive if Berenice were off on a cruise.  They trooped over to the old
Ketchum

Building, near the warehouse, and rented some cheap office space.  They
took a few old desks from the warehouse and supplemented them with
filing cabinets from a second-hand furniture store.  There would be no
more orange crates.

The daughters went home.  Marilyn was in New York making arrangements
to quit her job in the Trust Division of Manufacturers Hanover Bank, in
order to be able to devote full time to her mother's affairs, when
Berenice called and said she'd decided to cancel the office lease and
had returned all the furniture.  Obviously she had been speaking to
Frances.  But Marilyn was not yet worried.  Perhaps the office plans
were a bit premature.

Berenice called again and said she needed Marilyn's help right now. 
The problem was Larry.  He was continually pressuring her for more
money for flying lessons, camera equipment, and so on, and she was
finding it impossible to say no to her grandson.  Marilyn put in for
the two weeks' paid vacation she was owed and hastened back to Salt
Lake.  She too was worried about Larry, as was Elaine.  The sisters
thought their mother was harboring a psychotic killer, a boy so
desperate to recover his mother's love that he would do anything she
asked.  Worse, he would do anything he decided might please her and do
it without being asked. With Larry in her basement, Berenice could be
in mortal danger.

From New York, Frances was keeping in touch with Swindle by phone,
assuring him she would return as soon as possible to familiarize
herself with estate matters, as he had politely suggested.  She was
also in daily contact with her mother, soothing and smoothing from
afar.

A week after the funeral, Marilyn and Berenice picked up Franklin's
ashes from the mortuary and drove down to Lehi, to the family burying
ground.  Larry came along to take pictures.  They chose a pleasant spot
under a tree, a Lehi funeral director said a little Mormon prayer, and
Franklin's grandson and wife and eldest daughter put the metal
container of ashes into the ground and covered it with earth.  Later

Marilyn said she thought it looked just like a safe-deposit box.

A trip to bury her father in the company of the nephew she believed had
murdered him was more than Elaine thought her heart could take.  She
had already gone back to Oregon.  But her mother was soon on the
phone:

"Frances is up to something.  I need your help."  Like her sister,
Elaine dutifully returned to her widowed and bewildered mother but
found

Berenice unwilling to say much.  She just kept repeating that she could
not let Marilyn run things, yet she was unable to say why.  This in
itself was sufficient to tip off Elaine that Frances already had
Mother's ear and was beginning to stir the pot.  She would trickle the
poison in against her two sisters until she could be sure that she, and
she alone, ruled Berenice.  Elaine returned to Oregon and tried to
figure out what was really going on in Frances's brain.

Larry was hanging around Salt Lake until he could take his pilot's
license exam.  Meanwhile he was happy enough to submit to a polygraph
test at police request.  The results indicated that he was being
truthful when he denied killing his grandfather, but untruthful when he
denied "possession of undisclosed knowledge" of the crime.  The outcome
of

Larry's flight test was less ambiguous.  He left for Lehigh University
on

August z2, a fully licensed pilot.  He drove his latest used car, a
'68

Impala, and this time he had been careful to tell nobody about his
plans.

Nobody raided his trunk, and nobody knew anything about the few
souvenirs from the warehouse he had tucked inside before taking off.

In Reading, Pennsylvania, broke again, Larry had to pay his freshman
enrollment fees with a bum check.  He swiftly became very active and
moderately popular on campus.  Back in Salt Lake, Granny and Aunt
Marilyn happily threw away his "stinking mattress."

Marilyn returned to New York, quit her job "to be free to assist my
mother, "and took an exam to qualify as an IRS examiner.  Two weeks
later she was back in Utah.  Berenice was standing at the gate smiling
and waving when she got off the plane.  But when Marilyn had collected
her luggage and brought it out to the curb, she saw that she had
dallied too long.  Curled in the back seat of

Berenice's car, holding two containers of black coffee and smoking a
cigarette, was her youngest sister.

Marilyn knew when she was beaten.  A few days later she went home.  But
first she and her mother and sister called on yet another attorney,
Steve

Anderson, for a formal briefing on details of the estate.  To
Marilyn,

Frances's questions indicated that her sister's understanding of wills
and estates was minimal, extremely primitive compared to her own, and
she returned to New York unemployed but reassured and resigned to the
fact that from now on she and Elaine would have to operate from a
distance and under cover.  But, their objective was clear.  Although
they suspected the wrong grandson as the triggerman, they agreed that
the real villain was

Frances.

The murder of Franklin Bradshaw and the developing warfare over the
spoils would affect the survivors in different ways.  Frances seemed
energized by the stress, and sometimes Berenice did too.  But at other
times she broke down.  She began to suffer angina attacks, and she had
several surgical operations in the next few years.  But such things
were to be expected; she was approaching eighty.  Her nerves and
equilibrium held up remarkably well.  Elaine Drukman would first
harden, then soften, as her damaged heart again broke down.  Marilyn
went in the other direction: first softened by grief, later she became
hardened and implacable.  Larry's response was difficult to read.  Marc
fell into a heavy depression which lasted about a year.

Slowly the older sisters would come to feel that the ultimate villain
was

Frances-and -Berenice.  As they saw it, Franklin's death had removed a
certain boundary between mother and daughter and had allowed them
almost to merge into one.  "Mother and Frances have always had a
symbiotic relationship.  And now Berenice is Frances.  She has become
Frances,"

Elaine has said.  "After Dad died, Frances began living out part of
Mother's fantasy, living the high life that Mother always wanted.  That
was what she married my father for.  "

Marilyn observes that in cutting down her father, Frances also set

Berenice free.  "Since Dad died, Mother has no call whatever to be in
Salt

Lake, and Frances has had Mother's full attention.  Before, it was
split."

Before, too, "Mother and Dad were always at odds over what to do
about

Frances."  Now the deadlock was broken.  Eventually Marilyn would work
her way around to a position where she blamed her mother as the person
ultimately responsible for her father's death.  Was it not Berenice who
had brewed the broth which nourished Frances's dreams?  What else had
she accomplished with her constant harping on how much money her
husband had?  How tight-fisted he was?  How if only she had it, she
would give it all to the

Schreuders?  "I always knew she hated my father," Marilyn says thickly,
choking up.  "But I, never knew she hated him this much!"

By fall Larry was at college, Marc was a senior at Kent, and Ariadne
had transferred from Episcopal to Marc's old school, St.  Hilda's &
St.

Hugh's.  Perhaps only a nun can smell chocolate on the breath of a
five-year-old.  But on her first day of school, Ariadne was questioned
about her breakfast, and when she replied that she had found a glazed
chocolate doughnut in the kitchen, proper breakfast instruction was
once more begun.  No one at the school associated the enchantingly
behaved and dressed Ariadne Schreuder with grubby, rowdy Marco Gentile
of eleven years before.  Indeed, the school knew virtually nothing
about this new little girl.  They sent out the usual form letter to her
previous school, asking for financial, health, and other records.  The
form included the stock question about why the child is changing
schools-a discreet way of inquiring why the student has not been
invited back.  When Ariadne's form was returned by Episcopal, this was
the only question answered.  In large block letters someone had
written: "WE HAVE MET MRS.  SCHREUDER."

One day Marc went down to Crazy Eddie and spent some of his stolen
funds on a big new Audio-Technica mike and Akai tape deck.  He began
surreptitiously taping scenes of the Schreuders' home life.  His first
tapes, made in the fall Of 1978, seem to have been done for the hell of
it.  A year later he would make tapes of and for Ariadne, to show her
the reality of their lives, how she was being abused and brainwashed by
Mom, just as he had been.  But these first tapes were for himself. 
They were fun.  They probably relieved his depression and could be a
rich source of future blackmail.

On one tape Frances offiers Marc gleeful suggestions on how to torment
younger boys at Kent and to enjoy watching their "secret fears" as he
causes them to "be churning inside."  On another she giggles about the
rats in the walls at EMA and about the "big thick-lipped nigger
pictures" of Larry's graduation that Marc sent to Granny.  One tape
makes fun of

Behrens and his filthy apartment furnished with other people's sidewalk
discards.  Frances imagines "some filthy old bed."

"Oh God!  Swarming with cockroaches!"  Larry exults.  Frances becomes
ecstatic.  "Some dead man's bed.  Full of pee or something.  Ugh!"

She brags about coaching Marc to shoot straight.  She had said, "It'll
be easy as shooting fish in a barrel!  Oh, it was done properly -thanks
to me ... I even told Marc the strategy.  How to do it.  Larry, you
have to always go like this.  Up--and down."

LARRY: That's the way they do in the movies.  The cops.  mom: You have
to!

LARRY: And you hold it with both hands, right?  mom [patient]:
Preferably.  And you always go up and down.  You never go like
that-because then you'll miss.  Up--then down.  "Cause otherwise the
trajectory goes off ... That's the way you're supposed to do it.

Larry brags about the tapes he made of Granny last summer and gave to

Mom.  "Granny was furious about those tapes ... She just hates the fact
that you have those tapes!  ... She has no idea exactly what's on those
tapes.  We taped her so many times, she doesn't remember."

Frances describes her newest game.  "Well, I'm letting her imagination
go wild.  [Frances has told Berenice that) I've got a whole library of
tapes,

Granny!  Categorized and filed!  By date!  I .. You know, it's blowing
her fucking mind!  I've used it as a club over her.  Whenever we have a
fight,

I bring up the tapes.  And that immediately stops her in her tracks!
Oh, it's beautiful!  It just paralyzes her ..."

Dropping her voice to a gleeful whisper, Frances hisses, "You know
what

I did?  I ... let ... her ... lie!  I was never gonna tell her about
the tapes.  Then she kept pushing me.  This winter.  She kept pushing
me.

My back to the wall.  Then I let her lie let her tell me] a big bunch
of lies Then I said, "That's aw full To lie like that!"  She said,
"Yes."

I said [terrible, smiler-with-aknife hiss]: "I've got it on tapeP "

LARRY [laughing]: That must have blown her mind!  mom: She said, "What
do you meanT I said, [loud screaming] "I can't repeat everything you
said!  How can you say you didn't say it?  I said, [hissing) "I've got
the tapesl You wanna hear yourself Granny?  "Dead silence.  It was like
someone hit her over the head!  With a club ... there was, I swear,
five minutes of dead silence.

She was in shock!  Completely stunned.  She did not talk.  Dead
silence!

MARC: Pure ecstasy.

Frances's tape fantasy builds, batted back and forth between them like
an evil balloon, ever expanding.  "I have them in my bank vault!"  she
croons.  "What's she gonna do-blow up the bank?  [Chuckling.] This
little old seventy-five-year-old lady gonna come in like a mad bomber
gonna chop through Madison Avenue and Seventy-second Street, all that
cement!"  [Wracking, gargling coughing.]

Later the Good Old Schreuder Household congratulates itself on past
exploits, taping Granny and Gramps, getting Gramps 'all worked up ..
about our going to Harlem ... the blackies and the coons ... he's wild
and vicious about it!  Then he got Granny all hopped up about it." 
mom: I mean, they had us all set up!  Granny doesn't know how we
survived during the winter ... They expected us to go broke at any
moment! Well, the fact that we could s-t-r-in-g those checks out saved
us!"

MARC [childish]: It literally blew ... her ... mind.  BLAM!  mom; She
couldn't understand why we weren't broke either in May ... or

June ... LARRY: How we were still surviving!  Yeah, she musta been
really scratching the old head.  mom: A solution a day keeps the doctor
away!  (Sound of thigh slap, crazy cackling.] The Good Old Schreuder
Household and our sense of humor!

MARC- Boy, if it hadn't been for our resources last summer ... LARRY:
My resources!

MOM: My resources!

MARC: And mine!  mom: And Mommie's brainsl

Twice a year the New York City Ballet sends out thousands of letters
inviting a select public to buy seats at benefit prices to its Fall
and

Spring galas.  In the fall Of 1978 a "Champagne Gala" was promised, and
the house was scaled from $15o a ticket down to $5.  In time-honored
manner patrons were asked to indicate their preference by marking the
appropriate box and enclosing a check, and there was also a box which
said, "I am unable to attend, but enclosed is my check in the amount of
11

That summer the thrilling Soviet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov had
defected a second time, abandoning his showy perch at the American
Ballet Theater for the ensemble environment of George Balanchine's New
York City Ballet.

The young red Russian and the aging white Russian---each a champion in
his field had never worked together.  Baryshnikov had never even been
seen by the sophisticated Manhattan ballet audience.  Rumor had it that
he had been rehearsing the Ruby Cavalier role in Balanchine's Jewels
and might make his New York City debut on the night of the Gala.  The
mailing was an instantaneous sellout.  It was the hottest ticket in
town.

One of the form letters which came back to the ballet office was
unusual, indeed unique.  The respondent had checked the form in two
places and enclosed two checks, One, for $300, reserved a pair of
top-price seats.

But the sender had also checked "I am unable to attend ..."  and had
enclosed a contribution of $2,000.  Both checks were signed "Frances

Schreuder."  Not one of the half dozen people opening the
envelopes--some professional fund raisers, some volunteers-had ever
heard of her.  "So this was interesting," says one, "because between us
we know who everybody in New York City is."  Buyers sometimes sent in
contributions in excess of the ticket price, "but not six times in
excessl We did some quick eyeballing of old records, and discovered
that this person has made some small contributions in the past, but
nothing so interesting as a couple of thou."

The new name was added to the master list of major gift prospects, and
in due course the prized tickets were mailed out.  On the magic night
of

November 14, 1978, Frances Schreuder was among the crush of spellbound
balletomanes who saw the bright figure in pearly tights leap and hang
weightless for an instant against the bejeweled sky.

Outside the blazing gilt-and-crystal theater, in the real world of

Frances Schreuder, the weather had begun to darken.  On November 9,
Elaine

Drukman had done what her father had refused to do.  She had notified
the

FBI that Frances was a thief, a forger, and an embezzler.  She
described the theft of her Mountain Fuel stock and charged that either
Marc, Larry, or Berenice had acted under pressure from my sister
Frances ..."  She provided the FBI with photographs of each of the
suspects and with photocopies of Franklin

Bradshaw's stop-payment order to the State Bank of Lehi, and of the
eight forged checks.  Marilyn Reagan also obtained photocopies of the
bum checks, along with a letter from her father acknowledging them as
his daughter's handiwork.  She turned over her evidence to attorneys
Swindle and Anderson, saying that Frances was a crook, and her sisters
were determined to prevent the IRS from charging the estate a gift tax
on the stolen funds.

Together, checks and stocks totaled $50,000.

The split within the Bradshaw family had become a chasm.  The following
day Berenice Bradshaw, at the firm suggestion of her two older
daughters, signed papers acknowledging that her own wants were amply
provided for under the marital trust, and formally disclaimed any
interest in the family trust.  At that point five large Utah law firms
were involved in the Bradshaw estate matter.  Berenice and her three
daughters had each retained separate counsel, in addition to Swindle
who represented the estate.  The disclaimer was a device to forestall
further depredations by

Frances, working through her mother.  Unless some kind of legal,
binding brakes could be applied, it was at least conceivable that
Frances might wipe out the entire Family Trust.

That same week in New York, an unkempt school teacher who moved with a
crablike, belly-first walk, visited the Empire Savings Bank on West

Fifty-seventh Street.  Richard Behrens was planning to drop out of
teaching for a year of graduate work, he explained, and he arranged a
$5,000 student loan, which he agreed to pay back at $58.o5 a month over
ten years.

Three weeks later Marc came home from Kent on his Christmas vacation. 
A day or two after that, Larry was back from Lehigh, howling and
barking at the apartment door.  The weather was unusually cold that
year. Larry was "really begging!"  Marc says, while Frances lay in bed
yelling "No!

Don't you dare open that door!"  and Marc ran back and forth between
her bedroom and the front door feeling like his old friend Pepe the
bellhop.

Soon Marc too was begging.  If Mom refused to let Larry in, at least
she could give him enough money to stay at the YMCA.  At length Frances
phoned the Y and was told a room would cost $60 a week.  She came to
the door and counted out Wo for three weeks.  No money for food,
nothing for Christmas.

That was it.

Marc remembers "feeling just so sorry for Larry.  Him locked out and me
enjoying the luxury of the house.  Because I'm Mom's pet."  But Frances
did not seem unduly upset.  She walked back to her room, selected a
sheet of her pale blue, engraved Tiffany stationery, and climbed into
bed.  Ariadne was in the bed too, curled up with the family's other
pet, a rare red Persian cat with eyes like black opals.  The $500 cat
had been a present from Frances to Ariadne on her fifth birthday, and
the children called him Ginger.

Frances had renamed him Tiffany.  "More chic, more elegant," she
explained.

Now Frances uncapped her new gold and-ivory Tiffany pen and commenced a
polite note to the New York City Ballet.

Gentlemen:

I was rather surprised not to receive a personal acknowledgement Of My
gift Of $2,000 ... She sealed the envelope.  In a corner lay her old
ballet shoes.  She got out of bed, put on the slippers of faded pink
silk trimmed with white lace, and did a few simple movements, a
demi-plie, a port de bras.

"I was meant to be a dancer, Ariadne.  But Dad made me give up ballet
and go to Bryn Mawr."

At the ballet offices Frances's gentle note of rebuke provoked an
embarrassed letter of apology and an invitation to Mrs.  Schreuder to
please get back in touch if she were at all interested in further
involvement.

Planning for the Spring Gala was underway, and to attract a wider range
of patrons, the benefit committee had decided on a two-tiered
ticket-pricing system, which also meant two cocktail parties.  It was
now becoming apparent that nobody wanted to attend the "Juniors" party.
"Hundred-dollar people have no social cachet," one planner explained
later.  "They just have their hundred bucks.  So the problem was,-how
to market the second party?  The one nobody wanted to go to?"  The
committee had decided to throw in a dinner, and was discussing how to
pay for it, when the phone rang.  The caller was the mysterious Mrs.
Schreuder, effusively thankful for the letter inviting more
"involvement," and eager to do something else helpful right now.

The one unforgivable error in fund raising is to ask for $io,000

-and get it-from someone who might have been good for S5o,000.  So the
person who took the call suggested lunch a few weeks hence.  That would
leave time for the necessary financial homework.  But Mrs.  Schreuder
said she wanted to make a commitment right then on the telephone.  This
had not ever happened before.

"So I'm winging it," the planner said later.  "And I take a chance and
mention this hundred-dollar-a-person dinner, and how if we only could
get somebody to underwrite it, then we could say to people: Every cent
of your hundred dollars goes to the Ballet.  I tell her all about how
the Gala ties in with our challenge grant from the federal government,
how someone making this gift would really be doing something very
useful and would become involved with a committee.  Because it was my
sense that this woman, whoever she was, very much wanted some hands-on
involvement.  And then I say again, can I take her to lunch in a week
or two and discuss all this?

"She says two things.  One, she thinks the dinner party is a terrific
idea, and could she just say right now that she'll pay for it?  She
doesn't like to discuss money while eating; it doesn't do much for good
food.  At lunch we can talk about what she really likes to talk about,
which is ballet.

Two, she says, "I don't mean to be rude, but I have an account at the
Cote

Basque, so would you be offended if I took you to lunchT "

The planner hung up feeling slightly dizzy.  "I mean-this is the
fund-raising coup of the year around there!  People don't normally call
you up and pledge $10,000 to $15,000 out of the blue.  You're meant to
work for it!"

The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been
around since the Pharaohs.  That the born patron also needs an artist
to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.  Frances Schreuder would
turn out to be a born patron-selfless, unequivocal in her enthusiasm,
bottomless in her resources.  The artist whom she chose to receive her
bounty had not the slightest idea who she was.  It was the ideal
artist-patron relationship.

Frances Schreuder would become George Balanchine's last patron at a
critical moment in his history as well as in her own, and also in the
history of cultural philanthropy in the United States.  Unknown to all
but a very few intimates, by 1978 the great choreographer had begun to
suffer severe angina attacks.  The following year he would require
triple heart bypass surgery.  His disability was especially crippling
for an artist who worked the way he did, "making" his ballets directly
on his dancers, like a sculptor working in clay or

Bach tempering his clavichord.  He did not tell them what to do.  He
took them behind the closed doors of a mirrored rehearsal hall and
moved their bodies around, indicating all the lifts himself, dancing
all the parts, making every tiny adjustment until he found the effects
he wanted.  It was incredibly strenuous physical labor, especially for
a man of seventy-four.

The secret of his infirmity had to be closely guarded within the
Company, as well as from the public.  "Ballet is woman," Balanchine had
often said, and he had loved ballet with fierce and singular ardor
since 1914 when he was a ten-year-old boy dancing in The Nutcracker in
St.  Petersburg.

He had married five times, to five dazzling ballerinas--Geva,
Danilova,

Zorina, Tallchief, LeC]ercq.  He loved ballet still, with undiminished
passion, and it is not an exaggeration to say that his ballet company
was en masse in love with "Mr.  B."  He was the genius they served,
their only beloved master.  He was their father, their unattainable
lover, their beau id gal Word of his infirmity would devastate Company
morale.

Another of Balanchine's famous Delphic remarks, to a too eager stage
mother, was: "La Danse Madame, cest une question morale" To him, hence
to them all, the ensemble mode was a moral imperative.  Famous soloists
and lowly chorus dancers practiced daily together at the barre in
humble pursuit of the perfectly unnatural technique their art
required.

Balanchine himself had taught daily class for thirty years.  In such a
sublimated atmosphere--part training gym, part temple-the notion of
individual star dancers, in the manner of opera divas, would be not
merely vulgar but immoral.  That is why the names of soloists, even
Baryshnikov, were never announced beforehand.  But nature abhors a
vacuum, and human nature seems to demand superstars -in ballet no less
than in football.

So an ironic situation had evolved wherein, more than any of his
soloists, the choreographer himself had become his company's biggest
star.  His brilliance was legend, his work celebrated, his elegant form
and White Rabbit face known worldwide, and his firm, glowing presence
in the NYCB driver's seat was the major reason for his company's
stunning artistic and box~ office success.

Until quite rtcently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the
arts.  The Puritans thought dancing lewd, the Devil's business, and
this heritage had lingered.  Terpsichore was condemned to the chimney
corner, and there she languished until the early 1930s, when

Lincoln Kirstein, founding father of the New York City Ballet, stole

Balanchine from Europe in the manner of Prometheus stealing fire.

In the next half century, a dance revolution occurred.  Due chiefly
to

Balanchine's work, both as a teacher and choreographer, due to his
remarkable range of styles, his superb musicality, and the sheer
abundance of his creative output, an artificial style of dance
confected for eighteenth-century kings evolved into a popular American
art form.

Today this nation has nearly i,000 professional ballet companies, at
least io,000 trained professional dancers, and unknown millions of
ardent, knowing fans-an astonishing development for what until recently
had been considered manna for aesthetes only, the quiche of the
performing arts.

By the time Frances Schreuder appeared on the scene in 1979, George

Balanchine was nearly seventy-five, and Lincoln Kirstein was
seventy-three.  But both men were still very much in charge.  The
reclusive, patrician, and mercurial Kirstein, a tall, shaven headed
man, once greatly handsome and still impeccably austere, still
invariably dressed in black, listed himself as NYCB's general
administrator.  The title is deceptive.  He was always the shadowy
eminence noir behind the whole show.  Kirstein's wealth derives from a
family fortune in department stores.  His distinction derives from the
often subtle, sometimes outrageous way he has utilized wealth and power
to encourage whatever is finest among arts and artists.  Kirstein has
spent his life as a sort of invisible Lone Ranger of the arts, riding
out in defense of culture and in search of the gold to support it
against the Yahoos and Philistines.

His most stunning accomplishment among many was to recognize the genius
of Balanchine and offer it ideal conditions in which to grow and
flower.

Kirstein, like Balanchine, knew that a first-class ballet company could
not exist without a first-class ballet school to carry on the old
traditions and assure a steady supply of properly trained young dancers
for the performing company.  In czarist Russia, the Imperial Ballet
School had been a national service academy, comparable to Annapolis or
West

Point.  In 1934 Balanchine and Kirstein co founded the School of
American

Ballet, today chartered under the Juilliard School of Music and
presided over by Kirstein still.

As always, the difference between revenue and expenses of both the
School and the Company had to be made up by private contributions, and
Kirstein himself had always served as chief benefactor, fund raiser,
and one-man ball-out squad.  NYCB was mostly "in Lincoln's pocket"; and
when, as frequently happened, emergency financial help was needed,
Kirstein rang up one of his famous "LLL's"-Lincoln's little ladies-rich
women cultivated by the master patron over decades.  Only in 1963,
three years before the company moved from the grunge of Mecca Temple,
the old Masonic hall on West

Fifty-fifth Street, to the glitter of just-built Lincoln Center (which,
it should perhaps be made clear, was named for Abraham) did Kirstein at
last persuade the mighty Ford Foundation that a ballet company was as
worthy an object of corporate philanthropy as an opera company, say, or
a symphony orchestra.  In that watershed year, the big automotive
foundation, spurred by

W. McNeil Lowry, Ford's vice president for the humanities and the arts,
gave

NYCB over $6 million.

The Sugarplum Fairy herself could have made no grander gesture.  But
eventually Ford would turn its fickle head, and new pockets would have
to be found.  Enter Uncle Sam.  By 1977 the National Endowment for the
Arts had set up a system of challenge grants known as "three-to-one
matching grants."  The arts institution must raise $3 million in "new
funds" in order to get $i million of taxpayer money.  The first wave of
grants went to established, high-profile institutions-the New York
Philharmonic, the

Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Kirstein, once more riding to the rescue,
obtained a challenge grant for NYCB.  The point of specifying "new
funds" was to democratize philanthropy, to reach out to thousands of
unknown, anonymous pockets way beyond those of Kirstein, Ford, and the
LLL's.  It is a safe bet, however, that whoever thought up this good
idea, "new pockets," did not envision the dark and fathomless pit that
was the pocket of Frances

Schreuder.

Like many arts groups, NYCB had been somewhat slapdash in the conduct
of its fiscal affairs.  Only in 1977 did Kirstein and Randal R. Craft,
Jr."  the gracious, successful, arts-minded Wall Street lawyer who
serves NYCB as general counsel, get around to incorporating NYCB as a
tax-exempt charitable organization and forming a real board of
directors.  A professional development office was set up and assigned
specific goals.  One of these was to double the revenues from "special
events" such as the

Spring and Fall galas.  Like the other business objectives Craft laid
out, this has been accomplished with spectacular success.  The Company
has stayed in the black for the past seven years-a remarkable record
for an arts organization--during which time its annual budget has risen
from to million to $17 million.

One of the tinier slipups along the way had been the failure to do the
routine acknowledgment on Frances Schreuder's major gift.  "Frankly," a
knowledgeable person admits, "nobody was terribly interested in doing
it.

People are not on the boards of ballet organizations for altruistic
purposes.  You get a check from Walter Annenberg, and you can find
plenty of people who want to have lunch with Walter Annenberg.  They
want to have lunch wither ... Grant Tinker.  They even want to have
lunch with

Jerry Zipkin.  But they don't want to have lunch with somebody they've
never heard of, or somebody they cannot connect with a lot of money, or
with the Jet Set, or with social cachet, or the Fortune 500 list."

After the Cote Basque lunch, people in the NYCB offices were eager to
hear what the hot prospect was like.  "Fun to be with," they were told,
and "a passionate balletomane" who "looked sort of like Lily Tomlin."
In truth the woman had seemed a bit eceentric, "but eccentricity is the
norm around that place.  Normal people are the exceptions.  So she
didn't really stand out at all.  In some respects Frances was more than
eccentric; she was weird.  But everyone we dealt with was in different
ways weird.  None of them was weird like Frances, but I never met
anyone who was exactly like Lincoln Kirstein either.

"Craziness does not stand out around here.  Whoever met anybody like
John

Samuels?"  Samuels is the Gatsby-like financier who until recently was
chairman of the entire Lincoln Center complex.  "The rich are not the
same as everyone else.  There are things they can get away with doing
in public that others simply can't.  So sure Frances was confused at
times.  Pretty spacy.  Vague.  No eye contact.  Didn't complete her
sentences.  We thought maybe she was taking drugs.  Her hands and head
trembled.  I thought maybe

Parkinsonism.  But I'd seen other society women the same way and other
business people.  And persons in the entertainment business."

The mysterious Mrs.  Schreuder was intelligent, seemed generally
knowledgeable about ballet, and was clearly well educated, though there
were surprising lacunae in her awareness.  She talked about the many
things she wanted to do for "Mr.

Balanchyne," which she mispronounced to rhyme with "shoe shine."
Normally it is pronounced to rhyme with "smithereen," though the name
is in fact a

Frenchification, acquired during his Paris- London-Diaghilev period, of
the choreographer's true Georgian name, Balanchivadze.

Mrs.  Schreuder mentioned Bryn Mawr and her life in Europe.  She spoke
good

French.  A staff member drove over to York Avenue to inspect the return
address on her letter, and "it looked okay."  A lawyer friend of NYCB
put her name through LEX IS a legal computer search.  Nothing turned
up.  When the name Bradshaw appeared on one of her checks, she murmured
something about being a distant cousin of Arco's and later RCA's
president Thornton

W. Bradshaw, and she let it be known that she expected soon to come
into some family money herself.  Through her father, she said, and said
no more.

But if Mrs.  Schreuder was close-mouthed about her private life, so
were many ballet patrons.  The New York City Ballet was much newer than
some of the other not-for-profit performing arts organizations which
shared space at Lincoln Center-the Metropolitan Opera, for example. 
The money behind

NYCB was mostly new money.  Nobody knew where it came from; nobody
cared.

The NYCB board's current president, Gillian Attfield, a British-born
woman from Binghamton, New York, is entirely unknown outside of ballet
circles, invisible on the Manhattan social horizon, unlisted in Who's
Who.  Many people think her money comes from mortuaries.  It does not,
but the point is that it comes in to NYCB at about $75,000 annually,
and always has, and in an emergency Mrs.  Attfield always seems able to
write a check for any amount.

By May Frances was invited to visit the company's offices in the New
York

State Theater and to meet some of the people who were really running
things.  She had by then made good on her first $15,000 pledge, for the
dinner party, and was beginning to be talked about as a "Live One."
People were curious about her.  Frances did not stay long that first
day.  In a soft, timid voice she apologized for her raddled appearance,
her tremors, and grimaces, explaining that she was still suffering the
effects of a dreadful Christmas accident on the Triboro Bridge in which
several people had been killed.

As soon as she left, one person present was "overwhelmed with the
feeling:

We have just had a conversation with madness.  She had those wild eyes;
she had the intensity of a lunatic."  But no one else had seemed to
notice.

Overall, Frances Schreuder was making a favorable impression,
particularly among other so-called Live Ones.  "You must remember that
most ballet patrons are either socialites or businessmen," explains an
observer of Frances's progress.  "Neither group knows anything about
how artists or creative people function.  So this Mrs.  Schreuder-who
just wanted to give money and to talk about ballet-she was refreshing.
So what if her fine tuning was owl So what if she pronounced it
"Balanchyne"?  At least she wanted to talk about ballet, and she would
go to see the ballet, and she would discuss the performance last
night."

In short Frances was intensely interested in what fund raisers call
"The

Product."  Some other patrons often seemed not to care.  "If you'd sit
down and talk to most of those ladies on the Board about what the
performance should be at the next Gala, they'd tell you the performance
should be very short.  Because a lot of husbands are going to be
dragged there by their wives."

Belgian-born Oleg Briansky, a former NYCB dancer who with his dancer
wife, Mireille, now operates the excellent Briansky Ballet School, is a
seasoned, sophisticated observer of the ballet world.  Although he did
not meet Frances until later in the game, he read her exceptionally
well.  "I don't know how much Mrs.  Schreuder really knew about
ballet," he says.

"But she had a very uncanny sense of ... of how to get to people.  She
knew what people wanted.  She ... felt people's needs.  She had sort of
x-ray eyes, and could gauge a person, sense what that person hungered
for, and then-move in on them!  Feed their needs, out of this uncanny
knowledge she had.

"I've seen how good the woman was at it.  She always had a strategy.
She approached only people in the top positions.  And then somehow-I
mean, you cannot say that the woman was charming.  Not beautiful.  Not
a seductive person at all.  Yet through her compulsive, constant talk,
and keen sense of observation of other people's insecurities-she was
able to get to them.

"The world of art-not just of the ballet, but all art-tends to attract
unstable people.  It is a world which tolerates eccentricity.  And it
is a world always in need of money, and usually crazily financed.  I
mean:

The New York City Ballet has been in existence forty-odd years, it is
the greatest dance company in the world,

and it still has no permanent subsidy!  They still don't know, at the
end of each year, how they will come out.

"So this very pushy woman, who is pushing her way to give them money,
who starts trying to push Mr.  B into restaging a Sleeping Beauty-which
has got to cost a million dollars-they don't think of her as an
eccentric.

You must remember: the New York City Ballet has more than one hundred
dancers, an extraordinary payroll.  Mrs.  Schreuder gave them money,
and asked nothing in return.  To them the money was God-sent.  It was
not from a crazy lady.  It was from a Good Fairy named Frances
Schreuder!"

But Briansky was an outside observer.  Inside NYCB, they were mostly
mesmerized.  After the Live One's first visit to the backstage offices,
one senior staff person did take a few key people aside.  "If we have
anything to do with this woman," he warned, "I promise you it will mean
more trouble around here than she could possibly be worth."  He might
just as well have said the Emperor wore no clothes.  No one paid any
attention.

In hindsight, it is not hard to understand.  Some primal link has
always appeared to join Dionysus and Apollo-the madman and the artist.
Extreme individualism is valued throughout the art world.  And the
phantasmagoric world of ballet in particular has always been a magnet
to the mad, and a kind of haven.

"Over the years, George had experiences many times with strange
people," says a close friend.  "Many oddballs felt a special kinship to
him."  Love letters to Balanchine arrived regularly at the NYCB offices
from men and women around the world.  From time to time mental
hospitals telephoned

Company headquarters to inquire about a patient claiming to be a wife
or daughter of the choreographer.  Other claimants sometimes approached
Mr.

B on the street, asking for money.  A top NYCB executive, "always
afraid something awful was going to happen," began quietly to keep a
file on such people.  Nothing serious did happen, but at the time of
the choreographer's retirement, the file contained records of forty
bizarre episodes of one type or another.

"Frances was not at all alone in this regard," the executive is quick
to point out.  "Certain people attract nuts.  George was one of them.
An awful lot of people incorporated George Balanchine into their
fantasy lives.

It's a special kind of charisma people like him have.  The Kennedys had
it.  It's what Hinckley felt about Jodie Foster.  George was loaded
with it!"

There was another factor.  Balanchine himself, though not in the least
mad, was emotionally fluid.  His feelings lay very close to the
surface.

He was easily moved-not just by music or painting, but also by bravery,
nobility, or human suffering.  He once sought to give the opening night
receipts to aid Italian earthquake victims he had just seen on
television.  Another time he wanted to use NYCB benefit -money to buy
bullet-proof vests for Central Park policemen.  Like most creative
persons, he was extraordinarily open to experience.  He did not wear
commonplace armor against feeling Whenever a friend, trying to shield
him from the attentions of some of his more obviously unbalanced
admirers, would suggest, "Why do you waste energy on so-and-so?  Don't
you realize he's crazy?"  Balanchine's answer was the same.

"How do you know he's crazy?  Maybe he's the sane one and you're
crazy!"

Another close friend says, "There was always something about George
that was slightly mad.  He always defended the mad.  And he was always
himself afraid of madness."

But his friend Rouben TerArutunian, the stage designer, and one of the
few who could converse with Balanchine in Russian, the only language in
which the master was entirely comfortable, disagrees.  "Balanchine was
supremely practical and logical, a man who all his life was drawn to
harmony, to beauty-never toward disharmony, disorder, or aberration."

Nonetheless, more so than the bookworm or the music lover, the opera
buff or the sports nut, the balletomane has elected to inhabit an
ultimate fantasy world.  At its center, spinning in a white-hot
spotlight, drilling holes in the floor with diamond-hard toes, is a
perfect female figure of matchless grace and electric intensity who is
also in perfect balance.

The male figure is equally fantastic: an impossible amalgam of
weightlessness and strength, control and flight.

The backstage ballet world is also a very family-like environment; its
emotional compass can swing wildly between fury and love.  This
potential was intensified at the New York City Ballet, where George
Balanchine had become a kind of fantasy father figure for all the women
attached to the

Company which he had fathered and now led.  He himself loved women.  He
especially loved daughter-figures.  He fell in love with, and five
times married, only women younger than himself.  More than Picasso,
assuredly more than Stravinsky-the two other artistic geniuses to whom
he is most frequently compared-Balanchine was the greatest
daughter-lover of the era.  Fantasy is a two-way looking glass, and
more than anyone else whom we can bring to mind, George Balanchine
devoted his life to the romanticizing, celebration, and apotheosis of
the eroticized female child.

The new found Mrs.  Schreuder seemed to development people not just
eccentric but highly skittish.  They did not want to risk scaring her
off.

So they swiftly came to see her as "a woman who values her privacy
intensely," and to admire her for her extreme reticence in certain
areas.

"Frankly, I found this aspect of her odd personality delectable," says
one.  "She was so unlike the usual publicity hounds.  I mean: somebody
brings Aldo Gucci in here, and for $25,000 he wants his name on
everything.  In contrast, here was a woman eager to give us money who,
from the start, has only one stipulation: She wants 'no publicity
whatsoever of any kind."  Having dealt with some people on our Board
who are obsessed, with dropping names and dollar signs on you, and
flashing rocks at you, I found someone who only wanted to have lunch at
La Cote Basque and talk ballet utterly charming.  Get the picture?  A
bunch of us around here loved Frances!"

Those people who recognized Frances's value as a "Live One" struggled
to win for her the kind of hands-on involvement they sensed she wanted.
They encouraged her to attend planning meetings for the Fall Gala
dinner party she had agreed to pay for.  She did not show up.  Again
they thought she was shy.  "But she is doing odd things, the most
memorable of which is-she decides we have to serve a 'really great
dessert!"  " one of her admirers recalls.  Should it be a superb
chocolate cake, or the Cote Basque's very special strawberry tarts?
Frances discussed the matter interminably, yet she did not want to make
so critical a decision herself.  One Friday a uniformed messenger
arrived at the stage door with a $25 Cote Basque chocolate cake in one
hand, a box of strawberry tarts in the other, and a note suggesting
that people take them home to taste over the weekend.

A Board member with professional connections in the catering world
pointed out that identical cakes are available wholesale for $12.50.

"Yes, but this woman wants to become involved, " the others
explained.

"She wants to call the chef herself.  She wants to order the cakes for
150 people herself.  She does not want a bargain!"

The weird part was that Frances already was paying for the dinner, and
a budget had been set.  "So why is she also giving us $500 or $600
worth of cakes?"  On the other hand many patronesses seemed to the
staff chiefly to complain, and this one was sending over desserts to
taste.

As Frances moved into a new and different world, a new and different
personality-a second Frances-seemed to emerge.  The ballet's "Live One"
was the apparent antithesis of Bryn Mawr's bad, bold Frankie Bradshaw:
she was never raucous, disobedient, angry.  She was gracious, mannerly,
thoughtful, reserved.  The one uninhibited thing about her was her
generosity.  Instead of an enraged baby in a state of perpetual
tantrum, most ballet people in those early days saw Mrs.  Schreuder as
an eccentric but extraordinarily selfless lover of the arts.

All that separated Frances's two worlds was the great damask curtain
pleated in golden swags.  Frances had the ability to move back and
forth on either side of the curtain as readily as a dancer moving
downstage to take a bow.  Behind the curtain, in the magic land of
ballet, the former Frankie

Bradshaw had at last found a world in which she was comfortable, a
place where she could be accepted, could dream her own dreams,
and--soon could exercise her passion for control.  She fit in because,
to many people in the ballet world, emotional disorder simply did not
matter.  Only the bankbook was required to be in balance.  Naked social
climbing did not matter either.

Says one staffer, "An arts institution is therapy for climbers.  Who
cares why some people invent a new section of the Jet Set just so they
can be in it?  This is America!"

What did matter, especially within the development office, was to get
some advance notice of what new ballets the choreographer was thinking
of making for next season, so that they had some idea of how much money
would be needed.  Such information was almost impossible to come by.  A
seasoned fund raiser, not at NYCB, explains the difficulty: "You have a
rational assignment.  You are being paid a salary to raise money.
Effectively, logically, without offiending anybody.  But in your job
you are surrounded by artists, people whose creative process is in no
way rational.  You wake up, you have this idea for a ballet, and you
go, into a rehearsal room, and you make this ballet on people.  You're
not being rational, you're being creative.  Fine.  But because of that,
there is no particular respect among artists for rationality.  Why
should there be?  So the development office is always considered a sort
of step-child by these people."

At NYCB this problem was especially severe because the people in charge
were "still the first generation of leadership, the founding fathers,
and mothers.  Not just Balanchine and Kirstein, but all the top staff
people were first generation.  They'd all been there thirty years, and
the development office had been around only two or three years.  So you
did not have a lot of respect for the development office."  And this
generation gap, between Old Guard and Young Turks, only tended to
exacerbate the family like quarrels, the vacillations between fury and
love.

In Frances's real family, on the other side of the great golden
curtain, similar vacillations proliferated.  In January 1979, the same
week Frances had received the NYCB's belated letter of apology and
thanks, Berenice had arrived back in New York from the round-the-world
cruise she took to recover her equilibrium after the shock of what she
called her husband's death' Berenice Bradshaw does not use the word
"murder."

Frances was waiting on the dock.  She told Berenice that her sisters
had been trying to "blackmail" her for her sons' thievery the summer
before; that Marilyn had denounced her to the executors; and that
Elaine had actually called in the FBI.  These lowdown tactics were
further straining

Frances's precarious health, she added, and she intended to petition
the estate to raise her monthly allowance from $3,000 to $5,000 to
cover her new medical bills.

She invited Berenice to spend a few nights at 1675 York Avenue.
Ariadne's room was available; the child still slept with her mother.
The rent on the three-bedroom apartment had recently been raised from
$1,000 to

$1,200 a month, and in the five-and-a-half years the Schreuders had
occupied it, the place had become dingy and hopelessly cluttered.
After

Berenice had spent a couple of uncomfortable nights on the small
child's bed, Frances suggested they take a little walk.  She wanted to
show her mother a "fabulous investment."  1675 York Avenue is not a
chic address, merely East Side rich.  It is faced with beige brick and
has a curving carriage way entrance, lots of pretty flower beds, and
uniformed doormen.  A few blocks to the northeast lies Gracie Square, a
serene, two-hundred-year-old enclave of old New

York money at the quiet dead end of East Eighty-fourth Street
overlooking the East River.  To the north is Carl Schurz Park and
Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence.  To the south stands a
fortress-like, triple-towered apartment house known as io

Gracie Square, a landmark building of immense grandeur and
respectability, cooperatively owned by its distinguished tenants.
Apartment 6, in Building 111-the "fabulous investment" Frances brought
Berenice to see-is a fourteen-room duplex apartment with a two-story
living room, several wood burning fireplaces, and staggering views of
the East River.  But the apartment itself was in terrible shape and
could be bought for a mere $525,000.  Another half million or so would
be necessary for refurbishing and repairs.  Berenice glanced around at
the peeling paint, scarred parquet, crumbling piaster, rusting
plumbing, and said nothing.  She returned to Salt Lake City for some
necessary bladder surgery,

The ballet's spring season was on, and Frances rarely missed a
performance.  The word was out on the newest Live One, and board
members and assorted LLL's went out of their way during intermissions
to greet and chat with Mrs.  Schreuder.  Some were put off by her
mispronunciation of

"Balanchyne," others by her physical appearance.  She reminded one
woman of Gone with the Wind.  "She was like Tara-completely neglected.
She was too fat.  Her clothes appeared ... scuffed, and her white mink
looked secondhand."

Most of them noticed her handbag, which invariably was stuffed with
hundred-dollar bills.  One lady bountiful observed, "A woman who was
really brought up with money wouldn't wear a long white dress with
black shoes and an old bag."

"Maybe so," said her husband, "but you don't argue with the color
green."

Not surprisingly this was the view that prevailed, and Mrs.  Schreuder
was next invited to join the Ballet Guild, an organization which
encourages middle-level givers.  She began showing up regularly at
Guild fund raisers, parties, and lectures on ballet history.  Often her
comments were informed, occasionally rambling.  Her appearance at the
Galas was never quite right: her hair was overdone, and she wore
195os-style strapless gowns which made her look dowdy, older than her
forty-one years, the very opposite of fashionable women like Bianca
Jagger, John Samuels' frequent companion on Gala nights.  But as time
passed,

Frances's appearance improved; she began to slim down and smarten up.
More importantly her pledges were invariably generous and invariably
lived up to-not always the case in those days with other bigtime
pledgers.  Best,

Frances was that rarest kind of Live One who did not want anything in
return for her generosity.  "You'd ask her for money, and she'd say
okay," one person recalls.  "Not okay if I can be chairman of the
event.  Not okay if I can get my name on the program.  Not okay if I
can sit next to Suzanne

Farrell.  I mean, she was about the finest prospect I'd ever seen in my
entire professional career."

Kirstein himself characterized Frances Schreuder as "an extremely
intelligent and generous woman ... as highly strung as a creative
artist, [who] therefore ... understands the creative process as few
people can or do."

What did Mrs.  Schreuder really want?  What was driving her?  Some
thought she wanted only to become NYCB's new Fairy Godmother.  Others
disagreed.

An arts patron and lawyer of much experience along the city's
philanthropic byways feels certain that "Frances Schreuder was very
much a social climber, and she knew precisely what she was doing when
she alit on the New York City Ballet.  I'm not saying she may not have
been flaky in some areas.  She did not have the slightest idea of the
impression she made on other people, for example.  But as a social
climber, she knew exactly where she was going-she was going to get on
that Board."

This observer, a man who views himself not incorrectly as an
anthropologist among New York's culture savages, came to know Frances

Schreuder rather well.  She had very carefully surveyed New York City's
cultural landscape, he says, "and she figured the NYCB Board was the
most prestigious thing she could get near.  It offered her the greatest
opportunity for advancement because it was a weak Board, because it was
not well organized.  In a sense this made the ballet's Board militarily
indefensible.

"Mounting such an assault was plausible there," our anthropologist
says.

"It wouldn't have been possible at the Met.  Frances could be accepted
at the ballet more readily than at other places because the place is
used to odd behavior.  I mean: the resident genius-in-charge was
George

Balanchine, not a man who behaves like Tony Bliss.  Furthermore some of
the people on that Board could be described as 'avid to fund-raise."

Getting.money from

Frances Schreuder was a quick and sure way to enhance one's own
position among one's fellow Board members."

People who met Frances during this period tend to remember the
encounters with extreme clarity.  An elderly banker-balletomane can
recall five distinct occasions, the first at a small black tie dinner
at the home of a

Board member.  "She tried to pick me up!"  he says.  "I don't mean she
said-'let's go to bed."  What she said to me, quite loudly, in the
middle of dinner, so that everyone could hear, including my wife and
the butler, was, "Let's get out of here and go listen to Bobby Short."
"

Other similarly awkward encounters ensued.  The last this couple heard
from

Frances was a telephone call at 1:30 A.M. "She kept apologizing for
awakening us and said she knew it was inappropriate, but she insisted
that somebody on the Board was following her."

Frances not only spoke of her fear of being followed, she said her
telephone was tapped and her building under surveillance.  She
described a close brush with death at lunch.  Five minutes after she
and her guest that day left the restaurant, the woman's husband-a noted
gun collector-had turned up looking for her.

Not all Mrs.  Schreuder's social encounters with Board members were
sinister.  She could be a very animated and amusing conversationalist,
and she sometimes projected an intense, exotic sexuality.  New York is
full of fashionable women, another lawyer says.  "After a while, they
all look the same.  Frances was a true original.  I found her
fascinating."

A Ballet Guild party was held at the Carlyle Hotel.  Frances and her
escort grew raucous enough to drown out the entertainment.  When a
patroness tried discreetly to hush them, Frances huffed loudly that she
was a close personal friend of Lincoln Kirstein.  The next day the
woman checked.

Kirstein said he had never heard of her.  In truth the entire inner
circle knew about Frances by now, and it was becoming apparent that her
dinner party money was just the tip of a green iceberg.

The financial details of each new ballet mounted by NYCB are complex,
arcane, and jealously guarded; it would scarcely do for some givers to
know what other givers are, and are not, giving.  But some financial
facts are available regarding Frances's first really big benefaction,
which was not to a new ballet but a new book.  This was a mammoth
catalogue raisong entitled Choreography by George Balanchine, to be
published by a not-for-profit foundation.  Mrs.  Schreuder was first
approached about it during the spring or summer of 1979.  In time she
received a lofty letter from Winthrop

Knowlton-then president of the NYCB Board, as well as president and CEO
of

Harper & Row-inviting her to contribute to the $75,000 estimated cost.
" Providing the basic information in concentrated form, the book will
illuminate Balanchine's growth and adumbrate his career and influence
by outlining in factual form the essential details of place, occasion,
and personnel which, while emanating principally from America for the
past forty years, remain directly connected with the beginnings and
first triumphs in St.  Petersburg, Paris and London," Knowlton wrote.
His letter continued in like vein for three single-spaced pages,
eventually coming out with it: what K6chel did for Mozart, what
Gesellschaft did for Bach,

Frances Schreuder was hereby invited to help make possible for the man
whom her new friends placed alongside Picasso and Stravinsky as one of
the three surpassingly artistic geniuses of the twentieth century.

Did Frances come through?  Does a duck take to water?  When finally
published, in 1983, the huge book weighed nine pounds, sold for $75 a
copy, and had cost $420,000 to produce.  $105,000 of this came from
earned income, and the remaining $315,000 came from individual
contributors, who are thanked in the book by name.  It is heady
company.  In a single bound, plain

Frankie Bradshaw of Gilmer Drive had vaulted onto a list which includes
Mr.  and Mrs.  Sid Bass of Fort Worth, Texas; the Lila and DeWitt
Wallace

Foundation; the Eugenia and Henri Doll Foundation (a Schlumberger
family fund); the Lassalle Fund (a Julius Rosenwald family fund) and
the Ford

Foundation.  Unstated, but not unknown in backstage and boardroom
circles, was that an impressive 65 percent of the grand total Of
$315,000 came from

Frances-in reality, of course, from Berenice.  Mother and daughter had
ponied up $i5o,000 in cash for this heady endeavor, as compared to the
paltry $25,000 kicked in by the Ford Foundation.  Poor Franklin must
have been doing entre chats in his grave.

At around this time Frances began telling people she had been invited
to join the Board.  She had not-yet-but maybe she thought she had.
Maybe, even, she had been told she had.  Others, later, have suggested
such may have been the case.  Many odd things were occurring.  Frances
had taken to phoning

Board members late at night, talking lengthily about her late
husband,

"wealthy Belgian diplomat," and promising large gifts.  The gifts came
through.  In the outside, non ballet world, Frances paid bills late or
not at all.  But as the ballet's fairy godmother, no pledge was
unredeemed, and no check ever bounced.

At this time, too, she began to speak guardedly of a personal
friendship with Mr.  B, and to mention occasional private dinners. 
This was obvious fantasy, palpable falsehood.  Offstage, Balanchine saw
only artists,

Russians, and other dancers.  But no one much minded what she said. 
The green river washed other considerations away.

What seems to have happened when Frances Schreuder careened into the
New

York City Ballet was that she was misperceived by almost everybody. 
The only ones who had an accurate fix on her were those who were
strictly after her money, who saw her as a Live One and didn't care
about anything else; people who found her "selfless generosity" not
addled, or calculated, simply "refreshing"; people who saw her as the
all-time golden goose, source of unlimited golden eggs.

The misperception led them to see her not only as a Live One but as a
reasonably sane one.  This impression was perhaps strengthened by

Kirstein's personal attentions, which were real.  He invited her to
lunch.

He invited her to dinner.  So did W. McNeil Lowry and his wife, and one
or two of the others.  Kirstein occasionally accompanied her to Ballet
social functions.  He may have misperceived her madness as the divine
madness of the artist, rather than the mundane madness of the
streets.

Or he may just have seen her as newest and potentially most bountiful
in a long line of LLL's.

Who knows precisely what Kirstein saw?  He hesitated to speak about
Mrs.

Schreuder at all, he told one journalist, "as I have seen so many
recent examples of devilish malice magnetized on her, that one's notion
of the world's justice is only reinforced.  No one can trust anyone; as
Oscar

Wilde said when he got out of gaol, one has no friends, only lovers."

Kirstein's quixotic moods are well known.  In the words of one
respected ballet authority, a man of rigorous scrupulosity: "You must
remember,

Lincoln speaks the truth when he's at his lowest ebb.  His bad spells
often occur on his birthday.  He had one at age seventy, another at
seventy-five.  He's quite pulled together right now.  You can't believe
a word he says."

One of the few who did not misperceive Frances was George

Balanchine; he scarcely saw her at all.  "Who was that?"  he had been
heard to mutter, in Russian, when the big jack-o'-lantern grin beamed
out at the great choreographer as he hurried along a backstage corridor
like the

White Rabbit- I'm la tel I'm late!

In the real world outside the theater, Frances's strange association
with

Richard Behrens continued.  On April 18,1979, the two old friends
appeared at the East End Avenue branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank,
N.A."  and opened joint checking account #030-1-050738.  Their initial
deposit was $4,100.  Of this, Frances contributed $400 and Behrens
$3,700, all that remained of his $5,000 loan.  He wished to conceal his
assets in a joint account, he later explained, because he had by then
accumulated $6,000 in scofflaw parking tickets and feared the city
might seek a judgment against him.  In April, Frances withdrew $1,200
from their account, in May another $1,500, and another $1,200 in June.
By October, the balance on hand was $14-70.

Frances was moving into a new world of culture and beauty.  Expenses
were rising.  By June her request to her father's estate to raise her
monthly allowance to $5,000 was granted.  But her most important and
creative financial stroke that spring was to persuade her mother to
transfer all of her assets out of Salt Lake City and put them into New
York's Morgan

Guaranty bank.  It probably was not difficult for Frances to convince

Berenice that her wealth was in better, even safer financial hands in
New

York than in Bradshaw-dominated Salt Lake City.  Here in the East it
would receive sophisticated management from Morgan Guaranty's elegant
Mr.

Goodfellow, "a Jew not a Mormon," Frances pointed out, and it would be
watched over by the banks lawyers, Rogers & Wells, headed by former

Secretary of State William Rogers.  Once the money moved East,
Berenice's and Frances's affairs would be looked after by the same
institutions.

And, if the Ballet wanted to check on whether Frances was good for the
increasingly large donations she was pledging, likely a discreet peek
could be arranged.

Marc was now a senior at Kent School, and his for-tunes too had begun
to vacillate.  William Hart Perry, the muscular, grayhaired new dean of
students, formerly the crew coach, thought Marc Schreuder was
"brilliant," particularly at any academic subject or sport or pastime
which required a sense of strategy and tactics.  His history teacher,

Theodore F. Morse, thought Marc was "possibly the brightest history
student Kent has ever had."  Another teacher called him "frighteningly
smart," and admired his ability and willingness to challenge teachers
in their own fields.  He took many

Advanced Placement courses and won high marks in Latin,
Constitutional

Law, Math, Asian Studies, and Chemistry.  His only real problem was
with a class called "Theology and Ethics."  He could never score higher
than a

D. He did not really seem to grasp what the class was about.

But Marc's personal habits were atrocious.  He stank, he didn't bathe,
he never had his shirttail tucked in for more than ten minutes, and his
table manners were nonexistent.  He never went to bed on time.  He Red
to study past curfew, until 3 Or 4 A.M."  which repeatedly made him
sleep through breakfast and morning classes and earned him a great many
demerits.

His mother's one- and even two-hour phone calls to her son were
legend.

Marc talked to her from the pay phone outside the administration
offices, and everyone could hear him arguing, screaming, sometimes
shouting, "Go to hell!"

"What goes with you and your mother?"  Dean Perry once asked.

"Oh, we just don't get along," the lad replied.  But the phone calls
became so abusive, the counseling office began to keep a file.  Their
records show that on May 21, 1977, Marc was overheard talking "with
elation" to his mother on the pay phone and "whooping with delight" at
the news that his grandfather had cancer.

The school had been aware from the start of Frances's eccentricities
but chose, like the Ballet people, to overlook them.  The day the
Schreuders visited and Marc was accepted, a counselor had written in
his file, "The mother is sometimes in another world.  She feels Marc
may be the next

Einstein."

Frances had told the office that Marc's bill would be paid by his
grandfather.  He was "senile," she said, adding, "I will soon be in a
position to make a substantial contribution to Kent's endowment
fund."

By his third year, Marc was sleeping through many classes and had piled
up hundreds of hours of demerits.  He had few friends, and was often
taunted by the other boys.  Says Dean Perry, "He looked like a pigpen,
but it was hard to stay angry with Marc very long, because he was so
much like a misbehaving puppy."  But the puppy was turning into a very
difficult dog.

By the time Granny got her money transferred East, her grandson's prep
school graduation had come and gone.  Marc did not take part.  On the
other hand, neither did he go to jail.  One moonlit night in May, Marc
and another student had broken into the school store and made off with
assorted stationery supplies, sneakers, "cute little Parker pens," and
about fifty dollars in cash.  They got away with it.  To relax after
taking a math makeup exam, which brought up his precollege grade to A-,
Marc broke in again, alone this time, and was again undetected.  Then,
unable to sleep the night before he was to return home to Frances, he
was strolling the campus at I

A.m. and was again near the school store when a vice-principal
encountered him there and "chewed me out for lurking."

Later that night Marc's room was shaken down.  Loot worth $730 was
discovered, as well as a set of duplicate keys to every door on
campus.

Marc named the other boy, his partner on the original raid, but this
did not save Marc from prosecution.  Frances tried unsuccessfully to
keep the story out of the local papers.  The school was furious at the
flouting of its Christian ideals, and removed Marc's picture from the
senior yearbook.

Ultimately Marc was permitted to make restitution of the stolen school
property, plead guilty to breach of the peace, a Class C misdemeanor,
and pay a fifty-dollar fine.  Still only eighteen years old, he also
was able to have the matter expunged from his criminal record under
Connecticut's liberal-minded Young Offenders Statute.  Kent School was
not as forgiving.

Although the miscreant had fulfilled his academic requirements, Kent
embargoed his records for a year and, by refusing to forward a
transcript to any college, effectively enforced a year of academic
probation.

When summer came, Frances was back in another rented Southampton house,
less grandiose but more private than Dragon's Hall.  The new, two-story
stucco villa on Ox Pasture Road was surrounded by ten-foot-high hedges,
and it had a bigger pool.  This time Frances invited Granny to visit,
and pushed her to pay the bill.  Before mother and daughter left for
Southampton, they took another look at the Gracie Square apartment.
Here Granny could have a permanent room of her own, and bath, Frances
said, and it was a "real ritzy" address, a fitting place to raise
Ariadne, and Marc.  The building was nowhere so exclusive as the
Huguenot Society, but neither would the co-op's board of directors
accept just anybody.  They had turned down Diana

Ross and Liza

Minnelli.  But Lily Pons with her husband Andre Kostelanetz had
occupied one of the penthouses, and upstairs from the very apartment
they were looking at lived Mme, Chiang Kai-shek.  True, she was
Chinese, but very rich Chinese: she had thirty-five servants.  Berenice
agreed to think it over.

Once reestablished in Long Island, Frances took on new
responsibilities.

George Balanchine's triple-bypass heart surgery had taken place at
New

York Hospital in mid-June, and he was now convalescing in his modest

Southampton condominium.  It was surrounded by high walls, but a
portion of the big yellow umbrella on his sundeck was visible from the
street.

Everyone at NYCB and SAB (School of American Ballet) was worried about
him and avid for news.  Frances took to driving by daily.  If the
umbrella was open, it meant to her that Mr.  B was probably feeling
well enough to sit out of doors.  A closed umbrella, therefore, was
cause for concern.

Frances took to phoning in bulletins based on these observations.  All
this left her less time than usual for her own family, and Berenice for
the first time was free to enjoy a certain amount of uninterrupted fun
at pool and beach getting to know her grandchildren.

Larry was on his own.  Earlier in the year he had changed his name
legally to Lawrence Bradshaw.  He didn't want a foreign sounding name,
he explained later, especially if he should decide one day to run for

President.  He was proud that he had taken care of the paperwork
himself and not wasted money on a lawyer.  It had been a simple matter
to steal from Frances's voluminous locked files the ten-year-old
documents which had changed his name from Gentile to Schreuder.  He had
stayed up all one night typing up a similar set of papers, and at dawn
had driven from

Reading to New York and found the same courthouse, even the same
courtroom, Frances had visited before.  There were minor errors in his
handiwork, and he had to retype the papers and make the drive five or
six times more before he got everything perfect.  But eventually, as he
wrote in his Occupier, "The Judge complimented Larry on his fine legal
work."

This summer Larry was in Dallas, working two jobs.  He had driven there
after reading in his favorite magazine, U.S. News & World Report,
that

Texas had the highest employment rate in the nation.  For the first
three weeks, while earning enough money to rent air-conditioned
quarters, he slept in his car.  He was employed as a maintenance man in
a lead-re factoring plant, but the job he liked best was working for a
pharmaceuticals company interested in compiling statistics on teenage
drug and alcohol use.  The questionnaires were long, and Larry was paid
fifteen dollars an hour to find people to answer the tedious questions.
He learned to work poor black neighborhoods, where the supply of idle
teenagers was limitless and other pollsters were reluctant to visit.
Larry worked as hard at this canvassing as he had done when canvassing
for wheat backs He is strong for his size height five feet ten, weight
about 18o pounds-and seems to have limitless energy.  Like his
grandfather, he can make do with very little sleep.  In Texas, he
banked $6,000 in six weeks, sometimes putting in eighteen-hour days,
and still found plenty of time to hang out at topless bars and X-rated
movies, and sometimes to drive to El Paso and Juarez across the border.
He recorded his extraordinary earnings and erotic adventures in his
Occupiers.  His

Dallas girl cost thirty-five dollars, the Mexican girls only twenty.
Larry

Bradshaw was having the best summer of his life.

The summer gave Berenice Bradshaw time to contemplate anew and at close
range the disorder of her daughter's domestic life.  In mid-August,
Larry called Granny from Texas and learned from his grandmother that
Frances was again in Southampton, this time on Ox Pasture Road.  Larry
drove east without stopping except for brief catnaps in his car, and
had no difficulty locating his-family.  He found his way to the
Southampton post office.  There he waited and watched for his mother's
big new blue Delta 88 Olds, the car she bought after Freddie's car got
demolished on the

Triboro Bridge, the car she had proudly paid all cash for $8,000 her
sons stole from the Bradshaws the summer before the murder.  The car
showed up, with Marc at the wheel, and Larry followed his brother home.
His ROTC scholarship paid only tuition, he said.  He had no money to
pay for his sophomore-year room and board at Lehigh.  Frances acted
cold and disinterested, but Granny wrote him a check.  Then, just as he
was leaving, Frances handed Larry one of his own checks, from his F & B
trust fund.  He left feeling "pretty good."  His mother seemed to be
growing "less hostile."

Now what Berenice later called her "brainstorm" struck.  Why not buy
this disordered family that big duplex on Gracie Square?  Why non She
had the money, by God, and if Frances owned her own apartment, then at
least the

Schreuders could never get any more pesky eviction notices.  Perhaps at
$525,000 the place was a good investment.  It might even be a steal. In
any event, if her grandchildren did have to live in New York, it was a
good atmosphere in which to raise kids, not just respectable but safe. 
It was, in fact, a true Walled City, an enchanted and locked enclave
guarded by twenty-four-hour squads of uniformed doormen instead of by a
dragon, and protected by the East River instead of a moat.

Berenice instructed her new bankers to come up with the necessary
money.

She made her offer and in time was accepted by the co-op's board.  The
directors might have rejected Liza Minnelli, but Granny Bradshaw was
another matter.  She appeared before them alone, and, as she said
later,

"We didn't tell them about our naughty boys."  She was simply a rich
widow from Salt Lake City who just happened to keep her assets in the
Morgan

Guaranty Bank.  She intended to occupy the apartment herself, she said,
and anticipated frequent visits from her daughter and grandchildren.

Berenice had no more difficulty with the co-op's board than Frances did
with the Ballet's Board.  Moral; dough un sticks all doors.  This
Christmas,

Berenice told herself, twenty years of bailing Frances and her brood
out of an unending series of domestic crises would finally come to an
end.

This Christmas she could confidently expect to have her much
misunderstood and abused youngest daughter, her brilliant grandson
Marc, and her adorable ballerina granddaughter Ariadne all snugly
installed in the best damn address in New York City.

The previous spring, Ariadne had begun taking ballet lessons several
times a week after she came home from kindergarten.  Shortly after
Ariadne started first grade at St.  Hilda's and St.  Hugh's, Frances
dropped in to chat with the nuns.  Adroit at reading moods from faces,
the sisters had developed a reliable system for judging the volatile
Mrs.  Schreuder before she opened her mouth.  If she was smiling
broadly, as she was now, all would be well.  On some occasions her lips
were compressed in a straight line that crossed her face like a
zipper-a surefire tip-off that she was enraged, and endeavoring to hold
in her anger.

Today she had stopped by to arrange that her daughter continue her
study of ballet during regular gym periods.  The Schreuders were a
particularly arts-minded family, she explained; she herself was a Board
member of the

New York City Ballet.  Perhaps, then, one of the nuns suggested, Mrs.

Schreuder might enjoy the nativity pageant which the children were
preparing to put on at Christmas, at the Cathedral of St.  John the
Divine?  On hearing this, Frances offered, with a generosity which
bordered on insistence, to arrange that her "close friend" Beverly
Sills sing the Virgin Mary part.

That the school did not want an opera star, that it wanted one of its
own students in the role, seemed beyond her comprehension.  Nor did she
appear to understand that the former Bubbles Silverman, famous as the
Brooklyn

Jewish girl who made good in the world of grand opera, might not leap
at the role.  The real trouble set in later, when Frances dropped in on
first grade and discovered that Ariadne was not quick at learning to
read.  The star reader in her class was a small Nigerian boy.  That
night at home, when the shouting began in his mother's bedroom, Marc
recognized in her voice the same cold anger, the same bullying
repetitions, the mounting fury and threats, the tears and hysterical
pleading which had once been directed at him.  He camouflaged his big
new Audio-Technica mike inside a piece of folded cardboard and placed
it just inside the bedroom door.  Marc never again listened to the
so-called "Ariadne Tape," the hour-long cassette he made that awful
night.  He put it where he knew even Frances would never find it, in
his special hiding place behind the baseboards in the back of his
closet.  Later, he hid other tapes there.

Marc's tapes are a window on true domestic Bedlam.  They show how
dangerous it was to be a child in this disturbed household.  They are
the "flip side" of Franklin's Pleasant Memories and Berenice's
"mo-year

Autobiography."  They are the reality which sanctimony and Huguenot

Society hauteur had so long covered up.  They document the horror of

Frances's "mothering."  They show how, always, she used her children as
an excuse to do exactly what she wanted.  Nothing, really, was for
their good, their protection, their advancement; everything was for her
own.

Frances Schreuder is far from unusual in this regard, though she was
surely extreme.  In using her children, she dreadfully abused them. 
Yet many parents do much the same-parents who are not crazy at all.

Fall was an unusually eventful season, even for the Schreuder family.
Over the summer, the big money had been moved East.  By mid-September
the ~written invitation to Frances to become the modern Kbchel and

Geselischaft had arrived.  Ariadne had started first grade.  At Lehigh
University, Larry had been elected to

"Student Forum," as student government was known, and put on the
Discipline

Committee.  Marc, temporarily sidetracked from his pursuit of higher
education, had gone to work, first as an A&P delivery boy, then as a
four-dollars-an-hour bonded messenger boy for Mitsubishi
International.

Traveling the city by subway, he delivered "strictly financial stuff ..
stocks, bonds, cash, letters of credit, bills of lading."  He did not
steal anything, he says, "because this was my first experience in the
business world, and I wanted to prove myself."

On Halloween, while Frances was out at the ballet, Berenice and Marc
sat together at the dining-room table having a few drinks and reviewing
the floor plans for io Gracie Square while they waited wistfully for
trick-or-treaters to ring their doorbell.  Both Granny and grandson
were somewhat depressed.  Marc wished he were off in college, and
Berenice wished-what?  Tonight was her fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.
She was worried about her family, about the money, about her health.  A
few weeks earlier, in Salt Lake, she had been hospitalized with chest
pains.  As soon as Frances heard about it, she had insisted that her
mother return immediately to New York, where better care was available.
That Berenice's money was in New York now, and that the Bradshaw estate
was still in probate, and that Berenice had not yet made out a new will
must have made

Granny's ongoing good health a matter of special concern to them all.

That fall Berenice and Marilyn took a long walk through Riverside
Park.

Berenice was careful not to talk much about her troubles, particularly
her fears for her granddaughter-whom Marilyn had not seen since her
swift visit to the maternity wing of Doctors Hospital.  Berenice knew
that Frances was being "very hard on Ariadne, riding the child"
unmercifully, often "ranting and raving" into the wee hours.  One night
Frances had kept the whole household awake until 4 A.m."  bullying and
badgering the child about "what is a sentence," while Ariadne whimpered
in the corner.  Berenice had heard it all.  She knew that a
six-year-old should have a chance to sleep quietly in her own room, not
in her mother's bed.  She knew she should be weaned from the nightly
nursing bottle that Frances still insisted on.  But if Granny tried to
interfere, that made things worse for everybody, Ariadne especially.
The consequences of saying no to Frances had become truly dreadful.

Yet it seemed nothing could be done.  Berenice could not seek advice or
comfort from her oldest daughter.  Marilyn would only say, "I told you
so."  So Berenice walked in near silence, letting

Marilyn do the talking while they scuffed along through the autumn
leaves.

Richard Behrens's student loan was nearly gone; soon he would be on
welfare.  He had been trying with no success for some months to reach

Frances by telephone.  She refused to accept his calls and had
instructed her children and Granny to do the same.  He decided to
launch a letter-writing blitz.  His first letter to Frances, dated
December u, is a polite three-page request begging her to return his
money.  He does not use the world "steal," but, as he figures it, his
old friend is now into him for $4,778.43, including interest

On November 13 the Ballet's fall season had begun, and Frances stepped
back through the gold curtain once more.  Around the New York State

Theater, the word was out.  In the first-tier boxes and Promenade Bar,
where Board members and Guild members and ballet cognoscenti gathered
to gossip during intermissions, everybody knew there was a new person
on the scene.  She was a Mrs.  Schreuder, nee Bradshaw, Bryn Mawr '60,
and a college classmate of Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic of the New
York Times, and of the writer and balletomane Renata Adler.  She was a
distant cousin, as a matter of fact, of Thornton W. Bradshaw, the
industrialist who had just been named president of RCA.  When these
Bradshaws moved from

Pasadena to New York, Mrs.  Thornton W. Bradshaw was herself invited to
join the New York City Ballet's Board, and thereafter she and her
husband became frequent ballet-goers.  Not one of these four people,
who saw one another often at performances and parties that fall, could
remember ever before meeting, or even being aware of the existence of
the uncomfortably intense, chain-smoking woman who approached them now
during intermissions and doggedly repeated in her childlike voice,
"Don't you remember me?

Surely you remember me ... We all lived together in Rhodes Hall I'm

Bradshaw too, you know ... you must remember me ."  It was easier to
say yes than no to so terribly insistent a person, harmless except that
once she got started you could never interrupt her.  So they all smiled
politely back at her and murmured yes, of course they remembered.  Of
course.

One balletomane who did not have to pretend, who was sure he had never
met Frances in the past, and sure too that he could not take much of
her in the present-but was certain of her value to the board
nonetheless-was Board member Robert Gottlieb, editor-in-chief of

Alfred A. Knopf.

Gottlieb is a man passionate about ballet.  Working for Balanchine, he
says, "is a supreme privilege, like serving Mozart."  And Gottlieb
found Frances

Schreuder "extremely intelligent, an extraordinary person with a real
instinct for quality.  She felt, as I do, that our civilization can be
defined by Balanchine's genius.  If you're a serious person about art,
you must realize that Balanchine is one of, if not the great genius of
our era.

It's a litmus test for me."

Frances passed the test.  Nonetheless, Gottlieb acknowledged that
"despite her brilliance, she is an extremely peculiar woman, a seething
mass of disorder.  There are certain people whose psychic energy is so
powerful, you are uncomfortable in their presence.  Her tension was
overwhelming.  She stalks, prowls, corners people like a cat."

Gottlieb continues, "People were loathe to work with her because she
was so odd, so emotionally charged.  But that doesn't mean she was a
murderess.  I like her, although I wouldn't want to spend more than ten
minutes with her.

She affixes this glittering eye on you.  Words pour out in torrents.
She is obviously a tragic person-tragic because she has a mind locked
up in that caldron.  Whether it is a real intelligence or a gorging
dementia who knows?  She is simply more than you need."  As he speaks,
Gottlieb's face contorts, he grits his teeth, strains his facial
muscles, shudders as if trying to swallow a foul draft.

Backstage, and in the Ballet offices, Frances was regarded as a sort of
harmless pest-"not a pest to Mr.  B, because Mr.  B had no idea who she
was.

But we all soon realized that a major difficulty with Frances Schreuder
is simply that she takes up a great deal of time."  Partly this is
because she will not be interrupted.  Break into her train of thought,
and she simply starts over.  From the top.  It is like trying to hold a
conversation with a cassette.  Soon a new development specialist, a
Harvard-trained lawyer, was assigned to look after the precious "Live
One," and satiate her needs.

"That's the best you can hope to do with Frances," someone observed,
"satiate her needs.  You can't ever hope to satisj~ her."  Part of
"satiating

Frances's needs" was to send her numerous books on ballet, as well as
recordings of ballet music, particularly music which someone thought
might be under consideration by one of the choreographers.  In 1949
another brilliant and much younger, jazzier choreographer, Jerome
Robbins, had accepted an invitation to join the staff, and, over the
years, a lot of backstage and very much behind-the-hand talk concerned
who, and particularly which Board members, preferred the work of which
choreographer.

To be clear: Balancbine always said the dancer he respected most was
Fred

Astaire.  The choreographer he respected most indeed the only
choreographer he respected-was New Yorkborn Jerome Robbins.  In Europe,
which NYCB tours annually, audiences and critics sometimes respected
Robbins more than

Balanchine.  They relished the American's energy, verve, inventiveness;
they found the Russian a bit old-fashioned at times.  It goes without
saying, but needs to be said in this context, that Balanchine and
Robbins themselves understood and respected one another entirely.  Both
were artists.  Only non-artists made comparisons, had favorites, took
sides.

The advent of new-style business practices which Mrs.  Schreuder
exemplified was deplored by members of NYCB's old guard.  "For years we
were a deficit operation!"  they said with pride.  In the old days,
whether or not something was "best for the Company" was the sole
standard for accepting a gift, no matter how thin the purse, how fat
the cat.  The heiress Rebekah Harkness had offered to commission and
herself pay for an entire new ballet-something which rarely, if ever,
happened-but only if she could write the music.  NYCB declined.  The
impresario Sol Hurok had offered an immense bounty, but he wanted to
book Balanchine's dancers on a grueling series of one-night stands. 
The strain on bodies, feet, limbs might prove too great.  NYCB didn't
accept his money either.

"When George and Lincoln started this Company, they had a dream.  They
didn't want to do the old chestnuts, Scheherazade and The Nutcracker, "
a starchy old-timer recalls.  "And in the same years the Company
developed, ballet became a respected, mainstream art form.  "I mean:
the

Ford Foundation gave us nearly seven million bucks!  Who in America
before that had even heard of' dance grants'?  We'd made it!  So why,
now, having made it, do we knock ourselves senseless in order to
include a madwoman on our Board of Directors?  For what?  For money?

"Of course there is great pressure for money.  That's what a board
does.

The most prestigious boards in this town are the

Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and maybe the
Museum of

Modern Art.  The people on them talk endlessly about "What makes a good
board member."  The answer is always the same: Someone who contributes
a six-figure amount on a yearly basis."

Most rich people find asking other rich people for this kind of money
distasteful.  One or two don't find it distasteful; they relish it.
Such persons are rare, and today they are exceedingly valuable
additions to the board of any arts institution.  Least valuable board
members tend to be corporate executives who, with rare exceptions, hate
calling other CEO's to ask for contributions.  Indeed, big corporate
money is so difficult for a nonprofit institution to obtain, says the
starchy old guardsman, "that the lure of private-sector contributors
can become overwhelmingly tempting.

That's what happened to us."

Secretly, Larry Bradshaw had just bought another car, a '72 Impala,
blue with a black top.  It had 56,000 miles on it, had cost $i,000, and
was to

Larry a source of immense pleasure.  When his Thanksgiving vacation
came, he drove to New York and rang the Schreuders' doorbell.  Granny
admitted him to the apartment.  Frances was spending most of her nights
at the ballet, and her days in bed trying to stay out of Granny's way.
She particularly hated having her mother around the house during
holidays.  Berenice's attempts to "take over" and wrest control from
her daughter seemed most odious to

Frances on those occasions.  The tug-of-war over Ariadne was always
stronger then.  Frances accused Granny of trying to "indoctrinate" the
child.  Now

Granny was once again carrying on about a turkey, cranberries, yams,
despite the fact that Frances had already announced her Thanksgiving
menu-stuffed striped bass-and had bought the huge fish.  Granny
enlisted Marc's support in her pro-turkey rebellion, and together they
went out cruising supermarkets for last-minute supplies.  Larry decided
to take Ariadne to see Macy's

Thanksgiving Day Parade the next morning.  This would get them away for
a few hours from the mother-daughter free-fire zone.

Thanksgiving afternoon, with her mother out for a walk and all her
children at home, Frances made another melodramatic suicide attempt.
She was in bed sipping a gin-and-tonic from the small bedside tray
cluttered with glasses, papers, pill vials, coffee cups, cigarettes,
ashtrays, and bottles of

Schweppes tonic which always sat atop her bedside table.  Marc was also
in the room.  Gradually he became aware that his mother was
methodically swallowing Tylenol pills, two by two, along with her
drink.

"What are you doing, Mom!"  he shouted.  By the time he realized what
was happening, she had gulped ten or twelve.

She had Marc's attention and now "started just guzzling them down.
Really stuffing them in."  Marc began to slap and pound her bulging
cheeks.  "Mom!

What are you doing!  Spit 'em out, Mom!"

Begging and screaming this way, he became almost as hysterical as his
mother.  "Surprisingly, she did spit some out," he said later.  "But
she'd still ingested a shit-load, pardon the expression.  I said,
"Well, I've gotta call the ambulance!""

"Don't you dare call the ambulance!  First call Loughranf" Jack
Loughran was one of her lawyers at Rogers & Wells, a singularly patient
man whom she sometimes called several times a day, using him as a kind
of indentured shrink.

"No, Mom!  I wanna call in!"

"Call Jack Loughranl"

Marc thinks he must have dialed gn first, because he remembers Larry
admitting the paramedics to the bedroom while Mom and he were still
arguing about what to say to the lawyer.  "It was shocking to me-what
she wanted to talk to Loughran about was her willl"

Frances refused to speak to Loughran herself, so Marc relayed her
messages blindly, praying the ambulance would come soon.  "I kept
saying, "It's okay, Mom.  The ambulance is coming!"  And Mom was
saying, "Tell Jack that I like the will the way it is, and to get it
signed off.  Get it executeff

"Mr.  Loughran was asking, "What's going on, Mar cT and Mom was feeding
me the lines.  I'd say, Mom, Mr.  Loughran wants to know this!  He
wants to know that!  And she'd tell me what to say back.  Because I was
panicked.

And I was still on the phone with Mr.  Loughran when Larry let the
paramedics in with the stretcher.  By that time, when Loughran would
ask me, "What's going on, Mar cT Mom was saying, "I'm dying!  Tell him
I'm dying!"

The paramedics asked what had happened.  "Mom took a bunch of pills,"
Marc said.  But when they asked to see the bottle, Frances signaled her
son not to say anything.  They were putting her onto the stretcher
when she slipped the bottle into Marc's hand.

"Hide Ul" she whispered.

"I quickly ran out, hid the bottle in my cupboard, and ZOOM!  I was
back.

Then they carted her off to New York Hospital."

While Marc was out of the room hiding the pills, Frances had also
whispered to Larry to hide her locked briefcase and make sure that Marc
did not steal it while she was gone.  Her older son took this as a vote
of confidence, another tiny sign that his mother's feelings toward him
had begun to thaw.

Berenice became extremely upset when she got home.  But Larry was so
happy about the briefcase that he turned the evening into a celebration
and cooked his special spaghetti dinner for the others, the one
Vittorio had shown him how to make years before.

No one was allowed to visit Frances until Sunday.  Marc and Granny
walked over to the hospital first, and bought four bunches of pink and
red roses on the way.  "Mom didn't even want to talk to Granny.  She
was super polite saying, "Yes, Granny," "No, Granny."  But she
whispered in my ear that she didn't want Granny around, only me," Marc
recalls.

It was the first time she called her Granny the Croc.  "Get that
crocodile out of here!  With her crocodile tears!"  she whispered to
Marc.  Berenice found some excuse to leave, Marc says, and then his
mother sent him down to the deli.  "She had a craving for ham and
cheese sandwiches, egg salad .. wanted me to bring six or seven of
them!"

That afternoon Larry drove Ariadne to the hospital.  His little sister
was the only one to know about his newest car.  Later, driving back to
Lehigh, he thought it was a good omen that Ariadne had been his first
passenger.  He felt happier than he had been in some time.

When Frances came home a few days later, she seemed fine and talked
about how exciting it had been to see the Shah of Iran in the
hospital.

At Lehigh, Larry met Nancy, a biology student.  "She was a little
shorter than me, real skinny, red hair, green eyes, white, and very
smart."  He called Nancy his "first love."  For the first time in his
life, Larry had sex without paying for it.  It only happened once, but
Larry was pretty sure she would have remained his girlfriend if the
other thing hadn't happened.

He invited Nancy to spend Christmas vacation with him, driving back and
forth to Texas in the

Impala.  When she declined, he started to worry again about where he
was going to spend Christmas.  The dorms would be locked, Nancy had
rejected

Texas, Salt Lake City was out because Granny was in New York, and New
York might be out for the same reason.  Or it might not.  He wasn't
sure how his mother felt about him any longer.  She had been sort of
nice to him in

September, and there had been two nice days in November, before she had
tried to commit suicide.  And even then she had trusted him-not
Marc-with her briefcase.

Larry now started to become increasingly preoccupied with the
possibility of war between Russia and the United States.  He called his
mother and she invited him to meet her for dinner in New York.  He
recalls being in a restaurant on Madison Avenue that night, and talking
a lot about the "imaginary war," which by now had begun to seem quite
real to him, and in the middle of it all he blurted out some mention of
Nancy, and also asked if he could spend Christmas at home.

"We'll talk about that if and when Granny the Bat leaves."

Larry drove back to Pennsylvania.  He shared his dormitory room with
Farid

Sallourn, a transfer student from State University in ButTalo whom
Larry thought of as a "big hairy Lebanese."  When Larry's name had been
Lorenzo

Gentile, he had hated being called a Dago, or a Wop.  He now thought
of

Salloum as a kind of super-Wop.  The coming war with Russia was looming
larger and larger in Larry's consciousness.

The next day was bitterly cold.  He used the latest F & B check that
Mom had given him to pay his Lehigh bill, and withdrew all his savings
from his bank.  He had decided to spend Christmas in his car, driving
to Texas and back alone.  That day it snowed heavily.  By nightfall the
hillside he lived on was iced up.  The tires on his newest car were
totally bald.  It was impossible to leave, so he parked at the bottom
of the slippery slope, planning an early morning getaway.

He fell asleep in his car, and woke about 3:45 A.M. Chilled and
frantic, he climbed the hill to his dormitory room.  Sallourn was
asleep.  Perhaps Larry fell asleep too; he is not sure.  All he
remembers is Salloum jumping up, suddenly, surprising him, and Larry
finding himself with a big hammer in his hand.  He could not think what
to do with it, he said later.

What he did was smash in Sallourn's skull and jaw and leap out the
window into a snowbank.  Inside, Other students screamed and banged on
the locked door.  Campus police picked Larry up immediately.  At his
arraignment the cops said they had been unable to interview the victim,
but the perpetrator claimed Sallourn had been bombarding him with
secret alpha waves "with the purpose of turning him into a female."
They said Larry told them he had slept in his car until the waves
"invaded" the Impala.  Then he had "ruined" Sallourn.

Police also said they had found a heavy, blood-and-hair-covered,
metal-bladed mason's hammer lying on Larry's bed.  They did not know
that the weapon had been stolen from Bradshaw Auto Parts, or that Larry
had carried it back from Salt Lake City in the wheel well of his
Impala, or that the date of the assault, December 21, was Larry's
brother's birthday.  , Marc recalls the night well.  When the call
came, Mom was sitting on the couch.  "Oh my God!"  she shrieked.  Then
she said, "Sit down, Marc.  I have some very bad news to tell you."  As
usual, it was taking his mother half an hour to come to the point. 
Marc had gritted his teeth and kept silent.  He thought at first that
Granny had died.  Then he thought "they had found out about us."  Then
he thought "it must be something else bad about me."  When it turned
out to be about Larry, even that "Larry had hit a guy with a hammer,
had some kind of a psychotic episode and was in jail," Marc felt
relieved.

This time the responsibility was all Mom's.  "She knew he was unstable,
but she'd treated him like dirt anyway."

Maybe Tricky was right, Marc thought.  He'd always said that Frances
knew how crazy Larry was, and that she was frightened of him,
especially when he barked.

Larry Bradshaw was charged with attempted homicide, aggravated assault,
and reckless endangerment.  The hearing was postponed because the
victim was in too serious a condition to be interviewed.  He had six
skull fractures, a broken jaw, and multiple head wounds.  That day, a
week after the crime,

Frances visited her son for the first time.

Larry was transferred for evaluation to the state psychiatric hospital
at

Allentown, Pennsylvania, and received a preliminary diagnosis of
"Explosive

Personality.  RULE OUT: SCHIZOPHRENIA."  There were several more
postponements; Sallourn's condition did not stabilize until
mid-January.

Not one member of Larry's family visited or made inquiries, save for a
call from a Salt

Lake City attorney who seemed concerned lest the public defender
assigned to Larry's case attempt to make some claim for funds on the
Bradshaw estate.

Frances visited her son for the second and last time February 7. When

Larry called Nancy and told her where he was, she told him never to try
to find her again.  By February ig the hospital decided Larry was
"nonpsychotic, but dangerous if crowded."  They gave him a final
diagnosis of Explosive Personality Disorder and sent him back to prison
to await trial.

By the end of the month, the Schreuders were finally ready to occupy
their expensive new home.  Moving precipitated new fights over control
between Frances and her mother.  Granny wanted to pack boxes in an
orderly manner; Frances screamed that Granny was trying to "take over
my property" until she reduced Berenice to tears.  Packing or unpacking
silverware, plates, books-anything could trigger a new explosion.  "Any
time Granny wanted to pack anything, Mom would just go off into a rage,
scream at Granny, try to make Granny feel guilty," says Marc.

The new duplex contained a large formal living room, dining room and
library, kitchens, and pantries on the first floor, and a curved stair
in the foyer led up to four or five bedrooms and baths above.  Frances
took up residence in a very large bed in the center of the huge master
bedroom.  She used it for sleeping, eating, reading the papers,
receiving, telephoning, and all other at-home activities.  Ariadne and
Tiffany shared the bed, which was made up with sheets of ivory silk,
and draped in elegant Chippendalepatterned chintz.

Granny remained downstairs unpacking books onto the library shelves.
The scene was surreal.  Now and then Frances descended the staircase
like an enraged Japanese Kabuki actor, thundering, "What have you been
doingl"

Well, I've been unpacking.  Why not, Frances?"

"I told you not to unpack.  I told you!  Why did you disobey me?"

Childlike: "Why can't I unpack.  I just want to help."

"You destroy everything you touchl You will ruin all my prorlerty. 
It's mine!  Yeah, you may have bought this place ... but then I might
just as well move back out ... I WILL move back out!"  Frances
screams.

Granny dissolves in tears.

On March 3, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Larry's public defender
lawyer,

Stanley Vasiliadis, entered a plea of not guilty.  Courtroom observers
described his client as filthy, stinking, out of-contact, unkempt, with
black fingernails, bleeding gums.  A request for lowered bail was
denied, and Larry was returned to prison to await trial.

Marc Schreuder began keeping a diary.

March 13: Mom is lazy.  I came in after being locked out; the kitchen
is a pigsty: coffee is spread all over the counters; and a broken cup
is smashed on the floor.  I have to clean up, made dinner as usual.

Tricky [Behrens] agrees that Mom was sick to lock Larry out; this
destroyed him.  Mom buys cats for $500 apiece (Ginger & Fluff-fluffl as
a birthday present for Ariadne.  Yet I have to return Fluff-fluff.  I
have to feed them and change their litter.

March r4: Mom says Lehigh is shit.  She always sets unrealistically
high goals: only HarvardlYale for her kids.  She pushes her kids to the
limit.

You cannot tell Mom she Is wrong.

March 15: Mom picks her nose while reading the paper ... In the spring,
Kent School finally disembargoed Marc's academic records, and he
applied for admission to Yale, Wesleyan, Trinity, and Vassar.  Yale and
Wesleyan turned him down and, after the usual interminable round of
conversations, Mom turned Vassar down as "a bit too feminine and artsy"
for her son.  Happily for Vassar, Marc wound up at Trinity College in
Hartford,

Connecticut.

Frances was also preoccupied with Ariadne's education.  She had come to
dislike the nuns at St.  Hilda's and St.  Hugh's, and regarded their
school as a kind of minor-league holding pen for her daughter until
something opened up at a be tier school, that is, Spence, Brearley,
Hewitt, or

Chapin.  In the next few months she found time to visit them all,
with

Ariadne in tow.  Three of these schools said a very fast no.  But

Chapin-Frances's first choice-put Ariadne on its second-grade waiting
list.

Mother and daughter had two more interviews before, ultimately, Chapin
too decided that this mother might be more trouble than she was
worth.

There followed yet another La Cote Basque lunch with another somewhat
bewildered guest.  This time she was one of the Episcopal school
mothers, a wealthy woman married, Frances had surmised correctly, to a
Roman Catholic.  To her way of thinking, parochial school education was
essential, Frances announced as they sipped their white wine.  Public
schools were foul bedlams of violence and disrespect, filled with
"niggers, Jews, and dirty white trash."  Even St.  Hilda's and

St.  Hugh's was proving not quite the right atmosphere she wanted for

Ariadne.  The school was too West Side, too intellectual, too
liberal-minded, and accepted far too many Third World and Jewish
children.

Frances asked her guest to write a letter of recommendation to a fine
East

Side Catholic girls' school.  Ultimately Ariadne was accepted, and she
has been a student here ever since.  She is well liked by both teachers
and pupils, and her academic record is excellent.

At io Gracie Square, Berenice was now a regular part of the household,
and Marc and his grandmother were becoming friends.  Like a solid
marriage, their relationship was based on a community of interest, a
common problem: neither one of them knew how to say no to Frances. 
Much later, in prison, where Marc had learned to overcome this
handicap, he spoke about it to a visitor.

"Mom's relationship with Granny was interesting.  On the one hand, Mom
wanted Granny dead.  On the other hand, Mom wanted ... well, it seemed
like she was putting up a front, a facade, of overly caring for
Granny.

Because Mom hated Granny.  She waited for the day she was going to
die.

She told me so often.  If Granny died, Mom was gonna get everything.

"One day Granny wanted me to go with her to the Ninth Avenue Food
Fair.

Spring ig8o.  Mom said, Go aheadl I said, "Right on!"  I like to take

Granny places.  She's my grandmother.  Yet I didn't like to hang
around

Granny too much ... because Mom didn't like that.  It's a stigma on me,
when Mom calls me a "Granny's boy."

"But this time she gave me permission.  Then, while Granny was getting
ready, Mom whispered, "Try to get her to stuff herself!  Try to get her
to eat lots of salty foods, so she'll have a heart attack."

"I said, "Come on, Mom!"  I was really upset.  To me this was like
overkill.  I mean, what does she want to do-kill off everybody that's
close to her?  Am I next?  I was thinking.

"Anyway, when we went to the Food Fair, my orders were, get Granny to
stuff herself; select lots of salty foods.  So I made sure I did the
very opposite.  That is, I said nothing.  I let her select whatever she
wanted.  I went off by myself.  I thought, Man oh man!  What am I
supposed to do ... just bump off everybody?  This is ridiculou&

"When I came back, Mom was just sitting all happy, like a cat that
swallowed a canary, smiling, giggling over how Granny had stuffed
herself

Because she did.  And apparently Granny had some chest pains that
night.

Somehow I now became really mad1 don't know why-that Mom had actually
sent me to do this again.  Of course I didn't.  But the point was, I
felt sorry for Gran, and I felt angry at Mom.  And Granny did still
have chest pains.  But I had been trying to steer her clear of it.

"Granny still doesn't have any idea what's going on!  She can't accept
it.

She's deluding herself.  And maybe rightly so.  Maybe if I were a
little old lady, I too would delude myself.  Maybe it would be very
hard for me to accept reality-that your daughter is out to get
YOU-LITERALLY!  And that's sickening.  "That really changed my
perception of Mom.  That was the turning point.  From now on, I was
looking out for myself."

By spring Richard Behrens was getting desperate.  Five months of phone
calls and certified letters had done no good.  Frances was never at
home.  Once her door was opened by Berenice.  The strange man thrust a
fistful of photocopies of Frances's withdrawal slips into the old
woman's hand and sidled away.  It was the only time she and her
daughter's friend ever laid eyes on one another-until they met in
court.  Once Behrens waylaid Frances on the street while she was taking
Ariadne shopping.  With Behrens trotting alongside,

Frances related all her latest family troubles, acted offended when he
demanded she return his money, and again disappeared.  Next day Behrens
heard from his father, the doctor.  Some woman had called him and
complained that she was being harassed by his son.

Behrens wrote to the probate court handling the Bradshaw estate.  He
wrote the trust officer at the Utah bank.  He wrote Swindle.  He
complained to the lawyers at Rogers & Wells.  They said Frances was
going through some sort of crisis but would soon settle up.  He wrote
to Mr.  Goodfellow at Morgan Guaranty.  One day Marc turned up at
Behrens's door to explain to him that his mother was just out of the
hospital.  She intended to straighten out her affairs as soon as
possible.  Meanwhile Marc borrowed Behrens's American

Express Card to buy a ticket to

Maine fora college interview.  Behrens knew Frances was now receiving
$60,000 a year from her father's estate, in addition to the boys' trust
funds, yet she seemed as broke as ever.  His dozens of letters were
polite but increasingly bewildered.  He had known Frances much longer
than all these lawyers and bankers and doctors now involved in her
life.  How could his friend of fifteen years move into the costliest
apartment building in the neighborhood, fleece him of his savings, then
cut him dead?  He even wrote to the Utah Bar Association and the Legal
Aid Society.  He reminded former Secretary of State William Rogers that
he and Behrens's mother had once been childhood friends in Plattsburg,
New York.  He sent copies of his letters to everybody, including
Berenice, reminding them of the "David and

Goliath" aspects of his situation.  Frances lived at io Gracie Square
or

Southampton; he lived on welfare.  He even tried filing a civil suit in
New

York City.  Nothing worked, and his own bank continued pressing for
repayment of his $5,000 loan.

Behrens finally called up Marilyn Reagan.  She was astonished after all
these years to hear from the peculiar man she and Frances had met at
church so long ago.  Marilyn listened in silence to Behrens's tale of
woe.

Then with cold finality she told him that she could scarcely be held
responsible for her sister's bad debts, and hung up.

At home, Frances was growing increasingly ill-tempered.  Marc tried in
vain to learn what was the matter.  One day he came home and found
Frances out of bed, seated on the couch in the little
chocolate-brown-painted library that looked south down the East River.
It was the only furnished room on the first floor of the grandiose
apartment.  "Mom, tell me what's wrong.  What's bothering you?"  Marc
said.

"No!  Get out!  Get out of this room.  You know what's wrong."

"No, Mom.  What is it?  Please tell me."

Frances glared balefully, saying nothing.  She had refused to speak
to

Marc or Ariadne for two days.  They knew well enough what was wrong:

Ariadne had begun to love her brother more than she did her mother,
and

Marc had deliberately brought about this unacceptable state of
affairs.

Marc hated the silent treatment.  He lost control and shouted, "God
damn it!  Tell me what's wrong!"

"Oh!  Oh!"  she was screaming now, drawing away from him to the corner
of the couch, her face contorted.  "There are witnesses you tried to
kill me.  I have witnesses!"

Marc turned away in disgust.  He went upstairs to his own room.  A few
minutes later Frances stood in the doorway.  She carried a pair of
scissors in her hand.  "If you touch me, Marc, I'll stab youl"

Berenice returned to Salt Lake.  Ariadne.  was frightened of Mom
without

Granny around, Marc says.  When she was frightened, she tried to act
super sweet The next morning she and Marc were both waiting in the big
bedroom when Frances woke up.  Ariadne smiled.  Her mother glared at
her, without making a sound.

"I love you," Ariadne said.

Still silent, Frances got up and went into the bathroom.  Ariadne
turned and raced down the stairs to the foyer to wait for Marc to come
down and take her to school.

"Where's Ariadne?"  Frances snapped as she crawled back into bed.

"She just left.  I don't know why," Marc lied.

"Why doesn't Ariadne love me?"  Frances began to cry.  Suddenly she
shouted,

"You have trained her not to love me!"  and leaped out of bed.

Frances ran down the stairs, Marc following.  Frances grabbed Ariadne
and began shouting, "You're mean!  You're a mean little girl."  When
Marc tried to pull them apart, Frances whirled and pushed both children
out the door, onto the elevator landing.

Tock!  Tock!  Tock!  While they waited for the elevator they could hear
the three big locks on the front door being bolted shut.  This episode
occurred

May 28, according to Marc's diary.  On June 5, at a sanity hearing in

Pennsylvania courtroom, Larry Bradshaw was ruled fit to stand trial for
attempted murder.

That winter and spring, in the ballet world, two things had become
known.

George Balanchine had recovered sufficiently to have begun making a new
ballet, and Frances Schreuder had agreed to underwrite the entire
production, whatever the cost might be.  Even in ballet land not a
notably unruffled environment, excitement was running high.

Over the years, Balanchine had tried his hand at choreographing
absolutely everything; he had set twenty-eight circus elephants in pink
tutus twirling through Madison Square Garden to strains of Stravinsky.
But stunts and games aside, Balanchine's best work tended to be his
most abstract.  He normally avoided storytelling" ballets such as Romeo
and Juliet, or even The Nutcracker.  As he often said, "There are no
daughters-in-law in ballet, no grandfathers."  Dance can deal only in
primal relationships, not plot.

Whatever he attempted, his work always grew directly from the music; it
was the music, embodied by this centaur-artist-half musician, half
choreographer---in dance.  And now the music which lay open on

Balanchine's piano was Schumann's DavidsbUndlertidnze, a suite of
eighteen piano pieces which many consider one of the composer's
masterworks.

Balanchine, a formally trained musician, had known it all his life.

Schumann was one of his favorite composers.  Yet, before his illness,
he had never made a ballet on his work.  But he had begun playing the

DavidsbfindlerOnze, studying it, and consulting with musician friends
about matters of tempo and interpretation, while still convalescing
in

Southampton the previous summer and fall.

"This work seems ideally to have suited his present state of mind as an
aging artist, aware of his mortality," says one who knew him well.

"George was in no way an embittered man.  He never read the critics.
But as he aged, he became vulnerable to illness.  He was also very
religious, and knew a great deal about religions other than his
own-Suftsm, and the anti-Christ movement, for example.  His interest in
nineteenth-century

German Romanticism had also greatly increased.  And so he rediscovered
this score."

All that winter and spring of ig8o, behind the golden curtain, hundreds
of thousands of dollars of Franklin Bradshaw's money were spent
rehearsing, mounting, and costuming the important new work.  The
original budget was M5,000.  The eventual cost would be $327,000.  But
by that time

Frances had pledged $360,000 and had said, in effect, keep the
change.

It was the largest lump-sum contribution to NYCB ever made by a single
individual.  Her elevation to the Board of Directors seemed imminent.

Robert Schumann, a flower of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, was
a most literary composer, and Dayidsbfindlertdnze is the distillation
of all his poetic aspects.  Schumann thought and wrote of himself as a
double personality, as literally two people, with two names, Florestan
and Eusebius.  Florestan represents the strong, stormy, passionate,
active side of his nature, Eusebius the poetic, lyric, sensitive side.
Every movement of the eighteen dances in

Davidsbiindlendnze is signed by either "F" or "E," or sometimes "Fund

E."

The entire suite, in the words of his first biographer, is "a formal
thinking out, and writing down, of his own heart-life."  It became
something similar, in dance, for Balanchine.

His new piece was different in tone and color from what had come
before.  It was darker, more elegiac, an old man's brooding on an old
man's concerns: loss of his powers, episodes of Romantic love and
devotion intertwined with melancholy themes of madness and death, wild
with all regret.

The Davids bUndlers a poetic invention of the German Romantic writer,
Jean

Paul, were Schumann's most elaborate literary conceit.  They figure in
his allegorical writings, notebooks, manuscript notations, and
published compositions, and the Davidsbiindlendnze is their anthem.
Toembers of a mythical secret society of artists, the Band of David,
the Davids&and, they express Schumann's passionate belief that the
artists of the world must always band together to fight off the
Philistines, the anti-artists.  His own Philistines were the smug,
pedantic German music critics, scornful of the new Romanticism.  But,
he knew, it had been ever thus, and so the

Davidsbiindlers are all artists, throughout history.  Mozart, dead
twenty years before Schumann was born, was of course one of them,
Schumann wrote, as indeed was the biblical King David, the
psalmist-harpirt-warrior, for whom his Bund was named.

All of these ideas come together and find expression in the morbid,
disturbing, but magnificent work which Frances Schreuder paid for.

Ter-Arutunian's phantasmagoric stage set is an hommage to the haunted,
brooding landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the nineteenth-century

German Romantic painter whose famous dictum was: "Feeling is the only
law."

The curtain rises to reveal a claustrophobic all6e enshrouded by
gigantic flapping white curtains suggestive of the hospital curtains
which in nineteenth-century sanatoriums were placed around the beds of
the mad and the dying; a moonlit ruined chapel and a few ripples of
water are sketched in the background.  Schumann's own mental illness
seems to have been a creative springboard for both designer and
choreographer.

Through slits in the curtains four couples appear, the men in
nineteenth-century formal evening dress, the women in ice-blue tulle.

They are in a mysterious relationship.  Two dancers seem to be Clara
and

Robert Schumann, or perhaps they are each aspects of Clara and
Robert.

Although this eerie ballet does have a Schumann figure who bids
farewell to a woman who seems to represent his wife, Clara, the work is
more an allegory about the artist in society, and in particular about
the artist as one who is always -by virtue of his nature as an
artist-alienated from society; one whose feeling is his only law.

Balanchine always resisted invitations to discuss the "meaning" of his
work.  On this occasion he was willing to break his own rule and go so
far as to tell an interviewer that two of his dancers were indeed
Robert and

Clara Schumann, and that the gloomy setting was "not a real room ...
[but) ... a space in the past."  He had made Schumann "strange," he
said, "because a normal person could not be so great.

"You have to be strange to do great things."

Schumann composed his Davidsbiindlendnze in 1837, while bitterly
feuding with his piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, over his engagement to
Wieck's seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara.  Schumann had first seen
his beloved, and fallen under her spell, when she was an enchanting
child prodigy pianist of nine.  They married, despite Wieck's furious
opposition, the day before Clara's twenty-first birthday.  Robert
Schumann, then thirty and at the height of his powers, had a family and
personal history of mental illness.  Sixteen years and eight children
later, after a life of prodigal creativity interspersed with increasing
episodes of derangement and suicidal despair, Schumann leaped into the
Rhine, was fished out, and spent his final two and a half years in a
private asylum, where he died raving mad.  His biographers disagree as
to whether his torments were due to congenital insanity or terminal
syphilis.

The four couples in the ballet seem to be expressing something to do
with love, something to do with frustration, something to do with
devotion, with passion, with fear, and madness, and death.  The dancer
who plays

Schumann is given a powerful mad scene at the ballet's end.  Midway
through his solo, he is interrupted by five grotesque, black-clad
figures who appear through the flapping curtains in plumed black hats,
cloaks, and beards.  They wear pince-nez, and carry long quill pens.

 R

tions represent "critics and society people"-his Philistines, in
fact--as

Balanchine would later acknowledge.

The ballet's many admirers find the work exquisitely romantic,
mysterious, heartsick, bathed in sorrow.  Its detractors-far fewer in
number--see it as the work of an aging master gone soft; they find it
death-haunted, weary, sentimental, overly revealing.  But both sides
are in agreement that, in making DavidsbUndlendnze, a great artist was
consciously choreographing his own farewell.

While the new ballet was still in rehearsal, someone suggested to

Balanchine that Schumann's title would be difficult for Americans to
pronounce.  "If they can't pronounce it," he said, speaking like the
lifelong Dayldsbiindler he himself had always been, "they don't have to
come."

But they came, and they raved.  The piece was received as a
late-period

Balanchine masterwork, nothing less, trumpeted the New York Times, than
"one of the twentieth-century's great neo Romantic works of art."

At the bottom of the printed program, a chaste acknowledgment said: "A
deeply appreciated gift in support of George Balanchine and the New
York

City Ballet has made this production possible."  Only that and no more.
But every member of the inner ballet world, the entire peerage-pantheon
of high culture-bearers, ladies bountiful, fiscal bigwigs, serious
artists, jet-set sprinters, fading Tsarists, prima donnas, prime
aesthetes, busting stuffed shirts and the whole train of strenuous
social mountaineers puffing uphill behind them all knew that Frances
Schreuder was the great work's sole, albeit anonymous underwriter.
Surely the presentation of DavidsbUndlendnze, "her" ballet, was her
finest hour, the master patron's major gift to the master artist, and
all the world could now see who Frances's "real" father was.  Not
pinched, dreary, stingy Franklin Bradshaw in his soiled orange polo
shirt with penguins.  Her "spiritual father, " as she spoke of him, was
none less than the greatest living genius of the age, George Balanchine
himself.

On June 7, ig8o, in the little green conference room of the New York
State

Theater, Frances Schreuder was elected to the Board of Directors of the
New

York City Ballet.  This event took place two weeks prior to the world
premiere of Davidsbiindlerttinze.  It took place despite an urgent plea
the day before from a top staff member to Board president Winthrop
Knowlton:

"Please don't do this.  This woman is not in her right mind.  You will
pay in spades for this money!"  The words fell on deaf cars.  Having
found its very own Sugar Plum Fairy, the Board had promptly fallen
under her magic spell and forgotten the first lesson of all fairy
tales: a great gift always carries a great price.

At the Board meeting, Frances Schreuder's election was not even
discussed.

No credit, or background, or any kind of checkup had been done.  The
woman lived at an acceptable address.  Her previous pledges had been
generous, her current pledge was breathtaking, and the
Schreuder-Bradshaw pockets appeared to be wide open and bottomless.  W.
McNeil Lowry, now a Board member, said he thought a woman like Mrs.
Schreuder could be extraordinarily useful on the Finance Committee.  A
motion was made and seconded.  There was no discussion.  They didn't
even count the votes.  She was chosen unanimously, by acclamation.

Whether or not Frances Schreuder thought of it that way, she had just
made a bargain buy into New York's cultural ruling class.  A seat on
the

Metropolitan Museum of Art Board, they say, then cost a cool Si
million.

On June 2o, the morning after the premiere, Frances lay dreaming in her
disheveled tower bedroom.  Noon sunlight streamed through the great
windows above the river.  She awoke and sat up in the center of her
thronelike bed, eager to savor anew the critical hosannas.  She lit a
cigarette and opened the New York Times~ "George Balanchine has created
a ballet that is very moving, very deep and very great ..."  wrote Anna
KisselgofF, the paper's prestigious critic.  Her review spoke of the
ballet's "shattered world .. a world of love but not without pain, and
when that pain is depicted, it comes through with a knifelike thrust
previously unknown in any Balanchine work."  She mentioned "the
Schumann figure's poignant leave-taking, into dea thor insanity," and
ended up proclaiming the mad solo at the ballet's climax to be "the
creative artist's archetypal angst."

More than any other of the performing arts, Frances knew, choreography
without performance does not exist.  As she mused in the great bed, it
must have been a transcendent moment for the woman who had
single-handedly paid to bring such a masterpiece into being.  Perhaps
the music itself was playing now, on the phonograph, as she smoked and
slowly savored the critic's every rapturous word.  The grateful NYCB
management had presented her with a recording which she had listened to
daily for months now, unable to cease, even had she wanted to ... Yes,
singlehandedly.

Not too strong a word.

"You have to be strange to be great."

"The artist's feeling is his law."  His only law.  How true, thought

Frankie, lost in reverie on her frowsy, four-poster throne.

Midway between June 7, when Frances was elected to the Board of

Directors, and June ig, the night her ballet opened, Larry Bradshaw was
tried and convicted of attempted murder by the Commonwealth of

Pennsylvania.  He was represented by a public defender who had met his
client only an hour before.  But when the lawyer asked for a
postponement to give him time to study the case, his client spoke out.
He knew that the Constitution guaranteed him the right to a speedy
trial, Larry said, and he demanded to have one.  No one objected, and
the proceedings got under way.

The prosecutor said the defendant had brought the murder weapon to the
dorm from its normal resting place in his car, parked some distance
away.

Therefore his crime was premeditated.  Salloum, the victim, said he
scarcely knew Larry.  He could recall nothing between going to bed at
midnight and waking fourteen days later, in a hospital in Syracuse,
New

York, with six skull fractures.  He had undergone three brain
operations so far, he told the jury, and the doctors said he would need
another.

Testifying for the defense, a well-known psychiatrist, Dr.  Robert
Sadoff, who had twice examined Larry, assured the court he was
"psychotic" at the time of the crime.  A young woman student who
witnessed Larry's capture in the snowbank described him as gray-faced
and delirious.  When it came time for Larry to testify, he was asked
why he -had attacked his roommate with a mason's hammer?  Smiling, the
defendant replied that he would "rather not say."

Throughout most of the farcical, two-day trial, Larry had sat curled in
his chair in a fetal position, sometimes with his thumb in his mouth.
The jury deliberated only an hour and a half before finding Lawrence
Bradshaw guilty on all counts: attempted third degree murder,
aggravated assault, reckless endangerment.  His bail was revoked and he
was sentenced to serve two and a half to five years in prison, pending
further psychiatric examination.  Part Five

Js.~y -t ne Closing

In DURING THE SUMMER OF 1990, Frances and Marc had continued their
raids on

Berenice's bedroom.  At first, they were looking for a diamond ring
which

Frances accused her mother of stealing.  Later Berenice found a ring in
her apron pocket and returned it.  On another occasion, Frances loaned
Berenice some jewelry, then forgot she had loaned it, and accused her
mother of stealing that.  It would have been hard to tell.  Frances
kept her jewelry "all jumbled up together in her jewelry case," Marc
says, save for those pieces which might happen to be in hock.  Tiffany
purchases which Marc still can recall today include a pair of $40,000
clustered large diamond earrings, a $10,000 thick gold bracelet, and a
$io,000 short gold necklace with fancy, curved links.  Her other
jewelry included "a platinum ring with one very large diamond"; a large
emerald ring surrounded by small diamonds; earrings which each had "a
large, single diamond set in platinum"; an antique ring with little
rows of emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, and rubies; an 18-K gold chain
"so long that Mom had to wrap it around her neck twice"; and a second
gold chain, not so long but fashioned of thick, "fancy" links.  He is
certain there was "much more."  He estimates his mother spent $60,000
on Tiffany jewels alone.

There were also occasions, Berenice says, when her daughter stole her
jewels.  And Frances once borrowed a $10,000 mink coat from her mother
which she has yet to return.  Berenice's catalogue of goods stolen by
her daughter includes a $20,000 pair of Tiffany earrings.  The web of
inter family theft among these people is years old, and impossible to
disentangle.  Suffice it to say that they were both a family of thieves
and family thieves.  Stealing from one another, raiding each other's
strongholds, and forging each other's signature was an old family
custom, not too different from searching each other's pockets and
reading one another's mail.  That first summer at io Gracie Square,
Frances and Marc raided Berenice's room on several occasions.  Granny
complained that she could never keep anything secure, not even in her
own half-million-dollar apartment.  Once she even pried up the wall
to-wall carpeting and tacked her valuables underneath.  Still, they
were gone the next day.

"Me and Mom were raiding Granny's room, looking for jewelry, and I
said, "Ooh, Mom!  Look at all those checks!  And you're always so
broke."  Cause even though Mom was getting $5,000 a month now, she was
still always broke.  So I said, "Why don't you forge 'em off?  You've
done it before.

Granny's done it to Grandpa."  It just seemed like a family thing to
do-you know?"

At first Frances feared getting caught, says Marc.  Later, she gave him
carte blanche to work alone and get what he could.  Frances's main
interest in their raids that summer, her son says, was to find a copy
of

Granny's new will and be sure that Frances was in it in an important
way, "for the big hunk," to use Marc's term.  On the night that Frances
finally found it, she took it to her own room and stayed up most of the
night reading it aloud and crooning over the provisions.  "Ah, yes!
Here I am!

And here .. I look!  I'm getting about seventy-five percent of
everything!"

On July to, at a closed hearing, Larry Bradshaw was committed for a
ninety-day evaluation period to Farview State Hospital for the
Criminally

Insane at Waymart, Pennsylvania, and treatment with the antipsychotic
drug

Prolixin was begun.  By August the hospital had completed its
evaluation.

Larry was diagnosed as "paranoid schizophrenic with acute exacerbation;
very confused, suspicious, delusional, bewildered, chronically ill."

Each year the Ballet goes on tour overseas, and at some point there is
always a fete to honor, and entertain, the heavy givers.  Arrangements
are handled by the International Committee, and Frances had been an
extremely active member of this committee ever since her elevation to
the Board.  She was passionately involved in even the smallest details.
She was present at every rehearsal.  She went along on shopping trips
to prop and costume shops.  She attended all the parties.  "She showed
up for everything, " said one observer.  "This was obviously the main
part of her life."  She gave the others a feeling she had never been a
part of anything before.  So of course she talked too much, asked too
many questions, and alienated many by styling herself an expert on
everything from the cost of tulle to ticket-pricing.  "She wanted so
much to be a part of things ... and yet you couldn't talk to her!  She
wouldn't listen.  She was impossibly overbearing.  She afterwards
misquoted what you had said."

The new Board member not only babbled and misrepresented and at times
asked ridiculous questions; she was at bottom ineffectual.  Old-timers
on the

Board identified the problem straight off.  Frances Schreuder did not
know anyone.  She had no contacts in the corporate world or in big
business-the major source of development funds.  Her only source of
funds was Berenice

Bradshaw.

This year's great occasion was to be a "Festival d'Automne

Paris: Hommage A Igor Stravinsky," in honor of the centennial of the
composer's birth.  It would be memorable more as a social occasion than
a choreographic one.  After the committee had already settled on its
theme, it became evident that Balanchine had already choreographed the
best Stravinsky scores; only odds and ends remained.  In August,
Frances dervished nonstop through Bendel's and Bergdorf-Goodman's,
outfitting herself for the grand event.  But she did not fly over with
the rest of the group, and was a day late arriving in Paris for the
September 16-22 festivities.  It turned out that Frances's jewelry was
in hock at the Provident Loan Society, the society pawnshop on West
Fiftyseventh Street, and she had refused to leave town without it.  In
Paris, it would be important to "look rich," she said.

Berenice wrote another check, and Frances flew off with eleven pieces
of luggage for her ten-day tour.

Marc had begun his freshman year at Trinity College, in Hartford,

Connecticut, so Granny had been summoned back from Salt Lake to look
after

Ariadne, who had just started second grade.  For the next week,
Berenice and her little granddaughter had a wonderful time by
themselves at io Gracie

Square.  They made fried chicken almost every night, and ate candlelit
dinners for two on the terrace while they watched the river traffic
below.

And one day while Ariadne was at school Berenice invited Marilyn out to
lunch in a nice French restaurant.  "I remember Mother wore a lovely
yellow chiffon dress, and I've always been sorry I didn't tell her how
nice she looked," says Marilyn.  Mother and daughter never saw each
other again.

One of the ballet professionals who traveled to Paris with the Company
that fall was David Richardson, a muscular, intelligent, unflappable
man in his late thirties who is considered the topnotch trainer-teacher
of classical ballet to young children.  His main responsibility was to
select and coach child dancers from the School of

American Ballet to perform the various children's roles with the
professional Company, a job requiring exceptional powers of
observation, tact, control.  On his flight to Paris, Richardson noticed
an eccentric-looking woman, about forty, with severe, pulled-back hair,
and a very large antique gold watch hanging around her neck.

"That's the woman who paid for Davidsbiindlendnze, " his traveling
companion said.  "She's on the Board."  It was not at all surprising
that

Richardson had never seen her until now.  Professionals and Board
members rarely mix socially.  If anything, they strain to keep out of
one another's way.  The dancers are usually too busy, and too tired,
and Board members are careful to avoid even the appearance of meddling
in Company affairs.  Their job is to raise money only.

Richardson first thought it strange to see an obviously wealthy ballet
patroness traveling alone.  Such women usually brought a mate, friend,
or companion.  "But this woman was almost always alone in Paris.  She
was shy around other people, and others didn't seem to gather around
her."

Frances was looking a good deal better these days.  Richardson found
her "a strange mixture of unattractive and attractive ... not certainly
a beautiful woman, but she was stylish, well coiffed, and she looked
like she took care of herself.  She looked kind of like Lily Tomlin
dressed up.

"Also, she has a dignified quality in her stance; a certain elepnce
about her, I thought.  Then the next moment she'd start furiously
chain-smoking.

It negated that elegance; the dignity was gone.  Another thing I
noticed: when she stands still she looks much better than when she
moves.  She has a very strange, funny waddle in her walk.  In sum, the
package looks fine until it starts operating.  Then it doesn't look so
good."

In Paris, a glamorous fortnight of festivities had been arranged:
parties round the clock, lunches at embassies, dinners at Maxim's,
showings at

Chanel, exhibitions of furs, cocktails at fabulous boulevard
apartments,

VIP tours of the Louvre, suites at the Plaza Athenee.  Frances swirled
through them all, chattering nonstop, earrings a-jangle.  She was often
eccentrically dressed, in a series of expensive costumes which never
quite went together.  Around her neck she almost always wore a heavy
antique gold watch.  Although she did not realize it, it was ticking
away her last days of peace.  More than two years had passed since her
father's murder, and the case seemed closed or forgotten.  But in New
York, Richard Behrens's frustration was reaching intolerable levels. 
Soon it would overflow, and eventually extinguish Frances's flickering
flame.  The catastrophe would have been so easy to prevent.  All
Behrens wanted was his $3,700 back, less than the value of the watch
ticking now at her throat.  But Frances could never say no to money. 
She could never have enough.

A glittering cocktail party was under way at the hotel de la Ville,
given by the mayor of Paris.  George Balanchine sat at a round table
sipping champagne.  Leaning over him was a flat chested woman in
bare-shouldered, bright-red crepe, long, dangling earrings, a clunky
watch on a chain.  She had high cheekbones and her hair was pulled back
behind her ears in a severe .1 prima ballerina" style.  "That's the new
woman.  She pays for all his new ballets," the others whispered.

Frances chattered with great animation.  Balanchine's grave expression
did not change.  "She was trying to look intelligent, glamorous, and
seductive all at once-and she wasn't making any of it.  She looked like
a party crasher," said one observer.

Frances often looked out of place.  She frequently misplaced her ballet
tickets.  She sometimes seemed stupefied, almost comatose.  At an
elegant diplomatic dinner, her neighbor was forced to whisper, "Either
eat your dinner, Frances, or let the butler take away your plate."

At other times she was highly irritable.  One day at a fashionable
luncheon, the chic Parisian hostess inquired, "And how do you spend
your afternoons?"

"None of your business!"  Frances snapped.

Richard Behrens had first sought help from Marilyn Reagan in early
May.

As months passed, rebuffs accumulated.  Bradshaw family lawyers and
bankers all took the same attitude: anyone foolish enough to trust
Frances

Schreuder only got what he deserved.  Behrens could not generate
concern, let alone sympathy.  Most of his calls and letters were not
even acknowledged.  Meanwhile, he was sinking deeper in debt.  Marilyn
at least gave him time on the telephone.

Probably she considered Dick Behrens a harmless eccentric.  She talked
to him not because she thought it would help to nail her father's
assassin, but because it eased her hurt somewhat to talk about it, and
opportunities had become pitifully few.  Nobody but her husband and

Elaine and maybe Doug Steele even seemed to care much any longer about
what had happened to Franklin Bradshaw.  So she was willing to supply
Dick with the names of additional bankers and lawyers he might write to
in connection with what she regarded as an essentially fruitless quest.
And she was willing to share whatever tidbits of information on the
Schreuders; she had.

Later Marilyn and Behrens both would become prosecution witnesses. 
This would involve a prodigious amount of testifying.  In their various
statements to police officers, in their testimony under direct and
cross examination at two preliminary hearings, and two trials, and in
their assorted statements to lawyers, reporters, and others, both of
their stories modulated somewhat.  They shimmered in the glass of
memory, or perhaps forgetfulness, or possibly self-interest.  To put
the matter in

Marilyn's plain, dressmaker's language, the patterns of both stories
are essentially the same, but the edges do not always quite match up.

Among their assertions: Behrens said he learned for the first time
from

Marilyn in the spring of 198o that Larry was in prison for attempted
murder.  This seemed to her to confirm her suspicion that Larry was the
one responsible for her father's death, even if they could never prove
it because nobody could find the gun.

Marilyn said that in onebf Behrens's summer calls she learned for the
first time that, a year before her father's death, Frances's sons had
tried to kill him by putting poison in his oatmeal.  Marilyn then
suggested to Salt

Lake City police that they exhume her father's ashes, to look for
traces of poison.  They told her it was too late for definitive tests
to be made.

By now, the investigation of Franklin Bradshaw's murder had been
relegated to a back burner, and appeared likely to stay there, just
another unsolved case.  The trail was cold.  It had never really been
warm.  There had been plenty of talk, no leads.  Marilyn Reagan was
still talking, but, lacking any new evidence whatsoever, the cops
gradually were coming to regard Mrs.

Reagan as a pathetic, spiteful, jealous crank.  In fact, her endless
talk would soon produce the first break in the three-year-old case.

In subsequent phone conversations with Behrens that summer, Marilyn
learned that the boys had stolen $i5o,000 from her father a year before
his death.  She heard about Frances's lavish Southampton estates.
Behrens told Marilyn her sister had once asked him to try to find a
"hit man" whom she could hire to kin her father, and that he, Behrens,
had introduced Frances to "a fellow he knew that was talking big
stories."

Then Dick had walked away, and could not report on what had happened
next.

Marilyn later told the Salt Lake police she had written down the "hit
man's" name, but lost it before she could pass it along to them.

Behrens seemed terribly afraid of Frances.  His dunning letters, though
increasingly frantic, always speak of and to her in respectful tones.

His calls to Marilyn were made from pay phones.  He believed his home
phone was tapped, probably by private detectives employed by Frances.

Marilyn believed Dick was paranoid.  By fall, he was calling her two or
three times a week.  Whenever they spoke of the murder, Marilyn
accused

Larry.  Behrens told her two or three times that she was after the
wrong person.  But Behrens was a flake, and Marilyn did not pay much
attention to anything he said.  Now Behrens decided the time had come
to act, before the wacky Schreuders tried to pin the murder on him. 
And so the next time

Marilyn on the phone accused Larry of killing her father, Dick Behrens
told her she was after the wrong brother.

"It wasn't Larry," he said.  "It was Marc."  Then he added, "I've got
the gun."

Marilyn called Elaine to report this startling development.  She also
notified Salt Lake City detective Joel Campbell, the police officer
originally assigned to the case.  He was the same nice young man who
had taken the statements of all the family members and warehouse
employees three years before.  Campbell went to see Ernest W. Jones, a
quiet-spoken, overworked member of the Salt Lake County Attorney's
office.  Jones is a lanky, pale, low-key lawyer in his forties with a
disarming "aw shucks .  gee whiz" Jimmy Stewart manner, and an always
overcrowded desk.  His office handles seventy felony cases a month.  In
the increasingly unlikely event that an arrest were made in connection
with the Bradshaw murder,

Ernie Jones would be in charge~ and would prosecute the defendant if
the case came to trial.  Jones instructed Detective Campbell to tell
Marilyn

Reagan to try to get her friend to hand over the gun he claimed he had,
and to stay in touch.

When Behrens phoned the next day, Marilyn mentioned the original
$io,000 reward which had been posted by the Bradshaw family for
information leading to the capture and conviction of the killer.  Turn
in the murder weapon and surely the reward money was his for the
claiming.  She also reminded Behrens that New York had just passed a
tough new gun law: anyone found with a handgun who did not have a
license to carry one was subject to an automatic one-year jail
sentence.

Behrens told Marilyn he would give her the gun only if she promised not
to say how she got it.  He knew he could not hope to remain permanently
anonymous, but he wanted to be invisible for now in order to "force the
police to do their homework."  The anonymity was meant to protect him
from

Frances.  Unless the police "did their homework," it was sure to cost
him far more than the $io,000 reward money to "get out of what Frances
will do to me."

Marilyn agreed to keep his name out of it, and assured him the family
would take care of his legal fees, should that become necessary.  In

Behrens's next call, he said he was in a phone booth across the street
from her apartment house on West End Avenue.  It was early afternoon,

October 16, ig8o.  Marilyn came downstairs, and Behrens was still
huddled in the booth.  He crossed the street to join her, carrying a
paper shopping bag.  Together they walked to the Burger King on
Broadway.

Behrens placed the bag under the table and they both ordered cocoa.

Had Marc actually told Behrens that he had shot her father, Marilyn
asked.

Yes, Behrens replied.  "He said it was easy.  He just did it."  Behrens
also said that it was Marc himself who had given him the gun, or to use
his curiously insistent phraseology, "Marc dropped it off on me."

Marilyn put down her cocoa and picked up the shopping bag.  Without
looking inside it, she marched directly to the nearest police station,
the 20th Precinct, on West Eighty-second Street, and asked to speak to
the highest ranking officer.  She said she had just been handed a
parcel which she believed contained the gun that had killed her father
in Utah.

She turned over the bag, answered a few questions, gave the police the
name of Detective Campbell, and went home.  The New York Police
Department telexed the information to the Salt Lake authorities but
refused to surrender the weapon until proper identification was made.

A week later, in yet another phone call, Behrens supplied Marilyn with
the name and address of the Cavenaugh family in Midland, Texas, and
said they were the people through whom Marc had bought the gun. 
Marilyn duly passed this information on to Campbell, but she still did
not give him

Behrens's name.

The Salt Lake police had checked the gun's serial number with the
Federal

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and learned it had been sold
by

Colt Firearms to Texas ex-Sheriff Jerry Register.  Campbell flew to
Texas and attempted with little success to interview Register and the
others involved in the gun sale.  Their memories were vague, their
attitudes uncooperative.  He came on East.  Marilyn still would not
tell him how she got the gun.  He decided to drive the ninety-three
miles to Hartford,

Connecticut, drop in on Marc's freshman math class at Trinity College,
and ask the young man point-blank if he had killed his grandfather.
Marc denied everything.  Campbell's only success was in identifying the
weapon.

When he test-fired it on the N_YPD range, and compared the results with
the slugs recovered from Franklin Bradshaw's body, the bullets
matched.

The moment Campbell left campus, "ZOOM!  I raced right to the pay phone
in my dorm and called Mom.  Ringing and ringing.  Mom's never home when
you want her.  I finally got her two nights later, and when I told her
Joel

Campbell was here, she said, "Oh my God!  Don't talk over the
phonel"'

She ordered Marc to come to New York that weekend and meet her in a
coffee shop.  She didn't want him anywhere near Gracie Square.  Marc
was panicky.  "Look, Mom, somebody must have cracked.  It's been two
years!  It must be Tricky.  I know it wasn't Larry."

Frances appeared strangely unworried.  She said it probably was Larry;
perhaps he had let something slip to Farid Salloum.  She would make
some calls, ask around.  Marc was positive it was Behrens and could not
understand why his mother was resisting the idea.  "It had to be
Tricky!

Because he was the one who'd been calling and calling.  And I was the
one who'd had to answer the phone and say things like: Mom's not home,
Mom's asleep, Mom's not here, Mom's not there, Call back later.  "
Frances had been so afraid of wiretaps, Marc had been under orders all
summer not to stay on the phone longer than five minutes.  Yet now she
was telling Marc to relax, there was nothing to worry about.

Marc had always been worried about the gun.  He never even wanted to
bring it back to New York, but Mom had insisted, he said.  He had been
especially unhappy about caching the gun at Tricky's.  But both his
mother and Behrens seemed "very protective of it.  They really didn't
want that gun out of there," he said.  He understood Behrens's motives,
but not his mother's.  "I know he had other uses for it!  That's why he
bought the cleaning rods.  He was worried about the barrel rusting
out."

Marc believes Behrens wanted to use the gun to kill his stepmother.  He
had already offered Marc $i,000 to "bump off Joanie."  He claims he
told

Behrens, "Are you out of your mind?  Boy, if Mom heard you talking like
that to me, she'd never talk to you again.  That's outrageous!"  But
ask Marc why it is any more outrageous to bump off Joanie than bump off
Gramps, and he can only sputter.  "I dunno.  Never thought about it."
He looks sheepish and says, "Just because Mom wouldn't like it, I
guess."

Indeed, Frances had not liked it.  She had been furious with Behrens
when she learned about his $i,000 proposition to her son, Marc says,
and refused to talk to him for several weeks.  "It was incommunicado
time.  Lockout.  Like with me.  It's very effective."

After Marilyn received the gun from Behrens, she stopped hearing from
him.

His sudden silence was uncharacteristic.  She wanted to reestablish
contact because she "became concerned about Dick's well-being."  A good
way to do that would be to reimburse Behrens for all the letters and
photocopies and phone calls he had paid for which eventually had led to
the recovery of the murder weapon.  She knew he needed money.  A true
daughter of Franklin

Bradshaw, she mailed him twenty dollars.  He mailed back what he said
was a

Xerox copy of a sheet of Kent School stationery that he had discovered
in the shopping bag, alongside the gun, a few days before he turned the
weapon over to her.  After making the photocopy, he had burnt the
original.  On the

Xerox, in what he said he recognized as Marc's handwriting, had been
the name and address of Jon Cavenaugh in Midland, Texas.  This had been
his source for the Cavenaughs' name which he had given her some weeks
earlier.

Marilyn sent the Xerox to Campbell.

It was mid-November, ig8o.  Campbell said he could proceed no further
without knowing where Marilyn got the gun.  She finally told him, and
once more Joel Campbell headed for Texas.  Armed now with snapshots of
Marc and

Larry and Frances sup plied by Aunt Marilyn, he got a positive ID on
the purchaser of the gun.

On December 3, in New York City, Richard Behrens was visited in his
apartment at midnight by Joel Campbell and Detective Ed Regan from
the

NYPD.  In a rambling, sometimes incoherent statement, he told the
officers that Marc Schreuder had "dropped the gun off on me" and told
Behrens he had used it to kill his grandfather.  He was giving Behrens
the gun to keep, he said, because "maybe a relative was in the house,"
and Behrens's apartment was safe.

Asked the motive, Behrens said, "I think the whole thing is money."

Q: Did he say anything about anyone else being involved?

A: I think he just played the hero and did it on ... his own ... it
seems to me he said he was alone.  Q: When he told you ... was he cocky
or did he act like he was sad or .

A: He acted very, very goddam jumpy ... Q: Do you remember Marc talking
about the homicide in front of [Frances]?

A: Ya, ya.  She was a weird girl ... I don't know if she planned it or
who planned ... the kid's very headstrong, he could have been a ... a
see there's no father in the family, and he's tried to assume an adult
role, and she put a lot of pressure on him.

Why, after more than two years, had Behrens decided to tell his story
to

Marilyn?

When he realized Frances did not intend to pay her debt, "I figured she
was perhaps really flipping out, bananas, crazy, and : , , I was the
only person that really knew about this.  And that isn't a very good
position to be in if suddenly somebody who has a record of turning on
husband, fathers, sisters and-you know, a really strange psychiatric
record

Behrens could not explain why he had kept the gun, but he did indicate
great fear of Marc, who had "buzzed down that next weekend," after
Campbell had confronted him at college, in October, and had called
Behrens from his mother's apartment.  Certain that Frances tapped her
own phone, Behrens had refused to say a word and simply "holed up ...
stonewalled" for a couple of more months until Officer Campbell had
rung his doorbell.

Two days later, Campbell and a Connecticut cop went to Trinity College,
found Marc Schreuder in his dormitory basement playing Pac-Man, and
arrested him on suspicion of murder.  Since he was under eighteen at
the time of the crime, he could only be held on a ninety-day juvenile
warrant.  The plump college freshman spent a miserable long weekend
in

Hartford's Morgan Street Jail until Berenice Bradshaw, then en route
to

New York City to spend her first Christmas at io Gracie Square, could
be rounded up and induced to post her grandson's $125,000 bail.

Convinced that it was all a big mistake, that this grandson, at least,
was not a murderer, Granny was happy to have the boy out of prison and
home for Christmas.  Frances had found an excellent Connecticut
attorney,

Hiram Bissell Carey III, and he was working hard to straighten out the
mixup.  As Frances told her mother, "Cuckoo Behrens" and probably
Marilyn were behind the whole thing.  She was especially thankful that
the New

York papers had not picked up the story.

Four nights after Marc was locked into what he calls "that horrible
cesspool of a county jail," he was taken to the visitor's room where
Ted

Carey was waiting.  the lawyer drove him to his downtown office and
grilled him for two hours.  Marc told the lawyer the same pack of lies
he and

Frances had concocted two months earlier, after Campbell's campus
visit: that Marc and a school friend had planned a bicycle trip out
West.  When the trip was canceled, Mom said Marc could take a trip by
himself, to make up for the "lost fun and adventure of the missed
trip."  So he'd called up Jon Cavenaugh, who invited him to visit. 
Marc bought a bus ticket to Midland.  He'd had a wonderful time with
the Cavenaugh family, but he dreaded the bus ride back, so he decided
to fly.  Jon had even driven him to the airport.  Marc did not mention
the gun to Carey.  If he were ever asked about it, he intended to say
that, yes, he had discussed guns with Jon, but that was just to be
polite. Guns were something Texans liked talking about.

The story was a complete fabrication, but if Carey had doubts he kept
them to himself, checked his squirrelly-seeming client into the
Sonesta

Hotel, and told him to come back to the office first thing in the
morning.

Three days before Christmas, at Allentown State Psychiatric

Hospital, a nurse's aide approached inmate Larry Bradshaw.  "Do you
know who killed your grandfather?"

It sounded to Larry as if she was trying to trap him, so he simply
said,

"No-o-o-o-o-o," drawing out the one syllable as long as he could, and
keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the TV game show he was watching.

"Well, your brother's just been arrested," she said.  Ron Madsen,
Frances's

Utah lawyer, had phoned the hospital from Salt Lake City.  (A few
months later Madsen, who was very close to Frances and Berenice,
continually counseling them by long-distance phone in their legal war
against Marilyn and Elaine, and who is a frequent speaker on Marc's
homemade tapes, was quietly advised by his law firm that he could
represent either Frances or

Berenice, but not both.  Madsen discreetly left town for a while and
joined the Washington staff of Utah Senator Orrin G. Hatch.  He is now
back in

Utah, managing the Senator's at-home office.)

The moment her son was arrested, Frances began working on Richard
Behrens to recant his confession.  She warned him he was in very
serious trouble, that he was liable to a twenty-year prison term as an
accessory to murder, that the only way out of the mess he had put them
all into was to change his story and try something else.  She suggested
a new tack: put the blame on Marilyn.  She worked and worked on him,
increasing the pressure, building up his terror, until Behrens was
simply unable to hold out any longer.  It was easier to say no to
himself-to deny his own confession-than say it to

Frances, and on Christmas Eve, he finally did.

Saturday morning, December 27, twenty-four days after his statement
to

Campbell naming Marc, Richard Behrens took the train up to Hartford. 
He brought with him a laborious document allegedly setting forth the
"true" facts of the matter.  He had spent all Christmas day and night
typing it out.

In Carey's office, under the lawyer's bland but relentless
questioning,

Behrens gave his deposition to a waiting stenographer.  The burden of
his document and his deposition was the same: neither Marc nor his
mother had anything whatsoever to do with the crime or the gun.  It was
in fact Marilyn

Reagan who originally "dropped off" the gun on Behrens, and it was
Marilyn who had mentioned Texas to him, and later had gone to Texas,
and Marilyn who told Behrens she believed Marc had murdered her father.
she defamed Marc as a deceitful liar, lazy, and very bad epithets and
she indicated ... that maybe they both were in on it."

Marilyn was so obsessed with the death of her father, Behrens claimed,
that she had asked Behrens to make up a story about Marc buying the gun
in Texas, shooting his grandfather, and giving him the gun.  If Behrens
would tell this story to the Salt Lake cops, he said, Marilyn had
promised him $io,000 and free ski vacations in Utah.  Depressed, broke,
"mixed up," angry at Frances and intolerably pressured by Marilyn,

Behrens had caved in.

Q- Did Marc Schreuder ever come to your apartment and bring a gun
there?

A: Absolutely not.

Q: Did Marc Schreuder ever tell you that he had killed his
grandfather?

A: Absolutely not.

And why had Mr.  Behrens now decided to change his mind and tell the
truth?  "... several reasons.  I felt that an innocent boy was being
railroaded.

I felt that I was doing it for reasons that were not honorable.  And I
felt that I had a lot of pressure and inducements put on me ... by
Miss

Marilyn Reagan."

Armed with the Behrens recant, and with the unlimited budget Berenice

Bradshaw was prepared to put at his disposal to prove her grandson
innocent of murder, Carey hired an investigator to go out to Utah to
see what he could turn up that might be helpful.

The investigator trudged up the sagging steps to Bradshaw Auto Parts
warehouse.  "Come on in," Doug Steele said.  "Have a cup of coffee." 
He motioned toward the electric percolator.

"Mr.  Steele, what reasons do you think Marilyn Reagan might have had
for wanting her father out of the way?"

As soon as his visitor left, Doug called Marilyn.

"Talk about hurt!"  she said later.  "Your own mother pays for that!"

One spring day in 1978 Berenice Bradshaw had gone to a luncheon meeting
of the Huguenot Society of Utah.  The speaker was a natty, beaming,
balding sixty-year-old retired airline executive and nationally known
genealogist.  She found his remarks so fascinating that she contrived
to sit near him during the lunch itself and learned that he was from
Washington, D.C."  that he had been regional manager of the Eastern
Region of TWA, that he had never been married, and had recently been
retained by the Ford family to research their ancestry.  His search had
been so successful that two hundred similar requests followed, and he
had been forced to get business cards printed up, and to change his
telephone to an unlisted number.

He handed Berenice a small ivory card.  "Grahame T. Smallwood, Jr.."
she read.  His mild eyes twinkled behind rimless glasses.  "My friends
call me

Chips," he said.

After her husband's death, Berenice Bradshaw became one of Chips's best
friends.  She thought him beautifully mannered, a good
conversationalist, an excellent dancer, an attentive escort the
opposite of Franklin Bradshaw in every particular.  She had gone alone
on her winter, 1978, round-the-world cruise.  But soon after she
returned to Salt Lake,

Berenice and Chips began going every place together: dancing, drinking,
willing, dining, cardplaying, sight-seeing.  Berenice was impressed
with

Chips's always-correct dress and manners, and his ready ability to make
friends.

By 1981 she was inviting him along on her sight-seeing trips.  That
year they took three, and Chips handled all arrangements and
reservations.

Berenice was delighted.  "I'd never had anything like that before! 
I've always said: I had a husband, but never a companion.  A course, I
also had a freedom not many women have had."

Chips was in no sense a husband, but he proved a superb companion.  The
new friends spent springtime in Mexico, went on a midsummer's jaunt
to

England and Ireland, and in October flew to Lisbon for a tour of

Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and Madeira.  She didn't give a damn what
people like Franklin's pious sister Bertha Beck thought.  "They say
he's a wino.

They say he's a homo.  They say he's sixty-five and I'm eighty.  I say,
So what?"  she chortled.  "I say I'm finally getting' some fun out of
life.  "Bout time!"

In January 1982, Berenice and Chips set sail on the QE2 for South

America.  They wore funny hats and danced and sat at the captain's
table and gave nice cocktail parties in their cabins.  "One must never
give up,"

Berenice believes.  "Never give up anything on account of age.  My
husband and I gave up square dancing, and we could never get back to
it."

Berenice and Chips had a marvelous time boating up and down the Amazon,
and climbing the heights of Machu Picchu.  Returning, they cruised the
Caribbean islands.  Back in New York, there was even more to celebrate.
Ariadne, still two months shy of her eighth birthday, had been accepted
as the youngest student at Kirstein and Balanchine's School of American
Ballet.  It was run by two old Russian ballet mistresses whose own
training went all the way back to St.  Petersburg, but Balanchine
himself taught daily classes.

Kirstein was president of the Board-a separate entity from the
Ballet's

Board.

School of American Ballet has 350 students, and Ariadne Schreuder had
joined them in the same manner as the rest: she auditioned.  Frances's
presence on the NYCB Board of Directors had nothing whatever to do
with

Ariadne's presence among the students-though it would in time have
consequences.

SAB accepts children as young as eight, but they are not really weeded
out until thirteen.  Until then, bodies and feet are too immature to
make the lifetime choice-to be or not to be a ballet professional.  The
choice itself, the rigors of the training, and the odds against success
all are excruciating.  Out of every thousand eight-year-olds who
seriously take up ballet, the Company has calculated, "we will get one
good dancer."

Ariadne's thirteenth birthday will occur in April 1986.

Larry Bradshaw's twenty-first birthday was approaching.  The one
present he wanted was a glimpse of his family and a peek at the
wonderful new duplex apartment he had heard so much about.  The first
necessity was a transfer out of the escape-proof Farview State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane.

He had managed that back in mid-October, just about the time that
Behrens was turning in the gun.  But he had returned to Allentown State
Psychiatric

Hospital completely out of money.  He took a menial job, and eventually
a small check came in.  On February 9, three days after his birthday,
Larry-in the parlance of such institutions-eloped.  He carefully washed
and shaved and trimmed his hair, put on clean clothes, and at dusk he
strolled out onto the hospital grounds, caught a taxi to the bus
station, took a Greyhound to New York, a subway uptown, a cross town
bus, and by 8:30 P.m. he had got past io Gracie's downstairs doormen
and stood with his broad thumb on the doorbell of Apartment 6.

The door was opened by Paulette Tueller, the capable and savvy

Frenchwoman, active in the French Resistance during World War II, who
now had charge of feeding Ariadne and running the Schreuder household.
The family had acquired their "French maid" from her former employer,
Lily

Pons, who had once occupied the penthouse.  Larry identified himself
and

Paulette showed the visitor up the curving stair to the master suite.

Here he found his entire family, all snuggled together in and on the
big rumpled bed.

"Granny was shocked!  Mom was shockedl They looked at me like I was a
dead person," Larry laughs.  "They thought I'd risen from the grave!"
He thought they seemed happy to see him, though, and he himself was
overjoyed, especially at catching sight of Ariadne nestled deep down in
the pillows cuddling Tiffany.  Marc took Larry down the hall to see his
room and, not more than five minutes later, the doorbell rang again and
four big cops hurriedly summoned by Frances came pounding up the
stairs.

His mother told Larry that, with Marc out on bail, she could scarcely
take a chance on harboring an escaped criminal.  The cops took Larry
away.

He and Marc have not seen each other since.

Larry hated the next twelve days on Rikers Island.  "I'm a college
person.

I can't relate to any of these weird mental patients and those
thousands of blackies and jailbirds."  But when the Pennsylvania cops
arrived to escort him home, he rather enjoyed the leisurely drive.
While Larry was imprisoned in New York, his plea for a new trial had
been denied, and he was now placed in Northampton County Prison where
he would remain until

Christmas.  By that time he had deteriorated so severely, neglecting to
eat or care for himself, and refusing to talk, that he was sent back to
the psychiatric hospital at Allentown.  There he was again put on
antipsychotic medication, and again began to show some improvement.

Richard Behrens's recantation had put the Salt Lake authorities in a
very difficult position indeed.  They had the weapon but no material
witness.

Less than a week after Larry was released from Rikers Island Prison,

Behrens was locked up for three weeks in the same institution, charged
with criminal possession of a weapon, obstruction of justice, and
tampering with evidence.  Then, in Connecticut, ninety days after
Marc's arrest, Utah's juvenile warrant expired.  On March 5, 1981, all
charges against the twenty-year-old youth were dropped.  Berenice
Bradshaw's bail money was returned to her.  Marc Schreuder was
completely free.

Marc should have been elated, but he was not.  He felt the charges
might be reinstated at any time.  He was terrified of getting caught.
His mother was pushing him to reapply to Trinity, and other colleges,
"as if nothing had happened."  But the lawyers were telling him
something quite different.  They warned that eventually the Utah
authorities would probably figure out a way to get Marc certified in
absentia as an adult.  If this happened, Marc could be rearrested in
New York, Connecticut, or any other state.

Marc tried to explain all this to his mother, but she refused to
listen.

"At this point, Mom was the eternal optimist.  She just kept saying,
"Reapply!"  I said, "Why?  I'm just gonna get yanked out of college and
go on trial for murder anyway.  I'm fighting for my life, and you want
me to go back to college as if nothing had happened!"  "

But Frances refused to look at the bad side.  Marc can still hear, and
imitate, his mother's voice repeating like a manic parrot, "No
problem,

Marc.  No problem!  You'll get olP You'll get off!"

"But, Mom!  What if they ..."

"You'll get out of it, I promise you.  We've-got-the money

Berenice was begging Marc to leave, to run while he could.  "Go to
South

America!  Go to Europe!  Mexico!  Go to Switzerland!  Go to Canada!"
She was right, of course.  If her grandson had left the country, it
would have been far more difficult to catch and extradite him.  But,
instead, he went into hiding.  Why?

"Whew.  SH-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z.  That's a good question.  I think the reason was
I didn't want to leave Mom.  I couldn't face life in another country. 
I could not face leaving home.  I knew if I ran, and wanted to be
successful at escaping, I'd never be able to see Mom again.  Because I
knew they'd always be watching.  And I felt like-damn, there's my whole
life in there!  That apartment.  That was the biggest thing with me:
life with Mom.  I couldn't live with her, couldn't live without her.

"You see, I loved my mother.  I still love her, in a way.  I mean, she
was my whole life!  Mom was my only friend ..."

Marc's reasons for not fleeing the country are complex and
contradictory.

He was both afraid and overconfident.  In his mind, he was James Bond.
He wore an imaginary trench coat, dealt in international high finance,
played the stock market, speculated in foreign exchange, putting
together a grubstake.  In reality, he was a mama's boy, the damaged
victim of his mother's abuse.  But there was another reason he didn't
leave.  In the few months he had been away at Trinity, he had noticed a
change in Ariadne.  When Marc lived at home and worked for Mitsubishi,
he could go to the store for Frances, and did, every night after work.
"But now

Mom was beginning to have Ariadne take over my role in the house.  She
was going to the store and- getting Mom's food- She was becoming Mom's
confidante.  It was already starting to happen, and she was still only
seven years old!"

Even when he was home for the weekend, it seemed to him, Mom now
preferred to send Ariadne, not Marc, down to the deli.  "On the ballet
thing, Mom was pushing Ariadne really hard, too.  Everything Mom did
was really geared for

Ariadne."  Frances wanted Ariadne to fulfill her own fantasies of
becoming a ballerina, a perfect, tiny, adorable female, and Marc
thinks, "Mom really drummed it in.  I think Mom was pushing Ariadne
really, really hard.  I think, initially, Ariadne was very much the
same as I was-very devoted to

Mom.  She was a mommy's girl, like I was a mommy's boy.  She would do
anything Mom asked ... and I think she also wanted to copy Mom. 
There's a lot of attachment between the two.  A lot of love, and a lot
of hate."

Probably there was also a lot of sibling rivalry developing.  Marc,
although the overwhelming favorite son, had always become irrationally
jealous of the least attention his mother paid to Larry.  Now another,
more serious rival was appearing on the scene.  For whatever dark
combination of motives,

Marc decided the best thing he could do for Ariadne was to capture her
tangled feelings about her mother on tape, so that later he could show
her how she too was being used, and abused, just as he himself had
been.

And so he tenderly asked his half sister to tell him about her life
with

Mother.  He made tapes in which the little girl told him that every day
her mother slapped, kicked, hit, punched, and screamed at her.
Tearfully, she said that she liked her mother, but didn't like her when
she punched and kicked and screamed at her.  She did not like her
mother's threats to push her out of the window if she did not stop
crying.  Sometimes she could not stop.  Her mother knew that, and still
"she screams me.  She loves screaming me!  And she loves kicking me!
Loves punching me.  She just loves it!"

It made Ariadne feel as if "Mom, hates my guts," she told Marc.  She
dreaded coming home from school, she said, because her mother might put
a knife in her stomach or in her throat.  The worst part was riding
home on the school bus knowing it was going to happen.  She wished
things were only as bad as last year, when Mom used to beat her with a
hairbrush.  One day she had had to go to school painted with
Mercurochrome to cover brush marks on her forehead, arms, knees.

"What is that?"  Sister had asked, but Ariadne had quickly covered up.
"I said, "Oh, nothing.  I just fell down."  " It wasn't true, Ariadne
said, but she didn't want Sister to know the truth.  Then she would
tell Reverend

Mother, and something even worse might happen.

Marc laughed.  He knew just how she felt, he said.

That spring, shortly after Ariadne's birthday, another troubling
incident had occurred.  Berenice had invited Ariadne to the circus, and
she was seated in the foyer when Frances came storming down the stairs
shouting, "Don't you dare take my daughter anywhere!  I want to have
her at home.  I do not want to have you brainwashing her!"

Berenice had begun shouting back when Ariadne appeared and stepped into
the middle of the fight.  "You stop that!  You stop shouting at my
mommy, you bad old witch!"

It was too much.  "You stay out of this!"  Berenice cried out, and
angrily shoved the child away.  It was a push with her forearm, not a
blow, but it caught Ariadne in the midsection and she burst into
tears.

Frances raced to the phone and reported to the New York Society for
the

Prevention of Cruelty to Children that her mother was abusing her
daughter.

Then she gathered up the weeping child and rushed to Lenox Hill
Hospital where she demanded that Ariadne be examined and treated for
stomach injuries.  Although the hospital kept the child several days,
the real purpose, says Berenice, was to observe the eccentric behavior
of the mother.

Nothing physical was the matter with Ariadne, but doctors recommended
that the family seek professional counseling.  A

therapist was suggested, and Berenice and Frances paid him one visit.

"Are you sorry you reported your mother as a child-abuser?"  Berenice
recalls the psychiatrist asking Frances.

"No," Frances replied.

He prescribed some medication for Frances, and they stopped at the
pharmacy on the way home.  Berenice says she does not remember the name
of the doctor or the drug, but after they got home, Frances withdrew to
her bedroom with her new medicine and Ariadne, and locked the door.
Ariadne still slept with her mother, and ever since the "shoving"
episode, Frances had taken to locking her in at night, ostensibly to
protect Ariadne from her grandmother.

"About six o'clock in the morning I heard all this moaning and groaning
in there," Berenice recalls.  "I started knocking on the door, but
Ariadne wouldn't let me in."

Berenice knew that Ariadne always got up and went downstairs to make
her mother's coffee, so she waited, "and as soon as she opened that
door, I tore in.  I found Frances in the most horrible condition!
Unconscious.  She had chewed her tongue all night, and the blood was
running down, and she was just-her eyes.  And moaning.  Oh, she was
thrashingl

"I said, "Oh, Ariadne, you should have let me in."  But at that point,
it was war, and she probably thought she was protecting her mother."

Berenice woke up Marc and told him to try to reach Frances's own
doctor.

Meanwhile Paulette, who occupied one of the ground-floor servant's
rooms at io Gracie, came upstairs and helped Berenice hold down the
thrashing, unconscious Frances.  In an hour or so Frances's regular
physician arrived, sent for an ambulance, and Berenice and the doctor
accompanied Frances to

New York Hospital.

Berenice believes what caused this episode was a bad drug reaction,
although she cannot be sure.  Frances all her life has been careful not
to tell her mother whatever drugs she might be taking.  What stands out
most in

Berenice's mind is that the New York Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children automatically filed a report with Ariadne's school
alerting them that the child had a dangerous grandmother.  Eventually
it was necessary for Berenice, accompanied by one of her lawyers, to
visit the headquarters of the child abuse society to have her name
expunged from their records.

In June, Ernie Jones had a second stroke of luck.  The Utah Legislature
enacted a new statute which enabled the police to have Marc certified
as an adult in absentia.  They no longer needed to bring him back to
Utah to process the necessary papers.  The next time they went after
him, he would not have to be held on a juvenile warrant.

That same month Berenice retained a Utah criminal defense attorney,
Paul

Van Dam, to represent her grandson in that state, should it become
necessary.  Van Dam, about forty, is a gentle, rumpled, professorial
type, whose bald head is counterbalanced by a thick, gray-streaked
black beard.

He is a lapsed Mormon given to corduroy jackets and rumbling baritone
pronouncements.  If the Marc Schreuder case ever did come to trial, he
expected it to be the biggest case of his career.

Over the spring and summer, Frances locked out Marc permanently from
io

Gracie Square, lest the neighbors somehow find out that her son was the
object of police surveillance for grand patricide One evening the
husband of a Board member drove her home from the ballet.  As they
approached Gracie

Square, Frances grew fearful and agitated, reluctant to permit their
limousine to approach the building.  An important diplomat lived there
incognito, she said, and armed guards patrolled at all hours.  "I got
the feeling she was terrified of something, and that security was a
very important factor in her life," said her uncomfortable escort. 
When he got home he told his wife, "I never want any responsibility for
that woman again."

Marc was living in "that crummy Sloane House YMCA on West Thirty-fourth
between Eighth and Ninth Avenue ... the place is a gutter!  You have a
little tiny room, half as big as a regular jail cell.  Built about
1930.

Roaches all over.  Filthy !"  He moved to the moderate-priced Hotel
Seville.  He lived under aliases like Alexander Bentley and David
Zablonski and was pleased when his mother said the latter was "a good
lower class Jewish name."

In August, according to Richard Behrens, he met with Marc in Carl
Schurz

Park.  Here, for the first time, Marc gave Behrens details of the
murder, including the crucial detail that it had not been his own idea:
Frances had ordered him to do it.

Early in ig8i, Ernie Jones finally got the biggest break in his nearly
three-year-old unsolved case.  Sergeant Michael George, a young
investigator in the Salt Lake County Attorney's Office, stopped by
Jones's office and told him that an unexpected lull had developed in a
case he was working on.  "I'd like something more to do," he said.
Ernie tossed him the

Bradshaw file.

At twenty-eight, Mike George, a lanky, handsome cop with olive skin,
Afro hair, and a placid disposition, already had five years' solid
experience working narcotics, and the high confidence which comes from
a recent big win.  In the early 1970s, dope dealers had discovered Salt
Lake City, and liked the place for the same reason the Mormons had.  It
was isolated and safe.  It was also so clean and virtuous it did not
even have a police or sheriff's drug unit.  The dealers made Salt Lake
a "free city," a center to which couriers could bring raw heroin from
Mexico to be cut, diluted, packaged, and shipped elsewhere.  The
dealers had come to like the place less after five years of pursuit by
Mike George.

He often worked disguised behind a beard, mustache, bandanna, and gold
earring, posing as a major dealer himself.  It was a fervid, dangerous
life.  One woman had almost sliced him open with a knife.  But Mike
loved his job and was very good at it, spirited but stubborn, inventive
but never rash.  He was a prudent, self-made cop who wanted only to go
on being a cop.  He was married to Elaine Meppeh, a brainy and pretty
medical teehnologist.  As children began to come along, Elaine
suggested it might be time to get out of narcotics and into something
safer, like homicide.

While he worked undercover, he had called himself Mike Frustraglio.  He
thought it had "a nice Italian ring to it."  Besides, it was his
mother's maiden name, and Mike's mother had been the key figure in
molding his unusual persona.  Mike's father, John George, had been a
laborer at the

Hercules Powder Company in northern Michigan near the Canadian
border.

When the Michigan mines closed, Hercules transferred John George to
Salt

Lake City, where he worked on Poseidon missiles.  When Mike was twelve,
his mother was told she had cancer and less than a year to live. 
Mike's mother determined to use the time she had left to show her son
everything she knew about running a house.  Then the miracle had
happened.  Her cobalt therapy actually worked, very rare in those days,
and she is still living.

Mike George grew up to become a high school athlete who lettered in
football, basketball, and baseball, and doubtless was the only one of
his teammates who could also without embarrassment dust the house, darn
socks, and bake lasagna.  He had developed a winning combination of
boldness and modesty, self-confidence and faith, and he was also a kid
who knew exactly what he wanted out of life.  "I just always had this
burning itch to become a cop."

At that time the Lyndon Johnson administration had just launched a
national plan to diminish police brutality and community tensions by
upgrading police education.  It was called Project LEEP-Law
Enforcement

Education Program-and it advanced prospective cops full college tuition
and board.  Mike George applied.  Working eighteen-hour days, he
completed four years' work at the University of Utah in two and a half
years, supporting himself with a night job in a grocery store.  He had
to give up his beloved sports and, looking back, he says, "College was
just no fun at all."  But LEEP and the former Signorina Frustraglio had
produced a very good and unusual cop, probably the only one in America
who makes blueberry pies, raises bonsai trees, irons his own shirts,
and has built a full-size mosaic-tiled swimming pool in his backyard.
He and Elaine now have two daughters, ages five and seven, and a
two-year-old son, and every birthday Daddy bakes them an Easter Bunny
cake.

To admire such abilities may be merely sentimental-Bluebeard probably
ironed shirts-but Mike George brings to his work a striking blend of
gentleness and manliness, and utter equanimity.  "Is that right?"  he
murmurs quietly to the most outlandish bits of information.  He also
has a rare understanding of where the levers are inside people, himself
included.  He knows, for example, that he never wants to be anything
but a cop, and has several times turned down offers of a year's salary
to do two or three months' work investigating a case for a defense
lawyer.  Tm just prosecution oriented," he says, baffled and quietly
contemptuous of those legions of rationalists and opportunists-the
hired guns of the law-who can happily work either side of the street.

George was a ig6os liberal who campaigned for George McGovern, and
before that for Bobby Kennedy.  But his bedrock notions of morality and
integrity, plus five years working narcotics, turned him into an
ultraconservative in many matters.  He opposes marijuana use, and
speaks frequently at clubs and schools.  His first homicide case after
he left narcotics in t98o was the notorious

Joseph Paul Franklin affair.  Franklin was a white racist who spotted
two young black men not long out of high school jogging in Liberty Park
with two white women.  It was a Sunday afternoon; the joggers had just
come from church.  The sight moved Franklin to homicidal frenzy.  He
waited outside the park in a field until nine-thirty at night, riddled
the men with nine shots, and escaped in a speeding Camaro.

Mike George worked on the investigation of the Franklin case.  It took
nine months.  Eventually the car was discovered in Kentucky.  Mike
George found a Kentucky girl who remembered Franklin's hatred of
blacks.  The FBI followed the trail to Tampa, Florida, and found a man
in a queue trying to sell his blood whom they were able to identify as
the killer by the tattoo of the Grim Reaper on his arm.  The Franklin
case was stalled awaiting trial in early ig8j, which is why Mike
stopped by Ernie Jones's office looking for more work.

The case against Marc Schreuder was then in disarray.  Behrens had
recanted and would speak to nobody.  Campbell had unwittingly put too
much muscle on the Texans, and they had turned uncooperative.  They
confirmed that Marc had come to Midland and bought a gun, but the dates
of their statements ranged across an entire year.  "There's no way I
can go into court unless we can put Marc in Salt Lake on July 23,1978,
and also tie him to the gun in Texas," Ernie said.

Mike studied the case, quickly concurred, went to work.  "I've been in
airline searches before," he said.  Mike had worked on two major heroin
conspiracy cases that were ten years old before he started
investigating them.  He had had to search out evidence of plane trips
made a decade earlier-tedious, boring but vital work.  His experience
in narcotics had made him realize the overwhelming extent to which ours
has become a "society of records."  Wherever we go, whatever we do,
however we pay for it, somebody--or, more likely, somebody's
computer-has almost certainly made note of it.  Mike George immediately
subpoenaed all telephone, bank, and other financial records even
remotely connected with Franklin

Bradshaw's business enterprises, or with his estate.  He also asked
family members for personal documents and correspondence.  Bushel
baskets of stored-up documents began to pile up in his tiny office.
Marilyn and

Elaine and other

Bradshaws relinquished massive amounts of family correspondence; even

Berenice turned in some letters.

In 1978 only two airlines, American and United, flew between New York

City and Salt Lake.  Mike George assisted by Joel Campbell started
checking through the manifests of every direct flight into Salt Lake
City on the day of the murder, the day before, and two days after,
looking for a passenger named Schreuder or Bradshaw or Jewett.  Then
Mike learned from the NYC Bureau of Vital Statistics that Marc had been
born Marco Gentile.

He looked again.  They still found nothing.  Then: United did have a
record of a reservation for an "L.  Schreuder," on a flight from Salt
Lake to New

York two hours after the homicide.  But no ticket had been picked up.

Computers were the problem; computers were also the solution.  United's
"record" was in fact a signal from Continental's computer.  Continental
stores its passenger name records in Los Angeles.  George and Campbell
flew there, and searched through 251000 names before they hit the
jackpot: on July 22, an "L.  Gentile" had flown on American Airlines
from

New York to Dallas; on Texas International from Dallas to Midland; on

Continental from Midland to Phoenix, and there switched to a Hughes
Air

West flight into Salt Lake.  The ticket itself had been purchased in
New

York City at an American Airlines ticket agency.  Hughes AW stored its
old records in San Mateo, California.  George flew there and found his
essential missing link: a corroborating record that somebody had
actually made the Phoenix to Salt Lake leg of the journey.  Since Larry
already was in Salt Lake, this suggested to George the possibility of a
plot by Marc or Frances to frame her other son.

Mike George worked over all of the various records he had subpoenaed,
using a police technique called VIA (Visual Investigative Aid) which
charts and connects seemingly unrelated events.  Other patterns
emerged.

He began to feel that July 13 had been a critical day.  Frances had
called each of her parents on that day, both times at the warehouse
and, fortunately, both times collect.  Otherwise Mike would not have
been able to examine the phone bills.  (His authority covers Mountain
Bell only; he can subpoena only records of phone calls paid for in
Utah.) These would have been the calls in which Marc borrowed the final
$3,000, and promised never to ask Gramps for money again, the calls
that produced the $3,000 check payable to Ariadne which helped to buy
the gun and plane ticket-the calls which showed how Franklin

Bradshaw had paid for his own assassination.

VIA analysis of bank records made clear that Frances and her children
were entirely or heavily dependent for funds on her father.  Phone
records also showed numerous calls to Frances, or to Marc, from Gilmer
Drive, calls which must have been made by either Berenice or Larry.
There were also a number of calls from Gilmer Drive to Behrens.  These
had to be from Larry.

Berenice and Behrens had never met.

Studying these patterns, and reading through the voluminous family
correspondence, Mike began to feel that Marc was not really the person
he was after; or at least not the only person.  He saw no motive for
the boy to come to Salt Lake on his own and kill his grandfather.  One
day he blurted out, "Christ, Ernie, we're after the wrong person!  We
oughta start chasin'

Frances."

"On what evidence?"

No evidence yet, Mike said.  Only a "gut reaction.  The relationship
between this boy and this mother is strange."

And there was one other thing.  Marilyn Reagan and Elaine Drukman were
helpful and courteous when Mike telephoned seeking information;
Berenice was sometimes hostile and rude; Frances flatly refused to talk
to him.  But in a sense, her letters spoke for her.

The sum of the correspondence, dating back to the early sixties, showed
the duration and depth of the family friction over money.  "The feuding
between

Frances and her father is what tore this family apart," Mike said
later.

"It was not so much that Marilyn and Elaine feared Frances was after
their share of the inheritance.  They just didn't like what she was
doing to their father.  In her letters, you could see Frances pit
people against each other.  She pitted her mother against her father.
She would pit Marilyn's husband against Elaine's husband.  She was a
great conspirator, a master manipulator.  The further she went, the
more friction she caused."

Mike George longed to meet the other members of this family,
especially

Frances.  He had already interviewed Marilyn on one of her visits to
Salt

Lake.  Since he was in San Mateo checking airline records, he decided
it would be worthwhile to drive up to Berkeley, California, where the
Drukmans were then living, and talk to Elaine.

On this trip he understood for the first time how deeply divided a
family the Bradshaws had become.  Elaine turned out to be the most
bitter of them all.  She saw her mother as literally enslaved" to
Frances.

She believed Frances had used Ariadne as a "hostage" to obtain more
funds from her mother.  She was jealous of Berenice's extreme concern
for Frances's well-being, and relative disinterest in her own.  Before
returning from New

Zealand, Elaine had been paralyzed for a month with a back injury; she
had developed skin cancers from the strong sunlight.  But at the family
reunion which occurred at the time of her father's funeral, her mother
had not even asked her about these illnesses.  Berenice seemed only
able to think about

Frances's auto accident on the Triboro Bridge.  "Frances!  Oh, my
poor

Frances!"  was all Berenice could say, even though her sister had "no
crutches, no braces, no canes."

Elaine believed that her mother hated her, it appeared to Sergeant
George, and hated her most "for what I did to Frances'~-denouncing
Frances to the

FBI and forcing her to return the Mountain Fuel stock she had stolen
from

Elaine's sons.  Elaine even believed that Berenice's spontaneous blurt
at the time she first heard of her husband's murder-"I believe in
capital punishment, so help me!"-had been a deliberate attempt to mock
Elaine's long-standing political opposition to the death penalty.

After Marc, not Larry, had actually been identified as their father's
murderer, apprehended in Connecticut, and then released on a
technicality, the bitterness of both sisters had greatly intensified.
Marilyn had fired off letters of Hamlet-like grief and rage to the
governor of Utah, the attorney general, and both of the Salt Lake City
newspapers, taunting the authorities for being unable to hold on to her
father's assassin, even though "the murder weapon has been recovered
and directly connected to the victim's grandson."

Elaine's fury was directly aimed at her mother.  As she saw it,
Berenice was openly financing Marc's ability to avoid arrest, and she
was doing it "by feeding huge sums of Dad's money to Dad's murderer."

"Now I know everything," she wrote to her mother at about this time.
"You helped them murder Dad."  These were the last words Berenice would
ever hear from her daughter Elaine.

By the time Mike George returned to Salt Lake, his conversation with
Elaine had confirmed his own gut feelings.  "Frances Schreuder, not
Marc, was the brain behind this murder," he told

Ernie Jones.  "Marc was the executioner, but she was the mastermind."
About

Berenice, Mike was not prepared to go so far as Elaine and Marilyn.  By
this time the sisters were so bitter, they had convinced themselves
that their mother too was somehow involved in, or aware of, the plot.
They even thought she might have found and destroyed evidence of a
second will.  Mike George disagreed then, and still does.  He saw the
old lady chiefly as a victim of the family warfare around her.

More than anything, Mike wanted to meet Frances Schreuder.  He wanted
to spend time alone with her, establish a relationship, sense what she
was really like.  The only way this could possibly happen would be if
he were sent back to New York to arrest and escort her to Utah.  Such
an eventuality lay far in the future.  For now, he had to content
himself with a visit to

Larry Bradshaw at Allentown State Psychiatric Hospital.

Even for a tough cop, their three-hour meeting in April 1981 was
uniquely depressing.  For years, Frances had denied Larry's existence,
and she had instructed Marc and Ariadne to deny it.  None of their
schoolmates or their parents even knew they had a brother.  As Marc
puts it today, "Larry has been officially nonexistent for as long as I
can remember."  Sometimes, on

Larry's rare visits home, he would answer the telephone, and pass it
to

Marc.  "Who was that?"  the caller sometimes asked.

"Oh just some guy," Marc would reply.

In the psychiatric hospital, Frances's prophecy seemed to have come
true.

Said Mike George later, "He was very pathetic.  Dirty and skinny.  He
didn't take care of himself at all.  His gums bled profusely, from poor
hygiene.  He stank and his fingernails were long and black.  He was
just a pathetic human being-but very sharp, with an outstanding memory
for facts and details.  He could remember his exact route to Salt Lake
in the summer of 1978, the buses he took, the cities he stayed in, even
the names of cafes where he ate."  Larry confirmed stealing auto parts
from his grandfather's warehouse but declined to talk about stealing
checks, cash, or securities.  "Talk to

Marc about that," was all he would say.

The poisoned oatmeal was just a joke, Larry insisted, something the
boys had made up to entertain, or perhaps confuse Behrens.  But Mike
George was not so sure.  Several warehouse employees told him that one
day Franklin had come to work very upset.  He spoke of waking at three
o'clock in the morning and finding Marc standing over his bed.  Marc
had said he could not sleep and had come into his grandfather's room to
open a window.  But the expression on Marc's face had frightened
Franklin, he told his employees the next day.  And at the warehouse, he
was dizzy, vomited, had to lie down on his desk for a while.  Larry
denied all knowledge.

Mike George was in Midland by mid-July.  He needed to regain the
Texans' confidence that "they were on our team, they weren't suspects."
Instead of summoning them to police headquarters for questioning, he
invited them out to dinner.  Later, he began attempting to refresh
their hazy memories.

Again, his narcotics training paid off.  "It's hard for people to
remember dates, even last week.  But start to link the date you're
after with other events, and it will usually come back."  Jerry
Register proved the theory sound.  The ex-sheriff had originally placed
Marc in Midland on a Saturday in May-not at all helpful since the
murder occurred in July.  But now Mike

George encouraged the shy sheriff to talk, free-associate, remember.

Suddenly Register said, "Wait a minute!  My son was shot right after I
sold Marc the gun.  That's why I sold it, to buy my son some new
clothes ."

He had bought the boy some expensive Western boots, and nine-year-old

Richard Register had been wearing them and playing on the living room
floor with his still-younger cousin, fooling with one of the guns in
his dad's collection, when his cousin pulled the trigger.  The bullet
shattered Richard's spine and made him a quadriplegic.

"When was your son shot?"

"August 4, 1978."

Mike George had brought along a calendar.  Working backward, it was now
easy to peg the date of sale: July 22, 1978.

From mid-July of 1981 until the end of September, Mike had to put aside
the Schreuders for the trial of his white racist killer Joseph Paul

Franklin.  The jury split ten to two and Franklin drew a life sentence,
not the death penalty.  Two jurors held out because the evidence was
circumstantial; Mike had been unable to produce the murder weapon.  The
verdict was a major disappointment to the fervent champion of law and
order, and he vowed to do better next time.

Now Ernie Jones called a staff meeting on the Bradshaw case.  A new
warrant for Marc's arrest as an adult had been issued in mid-June but
never acted upon.  Marc's lawyers had meanwhile made preliminary
overtures: Marc would surrender voluntarily in return for a promise of
bail, and certain other stipulations.  But Ernie did not want to
bargain; he wanted to "deal from strength.

"Once you have the kid in the slammer, the more pressure you put on
him, the more mistakes he is going to make."  The prosecutor gave Mike
George thirty days to mount an all-out search for Marc.

In New York, the Schreuder matter was in the hands of the 2oth
Precinct, where Marilyn had turned in the gun.  These cops were now all
tied up on the John Lennon murder.  Mike George decided to bypass the
N_YPD and seek help from New York District Attorney Morgenthau's
office.  He drew a crack blue-eyed cop with a gaze like an icicle.  His
name was Steve Klein and, like George, he was young and enthusiastic;
this was the most important assignment of his brief career.

They had little to go on.  Mike gave Steve Klein the Gracie Square
address, and they started another phone records search.  Acting on a
hunch that if Marc were still in New York, Granny was probably
supporting him, they subpoenaed Berenice Bradshaw's bank records and
canceled checks, And there it was.  A check made out to "M.T.B.", and
at the bottom, a notation in a different handwriting-Re.  Marc
Schreuder.

M.T.B.-Manfra, Tordella & Brookes--deals in foreign exchange from
offices in the World Trade Center, the same building Marc had worked in
as a messenger boy for Mitsubishi International.  Mike assumed when he
saw the check that Marc had skipped the country and was somehow having
money sent to him overseas.  He telephoned M.T.B. and asked if he could
arrange to send money to a brother in Italy.

"Of course, sir.  We can transfer money to any bank in the world."

But Marc had not fled the country, or even New York City.  In June,

Berenice was involved in a minor traffic accident in Salt Lake City,
and police spotted Marc running from the scene.  He was in town to
collect his passport, police surmised, and probably had raised getaway
money from his grandmother.  Klein and George had no idea that Marc had
spent the summer in New York, occasionally, furtively visiting Mom, but
mostly living in crummy hotels, and, when necessary, forging another of
his grandmother's stolen checks to finance his trading in stocks and
gold coins.

In fact, Marc Schreuder embezzled $9o,000 from Berenice Bradshaw during
the ten-month period between his release in Connecticut March 5 and his
recapture October 27 in New York City-scarcely the work of a "naughty
boy."

Not even a doting grandmother could turn a blind eye to so large an
amount.

But Marc had not even attempted to run.  "He never could have done
it,"

Berenice later acknowledged.  "He's too much a mama's boy.  He needs to
know where he's gonna sleep every night.  He's not like Larry."

Now came another lucky break.  Steve Klein knew the wife of an M.T.B.
executive who had once worked in the New York D.A."s office.  Klein
persuaded her to arrange a peek into Marc Schreuder's account.  It bore
an address: 205 E. 85th Street.  This was a private "postal
supermarket,"

CITIPOSTAL, which consolidates several kinds of delivery services under
one roof-U.S. Mail, United Parcel, Federal Express, Purolator Courier.
Marc knew the place from his messenger-boy days-a tiny, step-down room
banked with the sort of locked brass mailboxes seen in oldfashioned
post offices.

Now he was using CITIPOSTAL as a mail drop for his foreign exchange and
stock transactions.

Klein learned from M.T.B. that Marc had just ordered still another gold
coin.  He discovered the magnitude of Marc's dealings-$9o,000 since
July, all of it accomplished, it would turn out, with the checks he had
stolen from Granny's bedroom.  As a thief, Marc showed himself his
mother's son.  As a foreign exchange trader he was less skilled. 
M.T.B. clerks had nicknamed him "The Magician" for his ability to make
money disappear.  M.T.B. management agreed to stall delivery of Marc's
latest purchase, a $12,500

Canadian 1912 to gold piece in gem-brilliant mint condition, until a
proper police surveillance could be set up.

Monday morning, Steve Klein stationed himself across the street from

CITIPOSTAL, between the Star of India Restaurant and a bicycle repair
shop.

When the chubby, slovenly blond haired youth arrived to pick up his
mail,

Klein made the collar.

"The kid about died.  He just about passed out," the investigator said
jubilantly, reporting the arrest to Mike George an hour later.  It
was

October 26, iq-four days before Ernie Jones's deadline.

As Marc's arrest became known, lawyers began heading for io

Gracie Square.  Paul Van Dam had to fly from Salt Lake City, so the
first legal meeting could not be held until Monday night, October 26.
Marc spent the night at Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal
holding tank.

When the lawyers gathered at Apartment 6, they were astonished to see
the contrast between the extreme grandeur of the layout and its meager,
shabby contents.

Downstairs, io Gracie Square is cold, old, expensive, and fortresslike:
one square block of solid wealth arranged in duplex apartments topped
by penthouses.  Upstairs, the lawyers stepped into a small, dim foyer
of dark old Chinese lacquer and peeling wallpaper with an ornate, grimy
mirror cockeyed on one wall.  A large, triple-locked door, lacquered
Chinese red, opened onto an astonishing space-bare ruined choirs, two
stories high.

Fifty thousand dollars' worth of huge new steel-framed picture windows
overlooked the East River.  They were set into the old masonry walls,
but the work was half-complete, unpainted, not even plastered.  The
vast space was empty of furniture.  Two twelve foot couches newly
reupholstered in "vanilla velvet," still in protective covers of heavy
transparent plastic, were pushed up against one wall.  Chinese rugs
were rolled up tightly at their feet.  Dark "good" wood floors gleamed
dully, reflecting river lights.

A huge old French mirror above the fireplace reflected a dusty
chandelier.

The whole place looked like a ballet set of some abandoned ballroom, an
old valse noble et sentiment ale almost audible in the wings.

Frances had planned to refurbish her castle with all-new marble
bathrooms as well as new windows, then abruptly halted all work midway,
lest one amid the small army of plasterers and plumbers turn out to be
a private investigator or police spy.  This had left the ballroom-like
living room in an incongruous state worthy of Magritte: three ten-foot
crates, two lying down, one standing, occupied the middle of the
otherwise empty room.  They resembled giant sarcophagi stored in some
dusty, unused chamber of the

Cairo Museum.  In fact, each crate contained a solid onyx bathtub
drilled for gold-plated fittings.  Because Frances had stopped the
workmen, all but one of the apartment's bathrooms still looked like raw
survivors of the

London blitz, while the great, shadowy, and mysterious living room
resembled a storehouse of loot from an Egyptian tomb.  Atop one of the
packing crates, as if placed there by Magritte himself, rested a pair
of vivid watermelon-pink silk ballet slippers, long pink satin ribbons
dangling down over the crate's edge in an attitude of chic abandon.

Off to the left was an empty dining room, to the right, the one
furnished room on this floor, the small dark brown library, its
bookshelves still mostly empty.  To the rear was an old-fashioned,
gloomy kitchen that smelled faintly of gas leaking from the expensive
new restaurant range.  The giant new restaurant refrigerator contained
only skim milk and Campbell's soup.

No desserts, no bread or butter.  Ariadne must stay slim for the
ballet.  A new ice maker dripped unused in the old butter's pantry
where very expensive roaches scurried.  A laundry room off the pantry
was jammed with metal filing cabinets bought on sale, bright green or
yellow, all locked.

Two interior staircases, front and rear, ascended to four bedrooms on
the apartment's second floor.  Granny's room, down the hall, was
carpeted in new purple shag and had the only decent bathroom installed
before all work had been halted.  "My Cinderella room," Berenice
Bradshaw called it, because it was so plain compared to her daughter's
and granddaughter's quarters.  The window looked out on a blank wall.
The room had a flowered bedspread and family pictures on the bureau.
The portraits of Marc and Larry showed them in short pants, Easter
outfits, and had been taken when they were only four or five years
old.

Had the lawyers been invited to tour the family's private quarters-they
were not-they would have been dumbfounded by the master-bedroom, lair
of their client's mother.  It was a Great Expectations chamber, gloomy
and huge, the floor so completely covered with stacks of boxes,
newspapers, dusty piles and mounds of other files and boxes that to
walk across it would be like crossing a large pond on stepping stones.
Rising dead center in the middle of the rubble was an astonishing
canopied bed reaching almost to the ceiling.  The bed table was stained
with coffeepot marks and cigarette burns, as was the portion of floor
visible between the stalagmites of rubble.  This was where she sat,
slept, smoked, phoned, ate, lived.  It resembled a ruined pagoda
improbably rising out of the stacks of bills, boxes, cans of floor wax,
and wobbly towers of shoe boxes on all sides.  A literal wall of boxed
ballet shoes stood in the dressing room-as if the room had been papered
in a repeat pattern of the magic word CAPEZIO.

Clothes closets were jammed, crushed full of costly garments.

The bathroom was a disheveled osprey's nest of brushes, tools, bottles,
jars.  Reigning dead center of the whole mess, on the bed, amid the
billowy mound of ivory-silk-covered pillows, sat Tiffany, the red
Persian cat, black opal eyes blinking slowly.

To the rear on this floor was a disorderly twin-bedded room and bath
for the boys.  Down the hall was a small two-room suite of immaculate
and cheerful perfection.  It looked like a magazine illustration of an
ideal little girl's room.  Dozens of stuffed toys sat on child-sized
furniture.

Schoolbooks, pencils, and paper lay on the writing table like surgeon's
tools.  All the bathroom porcelain gleamed, and small bottles sparkled
in graduated sizes on the glass shelves behind the mirror.  The small
ruffle-trimmed bed, perfectly crisp and smooth, sat dead-center in its
own doll-size sleeping chamber off the larger room.  On three sides of
a large, well-lit closet hung rows and rows of small dresses and coats
and ballet tutus, in perfect order above dozens of pairs of ballet
slippers and polished party shoes aligned on freshly painted shelves.
Open the closet door and a light went on automatically, illuminating
what appeared on the upper levels to be an enchanted toyshop.  Rows of
new-looking, richly costumed beaded, wimp led pearl-encrusted, armored,
satin and silk and velvet and gold-thread Storybook Dolls stared
blankly at one another from the three sides of the closet with unseeing
dolls' eyes.

Downstairs, in the little brown library, mother and grandmother-in
their way no less surprising than their habitat-sat down with their
three lawyers.  The purpose of the meeting was to formulate strategy to
get Marc out of jail in New York and keep him out of jail in Utah. 
From MCC he was headed for Rikers Island, and doubtless would remain
there unless or until bail could be arranged-always a difficult matter
in capital cases.  Ted

Carey had come down from Connecticut to join Van Dam.  But the New York
lawyer was new to the case.

At the time of Marc's Connecticut arrest, the cooperating New York law
firm had been Ostrow & Grand.  But Paul Grand is a son-in-law of New
York

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, and as a matter of policy his firm
does not work on cases that fall within Morgenthau's jurisdiction.
Grand had therefore called in Michael Armstrong, the very able former
Queens district attorney who had served as counsel to the Knapp
Commission during its inquiry into police corruption in the city.
Armstrong was busy Monday night-his daughter was leaving for Botswana
to join the Peace Corps--so his firm was represented by a sturdy,
redhaired, and studious twenty-eight-year-old attorney named David
Frankel, one of the bright young men at Barrett, Smith, Schapiro, Simon
& Armstrong.  As luck would have it, Frankel had recently made a
special study of extradition law, a thorny subject.  He had no
experience in a capital case.

Since the passage by all fifty states of the Uniform Criminal
Extradition

Act, a state-to-state extradition request can be challenged only on
narrow technical grounds.  Either you are the wrong person, or you were
not in the state at the time of the crime, or the extradition papers
themselves are not in order.  Point three had saved Marc from Utah's
clutches in Connecticut.  Now Marc's only hope was point two: he would
have to show that he had not been in Utah on the day his grandfather
was killed.  This requirement made it somewhat more important than
usual that the lawyer know the full truth about exactly what his client
had been doing that day, since the burden of proof in such matters is
on the defendant.

On Tuesday morning lawyers Van Dam, Carey, Frankel, and his boss,
Mike

Armstrong, went en masse to MCC, where Marc was waiting to be
arraigned.

They saw a down-at-the-heels twenty-year-old who appeared quite
self-confident for his age and predicament and flatly denied any
connection with Franklin Bradshaw's murder.  It took the lawyers a
week, and $150,000 cash bail posted in full by Marc's grandmother, to
secure his release from Rikers Island.  But once he was free, Frances
absolutely refused to let him come anywhere near her apartment.

By an incredible stroke of luck, news of Marc's arrest had gone
unreported by the New York Timem True, a big story had appeared in
the

New York Daily News.  It described Marc Schreuder's arrest for his
grandfather's murder.  It named Berenice Bradshaw and listed the
suspect's address as io Gracie Square.  But-miraculously-Frances
Schreuder's name was not mentioned by the News, and the people who
mattered in Frances's life-the New York City Ballet peerage-relied for
news on the New York

Times and its promise of "All the News That's Fit to Print."  The Times
evidently had not found the Schreuder story fit.  Thus it happened
that, for six more months, not a soul around the New York State
Theater, or at the New York City Ballet directors' meetings, had the
slightest idea that their very own Sugar Plum Fairy was intimately
connected to a notorious Utah murder case; nor that her father's recent
murder was in fact the source of her prodigious wealth; nor that her
son had been charged with the crime and was almost certainly facing
trial.

Marc took a hotel room on East Eighty-sixth Street, as near to his
mother as she would allow, and spent most of his time downtown in the
office of

David Frankel.  As the days ground on, the older lawyers came to hope
that

Frankel's youth might prove an asset in the delicate task of
obtaining

Marc Schreuder's confidence; that this odd young client, so very
obviously in need of a big-brother figure in his life, would come to
see

Frankel in that light.  Marc was telling the lawyer the same rambling,
phony story involving a visit with the Cavenaughs that he had first
used a year earlier on Detective Campbell.  He said he had been at home
with his mother in New York and had first heard on the radio about the
shooting in Utah.  He spoke of a long visit that same Sunday afternoon
to the neighborhood delicatessen.  But in a week of interviewing his
client,

Frankel was unable to come up with witnesses, bus tickets, plane
tickets, or any other evidence to support Marc's story.

Furthermore, the more time he spent talking to Marc, and to his bizarre
mother, the less Frankel believed any of it.  Very soon it dawned on
him that Marc was not telling the truth.  He liked to play games.  He
was sly, or thought he was.  Marc's story had developed into a
rambling, complicated account of a two-week Texas bus trip, and when
Frankel sought to trap Marc in inconsistencies, he responded like a
Dungeons and Dragons game player attempting to outwit his opponent.

At other times he spoke of running away.  "I'm innocent, but nobody
believes me," he would say.  "I'm gonna have to disappear to South

America."  He liked to employ spy jargon.  He talked about "going
incognito, into deep cover."  Frankel could see his client donning an
imaginary trench coat as he spun out his yarns.  But yams they almost
certainly were, and every time Frankel got close to the truth, Marc
would threaten to bolt.

Frankel tried calling his bluff.  "Fine, Marc.  Run away.  If you're
not gonna cooperate with me, not gonna deal with the truth-then run."

"I will."

"Then gol" Frankel shouted, pointing melodramatically at the door. 
Marc did not move.  The game %yould begin again.  The young lawyer was
getting no place.  One afternoon he dropped into Armstrong's office,
and they talked until well past midnight, discussing every aspect of
the case.  Did they even want to know the full truth?  There was no
other way, they concluded, to challenge the extradition
proceedings-which was what they had been hired to do.  "So we
determined to bear down, force out the truth."

For the next ten days lawyer Frankel and his client sat in his office
four to eight hours a day, going over and over Marc's story.  The only
reason

Marc did not clam up or disappear, Frankel believes, "was because he
thought we were miracle workers for getting him out of Rikers on
bail."

Frankel teased, threatened, bullied, cajoled.  He used all the good-cop
bad-cop techniques he'd seen on television.

Marc kept spinning different stories.  Once Marc said that although he
was "involved," Larry had done the actual killing.  Another time he
said Larry was merely "involved."  At other times he blamed Behrens.
The one person he did not blame was his mother.

"It was a pretty emotional time for both of us," Frankel said later.
"It became hard for me to separate Marc from the environment he'd grown
up in."

Doubtless Frankel had begun to feel somewhat sorry for his crafty,
shifty, fantasy-prone client.  By then Frankel had seen a good bit of
Frances, "and

I didn't know how I was going to feel in the end if it turned out Marc
had done it."

After ten days and seventy or eighty hours of intensive grilling, Marc
broke down and confessed that he and he alone had shot his grandfather.
He described the killing in some detail.  And many hours after that,
amid floods of tears, Marc finally sobbed to his lawyer that his mother
had compelled him to do it.

Before the interrogations ended, Frankel knew a great deal more about
all the Schreuders than he needed or doubtless cared to.  In a
safe-deposit box

Marc had the eight tape cassettes that he said were secret recordings
of his family life he had made between the fall Of 1978 and December
ig8o, when he was arrested in Connecticut.  Marc turned over his tapes
to David

Frankel.  If they were genuine-as they certainly appeared to be-they
offered intimate glimpses of at-home family life otherwise unknowable
to anyone but family members themselves.  Frances, Marc, Larry,
Ariadne, and Berenice all make their appearance on these tapes, as do
various lawyers and others to whom Frances speaks by telephone.
Whether, and how, the tapes may have been edited there is no way to
tell.  Since all family members except Ariadne appear to have engaged
in fairly nonstop pilferage of one another's various belongings, it is
not even possible to state with certitude that Marc himself made all
the tapes.  They all owned tape recorders.  On Marc's tapes, Larry
and

Frances speak of having tapes of their own.  On some, but not all, of

Marc's tapes, the speakers seem to be aware that a live microphone is
present; they appear to be acting, and sometimes seem to enjoy acting.
In other tapes their laughter and tears-Ariadne's tears in
particular-are unquestionably real.  But whatever the provenance of the
tapes, taken together they offer a shocking glimpse into a human snake
pit of uninhibited family discourse.

David Frankel was the first non-family member to hear the tapes.  He
asked

Mike Armstrong to listen to a few.  One of these tapes-the so-called

Ariadne Tape of Frances threatening the little girl about her
schoolwork-would become the key piece of psychological evidence of

Frances's demonic power over her children.  The background noises,
interruptions, and certain internal evidence, such as Walter
Cronkite's

TV voice announcing the news on a certain date, make this tape at least
appear to be an authentic and-so far as it goes-unedited record of the
occasion.  The Ariadne Tape, and a defense-made transcription of it,
were part of the evidence in both trials, Marc's and, a year later, his
mother's.  It was heard by both judges and both sets of trial lawyers,
and both times was the subject of testimony by the expert psychiatric
witness, Louis G. Moench, M.D. Dr.  Moench, a venerable psychiatrist of
impeccable academic credentials, says the Ariadne Tape is "the worst
verbal child abuse" he has encountered in over forty years of
psychiatric practice.  The contents of the other seven tapes have never
been made public.

David Frankel's familiarity with these tapes, as well as his marathon
conversations with Marc, and perhaps a half-dozen long phone
conversations with Marc's mother, led Frankel to reach certain
conclusions about several members of the family.

"I would be skeptical of anything Frances Schreuder said.  I believe
she is capable of saying anything, making up anything, on the spot," he
told a recent visitor.  "I find Marilyn's role very bizarre-that she
would turn in her nephew without even a phone call.  I see Marc and
Larry as tragic figures, in the sense that they never had a chance to
grow up in any way other than they did.

"The two really tragic figures in this case are Berenice Bradshaw and,
of course, Ariadne.  Berenice I developed a tremendous fondness for.  I
thought she was a strong and caring woman who just could not believe
what had happened in her life."

By the time the marathon interrogation had ended, and Frankel and
Armstrong were satisfied that they had forced out the whole truth about
their client at last, Marc Schreuder had become well known around the
sprawling downtown offices of Barrett, Smith, Schapiro, Simon &
Armstrong.  Many people in the big law firm had worked on peripheral
aspects of the case.  Not all of them agreed with Frankel's assessment
of the principals.  One who did not was

Mike Armstrong's former legal secretary, an attractive young woman who,
after some years of night law school, had herself passed the bar exam
and joined the firm.  She had met Marc Schreuder several times in the
course of preparing certain motion papers on this case.

"How did he strike you?"  she was asked.

"Let me put it this way.  I would not get on an elevator alone with
him.

I've met a lot of felons.  But Marc Schreuder makes my blood run
cold."

While Mike George had been chasing Marc and Frances, Ernie Jones was
after

Behrens.  If Utah could not for the moment compel the presence within
its flinty borders of Marc Schreuder, it could at least continue to
grapple for the essential material witness in the case.  But Richard
Behrens had got himself a new and of necessity pro bono lawyer.  Larry
Goldman is an extremely able, amiable, pipe-smoking attorney with curly
gray hair who viewed his job as not merely to fight extradition, but to
hold his frightened client's hand and try to keep him from flipping out
completely.

Goldman saw Behrens as "a schlubby guy, a little old-man type, lonely
and garrulous.  He talks your ear off, smokes incessantly, does good
dialects,

Jewish accents especially.  If I wanted to pick up women, I would use

Richard.  He can be amusing and he talks to everybody.  I mean, he
starts up conversations with every person he meetsl

"Richard is not criminal, not venal.  He's terribly naY ve and
gullible.  He kept the gun for Frances because he got attention out of
it, and companionship, and a little drama in an otherwise boring
life."

To Goldman, Behrens was that familiar figure around every courthouse:
the litiginous crackpot.  He saw his client as "essentially a failure
in life, a guy who just couldn't quite put it together, the kind of guy
who trudges through life with an armful of yellowing, frayed, legal
papers, and types 'cc: Senator Moynihan' at the bottom of all his crank
letters."

The lawyer seems to have become rather fond of his wacky, eccentric
client.

He saw that Behrens was not only seared stiff of Frances Schreuder, he
was terrified of having to set foot in Utah.  Frances had succeeded in
depicting her native state as a Wild West place where any stranger
could expect to be shot or strung up vigilante-style.

Larry Goldman fought the extradition request over many months, arguing
that his client was certainly not a fugitive from Utah-he had never
even been there-nor had he committed any act in Utah that was also a
crime in New

York.  Finally, on November 17, 1981, Judge Eve Preminger complimented
Mr.

Goldman on the ingenuity of his argument, but ruled against him from
the bench.  Behrens was immediately avid to appeal.  He announced
grandly that he was prepared to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
Goldman gently pointed out to him that he would probably lose, in which
case he might be compelled to do hard time for concealing a murder
weapon or even being an accomplice to murder.  A better strategy would
be to work out some sort of deal with

Ernie Jones.

Behrens had got in the habit of telephoning his lawyer at least once a
day, and sometimes more often.  By December 4 he was beginning to
indicate a willingness to go to Utah and testify for Jones, providing
he received an iron-clad grant of immunity against prosecution. 
Frances had persuaded

Behrens to recant in the first place by convincing him that Utah was
certain to give him twenty years.

Now that Marc was released on bail, Mike George asked Ernie Jones to
send him back to New York City so he could plug up several remaining
holes in his case.  He traveled with his chief, Don Harman.  The two
Utah cops visited the American Airlines clerk who had sold Marc the

"L.

Gentile" ticket.

Carolyn Karoliszyn Morris had an amazing memory.  Although she sells
fifteen plane tickets a day, she remembered the strange, chubby boy in
tousled clothes with wads of cash in his pockets and identified him
readily from a stack of seven photographs Mike showed her.  Later, in
Salt

Lake City, Carolyn readily picked out Marc from a lineup of seven.

Mike met with M.T.B. executives and for the first time got an idea of
the magnitude of Marc's coin dealings, and the extent of his check
forgeries-$go,000 in less than three months.  He visited the
Schreuders' old

York Avenue neighborhood and talked to shopkeepers who had carried the
family for years because they felt sorry for the children.  Except
for

Larry, the family was well known.  Frances's general reputation in the
neighborhood was that of a flake who lived high but had trouble paying
her bills.  At times she had plenty of money, at times she was dead
broke.  She had no visible means of support and no boy friends. 
Ariadne was "treated like gold, and got everything she wanted always,"
Mike George was told.  He heard Frances described as "totally wacko," a
deadbeat, a hedonist.  At a time when the family was facing eviction
for nonpayment of rent, he was told, she had purchased a $i,000
negligee and a $io,000 Tiffany diamond ring.  Neighbors at 1675 York
Avenue described the boys' frequent lockouts, the cardboard and
newspaper nests they constructed in the building stairwells, and "an
apartment that was an absolute pigpen except for

Ariadne's room, which was spotless."

Mike made inquiries of shopkeepers, employers, neighbors, schoolmates,
looking for any kind of evidence that Marc had confided in anyone.
Again, nothing; the boy had no confidants except his mother.  After his
Connecticut arrest he had nearly broken down and confessed to one of
his roommates, but the other boy had told him, "I don't want to hear
what you're about to say.

I don't want to get involved-"

Mike went out to Rikers Island and interviewed Marc's fellow inmates.
He had been housed in the "homosexual tier" because the authorities
thought he might "survive better" there, and Marc had agreed.  While
insisting he was not gay, Marc said he "felt comfortable with them" and
"felt he would not be beaten up there."  Mike learned nothing from the
prisoners.

The two Utah cops' most emotional encounter was with a bantam pearl
importer in his small office in the wholesale diamond district.  They
had simply looked up Vittorio Gentile in the phone book and rung his
doorbell.

It was opened by "a fat, jolly Italian man-very cooperative and
hospitable.  He had no idea why we were there.  I told him we had come
because of his son Marc."

"Marco!  What's the matter with Marco?"

"Don't you know that he's been arrested?"

"Arrested!  For what?"

"Murder.  Of his grandfather."

Color drained out of Vittorio's face.  He did not even know Franklin

Bradshaw had been shot.  Frances had told him that her father had died
of natural causes.  Vittorio told Mike he had been trying to get in
touch with

Frances in order to find Larry, but she had been refusing his calls.

"Can you help me find Lorenzo?"  he asked.

"I have bad news for you there, too," Sergeant George replied.  "But I
can't lie to you."  He told the little man that Larry was in prison
in

Pennsylvania.

Later, Mike George said soberly, "It was one of the most traumatic
moments

I've ever had in police work ... a double whammy.  This man had two
sons, and suddenly he finds out that both are in jail.  It was like we
had taken half his life away.  To Italian people the family is the most
important thing."

Vittorio composed himself and afterward talked a little about his sons,
confirming what the policemen already knew: that Marc was a loner,
that

Larry had a history of emotional problems.  Then he broke down and
sobbed.

Mike felt terrible when he left.  He made it a point to arrange a
second meeting, as soon as possible.  Four months later, Mike returned
to New York.

Gentile then told him that Frances had been "the great love of my
life," and he described a protracted struggle for custody of his sons
"when she went off the deep end."  He told Mike how Frances claimed he
was an alcoholic who tried constantly to beat her up, and said he
believed she was crazy.  He said she had been expelled from Bryn Mawr
"for stealing and for dope," and had married him because it was an
opportunity to "save face."

Then he repeated that he had really loved Frances, adding that he loved
her to this day.

By the time their second meeting ended, the two men of Italian ancestry
had formed a relationship that would have important consequences for
Marc.  Mike

George had now spent nine months chasing down a boy he had never met, a
boy who at seventeen had coldbloodedly shot his grandfather in the
back.  The case consumed him.  He wanted more than anything to convict
Marc

Schreuder of the crime.  At the same time, he had formulated a very
clear picture of what he wished his own relationship to the boy to be.
"I wanted to be able to say to him when it was all over with: I hope
you have a good life, Marr.

"I never had any ill feelings against Marc Schreuder.  He deserved a
fair trial.  But at the same time, the state of Utah deserved a fair
trial."

The most important person on Mike's list that week was Richard
Behrens.

Unless he could be persuaded to reaffirm his original story, Utah had
no case.  The approach to him had to be just right.  The cops were
"reluctant to bust in on him, for fear we would set him off."  They
were unaware that they had a silent ally in attorney Larry Goldman. 
But within moments of their arrival in Goldman's office on December 8,
to deliver papers that required

Behrens to come to Utah or risk contempt of court, Goldman said, "You
people seem like gentlemen.  Mr.  Behrens is in the next office.  I'll
see if he'd like to talk to you."

They repaired to a conference room.  Behrens "was on pins and needles,
very nervous," even though the cops had agreed not to ask direct
questions about the case.  Mike George tried to play on the jumpy
little man's emotions.  He compared Behrens's position to Franklin
Bradshaw's: a mature man imperiled by a wild, unpredictable, brilliant
kid.  He talked about how bizarre the case was.  Goldman-intrigued, or
perhaps reassured--finally permitted George to ask direct questions.
The response was startling.  Behrens not only reaffirmed his original
statement to Joel Campbell-that Marc had told him he had shot his
grandfather.  He vastly improved it.  Richard Behrens now said-for the
first time -that in fact it had been Frances, not Marc, who had
"dropped the gun off" on him.  He said it was she who had "ordered the
killing."  Even better, he now remembered the name of a "hit man"
whom

Frances had tried to hire to assassinate her father, after Behrens had
introduced them.  He was "some guy named Manning," a printer by
trade.

By the time the conference ended, Mike George could barely contain his
elation.  That morning all he'd had on Frances was the original
statement, since recanted, of Richard Behrens, hardly an ideal witness
in any case.  Of course, the investigator also had proof that the
checks stolen in the summer Of 1977 by Marc and Larry had been forged
and cashed by their mother.  But he could not charge Frances with any
crime because Franklin

Bradshaw was dead, and he was certain Berenice would not file a
complaint against her own daughter.  By nightfall the Behrens meeting
had confirmed George's long-standing hunch: Frances Schreuder was
"really the guilty party, the boss, the mastermind behind this
murder."

Furthermore, in addition to having his key witness back on the right
side of the fence, Behrens had unexpectedly provided the name of the
essential corroborating witness.  "If we could find this Manning guy, I
felt we would have a really good shot at charging Frances with Murder
One."

When he phoned his boss, Ernie Jones was excited but circumspect.  He
would require very solid evidence to charge an important woman like

Frances Schreuder.  The next morning Mike got out the Yellow Pages and
began calling a list of print shops.  He was looking for a relative
named

Manning, he explained; there had been a death in the family.  Coming
from a right-to-work state like Utah, one of the least unionized places
in the nation, it never occurred to Mike to call the printers' union.
Finally someone at the New York Daily News said that a fellow named
Manning worked the night shift.  When the printer showed up at 8:00
P.m."  Mike

George was waiting.  He identified himself as a police officer.

"Whaddya want with me?  I ain't done nothin' wrong."  Manning was a
barrel-chested man in his forties, with a big head, two day beard,
short legs, and a breezy, wise-guy manner.

Mike said carefully, "Your name has come up in a very important case. 
A tragic murder in Utah.  Some people are trying to say you're
involved. I don't believe them.  I think they're probably trying to
frame you . - ."

Manning appeared shaken.  "I've never done anything bad in my life. 
You got the wrong guy, pal."

Mike handed him a photograph of Frances Schreuder.  "Tell me that you
cannot identify this woman."

The printer's hands began to shake.  The picture trembled.  He said
softly,

"What do you want to know?"

Myles Manning then told Mike George the same story he would repeat on
the witness stand at two trials.  In the fall Of 1977 Behrens, a
neighborhood acquaintance, arranged a meeting on the street with a
woman named

Frances.  At a later meeting, in the woman's apartment, she told him
she wanted to have her father killed.  A little girl was playing on the
floor while they talked.  The woman reached under the couch cushions
and handed Manning $5,000 in cash, mostly tens and twenties.  She also
gave him recent pictures of her father, his warehouse, his truck.  "It
was shit.  She had photos, maps, sloppily written directions, times of
day, how it should be done-very incomplete.  If I was a hit man, which
I'm not, I'd say that three quarters of what she gave me was useless,
and I'd need a hunnert percent more than what I did get.  She was such
a jerk, she wrote it left-handed so it couldn't be traced.  Let me put
it another way: with her instructions, I would have been caught."

Manning never went to Utah.  He took the money, got drunk, checked into
a New York City YMCA for a few days, then told Frances he had been
arrested in Salt Lake City before he could carry out his assignment.

Manning told George he felt no guilt whatsoever for "stinging"
Frances.

"He thought it was the rottenest thing he'd ever heard of, to
commission your own father's killing.  He was outragedl "A woman like
that deserves to get taken," he said."

Myles Manning is nothing if not outspoken.  After receiving immunity
in

Utah, and testifying at both Marc's and Frances's trial, he talked
candidly to a barroom acquaintance.  "I never cared anything for
Marc-he was so cold-blooded.  I just blew my grandfather away, he said.
Nobody is crazy all the time, but he was off the wall.  Murder itself
doesn't bother me.  You kill somebody, rob 'em and kill 'em, I'm not
gonna do anything about it.  But this was different.  I don't have a
family, but I guess I'm a family man.  And this was just wrong.
Everybody's got a limit, and they went past it.

"They were all crazy.  That Behrens, he's not wrapped too tight
either.

If I didn't have too much to lose by it, he'd be in the hospital by
now.

After he went down, he gave them my name.  He didn't have to do that.
No one knew about it.  His back wasn't against the wall to name me, but
he did."

The Salt Lake County Attorney's office has a meager budget, and by
week's end Mike George and his chief had run out of money.  They had
already checked out of their hotel and were scheduled to return to Utah
that night.  But that evening they got a tip from Steve Klein's boss,
Al

Sullivan, the New York assistant district attorney who had been helping
them all along, and who was representing Utah against Marc's lawyers in
the extradition fight.  Once more the Utah cops were amazed by the
helpful zeal of the New York authorities.  They had expected to be
received in the big city like hayseeds.  How much could one faraway
murder mean to men who handled two thousand homicides a year?  But A]
Sullivan, who was also prosecuting Mark David Chapman, the
self-appointed executioner of John

Lennon, was proving to be a slow, methodical, and very efficient
law-enforcement professional.  He now told Sergeant George that, at an
extradition hearing scheduled for the next day, Judge Harold Rothwax
just might be inclined to surrender Marc to the Utah authorities, even
though

Mike Armstrong could be counted on to put up a thundering fight.

Steve Klein let the Utah cops sleep overnight on the floor of his

Greenwich Village pad.  Before retiring, they got Ernie Jones to wire
them an extra plane ticket for Marc, should they get lucky the next
day, and they made reservations back to Salt Lake City out of all three
New York airports, La Guardia Newark, and JFK.  If they did get custody
of the prisoner, they would have to move fast; Mike Armstrong would be
prepared to file an instant appeal.

The next afternoon Armstrong lost.  Sullivan did not even have to
argue.

Judge Rothwax, a courtly and deceptively soft-spoken man, said that
this defendant had been better represented than any defendant he could
recall in a similar proceeding, "but, Mr.  Armstrong, you just ran out
of law .  Are the people here from Salt Lake City?"

George and Harman stood up.  "Take him," Rothwax said.

They literally grabbed Marc, lied that they were heading for JFK,
hustled him out of the courthouse, and sped toward New Jersey in Steve
Klein's car.  Marc was stunned and frightened.  He'd had no idea his
day might end with a flight back to Salt Lake City.  As for Mike
George, he was flabbergasted by his prisoner's appearance and manner.
"He wore an old, wrinkled shirt, pants three sizes too big that he had
to hold up with his hands, and a floppy coat.  He was a very loud
talker, almost abrasive; he'd practically yell at you in normal
conversation.  Underneath all that was a very smart kid who just didn't
have any manners, and no common sense living habits.  He was plain
dirty."

En route to the Newark airport, Mike was firm but gentle.  "If you say
a word to anybody, or act up, I'll cuff you," he said.  "But if you
behave yourself, nobody will know you're anything but my friend."

On the plane Marc relaxed a little, and when the attendant came around
he asked her for vodka and orange juice.  "Sorry."  Sergeant George
shook his head.  "My friend is underage."

David Richardson, the New York City Ballet's specialist in child
dancers who had first seen Frances Schreuder on the plane to Paris in
the fall of 19go, remembers with extreme clarity each one of his
encounters with this strange woman.  There were four in all.  "I knew
on the Paris trip she was odd.  The next event was a message I got a
year later, in Boston.  Third, I saw her smoking in the Lower
Concourse, and talking.  Finally I got the full-blown tantrum."

It was autumn of 1981 when Richardson heard of Frances Schreuder the
second time.  He was in Boston, about to leave for New York to hold the
annual

October auditions at SAB to cast the children's parts in the NYCB's
traditional Christmas production of The Nutcracker.  This ballet uses
child dancers in several scenes-in Act 11 they are angels-but Act I's
opening

Party Scene, in which Herr Drosselmeier gives the children individual
nuts, is considered the choice spot.

Earlier that fall the NYCB had visited Boston for a fund-raising Gala
while

Richardson was away in Japan.  When he returned, he was told that
someone named Frances Schreuder, a Board member in town to attend the
Boston Gala, had been looking for him.  At first David did not connect
the message with the woman he had seen in Paris, "which later made me
very, very happy," as he delicately puts it.

"Then, I didn't know Ariadne was hooked to Frances, either," he adds.
But the Boston message, delivered through the School, was very clear:
Try to make sure that Ariadne Schreuder gets into the Party Scene.
Richardson had never before received such a message.  He was quietly
appalled, "I don't do that sort of thing," he says.  "You can't 'get to
me."  Most people realize they shouldn't even try."  That she did not
recognize the obvious was the second odd thing he remembered noting
about Mrs.  Schreuder.

But as it turned out, at the audition he was attracted to one little
girl because she was so small for her age (he did not know she was in
fact underage) as well as talented.  "So when the whole casting was
done, I found out I had indeed chosen the daughter of somebody who was
on the Board."  It was the only occasion

Richardson has found himself working with a dancer who was the child
of

Board member, as well as the only time any Board member ever attempted,
to influence his casting choices.

The day the family was notified that Ariadne had indeed been chosen to
appear in the Party Scene-possibly the plummiest spot for a very young
dancer in the entire nation-was October 31, Halloween, Granny and
Grandpa

Bradshaw's fifty-seventh wedding anniversary.

November was devoted to rehearsals, most of them held in the
below-stage rehearsal halls at the New York State Theater known
formally as the Lower

Concourse Studios.  It is a strictly functional lineup of windowless
spaces-practice rooms, makeup and wig rooms, bathrooms, and an adjacent
"lounge area," a bare space containing only vending machines, plastic
tables and chairs, and pay phones in the corridor.  It is neither
comfortable nor attractive, just a resting place for sweaty, tired
dancers between scenes.  Two or three weeks into rehearsals, as
Richardson got to know one child from the next, he noticed one mother
always in the lounge area, chain-smoking.  "I realized this was the
one.  What seemed odd was: it's only a place one would go to if one had
absolutely no other choice.

Yet Frances used it as her hangout.  She lived there.  "Parents are not
encouraged to stick around, not permitted to watch their children in
rehearsals, or watch other dancers.  Most mothers and fathers deliver
their children to the theater and pick them up later at the appointed
hour.  "Mrs.

Schreuder just sat there hour after hour in this very grim,
uncomfortable atmosphere."

Most striking was that she seemed to have no awareness of the
inappropriateness of her own behavior.  She was a stage-door Giselle
whose mad generosity had bought her a privileged position within the
Ballet's inner, working world, a privilege she had no hesitation about
invoking.  It was not a matter of wealth or breeding or even training.
Things others know instinctively are not done" were done all the time
by the Schreuders.

"Frankly, all you have to do is talk to the woman to realize she's
unbalanced, though she was always kind of giggly and fun too," says

Richardson.  She could also be regally kind.  "You know, Mr. 
Balanchyne thinks your daughter is really very talented," she would
sometimes tell another mother.  It did not matter that Mr.  B did not
know one child from the next, that he did not know who Frances

 R

vi dual children; did not matter that he never would have made such a
remark.

What mattered was only the power she felt flowing through her.

"I really have to hurry," Frances sometimes said to other parents while
they helped their little daughters in and out of costumes and makeup.
"I'm dining with Mr.  Balanchyne, you know."  On other occasions, she
said she had given the Company a $5 million endowment, and pledged an
additional $i million a year.  Again, it was not the enormity of the
amount but of the braggadocio that was striking.

It looked to Richardson as if Mrs.  Schreuder was lingering in hopes
that "some dancers might come by and, maybe, nod and say "Hello."  "
But he thought her presence not good either for the other youngsters or
for

Frances.  She had shown herself "simply not a woman who understood how
children behaved.  She never did get it, the way kids play.  She always
thought they were picking on her daughter, rather than just doing what
kids do."  When another child accidentally bumped Ariadne, Frances
complained loudly that the child had pulled her daughter's hair.

Then came the Saturday matinee when "the people who help me take
attendance came to the stage and said: Ariadne Schreuder's not here.
We've phoned her home and there's no answer."  The rules were well
known.  If a child did not show up by i P.m."  her alternate was
summoned.  Richardson called a child in

Brooklyn, one who had danced the part the previous year, and she and
her father got on the subway.

Moments later the ballet master was hastily summoned to the Lounge
Area.

Ariadne and her mother had arrived, and an al lout Frances tantrum was
in progress in full view of the other children and mothers.  "She was
slumped on a sofa, in her big black mink coat.  She didn't looker
presentable.

She was crying, bawling actually, and saying very, very loudly,
"Ariadne must dance this afternoon."  "

"I said, "No, Ariadne cannot dance.  Because you didn't call.  And you
are the same as anyone else--you have to follow the rules."

"She was screaming.  She said, "She has to!"  She was ...
uncontrollable.

No one else I've ever come in contact with would pull this-frenzy!  Her
story was that the grandmother had been rushed to the hospital and
almost died, so they had been at the hospital all morning and couldn't
get a chance to call, and now

Ariadne was so upset about her grandmother that we just could not do
this to her.

"So at last I said, "All right.  Your daughter can go on the stage."
Because

I didn't like the other children seeing this."

During the uproar, Ariadne had stood quietly with her head down.
Richardson had a sense she had seen her mother do this before-, that it
was something she was used to.  "But my own 'instinct was: I wanted to
get Ariadne out of there, and put her on the stage-just so that she
wouldn't be embarrassed.

Maybe it didn't bother her.  I wasn't sure."

The point was, it bothered David Richardson, it made him so acutely
uncomfortable that mostly he wanted his own discomfort to end, and the
only way to do that was to let Ariadne go on stage.  Thus yet another
shaken-up individual joined the battle scarred legions of people who
found themselves unable to say no to Frances.

Richardson had an extra costume.  He told Ariadne to put it on, and at
that performance of The Nutcracker, not seven but eight little girls in
mauve pantaloons twirled and cajoled and pleaded with Herr Drosselmeier
for the first nut.  The Party Scene is a long one.  The dancers in Act
I move rapidly onstage and off as the excitement builds.  All the time
that Ariadne was on stage, Frances remained backstage, screaming,
"Lincoln Kirstein will find out about thisl How dare David treat my
daughter that way!  I will have that other child removed from the
School!"

And at one point in the madness, upset dancers bumping into one another
in the gloom, the other child had whirled briefly offstage right where
Mrs.

Schreuder was standing.  "I'm going to kill youl" she hissed.

Mercifully, the curtain dropped.  "Mrs.  Schreuder's gonna have me
kicked out of School!"  the other child wailed.

"I don't think that could possibly happen," said Richardson, sounding
calmer than he felt.

"But I'm scared she might hurt me!  She said she was going to kill
me!"

"Don't be ridiculous.  That's just a ... a figure of speech."  He
promised to look into the matter.

Richardson telephoned Mrs.  Schreuder and invited her to join him that
evening at the Promenade Bar during the regular performance.  She had
calmed down, "was just chain-smoking, though she did order a very
strong drink, a double-double, to enable her to get through the
conversation.  So we talked, and in a way I was protecting myself ...
because I didn't really know how much power she had.  I mean, I was
pretty sure my job wasn't in jeopardy.  But I did feel that I should,
at least, talk to her, make her feel important-if that's what she
needed. Which is the way I read what had happened."

Richardson mentioned some things Mrs.  Schreuder might better be doing
than throwing tantrums.  Perhaps she could look around backstage, where
the children work and dress and rehearse, and see if she could not find
ways to improve their environment.  A word dropped to Mr.  Kirstein, or
a report to the Board, might be more constructive than "just sitting
down there fomenting trouble with the other kids, competing her
daughter against another."  Who is better, who is best?  Which one is
fairest of them all?

"You know, Ariadne is good.  She is talented," he added.  This seemed
to reassure Mrs.  Schreuder more than anything.

The following day a messenger appeared at the stage door.  He had a
four-page, handwritten letter on pale blue, ornately monogrammed
Tiffany stationery, and a small, heavy turquoise pasteboard Tiffany
box.  The letter was phrased in curiously lofty language, as if penned
from some remote tower room in St.  Petersburg by a courtier practiced
in palace intrigue, someone who understood instinctively that nothing
said under such circumstances means exactly what it seems, and may mean
quite its opposite.

After many weeks of observation, Frances wrote, she was in no doubt
whatsoever that "there will never be another David Richardson, just as
there will never be another ... George Balanchine ... As an artist and
a private person you must always follow your own instincts ... Unlike
others you are still young and my passion and protective feelings for
the N.Y.C.B. are so intense that I hope you never leave us."  The
letter flowed on and on, filled with threat-by-obverse, the cloven-hoof
language even young children understand wherein "you are very
beautiful" really means "you are beautiful only in soul; in body
hideous," and "we need you" means "we don't."

"Great artists are more rare than the most precious of diamonds.  Your
selflessness, devotion and inspiration can never be measured by
ordinary standards.

"However tense situations may get at times in our lives, you can always
count upon my steadfast devotion for your rare abilities and above all
for your self "

The letter was wrapped around a heavy gold Tiffany cigarette lighter"
and contained two pregnant postscripts:' "... isn't it nice to know
that you also earned this on your own merit!  PPS.  I always prefer
anonymity but it was not possible for this little gesture.  I trust
however that you will not mention it to anyone."

For a long time, David never did.

Marc Schreuder spent his twenty-first birthday, December 21, 1981, in
the

Salt Lake City jail waiting for Granny to come up with more bail
money.

She and her friend Chips had gone off on a Caribbean cruise, and Marc
had to sit in jail nearly a month before he could reach her and ask her
to wire the necessary $100,000 from Morgan Guaranty in New York to the
lawyers she had retained for him in Salt Lake.  By now the rumpled Utah
lawyer Paul Van Dam had invited another ex-prosecutor to join him in
preparing Marc's defense.

Joseph Tesch, Jr."  is an aggressive bantamweight with a taste for
politics, Western clothes, and pedigree quarter horses that he and his
lawyer wife raise on their ranch in the Wasatch foothills.  The fees of
both of Marc's attorneys were being paid by their client's grandmother,
who steadfastly maintained her belief in Marc's innocence.  Her
grandson might be a natural-born thief, but he was no murderer.  Of
that she was sure.  As his inevitable trial approached, the defense
lawyers' situation grew increasingly sticky.  Their chances for winning
acquittal, fame, and fortune would improve dramatically if they could
persuade their client to let them attack Frances.  But he would not
agree, and perhaps that was just as well.  Such a strategy would put
them in the position of trying to pin the murder, on the favorite
daughter of the woman who was paying their $150,000 fee.  Their only
other choice, or so it then appeared to the prosecution, was to blame
Larry.  Ernie Jones and Mike George therefore set about doing what they
could to discourage this gambit.

Meanwhile Tesch and Van Dam forked over the bail, and Marc immediately
checked into one of Salt Lake's sleaziest hotels and spent three days
trying to call his mother from the pay phone on the wall outside his
room.  The rest of the time he hung out at porno movies, gorged on his
favorite food, Chicken McNuggets, and revisited old haunts.  He was
amazed and thrilled to find

Larry's penciled initials still legible in the gas station phone booth
they had used five years before to make reports of their warehouse
crime spree to Frances in New York.  Carefully Marc inscribed his own
initials,

MFS, and the date, 1982, and photographed both monograms-part of the
same compulsion to record their aimless lives that drove Larry to write
his monthly Occupiers and Marc to make his secret tapes.

Unknown to Marc, Mike George had rented the adjoining room in the same
"dirt bag hotel," and was spending his days with his ear pressed to the
wall, hoping Marc on the phone might let something slip about the
murder.

But Marc spoke almost entirely in French.  The only person he could
reach at io Gracie Square was Paulette, the maid.  The ballet season
was at its height.  Between her own ballet doings and Ariadne's
performances and rehearsals for The Nutcracker, Frances was very rarely
at home.

When Marc finally did connect, Mike was almost as happy as his
suspect.

For three days the policeman had been self-imprisoned in a place so
filthy that he had slept in his clothes on top of the bed rather than
open the sheets.  He went home, showered, and drove over to Gilmer
Drive to try to talk to Berenice Bradshaw.  She refused to unlock the
door.

When Marc got back to New York, he stayed with his mother but called on
his father.  They did not discuss the upcoming trial, but Vittorio told
him, "This door is always open, Marco.  If you need a home, this is
your home.  Maybe I haven't always been the best father, but you're my
son.

I'll be there when you need me from now on."

Mike George and Ernie Jones were delighted to learn of this
development.

They hoped that if Marc got a good relationship going with his
father,

Vittorio eventually might be useful in influencing the boy to do what
the prosecutor needed most: agree to testify against Frances.  Mike and
Ernie were avid though not very hopeful of persuading this wretched
mama's boy that there was but one way to "become a man."  He would have
to betray his mother.  Several times, after Marc was jailed, they urged
Vittorio to come out to Salt Lake and talk to his son.  But Marc always
got wind of the plan and pleaded, "Please, Papa, don't come!"
Vittorio's manifest warmth and affection, the welcome mat into the
pleasant new Gentile household-nice wife, three nice kids-must have
seemed to Marc by then the only tidy corner of his own existence.  He
needed to keep it inviolate, a kind of sanctuary.  He liked visiting
Papa's world; he did not want Papa visiting his.

As soon as Marc left New York, Frances called the police and accused
him of stealing $4o,000 worth of her jewelry from lo Gracie Square
while he was staying in her apartment.

During his month in Salt Lake County jail, Marc had met a woman who
would become the first girlfriend he'd ever had.  At first glance she
seemed the unlikely object of a young man's fancy.  Mary Lou Kaiser was
thirty-six years old, about five feet tall, and weighed at least 250
pounds.  She had been born in Torre6n, Mexico, one of the many children
of a "saint incarnate" mother and an abusive, alcoholic father who had
become a Utah copper miner and backslid Pentecostal preacher.  Mary was
deeply religious and worked as a cleaning woman.  She was also
extremely motherly, good-natured, warm-hearted, cheerful, and loving.
She had creamy beige skin, beautiful white teeth, dancing eyes behind
thick glasses, and a long braid down her back.  Mary had survived
open-heart surgery at thirty-one, and at thirty-six, much to her
surprise and joy--she had been asking God to give her a baby for over
twenty years-she had been blessed with a baby daughter.  Mary Lou
Kaiser's luck with men was different.  She had been married three
times, most recently to a taxi driver who had thrown her and the baby
out of their home.  Mother and infant wound up in a filthy,
roach-infested $109 welfare apartment, and taxi driver Millard

Kaiser wound up in the county jail, charged with sodomizing a
nine-year-old girl.

Marc had met Kaiser in jail, and believed him innocent, and as soon
as

Granny came up with his own bail money, Marc set about fulfilling his
promise to Kaiser to try to get him out on bail as well.  During his
three days in the "dirt bag," Marc had gone to visit Kaiser's
stepfather, who in turn had brought Marc over to see the taxi driver's
estranged wife,

Mary.  Maybe she -would sign his bond.

"The first time Marc came through my door--bang!  Love at first sight!
I saw those gorgeous blue eyes and said to myself.  I'm gonna hustle
this boy!"  Mary said later.

Kaiser's $5,000 bail required $500 in cash and someone to sign his bond
who owned property and had been employed in the same job seven years.

Mary did not qualify, so they all piled into Kaiser's jalopy and drove
around town looking for some other relative to post bond.  "But my
husband was a bad apple.  He'd screwed everyone."  As they drove, Marc
said he guessed he'd need a car, now that he was out on bail.  The
stepfather tried to sell him the one they were riding in.

"You don't want this piece of garbage, Marc!"  whispered Mary.  It was
the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  When Marc returned to Salt
Lake from

New York he went back to jail to fulfill his promise to try to help

Millard Kaiser, and found Mary in the jail visiting room, baby on her
enormous lap.

"Hello!  What are you doing here?  Ever the faithful wife, I
suppose!"

"Whaddya mean, 'faithful wife'?  I'm just here because I was asked to
be."

Marc volunteered to walk her home, three blocks from the jail.  He
carried the little girl, Monique.  Later, Mary cooked up her special
treat, chicken mole.

The next afternoon he returned for more Mexican home cooking, and Mary
later invited him to sleep on the sofa.  Marc shuddered at the filthy
apartment.  He had to go call his father, he said, and she had no
phone.

"This place looks like a pigpen," he said.  "You clean it up and
maybe

I'll stay."

Four hours later he knocked at her door.  She was in bed in her
nightgown.

"Hey," he said, "am I in the right place!"  The apartment was now
immaculate.

"Hey, you know what?  I do cleaning for a living.  I'm the best
cleaning woman in Utah!  You wanna talk to me, come in the bedroom,"
she added, cheerfully bent on seducing Marc if she could.  But that
first night they talked for many hours, until Marc fell asleep on top
of the bedclothes.

"I was under the covers.  Since I was extremely religious, I felt very
guilty sleeping in the same bed with a strange man."  She slipped out
of bed and spent that night with her baby on the living room couch.

Marc's own personal habits were curious.  At Rikers Island, and again
in

Salt Lake, he sometimes stank so badly that other prisoners demanded
not to bunk near him.  At other times he bathed and changed his clothes
three or four times a day, and he was so neat about schoolwork that he
ironed his papers before turning them in.

Delightedly he told Mary in the morning her place was so clean "you
could put the rope up"-it looked just like a roped-off model room in a
museum.

Marc stayed.  "He seemed so hungry for love and affection.  There isn't
one mean bone in his body," she said later.  He eagerly fed and changed
baby Monique, whom he called Mona Lisa.

When Mary asked him why, he said untactfully that "every Monique I've
ever known was fat."  Marc told Mary he had been in jail on a drug rap,
but otherwise their relationship appears to have been quite an honest
one.

Mary was frank to admit she liked Marc's money, as well as his looks.
"He had those crazy blue eyes!"  she would say later.  "And -he's such
a sweet, gentle person ... so different from my husbands.  Marc opened
doors for me!  He pushed my baby.  He bought me presents.  He gave me a
compliment every single day!"

When they were together, Marc did most of the talking.  He could
discourse for hours on any subject.  He liked to work jigsaw puzzles,
the tougher the better.  He ate whole cloves of garlic.  Vittorio had
taught him it was good for health and sexual appetite.  One day he said
that Mona Lisa had eaten three jars of baby food.  Mary looked
dubious.

"Okay, Babes.  I'm coming out of the closet.  I love baby foodl"

The next time Marc returned to their apartment after visiting his
grandmother, he told Mary he and Granny had gone apartment-hunting and
had seen a $125 apartment.  Berenice had pronounced it "a dump," Marc
said, but she had been willing to contribute $500 for a deposit and one
month's rent in advance, believing it was for her grandson alone.  Marc
told Mary the new place had three rooms and he was tired of living in
"the Roach Hilton," looking out through holes in the walls and sitting
up nights throwing glasses of water at the vermin.  Marc had begun
getting rid of everything Mary owned-dishes, pots and pans, linens,
lamps-and replacing it little by little with good secondhand
furnishings.  He insisted she abandon her roach-ridden life.

Mary was thrilled but appalled when Marc went to the grocery and spent
$200 to $300 a trip.  "Marc, this has gotta stop.  I'm a welfare
mother," she protested.  Sometimes she also grew jealous of Marc's
five-hour visits to Berenice.  "I can't compete with twenty-six million
bucks," she would tell him.  But she knew he had no other friends, and
she could understand that his grandmother was lonely, too.  The only
thing he criticized her about was tithing to the Pentecostals.  He
didn't believe in God.  "How can you let that preacher ruin your life?"
he railed.

Every day for almost two months, Marc and Mary played house, choosing
new furniture, taking care of Monique, snuggling at night.  They called
each other by the same nickname: "Babes."  They were very happy.

In early February, unknown to the pair of lovers, Richard Behrens had
made a critical two-day trip to Salt Lake City, accompanied by his
lawyer.  Now for the first time he gave Ernie Jones a full and complete
account of his role in the Schreuder case, including details of his
recruitment of Manning.  He described a trip to Virginia in April to
try to buy a gun.  He had been unsuccessful, but his story checked out.
He also described a chance meeting with Marc the previous August during
which Marc had given Behrens additional details of the murder and had
told him it was "easy," and gave him the direct quote: "Mom made me do
it."  He said he had spent Sunday, the day of the murder, alone riding
his bike in the park.  Marc was mistaken about seeing him in the
vestibule when he returned from Salt Lake City.  Behrens now claimed he
did not see the Schreuders until later that evening when first Frances,
then Marc, came to his apartment and "dropped off" the gun.

When it was time for Mary and Marc to move into their new apartment,
they decided to economize and transport everything themselves, by
grocery cart.  They got so involved in the three day move that Marc
forgot to show up at the jail for a lineup that had been requested by
his own lawyers.

All hell broke loose, but Mary had no TV or telephone, and they did not
know anything was amiss until the next morning when they heard on the
radio that Marc Schreuder had jumped bail and was believed on his way
to

Belgium.

"Oh, Babes, I hate waking up like this!"  groaned the "fugitive," home
in bed not three blocks away from the jail.  He needed a phone, so they
went to a photo studio where Mary worked as a scrubwoman.  From seven
to ten o'clock that morning, while Mary was cleaning, Marc tried in
vain to reach his lawyers.  They were moving to another office, and the
phone was temporarily disconnected.  He called -his mother, but the
maid said she was out.  Mary now asked Marc for the first time what he
was really charged with.  The murder of his grandfather, he admitted.
"Did you do it?"  she asked.  When Marc said no, she asked no more
questions and they strolled home, Marc carrying the baby.

The police had blocked off the street in four directions.  They had
expected gunplay.  A neighbor had recognized Marc's face on the TV news
and phoned in an anonymous tip.  Suddenly four officers threw Marc to
the grass, cuffed him, and hauled him away, calling him asshole and
shouting that "the state of Utah just became $100,000 richer!"  Mary
was left standing in the middle of the street holding

Monique and crying hysterically.

Back in jail and awaiting trial, Marc was housed in the same tier as

Mary's estranged husband, Kaiser, who had by now decided to cop a plea
on the sodomy charge rather than undergo the shame of trial.  "Why
don't you give her a divorce?"  Marc demanded.

"Because I want to let her stew."

But Marc insisted, and eventually he lent Mary the necessary $250 to
pay the lawyer.

Mary settled into a routine of cooking chocolate cakes and chicken mole
to take to Marc in jail, and waiting for his trial.  She believed he
was innocent, and hoped that one day they might marry.  She always
brought

Monique to visit "Uncle Marc"; later she would tell the child Marc was
her father.  When she got depressed, she visited her Pentecostal
preacher.

"He said I was a big sinner.  One day he told me I could have Marc, or
I could have the church.  I told him I felt Marc needed me.  I said I
can't believe I'll go to hell because somebody needs me."

One early spring morning in New York City, Mireille Briane, wife of
Oleg

Briansky, was about to begin teaching her regular Saturday morning
children's class when a woman with "very strange eyes, as if staring
into a void," turned up asking for private tutoring for her little
girl.  The child had been studying at the School of American Ballet for
about a year, she said.  Other mothers were present.  Frances could not
seem to stop talking.  At machine-gun pace, she named so many important
people she knew at NYCB that Mireille grew frightened.  "Don't be
nervous," Oleg muttered in Russian, so Mireille proposed that Ariadne
join the class then in progress.

"My daughter really wants private lessons."

"That is quite expensive."

"Don't worry about the money.  Get in touch with the Morgan Guaranty
Bank.

Ariadne has a trust fund there."

Three-times-weekly private lessons began.  "We liked Ariadne very
much," says Mireille.  "She was always on time, never missed a class.
And she was very polite, very friendly with the other girls.  "

The Brianskys, both former NYCB dancers, are serious teachers; they do
not accept children younger than nine.  Ariadne was eight, and small
for her age, but when Mrs.  Schreuder had said her daughter was nine,
the child had nodded.  And when they had asked to see her dance, they
noted the positive side of her immaturity: because the child was still
small, she was sturdy, not yet weedy.  Also, her feet were strong.
Although she was underage, "we took her because she was a very
independent child.  No problems with her.  A very, very nice
child-smart, extremely observant.  She didn't miss a thing," says
Mireille.  "I think quite talented."

One can find other baby ballerinas, and mothers, both at the Briansky

School and at SAB, who say, "Ariadne was the worst dancer in the whole
school.  Clumsy.  Gawky.  Terrible.  And the least popular.  She was
mean, and everybody hated her.  And all the mothers hated her mother.
My mother even hated her grandmother ... Of course, my mother hates
everybody."

Such poisonous talk is in fact the lingua franca of the backstage
ballet world.  Few there take it seriously.  "Ballet is woman," said
Balanchine, and the cackle and hiss of neurotic mothers and their
anorexic daughters are merely the dark side of the impossible dream.
Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked
bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue, and sulfurous hatreds
where anything is likely, and dancers know it.  A well-known backstage
anecdote concerns the occasion when the prima ballerina found ground
glass in her toe slipper-and every other dancer in the Company was
equally suspect.  Dancers know that almost all infant ballerinas have
pushy mothers.  To want one's daughter to become a ballerina--one of
the most punishing, romanticized, and least-rewarding disciplines
imaginable-itself betrays a certain fixation.  Much better to judge
Ariadne and her mother through the experienced eyes of solid
professionals, people like the Brianskys and David Richardson.

Frances's newfound role in the ballet world, her uniquely powerful,
heavy position of being at once ballet Board member and ballet mother,
had given her distraught life a focus at last; it had given the
madwoman something to do.  It had also given her license to do it her
own, high-decibel way.  All her volatile temperament was now on
display.  You could hardly miss it.  The backstage scenes, the front
stage screams were becoming continuous.  By 1982

Frances Schreuder was acting on occasion as if she owned the Company,
as if she thought she had bought it.  She sent $200 bouquets to favored
ballerinas after a performance that pleased her.  Male dancers received
a case of wine.  She arrived at a baby shower for a ballerina
mother-to-be bearing gifts that had cost more than $i,000.  She told
others that Balanchine and Kirstein "will do whatever I ask them."  She
told leaders of the Company that she would pay for, and Balanchine
would stage, a new

Sleeping Beauty such as the world had not seen since the days of the
Tsars.

And others encouraged her to think this way.  They sent her books on
dance history-Petipa, Fokine, Diaghilev.  They offered her tapes to
study; they invited her to special little private dinners and teas.
They wanted her to understand, to enjoy, to endow.

What did Frances want?  She, too, wanted what she had never had.  She
wanted to buy friends.  She wanted to buy acceptance.  She really
wanted to buy a family-not a skinflint father, parasitic mother,
hateful sisters, but a beautiful, glamorous, fairy-tale family, a
family as perfect as the storybook dolls in unreachable rows at the top
of Ariadne's closet.

By early March, Mike George's investigation had turned up the tuition
checks that Berenice Bradshaw had written to EMA, Kent School, and
Episcopal

Nursery School on Franklin Bradshaw's account.  Far more dangerous to
Marc were the prosecution's copies of Granny's letters to Larry.  They
did not only indicate the icy state of affairs between the Bradshaws
and the

Schreuders in the months before the murder.  In one, Granny complained
that talking to Marc was "like talking to a vegetable."  His mother had
him so "brainwashed," she had written, that he could not call his soul
his own.

Marc Schreuder's preliminary hearing (Utah's alternative to grand jury
proceedings) was held March 16 and 17.  Berenice Bradshaw gave her
grandson

Larry the necessary alibi.  By that time, the Salt Lake authorities had
sufficient facts from Behrens to enable them to obtain an "information"
showing "probable cause" to believe that it was Franklin Bradshaw's own
daughter who had masterminded his murder.  The judge issued an arrest
warrant, and the following day Frances Schreuder was listed on all
National

Interstate Crime Commission computers as "wanted in Utah."  After that,
any state in the Union could arrest her.  New York acted promptly.  By
i P.m. on

March 18, Detective

Steve Klein was at to Gracie Square.  When Paulette said Madame was not
at home, the building's security people refused Klein admittance, so he
staked out the premises until io P.M."  then went home.  At seven the
next morning he got into the building with the help of a dog-walking
butler, but Paulette refused to open up.  He heard shouting from within
the apartment.  The scribbled name and telephone number of attorney
Norman Ostrow was pushed under the door.  Klein went downstairs and
called Ostrow, who said he was talking to Frances on his other line.
She sounded suicidal, he said, and she was also a potential threat to
her eight-year-old daughter, who was locked in with her.  Ostrow begged
for more time.  Tell her to open up by nine, Klein said, or he would
break down the door.  He returned to the precinct to get additional
help.

Stationing one cop in the lobby, and another at the service entrance of
the building, Klein returned to the vestibule of Apartment 6
accompanied by his partner Ernie Cruz and policewoman Annette Cimler.
Inside, Frances was refusing to accept calls from lawyer Ostrow, a
psychiatrist, her mother, and perhaps others.  When Paulette still
refused to open up, the cops tried first to remove the triple locks and
then smashed the front door in.  Seeing no one, they raced upstairs.
Frances was in bed, shrieking, covers pulled over her head, Paulette
and Ariadne alongside.

"Mrs.  Schreuder was hysterical.  She was screaming epithets at me,"
Klein later testified.  The New York City Police Department was now
discovering the extraordinary unpleasantness of saying no to Frances.

The phone rang.  Steve Klein answered.  This time it was lawyer
Frankel, who identified himself as Marc's attorney.  Apparently Frances
was willing to speak to Frankel but not to Ostrow.  This had put the
young lawyer into an intolerable position: his client had already
confessed to Frankel that he himself had done the murder-because his
mother had insisted on it.

Marc's confession was absolutely protected by the watertight legal seal
that keeps so many crooks afloat: the sacred "attorney-client
privilege."

Frankel could not even discuss her predicament with Mrs.  Schreuder,
not even in the most general way, without violating his oath to her
son.  He could only try to keep her calm, and silent, while groping
frantically for another lawyer.  Poor Frankel had to say no to Frances.
But this scarcely stopped Frances from appealing to him.  Frances had
spent the entire long night on the telephone, speaking alternately to
lawyers, psychiatrists, relatives, and perhaps to others.  She was
raving, ranting, screaming, wild-eyed.

But this morning, now that the police had actually forced their way
in,

Frankel was able by phone to persuade Frances to calm down sufficiently
to respond to what the cops were saying.  This allowed Klein to read
the suspect his Miranda warnings-that she had a constitutional right to
keep silent, and so on.  Frances told him she understood.  If Frances
would get out of bed and put some clothes on, everybody now agreed,
police would hold off until the lawyer rounded up by Frankel could
arrive.  Abruptly reasonable again, Frances requested a few minutes of
privacy to get dressed and to explain matters to Ariadne.  Klein posted
the policewoman outside the closed bedroom door and withdrew with his
partner to a bench in the foyer downstairs.  The suspect appeared to
him to have recovered her composure with remarkable alacrity.

Suddenly he heard a child scream, "Mommie!  ... Mommie, don't!"

The cops raced back up and found Frances halfway out of her bedroom
window, seven floors above the East River.  Both her arms and one leg
were already outside the building.  Ariadne, howling, was hanging on to
her mother's right leg.

"It looked like the kid might go right out with her," Klein said.
"Ernie grabbed the kid, and I grabbed her and threw her on the bed."
Klein handcuffed Mrs.  Schreuder and took her down to the 19th Precinct
on East

Sixty-seventh Street.

Lawyer Frankel arrived there to find his client's mother once more
hysterical and handcuffed to a chair.  The police, anticipating,
another suicide try, had summoned paramedics.  "I just want you to hold
my hand,"

Frances pleaded.

Frankel thought it prudent not to say no again.  "Okay.  But don't talk
to me about what happened, Frances.  Please.  " He took her hand.

Finally, to Frankel's immense relief, the other lawyer, Michael Shaw,
arrived, and so did the paramedics.  Frankel left.  The others all went
down together to Bellevue Hospital.  Shaw and the cops waited on a
bench while a psychiatrist spoke privately with the suspect, attempting
to evaluate her emotional state.

Quite obviously, Mrs.  Schreuder told him, the police had made some
sort of outrageous mistake.  She appeared understandably upset,
particularly about the effect on her young daughter of witnessing her
mother's arrest.  But the doctor was unaware of the suicide try, and
the woman before him was behaving in a composed and rational manner. 
He emerged from the interview saying he saw no reason to hold this
woman for psychiatric observation.  He changed his mind however, when
Kleindescribed what had just occurred.

Bellevue lacks facilities for female mental patients, so Frances was
held over the weekend for observation at Elmhurst city hospital in
Queens, then moved to Rikers Island.  Her last words to Frankel that
Friday morning as she was being led away were, "What will Mr.
Balanchyne think!"

Paulette delivered Ariadne to her ballet lesson early the next morning,
and Mireille noticed they both seemed upset.  "Ne dites rienl"
whispered the maid.  "Lisez le journall"

That Saturday morning the ballet world picked up its newspapers and
learned for the first time that its all-time champion patroness was a
first-degree murder suspect in Utah, now jailed in New York after
trying to leap from her bedroom window.  Phones buzzed madly.  Dancers,
staff members, and balletomanes were incredulous.  The one person who
received the news with equanimity was George Balanchine.  His sole
response to the phone call from the Ballet executive was a tolerant,
amused chuckle.  He appeared to view the matter, not unkindly, as some
sort of cosmic joke.

Never from the moment he was told of her arrest did Balanchine have any
but the gentlest, most tender words for Frances Schreuder.

Lincoln Kirstein reacted to the news with a posture of militant
outrage.

Mrs.  Schreuder was a victim of one of the most hideous frame-ups since
the Dreyfus case, he said, and he promised that she would be vindicated
in the same way.  Her dead father, he later added, had been a beast,
and her sisters had hated her since she was born.  He pronounced her
the victim of a political conspiracy emanating from the Salt Lake
County

Attorney's office, and he clinched his argument with the observation
that anybody who would seek to use artistic patronage of George
Balanchine as proof of mental illness--as Frances's sisters were now
attempting to do-left no doubt as to their own lack of moral worth.

Marc Schreuder has no clear memory of being summoned to the visiting
room of the Salt Lake County jail early that Friday evening and told of
his mother's arrest.  He is not even sure which of his lawyers gave him
the news.  He just remembers a sense of supreme despair, a feeling that
his entire world was collapsing, like a huge building being demolished
in a silent newsreel.  "They arrested my mother.  My poor, sick
mother," he sobbed to Mary.  For the first time, he himself began to
have suicidal ideas.

Frances Schreuder spent the five weeks following her arrest in Rikers

Island jail.  On April 6, her forty-fourth birthday, Robert Gottlieb
sent the prisoner a slim volume of Igor Stravinsky's letters.  Several
ballerinas sent birthday cards, and long-stemmed red roses from Lincoln
Kirstein arrived.

Frances had retained the respected Washington law firm headed by
Edward

Bennett Williams.  They set about negotiating bail and gathering the
necessary information to prepare an insanity plea, a strategy that they
had recently used with great success in their defense of John W.
Hinckley, Jr."  after his assassination attempt on President Reagan.

Few members of NYCB's Board of Directors viewed the news in Saturday's
papers as tolerantly as Balanchine and Kirstein.  The Board was deeply
divided.  A number of Directors wanted to scuttle Frances at once, in
hopes of minimizing the bad publicity.  Others found the fact of her
arrest for murder simply inconceivable.  Outside observers deemed the
dump-Frances movement the same sort of irresponsible behavior it had
been to romance her so ardently in the first place.  The lawyers on the
board, led by new president Orville H. Schell, took a firm stand:
dropping Frances at this point would be both morally and legally
unacceptable, as well as quite possibly counterproductive from a public
relations standpoint.  The lawyers reminded the others of Frances's
constitutional rights.  They pointed out that the American system of
justice presumes a person innocent until proven otherwise, and they
very firmly recommended a do-nothing policy, at least for the moment.
Privately, the lawyers began subscribing to Salt Lake City newspapers
to keep tabs on the bizarre case.

The lawyers' wisdom prevailed.  The Board took no official action.
When

Frances got out of jail, she bravely resumed her attendance at
regular

Board meetings, held every six weeks, as if nothing untoward had
occurred.

Publicly, no reference was made to Mrs.  Schreuder's difficulties.

Privately, one or two Board members whispered words of encouragement.
But at least two women Board members stopped speaking to Frances.  The
least she could do, they told the others huffily, would be to take a
leave of absence and spare the Ballet further embarrassment.  Not
bloody likely.  Mrs.  Schreuder clung to the board room table as to a
raft in a typhoon.  When it was clear she had no intention of
resigning, the two women took to appearing at meetings lugging stacks
of heavy books, books which they then arrayed in front of themselves on
the board room table as barricades, lest Frances take a sudden notion
to open fire.

On April 8 bail was finally set at half a million dof lars Berenice

Bradshaw put up the whole $500,000 in cash, and Frances Schreuder
returned to Gracie Square.  When she stepped through her stiH-smashed
front door, the impeccable Kirstein himself stood hal oed in the
sunlight flooding through the dusty, ceiling high windows.  He held an
armful of roses crushed against his soot-black suit, and as Frances
entered he silently extended the bouquet and she, weeping, sank to her
knees in an attitude of Pavlova-like obeisance and gratitude for his
faith in her innocence.

That week, just as Ariadne celebrated her ninth birthday, the School
of

American Ballet won the all-time Bradshaw fund-raising Olympics.  That
very same week Frances pledged to underwrite two full four-year
scholarships, at a cost of $2o,000 per year.  Kirstein and Balanchine
both were willing to come to Salt Lake City and testify on her behalf,
Frances told her mother.  Berenice signed the check.  (A year later,
after

Balanchine's death, and on the eve of her own trial, Frances would
change, and double, her pledge through the establishment of a
permanent

Balanchine memorial.  This gift took the form of a $400,000 endowment,
sufficient to earn enough income to allow four scholarship students to
study full-time.)

The week after Frances got out of jail, Berenice Bradshaw also laid out
$100,000 to Williams & Connolly for its first retainer.  When Marilyn

Reagan came home one evening from work at Coudert Brothers, two
Williams & Connolly lawyers were waiting in her apartment house lobby
to question her regarding details of her sister's expulsion from Bryn
Mawr.  Marilyn could not recall very much.  Even so, by the time they
left, the two lawyers knew more about Frankie Bradshaw's brief and
mottled college career than did Bryn Mawr's own trustees.

Not long before her arrest, some of the college's important alumnae had
got wind that a Bryn Mawr graduate had recently become uncommonly
generous to NYCB.  Bryn Mawr's hundredth anniversary was approaching.
Perhaps, they ventured, the Ballet's new benefactress would like to do
something for her alma mater.  It wasn't an official approach, just a
discreet inquiry, another little lunch date.  But Frances had responded
with her customary alacrity and enthusiasm.  She would indeed be
interested in trying to help.  A specially commissioned ballet might be
possible; something choreographed by Balanchine, paid for by Frances,
and premiered on Bryn Mawr's greensward on Garden Party Day.  In view
of the baroque consequences that might have arisen from this newest
entanglement of culture and money and madness, it seems a pity that
Mike George and Steve

Klein moved as rapidly as they did.

In the coming months, George Balanchine became Frances Schreuder's main
source of inner strength.  Her sense of Mr.  B's quiet but firm support
gave her the will and courage to withstand assaults from people like
Ernie

Jones.  Privately, Frances felt closer than ever to Mr.  Balanchyne. 
It seemed no accident that they had become linked through the

Davidsbiindlerldnze, the Band of David, drawn to it by a shared
interest in the same themes-beauty, madness, love, and death, her
belief that "feeling is the only law"; no accident that they were
joined now in the same battle, the war against the Philistines.  Mr.
Balanchine, whom she thought of as her spiritual father, must know that
she was innocent; not guilty of the monstrous charges lodged against
her, it would seem, with the encouragement and connivance of her own
son.  Should it become necessary, Frances felt certain Mr.  B would
come to Salt Lake and rescue her from Utah's Philistines.

She hoped it would not become necessary.  Balanchine was noticeably
unwell.

Something had been affecting his sense of balance, his essential
ability to move and pirouette.  Now gight and hearing were beginning to
fail.  No one knew what was the matter.  Many diagnoses were made and
discarded during his long, slow, mysterious decline.  That in fact his
brain tissue had been invaded by a rare mini virus that causes the
condition known as

Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease could not be learned until an autopsy was
performed.  Balanchine lingered on for another year.  It was not to be
a dignified or merciful death.  It was cruel, prolonged, agonizing, a
disease marked not just by increasing physical debility, but by the
wildest of nightmares and terrifying hallucinations as the unknown
virus ate into his brain.

To Frances it came to seem no accident that during this time while she
was out on bail charged with the murder of her real father, she was
being permitted to serve her suffering spiritual father at so agonizing
a period in both their lives.  At moments she believed she knew how to
save his life, if only she were permitted control.  She was not, of
course, but she did continually devise new little ways to try to
relieve his suffering or divert his attention with breathtaking gifts
of flowers, special Russian foods, unobtainable caviars, rare wines.

All that year, while her lawyers were fighting to disentangle their
client's future from Marc's own, and to keep Frances Schreuder out of

Utah's clutches for as long as possible, Frances was fighting as best
she could to restore Mr.  B to good health.  In Rikers Island, "I'd
thought-and it was horrible-Now I've lost everything!  I've even lost
George.  Instead it was just the opposite!  He cried, with joy, when I
was released from prison.  He'd say to me, "Frances, you're so.  strong
"I used to feel guilty when he said it.  Why did he have such faith in
me?  He even offered to testify for me!  He used to spend hours telling
me, "Have courage.  Have faith.  Be strong.  You are strong!"

And so she fought to be strong, to prepare herself for the coming
ordeals in Utah, to "focus on evil," to "fight to win."  And she fought
with all her strength to keep Mr.  B alive.  She had already lost one
father in her life.  She could not bear to lose another.

Mike George stayed in fairly close contact with Marc after his mother's
arrest, passing along messages from Vittorio, since Marc was not
permitted to receive phone calls, and trying to arbitrate squabbles
with other prisoners, most of which concerned the bad smells emanating
from Marc's cell.  But Sergeant George remained only a remote father or
big-brother figure, careful not to elicit any confidences from Marc
that he might be forced to testify about at trial.  His strategy was
more indirect.  This troubled, jumpy, frightened boy was the key to
nailing Frances.  The smart cop would move slowly, with great
circumspection.

Mike George went back to Gilmer Drive, now with subpoena in hand.

Berenice still refused to open up.  "You have no choice!  I'm serving
you," he shouted through the locked door.  When she opened the door a
crack, Mike showed her a canceled check.  "By the way, did you write
this?"  he said pleasantly.

She examined the check and unchained the door.  It was yet another of
Marc's forgeries, this time for the rent and deposit money on Mary Lou
Kaiser's new apartment.  The old lady was furious.  She talked to Mike
for two hours, heaping abuse on Marc, telling Mike all the trouble Marc
had caused the family, all the grief he had caused his mother.  Marc
had even taunted Frances that he had wrung more money out of the
Bradshaw estate than she had,

Berenice said.  She blamed Frances for none of it.  She told the
policeman that Marc had forged $360,000 on her account since her
husband's death, $9o,000 going to coin dealers alone.

Mike heard her out, saying nothing.  The main reason he had wanted to
interview Berenice was to nail down Larry's alibi.  Since he and Ernie
suspected Van Dam and Tesch would try to throw suspicion on Larry, it
was vital that Berenice say he was still asleep at the time of the
murder.  "We had to make Larry look as good as we could."

Until the last moment, the prosecutors could not be sure Berenice would
even testify.  She was dodging subpoenas, hiding out in a remote Maine
fishing village with her eighty-five-year-old Aunt Bea, while her then
lawyer, Kevin Kurumada, negotiated a promise that in return for her
cooperation his client would not be charged with forging checks on her
husband's accounts to pay her grandchildren's school fees.

Even after the agreement was signed, "our hearts were in our throats,
not knowing what she would say on the stand.  She could have changed
her story on Larry, and cast suspicion on him at any time," George
says.

Possibly Berenice thought Larry had suffered enough.  Or perhaps she
feared him.  A few months earlier, unknown to the Utah authorities,
Farid Sallourn had filed a personal injury suit against his former
roommate, charging permanent brain damage.  At that time, just before
Christmas, Larry had been transferred from his Pennsylvania prison back
to the mental hospital for a'third time.  He was extremely withdrawn,
not eating, and suffering severe tremors.  A month later, in January,
he would be returned to prison with an updated diagnosis: "chronic
paranoid schizophrenic ... prognosis guarded .  unemployable at this
time Berenice's Pennsylvania lawyers would eventually settle Farid's
suit for $50,000.

After Van Dam and Tesch received Marc's eight tape recordings from
David

Frankel, they arranged for their client to be examined by a noted
forensic psychiatrist, Louis G. Moench, M.D."  with a view to putting
forth a defense based on his mental state.  The old doctor had two
two-hour sessions with

Marc, in May and early June, and concluded that, while the young man
was certainly not insane, he had indeed suffered from extreme emotional
pressures exerted by his mother.  The evidence of this was right on the
so-called Ariadne Tape.  Later, in court, Dr.  Moench would say that he
had not the slightest doubt of the tape's authenticity, and that he had
never before heard anything like it.

In transcription, the tape is a more than thirty-page nonstop record of
a mother goading, terrorizing, taunting, cajoling, mocking, and
threatening a sniffling five-year-old for being unable to repeat the
schoolbook definition of a sentence-that it is something which starts
with a capital letter and ends with a period.  One hears the child
choking on her tears as the mother calls her a stupid bastard,
threatens not to give her any more sleeping pills, says her grades are
rotten, that she's not even trying.  The mother mocks her for being a
crybaby, tells her she will never have any friends, never go to "pretty
parties" with "nice girls," just with "cheap, rotten Yids."  The child
is accused of being stupid, disobedient, a liar, and told that all of
it is her own fault.  Ariadne did it to herself.  "You did it!  You had
a choicel You decided to talk to those little Jew girls!

You won't have love from me.  Or respect.  Or from Mr.  Balanchyne's
ballet school.  Or Brearley, Spence or any other nice school ... You
will be sad the rest of your life ... I will make you really cry!
[Terrible scorn]

You expect me to put my arm around you like Granny does and say it's
all right!"

Sometimes Frances's voice becomes the child.  "I hate you ... stupid!"
she wails.  "I'll put you in a hospital for stupid children ... you
don't come home if you're stupid.  It's not like a broken neck.  You
live and die there.

You'll never get married, never see boys, never go out and work, never
see other children.  You'll never see your mother again.  You'll never
see your house again.  Or anyone else's house.  They have special
hospitals for children who are disturbed and cuckoo and there's
something wrong.

They stay there for the rest of their lives.  They are not permitted to
go out--ever!"

Ariadne whimpers, is incoherent.  She tries to speak.  Her mother will
not let her.  "Whaddya do with such an idiott" Frances shouts.  "I hate
your crying ... it's disgusting ... At ten o'clock at night you still
don't know what a sentence is!  Well, I hate your guts!"

"Mommy ... Mommy ... I am trying ... [sniffles]"

"Children like you don't go to school with other children.  You have to
go to nigger school, where there are only poor kids ... little Jew kids
.."

More tears and sniffles.

In utter fury: "Just tell me what a sentence is and shut up the crap!

Stop crying and stop shivering!  What is a sentence-you cowardl You
belong in a zoo with the animals and the monkeys!

Becoming hysterical: "Mom Mom ... wait a second ... Mom, don't hit me
... A sen ... Mom, a sen ten ... a sentence is ... is ... a .  a
sentence is

"I've asked you for four solid hours!"

At last it was over, Gratefully Dr.  Moench snapped off his tape
recorder.

Later he said frankly, "That's about as abusive a dialogue as I've ever
encountered."

That spring Frances spoke to the Brianskys about enrolling Ariadne in
their well-known summer ballet camp at Saratoga, New York.  After they
accepted her, three sets of parents notified the camp directors that
they had changed their minds about sending their own daughters.  More
than simple snobbery was involved.  With Frances's recent notoriety,
her

Christmastime backstage threat to kill another child had taken on new
gravity.

In May, Ariadne performed enchantingly at the School of American
Ballet's

Spring Gala, and Frances brought Berenice along as her guest to the
fund-raising dinner party afterward in the New York State Theater.
There were no place cards, and the two women and the little girl wound
up sitting with two very nice and attractive men.  When they first sat
down together, nobody had expected much fun; benefit dinner parties
rarely sparkled.  The men figured the women were just ballet mothers;
the child was indistinguishable from every other thin, pony-tailed
little girl.  But all five people had a wonderful time.  They chattered
gaily and did not even formally exchange names until midway through the
evening.  The two men were astonished to discover that the younger
woman was a member of the NYCB Board of Directors.  They had never met
a Board member before; the two worlds rarely mingle socially.  They
found the child charming, the younger woman vivacious and amusing,
especially her long, funny story about having three bathtubs in her
living room.  They adored the older woman's matter-of-factness.  "I got
tired of paying to have my lawn mowed," she said.  "So I had my
contractor cement over my entire yard."

The women enjoyed meeting the two men just as much.  They turned out to
own a house together in Saratoga, the very place Frances and her
daughter would be spending their summer.  What's more, one of the men,
Chris

Alexander, was a well-established theater and portrait photographer,
and his friend was the dancer Shaun O'Brien, the very man who played
Herr

Drosselmeier.  Who could have recognized him without his grotesque

Nutcracker makeup?

Early in June, Larry Bradshaw was given a weekend pass for a home
visit.

But when he got to New York, Paulette explained that Frances was too
busy with the Ballet to see him, and he spent the weekend at home with
the

Gentile family.

On June 8, at their regular annual meeting, the members of the Board of
the New York City Ballet, by now champions to a man, and woman, of
the

Anglo-American system of justice, unanimously elected Frances Schreuder
to a new four-year term.  To speak to many of these people today is a
little like interviewing Germans after World War Il.  Only "good
Germans" existed.  There were no Nazis.  The same attitude prevails
throughout the entire ballet world-front office, Dress Circle, and
backstage.  Nearly everyone professes to have been too preoccupied, too
terribly busy, too focused on his or her own obsessions, too strung
out, too exhausted, too inured to at least mild and at times galloping
eccentricity within their own ranks to have noticed anything odd or
amiss.  In the same way, the woman who was sometimes bad, bold Frankie,
and sometimes poor mad Mrs.

Schreuder-and at almost all times an embarrassment while she was
there-is an embarrassment in memory.  She should not have been
tolerated.  Easier to pretend it all never happened.

The Board has new procedures now.  There are mandatory checks, a
selection committee.  There is never to be a second Frances Schreuder.
As for the first one, she has been folded up like an old costume.  She
is permanently out of the repertoire.

The day before the Ballet Board met to re-elect Frances Schreuder in
New

York City, pretrial hearings in the case of State of Utah vs.  Marc

Francis Schreuder finally got under way in Salt Lake City.  The
prosecution had by then been forced to abandon its original
headline-grabbing dream of staging a joint mother-son murder trial.  No
judge was likely to permit two opposing defenses---each defendant
blaming the other-in a single case.

The morning these hearings began, Marc asked Mary Lou Kaiser to bring
him two books from the library.  He wrote out the titles for her.  One
was

Crime and Punishment; the other, The Brothers Karamazov.  "It's about a
boy who kills his father," he told her.

"Amen!"  said Mary Lou.  Part Six

A7-f 7 -t ne Closing

Down ... THE PLAYERS ASSEMBLED at the start of Marc's trial look like
a prosecutors' convention.  On the left, well brushed and sober-faced,
sit the earnest prosecutor Ernie Jones and his sidekick, Sergeant Mike
George.

On the right, equally grave, are the two defense attorneys, rumpled
Paul

Van Dam and feisty little Joe Tesch, both of them former prosecutors.
And seated on the bench is the most famous prosecutor in Utah.  Judge
Jay Banks is a deeply lined, lean, severe-looking man who brags that in
twenty-two years as a prosecutor, he has probably tried more murder
cases than any lawyer in Utah-thirty-three during his last year in
office--before ascending the heights of judicial impartiality where he
now sits like a seasoned falcon, leather hood still in place.  In
short, a hanging judge.

The proceedings begin with protracted legal arguments.  The defense
announces it is waiving its right to a trial by jury.  It sounds
lunatic, staking everything on the opinion of one man this man.  But it
will turn out that the move is a desperate attempt to get a different
judge.  Judge

Banks, who is not well, had said at a preliminary hearing that, should
the defendant waive a jury, he might reassign the case.

The grubby defendant sits hunched between his two lawyers, his back to
the courtroom, kicking his short legs back and forth under the table.

Spectators caught only a glimpse of Marc Schreuder before he sat
down.

He is five feet six or seven inches tall, his dark blond hair is cut in
bangs, and he has a little potbelly.  The bright blue eyes are
expressionless as blue marbles.  He wears wrinkled jailhouse clothing,
no socks, and rubber thong sandals which soon fall off from his
relentless kicking.  The legal wrangling, and the kicking, continue
until Judge

Banks, a man of his word, finally tosses himself out of the case.

June 16, 1982.  Marc's fate has been reconsigned to the tender mercies
of one Judge James S. Sawaya, a swarthy, bald, heavy featured Lebanese
father of six who promises he will be no less stern than his
predecessor.  On the first day of testimony, Van Dam announces his
intention to waive an opening statement until the prosecution has
presented its case.  The defendant, who today has brought his copy of
The Brothers Karamazov to court, is still jiggling his legs, kicking
his feet, tapping his fingers, scratching his head.  Jones gets to his
feet and, in brief, declarative sentences, lays out what he intends to
prove: that defendant Marc Schreuder murdered his grandfather for
pecuniary gain.  He presents his first witnesses in workmanlike
fashion: the early customers who found the body, the medical examiner
Dr.  Moore, some cops.  Then he calls grandfatherly Doug Steele.

The manager of Bradshaw Auto Parts is a rough-and-ready type with white
hair, a raspy voice.  "I was with Frank for thirty two years," he says,
and describes his boss's prodigious work habits-seven days a week,
twelve to fifteen hours a day-and the breadth of his empire at the time
of his death.  In addition to the million-dollars-a-year warehouse
operation, which had twenty one employees, there were twenty-eight auto
parts stores, six corporations, a "Jobbers' Service," and an "oil
service operation."

"Fair to say he was a millionaire?"

Steele turns red-faced.  "Heh, heh!  He was a millionaire-yesl"

In the summer Of 1977, Frank told Steele that his grandsons were coming
out to work under his supervision.  Did Steele "experience any problems
with the defendant that summer"?

"From Day One."

Steele describes the $1,400 shortfall on Marc's first day at work.
Within a week it was clear to Steele that the grandsons "had no
intention of working."

"Based on your observations, how did the defendant treat his
grandfather?"

"Terrible."  He was "disrespectful ... dishonest ... arrogant."  Yes,

Steele was present when Frank accused Marc of breaking into his files
and stealing stock certificates hidden in stacks of Life magazines.
Marc denied it.  Frank asked Doug to talk to the boy.  Marc stonewalled
several hours more.

Steele was also present the day the two forged $io,000 checks came back
from the bank, and Marc and his grandfather had a public "screaming
match," and the old man burst into tears.  So were Larry, Berenice,
Nancy

Jones, Frank's secretary, and several others.

The warehouse had ten doors, five at the rear, and all were normally
locked on Sundays.  The Sunday Frank was shot, the police asked

Steele to look the place over and tell them if he noticed anything
unusual.  The padlocks were hanging open, he told them.  Yes, the keys
were in their usual place, a drawer in the manager's desk behind the
counter.

When Steele arrived for work one morning a few weeks after the
grandsons had returned to New York, his boss handed him a copy of
Exhibit # 22, a curious half-page document naming Steele and Marilyn co
administrators of the Bradshaw estate, and dividing his fortune into
equal thirds among

Berenice, Marilyn, and Elaine.

This was the first time Steele knew the boss was thinking about putting
him, a non family member, into his will.  Steele knew that Frank did
not like his old, ig7o will; he had said so to Doug on numerous
occasions.

June 17, 1982.  Steele is back this morning and, at his honor's
request, has brought along both of his copies of the will-change memo
from the office files.  The dead man frequently re revised his old
will; the witness saw him working on it, making additions and
deletions, for four or five years.  When his older brother Frederick,
the bank president, died, Frank obtained a copy of Frederick's will and
tried to "dovetail it" to his own.  He bought a book, How to Make Your
Own Wi14 to "show how simple it was."

Frank understood that his half-page memo was not a legal will.  But he
told Doug it represented "what his intent was, on his new will ... He
said he had had it with Frances," and intended to put Doug and Marilyn
in charge.  Later that morning, he asked Doug to drive him over to his
lawyer's office on Main Street.

Did Bradshaw ever indicate to Steele that he was afraid of Marc?

"Yes," says Steele, before Tesch can object.

Van Dam's lengthy cross-examination seeks to establish that Steele, as
a top employee with profit-sharing benefits, was himself a beneficiary
under the will.  Correct; but he had no part in the real money-maker,
the oil lease business.  "It was strictly Frank's."

Have any arguments with the old man?  "We always had disagreements
.."

"Did you ever end up arguing or yelling at Mr.  Bradshaw?"

"You didn't yell at Mr.  Bradshaw ... He was the best listener in the
world.  He would listen you out."

Only three months before his death, Bradshaw had finally incorporated
his stores.  Steele was vice president.  After Bradshaw's death, he
became president until ig8o when the business was sold.

In the afternoon of the day Steele drove Bradshaw to see the company
lawyer, Alma Boyce, who is also a cousin of the Bradshaws', Frank
gave

Steele a second will memo slightly different from the morning one.  He
wanted Doug to be familiar with all the nuances of his thoughts about
his estate.

"Did he ever ask you, or anyone that you know of, to witness either of
these documents?"

"I found that sad tale later on, when I took it to a lawyer myself to
ask him what was the validity of it."  An unwitnessed document is
invalid.

The morning they discovered the two forged $io,000 checks made out to
cash and deposited by Frances, they also, eventually, discovered
another $6,000 in smaller forged checks to department stores, beauty
salons, and so on.

Any proof that Frances and her sons were involved?

"Yes.  You betcha!"  But the police were not called, and this response
is not explained.

In cross-examination, Van Dam brings out that the strained relationship
between Frank and Berenice frequently made it necessary for Steele to
act as a kind of confidential go-between.  Thus, although Frank was "a
very proud, private man," Steele was privy to much.  When Frank told
him Berenice was coming to work, he'd asked, "What the hell's going
on?"

"She's broke, Doug, and she's got to earn some money.  I am going to
give her money for household expenses.  [But] I am cutting off all the
funds for

Frances, and she knows it."  If Berenice wanted to send money back to

Frances from now on, she would have to earn it.  Frank would pay his
wife $4.00 an hour, same as anybody else.

Didn't she resent having to work for nickels and dimes?  "I imagine she
would."

On redirect, the witness makes clear he believed Frank intended to make
a new will, but was killed before he could carry out his intention.

The next witness, Jon Cavenaugh's mother, was concerned enough "as a
mother" to suggest they call Mrs.  Schreuder when she learned that
their well-dressed young visitor had come all the way out to Texas to
buy a gun.

"Go right ahead," said Marc.  But then she decided Marc was so at ease,
so "open and disarming," she hadn't bothered,

Tall, good-looking Jon Cavenaugh, now in the Navy, is a typical
hell-raising West Texas rich kid, the antithesis of Marc.  He was two
years ahead of Marc at Kent, barely knew him at school, and had been
surprised to receive his phone call.  Jon identifies the heavy blue
steel gun, a "Sheriff's Special" highway patrolman model, and explains
how he arranged the $175 cash sale.  Jon later showed Marc how the gun
worked, but neither one of them fired it.

Joe Tesch on cross-examination brings out that Marc was rather
excitable .  socially backwards" compared to the laid back Texas youth.
Didn't he tap his foot a lot?  Talk very fast, in a loud, high voice?
Tesch seems to be trying to paint a picture of an emotionally
distraught kid, but it isn't working.  Marc 11 wasn't abnormal, by any
means," Jon says.  One begins to wonder what sort of defense these
lawyers will be able to put forth.

Miss Nancy Jones, in her middle thirties, wears a neat secretary's
hairdo, blazer, and skirt.  She is prim and soft-spoken, but it is
clear she adored her boss and has little use for the rest of his
family.  Most of the monies sent back to the Schreuders went through
her hands.  On July 13, after Frances and Marc.  had called the
warehouse collect looking for

Berenice, Nancy heard Mrs.  Bradshaw speaking heatedly to Frank.  If
they sent the Schreuders one more check, they would never be asked for
money again.  So "he came in and told us to type up a check and mail
it."

Nancy can identify the typewriter Franklin used to type up his
half-page will memo.  It was his usual practice to type up his rough
drafts on half-sheets of paper, then give them to one of his two
secretaries for retyping on whole sheets; he saved paper that way.

For such a cost-conscious man, Bradshaw had curious business
practices.

Loose, unnumbered blank checks were kept underneath the parts counter
in an open box.  Stealing them would be easy as stealing peanuts.  Yet
Doug

Steele, in his testimony, had said that Frank hid his cash so carefully
among the parts bins that, despite all the treasure hunters who had
combed through the great rats' nest of a warehouse, hidden pools of
cash were still turning up three months after the old man's death.  And
finally,

the office rubber-stamp signature would have made forging checks a
relatively simple matter.

On cross-examination, Tesch brings out that Nancy wrote checks to all
three

Bradshaw daughters.

And how big were the checks to Marilyn and Elaine?  Ernie Jones asks on
redirect.

"One hundred dollars apiece.  On their birthdays."

June 18, 1982.  Jerry Register, thirty-four, an amiable and large
bellied good ole boy in plaid Western shirt and square haircut, has the
unfailing politeness of Texas country boys.  In 1978 Register was chief
of police of

Stanton, Texas, eighteen miles from Midland.  He then owned three .357
magnums, one of which he was happy to sell in order to buy new boots
for his nine-year-old son's birthday-boots the son will now never
wear.

Withal, the witness does not seem at all concerned that he sold another
deadly weapon to an underage boy who the next day used it to execute
his grandfather.  Register is a gun fancier who bought his own first
pistol when he was fourteen.  He can state the date of sale to Marc
with accuracy because he remembers it was a Saturday, that's the day
his wife worked in the finance company office, and it must have been
two weekends after Old

Settlers' Day, when they have the jalapefio pepper-eating contest" and
the egg-throwing contest.

When the various people involved in the sale gathered in the bank lobby
that Saturday morning, and Register saw the buyer for the first time,
he thought he "looked kinda nervous."  The big blue steel weapon was
brand-new, still in its original packing, inside a paper sack.  Marc
peeled Off $175 in small bills-a to profit for the sheriff-and when the
exchange was completed, somebody said, "That'll take care of anything
you run into backpacking in Utah."

Stephen Swindle, the attorney in charge of administering the Bradshaw
estate, is a large, genial, prosperous-looking chap through whom the
court learns some interesting facts about the 1970 will.  The original
copy of that will, the one that Berenice had told police on the day of
her husband's death "Franklin never liked," has never been found.
Swindle has only his yellow office file copy.  Twenty-five attorneys
from Swindle's firm, plus numerous clerks and paralegals, turned the
warehouse upside down looking for the original.  He finally was able to
obtain a special ruling from the probate court that the copy was the
document still in force at the time of Bradshaw's death.

Had there been even a whisper of a threat to contest the will, this
would not have been possible.  The law must presume that, if the
original document cannot be produced, the testator may well have
written a subsequent will which would invalidate the earlier one.  It
is precisely men like Frank Bradshaw who prove the wisdom of this
precaution, Steele has already said that Frank tinkered continually
with his old will.

Swindle has brought charts to explain the will and trust provisions,
and he emits immense thickets and billows of legalese in the process.
In sum,

Berenice Bradshaw controls it all, and Swindle pegs the inventory value
of the estate-much smaller than the actual value--at about $10.5
million.

Three or four months after Frank's death, Berenice had formally
disclaimed her interest in the family trust.  The effect was to permit
assets of the family trust to pass down to the grandchildren as if

Berenice had predeceased her husband.  Marc Schreuder, like the others,
is not a beneficiary in the will.  He is a beneficiary under the family
trust.

Were Berenice and her daughters familiar with the provisions of the
original will?

Swindle has had numerous conversations with Berenice and her
daughters.

Elaine didn't seem to know much about it.  Marilyn said she believed
her father had had a "progression of thought" concerning the original
provisions.  And "a rather extensive letter in our estate-planning file
written by Mrs.  Schreuder - - .  would indicate that she had knowledge
of the contents of the documents."  This is the fifteen-page howl of
protest which Frances wrote in 1975 saying that her mother did not
understand her father's will.  The legalese in Frances's letter is far
knottier than

Swindle's, but the underlying message seems to be that her mother is
scatty and might inadvertently--or deliberately-Aivert monies away
from

Frances and her children to the Drukmans, or even to Marilyn.

Six of Richard Behrens's plaintive letters to Swindle's office
regarding some sort of joint bank account with Frances Schreuder are
produced.  The letters bulge with documentation.  The fellow apparently
had hoped to recover his loss out of the estate funds.  Not while the
impeccable

Stephen D. Swindle is in charge.  He had suggested to Behrens that he
get in touch with the lawyer who represents Frances, Ron Madsen of
Parsons, Behle & Latimer.

On cross-examination Paul Van Dam brings out that, once Berenice had
disclaimed interest in the family trust, she could not invade that
trust to divert money from the Drukmans or Reagans to the Schreuders.
In Swindle's words, "it became apparent to us that a harmonious
relationship did not exist" between Berenice and her two eldest
daughters.  By then, Berenice and each of her daughters and the estate
had all retained separate counsel, and

Elaine's lawyer had obtained a court order "saying the admission of the
will to probate is vacated.  Period."  This appears to have been a
preliminary move to perhaps challenging the old will.  It would have
served to put matters on hold while the possible challenge was being
considered.

Would the effect of this have been to prevent Mrs.  Bradshaw from
getting any money out of the estate?

No.  Because, at the same time, a petition was filed and granted
giving

Berenice a $10,000-a-month family allowance.

But the effect was also to put on hold what otherwise would have been
her freedom to do whatever she liked with the bulk of the estate? 
Well, yes.

What did Marilyn mean by the strange term "progression of thought"? 
She used it to indicate that she had "seen an outline of another will
which was not signed by her father."

Yes, Swindle's firm did consider itself attorneys of record in charge
of

Bradshaw estate matters, though other attorneys took care of other
legal business for Franklin.  And no, Swindle himself never met Frank
Bradshaw, nor had any communications with him.  And yes, Swindle is
aware of the half-page "instrument" indicating a possible change of
mind, but it is undated, invalid, and in no way changes anything.

Now, how would Marc Schreuder have benefited under the existing will?
He would have to survive his mother, and become twenty-one years old,
before he could get anything.  Or Granny or one of his aunts could
appoint some assets to him.  Or Marc could try to establish some
compelling need to invade the principal, but he would have to do that
through Swindle's office.  (Easier to put a camel through the eye of a
needle, one would think.)

What did Swindle know about the original copy of the 1970 will?  Only
that he was finally able to get a court order saying it had been lost
or inadvertently destroyed-but not intentionally destroyed.

And suppose Frank Bradshaw had died intestate?

Ah, well, that would have changed the distribution dramatically.
Berenice would then have received $5o,000 plus one half of the estate.
The other half, less the $5o,000, would have been divided equally
between the three daughters.  The tax bite would have been much larger
and ... Yes, but wasn't it also true that each daughter would have
received "a great deal more money" outright than under the will? Yes.

And wasn't there not just "disharmony" but outright "hostility" within
this family?  "Paul, I sensed that she was a very torn mother ... very,
very hurt .. "

And wasn't, in fact, the disclaimer on the trust she filed on November
to, 1978, a kind of trade-off, whereby if Berenice disclaimed, her
daughters would agree not to contest the will?

Hack away the lawyerly language, and what we are hearing is that the
elder daughters, Elaine in particular, became concerned that, unless
some kind of brakes could be applied to the runaway chariot which was
Frances and Berenice in tandem, "there was no ultimate certainty that
the [other daughters] would receive anything ..."

Unstated is the fact that mounting a will challenge would have been
very expensive, because of the necessary fees to lawyers and private
detectives.  Elaine and Marilyn did not have, or else perhaps did not
wish to lay out, the kind of monies necessary.  More important, it
would have required a united front between the sisters, and it also
would have required them to, challenge their mother's mental
competency.  In the months right after their father's death, Marilyn
didn't have the heart to do this; Elaine could not afford to do it
alone.  Later, by the time

Marilyn's resolve hardened, Elaine's health had again broken down.  By
the time she had recovered from the cardiac surgery, it was too late.

Unknown to anyone in this courtroom, except possibly the defendant, is
the fact that the original will does indeed exist.  When Larry Bradshaw
was arrested, his belongings were impounded by Lehigh.  About two years
later they were opened by the university; a will was found.
Pennsylvania and then Utah authorities were notified.  On December 13,
1982, Utah would obtain a search warrant in Pennsylvania to examine

 Rings  Among thousands of travel photos were the letters from
Berenice.

There too was Frank Bradshaw's will.  When he stole it, whence he stole
it, and whether anyone else knew he stole it, is unknown.

Judge Sawaya leans forward.  How much money has been distributed from
the estate so far?  Swindle says Marilyn, Elaine, and Frances have each
received about $136,000 plus some oil and gas leases.

Officer Joel Campbell is a thin, sinewy cop with lots of carefully
combed dark hair and a droopy mustache.  Marilyn Reagan really broke
the case, he says, though Behrens's aid was vital.  However, Behrens
"refused to be interviewed by police," and only after Utah offered
complete immunity from prosecution was Behrens even ready to consider
cooperating.

The fourth day of trial, entirely taken up with more gun testimony, is
in every sense a bore.  But Day Five produces the State's key
witness-slovenly, barrel-shaped Richard Behrens.  In his late forties,
he has a steel-gray crew cut and a darting gaze as random and erratic
as a* pinball machine.  A nervous habit of continually stroking his
cheeks and chin further distorts his already rapid speech.  Before he
can even begin to tell his story, Tesch says, "This is the witness that
we requested a psychiatric examination on ... He's had psychiatric
problems in the past ... and it appears to us that he does not know
what it means to tell the truth."

But Judge Banks had already vetoed this idea.  "I will not overrule
Judge

Banks," says Judge Sawaya dryly.  "Proceed."  In all, the ruling seems
a loss to the annals of forensic psychiatry.  This is a very odd
witness.

At one point the judge leans forward, incredulous.  "Am I to believe
that you had a conversation with Marc Schreuder when his mother dropped
off a gun and said it was a murder weapon?  Is that what you are
sayine."

"Well, it was a mad scramble ... He came in later ... He had just come
back in town and he had shot his grandfather.  This was put out by both
he and his mother."

"I want to know the details.  Did he knock on the door?"

"No.  His mother initially rang the bell and rushed in with this gun
and dumped it on me and ... within a half an hour, twenty minutes, Marc
came in."  Behrens's apartment was only a block from the Schreuders'.
Marc had stopped off at the neighborhood deli, establishing his alibi.
A few days later, Marc, Frances, and Behrens looked in the Yellow Pages
for a gun dealer.  Frances lent

Behrens her Olds, and he and Marc drove down to Chambers Street and
bought a leather gun cover and cleaning rods.  For the next two years,
the gun sat undisturbed on Behrens's kitchen shelf in a paper shopping
bag.  He did not realize that a note in Marc's hand on Kent School
stationery was also inside.  When he found the note, he Xeroxed it and
burned the original, to be certain his fingerprints were not connected
to the weapon.

He runs through his whole story: the joint bank account with Frances
telling Marilyn he had the gun and turning it over to her; his
confession, his recantation, his re confession after the grant of
immunity, in which he now blamed Frances for the first time, and said
it was she-not Marc-who "dropped the gun off on me."

"Why did you hang on to the gun so long?"

"That's a good question.  I certainly meant to throw it away." 
Instead, he called Marilyn.

"I will have the police come to you," she said.

Behrens told her if the police came to him, "the gun wouldn't be there,
and

I would sue them for breaking and entering, and false arrest."  Behrens
wanted nothing more to do with the matter.  "So she agreed ... and
walked it up to the 2oth Precinct herself."

Two months later, Behrens gave his first statement.  He told Joel
Campbell that he got the gun from Marc.  Frances then summoned the
little man to to

Gracie Square.  Mother and son held him captive for hours and
terrorized him into typing out a long, phony story putting the blame on
Marilyn.

Otherwise, they warned, he would be charged as an accomplice to murder,
and he would serve twenty years.  "I had a very strong motivation ...
Mrs.

Schreuder told me they were going to blame it on me ... I kept ahold of
a gun, after all.  I didn't come forth ... didn't tell exactly what
happened ... S000o, I swung it around saying that Marilyn had the gun
all along.  "Once he had typed out the statement, Behrens and Marc
drove to a

Xerox place to have copies made, and notarized.  Frances required a
copy, she said, in order to convince Berenice to pay Marc's legal
fees.

Behrens is on the stand two days.  Both days he wears a dirty, frayed
nylon shirt soiled with jelly stains that look like blood.  For twenty
years, he says, he had heard Frances talking about her inheritance. 
But the more he says, the wilder his story seems.

Family assassination plots!  Poisoned oatmeall Other lawyers drop in to
hear the fantastic tale unfold.  Around the courthouse, Behrens is
known as "the New York twit."  When it comes time to cross-examine him,
lawyer

Tesch rises to his full height, sucks in a deep breath, rocks back and
forth in his cowboy boots.  He stares a long time as if about to
encounter something awful, then says, "Mr.  Behrens, how much immunity
for the commission of this crime have you received?  For everything
connected with this crime, is that true?  ... And that immunity extends
not only to perhaps assisting in the murder?  But also extends if in
fact you committed the murder, does it not?"

Less startling than the accusation is the fact that it ruffles Behrens
not at all.  "News to me," he says blandly.  But he does vigorously
deny it when Tesch suggests he had sexual relations with Frances.

Questions turn to what the defense alleges was Behrens's true motive
for keeping the gun: that he too had feared losing a share of an
inheritance from his father.  "Did not he write to you in fact and say
that he wished to divorce his wife because she was eating up the
estate?"

"He didn't use those words.  He was concerned about her drinking, and
was concerned, at his age, trying to go through a divorce, the strain
and stress of it."  These concerns have become newly moot: the day
before

Behrens flew to Utah to testify, he had buried his father in New
Jersey.

"Do you recall that you had conversations with Mrs.  Schreuder to the
effie ct that both of you could use a hit man?"

"No.  I talked to her about legality because she was an experienced
person in the ideas of divorce.  She had been divorced twice.  I wanted
to know what my father ... would have to go through to get a
divorce."

Behrens admits twice going down to Virginia and attempting to get a
gun.

"She wanted a gun to shoot her father."  But Behrens, a nonresident,
was unable to purchase a weapon there.  He admits driving Myles Manning
up to see his father's summer home in New Jersey, but denies that his
purpose was to show Manning the person he wanted hit-his stepmother,
Joan Bloom

Behrens.  He only wanted Manning along to witness that loan was denying
him admission to his father's summer home.

What made him think Manning was a hit man?

Here, once more, a glimpse of the "political" views of the

"Schreuder gang ..... He was in the printers' union, Union types enjoy
an unsavory reputation ... I thought perhaps he might know of somebody
himself."

"What made you think that he wouldn't turn you and Frances in to the
police?"

"I didn't think about it."

Tesch rocks back on his heels.  "You were conspiring and planning a
murder with Frances Schreuder, and you didn't think about the fact that
he might turn you in to the police?"

"No.  I wanted them to conspire to murder her father, Myles Manning
and

Mrs.  Schreuder."

Deadpan.  "You wanted them to conspire to kill her father."

"I wanted them to discuss it to discover whether he would do it."  What
was in it for you?"  "Nothing."

He had described the defendant's mother to Manning as a woman with
"evil thoughts in her mind."  But once he had performed the
introduction,

Behrens waited outside.

"If you wished to remain not involved in this at all, and wished them
to conspire ... why did you allow the meeting to arrange a murder to
take place in your home, if there was nothing in it for you?"

"I dunno.  They didD't wanna talk on the street ... If they wanted to
do something, it was all right with me.  But I didn't want to be
anywhere a part of it."

Tesch is disgusted.  "What grade of our children did you teach?"

Weeks later, Behrens says, Frances called him to complain that Manning
had conned her.

Here one wonders if possibly she thought that he and Manning split the
$5,000.  If so, that could explain her motive for looting Behrens's
savings from their joint account.  Or perhaps she had no motive, only a
compulsion.  Perhaps, like her father, she just loved money.

Didn't Behrens later ask Marilyn to get him a copy of the ballistics
report?

Yes, to be sure that the gun he'd been given was indeed the murder
weapon.

Wasn't it true that the real reason he gave Marilyn the gun was to
recover the $3,700 Frances owed him?  And because he had his eye on the
$10,000 reward?  And because Marilyn had offered to pay his attorney's
fees?

"No.  It was to keep Larry Bradshaw from being wrongly accused of a
murder .  Larry didn't do it, and Marc did."

Tesch's volley of questions grows harsh, angry.  His witness begins to
give ground.  He admits that Marc might not have given him the gun the
night of the murder; it might have been the next day.

But when Tesch suggests that Behrens held back the Cavenaugh note on
Kent stationery not because of fingerprints, but because he hoped to
sell it to Marilyn for a higher price, the witness denies it.  Tesch
suggests sharply that in fact Marc never admitted anything to Behrens,
that

Behrens is concocting this story on his own, to please his new masters,
the State of Utah.  Tesch attacks Behrens's memory of dates, months,
years-implying over and over that he and Marilyn Reagan together
fabricated the entire story against his client.

Isn't it true that the real reason he recanted his story in the office
of Hiram Bissell Carey III is that Marilyn had failed to come through
with the $io,000 reward she had promised him?  No.  "Do you remember
making a statement, "Maybe Marc bought this thing for Larry'?"

The witness denies this too.  But he did make the statement, it is on
the police tape, and logic suggests that it could be one bit of
truth,in his immunized, jelly-stained tissue of truth and lies.

Carolyn Karoliszyn Morris, the American Airlines ticket clerk with the
phenomenal memory, ticks off four things which made this particular
sale stick in her mind for two and a half years.  Ticket #0014455192945
was itself unusual; she had never written one like it before or since.
The customer paid all cash.  The customer's name was Gentile, And "his
appearance is a little unusual ... I remember his eyes.  They were ..
piercing ... You know ... looking through you, almost."  Asked if she
sees the buyer now, she points to Marc, sitting head down at the
defense table.

Joe Tesch rises to cross-examine.  Has the witness "ever been told
whether or not Marc Schreuder had a brother ... one year older" whose
name is, in fact, Larry?  Or "L.  Gentile," the curious name which she
recalls writing on the ticket?

No, says Carolyn.  She is excused.  These last questions can be
interpreted in only one way.  George and Jones had been right.

The defense is now trying to throw blame for the murder on its client's
brother.

Marilyn Reagan has let her hennaed red hair go gray for this court
appearance, and she moves to the witness stand with purposeful tread,
as if she expects to enjoy this moment.  "To the matronly hairstyle she
has added rhinestone glasses, gold earrings and bracelets, and has made
herself a floral pink outfit, hemline well below the knee, that
suggests a Hawaiian tourist.  The total effect is of a well-to-do,
no-nonsense

Mormon matron.  A handkerchief is wadded into her strong right hand.

She describes her relationship to her mother: "It was very good."  To

Frances: "Distant."  To her' father "He was very frugal.  Mother's
attitude was different.  She often said, If he has all this money, why,
can we spend it?"

Yes, the family offered a reward after her father's death.  "I
suggested it to the executors of the estate, and they agreed.  So I
went ahead and put the ads in the paper."

She tells the whole story of Behrens and the gun with great vivacity,
as if she has been looking forward to this day for some time.

JUNE 24, 1982.  For her second day's courtroom appearance, Mrs.  Reagan
has chosen an airy, wispy, cream-colored lawn party dress which
projects just the right image-not a trace of New York City.  Despite
thirty years in

Manhattan, she's pure down-home Salt Lake.  "Like Betty Crocker," one
of the reporters says.

Under Paul Van Dam's cross-examination, she is icily ladylike.  She
flatly denies any intention to attempt to succeed to the management of
her father's business after his death, or to take over the care of her
mother's affairs, or any problems with her mother in this regard.

"The only problems I have had with my mother have been letters I
received after I visited when Frances was here ... The letter accused
me of doing things I didn't do."  The letter resulted from her sister's
powerful influence over their mother.

"And do you resent that?"

"I am not a resentful person, Mr.  Van Dam."

"You don't resent it?"

"I think it is very unfair not to have a mother when she is living .. I
wish she could speak to me.  But she can't."

Describing the moment Behrens handed over her father's murder weapon,
she says she did not open the shopping bag because she was aware that
anyone carrying a gun in New York without a license "would have been
arrested.  fAlso] In a Burger King, pulling out a gun is not a good
idea."

How did she feel about the money her mother gave her sister for the
ballet?

"If that's what she wanted to do with her money, that's her business .
It's a good charitable deduction."

Any hard feelings between herself and Frances?

"Not on my part," she sniffs.  Her only complaint is that Frances
created tension between her parents by "always pitting my mother
against my father to get more money."  Yes, her parents had argued over
money.  "That was a "way of life" in the Bradshaw household.

Myles Manning is purest Guys & Dolls, the trial's comic relief He looks
like a denizen of "Archie Bunker's Place," and talks likewise.  Like

Behrens, he has immunity.  He describes his four meetings with Frances,
two on the street, one at her apartment, one at Behrens's place.  At
the first meeting, she "was a little devious."  But she asked me if I
was willing to do it.  And I said, "No, but I would have somebody do
it."

At the second meeting, he named a price, $5,000, because that was the
total amount of his current debts.

At the third meeting, in Frances's apartment, a little girl was
present.

Manning says she was "eight or nine."  But in October 1977, Ariadne was
in fact only four.  At this meeting, Frances handed him a manila
envelope containing the money, a handdrawn map showing the location of
the warehouse, and pictures of his "target."  For the first time, he
learned that the "hit" was her father.  Scornfully, Manning threw away
everything but the money and holed up in the YMCA.  Ernie Jones
produces the receipted bill.

At their fourth meeting, chez Behrens, Manning told Frances he had gone
out to Salt Lake but got arrested before he could do the hit.

"What was her reaction?"

"She started crying and she said, "I am going to have to take my kids
out of school, go on welfare She wanted her money back."

In his cross-examination, Tesch wonders if Manning might not be liable
for prosecution in New York to recover the $5,000.

A beeT-bellied, genial New Yorker rises in the spectators' section to
address the court.  He turns out to be Manning's lawyer.  "If Mrs.

Schreuder chooses to prosecute Mr.  Manning for five thousand dollars
that she gave him with the hopes that he would kill her father, she
could go right ahead and do it."  Appreciative laughter sweeps the
room.

Manning says that he has never seen Marc Schreuder in his life until
right now, and that Marc was not involved in the conspiracy in any
way.

He says that Frances not only suggested he fake a robbery to confuse
police as to the motive of the crime.  She reminded him that he could
keep any proceeds from the robbery, in addition to his S5,000 fee.

Manning says he was never a good friend to Behrens, just a street and
barroom acquaintance.  He admits to a severe drinking problem in those
days.

What did Behrens say to Manning at their first meeting?

"He asked me if I knew anyone that would commit a murder.  I said
yes."

"Were you lying to Mr.  Behrens?"

"Of course."

Both sides take it fairly easy on the next witness, Berenice Bradshaw,
a handsome and smartly dressed old woman with an air of money about
her.

She wears huge sunglasses and is slightly deaf.  The lawyers must
shout, but they are deferential to the matriarch of this extraordinary
clan, aware of the pain she must be feeling to see her grandson on
trial for her husband's murder.

Paul Van Dam's cross-examination seems excessively courtly, though not
perhaps for a lawyer who is cross-examining his employer.  The court
learns that Frank Bradshaw had had a physical examination only two
weeks before his death, and "was in terrific health."

"Mrs.  Bradshaw, did you ever tell your daughters, Elaine or Marilyn ..
that Larry left the house shortly after Franklin, on the morning of his
death?"

"No.  What was Berenice's relationship to Marilyn?  Were there problems
with her after the funeral?

"Her attitude was a bit disturbing to me.  She wanted to take over and
I didn't want any of my family to take over.  She was a bit ... a bit
hostile ... She walked into the auto parts store and said, J am taking
over."  The manager said, "No, you are not."  "

"What else did she do?"

"She rented this office and was going to set herself up so she could
run things ... I went along with her at first."  But after Marilyn left
town, "I thought it was foolish for her to rent an office, and furnish
it, when right in the warehouse there were plenty of desks and
phones.

She could work there.  So I canceled the rent ... and sent the
furniture back ... "I wrote a letter telling all three girls I wanted
none of my family into my affairs."

"And are Marilyn and Elaine angry at you because you continue to have
contact with Frances and Marc?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever have any knowledge as to whether or not Mr.  Bradshaw
intended to disinherit Frances and her children?"

"I heard him say once that he was going to disinherit Frances.  But I
never told anyone."

"You say you never told anyone?  You never told Frances?  Or her
children?"

Pause, then, "No."  But it is a very weak-sounding no.

Before her testimony that day, her own attorney, Kevin Kurumada, had
invited the old lady out to lunch and been astonished and delighted by
her good appetite, her enjoyment of life, her candor.  She talked about
her poor childhood, about raising her family, about how it was 1975
before it really dawned on her that the Bradshaws actually were rich.
She counted up the auto parts stores-they then had thirty-one!  She
began complaining to Franklin about his stingy ways.  If he did not
start spreading it around, she had warned, there would be a "blood
bath."  Of course she had not meant it literally, but this was how she
felt.  By the summer Of 1977, her grandsons' behavior had become so
atrocious she had begun to wonder whether her grandsons would wind up
in prison or in a mental institution-And now I've got one in each!"

She told Kurumada she was glad when she heard Marc had missed his bail
lineup and had to go back to jail.  It had made her nervous to have him
running loose around town.  The lawyer got the idea that she was not
especially fond of either of her grandsons.  Yet, this afternoon after
her testimony, when she unexpectedly encounters Marc being escorted by
a jailer through a back hallway outside the judge's chambers, she
impulsively rushes to embrace him.  Granny and grandson weep in one
another's arms while the transportation officer-who normally does not
permit his prisoners to have body contact with anyone else-mercifully
looks away.

Lawyers always save their best witness for last.  The assignment in
this trial goes to a soft-spoken woman named Dorothy Ferguson.  She
identifies herself as a free-lance writer and longtime friend of
Richard Behrens who lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.  In mid-July, just
before the murder,

Behrens had made one of his regular visits to her home, and stayed
about a week.  She told him she intended soon to take a trip to the
beach.  A few days after he went back to New York, she called him to
report a few more details of her planned beach excursion.

Miss Ferguson is more organized than many free-lance writers.  She
saves her old phone bills.  And one of these, recovered by the
prosecution from

Miss Ferguson's attic, shows a record of a four minute call from Miss

Ferguson in Virginia to Richard Behrens in New York City on Saturday
night, the twenty-second of July.

It had long ago become apparent to the prosecution that defense
strategy would have to be to try to cast blame for the crime on anyone
but their client.  Absent permission from Marc and/or Berenice to mount
a full-scale assault on Frances Schreuder, the next likeliest
candidates for blame had been Larry Bradshaw and Richard Behrens.  It
is now apparent that, just as Berenice Bradshaw had given Larry his
alibi, Miss Ferguson provides one for Behrens.  If he was at home in
Manhattan Saturday night, there was no way he could have made it out to
Utah in time to murder Franklin

Bradshaw at seven the next morning.

Doug Steele is briefly recalled to rehabilitate Marilyn's reputation as
a competent businesswoman, after her mother's somewhat disparaging
testimony.  That done, the State rests its case.

The defense attorneys now make the usual motions to have the
prosecution case thrown out for lack of evidence; the judge makes the
usual denials.

It is time for the defense case to begin.  And then, two weeks into the
trial, the bomb drops.

The astonishing turn of events starts with the defense asking for a
long lunch recess after the prosecution has rested.  Observers assume
they are simply unprepared.  It turns out they have been awaiting the
arrival of wise men from the East, two of themHiram Bissell Carey III
and David

Frankel.  Both lawyers had been awakened that morning at 2 A.M. by
calls from Salt Lake City and told to catch the first available
flight.

After lunch, Paul Van Dam addresses the court.  "It is our plan, your
honor, to submit several exhibits in the form of a tape and a
transcript of that tape ... for the purpose of allowing the court
access to underlying information that a psychiatrist, Dr.  Moench, has
used in forming and arriving at [his] opinion."  What does this
convoluted sentence mean?  Even seasoned trial observers cannot figure
out what the lawyer is trying to say.  "We have also asked two lawyers
that have heretofore represented Marc Schreuder," Ted Carey and Dave
Frankel, to come here to testify for the defendant.

Marc Schreuder, at seventeen years old, had found himself in certain
extremely strange, pressing, overwhelming circumstances, Van Dam
continues.  One of the lawyers the defense intends to put on the stand
will describe an encounter with the defendant's mother.  The second
lawyer, Frankel, will testify as to a period of time he spent with Marc
just after he was arrested and while he was fighting extradition.

Judge Sawaya interrupts to explain for the record that during the lunch
break he has conducted an in camera proceeding in which Marc expressed
his desire to waive his attorney-client privilege so that his Eastern
lawyers can testify.  The judge had required Marc formally to ask his
lawyer to testify.  He had also inquired into Marc's mental state, his
free will, drugs, psychiatry91 the questions one would expect a court
to use to protect itself against overturn on appeal in such an unusual
situation.

Van Dam begins to say that Mr.  Frankel will testify "to matters that
will be a revelation ..."  then stops himself, preferring "they come
from his own mouth."  Frankel's testimony, says Van Dam, will explain
certain acts and lay important foundations.  And then it comes.  Marc
Schreuder is going to change his plea from Not Guilty to Guilty.  He is
going to admit responsibility for the crime.

Hiram Bissell (Ted) Carey III is young, Waspy, athletic-looking.  He
was retained to represent Marc Schreuder after his arrest at Trinity
College.

Yes, he has spoken to Marc's mother "on numerous occasions."  How
often?

"Over thirty occasions."  He winces.

Her calls, "and the purpose of them ... became less and less clear .
Mrs.  Schreuder had, in my opinion, a case of wanting to hear something
which was always unclear, but never listening to what was said.  As a
result, her conversations ... were always relatively nonsensical .."

Mrs.  Schreuder's phone calls went on over a period of about a year. 
"I would attempt to explain to her to the best of my ability -and to
the extent that I was allowed to, in view of the fact that I
represented her son and not her-what was going on.  And respond
directly to her questions.

The problem always was that she would ... be silent on the other end of
the line, then ask the same question again ... any number of times
despite how many times you attempted to answer, or you refused to
answer ... and I will be frank to say that, after a while, I began to
feel as though Mrs.  Schreudtr was wasting my time.  And I made a
conscious effort to avoid talking to her, essentially because the
length of conversations became so time-consuming ... and so non
fruitful

So it would be fair to say "that you became well familiar with her
voice"?

"There's no question about that, Mr.  Van Dam."

Van Dam now shows the witness Exhibit #92, the so-called -Ariadne
Tope."

Can he identify the two female voices?

Yes.  He is quite familiar with both of them.  The adult voice is
Frances.

The "very young child" is Ariadne.

The defense lawyer does not yet attempt to place the tape in
evidence.

"How would you characterize your telephonic relationship with Mrs.

Schreuder?"

"Difficult, at best.  Mrs.  Schreuder demonstrated to me a lack of
willingness to understand ... what was being told her, and an uncanny
ability to 'corner lawyers'-my term, Mrs.  Schreuder made a conscious
effort in my opinion to get me to criticize [Marc's Utah lawyer] ...
and vice versa."

How many people has attorney Carey dealt with professionally in his
years as a litigator?

"Well into the thousands."

As compared to the others, was Mrs.  Schreuder unusual?

"In my opinion, she was the most difficult individual I have ever dealt
with ... in the practice of law, and personally, for that matter."

On cross-examination, Ernie Jones brings out that Mr.  Carey only heard
the tape "out in the corridor twenty-five minutes ago."  The prosecutor
objects that no foundation has been laid as to how and when and by whom
the tape was made.  Evidently, at this point, he is unfamiliar with its
contents.  Judge Sawaya, who has already listened to it, agrees to
reserve his ruling on the matter.

Young David Frankel now takes the stand.  He does not look happy.  It
is his unenviable role to confess his own client's guilt.

"Did there come a time ... when Mr.  Schreuder admitted to you direct
involvement in the death of his grandfather?"  Joe Tesch inquires.

"Yes, sir ... After four or five conversations ... just Marc and myself
present .  - .  Marc said that he and his brother Larry had murdered
their grandfather."

"Did he tell you why?"1... the gist ... was that he was terrified that
his mother was going to commit suicide.  Because over the past year to
year and a half, she had hysterically warned both he and his brother
about the possibility that Mr.

Bradshaw was going to disinherit Mrs.  Schreuder ... Between the two of
them, they felt their act was necessary for the protection of their
mother."

Was his mother involved?

"He said she was not."

"Did he state to you whether or not she knew about the plot?"

"He said she did not."

In the courtroom, the lawyers representing Frances and Berenice allow
themselves faint smiles.  It looks as if Marc has finally decided to
take the fall for his mother after all.

Frankel describes the next fifteen or twenty hours he spent breaking
down

Marc's story, getting him finally to confess the whole truth.  "His
story changed ... The meetings were at times very emotional.  I was not
easy on him ... Details began to change.  I continued to press him."
Marc's story was consistent on only one point: that his mother was not
involved.  Then one day, deep into a three- or four-hour session,
Frankel said he thought

Marc's mother was involved.  "I yelled at him.  I told him I simply
couldn't help him unless he told me the truth."  Frankel asked him one
more time.

"He put his head down and simply said: "Yes' very quietly."

In the courtroom, Marc puts his hand over his eyes and appears gripped
by private emotions.

"I simply watched as Marc tried to gain control of himself.  He was
shaking."  Several minutes passed.  I told him I thought I

understood how difficult it was for him to tell that.  He nodded his
head."

A quarter hour of small talk went by.  Then, "I pressed him for details
of how he and his mother were involved ... He told me that for the year
or year and a half prior to the murder.... his mother had told him that
his grandfather had to be killed because he was going to disinherit
them.  They were.  going to be thrown out on the street with nothing to
eat ... That at one point she had attempted to hire what Marc called a
hit man whose name was Myles Manning ... He simply took their money ...
At that point,

Mrs.  Schreuder told Marc that he was going to have to do it.  And they
were going to have a plan ... his mother suggested a number of
scenarios .. eventually it was decided that Marc or she would have to
get a gun, and

Marc would have to go up to Utah and shoot his grandfather."

Any more details?

"In the first conversation in which he told me that his mother was the
author of the plan, he also said his brother Larry participated in the
planning."

Frankel gives it everything he has.  He recounts in detail Marc's
version of the events of July 22-23, 1978.  He identifies the Ariadne
Tape, and says he himself received it from Marc and turned it over to
Van Dam.  He says Marc brought the gun back to New York because his
mother insisted.  "He told her he thought they should get rid of the
gun, but that she said no ... Then his mother gave the gun to Mr.
Behrens."  Later Marc was banished from home anyway.  After his arrest,
Frances feared the poor opinions of her neighbors, and of the co-op
board.  Marc was sometimes permitted to eat at home, but no longer to
sleep there.  His grandmother paid for a small hotel room a few blocks
away.

Fire in his eye, Ernie Jones rises to cross-examine.  He cannot let
this sudden "proxy confession" knock his case down to manslaughter.
"Didn't Marc tell you that if there was any possibility of tracing the
firearm, they wanted to be able to blame his brother, Larry, for the
murder?"

"No, sir."

"And you don't ever recall him telling you why he used his brother's
name?"

"That's not my testimony.  I testified that I do recall he told me, but
I don't recall what he said."  Oh, the sudden, blessed blankness of the
legal mind!

"Ever tell you he and his brother Larry got in arguments from time to
time?"

"Yes."  At first Marc said he and Larry planned the murder, and carried
it out; that Larry made Marc's motel reservation, that Larry phoned Mom
to confirm that Gramps would be at the warehouse Sunday morning.  But
later on, Marc changed his story and said that his brother had nothing
to do with it.

And who else was involved in this plot?  Ernie Jones has forgotten the
old lawyers' rule: never ask a question to which you do not know the
answer.

The reply further spatters his own witness, though-rain coated in
immunity-it scarcely matters.  One of the things they don't tell you
when they sell you the immunity coat is the mud it attracts from the
other side.

"Marc had told me that Mr.  Behrens had known about it."

When Jones asks Frankel about Marc's awareness "that his grandfather
was making a new will which would discredit his mother?"  he gets an
unexpected bonus.

"He told me that his mother told him that."  Until now, the prosecution
had not had direct evidence of Marc's knowledge of his grandfather's
will.  That a defendant have a "pecuniary interest" in the crime is
essential to a first-degree murder conviction.  This response takes the
prosecution one step closer to that goal.

Jones wonders if possibly they had kept the gun in order to dispose
of

Myles Manning?  Frankel has no comment.  But he does add another tidbit
to the mounting pile of evidence scraps against his own client.  Marc
told

Frankel he walked into the warehouse through an unlocked "side door"
after he heard his grandfather arrive.

Jones asks again: "He told you this murder was committed for the
inheritance or the money from the Bradshaw estate?"

"No."

"Didn't he tell you they were going to be cut off or cut out?" "Yes."

"Mr.  Frankel, the defendant told you that he felt some loyalty to his
mother?"

"Yes."

"Mr.  Frankel, did this defendant, Marc Schreuder, ever tell you that
as late as February of this year, he had stolen forty thousand dollars
in jewelry from his mother," and that she had filed a complaint with
the New

York police?  No.  "Ever tell you that he forged his grandmother's
signature ... to the tune of almost three hundred thousand dollars?"

"As I recall, he told me that he had stolen about forty thousand
dollars from his grandmother."

Sarcastic.  "Feel or share the same sense of loyalty toward his
grandmother and grandfather that he expressed toward his mother?"  No.
"How many times did his story change?"  Four or five.  "How many times
did he lie to you?"

Many.

On redirect, Frankel says that, shortly before this trial, Frances had
begun urging her son "that the best thing for everybody would be if he
just disappeared."  But the lawyer had persuaded Marc to stay, to
return the latest $40,000 he had stolen from Granny, return anything
else he might have stolen, and face the music.

Leaving the courthouse, Ernie Jones is almost smiling.  Joe Tesch looks
worried.  "Do you think we should have rested?"  he asks a friend.  The
defense could have put on no witnesses whatsoever, heaped scorn on the
unimpressive prosecution witnesses, Manning and Behrens, and relied on
the coat of reasonable doubt to protect their client.

If Van Dam and Tesch had used this tactic, Utah would probably have won
a conviction for second-degree murder at best.  The defense could have
harped both on Jones's inability positively to place Marc in Salt Lake
City, and his failure to prove that Marc had a pecuniary interest in
the crime.

Without an eyewitness, a motel registration, or other direct evidence
of

Marc's presence in Salt Lake City, Mike George's massive airline
researches had merely put Marc aboard a Salt Lake-bound plane; the
evidence of his presence on the ground was still technically only
circumstantial.  Before

Frankel's testimony, Utah had still lacked a "smoking gun."

By admitting that Marc Schreuder killed his grandfather, Frankel had
put the gun into Marc's hand, and spelled out the motive for the crime:
not money but the desire to please his mother.  The gambit would be
argued for years in Utah legal circles.

Some among Berenice Bradshaw's platoon of lawyers were frankly
appalled.

"Before today, they weren't looked at as a capital case," said one.
"Now I think they are."  Others thought the best strategy would have
been a united front, that mother and son should have been tried
together.  "Someone should have told Berenice to pay for only one
defense," one of them said.

And still others descried a larger strategy at work: a grand design to
protect Frances Schreuder at all costs, including the highest possible
cost to her own son.

JUNE 29, 1982.  The next morning the defense puts into evidence the
so-called "Ariadne Tape," made by Marc when Ariadne was not yet six.
The tape is offered "not for truth, but to show some of the information
the next witness, Dr.  Moench, had in arriving at his conclusions about
Marc and his mother," Tesch explains.

Ernie Jones objects that no proper foundation has been laid on the
tape's authenticity.  "I can see it's a close issue," Judge Sawaya
says, "but I'd like to hear the doctor's testimony, and I can't without
admitting it."  Psychiatry and the law do not normally mesh very well.
The two disciplines attract different types of minds.  The law deals in
blacks and whites, and human emotions and feelings come only in
infinite shades of gray.  Trying to describe human emotion in the
language of the law is like trying to dissect a butterfly with a meat
ax, and in the courtroom, at least, the two professions have scant
respect for each other.  Very few forensic psychiatrists, even old
white-haired ones, are received in courts of law with the respect and
gravity accorded the next witness.  Louis G. Moench, M.D."  is a tall,
spare psychiatrist in his late sixties, courtly in manner, a
Harvard-educated Phi Beta Kappa with a medical degree from the
University of Chicago Medical School.  His piercing blue eyes, white
hair, and pale parchment skin have become rather familiar around the
Utah courts; he is called upon equally often by prosecutors and defense
attorneys to testify as an expert psychiatric witness, although "it is
not the easiest nor most pleasant part of my work."

Dr.  Moench presides over the Salt Lake Clinic, and he twice visited
Marc in jail, a two-hour visit each time, he says.  He interviewed no
one else in the family.  Yet his professional conclusions are so firm
that Ernie

Jones will term them "cast in concrete."  Moench is not a man to doubt
or hedge his own opinions, though he claims no profound knowledge of
the psyche of this defendant.  That is not his function.  Marc
Schreuder is not his patient.  He is on trial in a criminal case on
which the court would like to hear the doctor's professional opinion of
his mental state at the time of the crime-a very different matter, as
the sixty-nine-year-old witness will shortly make clear.

Before their interviews Dr.  Moench had told Marc that, in a capital
case, no doctor-patient privilege exists; he might well be called upon
to testify.  This is something of a euphemism; Dr.  Moench had examined
Marc at Tesch and Van Dam's request.  His purpose here this morning is
to tell the court that Marc was sufficiently disturbed at the time of
the crime to justify a charge of manslaughter, not a capital offense.
Judge Sawaya inquires formally of Marc whether he understood at the
time that he had waived his privilege?  A murmur, "Yes."

Moench has brought along his clinical notes, eight sheets of green
paper written in a spidery hand.  He consults these freely during his
testimony, and often reads from them directly, preferring not to
paraphrase or elaborate on his original conclusions.  He relates Marc
Schreuder's history: his mother's marriages and divorces, the years of
family fighting, the lockouts, his relationship to Larry, whose own
history is swiftly sketched in.  Marc had described his mother, Dr.
Moench says, as "an upwardly mobile person ... always trying to raise
her standard of living."  He spoke about her Si,000 apartment, her
$20,000-a-month Hamptons estate, her fondness for caviar.

"He described his mother having spent some six or seven years under the
care of a psychiatrist in New York, and having an intense emotional
reaction when the psychiatrist moved to Canada ... One of the attempts
at suicide ... profoundly disturbing to Marc" occurred at that time.

"Following this, Marc related that he virtually became his mother's
psychiatrist."  He was made to "listen endlessly to her many problems .
try to advise her ... trying to do the man's work in the family,
helping move from one apartment to another, cooking, shopping,
tending

Ariadne."

Marc had told the doctor of his and Larry's struggles to provide their
mother with the money she believed she was rightfully entitled to-by
stealing it from her parents.  It was "never enough."  She could "never
be satisfied," not even when "she went to Tiffany's and, as Marc put
it, burned one hundred thousand dollars there."  Yet when Frances later
complained they were going to be evicted, and Marc asked her to sell
some jewelry, she had refused.

At first Marc had thought his mother was joking when she said

"Gramps would have to be killed."  Marc was very relieved when he found
out

Myles Manning had "ripped off" his mother rather than carry out her
assignment.  Throughout the winter and spring Of 1978, Frances
increased the pressure on Marc.  Her nightly calls to him at Kent
School lasted two or three hours.  He was unable to study, "yet she
made demands that he get excellent grades.  She would discourage any
friendships," continued developing the murder scenario, made the air
plans for Texas ... Shocking, horrible shrieks in the hallway interrupt
this testimony.  A woman has fainted, her friend is screaming
hysterically.  The husband had won all in a divorce suit.

"Go ahead, Doctor," Judge Sawaya says blandly as if he expects the
psychiatrist to be as imperturbable as himself to this sort of unseemly
outburst.  The witness relates how Frances had insisted to her son that
murder was the only solution to the family's problems, that "Gramps was
an old miser ... a Howard Hughes ... destroying their family, that she
and

Ariadne would have to live in Harlem in the gutter if Marc didn't do
this."

Dr.  Moench describes Marc's return to New York where "His mother
embraced him and kissed him and hugged him for about ten minutes while
he was sobbing.  He said she had never done anything like this before
in his life."

Tesch asks the witness his opinion of this particular mother son
relationship.  Dr.  Moench folds his long-fingered, elegant hands.  "It
was my opinion that ... there was an extremely pathological
relationship between

Marc and his mother ... that he had not resolved-forgive the
jargon-the

Oedipal situation ... there was no male figure in the family] ... it
was a sick relationship ..."

What about the strength of this mother's hold over her son?

"She was an extremely controlling person ... she insisted on having her
way ... she was always right ... if he or Ariadne didn't do exactly as
she said, or Larry ... she would make a suicide attempt."  Marc found
her continual threats to kill herself "extremely terrifying by far the
strongest influence in his emotional development."

What conclusions can the doctor draw about Frances's personality from
the

Ariadne Tape?  For once, the psychiatrist has no need to glance at his
notes.  He can describe the contents of the tape from memory, and does
so at some length, concluding, "I consider this child abuse, and
extreme pressure of the worst form.  " His voice quavers.  "I would
much prefer hearing about a parent spanking a little child.  I think
this is outrageously abusive, and ... pretty well confirms the way Marc
described how she put pressure on him and

Larry to do what she wants."

Was there any doubt in his mind as to whether this mother had once
hectored and raged at her older children in similar fashion?  He does
not know about

Larry, whom he has never met.  But he doubts Marc has been "abused in
the same sense Ariadne was."  Marc's dual role as his mother's stand-in
psychiatrist and standin husband, her reliance and dependence on his
ability in times of stress, would to a degree shield him from the total
abuse showered on the helpless Ariadne.

The "profound effect" of such an upbringing, says the doctor, is that
the child's "first priority is always to please his mother.  And to
prevent her from doing something dangerous to herself.  Or rejecting or
throwing him out of the household."

The doctor sees no "propensity for violence" in Marc's nature.  "I
think he was always trying to be the peacemaker in the family ... But I
think his efforts to please his mother, and prevent rejection,
transcended any judgment about right and wrong ... His mother's
influence was so strong that nothing else mattered."

Now, a key question: What is the matter with Frances?  Speaking as a
physician and psychiatrist, how would the doctor characterize her
personality?

Admittedly he has had little to go on, just a couple of interviews
with

Marc, plus the Ariadne Tape.  But he is not without a double-barreled
professional opinion.  "I had to use two different diagnoses to satisfy
my mind about her character."  First, he believes Frances suffers from
a narcissistic personality disorder, "which essentially means-I want
what I want when I want it.  And if I don't get it, there is going to
be trouble."

A person with a narcissistic personality disorder is pathological-i.e.
sick-"in the sense that the first-person pronoun is the most important
part of the alphabet."  The welfare of others, their comfort or
wellbeing, even their lives are of lesser importance.  He sounds
disgusted.

Second, Frances is a histrionic personality, someone who insists on
"being onstage all the time, being the center of attention, feeling
entitled to everything, feeling entitled to all of the attention, all
of the influence, always the center of the stage, so that everyone else
has to play roles around this person."

Uncannily, Dr.  Moench has just limned the primal scene on Gilmer
Drive, 1938: a baby squalling in her crib surrounded by the entire
family-both parents, two older sisters, and a brother -all of them
singing lullabies hour after hour as they try to quiet the howling
infant.

And here it comes, the invitation to express the expert opinion the
defense needs to support a manslaughter charge.  "Doctor, what do these
symptoms add up to?  I mean, how do you describe the nature of Marc's
personality?  Is he mentally illI I don't see him as mentally ill.  I
see him at the time of the alleged event, and much of the time
subsequently, as operating under extreme emotional turmoil."  In legal
jargon, this defines manslaughter.  The defense attorneys pound in
their point, and extract the response: "... Marc was operating under
extreme pressure as the result of his indoctrination, or brainwashing,
if you will, over a period of several years, and, in fact, over his
entire lifetime with his mother."

Cross-examination is handled by young David Walsh, a boyish expert in
the legal subspecialty of disparagement, derogation, flustering, and
deflation of pompous shrinks.  The moves on both sides are preordained.
How much is the doctor being paid?  No payment for testifying, the
usual rates for interviewing; total about $500, less than he would earn
from a private patient.  Would it not be important to talk to other
people besides Marc?

Granny perhaps, or Mom or Larry?  Not necessarily.  The examination of
the person himself is the most important thing.  Yes, but might not
Marc have a motive to lie?  "I suppose he may have had a motive, but I
don't think he lied to me."

Yes, of course Marc knew the diffierence between right and wrong.  No
question he knew he was breaking the law.  Dr.  Moench has never
suggested

Marc suffered any psychiatric illnes& No, he did not bother to perform
an

IQ test.  Marc is obviously in the normal range.  What did the doctor
do to assure himself Marc was telling him the truth?  "I've had
thirty-eight years' experience talking to people, and I think I can
tell usually when they are not telling me the truth."

Mr.  Walsh's cross-examination brings out that the old psychiatrist
knows virtually nothing of the defendant's other dirty deeds, his
prodigious thefts and forgeries-Walsh mentions a grand total Of "some
$365,000"-nor of his attempts to rip off his grandmother, to frame his
brother for murder, to poison his grandfather.  It does not matter to
Dr.  Moench.  That four years have passed does not matter; that Marc
told Behrens "it was easy" does not matter; that he wanted to kill
Manning does not matter.  If he knew Marc had been lying to him, it
still would not matter.  Nothing could change his professional opinion.
The defendant's mental state is one thing, the nature of the offense
which brings him before this court is another.  The oil and water of
law and psychiatry can simply never mix.  The only thing that matters
is: will the butterfly survive the meat ax?

But the testimony of Dr.  Moench has come as a surprise to the
prosecution; they heard about it only yesterday morning, when Carey and
Frankel arrived from the East.  That matters.  The prosecutors demand a
second opinion.  They want to bring in their own psychiatrist to
examine Marc.  Judge Sawaya says sagely that he would like to hear as
many expert opinions as possible.  Now

Tesch and Van Dam are unhappy.  They prefer that the court appoint a
second psychiatrist, rather than let the county prosecutors put on
somebody who is certain to be friendly to the State's cause.  In other
words, the law permits the defense to hire an expert and, in effect,
beg for mercy.  But it does not permit the State to hire an expert to
beg for vengeance on the part of the people of Utah.  Marc is protected
by the Fifth Amendment.

The defense rests.  The State has asked for a continuance, in order to
find its own psychiatrist.  In chambers, the defense points out that
this is not an insanity plea, and moves to bar a Stateappointed
psychiatrist from interviewing their client.  When Marc waived his
doctor-patient privilege, he did not also waive his Fifth Amendment
privilege.  If he were forced to undergo examination by a
State-appointed psychiatrist, he would in effect be forced to testify
against himself.

Tesch therefore objects to Jones's motion for a continuance, on ground
of "potential prejudice" to his client.  But the judge overrules him.
"Given the importance of this case, and the surprise nature of the
defense, the court would like to hear a second opinion."

By the time court reconvenes, Ernie Jones has discovered Dr.  Lee
Coleman, of Berkeley, California, a tweedy, spade-bearded,
forceful-speaking professor widely known in forensic circles as a
professional anti psychiatrist.  He is a medical mercenary, regularly
hired by prosecutors all over the nation to knock down the lofty,
God's-word-on-stone-tablets type of psychiatric testimony with which
Dr.  Moench has just favored this court.  "Have couch, will travel," as
the reporters say.

Dr.  Coleman today earns his fee several times over.  Point by point,
every one of Dr.  Moench's certitudes is swept away: psychiatric
expertise does not exist; psychiatry is not a science; it has no
diagnostic criteria; all judgments about the "mental state" of another
are perforce subjective.  Dr.  Moench's testimony has been
storytelling," not science.

The Ariadne Tape could be fabricated.  It is "preposterous" to make a
medical diagnosis on the basis of two two-hour interviews and a
one-hour tape.  How about Moench's statement, "I don't think Marc lied
to me."

Ridiculous!  Psychiatrists are no better than anybody else at
determining this sort of thing.  Usually, they're worse.

The defense recalls Dr.  Moench.  He sounds as positive as ever, his
voice rattling along like dry leaves in the wind.  On crossexamination,
Ernie

Jones draws out the somewhat surprising statement that the doctor wrote
out his eight green pages after his first two-hour examination.  The
second meeting was merely to double-check a few points.  Surely between
this man's hidebound assertions and Coleman's trendy, Bay Area
debunkery lies a middle ground.  Doubtless Judge Sawaya will find it.

Ernie Jones offers a quiet, nail-everything-down summation, dryly
expressing the State's gratitude to lawyer Frankel for confirming for
the court "all our suspicions, all of our hunches ... all of our
evidence."

He scoff is at the story of Marc's tearful, hour-and-a-half phone call
to

Frances the night before the crime begging to be let off the hook.
Where are the phone records of such a call?  He is skeptical of Marc's
timing with Frankel: Why does Marc implicate his mother only on the eve
of his extradition from New York?  Is this the action of an admitted
liar, admitted thief, admitted murderer who suddenly now wants to purge
his soul?  Or is it the action of someone trying, at the eleventh hour,
to lay off some of the blame?  Four years ago, Marc had tried to throw
suspicion for the murder on a robber.  If the police had actually found
a thief,

Marc would have let him hang.  As the cops drew closer, he tried to
blame his own brother.  He tried to blame his good Aunt Marilyn.
Finally, he points the finger at his own mother.

"She made me do it!"  he whines.  This is a defense made in
desperation, in despair.  There is no mental illness here.  What you
have is an extremely obedient young man who does what his mother tells
him.  But that is no defense for murder!  "Everything about

Marc Schreuder suggests a cold, calculating killer.  I ask this court
to return a verdict of first-degree murder."

The defendant has listened to all this with his face buried in his
hands.

Was he coached to sit this way?  Does he hide tears, or the lack of
them?

When his hands come down, his eyes are dry.

Joe Tesch's summation is a rather sentimental appeal.  Judge Sawaya has
six children.  Tesch has spent the Fourth of July weekend with his own
wife and children.  "It was a grand reflection to me on what children
are .  and how bizarre is the truth in this whole matter."  Tesch does
not mention that, for part of the weekend, he and Van Dam went off
horse racing in Idaho.  They might better have stayed home and worked
on their summation.  Trial buffs find the entire defense presentation
somewhat flaccid.

Tesch turns on his booted heel, sweeping an arm toward his client.
"This is not a boy on a mission of murder ... This is a boy on a
runaway boxcar, or a ship in a typhoon ... This boy has never known a
normal life ... never had a guardian with love ... He was entwined in a
web over which he had no control."  The Ariadne Tape is "an indication
of the severity of the storm" in which he was trying to survive.  "We
know he has a brother who is certifiably insane .  - ."  We know from
Ted Carey that

Frances Schreuder was the most difficult woman he ever met.  We know
the same things from Behrens, from Dr.  Moench.

"We live in the Christian-Judeo Western culture.  Our criminal justice
system says we do not ask for an eye for an eye or a life for a life-as
the State asks for today.  We ask for justice tempered by mercy."

Tesch does not suggest for a moment that Marc Schreuder did not intend
to kill his grandfather.  He suggests only that the motive was not the
one required by the statute for a finding of murder in the first
degree.  "The motive was to keep this boy from losing his mother."  And
with this remarkable assertion, the strange trial winds down.

JULY 6, 1982, 10 A.M. Judge Sawaya takes less than seven minutes to
deliver his verdict to a packed courtroom.  He has reviewed the
evidence over the weekend, and reached his decision: The defendant
intentionally and knowingly caused the death of his grandfather.
However, some reasonable doubt exists as to the circumstances.  The
evidence does not show that death was caused in the course of a robbery
for pecuniary gain.  It does show that the defendant caused the death
of franklin Bradshaw based upon the desires of another person.  He
finds him guilty of murder in the second degree.

Marc Schreuder is smiling and animated for the first time during the
entire trial.  But all the lawyers at both tables are visibly unhappy.
Tesch and

Van Dam refuse comment.  Ernie Jones has gone almost white and is
slumped in his chair.  In the corridor, his wife is in tears.  Jones's
boss, Salt Lake

County Attorney Ted Cannon, is the only person willing to speak for the
record.  "This is an election year, and I'll make a comment.  If this
wasn't a first degree murder, then it's hard for us to see what is."

Mike George made it his business to visit Marc Schreuder that
afternoon.

They were together more than three hours.  "Marc, this is the first day
of the rest of your life."

The prisoner affected not to hear.  "Know what the highlight of the
trial was for me?"  he smirked.  "Seeing how disappointed you guys
were."

"You're right, we were."

"You looked like you'd been bit in the face with a brick!"

Sergeant George suspected Marc was really just posturing, that in fact
he was scared, terrified of what his sentence might be.  Before the
trial, Mike knew, Marc had never considered himself a candidate for the
death penalty.

Then, during pretrial motions, one of his attorneys had made some
comment about Utah juveniles not getting the death penalty and Judge
Banks had quickly ticked off the names of six teenagers he himself had
sentenced to death.

Mike George hoped to keep Marc from dissolving in fruitless anxiety,
and to encourage him to make plans about his own future that were both
positive and realistic.  In sum, he said, "You know, Marc, you've now
got to become a man.  You didn't become a man by killing your
grandfather."  He told Marc he would be in the state penitentiary a
long time, and "You can make of it what you want to."  He knew that
Marc recently had been thinking a lot about suicide, that he had been
put on "suicide watch" both at Rikers Island and here in the county
jail awaiting trial, and that he had talked with

Vittorio about ending his life.  Mike urged him not to be afraid of
prison.

He told him that both college and trade study would be available to
him, and he de scribed the "Lifers' Program," in which prisoners
serving life sentences go out into the community and speak to school
and civic groups.  Marc seemed somewhat interested, he thought.

Mike also talked about ordinary, everyday things: his wife, his kids,
his daughter's dance recital.  Suddenly Marc blurted, "You know, Mike,
what

I really miss is Chicken McNuggets.  Every time I see that commercial,
I just get sick I want them so bad."

"Tell you what, Marc.  If I can arrange to get you some Chicken
McNuggets before you go up to the state prison, I will."

Judge Sawaya gave Marc the strongest sentence the law allows: five
years to life on the murder, plus another year for carrying a firearm,
plus five more for using a firearm in connection with a felony, and a
to,000 fine.  Were it not for the State's inability to prove pecuniary
motive, he said, Marc might be facing the death penalty.  As it was, he
recommended a long prison stay, and said he would oppose any move to
let

Marc out on parole after five or so years.

Marc appeared stunned.  He had expected to serve two or three years. 
He knew now it would be twelve or fifteen.  After Mike George heard the
sentence, he dropped in on the jail commander, a buddy, and asked
permission to take Marc out for a drive before he went to prison.

"If you lose him, it's your neck."

Mike and another cop went to Marc's jail cell.  "What are you doing
here?"

The color drained from Marc's face.

"Well, we took off," Sergeant George said later.  "We drove down
State

Street and pulled into a McDonald's.  His face just lit up.  He ate
three orders of Chicken McNuggets, a big Coke, a couple of orders of
fries.  He was just a happy little kid."

Sergeant George knew this would be his last chance before Marc went to
prison, and he decided to drive him around Salt Lake City and try for
answers to a few still unexplained questions.  The cop hoped Marc would
show him the motel where he had spent the night before the murder.

Sergeant George had already checked records and talked to room clerks
at forty hotels and motels within a one-mile radius of the warehouse,
and found no direct evidence of Marc's presence in the city.  Now he
learned that Frances had warned her son to stay as far away from
Bradshaw Auto

Parts as he could.  Marc pointed out the Best Western World Motel,
about three miles away.  Later, when Mike checked the Best Western

 R

one who could have been Marc.  Marc also pointed out a Ute taxi stand,
half a block from the warehouse.  That was where he had caught a cab
after the shooting, he said.  Mike had already checked out the taxi
rank; now he rechecked.  No cab driver could recall picking up Marc
Schreuder Sunday morning.

Driving south now on Interstate 15, Mike asked his prisoner the
question he had often asked Marc before, and would ask several more
times over the next fourteen months: Why, in spite of everything, did
he still refuse to testify against Frances?

The answer was always the same.  "I can't.  She's my mother and I love
her.

I also hate her.  But I love her and I can't."

Frances had remained resolutely away from Marc's trial.  Once he was
found guilty, she felt justified in severing all ties with her father's
convicted killer.  Berenice more or less agreed.  Before Marc's trial,
she had maintained at least an outward belief in her grandson's
innocence.

Later, she said she "had to abide by the court's decision."

Mary Lou Kaiser had attended every day of Marc's trial.  She had
refused to believe Marc was guilty until he switched his plea and she
heard the words of his own lawyer.  She became bitterly critical of
Frances.  "His mother didn't even show up!  She didn't do anything but
send a dumb lawyer.  I've got second sight.  That woman's a witch!"

Frances was equally contemptuous of Marc's unusual girlfriend, whom she
probably heard about from Berenice.  Long before Marc's trial got under
way, Frances had ordered her son, "Drop her!"

For once Marc had refused.  "She's the nicest girl I've ever met!"

So Frances hired private detectives to "get something" on Mary.  One
night a man came to her apartment.  "What's this thing with the
Immigration in 1978?"  he demanded, waving a photocopy of an
official-looking Immigration

Department document under her nose.

"Honey, I became a citizen in 1978," she laughed.  Had she not once
been arrested for harboring illegal aliens in her home?  Sure, she
said, but no charges were ever filed.  She giggled to think that the
man was being paid to snoop these things out.  "The old witch could
have saved her money, I would have told you everything, if you'd just
come and asked me.

I already told it all to Marc."

As sbon as new Inmate #159o6 was permitted to have visitors, Mary
resumed her shopping and baking.  Although Marc relished junk food, he
refused to eat anything made with preservatives or artificial coloring.
She never came to prison to visit him without bringing a homemade cake,
a bagful of take-out McNuggets, some of the homemade Mexican food he
loved, and sometimes a pizza too.  They snacked contentedly together
and played

Triaminos or Monopoly (Mary did not care for Stratego) while Monique
snoozed in her basket.  Mary had made up her mind to wait for Marc as
long as was necessary.  "I already been married three times.  I ain't
got anything to lose," she told a friend.

Mike George had arranged for Marc to be housed in the prison's
Special

Services section, where there were dormitories with individual rooms,
rather than cells, and where he would be somewhat sequestered from the
main prison population.  Marc told Mary he had decided to "pretend I'm
in an all-boys' cottage at college," and to take as many college
courses as regulations permitted.  "Even if they opened up the gates, I
wouldn't leave here until I finish college," he said.  She said she
thought he would make a damn good lawyer someday.

When Marc completed his freshman college year with a 4.0 average,
Mike

George somehow arranged a special reward.  He was going to spirit him
out of prison for a few hours, he said, and take him to see Return of
the

Jedi.  Marc climbed into Mike's unmarked two-door Ford, and there sat

Mary, squashed into the back seat.  After the movie the three of them
stopped at McDonald's.  Marc and Mary ate almost $30 worth of Chicken

McNuggets.

Another time, Mike arranged a quiet, out-of-prison meeting between Marc
and his father in Vittorio's motel room.  The visit, like the movies,
was part of Sergeant George's low-key campaign to win the trust and
respect of this untrustworthy, disrespectful, and troubled young man.
He had to make Marc understand that there was only one way out for him,
only one way he could stop being a "Mama's boy" and grow up.  The pain
would be excruciating, like lancing and cleaning an infected wound. 
But when it was over he would feel better.  The one way Marc Schreuder
could ever become a man, he said, would be to find the balls to testify
against his mother at her upcoming trial.  Marc listened, but he never
said a word.

During their long talks in the visiting room, Marc told Mary about his
life.  He told her his mother threw Larry out because she couldn't
manipulate him the way she could Marc.  "He had a mind of his own."  He
described the way his mother beat him with a belt buckle, and asked her
to feel the network of scars which crosshatched his scalp.  He spoke
about

Vittorio and said he could never recall his father being mean, but that
he had seen Frederik beat his mother cruelly, and that was when she had
started beating her sons.  Marc thought there was probably some
connection.

People had suggested to Marc that his mother had liked Vittorio to
smack her around a bit, that it stimulated her sexually.  Did women
really like that?  he asked.

Mary told him she "understood a lot about domination," that she'd had a
very strict, abusive father who never let her date, and who often beat
and terrified her.  "Honey, your mother don't know what beating is till
she been hit as many times as I have!"  Mary laughed.  Then she added,
"Maybe she didn't feel loved unless she got beat up."

Marc and Mary talked often about his mother's upcoming trial, and
whether or not he should testify.  He told her he was determined not to
make the decision until the very last possible moment-even though he
still had no idea what his decision would be.  Mary understood without
being told that

Marc was still terribly attached to his mother, that underneath all, he
still loved Frances very, very much.  She also knew he understood the
choice he was so plainly being offered: help Utah to convict Frances by
testifying against her, or spend much of the rest of his own life in
prison.

Marc kept asking his motherly girlfriend what she thought he should do.
She steadfastly refused to give him any advice whatsoever.  "Marc, I
want you to make that decision on your own.  Someday we may have a
fight.  And if that happens, there's three words I never want to have
to hear you say: It's your fault.  I couldn't bear that, Marc."

While Marc Schreuder was on trial in Utah, Ariadne was enrolled at
the

Briansky's ballet camp in Saratoga, N.Y. "We found Ariadne very
delightful, very independent and very smart.  But she was not like
other children.  She seemed to lack a certain ... spontaneity," says
Oleg.  In New York, he had noted, Ariadne never smiled.  In Saratoga,
she did.  "In Saratoga, Ariadne was like a different person.  She liked
to go swimming.  She had friends.  She liked going to ballets."

Only when her mother came to Saratoga, say the Brianskys, did Ariadne
change.  She stopped smiling.  "She went back into her shell."  Frances
insisted Ariadne have her own room, no roommate--she would pay the
difference.  "Mrs.  Schreuder didn't want Ariadne mixing any more than
necessary with the other children.  She always told her: stay alone,
stay in your room.  You have your dolls, " says Oleg.

Mireille adds, "We both always liked Ariadne very much.  A very, very
nice child."  Also, "We take her because we see that Ariadne never had
children around her, people her own age to play with.  It was a very
unnatural way of raising a child.  She had no friends.  We felt sorry
for her."

In New York, if her mother did not personally bring Ariadne to class,
she arrived with the elderly French maid.  She never went to other
girls' parties, nor gave parties of her own.

Frances would plan elaborate ballet-going afternoons for Ariadne and
the others, then fail to follow through.  She once invited a group for
a Sunday benefit performance and said she would pick them up at eleven
o'clock.  She did not arrive until one.  By then it was too late to
go.

Parents were not encouraged to visit their children at camp in
Saratoga, nor even invited onto the grounds; the other children became
too jealous.

Most parents understood.  Frances was not like other parents.  She
telephoned her daughter nightly and "kept the child on the phone for
hours."  She arrived for her first summer in Saratoga, put up at the
wanly elegant

Gideon Putnam Hotel and demanded daily visits with her daughter.  Like
everyone else, the camp directors soon found it pleas anter to say yes
to

Frances.  Mrs.  Schreuder was told she could take Ariadne off the
grounds and out to dinner, "in an inconspicuous way," after the other
children were already in the dining hall.  Inconspicuousness is not
Frances's mode.  On the street directly in front of the Briansky
Saratoga Ballet Center is a tall, overhead streetlight.  After one
dinner out with Ariadne, Frances backed her rented car into the light
pole with sufficient force to bring the whole thing crashing to the
street in a shower of sparks.

When camp ended in late August, the children were sent home by bus.
Parents were instructed to pick up their daughters at the Port
Authority Bus

Terminal.  No one showed up for Ariadne, so another mother took her
home with her own daughter.  At six that evening she telephoned to
Gracie Square; there was no answer.  She reported Ariadne's whereabouts
to a doorman.  Frances did not telephone back until eleven.

For some time, Williams & Connolly had been recommending to Frances
that she plead insanity, a suggestion the client did not find
appealing.  So

Frances found new counsel, lawyers who were willing to enter the plea
she wanted: Not Guilty.  Berenice Bradshaw was not notified of the
switch, she said later, until after she had paid the original law firm
a second $100,000o in addition to their $100,000 retainer.

Switching lawyers was essential, Frances then explained to her
mother.

Williams & Connolly were preparing deliberately to lose her case.  "You
see, a lot of people were angry because that Williams & Connolly got
that

Hinckley off," Berenice says.  Frances had become convinced her lawyers
"were ready to blow her case to make up for what they'd done for
Hinckley."

The new lawyers, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, the Roy Cohn firm, set a total
fee for their services of one million dollars, Berenice says.  It was
payable in advance, so she gave them a retainer, and they set about
seeking as many pretrial delays as possible while familiarizing
themselves with the case.

Their efforts won their client another twelve months of expensive
freedom during which she was able to continue without interruption her
tireless pursuit of cultural affairs.

Frances had an ambitious project in the works.  She now talked
continually-at board meetings, lunches, private dinners, backstage
during rehearsals, in the NYCB offices, at the School of American
Ballet, at the

Brianskys, during intermissions at the New York State Theater-about her
intention to make possible the greatest production of George
Balanchine's career, a massive new restaging of Tchaikovsky's four-act
The Sleeping

Beauty.  This was the fabled pink-and-gold ballet of the master's
youth, the period when he had danced with the Imperial Kirov Ballet and
appeared at the Maryinsky Theater in St.  Petersburg.  People had
talked for years about restaging it.  But such a production would cost
at least a million dollars.

It would require a huge corps de ballet, a revolving stage, and other
miracles of nineteenth-century stagecraft unavailable at the New York
State

Theater.  Others had always deemed these facts insurmountable obstacles
to

The Sleeping Beauty's rebirth.  But Frances was undaunted.  She
appeared to regard her proposed gift as a kind of choreographic Angel
Moroni glittering at the pinnacle of the magnificent edifice that was
George Balanchine's career.  But by fall 1982, all of

Balanchine's faculties were failing, and to his intimates it was
apparent that he would never again be able to walk properly, let alone
make more ballets.

During the fall season, says a fellow Board member, Frances often
seemed drunk or on drugs.  She was noisy and "talked loudly during
performance to any companion or neighbor, or to herself " On public
occasions she sometimes singled out Board members she disliked and
shouted, "You hate me!

You think I'm a murderess!"  The bizarre behavior grew so pronounced
that other Board members began to forgo their special, conspicuous
seats on the

First Tier, preferring to sit in anonymous quiet with the hoi polloi.
"We tried everything to discourage her from showing up.  We said her
tickets were lost in the mail---everything!  We just didn't want to be
bothered with her."

When the Ballet went to Washington in October for a Gala Benefit and a
week of performance at the Kennedy Center, it was deemed impossible to
bring

Frances along to the planned Board festivities.  She was told that
her

"State Department clearance hadn't come through," a transparent excuse
which she of course recognized.  "The truth is, we just didn't take
her.  She didn't participate with us.  Didn't come to the State
Department, for the lecture on antiques.  Didn't come to the parties,
the White House tour, the luncheons, the visits to museums.  Oh yes, of
course she came to Washington!

And she came to the theater.  I mean, she'd paid for her tickets.  It's
a free country."

When the time came to choose children for the Christmas 1982 production
of

The Nutcracker, the executive staff of the NYCB made an essentially
political decision, one with which David Richardson agreed.  While it
certainly would be wrong to drop Ariadne from the cast because of her
mother's notoriety, it would be equally wrong to make her extra
conspicuous by casting her in the main child's part that year of Marie,
the little girl who dreams the entire Nutcracker fable unfolding on
stage.  They decided this despite the fact that Marie was a role which
Ariadne was now probably proficient enough to handle.  As Marie, she
would be more visible to gossip writers.  She could become just the
sort of lightning rod to vulgar publicity which NYCB's company policy
always had been so careful to avoid.

Richardson also thought it might be cruel to spotlight Ariadne right
now.  Finally, it just wouldn't "cook well" to give the leading role to
the daughter of a prominent board member.

Accordingly, although Ariadne would normally have been at least a
contender for the role, Richardson was encouraged to look extra hard
for a different

Marie, and he found her.  Ariadne was assigned to dance the same part
as she had the previous year and, predictably, Frances took great
umbrage.  She detected unseen enemies both behind and in front of the
great gold curtain.

Berenice Bradshaw, deeply disappointed, laid the trouble directly at
the feet of "that scandal sheet, 'the New York' Times."  A few months
later, when Larry Bradshaw heard about the newest slur upon his family,
he recorded it in his newspaper, The Occupier.  Had it not been for the
malign influence of Aunt Marilyn and Vittorio, as he interpreted the
matter, his little sister "could have gotten the lead role."

In fact, says Richardson, the second child was in some ways a better
choice because, "while Ariadne has a lot of qualities, one thing she
does not have is the true quality of innocence this part calls for."
Also, Ariadne was still his tiniest dancer, and Marie is one of the
dancers who have to be paired by size: Four boys in pink pantaloons,
four girls in blue dresses.

Ariadne was so smah that Richardson could find no one else good enough
to pair her with.

"I was expecting, er, something ... and lo and behold, Lincoln Kirstein
calls me into his office and wants to know why Ariadne isn't in it.
Putting no pressure on me, you understand.  He just needed the reason.
And when I explained, he said, "That's fine.  I just wanted to check. I
was sure there would be a good reason.  But Mrs.  Schreuder wanted to
know."" To complain to

Kirstein about so lowly a matter is madly inappropriate, akin to
complaining to the Commander-in-Chief that one's son has not made it
into the Marine Corps Band.

Most truly sympathetic to Ariadne's painful position were some of the
other dancing children.  They resolved to do what they could to make
her life easier, less stressful, and not to disclose their plan to any
adults.  The dancer Jacques d'Amboise, very active in working with the
children at the

School, at length discovered that some of them had formed a conscious
cabal to protect Ariadne from needless slings and arrows.  Sympathetic
himself, he attempted gently to discuss the matter, but was re buffed.
"Trust no one over ten" seems to have been the "baby ballerinas' "
resolve.

In truth, Richardson had found a good role for his tiniest dancer in a
second ballet, and on November 9 Ariadne appeared onstage for the first
time in CoppOlia, the classic E. T. A. Hoffman fable about a doll-maker
who creates and brings to life a dancing clockwork automaton.  The
story is another variation on the theme of mechanical people breathed
into life by mad scientists; Dr.  Frankenstein's monster, invented by
Mary Shelley, being the best-known member of the genre.  Dancing dolls,
lurching hunks with bolts in their necks, and other michanikos of the
time reflected the era's growing obsession with the machine, the force
which was transforming the world.

At the climax of Copp&ia, in the Balanchine staging, twenty four
children appear and do a sort of fantasy Dance of the Hours, a sequence
of classical steps in pink tutus.  Richardson was appalled to discover
that, at each performance in which Ariadne appeared, Frances sat in her
Board seat with notebook and opera glasses, making copious notes on
every move.  Afterward she could be overheard shouting her critique to
Ariadne.  NYCB considers personal comparisons between dancers odious,
invidious, bad manners.  Like the "star system," it is understood that
comparisons are "not done."

Invariably, Frances could be heard telling her daughter, "Your ~166 was
not as high as Gloria's!  You did not point your feet like Eleanora in
the pas de chat!"

Asked to rate Ariadne as a dancer, Richardson is judicious,
scrupulous.

"She's disappointing at times, because she's almost really good.
Ariadne is technically very proficient.  She learns very quickly.  But
she doesn't speak with her face what she's feeling, as a lot of
children do.  And if you correct her, you don't get the satisfaction
that the correction went inside of her and meant something.  She just
stares back at you.

"She does do it.  She just needs to be more energetic.  But you can't
find a way to make her go that extra level.  She simply won't be
pushed.  She's the only child I've ever met who-when you ask her to try
a bit harder--doesn't change at all.  Very strange.  Other kids, when I
push them very hard, get a certain look on their face: you're driving
me crazy.  Stop it!  I can't stand it any morel But Ariadne would just
stare back at me.

"I always thought: I've never failed any child before, when I gave 'em
my pep talk.  And took my patience, and my energy Got up and exerted
... put out double the amount of energy than

I would use myself, in order to ... show it-almost becoming a cartoon
figure.  Yet I still could not get her to ... open up.  I always felt
bad.  "y can't I reach that girl?"

Whatever the reason, Coppelia, the ballet of mechanical dancing
dollies, seemed to suit Ariadne's personality better than The
Nutcracker's enchanted world of childhood innocence.  "Ariadne does not
exactly breathe exuberance and happiness when she is performing.  She
never looks transcendent.  She doesn't make mistakes.  But she wasn't
on that special plateau.  She had none of that sense of excitement and
joy in her body which so many dancing children have.  Though she was
always very well-disciplined.  Very good."  In sum, a nine-year-old
michanikos, truly a dancing dol lie

By December, new alliances and relationships were forming on the far
side of the footlights in anticipation of the trial to come.  Michael
Rosen, the top trial man at Saxe, Bacon, was planning the same defense
for Frances

Schreuder which he had used successfully with every criminal defendant
in the past eight years: put on no witness whatsoever, and rely on his
own forensic skills, plus his client's presumption of innocence, to win
an acquittal.  As Rosen prepared himself for this trial, the darkest
cloud he saw on the horizon was his client's son.  On December 6, Rosen
glimpsed

Marc Schreuder for the first time at the preliminary hearing of Case
No.  8z-CRS-0795, State of Utah, Plaintiff.  vs.  Frances Schreuder,
Defendant,

Fifth Circuit Court, State of Utah, in Salt Lake City.  The lawyer was
not favorably impressed.  He saw a "dangerous animal."  Frances was not
present.

She was in a New York hospital, Rosen explained to the judge, with a
gynecological ailment.  She was required to be present for her
arraignment, however, and she appeared in the Salt Lake County
Courthouse for the first time on December 16, iq8z.  The press
described a woman who looked ill, white and silent, was draped to her
ankles in black mink, and spoke but two words: "Not Guilty."

To escape family pressures, always worst during the holidays,
Berenice

Bradshaw had signed up for another sightseeing tour, had flown alone
to

Cape Town, South Africa-Chips had to be in Washington, D.C."  on family
business--and "spent Christmas out with the zebras."  Larry celebrated
the holidays by attempting to place collect phone calls to every member
of his family.  The only person who accepted was Vittorio.  Larry
wished him and his family a Merry

Christmas and said cheerfully, "Only ten weeks to go!"  Then he
expected to be paroled into Threshold, a halfway house program which
helps offenders like Larry readjust to life in the outside world.  A
condition of his parole was that he report regularly for Prolixin
injections, his antipsychotic medication.  The drug made him heavy and
lethargic, and Larry did not believe he needed it, but he was willing
to cooperate with any plan that would get him out of the prisons and
hospitals where he had spent the past two years.

In prison, Marc was carrying a full academic load and taking as many
self-improvement courses as he could fit in-first aid, emergency room
care, psychology, and professional culinary skills.  He was not really
unhappy.  He is phobic about doors and lockouts and for years has
feared every time he approached a strange door that it would not open
or, if it was open, that it would slam before he could reach it.  Here
in prison he felt safe.

I have my own room.  I have my own key.  And I'll never be o'eked out
again," he told a visitor.  "In a way this place is like a blessing. 
My room is mine.  Nobody's gonna ransack the place and take all my
property away.  Nobody's gonna demand that I go down to the commissary
and get them food and stuff.  I'm my own person here.  I can worry
about me.  I can worry about getting my own life straightened out.  So
in a way, you know-I feel really-really happy here!  In a way, I've
never had it so good."  He has begun to slip again into his taped
"Rockford Files" dialogue.  "Yeah, I'm in prison.  Yeah, my freedom's
taken away.  In a way, though, I have more freedom here than I had at
home."

Tesch and Van Dam were critical of Vittorio for refusing to testify
during Marc's trial, but Marc was entirely forgiving.  "It would only
have embarrassed Poppa," he says, "and it would not have done any good
for me.

He didn't know me!  He didn't know the history ... " Marc had in fact
begged his father not to come to Utah.  He did not want him to see his
son sitting in jail or on trial for murder.

"He's one man I really love and really respect," Marc says today.  "I'm
sorry I knew him as late as I did.  I think that if I had grown up with
him-Poppa and I have talked about this-I would never have done what I
did, I think that if I'd grown up with him I'd have been at least ...
somebody worthwhile."

Awaiting trial, Marc had often been bitter, morose.  Vittorio told him,
"Any time you want to call me, my door is always open."

"The very opposite of Mom!"  Marc points out.  "I used to call him from
the county jail when I was real depressed, and any time he'd hear my
voice, he'd say, "Ofa course!  Ofa course I accepta da call!"  Marc is
a perfect mimic of both his parents.  "All I'd ever heard from Mom was:
"Nol No!  I won't accept."  Always with Mom it was cutting off, locking
doors, not accepting charges.  With Pop it's-My door is always open.
Yes, I will accept charges.  "He's just so loving!  I mean, I wasn't
used to that.  At first I was very embarrassed.  I was very shy.  I
didn't know how to deal with this.

Especially his love, his kisses ... and just his open door policy."

Without question, the best thing that happened to Marc during his first
fourteen months behind bars was his visit with Vittorio.  Once again
Mike

George had been almost magically helpful.  Marc was ashamed to have to
meet his father in the prison visiting room, and somehow Sergeant
George was again able to escort Marc out of state prison to a quiet and
private meeting-indeed, two of them-in Vittorio's Utah motel room.

In November George Balanchine had entered the hospital for the last
time.

His decline was precipitate.  A poignant, prolonged Slavic deathwatch
set in.

Visitors arrived from around the world.  One of Frances's gifts was a
ravishingly beautiful floral bouquet as big as a small tree.  It
literally filled the room and was banished by the nurses to the
corridor as hopelessly impractical.  In fact, if the object of the
exercise was to distract the dying man from his torment, the floral
extravaganza was probably more "practical" than all the medical
paraphernalia.

Alas, after Frances Schreuder had shown up two or three times at
Roosevelt

Hospital, it became necessary to instruct the round the-clock nurses to
deny her further access.  (Since Balanchine had no family,
responsibility for his care was assumed-at his request, when he was
still well enough to make requests-by a dear friend whom we shall call
here Giselle.)

In January, the special nurses called Giselle to report that "One of
Mr.

B's visitors is a very disturbed woman."  She had a habit of intense
staring which upset some of the younger nurses.  She hung around.  On
one occasion, the nurses had to call hospital security and ask them to
escort Mrs.  Schreuder from the sickroom.

Shortly afterward, Giselle began to be awakened by anonymous phone
calls at two or three in the morning.  The telephone harassment became
so intensive that it was necessary to take the phone off the hook each
night in order to get any sleep.  The all night nurses were instructed
that-if

Mr.  B took a sudden turn for the worse, or died in the night--someone
would have to come personally to knock on the door and notify
Giselle.

The phone was off the hook.  It was too risky to change the phone
number during this period, lest the dying man miss some important
message.  Calls from Paris and even Moscow were commonplace in the
melancholy last months.

When, predictably, the phone rang at three or four o'clock on the night
after Balanchine's death, April 30, 1983, Giselle picked it up and
said,

"He's dead now.  You can stop torturing me."  After that, the anonymous
calls did stop, which appeared to confirm that they were

Balanchine-related.  Although Frances claims to have visited Mr.  B in
the hospital in November, bringing with her the first copy off the
press of the big book she had mostly paid for, Choreography by
Balanchine, Nancy

Lassalle, the Board member who organized and ran this book project,
says this is entirely untrue.  "The first copy was given by me to
George!  This whole story of her giving it to Balanchine is absolute,
total inventionl-based on her hearing that we had sent a special copy
to the hospital, one that we had made up for him.  It has nothing-but
zilch-to do with her!  ZILCH!"

The anecdote confirms Frances's pattern: she incorporates pieces of
other people's lives into her own.  It is a kind of psychic vampirism.
She eats other people's stories.  One might call her a biographage.

Although Frances speaks often of the "intense spiritual relationship"
which developed toward the end between herself and Mr.  B, and says she
helped him recover long-buried memories of the days when he was a
ten-year-old, just learning to dance, this too seems unlikely.  By

January--date of her first confirmable hospital visit-"he may not even
have recognized her," says Giselle.  After Christmas, Balanchine
deteriorated greatly.  He talked less and less and no longer in
English; sometimes he spoke French, increasingly he spoke only Russian.
He suffered "strong dementia, terrible nightmares, terrible
illusions"

In January or February Frances had another backstage tantrum.  Ariadne
had somehow displeased her mother and suddenly, "downstairs, where all
the other girls could see and hear," says David Richardson, Frances
began shouting and waving a fifty-dollar check.  "How would you like to
live on only this much moneyl I'm going to leave you right here for
good!

Here-take it!  You'll never have any more money from me again!"

She tossed the check on a table, left Ariadne standing amid the other
girls, and walked out.  Again Richardson thought Ariadne seemed
strangely unfazed, "as if this had happened before."

One of the Ballet's most popular forms of fund-raising is the Sunday
afternoon tU.  Parents love to bring children dressed up in their
Sunday best to see the special dance programs and sip wine or tea
afterward at pretty little tables decorated with fresh flower baskets
set up on the theater's Promenade level.  Frances and Ariadne attended
a the in late

February.  "We were shocked that she would show up!"  a Board member
said later.  "We had tried everything to discourage her."  Once again,
Frances was refusing to accept no for an answer.

"After the performance, we couldn't seat anyone with them.  No one
wanted to be seen with them."  So mother and daughter sat at a little
round table by themselves, the last time they were glimpsed together on
a public occasion.  When it ended, the other patrons and children
watched the pair of them make their careful way down the marble
staircase taking home souvenirs of the occasion.  Frances had the
programs and the gift bottle of wine, and Ariadne carried the basket of
flowers.

Berenice and Chips spent January and February cruising around South

America and ended up in Rio de Janeiro in time for Car navaL "Travel
and dancing-that's what I enjoy the most," Berenice says.  "Chips and I
do ballroom dancing.  We don't like this disco stuff.  We danced every
single night, all the way around Cape Horn!"

In March, Frances turned up in Berkeley, California.  It was early

Thursday morning when Sam Drukman, Elaine's son, looked out of the
window of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, another Berkeley
graduate student, and saw a strange woman across the street
photographing his building's entryway and vestibule.  A silver
Mercedes-Benz with its motor running and a driver behind the wheel was
parked down the block.  Sam had seen the woman once before--at his
grandfather's funeral, wearing a funny little black hat and veil.  When
Sam came back from the grocery store

Saturday morning, the same woman was just leaving his vestibule.  She
had some letters in her hand.  Sam shouted, and started chasing her
down the block.

"Give him the goddam mail, Frances!"  yelled the woman in the
Mercedes.

Frances dropped the letters, leaped in, and the car sped off.

Utah authorities had always worried lest Frances take off for South

America or parts unknown.  They were determined not to be robbed of
their prize before she could be brought to justice.  A condition of her
bail required her to telephone her whereabouts personally to Mike
George twice a week.  When Mike was told about the events in Berkeley,
he attempted unsuccessfully to lodge a charge of mail tampering, a
federal offense, in order to get her bail revoked.

When Marilyn Reagan heard about the odd episode, she concluded that

Frances hoped by stealing the mail to prove to Berenice that twenty
-five-year-old Sam had a live-in girlfriend.  If such an impropriety
could be demonstrated, Granny could be persuaded by Frances to
disapprove of it, and that would drive a further wedge between the
Frances- Berenice entente and the Marilyn-Elaine axis.  Marilyn knew
that Frances had a penchant for plotting, snooping, and scheming.  She
had tried to involve

Marilyn in the same sort of amateur sleuthing during the Gentile
divorce.

During her Schreuder divorce, she had made Dickie Behrens her partner
and confidante and used his apartment as a repository for her
"evidence."  If

Marilyn was right-and Mike George thought she probably was-the woman in
the Mercedes was the new Behrens.

Elaine had a more sinister interpretation.  She saw a possible
assassination plot by her sister against her sons.  "No amount of money
is 'enough' for Frances," Elaine had often told Mike.  "She's a
bottomless pit.  The depth of her greed and avarice is not to be
believed."  Elaine thought Frances was now looking for ways to
eliminate all rival grandchildren who might make a claim on Berenice
Bradshaw's estate.  She and Marilyn knew that her mother had rewritten
her own will at least twice since their father's murder.  She was
fairly sure that Marc already was disinherited; Larry's standing had to
be doubtful, at best.  So if the

Drukman boys could be disposed of, that would leave only Ariadne
Elaine thought the photographs were probably intended for the guidance
of a future "hit man."

On March 14, Larry Bradshaw's parole came through and he moved to a

Threshold Residence in Reading, Pa.  In a few weeks, if he did well, he
would be permitted to move from the Residence to a furnished apartment
shared with two other parolees.  If he got a job, stayed clean, took
his medicine, stayed in touch with his parole officer-all of which he
was determined to do-he could expect to be in his own apartment
before

Christmas.  Another year, and he would be off parole entirely.

Larry's first act as a free man, as he himself noted in his March

Occupier, was to buy "some supplies for the Occupier magazine, and a
book on Colleges, and a 1983 Almanac."  A major story in his first
issue after his enforced three-year hiatus from publishing reports:

LARRY CAPTURES STALINGRAD

Larry and Marc had a game.  Whoever's fortunes were furthest ahead,
would have their troops furthest ahead.  It refers to the fortunes of
life.  Right now Marc is in a Utah State penetentary.  He's been their
io months now and has nine years to go.  So he's not doing too well.
Larry for the past 31/2 years has been securely locked up at NCP, doing
equally as bad, so according to the game he was almost kicked off the
earth.  Now his German Panzer divisions have finally captured
Stalingrad.

Larry did indeed become a model parolee.  He got two jobs-working in a
clothing outlet store, and doing more of the canvassing work he enjoyed
and performed so well-and soon bought two more used cars.  He dieted,
went back to college, and began finding new girlfriends, and now that
he was free and over twenty-one, started taking steps to cash out his
shares of F & B stock-all of which he reported in his Occupier& By
Christmas, after several chats with Mr.  Goodfellow at Morgan Guaranty,
and with numerous other family bankers and lawyers, Larry had been able
to trace down and have reissued at least some of his trust fund checks
which had been sent to him care of Frances, and cashed by her and Marc,
during Larry's imprisonment.

He had also prevailed on Berenice to sign the necessary papers
permitting him to cash out completely.  With his first $30,000 from F &
B he bought two more cars, an apartmentful of new furniture, stereo and
camera and other equipment.  As soon as he was permitted to leave the
state, he began working off his inexhaustible energy on furious
no-sleep motor trips.

Over one long weekend he drove to Nova Scotia and back.  Another time
he drove out to see Palm Springs and Santa Monica.  These excursions
too were recorded in his Occupier's, well illustrated with bright
colored marking pens.

On April io, Ariadne was ten years old.  And on April 30, George
Balanchine died.  The long, elaborate Russian Orthodox services drew
thousands of mourners.  Many wept in the streets.  Inside the
cathedral, hundreds of grieving Russian friends, and dancers, artists
and balletomanes of all ages stood squeezed together amid icons and
incense during the solemn two-hour ritual.  Every great dancer who
could attend did, including four of

Balanchine's five ex-wives.  Each of the mourners held a lighted taper.
The satin lined casket was open to the waist and tilted toward the
multitude.  One by one, the long file of weeping, candle-holding
dancers and friends moved to the altar and bent to leave a goodbye kiss
on the waxen cheek.  It seemed to be part state funeral and part suttee
as the cortege of grieving women leaned their long bodies across the
master's own to bid him farewell.

The service had been intentionally planned as a public event.  The
burial was meant to be kept just as deliberately private.  Only two
black limousines had been rented to carry the closest friends behind
the hearse out to the little cemetery in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where
Balanchine had asked to be laid to rest.

Except that three black limousines made the journey.  In the third one,
a woman entirely dressed in black sat alone, weeping convulsively.
Mascara ran down her cheeks.  She wore elbow length black gloves and on
her head was a little black hat like a witch's cap perched in a cloud
of black veil.

By July, Frances had got word of Vittorio's Utah visits to Marc.  She
told

Berenice that sister Marilyn was paying Vittorio to "get me."  The next
time

Larry telephoned his mother, she accepted his call.  "Marc and Vittorio
are out to hang me, Larry," she said.

Larry was very happy to talk to his mother.  Later he told a friend, "I
think my Mom's starting to like me again."

Frances rented a house in Saratoga for the month of August.  To the

Brianskys, she seemed more determined than ever to keep other children
away from Ariadne.  "When Ariadne came back the second year, I found
she had lost a little bit that spark, that interest in her dancing,"
says

Mireille.

Each summer the Brianskys give a demonstration for parents and friends
at camp, as they also do in spring at their New York City school.  That
spring, Frances had sat in the front row.  "She didn't even applaud!"
says another parent.  "She must have thought her daughter was not good
enough.

Sometimes she would say: "I love you.  "Sometimes we heard her say: 7
hate youl' The child never knew.  She had the life of an adult.  No
friends."

But mother and daughter had new friends, adults to be sure, in
Saratoga.

Chris Alexander and Shaun O'Brien lived just a few houses away and soon
were inviting their delightful and strange new acquaintances over for

Saturday lunch or tea.  Alexander, the portrait photographer, says, "I
was absolutely riveted by Frances's expression.  She had a haunting
look, the eyes always way over to one side.  She looked terrified.
Flora Robson could play the part."

The children gave a demonstration on the last day of camp.  There was
to be a reception after the performance, and then Frances and Ariadne
were taking a taxi to Albany to catch the plane to New York.  Labor Day
weekend was coming up.  School would be starting next week.  Jeannie
Columbo, a young and warmhearted ballet usher, had been hired to move
in to io

Gracie Square and look after Ariadne.  Frances would be flying to
Utah.

On Tuesday morning, the day after Labor Day, she had an appointment
in

Salt Lake City.

So the reception after the demonstration at camp was really to be the
end of a dream, the finale to the beautiful fantasy life which
Frances

Schreuder had been living with increasing intensity for nearly five
years, perhaps longer-who knows when it began?-but certainly ever since
the magical November night when she had first seen the bright figure
of

Baryshnikov leap and hang weightless for an instant against the painted
sky.  As happens in fairy stories, it was a happy ending.  For at the
demonstration, Shaun O'Brien saw Ariadne dance for the first time. 
That is, he was sure for the first time which pony-tailed little dancer
she was, and he knew that she was good.

"That kid has got something!"  he told Chris sincerely, driving home
after the reception.  "You very rarely see that quality in a child."

Frances and Ariadne had been invited to stop by and say farewell to
their new friends on the way to the airport, and now Shaun was
especially looking forward to the visit.

"Wow!  Ariadne is something wonderful!"  he told her mother.  Frances
beamed.

It began to rain, a savage summer storm.  Later Chris told a friend,
"It was very foul weather, and I heard myself suggesting that I drive
them to the airport.  I think because I liked that little girl.
Normally, I don't like children much."  The two men were astonished by
how much luggage Frances had, but somehow they got it all stowed in
their Toyota, Ariadne sitting on top, for the jolly ride to Albany.

Shaun O'Brien had felt sorry for Mrs.  Schreuder's daughter ever since
he'd heard her sad story and learned of the cruelty of the other
backstage mothers.  He had always hoped to find a way to do something a
little special for the child.  But frankly, before today's
demonstration, he was never absolutely certain which child she was.  To
him, all small girls in tights and ponytails look pretty much alike.
Now he knew, and he even thought he had found a way of doing it.  From
now on, he told Chris, no matter what the other children did, he as
Herr Drosselmeier could always make sure that

Ariadne was the child who got the first nut.

In the magical way of fairy tales, the weekend would prove to be a kind
of happy ending for each member of the damned and doomed family.
Shortly after

Berenice had moved all her money East, her new lawyers at Rogers &
Wells had presented her with a draft of a proposed new will, a will
dividing her estate equally among her three daughters.  She had not
asked for a new will; it had simply been submitted for her
consideration.  Eventually she had signed it.  It seemed the fair thing
to do.  Now, on Gilmer Drive, on the very eve of her daughter Frances's
trial, the same thing happened again.

The newest lawyers, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, had submitted a new draft of
yet another will for her to inspect and approve.  This one left
everything to

Frances.  Berenice said she wanted to sleep on it.  She did not want
the lawyers to know she had already made up her mind, even though she
had.

Out at Point of the Mountain that weekend, a new prisoner was
transferred to Marc Schreuder's cottage.  He asked Marc whether he
happened to know an acquaintance of his, Mike George?

Marc smiled.  "Mike George?  He's my best friend in the whole world."

MONDAY, SEPTEMBERrg, 1983, 2 P.m. It is afternoon now on the first day
of testimony in the murder trial of Frances Bradshaw Schreuder.  The
lawyers made their opening statements this morning.  Then the jury
heard brief testimony from Ernie Jones's first two witnesses, the
customer who discovered Franklin Bradshaw's body, and the medical
examiner who autopsied it.  By that time it was time for lunch.  Now
the entire cast of characters has reassembled in the round blue
courtroom.  Everybody, that is, save the twelve jurors and two
alternates; for some reason, they are still offstage.  The defendant is
again seated between her lawyers, Mike

Rosen, John Lang and Kevin Kurumada, toying with her gold-and-ivory
pen.

The play is about to resume.

Bang of gavel.  Judge Baldwin says quietly, "Call Marc Schreuder to the
stand."  Frances's camel coat is thrown back over her chair, and her
hands grip the counsel table so hard that her body shakes.  A
baby-faced young man in prison denims stands blinking in the doorway
from judge's chambers, then duck-waddles across the arena to the
witness chair, sits, smiles at the prosecutors.  He does not look at
his mother.  His blue-eyed glance appears stapled onto Mike George's
face.  He swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but in a firm,
strong voice.

Judge Baldwin looks worried.  "Is he aware that since his case is on
appeal, he does not have to answer any questions?  Has he had the
advice of a lawyer?"

Marc says yes, several lawyers, "and I have come to the decision to
testify at this time."  He has done this in spite of the lawyers'
advice that he withhold cooperation until he has something in writing
from the prosecution stating what they intend to do for him in
return.

Marc has nerved himself to dive off the high board.  It must be now or
never.

The defense lawyers look smitten.  Rosen pleads for more time to
prepare.

Judge Baldwin permits only a ten-minute recess before the seven women
and five men jurors and the two alternates come marching in,
blank-faced and squinting in the glare, to take their double row of
seats.  The young fellow in the witness chair gives the clerk his name,
Marc Francis

Schreuder, and spells it out.  "S-C-H-R-E-U-D-E-R."

The jurors keep their poker faces.

Ernie Jones stands up and asks in a kindly tone of voice, "Marc, how
old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"How are you related to Franklin Bradshaw?"

"I am his grandson."

"And are you familiar with the defendant in this case?"

Looking right at her for the only time in two hours of testimony,
"Yes,

I am ... She's my mother."

"Mr.  Schreuder, who killed Franklin Bradshaw?"

"I did ... I shot him."

"What is it that led you to kill your grandfather?"

"My mother asked me to."

"Whose idea was it to kill your grandfather?"

"My mother's."  His voice is totally without emotion.  He might be
saying "vanilla."

She had been talking about the murder for three years.  The first time
she'd mentioned her plan they were alone in the apartment, or "perhaps
my brother" was there.  "In a joking sort of way, she said that we were
broke, and we had no source of income, and that killing grandfather was
the only way of assuring we would have funds to sustain the family
through the years."

The first time Frances suggested that Marc himself do it was the
summer

Of 1977.  Marc and his brother "came out to steal some money for Mom,
and at the same time we were also supposed to kill grandfather."

"How were you supposed to kill your grandfather?"

"Put amphetamines in his oatmeal and make him have a heart attack ..

I got them from my mother."

"Did you attempt to kill your grandfather in the summer of 1977?"

No.  But they had discussed two alternative plans: "One involved
burning down the warehouse, knocking him out ... and leaving him
inside.

Another one involved throwing some kind of electrical appliance in the
bathtub while he was taking his morning bath."

Did his mother also instruct him to steal?

Yes.  In the summer Of 1977, "I took stocks, checks and cash" which
were either in the till, or hidden in the warehouse.  He took checks
from

Granny's house.  He and Larry got "I think approximately $200,000,
mostly in stocks, but about $30,000 in checks, and $3,000 or $4,000 in
cash."

"What did you do with all these stocks, and the cash and the checks
that you took?"

"I sent everything back to my mother except for ... about $500 to
$i,000 I kept of the cash."  His grandfather found out about some of
the thefts.  "He was very angry."

Defense lawyer Lang looks horror-stricken.  The jurors appear
stunned.

Frances has got hold of herself and regards the witness with a level
gaze.

Marc is describing how he called home twice daily for further
instructions, sometimes making collect calls from the warehouse, or
from

Gilmer Drive, but most often using pay phones because such calls cannot
be traced.  When Marc was unable to call, his brother Larry checked
in.

Individual calls often lasted two or three hours.

"Did any of them involve the death of Franklin Bradshaw?"

Like an eager puppy hearing its name: "Oh yes!"  Marc's broad face,

Dutch-boy bangs and the blue prison shirt cut like a painter's smock
give him an air both sinister and childlike, very like the Night
Kitchen figures drawn by Maurice Sendak.

That same summer, at his mother's request, Marc took a great many
photographs of his grandparents, their home and the warehouse.  He
brought them to Dragon's Hall, his Mom's Long Island summer home, as
soon as he returned from Utah.  She said she needed them to show to a
potential "hit man," someone her friend Mr.  Behrens said was connected
with the Mafia, and who was willing to assassinate her father for
$5,000.  When this scheme fell through, his mother had tried to hire a
second hit man.  Then she told Marc he would have to do the job
himself.  Both he and Behrens tried to purchase a weapon in New York,
New Jersey and Virginia.  Finally

Frances came up with the name of a schoolmate from Texas, and she stood
beside Marc writing out his dialogue on a yellow legal pad while he
spoke to the boys' parents from a pay phone in the foyer of the
Schreuders' New

York City apartment house.

She had stood beside her son again, in early July, and forced him to
phone his grandparents, say they were being evicted, and plead for a
last $3,000.  If they would just come through one more time, he
promised never to ask for money again.  When the check arrived, it was
made out to his half sister Ariadne.  Morn cashed it and gave some of
the money to Marc to buy the gun and plane ticket.  They booked passage
under the name "L.  Gentile" because "Mom didn't want my name on the
ticket.  So if the police found out anything, suspicion would be cast
on Larry instead of me."

"Your mother suggested you use his name?"

"She insisted I use his name!"

It seems an appropriate moment for recess.  Reporters rush to the
phones.

Marc had not been expected to take the witness stand at all, certainly
not on opening day.  Nor had anyone anticipated such devastating
testimony.  The story he is telling is so unrelievedly wicked, and is
related in such deadpan tones, that the spectator is moved to giggle as
often as gasp.  The experience is less like watching a Friday night
horror movie than the kiddie cartoon mayhem on Saturday morning.

Resuming, Marc describes calling his mother from the motel the night he
arrived in Salt Lake City.  They talked for about two hours.  "I told
Mom .  there was no way I could go through with it.  She said, "If you
don't do it, don't come home again."  She made it clear to me."

Marc took a taxi to the warehouse the next morning, hid behind the
loading dock until he saw his grandfather arrive.  They talked about
fifteen, twenty minutes.  "About grandfather sending money to Mom.
After the conversation, I shot him."

"Where was he when you shot him, Marc?"

"I just remember two shots ... I waited until he turned his back
because I couldn't shoot him while his face was to me."

Marc got back without incident to the Schreuders' New York apartment.

"Marc, do you remember her reaction when you told her, "I did it?  "

"She said ... Thank God!  Then she ran up to me, and hugged and kissed
me, stuff like that."

Frances wanted to give the gun to Behrens to take home with him that
night.  When he refused to take it, "she locked it up in her little
white cabinet ... little white desk."

"Do you know why your mother wanted Behrens to keep the gun?"

She was afraid of a search warrant.  His mother had always confided
in

Behrens and previously had used him to hide other items-legal documents
during her divorce, for example.

"Marc, would you have told anyone else about killing Franklin Bradshaw
besides your mother?"

"Just Mr.  Behrens.  And a little bit my brother."  the jury sits
frozen-faced, unbelieving; two rows of department store mannequins
bolted into their chairs.  Marc tells them about his mother's joint
bank account and Behrens' increasingly frantic efforts to recover his
money.

Ernie Jones says very quietly, "Marc, did your mother have the $3,700
to pay Mr.  Behrens back?"

"Yes, she did."

"Do you know why she wouldn't pay him the $3,700?"

Matter-of-factly, "Because she was always broke."

The story moves to Marc's arrest at Trinity College, his release on
bail, his return to his mother's apartment where she was already
working on

Behrens to recant his original statement and blame Marilyn Reagan.

His Aunt Marilyn!  "Your mother instructed Behrens to change his story
and blame her sister?"

The prosecutor's raised-eyebrow tone of voice is unnecessary,
excessive.

"Marc, was Marilyn Reagan ever involved in the murder of your
grandfather?"

"No, she was not."

"What about your other aunt, Elaine Drukman?"

"No."

In July or August 1981 Marc moved out.  His mother suggested he leave
the country.  He did not and was arrested in October at a postal letter
drop he had set up.  His attorney was David Frankel and, after many
talks, eventually he told him the whole truth.

"You ever implicate anyone else?"

"Objection!"

"Sustained."

Marc received no money as a result of his grandfather's death.  His
mother received an allowance from the estate, $3,000 a month.  Later,
at her request, this was increased to $5,000.

The judge interrupts to make clear to the jury that "The $3,000 a month
we're talking about was not a result of the will of Franklin
Bradshaw."

It is not evidence of pecuniary interest.

Yes, Marc recalls talking to Dr.  Moench, and he recognizes Exhibit
#21.

"This is one of my tapes."  He made it in '78 or'79.  The voices are
"Mom,

Ariadne, and for a moment, me."

"Marc, were you subjected to any kind of pressure from your mother, as
a child?"  I

"If she wanted you to do something ... it was impossible to say no ..

She just keeps harping and harping on you ... She'd scream, or yell, or
go into hysterics ... You just don't tell Mom no."

Ever lock him out?

"Sure she did."

For how long?

"Until I'd thought about it."

"How often would this occur, Marc?"

"All the time."

"Were you afraid of your mother?"

"Object!"

"Sustained."

"Marc, what is it then that led you to kill your grandfather,
Franklin

Bradshaw?"

A little too quickly, "My mother ordered me to ... I didn't really have
a choice ... Eventually, at some point in time, I knew I would have to
do it ... My biggest concern was, God, Mom would hate me forever.  She
would .  never let me back in the house."  She had said it to him on
the phone the night before the murder.  ""Doors can be opened, and
doors can be locked'-y'know?"

"Has the decision to testify in this case been a difficult one for
you?"

"Object!"  Rosen is snarling now.  Sustained."  "Have you had second
thoughts about testifying here today?"  :, Yes, I have.  " "Marc, do
you still love your mother?"

Rosen leaps to his feet, shouts out, "I object to this sh-sh-shshow!"

"Sustained."

At defense request, the cross-examination of Marc is deferred until
tomorrow morning.  Frances's attorneys are going to need time to
prepare a cross-examination on this seemingly unexpected testimony.  In
the corridor, smoking their cigarettes, Rosen, Lang and Kurumada look
punched out, as if they had just gone fifteen rounds with a ghost.

"Call Vittorio Gentile to the stand."

A tiny man in Coke-bottle glasses, neat gray suit, crinkly blond-tinged
hair-a midget Kissinger with a Chico Marx accent -mounts the witness
stand and tells the court and jury his name and address.  Asked if he
knows Marc Schreuder, the man says, "Datsa my second son."

The witness describes how he came home from work one day in 1963 and
found his East End Avenue apartment completely empty, the furniture,
his wife and two children gone.  Eventually Frances got custody.  By
that time

Marc was about four years old.  As for Vittorio, "I was completely
destroyed.  Monetarily ... physically ... emotionally."  In 1967 he
returned to Italy.  His divorce became final in 1968.  Frances got it
in

Idaho.  In 1975 he moved back to the United States.  He had been
married, in Rome, to "another American girl," Jacqueline Morgan, with
whom he now has three children.

Yes, he had lunch many times with Frances after his 1975 return and
yes, he recalls a lunch with Frances at Gino Restaurant on Lexington
Avenue in the spring Of 1978.

At lunch, did Frances mention something about wanting to put a contract
out on her father?

"Yes, out of the blue sky!  I couldn't believe it!  I was speechless
She said it as we were leaving the restaurant."  But she did not
elaborate, and her ex-husband had said nothing more.

Mike Rosen's cross-examination drips with mockery thick as marinara
sauce.  "You 'used to go' to Gino's?"  All these jurors would have to
do is walk by Gino's, across from Bloomingdale's, any day of the week,
and they'd see you sitting at the bar every afternoon!  Won't they?

Quietly, "Yes."

"When you were with Frances, ever beat her up?"

"No ... I slap pa her to help her with her crises ... she have-a de
hysterical commotions."

The last time he talked to his son Marc was "three ... four months
ago."  They met in a Utah motel, just father and son alone, soon
after

Marc's conviction and sentencing.  "I aska Meester George, I say, I war
ma see Marco, eefa I canna see him privately."

Very overbearing now, Rosen demands, "The court also took your name
away from your sons, didn't they?"  He waves a piece of paper, the
court order, signed December 31, 1968, by New York Judge Abraham
Gelinoff.

"I was penniless," the little man replies.  For eight-and-a-half
years,

"I had no contact with my children."

"By the way, Larry, at the age of four, was certified as a handicapped
child by Dr.  Webb, was he not?"

Vittorio does not know.  He was in Italy.  But yes, he was found in
contempt of court, "two ... three times.  For back alimony.  I am in
the business which I need liquid money."

Scornfully, "What kind of business?"  He went into bankruptcy, didn't
he?

"She was spending money like a maniac," says the witness.  In this
instance the cliche seems apt.  I

"Did you want custody?"  Ernie Jones asks on redirect examination.

"Very much.  I even say, "Let's do friendly.  You tak-a one, I tak-a de
other."  She say no!  The children cannot be divided."

Yes, he helped with their care.  "Soon as I came home from the office,
I used to change their diapers."  He loves children.  "Like I do with
my three children now ... I take my children alone to Italy for one
month every year."

It is true that he owed Frances four or five thousand dollars in back
alimony, but he did always pay his child support fees.  He was a good
father, he insists, and a good husband too.  "After the divorce, she
wanted to come back with me."  When Frances was living in Europe with
her second husband, "She used to call me from Belgium, when I was in
Rome, and spend a couple of hours on the phone ..."

The witness is excused.  Out in the corridor, before leaving, he smiles
shyly and offers reporters his business card:

"Pearls are Girls most intimate Jewels"

Pearls

Borrelli

Vittorio Gentile 608 5th Avenue importer of cultured New York City
10020 pearls & corals (212) 555-9790

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 10 A.m. The faces of Ernie Jones and Mike George
at the prosecution table are not quite so grim on this second morning
of trial.  Over at the defense table, Mike

Rosen's handsome head looks a bit grayer than it did yesterday.  His
client remains a terrifying portrait.  Unrelieved now by a trace of
makeup, she is less Hogarth than Medusa.  The "seething mass of
disorder" within is becoming outwardly more visible.  The face has
commenced a kind of meltdown.

At ten o'clock sharp with a clank of keys, the bailiff locks the double
doors to the corridor and stomps back offstage.  Judge and jury,
lawyers, reporters and spectators are now all locked in together.  The
court clerk and the court reporter enter through the side door from the
judge's chambers.  A pair of tall and bookend like figures, they sit
just beneath

Judge Baldwin's veneered escarpment and prop up the proceedings.  One
is red-whiskered, one gray-bearded, but they are otherwise
indistinguishable, minor characters-the Rosencrantz and Guildenstem of
this drama.

"Please rise!"  Sound of feet shuffling.  "The court of the Honorable

Ernest T. Baldwin is now in session ..."  Marc is back on the witness
stand.  Judge Baldwin nods toward the defense table.  "All right, Mr.

Rosen.  Your witness."

The lawyer rises, walks slowly around and behind the defendant, places
both his hands protectively on her shoulders and, looking squarely at
the witness, says with faint contempt, "Mr.  Schreuder, my name is Mike
Rosen.

I represent "Mom.""

With heavy sarcasm, he inquires, "Hasn't the prosecutor promised to
communicate on your behalf to the Parole Board, sit?"

"Yes, he has," Marc says pleasantly.

"Have any expectation that maybe the prosecutor's communication would
get you out of jail a little earlier?"

"Perhaps."

"Ever go to the movies with Sergeant George?"

"Yes ... in June or July of this year."

"Just you and Sergeant George?"

"Mr.  George, myself and my girlfriend."

"You have a girlfriend in Salt Lake City!"  "What did you go to see,

Fantasy Island?  ... What else did you do the evening you were out
with

Sergeant George and your girlfriend?"

Nothing else that day.  Another time, George took Marc to the
University of Utah to pick up an award he'd won.

"What was the award, Prisoner of the Year?"

Judge Baldwin cautions Rosen to cut out the sarcasm.

Yesterday did not the witness mention a psychiatrist, a certain
"Doctor

Munch?"

"I believe I said Dr.  Moench Marc corrects the lawyer's pronunciation,
speaking the difficult name with a perfect German-Swiss accent.

"Get that camera down!"  barks the judge.  "Take the film out and hand
it to the bailiffl" Utah law permits photographers in the courtroom,
but they may photograph only court personnel.  Baldwin thinks he has
caught a newspaper cameraman sneaking a shot of Rosen snarling at
Marc.

Did Marc's lawyers tell him to go see Dr.  Moench?  Yes.  Was that in
connection with his attempt, at his own trial, to plead extreme
emotional disturbance and get a lighter sentence, manslaughter not
murder?

"At the time I did not know it.  Later on my lawyers told me."

Rosen fires ofF a sarcastic string of questions about Marc's excellent
academic record, pointing out that in 1976 he had graduated with honors
from Allen-Stevenson and had won still more honors at prep school.
Waving a copy of the Kent School yearbook, Rosen gets the witness to
acknowledge that he got good grades and was accepted by both Trinity
and Vassar colleges.  And is it not correct that Marc took his SAT
exams twice and scored slightly better the second time, after he killed
his grandfather?

Yes.  And has he not also been active in the stock market for the past
several years, maintaining his own account at W. T. Cabe & Co."  and
trading in Sro,000 blocks of Global Marine, Smith, Kline, and other
stocks?  "Who gave you the money for that?"

"No one did."

And the money to buy rare coins, such as his $17,000 solid gold Maple

Leaf?  "Moms give you the money for that?"  No.  "You steal $40,000
from

Moms?"  No.  Jewelry?  No.  Money?  No.

"Steal ... from Granny?"  "Yes."

"How much you steal from Gramps?"

"Seventy, eighty thousand.  It's a really vague figure."  The response
is unhelpful to Marc's cause.  The figure may be vague to him, but it
sounds quite specific in this courtroom..  On the other hand, Rosen's
bullying, hectoring tone of voice cannot be winning many popularity
points with this mannerly, modest Utah jury.

Rosen seeks to blacken the young man's reputation a bit more.  The
summer before the murder, when Marc and Larry were in Salt Lake City
boarding with their grandparents and working at the warehouse, didn't
the brothers spend considerable time at sex movies?  Didn't they treat
their grandfather terribly?  Isn't it true he used bad language to
Gramps?

No, only to Granny.  The witness is keeping himself under very tight
control.

Picking up steam, Rosen demands, "Did not Doug Steele tell you your
grandfather was afraid of youl"

"Objection!  Hearsay."

"Sustained."

"Didn't you tell Richard Behrens that you tried to kill your
grandfather in the summer Of 1977?"

"That's right."

"You told us yesterday that Richard Behrens was Mom's friend.  Did you
ever, Mr.  Schreuder, take pictures of Richard Behrens in your bed?" 
He hands the witness a Polaroid snapshot.

"He's on my bed," Marc says dryly.  Rosen has implied a homosexual
relationship between the witness and his "Uncle George."

Rosen seeks to place the snapshot in evidence, but Jones objects that
no foundation exists.  He is sustained.

"Ever tell Richard Behrens that in killing your grandfather you acted
alone'

"Well, I told him a lot of stories Mom wanted me to tell ... phony
stories."  Marc told so many stories, he is no longer sure what he
said.

"Ever tell anybody your brother Larry was involved in the murder of

Gramps?"

"Yes, I did."

"As a matter of fact, didn't you snitch on ... Larry [the previous]
summer about him stealing some auto parts?"

"Yes, I did."

How much time elapsed between the two shots?  Did Marc shoot his
grandfather the second time as he was going down?

"No, I did not,"

"Shoot him in the head after he was down?"

"Yes, I did."

Rosen now crouches to the floor himself.  "And when Gramps was on the
floor ... you actually put your hands in his pockets I .  " Rosen
pauses to let this sink in, then pounces.  "Ever tell Richard

Behrens it was 'easy to kill'?"

"No.  I never did."

"Ilank you, Judge."  Rosen spins on his polished heel and turns away
contemptuously.  Now it is up to Ernie Jones to rehabilitate his star
witness.

In a calm, fatherly voice, the prosecutor asks, "Marc, you indicated on
cross-examination ... that Larry may have been involved in the murder

Was he?"

"No, he was not.

Does Marc know why Larry was in Salt Lake in the summer of 1978?

"Because Mom locked him out, and ... Granny offered to take him under
her wing ... After ... Eastern Military Academy, Mom wasn't going to
have him at her house."

Jones returns to Marc's academic record.  Marc says he was not really
aware of being an honor student.  His report cards were sent directly
to

Mom.  But he thought he usually got A's or B's.

"What happened if you got C's or D's?

In a matter-of-fact voice: "She flew into a rage ... she would take a
belt out and start beating me."

Hoping to retouch the rather intimate picture Rosen has painted of the
relationship between state prison authorities and the county attorney's
office, Jones elicits the fact that Mike George drove Marc to the

University of Utah because his prison earned marks were so high that he
had been elected to Phi Beta Sigma, the honor society, and Marc was
rewarded by being allowed to attend the initiation ceremony in
person.

In nearly a year and a half in prison, he has maintained a better than
3.5 grade point average.  Presumably, this will impress the jury, some
of whom attended the same university.

"Did you receive any kind of financial gain ... for killing your
grandfather?"

"No.,"

"Did I make you any promises?"

"No promise except that you would appear at the Parole Board."

"Did anyone ever promise you that if you testified your sentence would
be reduced?  Promise you're going to be released from prison early?"

"No.,"

"in exchange for the appearance or representation to the Board of

Pardons, by the county attorney's office what are you expected to
do?"

"Tell the truth."

"And are you doing that?"

"Yes.  11

"No further questions."

Lunchtime.  The elevator is packed with reporters, lawyers, spectators,
one of whom is conspicuous both for her spherical proportions-she is
perhaps five feet tall and weighs well over two hundred pounds-and for
a smile of seraphic sweetness.  She becomes even more conspicuous when
she announces proudly, addressing no one in particular, "I'm Marc's
francke.

The movie was Return of the Jedi.  Then Mike took us to McDonald's
for

Chicken McNuggets," she beams.  "That's Marc's all-time favorite
food."

Mary Lou Kaiser goes across the street with Mrs.  Ernie Jones to grab a
quick hamburger.  They have just seated themselves in a booth when,
through the plate glass windows, she spots her france coming across the
parking lot escorted by a prison guard.  They are stopping for more

McNuggets before returning to Draper.  " "Scuse met" She leaps up from
the booth with surprising agility and is standing chortling in the
doorway as the guard and his prisoner swing through the door.  "Hiya,
Babes!"

The guard, a nice fellow who knows jolly Mary Lou, allows her to bring
her tray and eat with them.  Marc is smiling, almost grinning, but he
is trembling too.  His hands shake as he nervously massages his two-day
stubble of blond beard.  Up close, one can see that the china-blue eyes
are full of tears.  He appears a very troubled young man.

"Take it easy, Babes," Mary says quietly.  "Think of it this way.
You're only twenty-two years old, Marc, and already the two hardest
things you're ever going to have to do in your whole life are both over
with!"

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1983.  At 11:35 this morning, the strange trial
of

Frances Schreuder ends barely four days after it began.  It has been
unsettling and unsatisfying because of its shape -a pyramid standing on
its head.  Lawyers normally try to structure a case to build to a
climax and save their strongest witness for last, not first.  This
time, the prosecution hadn't dared wait.

The risk was too great that Marc Schreuder might change his mind, or
lose his nerve.  So the climax came first and, after Marc's testimony,
almost everything else-Moench, Steele, Marilyn, Behrens, Manning, Mike
George-has been mere corroboration and amplification.

The defense will be still less dramatic.  Rosen now indicates his
intention to pull on no witnesses whatever.  No Frances, no nobody.  He
will rely on his client's presumption of innocence, and his own
forensic ability to show in his summation that the prosecution
witnesses without exception either were out to get Frances -her
ex-husband, her greedy sister--or were relying on grants of immunity
plus a bit of testimony helpful to the prosecution to save their own
dirty necks-Behrens and Manning.

Marc Schreuder has both motives, vengeance and naked selfinterest, it
now becomes clear.  As soon as the jury is excused, Judge Baldwin says
the young man has just called him, from prison, to say he had forgotten
to mention during his testimony something which lawyers on both sides
seemingly had forgotten to ask him about: in the unlikely event that,
despite all, Marc's own appeal for a new trial were to be granted by
the Utah Supreme Court, nothing he has said in this trial may be used
against him.

Rosen wants to be the one to inform the jury of this cozy
arrangement;

Ernie Jones prefers that the court do so.  Irritably, Judge Baldwin
says,

"Look, I have no law clerk, I have no secretary.  I am exhausted.  We
have all been working without pause or stop.  We will now all recess
for a long weekend.  Monday, I will give my instructions to the jury.
At 9:00 A.m.

Tuesday, you will give your summations, and then I will charge the
jury."

The jury now is invited back in.  Before they go home for the weekend,
the judge wants them to know that "there will be no need to brown bag
it on

Tuesday night.  That night the county intends to feed you.  Because
you'll be out deliberating by that time."  Poker-faced, jurors and
alternates file out.  What thoughts can be whirling around inside their
fourteen heads?  On

Monday they had been told to prepare themselves and their families for
a four-week trial.  Suddenly, on Friday, Day Five, they learn that it
is all but over.  Not only will they hear no witnesses from the other
side; the defense has not even bothered formally to rest its case.

It looks to court wise observers as if the fancy, Eastern defense
lawyers may have just made a grave mistake.  The difference between
trying a case in New York City and in Utah, some say, is the difference
between playing football on AstroTurf and on grass.  Wise-guy New York
jurors assume that witnesses will lie; they expect to hear perjury.  A
Utah jury is more apt to assume that people who have sworn to tell the
truth are probably doing so.  A Utah jury needs to hear the story from
both sides.

These jurors will not get that chance.  Rosen has the confidence of his
own track record: no defendants on the stand, not even any defense
witnesses, in eight years of very successful trial work.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 9."20 A.m. Frances today wears a trim navy suit,
white blouse, freshly washed hair parted in the middle, and looks much
more pulled together than the gorgon of last week.  Berenice Bradshaw,
no longer a potential witness, is in court for the first time, seated
in the shadows directly behind her daughter.

Each juror has in hand a thick sheaf of written instructions from
Judge

Baldwin, forty-two in all.  His honor proposes now to lead them through
this legal boilerplate item by item.  Whistling slightly through his
teeth, the judge begins to read.  First, the indictment: "That the
defendant Frances Schreuder"-Baldwin pronounces it "Shrewder"--did
"intentionally, or knowingly, cause the death of Franklin I Bradshaw
for pecuniary or other motives."

The jurors wear the solemn countenances which are predictable at this
moment of every trial, when the full weight of the burden they bear now
looms suddenly so large, the fateful moment so close.  Peering and
squinting through blue glasses, Berenice Bradshaw methodically studies
each face.

The judge prefaces his instructions with the usual lecture on how the
defendant is protected by the presumption of innocence which she wears
like a cloak, the prosecutor's job being to tear it to shreds, if he
can.

Because of this impervious cloaki our system grants the prosecution two
chances at bat, the defense but one.  The jury will first hear a
summation from Mr.  Jones, then a summation of the defense case from
Mr.  Rosen, and then Mr.  Jones will have the last word.

The ritual instructions now begin.  The only sound in the courtroom
besides Judge Baldwin's whistling drone is the sound of fourteen jurors
turning their pages in unison as they follow along.

Of particular interest is Instruction #18: Marc Shreuder, Richard
Behrens and Myles Manning all have received certain promises from the
prosecution in exchange for their testimony.  Jurors may consider this
fact in weighing their credibility.

Instruction #21: A person commits criminal homicide if he intentionally
or knowingly causes the death of another.  The homicide constitutes
Murder in the First Degree if it was committed for pecuniary or other
personal gain.

Judge Baldwin explains the trust agreements which accompany Franklin J.
Bradshaw's 1970 will.  The bank is directed to set up and manage two
trusts: a marital trust for the widow, a family trust for the daughters
and grandchildren.  "The will makes no provision for his three
daughters, and they did not inherit under the will."

All income, rents and so on accruing to the Bradshaw estate flow into
the marital trust, over which Berenice Bradshaw has absolute control.
She also "has the discretionary power, without limitation, to tell the
bank to pay the principal to any of the children, or grandchildren, at
any time ... for medical or for any other reasons."  In the shadows,
Berenice Bradshaw is sitting motionless, listening very hard, her chin
out thrust looking as if she is hearing this information for the very
first time.

"On Berenice Bradshaw's death, her will can distribute the marital
trust in any way she wishes, without restriction."

Hence, any funds, or family allowances, received by Frances Schreuder,
are not the result of the will of Franklin Bradshaw.  They either flow
from the

FJB family trust, which is managed by the bank, or they result from the
very broad discretionary powers granted to the widow.

Instruction #32 on accomplice testimony is particularly important.  "A
conviction shall not be had on the testimony of an accomplice," Judge

Baldwin reads, "unless his testimony is corroborated by other evidence
which in itself and without the aid of the testimony of the accomplice
tends to connect the defendant with the commission of the offense ...
The testimony of such an accomplice is corroborated, however, where
there is evidence from sources other than the accomplice, which when
considered together with other facts in evidence tends to show that the
crime ... was committed and that the defendant was implicated and
connected with the commission of the crime."

To find Frances Schreuder Guilty of Murder 1, jurors must believe five
things: that Marc Schreuder intentionally, knowingly,

and unlawfully caused the death of Franklin J. Bradshaw; and that
Frances

Schreuder knowingly solicited, requested, committed, encouraged, or
intentionally aided her son; and that she did this for pecuniary or
other personal gain; and that "the hope for financial gain [was] the
cause of the homicide, not merely the result."  And you must be
"convinced of the truth of each and every one of the foregoing elements
beyond a reasonable doubt."

Murder 11 is "a lesser included offense."  That is, if you believe all
of the foregoing, but are not convinced "that the homicide was carried
out for economic gain then you may find the defendant Guilty of
Murder

II.

It is 10:07 A.m. by the time Judge Baldwin gives the jurors the three
possible verdicts, already typed out on three sheets of paper-Guilty
of

Murder 1, Guilty of Murder 11, and Not Guilty-and calls for a brief
recess before the summations begin.

At 10:21 A.m. Ernie Jones gets to his feet, moves the podium out of the
acoustical dead spot, clears his throat, and begins speaking quietly.

"Ladies and gentlemen ... there is no question in this case who
killed

Franklin J. Bradshaw.  The real issue in this case is why.  Why would a
seventeen-year-old boy kill his grandfather?

"That's why we thought it was important that you understand , the
friction in the Bradshaw family.  The source of that friction was
always Frances.  Frances!  Frances!  Frances!  And the subject of that
friction was always money ... "The motive?  Marc Schreuder mentioned
two: "My mother was afraid she'd be cut out of the Bradshaw estate.
"And second: "She hoped for a great deal of money from the estate by
killing her father ... "

Her "fears were real Jones emphasizes.  His manner is quiet, sincere.
"On

July 26.... three days after Franklin Bradshaw's death, Frances tells

Detective Campbell there is a new will," probably prepared by the
since-deceased accountant, Herman Wood.

"Ask yourselves: was there a new will?  Or was this a figment of her
own imagination?  Well, Frances thought there was.  And that is what is
important!"  That is why she had her father killed.  As for the old
will, the defense is correct when it says that Frances did not inherit
under the will.  "But Frances was a beneficiary under the trust." 
Jones speaks slowly, swinging at his points methodically, like a golfer
with a bucket of balls.

"Frances Schreuder starts to make her own attempts to get a gun ...
Marc says that they went to a rifle store.  Marc says that his mother
was looking at mail order catalogs ... She tells Vittorio Gentile, "I
am going to put a contract on my father."  The woman is serious!

"For two and a half years, we sit here in Salt Lake City with no leads
on the case ... Then Richard Behrens, October 16, ig8o, brings
Marilyn

Reagan State's Exhibit #9,-the gun, and says, "This is the gun that
killed your father."  Richard Behrens ultimately was charged with
obstructing justice, with tampering with witnesses.  Then he was
promised a grant of immunity, in return for telling the truth.  If he
did not come clean, his own attorney warned him he could be charged and
prosecuted as an accomplice.  And he told you: "Frances masterminded
the murder of her own father."

"Frances was so successful in manipulating people and so successful in
hiding the evidence ... There was only one flaw.  She double-crossed

Richard Behrens over $3,700."

Remember that "Marc said she could have paid him back.  She had the
money to pay him back, but she wouldn't.  Because that's the way
Frances is.

"I'm not asking you to rest your verdict on the testimony of Marc ..

You cannot convict ... on the testimony of an accomplice ..."  But
think "about last Monday and how difficult it must have been to testify
against his own mother!"

And remember what Marc told you: "I did it because my mother told me
to.

You just don't tell my mother no."

The prosecutor has spoken for sixty-one minutes, a sober, tightly
organized, impressive summation of his case.  Spectators trooping out
of the courtroom pass the defendant turned around in her chair,
speaking with urgency to her mother, directly behind her, and trembling
severely.

Getting closer, one can see that Frances is crying and telling her
mother excitedly, "Don't talk!  Don't talk!  He's listening to
everything you say!"  She rolls her scary eyes toward the prosecutors'
table.  Berenice, still seated, awkwardly grasps her daughter's head in
her two hands and pats her hair, trying to comfort her.  Frances twists
away from her mother's grip and walks out into the corridor alone, in
tears.

Mike Rosen has outfitted himself for his big scene in a new,
expensive-looking pastel suit, above which his bright white smile
gleams almost nonstop.  But his words are very much at odds with his
expression; the effect is disconcerting.  "If Marc Schreuder can kill
his grandfather, ladies and gentlemen," he begins, "he can kill his
mother."

He is pacing very close to the jury, speaking in quiet, almost intimate
tones.  Frances, from her table across the round well, maintains her
Medusa stare.  "This is not gonna be a short summary," the lawyer
says.

"Four-to-six weeks became five, six days ... Be patient with me now.

Ernie Jones, under the rules, comes back, but ... this is my last
chance and more important ... this is Frances's last chance."

Rosen spins a long and complex tale: the world according to Frances.
The consensus among Utah lawyers will be that Mike Rosen's three-hour
closing argument is the best one ever heard in this courthouse.
"Frances Schreuder, as her two oldest sisters did," left Salt Lake City
for good and as soon as she was able.  She had two boys who were "in
turmoil from the beginning .. a very bitter divorce ... beaten by
Gentile like a meatball ... Frances Schreuder was concerned with
education.  Was concerned with culture for her children.  Remember that
she was with her daughter at the ballet when they were trying to arrest
her ..."

This is a nice touch, but a fanciful one.  The New York City Ballet was
two hundred miles away, performing in Syracuse, N.Y."  every night that
week.

"Marc Schreuder.  Let's get right to it ... I would like to focus on
the shooter.  " The lawyer holds aloft two handfuls of trial
transcript, thick as telephone books.  "It comes out of here.  Out of
these pages under oath.

Sergeant George described Marc Schreuder as highly intelligent and
calculating.  Richard Behrens as intelligent and headstrong.  Doug
Steele told you that Marc Schreuder didn't have an ounce of
compassion.

As cold as

Toby's behind."  Flourishing the transcript, the lawyer quotes with a
sneer what Behrens told Marilyn at the Burger King: " "He said it was
easyl "

Now he attempts to strangle Marc with his own I.Q. "Nancy Jones told
you that Marc was disrespectful to his grandparents, cursing at them ..
His teachers' reports revealed a sharp mind ... Doug Steele told you he
saw report cards with straight A's ... Now we are not talking about
some little dummy!"  At the Kent School, one hundred miles away from
Frances,

Marc was still getting honors.  "Some little robot, huh?"  He's even
gotten honors in jail!

"That's a little dummy who goes out and kills because his mother tells
him?

He has a stock brokerage at W. T. McCabe and Company in Manhattan where
he buys and sells securities.  $10,000 at a clip ... expensive, rare
coins at $17,000 a pop.  Some little-as we call 'em on the East
Coast-some little nebbish, huh?  "This boy, the proof shows, is totally
self-destructive and irrational .  and very, very bright.  This is the
little dummy that walks around with a pistol, and blows his grandfather
away because "My Mommy told me to do it'?  ... Everything he said here,
"My Mommy told me to do it!"

Also, consider this: if Frances was scheming to get money from her
father, "wouldn't Frances tell these boys: Look, fellows.  You go out
to Utah and just be so nice to Grandma and Grandpa ... because if she
tells 'em .. to come out here and act like the animals that they are,
she knows for sure she's out of the ball game.  So she would say,
"Marc, sweetheart, you act like a little angelP

"Grounds for reasonable doubt?  Huh?  ... You woulda seen two of the
nicest little angels runnin' around wid hot auto parts yuh ever seen in
yer whole life!"

When Rosen gets worked up, he slips into tough Brooklynese street
accents, as if he's playing a John Garfield part.  How does this sound
to a Utah jury-offensive, or just plain weird?  His summation has
become like a serpent's tail, severed from its brains, and lashing
reflexively in any direction.  It is a dangerous, loose-cannon defense,
rolling around the deck, smashing into whatever is in its random path.
Even Rosen's employer is not safe.  Suddenly it is Granny who is
getting clobbered.

Sure there was friction in the family, and sure Frances needed money.
But that doesn't mean she wanted to kill.  Yes, the money from the
forged checks went into Frances Schreuder's account.  But "who signed
the front" of those checks?  "Maybe Berenice?  .  " They certainly
didn't bring in any handwriting analysts!

Now a telling point.  They didn't bring in all the phone bills
either.

Remember: they have the phone bills for the '77 calls!  "Where's the
bill?

The collect call, '78, Saturday night, the night before the murder?
"Hi,

Mom.  I can't do it, Mom.  I am flipping out."  ,

The loose cannon is tied down again; Rosen is back on target, making
very good sense indeed.  He reminds them of the law on accomplice
testimony: "You cannot take the word of an accomplice to a crime,
unless what he says is independently corroborated."  The State claims
Behrens corroborates Marc, and Manning corroborates key portions of
Behrens.  "But

Behrens cannot corroborate Marc.  And Marc cannot corroborate Behrens.
That is what His Honor ... instructed you."  Rosen will list four ways
in which

Behrens himself can be seen as an accomplice, four areas in which
his-uncorroborated-testimony may therefore be assumed to be unreliable.
Now, the first way to find that Richard Behrens is an accomplice is: he
has immunity!  An agreement against prosecution for murder!

Second, Richard Behrens himself told them that he went to New Jersey,
and twice to Virginia, trying to help Frances get a gun.  Third, Marc
Schreuder has told them that Richard Behrens was present at the family
murder planning discussions.  Fourth, and most telling, Behrens did
nothing to prevent the murder, did nothing "to save Franklin Bradshaw's
life."

To win this case, it is not sufficient for Rosen to wrap his client
securely in her mantle of reasonable doubt.  He must also try to wrap a
dark shroud of criminal intent, and responsibility, around her son
Marc.  He returns to the matter of the airline tickets.  "Mr.  Jones
tells you it was

Frances Schreuder's idea to use "L.  Gentile' on this ticket, which
is

Exhibit 36.  So Frances is the mastermind.  It's her idea.

"No, Ladies and Gentlemen.  It was Marc's idea!"  Rosen picks up the
actual plane ticket from the table of exhibits and brandishes it like a
spear.

"This was Marc's way of sticking it to Larry, and what he ultimately
does with Larry is almost as obscene as what he is trying to do to his
mother!"

But you can't have it both ways.  You cannot claim both, "My mother
gave me the name of the hotel to stay in," and also claim, "I can't
remember the name of the hotel I stayed in," as Marc had testified.

"This is a death-penalty case!  ... Don't buy it!"

Then he reaches out and tickles the manifest common sense of these
sober jurors.  "If any one of you, God forbid.... had to make a real
critical life-and-death decision for one of your loved ones, would you
take the word of Marc Schreuder?  Would you take the word of Richard
Behrens?  ... Would you take the word of Myles Manning before you made
that life-or-death decision?"

He highlights other unlikely aspects of the prosecution scenario.
Feature this: Marc Schreuder emerges Sunday morning from his nameless
hotel, fully packed.  "Got his little toy"-here Rosen holds up the
big357 magnum and sneers-"and he is going to do what his mother ordered
him to ..."  Now

Marc takes a taxi.  The prosecution has painted this as a precision
operation.  What if Marc couldn't find a taxi?  What if Grandpa arrived
earlyl

Where is cabdriver Number One?  "He doesn't exist!"

Rosen has begun to carom around again, striking miscellaneous points,
like the ball on a pinball machine.  The padlock!  It was open!  But
Larry had gone there the night before.  Larry let him in!  Boi-n-n-n-g!
He has bounced to a different pin.  "Then Marc Schreuder, after twenty
minutes of talking to

Gramps, takes this thing, this frightening thing ..."-again Rosen holds
up the gun-'and about a foot-and-a-half away, Dr.  Moore said, hits his
grandfather in the back!  Absolutely vicious ... asked him: "Did you
shoot him in the head while he was going downT He sez, "No I didn't."
"Oh!  Did you shoot him in the head when he was downT He sez, "Yes, I
did."

No mother, no other human being can transmit that kind of viciousness.
Lying in the pool of blood, and this kid can go through his pants!"

Frances Schreuder is now shaking all over.  She weeps convulsively, her
great jaw pushed forward, eyes and mouth turned down.  She has become

Mayan mask of horror, horror at the suggestion that her son might
actually have dabbled his hands in the blood of her father.  Watching
her recoil, one feels certain that this dreadful aspect of the matter
had not before occurred to her.

"How did he get another cab!"  Rosen thunders.  That's a third taxi
there's no record of!  "And we saw no witnesses that Marc was on the
plane home."

Frances is still shaking.

Rosen is doing a neat job of shining his flashlight of reasonable doubt
through the holes in the prosecution case.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it didn't happen the way the killer said it
happened .  !

"Lunch, Judge?  Would this be a convenient place to break?"

Up on his parakeet perch, Ernie Baldwin is smiling.  The judge has been
enjoying this lawyer's performance immensely.

An hour later, everybody is back in his blue plastic seat, and Rosen is
once more on his feet.  How did Marc get into the locked warehouse?
Maybe

Larry let him in.  How did Marc get to the airport?  Maybe Larry drove
him.

Last year, Marc was on trial in this very courthouse, charged with
murder.  This brings up Dr.  Moench.

"Now, I don't question Dr.  Moench," or his purposes.  But Dr.  Moench
spent a total of only four hours with Marc.  He got his information
"solely and only from Marc."  And Dr.  Moench was originally the
defense psychiatrist.

Extreme emotional distress-that was going to be Marc's defense.  "He
was hoping for manslaughter, not murder."

In Marc's trial, Rosen informs the jury, Dr.  Moench was cross examined
by this same Ernie Jones.  In fact, Jones even brought in his own
psychiatrist, Dr.  Coleman, and the State's own expert, Dr.  Coleman,
had testified that "Dr.  Moench doesn't know what he's talking about!

Dr.  Coleman said Marc is storytelling."

Why the defense has not spent a few more Bradshaw bucks to bring Dr.

Coleman to say the same thing to this jury is not explained.

Rosen gets to the point.  Marc's "Mommy made me do it" defense was
rejected in the first trial, and he was found guilty.  "Grounds for
reasonable doubt just pours out of that set of facts."

Does it?  Or is the flow in the other direction?  Perhaps reasonable
doubt pours in.  The defendant's eyes are closed.  Frances is asleep!
If, throughout this ordeal, Frances has been supervising her own
medication, this would account for her dramatic changes in aspect:
grief, fury, agitation, zombie-like torpor and gusts of antic glee have
played across her countenance in rapid, bewildering variety.  Watching
Frances these past few days has been like watching a sunset over the
Grand Canyon.

Clearly Frances is sick.  What is the matter with her?  Surely some
major disorder is at work here.  One has not been surprised to hear of
suicide attempts and other wild behaviors; they are implicit in her
general appearance.  What is surprising is to find her in a courtroom
at all.  Or if she must be in court, why is she not getting an insanity
defense?

Whatever the reason, the defendant seems clearly to have been serving
as her own physician, and it is apparent that she has today
overmedicated or over tranquilized herself to the point of stupor.

Rosen is back at his pinball game.  "What you saw in this courtroom was
an outrage!  Judge Baldwin should have told you that another promise
was made to Marc," one that Marc forgot to mention: nothing that Marc
said here this week can ever be used against him at future trials ..

"He's manipulating the system like he has done for himself, like he
manipulated his brother.  Please don't let him get away with it.  Don't
let him bury his mother like he buried his grandfather!"

He even manipulates his captors!  Mike George takes him down to a motel
so he can meet with Pop.  They ask him: whaddya miss most in jail? 
Marc tells 'em, my girlfriend, and going to the movies.  So what
happens? "He blew his grandfather into the grave, and they take him to
the movies with his girlfriend!

"Richard Behrens ... this teacher of English and science 11 He has
immunity in New York and in Utah for every eventuality imaginable.
Richard Behrens!  ""What could I doT I'll tell you what he could do.
"Hello, Salt Lake City?  There's some kid comin' out wid da gun. Better
warn Mr.  Bradshaw' none of us would be here today..  our friend
Behrens.  Remember now, Behrens says Frances gave him the gun.  So what
does he do?  ... For $3,700 he does the following: He writes to
lawyers.  He writes to bankers.  He writes to Frances.  He writes to
Mrs.

Bradshaw.  He sues Frances in court for $3,700.  Ladies and gentlemen
of the jury: If Ranees Schreuder gave Richard Behrens this gun, would
he have done all of that to collect his $3,700?  Or would he have said:
"Frances, come here.  Remember dis, Frances?  $3,700.  Please."

"Oh, it was tough finding Frances!"  Rosen sneers.  "She wouldn't
answer his calls.  So you live two blocks away.  You wait until Frances
comes home with

Ariadne from Lincoln Center, and you are standing outside, and you say:
"Frances, come on!"  " Rosen holds up the bank passbook from the table
of exhibits.  " "You remember dis!  Can I have my $3,700, plea seT And
if Frances gave him the gun, you know what she would have said?
'$3,700?  How about $37,000, RichardT ... Do you think she is going to
put her life on the line here for $3,700 when she is shooting for a
million-dollar estate?  She could buy this gun for $3,700 in a second.
Baloney!  She never gave him the gun."

Boi-in-n-g!  "And Marilyn Reagan!  I wonder why she was smiling, every
time she looked over at Sis fighting for her life?"

Bo-i-in-n-g!  "How do we know for sure that Behrens is full of baloney
that he got the gun from Frances?"  Because when Joel Campbell first
took a statement from Behrens, on December 3, on tape, " "He gave me
the gun,"

Behrens told him.  ""He," not I she."  Don't forget.  This guy's our
English teacher.  I guess he can tell the difference between he and she
... He said, "Get rid of it."

But in his affidavit, dated December 27, recanting his first
statement,

Behrens says that he made up the entire story implicating Marc and made
it up at the request of Marc's "hate-filled" Aunt Marilyn, who was
determined to pin her father's murder on her sister's two sons.  In
return, says Rosen, Marilyn promised him the $10,000 reward and free
ski trips to

Utah.

So where is this famous affidavit?  Why is it not in evidence?  Rosen
stops pacing, turns his back on the jury, then spins on his heels to
confront them.  "Grounds for reasonable doubt?"  he barks.

Rosen draws their attention to other grounds.  "October 16, 198L
Richard

Behrens gives his original statement to Joel Campbell.  He swears to

Campbell that Marc gave Richard Behrens the gun.  No mention here of
Myles

Manning!  No mention of Frances!"

On the tape of this interview, Richard Behrens even suggests,
"Perhaps

Marc bought the gun for Larry.  " Boi-in-n-g!

In addition to his pinball attack, Rosen employs other techniques.  He
cites inconsistencies: "Behrens says it was his idea to buy the gun
cover and cleaning rods.... He says he bought this cleaning
paraphernalia one week after he got the gun.  Marc said one year ....
But then

Rosen draws no conclusions.

He asks provocative questions: "Why does Richard Behrens go to the
trouble of cleaning this gun?  ... with cleaning rods!"  ... but then
fails to supply any answers.

He points out situations: "Behrens also told you something else: that

Marilyn and Frances hated each other" but fails to interpret them.

He highlights contradictions: "Richard Behrens says he knows Myles

Manning since 1974, 1975, Manning says, "I knew him three or four
months' " ... but doe8 not interpret them.

Ernie Jones had delivered his summation like a crack marksman.  Rosen
is firing buckshot.  One man is not necessarily better; each has a
different problem.  Jones needs to nail Frances.  Rosen needs to sow
enough seeds of reasonable doubt to raise a protective meadow around
his client.

More inconsistencies: Richard "Behrens says that Frances Schreuder gave
him the gun on the night of the murder.  Well, Marc says Frances
Schreuder locked it up in her little white cabinet," and gave it to
Behrens the next day.

More non conclusions "Marilyn Reagan told you that her father left
everything to Berenice Bradshaw.  Frances had not been disinherited ..
Mr.  Bradshaw left everything to Mrs.  Bradshaw!  Frances was not
disinherited!"

Big-ego lawyers-and in the cock fighting pit of the criminal bar, they
are probably the only kind who are any good, the last of the Lone

Rangers-suffer the occupational stress of their trade, which is
overkill.

That is happening to Mike Rosen now.  A white-haired juror is yawning
in the lawyer's face.  It has all been going on much too long and too
randomly to follow.  It has come to seem as if the defense lawyer is
just winging it, reading his notes aloud without plan, just confused,
confusing spouting, oat sowing

Rosen suggests another ten-minute recess.  This time Frances is not
among the corridor smokers.  She sits huddled half-asleep in a back
stairwell, entirely alone, arms encircling drawn-up knees, head buried
between.

Where are her high-priced defenders?  This image of desperate sleep is
familiar to hospital workers, to Parisians confronting clochards, and
to

Manhattan pedestrians stepping carefully around the city's sleeping
street people self-hugged in doorways.

It is time for Rosen to deal with the little man with Coke-bottle
glasses.  He is not kind.  "This guy is so bad that the court strips
his children of his name!  This guy don't have legs.  He's got a bar
stool for the bottom part of his body ... With all that has gone on
between

Frances and Vittorio, you think she trusts him to keep ... quiet" that
"she's gonna put out a contract on her father, something that could put
her subject to the death penalty?"

Still more rhetoric is employed to pound Vittorio Gentile into the
ground.  How come after Franklin Bradshaw's death that Gentile never
went to the cops?  Grounds for reasonable doubt there?

Recalling once more the image of the drunken wife beater, Rosen
finishes,

"He coulda killed her then.  Don't ... let ... him ... kill ... her
now!"

A parting shot about the dead man's estate.  Hizzoner has already told
them that Franklin Bradshaw's will made no provision for his three
daughters.  "We know she knew she wasn't in the will.  We know Frances
knew she couldn't inherit.  Maybe Marc thought he could inherit!"

Under the terms Of the will, the widow "could give it all to a guru
in

Egypt, and no one could stop her."  In her own will, she can do what
she wants with whatever's left.  "So Frances Schreuder got nothing
under either trust.  So Frances has no motive to killl"

Rosen draws this idea together effectively and ties a neat bow.  "Now
Mr.

Jones is left with this argument: she killed because of the $3,000
allowance.  Absurd!  ... She couldn't even count on a judge giving her
the $3,000.  That's purely up to a judge!  If she thought there was a
new will, and she was out of it-the last thing she would do is kill
him.

She'd come out here and do a nice song and dance on Dad ... As soon as
you kill him, that will is final.  You are out forever."

Rosen ticks off a few final inconsistencies in the prosecution's
argument.  Where is her bank statement showing the withdrawal of $5,000
for Myles Manning?  They showed you other bank statements, why not this
one?  "Grounds for reasonable doubt?"

Steve Klein.  Rosen says Frances's hysteria during her arrest was the
response of a frenzied mother trying to protect her child from
frightening scenes of cops with drawn guns.  Through savage
cross-examination, Klein had insisted he never drew his gun.  Sneers

Rosen, "What police officer makes a forced entry in a murder case and
doesn't have a weapon out to protect himself?  She coulda been sittin'
in there wid da machine gun!"

Another wild oat: if Frances Schreuder is guilty, why doesn't she run
when she hears the cops have been to to Gracie Square asking for her?

And another: "Mr.  Jones said 'escape."  She's trying to 'escape' out
of the seventh floor window.  Seven floors in the sky!  What was she
gonna do-fly to Argentina?"

And a bid to leave' em laughing: who is Myles Manning?  An admitted
alcoholic.  He was evicted with his brother from a series of
apartments.

For being winos.  So he had a very appropriate reason for spending
three days in a YMCA!

There's no corroboration at all for Myles Manning saying he got $5,000,
or even that Frances Schreuder withdrew such a sum from the bank! 
Now

Mike Rosen wants to call the jury's attention to a coincidence, "and if
it is all just a coincidence-it's the greatest coincidence in the
history of mankind!"  Something happened at Culver Lake, New Jersey, in
the fall

Of '77, and it happened at the same time Myles Manning was supposedly
employed as the hit man for Frances Schreuder.  "Dr.  Herman Behrens,
Richard's father, had a younger wife, Joan.  And Richard Behrens feared
that his father was having a change of attitude.  Richard Behrens was
very worried about the undue influence his stepmother Joan appeared to
have over his father the doctor.  Wow, what a coincidence!  Richard
Behrensfeared he would be cut out of his father estate!"

It is obvious that Behrens and Manning were up to no good.  "What
Behrens has done here, ladies and gentlemen, is to shift his treachery
up at the lake to an identical situation with Frances Schreuder.  What
a package!

That 'coincidence' is an insult to your intelligence ... I don't know
what Behrens promised Manning ... split the reward?  I wasn't there
(and] they both have immunity ... So don't compromise, ladies and
gentlemen.  You promised.  Stick with your belief!  There is no way
back if you make a mistake.  A trial is something like a jigsaw puzzle.
It's all a beautiful picture when you first see it.  Then some ...
pieces start falling out ... The picture gets blurry ... if all the
critical pieces fall out, as I submit they have here, whaddya left
with?  You're left with a frame!"

It is four o'clock, time to recess.  Ten minutes later, Ernie Jones is
back in front of the jury to deliver his final summation in his best

Jimmy Stewart manner.  One can actually hear Stewart's drawling
delivery in Jones's opening lines.

"As I listened to defense counsel, ladies and gentlemen, I took it to
mean that all of these people who have testified ... Marc Schreuder,

Marilyn Reagan, Richard Behrens, Myles Manning, and Vittorio Gentile
are liars.  All ... are in a conspiracy against Frances Schreuder." 
But why would Marc lie?  The defense never gave a reason, a motive, for
why Marc

Schreuder would say his mother put him up to it.

Jones acknowledges that Myles Manning is a comic figure whose
recollections are foggy.  He uses this fact as an indication that
Manning was telling the truth, pointing out that various discrepancies
in his and

Behrens's testimony should be a little "refreshing," not proof of
pedury, or of a desire to obstruct justice ... "Myles Manning took
$5,000 in a con game!"

But what about the testimony of Dr.  Moench-he came to the same
conclusion in both trials.  That Marc was a victim of extreme
pressure.

"If you throw out all the evidence against Frances except the testimony
of Marc Schreuder and Dr.  Moench-that's enough evidence to convict!"

Marc Schreuder has no reason to lie in this case.  "I mean-you hate to
say it.  But maybe it was the best thing that ever happened to Marc to
be convicted of second-degree murder ... to get him out of that
environment in New York City."  Jones knows his jury.  This is a
telling point.  Now he reminds them of the history of this case.  "At
the time Marc Schreuder went to trial, Frances Schreuder had already
been charged with murder.  That was already our position-that she was
the mastermind-even then."

The motive for this murder was money.

"You ask yourself.  what kind of a daughter would order the execution
of her own father?  What kind of a mother would ask her own son to
carry out that murder?  What kind of human being are we talking about?
What kind of human being ... makes it appear as though her own son,
Larry, is the prime suspect?  ... What kind of a human being would then
convince Richard Behrens that he should blame her sister, Marilyn
Reagan, for the murder?

"Members of the jury, I submit to you that Frances Schreuder has tried
to destroy everyone who got in her road.  She destroyed her father. 
She destroyed Marc.  She tried to destroy Richard Behrens.  She tried
to destroy her sister Marilyn.  She tried to destroy Larry.

"Frances is ruthless and cruel.  She was ... hysterical at times if she
didn't get her own way.  She was obsessed with money.  And she kept,
according to Dr.  Moench, harping and harping and harping on Marc to
carry out the murder for her.

"I submit to you that Frances Schreuder almost pulled off the perfect
crime.  Almost.  There was only one flaw.  She crossed up Richard
Behrens for $3,700.

"The defense said-the crime doesn't make sense.  It's not logical.
Murder never is logical.  This isn't a logical woman.  This is a woman
who becomes hysterical when she doesn't get what she wants.  That's why
she tells her own son on the night before the murder-Don't come home if
you don't kill

Franklin Bradshaw.

"I submit to you that there is only one thing standing in the road at
this point in time, and that is a verdict in this case.  I submit to
you that

Frances Schreuder is a party to the offense.  She master-minded this
offense.  She engineered it.  She put pressure on her own son to kill
her own father.  Thank you very much."  It is 5:25 P.m. Judge Baldwin
excuses the two alternates, and announces he will not send the twelve
jurors out to eat until 7 P.m. BY 5:29 P.M. the jury has retired to the
jury room and is hard at work.

Western judges do not waste much time.

Departing reporters and spectators straggle out of the courtroom.
Nothing to do during the anticipated long wait for a verdict but find a
barroom and sit there.  Rounding the corner to the elevators, they come
upon the defendant.  She is again alone, propped up at an open, booth
less pay phone in the corridor across from the elevators, and sobbing
very loudly, indeed convulsively, as she waits for her call to go
through.  Decency compels the crowd to look away.  People turn to face
the elevators, their backs to the phones.

Then, from behind them, comes a high, thin, childlike wail, as if it is
being torn from the crepey, middle-aged throat: "Ar-i-a-aa-dne!"

io.-o4 P.M."  JUDGE BALDWIN'S CH,4MBERS.  All jury waits are agonizing.
His honor looks punched out, hollow.  Dixieland jazz relaxes him, and
he is leaning back now, eyes closed, puffing at an unfiltered
cigarette, listening to his tape deck, a jazz piano medley distributed
by the Book of the Month Club.  He reaches under his desk blotter to
fish out a hidden, dog-eared clipping.

"I've been through this thing five times now," he says, "and I don't
get paid as much as a goddam plumber!"  He hands the clipping to his
visitor.

It is a famous quote from a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert

Jackson on the solitary ordeal of the trial judge.

The triaijudge sits alone and does most of his work with the public
looking on.  He cannot lean on the advice of associates or help from a
law clerk.  He works in an atmosphere of strife, with counsel,
litigants, and often witnesses and spectators bitter, biased and
partisan ... This lone trial judge must make a multitude of quick and
important decisions ... He must rule immediately and firmly on
questions which appellate judges may deliberate for months and then
decide ... Baldwin opens his eyes a crack to gauge the visitor's
reaction.  "You're damned if you do and damned if you don't," he
says.

"The only thing that keeps me going is-I don't give a goddam."  He
takes a long, deep drag, a double lungful from his cigarette.  Eddie
Condon and

Fats Waller tear into Ain't Misbehavin' Suddenly the bailiff shouts
through the doorway, "Your honor, they've reached a verdict!"

The entire cast of characters has rushed back into the courtroom,
everyone in his accustomed seat, utterly silent, awaiting the arrival
of the play's special audience of twelve.  Frances's face looks lumpy,
white and prayerful, as if the ever-moving, molten lava has at last
begun to congeal.  Beside her, Mike Rosen strokes the sides of his nose
with paired fingertips, then rubs them over his cheeks and lips, like a
blind man trying to read a face.

Breaking the stillness comes a single harsh bark of hearty laughter,
heard through the wide-open doors to the jury room.  Then the jurors
march in and hand the judge their pre typed ballot.  He glances at it,
reads aloud, "We find the defendant Guilty of Murder in the First
Degree."

It has happened very fast.  The jury was out less than five hours
including dinner.  The judge announces a one-week interlude between
verdict and sentencing, rejects the prosecution's pro forma plea for
immediate incarceration, and releases the prisoner on her own
recognizance, supervised by her local counsel, Kevin Kurumada.  The
reporters have all rushed off to file their stories.  In the most
recent press pool, the odds against a Murder One conviction had been
twenty to one.  By 10:24 P.m. not a soul is left in the round blue
chamber save the defendant, two of her lawyers, and her mother.

Out the corridor windows, crossing the brightly illuminated green grass
lawn two floors below, a shirtless Mike George can be seen, leaping and
twisting in the air, his arm around Ernie ]ones's shoulder, two antic
black silhouettes whooping off together into the moonlight.

One week later, on Monday morning, October 3, the entire cast of
characters in State of' Utah vs.  Frances Schreuder and their
handpicked audience of twelve reassemble in Judge Baldwin's courtroom
for the second-to-last time.  Phase Two of Frances Schreuder's trial,
the so-called referendum on her moral character, is an embarrassment.
Three character witnesses take the stand to say they do not believe
that this defendant merits the death penalty.  Two of them are
fund-raising officials of the

School of American Ballet: Mary Porter, now director of development and
formerly private secretary to Lincoln Kirstein, and the former Ford

Foundation man, W. McNeil Lowry.  The second-biggest giver after the
Ford

Foundation has been Frances Schreuder.  Her-or, more accurately, her
mother's-combined benefactions to the Company and School now total
about one million dollars.

The defense's third character witness is a high school classmate whom

Frances befriended when she and her family came to Salt Lake City
from

Germany in the 1950s.  Now a professor of German at Mills College,

Oakland, California, the woman owns a silver-gray Mercedes-Benz, and
she is believed by the prosecution to have been the driver of the
"getaway car" during Frances's spring raid on Sam Drukman's mailbox, an
accusation she now denies from the witness stand.

Frances has said that Mr.  Balanchine himself would have come to Salt
Lake

City to defend her, if only he could, and she is probably right.
Lincoln

Kirstein did come and is seen glowering in the courthouse corridor
while his two associates testify.  Mike Rosen does not put Kirstein on
the stand, he says later, because Kirstein is not anxious to testify,
and

Rosen doubts it would be of any help.  The defense already has
exercised its right to waive the jury in this phase of the trial and to
leave the determination of its client's fate-death, or life in
prison-to the sole discretion of Judge Baldwin.  Given the evident
state of mind of this particular jury, that seems the only civilized
option the defense had left.

Throughout the morning of testimony and cross-examination, Frances sits
quietly at the defense table, her hands clasped around a small,
turquoise-colored Tiffiany box.  Protecting himself on appeal, Ernie
Jones demands formal assurance from the defense that the client knew
what she was doing when she waived her right to a jury and was not, for
example, under the influence of drugs.  Teetering slightly, Frances
Schreuder gets to her feet and, for the first time in these
proceedings, speaks in her own behalf.  Her voice is musical, girlish,
pleasant.  "Within the past twenty-four hours?  No.  I have physical
illnesses, but not in any way so as to render me incapable."

Judge Baldwin says that over the weekend he has received two letters
from family members urging the court to show mercy.  "Though she caused
the death of my father, I do not wish her death," Marilyn wrote, and
she requested "some kind of psychiatric care."  The judge considers the
plea from the defendant's mother "truly heartrending," he says, adding
later that the "real victim here is Berenice

Bradshaw."

The lawyers now make their final pleas, Rosen for a "civilized"
disposition of the case, Jones for the execution of Frances Schreuder
as an expression of society's "outrage."  Judge Baldwin says he has
known for several days that he, not the jury, will have to make this
life-or-death decision, and he has no need to retire to chambers to
consider his verdict.  So saying, he sentences Frances Schreuder to
life imprisonment.

Mrs.  Bradshaw is expressionless.  Her daughter sits with her mouth
open, a poppet with its stuffing out.  A policewoman appears to take
the prisoner into custody and escort her to jail.  At her approach,
Frances stands up and opens her little package.  It contains a heavy
crucifix.  Thrusting this object out before her in time-honored,
two-handed, anti-Satan fashion, the defendant says loudly, "I stand on
my constitutional rights!"  Then the poor thing is led away.

The play was over, the stories told.  The prosecutor's version had won
handily.  The departing players straggled down the courthouse steps,
passing the big, black Ten Commandments monument for the last time. 
The Schreuder affair had violated most of the ten.  The jury had heard
no evidence of adultery, no coveting of thy neighbor's wife.  But of
plain, garden-variety coveting there had been an abundance, along with
killing, stealing, worship of an entire pantheon of false gods, bearing
of false witness, failure to keep the Sabbath, and sufficient
dishonoring of thy father and thy mother to gladden the black heart of
Satan himself.

But here in Salt Lake City, the case had been viewed primarily as a
violation of what might be called the Eleventh Commandment: Honor Thy

Family.  Here where the family is cast in bronze, painted in murals,
poured in concrete and carved in marble, where totemic groups of Father
and Mother and little children clustered at their knees dot the broad
avenues and loom down from the walls, where billions of invisible
ancestors are believed to hover somewhere in the vacant blue skies
above, their souls mingled with the infinitude of children yet unborn,
where all will one day stand up together in holy white garments in a
greater, vaster family portrait than the human mind can conceive -here
Frances Schreuder's behavior was perceived as an abomination against
the family.  That is the version of reality these people saw.  That is
the play they preferred.  The jury's swift verdict made it very clear.
The jury had functioned just as they were meant to, as "the conscience
of the community."

Frances Schreuder had dishonored the family, they had concluded, and
for this she now literally, in the biblical sense, had been cast out
for her crimes.  Afterword

 : , , MY WORK ON THIS book had started with a letter and, in a sense,
it ended with one.  The first letter had been my own to Frances, mailed
to to

Gracie Square before her trial and returned unopened.

After Frances went to prison, Berenice Bradshaw returned to New York
City to keep an eye on Ariadne and supervise the completion of the
renovations at io Gracie Square which Frances had begun and then
suspended three years before.

At the regular November meeting of the NYCB Board of Directors, a brief
letter of resignation from Frances Schreuder was read, moved and
seconded without comment.

Ariadne was back in school and in ballet school, preparing for her
third season in The Nutcracker.  Her constant companion was Jeannie
Columbo, the young former ballet usher who had been hired as a
temporary au pair just before Frances's trial.  Jeannie had proved to
be an attentive, loving-and loved-caretaker.  The child had never
seemed happier.

Frances still telephoned home nightly, from prison, to discuss
schoolwork, dictate menus, and generally attempt to continue her
supervision from afar.

She refused to speak to her mother during these calls.  Berenice
Bradshaw was heartbroken several times over.  She had given her entire
life to her family, and all lay in ruins about her.  Not one of her
daughters would speak to her.  "How could they convict Frances of
something she didn't do?"  she asked continually.  She and I continued
to call one another several times a week, as we had since we met.  Once
when she sounded especially blue, I urged her to come and visit me in
the country for the weekend.

While we were there the phone rang.  "Is a Mrs.  Bradshaw available to
accept a collect call from Utah?"  Yes, I said, but the caller had
already hung up.

I knew enough by then about Frances to recognize that this was her way
of checking up on Granny's whereabouts.  She did not like where she
found her.

 424 AFTERWORD

Later Berenice invited me several times to visit io Gracie Square.
Although she still seemed bewildered by the turn of events, she now
said she had begun admitting to herself the possibility that "Frances
may have done it."

I had told her before the case went to the jury that I thought her
daughter was probably crazy and had been for some time, in which case
she belonged in the care of doctors, not jailers.  Nothing I came
across in my research caused me to change my mind.  Eventually I found
my way to a psychiatrist who works with homicidal children and often
advises courts in the handling of such cases.  The same doctor was also
a specialist in the diagnosis of bipolar mood disorders (formerly, less
accurately termed manic-depressive psychosis), which by then appeared
to be the category into which Frances's illness fell.  I suggested to
Mrs.  Bradshaw that an informal talk with the doctor might be useful,
if only to make her feel less distraught.

Both she and the doctor agreed, so I drove her down to the hospital and
sat in on their three-hour conversation.  It sounded to me as if the
doctor had the diagnosis about right.  Here is the relevant passage
from Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, or DSM III, the
book which serves psychiatry as the Blue Book does the used car
business.

MANIC EPISODE: The essential feature is a distinct period when the
predominant mood is either elevated, expansive or irritable ...
Symptoms include hyperactivity, pressure of speech, flight of ideas,
inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, and
excessive involvement in activities which have a high potential for
painful consequences, which is not recognized.

The elevated mood may be described as euphoric, unusually good,
cheerful or high; often has an infectious quality for the uninvolved
observer; but is recognized as excessive by those who know the
individual well ... Although elevated mood is considered the
prototypical symptom, the predominant mood disturbance may be
irritability, which may be most apparent when the individual is
thwarted ... The term hypo mania is used to describe a clinical
syndrome that is similar to, but not as severe as, that described by
the tern!  mania or manic episode.  "

 AFTERWORD 425

DSM-III CRITERIA FOR HYPO MANIA

MOOD: elevated expansive PSYCHOMOTOR: more energy.  than usual physical
restlessness

SPEECH: more talkative than usual

SLEEP: decreased need for sleep

COGNITIVE: inflated self-esteem sharpened and unusually creative
thinking overoptimism or exaggeration of past achievement BEHAVIORAL:
increased productivity, often with unusual and self-imposed working
hours hyper sexuality inappropriate laughing, joking excessive
involvements in pleasurable activities with utter lack of concern for
painful consequences: buying sprees, reckless driving, drug & alcohol
abuse

When Berenice Bradshaw went home to Salt Lake City on the day before

Thanksgiving 1983, she drove directly from the airport to the prison.
Her daughter refused to see her.  At home she found a six-page letter
waiting, "a very, very vicious attack.  I was completely laid low."  By
Saturday, she had decided to try again, this time remembering to bring
along some flowers, which she knew Frances liked.  She gave the flowers
to a "matron" and mentioned that on her Wednesday visit Frances had
refused to see her.

"Well we'll just see about that!"  said the matron, and Berenice later
told me that she and Frances had sat out in the sunshine all afternoon
together.

"She was just as nice as she could be!"  Berenice said, except when the
conversation turned to books.  Several people were then writing about
the

Bradshaw murder.  The books were all Berenice's fault, France-, had
told her mother, and she had vowed that, "When those books come out,
she's never going to speak to me again."

On Berenice's next prison visit, at Christmas, she brought

Taken from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Third

Edition.  Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 19go.  DSM III
stresses that bipolar disorder occurs more frequently in certain
families than in the general population.

 426 AFTERWORD

smoked salmon which she knew Frances enjoyed, and again the visit went
well, with one exception.  Frances asked her mother to smuggle in a
bottle of liquor for New Year's Eve.  She showed Berenice the bush it
could be stashed in, and was not happy when her mother refused to
cooperate.

While Berenice was at Draper, she also dropped by the men's side of the
prison to visit her grandson.  "I didn't tell anybody, just went to see
him.

I thought: After all, he's a human being!  I took him a fruitcake.  He
was so happy to see me, he cried.  I didn't tell his mother.  I have
enough problems without that.  Everyone says we're supposed to discard
these kids.  I know

Marc is sick, but you don't just throw a sick dog in the gutter.  You
try to do something for him.  And after all, it was Christmas."

Although Berenice Bradshaw and I always enjoyed one another's company,
I don't think either one of us deceived ourselves into believing that
we could be or wanted to be "friends."  "Fellow travelers" was closer,
passengers for a time on the same train, one critical difference being
that

I could get off the train at any time.  She could never get off.
After

Christmas, I noticed a faint chill in her voice, but we still continued
to chat on the phone and to share an occasional meal.  At our last one,
in a

Chinese restaurant, I was astonished to learn from Berenice that she
had never even heard of Davidsb4indlertdnze, the ballet she had
entirely paid for.  I was also surprised to hear that the New York
State Theater had honored Frances with a gold plaque.  "Go look at it,"
Berenice said.  I couldn't find it.  I was not at all surprised when
Berenice told me that she had decided in her newest will to leave every
dime to her much misunderstood, much abused youngest daughter.  That
development had seemed to me inevitable.

It was just as inevitable that our relationship would come to some
acrimonious end.  I -had by then been awakened several times by late
night anonymous phone calls.  Usually when I picked up the receiver the
caller hung up.  Between Christmas and New Year's, an anonymous
typewritten letter arrived.  The writer claimed to be "a former friend
of the family," but I had by then read dozens of letters Frances had
written and recognized certain turns of phrase.

 AFTERWORD 427

Dear Ms.  Alexander,

I have debated writing to you for months now.  I can no longer sit back
and do nothing but I feel I must come to the defense of one who has
been persecuted her entire life.  As a former friend of the family, I
feel it necessary to bring some facts to your attention.

Frances Schreuder has many good and decent friends.  She is an
extraordinarily brilliant woman who has a sensitive and caring nature.
She has, unfortunately, had so much tragedy in her life, it may have
taken its toll in many ways.  Surprisingly, it has not made her bitter
or taken away her sense of humor.  She numbers among her friends the
very great and the very small.  Not one of them would come forward to
speak to you without her permission.  Those who will speak, however,
are those who have given

Frances nothing but misery her entire life.

When you spoke to Marilyn and Elaine, I do not suppose they told you
they used to lock their baby sister in closets when she was a baby and
they were old enough to know better.  Marilyn was always jealous of her
youngest sister.  Frances was the first to marry and Marilyn was
frantic to get married.  Their own mother has said on several occasions
that Marilyn only got a husband by squawking about how much money her
family had.  Did either sister tell you how many times Frances invited
them for holidays?  Did they tell you they never showed up?  I will bet
they never told you they never once sent a birthday card to Frances or
her children.

Did that mother tell you how she gave to all her children?  Did she
tell you she never once gave a thing without telling you or anyone who
would listen how much it cost and how wonderful it was of her.  Did she
tell you she felt stuck with her own children?  Did she cry about her
husband working three hundred and sixty-five days a year?  What a shame
he isn't here to tell you he had to get away from his nagging and
badgering wife.

Did that mother tell you that when Frances was a little girl and went
off to camp that she asked how to take care of her child's kittens.
When

Frances was gone she took the kittens and drowned them.

This story makes Mommie Dearest look like a Grimms Fairy tale.

 428 AFTERWORD

Frances could never tell you these things because after all they have
done to her, she could never hurt them.

I wonder who really sent Marc to kill his grandfather?  ... (signed)
Anonymous

In late January a second letter arrived.  This one, from Berenice,
written and signed in her hand, said I sought only to profit from her
family's misfortunes.  "In some circles you have a nickname 'the
ghoul,"" she wrote.

"Now I can see why.  You certainly are digging my grave ..."  Once
again I recognized Frances's epistolary style, her precision poison
penmanship, although there was no question that the actual writer was
Berenice, and that her feelings were very bitter.

But to depict the face of madness, one must show that face.  The story
of the Bradshaws pierces our thin skin of sanity and bares the madness
in us all.  We are helpless in our madness, and blind in our sanity.
One must strive to say no to the power of madness, and to remember that
madness comes from within.  A story such as this requires a telling in
full.  Only an honest and seamless account is worth writing.

"Without talking to all of us who know Frances and know her well, your
book will be incomplete," the first letter, the anonymous one from the
"former friend of the family" had concluded.  "Not only that.  By
talking to anyone within this family of hate, your book will not be
accurate."

I have now talked to everyone within this family of hate and have
reached a few conclusions as to what may have happened.  Nothing as
coherent, cohesive, neat, and tidy as a specially written play for a
jury of twelve.

Just some notions that belong herein the realm of speculation, not
fact-but do I think belong.

I think it quite possible that Frances Schreuder is only technically
guilty.  She may not have actually "solicited, requested, commanded ..
for] intentionally aided" Marc in the murder, in the words of the Utah
statute on aiding and abetting-although it is difficult to see how she
could deny having "encouraged" him.  Marc may have acted entirely on
his own, done it because he knew it would please his mother, or to win
love from his mother, and she may have had little or no specific
knowledge of his intention.

 AFTERWORD 429

1 think the murder in Utah in 1978 could be an eerie recapitulation of
the infamous murder in the cathedral eight hundred years before, when

Thomas A Becket was killed by courtiers of King Henry 11, not because
the

King had ordered the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but
because the assassins knew the sovereign's wishes and sought to curry
favor.

It also seems possible to me that what we may have here is a folie d
trois-Frances, Marc, and Behren&-or even d quatre, if Larry too was
involved.  In other criminal trials, though not in this one, the
experts speak about "lethality," and whether a defendant possessed
sufficient "lethality" to do the deed.  Sometimes when I think of those
three flaky, idle people-or was it four?  sitting around day after day
in that lonely flat on York Avenue, drinking, smoking, and imagining
murder and playing the game of murder, ruminating hour after hour on
why and how Franklin

Bradshaw had to be disposed of, I think that quite possibly no one of
them possessed sufficient lethality to do the deed.  What if it
required the confluence of three or four dreaming brains-the smoldering
resentment of Behrens, the manic frenzy of Frances, the young,
disturbed, abused brains of Marc, and perhaps Larry -to conglomerate
sufficient psychic energy and lethality to act?  What if it was a kind
of spontaneous.  combustion of madness?

I often wonder: how could Frances for so long have evaded the nets of
psychiatry, the toils of the law, the attentions of child abuse
authorities, and other guardians of social order?  When I asked Dr.
Moench his opinion, he said, "Easy.  The green poultice."  Money heals
much and hides what it cannot heal.  For the most part, only the poor
wind up in the madhouse, or on death row for that matter.  The green
poultice dilutes madness into harmless eccentricity.

I think that Frances was a monstrous mother.  She almost invariably
used her children as excuses to do whatever it was that she wanted to
do.  I think some mothers do that to an extreme, and almost all of us
do at times.  But Berenice Bradshaw was not one of them.  Berenice's
problem was that she was literally in thrall to her youngest daughter.
She forgot about the principle of the carrot and the stick.  She was
choking Frances on carrots.

Frances told me after the verdict that she had wanted very much to
testify.  "After Marc took the stand against me, that jury had to hear
from me," she said to me during that long afternoon in her locked hotel
room.  "I begged my lawyers to put me on.

 430 AFTERWORD

They said no."  I thought she was right.  After Marc's testimony,
nothing less than hearing from Frances could have helped her.  And it
was hard to imagine how her testimony, however bizarre, could injure
her any worse than her son already had.

I think Granny was more-or-less right when she wrote to Judge Baldwin
that her grandson was "a born liar, a born thief."  He is also a born
games man

Money is the main game, as it is for others in his family.  Money is
one of the few things Marc seems to have genuine feelings for.  His
protestations about having been entirely Mom's puppet have substance
but do not always ring true.  Rather than being an "emotional cripple,"
he seems to have no real "emotions" as most people understand the term.
He did have his lifelong, infantile dread of Mom's anger and
overwhelming craving for her love.  But once he turned on her, he lost
some of these infantile feelings.

Having proved his manhood Mike George's way-by testifying against
Mom-Marc may be no longer a "mama's boy," no longer an "emotional
cripple."  A better term for Utah prisoner #159o6 might be "emotional
debris."  He is like the pile of tailings left behind after his
mother's lifelong, systematic strip mining of all of this young man's
considerable natural resources.

And what of Larry?  Ask Larry Bradshaw today what he thinks really
happened, who the real mastermind was, and he smiles broadly and shakes
his head.  "I don't want to get anyone in trouble," he says.  But at
other times, he has said that Frances, Marc and Behrens all were
involved.  Six months or so after his mother's conviction, Larry drove
to New York and dropped in on

Richard Behrens.  They visited their old hangout, the Midnite Express
coffee shop, and at one point Behrens leaned across the table, Larry
says, and told him, "This is the place Frances and I planned it all
out.  Sitting right here."

Mike George, you see, believes that Larry was in fact Frances's
designated hit man, but that at the last moment he refused to play his
part.  "Frances felt she could control Larry.  So, if the finger ever
pointed at the

Schreuders, she could save Marc, and Larry would take the fall.  That's
how it was meant to work.  But Larry balked."  That is why Marc and his
mother had an hour and-a-half phone conversation the night before the
murder.  Frances was telling Marc that, since Larry would not
cooperate, Marc was going to have to do the job by himself.  That is
why Frances was insisting, and

Marc was sobbing, and Frances was threaten AFTERWORD 431

ing: do it, or don't bother to come home.  The reason Larry was
permanently locked out thereafter was to punish him for disobedience.

Mike also believes that Franklin Bradshaw had made a new will.  He
thinks

Larry went to the warehouse Saturday night under orders from his mother
to find it and destroy it, and that Larry accomplished his mission.

Mike thinks that by Saturday night, when Larry opted out, he knew the
"whole ball of wax," but that Larry will not admit any knowledge or
involvement in the murder because he fears losing his inheritance, as

Marc and Frances have done.  By law, one cannot commit murder for money
and keep the money.

Myself, I have about concluded that Larry Bradshaw, dented though he
be, is in this tale the only family hero.  Undergoing Frances's
monumental abuse, and surviving it, toughened him.  It made him, like a
mended china teacup, stronger at the broken places.  Instead of being
consumed by the flames of his mother's rejection, he was hardened by
them.  By the end,

Larry Bradshaw had turned out to be the only person in the whole
improbable story strong enough to say no to Frances.

There remains the mystery of why they kept the gun.  "That's the only
place they screwed up," Mike George says.  "The gun did them in.  If
he'd thrown it into the East River, or the Jordan River, this case
would never have been solved."  The likeliest explanation, Mike thinks,
is that

Behrens was supposed to get rid of the gun and decided not to, and
the

Schreuders had no idea he still had it.  Being Behrens, he might have
had any number of reasons for keeping it.  A gun was useful and, he
knew from experience, hard for New Yorkers to obtain.  Behrens was very
afraid of

Frances.  Should she or her son ever turn on him, perhaps try to pin
the murder on him, he had the gun, and the gun was firmly tied to Marc.
So perhaps he kept it as several kinds of insurance.  Perhaps he
thought he might have a use for it one day.  Who knows what someone
like Behrens has in his mind?  Maybe, like the Bradshaws, he simply
could not bear to throw anything useful away.

But why had Frances insisted that Marc bring the gun home?  What did
she have in her mind?  What other plots was she hatching?  Or did
Frances insist?  Maybe bringing the gun home was Marc's own idea?  Or
it could have been Marc and Behrens's

 432 AFTERWORD

private game.  Why else did they buy those cleaning rods and the
protective case?

Why wouldn't Frances give Behrens his $3,700?  Didn't she understand
how dangerous he was?  If she didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't, then
why didn't Marc pay him?  Or Larry?  It would have been a simple enough
matter to forge another of Granny's checks.  It wasn't logical.

But "murder is never logical," the prosecutor had said.

The murder of Franklin Bradshaw had started as a family game, a family
sick joke.  Then some kind of lid came off, some restraints blew away,
and the game escaped into reality.  I think most murders happen that
way.

By Christmas 1984, Larry Bradshaw was no longer on parole.  He drove
back to Salt Lake City, where he had already rented an apartment and
bought furniture, and he prepared to enroll in the University of Utah
and major in political science.

His brother continues his studies at the state penitentiary, working
toward a paralegal degree and an advanced degree in federal income tax
studies.  Mary Lou Kaiser continues visiting, baking, waiting.  Marc

Schreuder's appeal to the Utah Supreme Court has been filed, but one
of

Berenice's many lawyers says he would "fall off my chair" if a new
trial were granted.  Marc will be up for parole in June x986, however,
and his chances of release look very good.

Berenice and Chips spent Christmas touring the Balearic Islands.  She
had completed remodeling the big duplex, sold the place for a tidy
profit-something over $3 million-and bought a smaller apartment not far
from Ariadne's school.  Her granddaughter is still passionate about her
dancing, and Granny does not want to take the child away from what she
loves most.  Ariadne spent this Christmas as she had the previous
three-twirling and arching and leaping in the spotlight, spinning now
on diamond-hard toes, The Nutcracker's enchanted child.

Earlier in the year, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan were quietly dropped and
Salt

Lake City attorney Ron Yengish was retained by Mrs.  Bradshaw to handle
her daughter's appeal.

In prison.  Frances Schreuder has been a constant disciplinary problem
since she arrived.  First she was caught and punished for trying to
smuggle in whiskey.  Soon after, morphine was found in her urine and
she was punished again.  By summer 1984, funded

 AFTERWORD 433

by the generous allowance she receives from Berenice, she was running
the prison commissary rackets.  Later that summer she was severely
beaten up by two other inmates.  Authorities believe the mauling was
somehow related to her newfound status as Point of the Mountain's
leading black marketeer.

In November, United Press International reported in a small item:
"Frances

Bernice Schreuder, the New York socialite convicted of first-degree
murder in the death of her father, is suffering from 'culture shock,"
and has been moved from Utah State Prison."

Readers familiar with the case took this to mean that Frances was at
last where she had belonged all along-in a mental hospital.  But they
were wrong.

Utah prison officials had simply got fed up with Frances and shipped
her off to Idaho.  The two state penitentiaries have a reciprocal
agreement, and

Utah had decided to let Idaho take a crack at saying no to Frances for
a while.

New York, N. Y

Spring 1985 Index

Adler, Will, 138 health of, 323-24

Alexander, Chris, 328, 384 last days and death of, 378-79

All Car Parts division, 47 relationship with Frances, 323-24,

Ailcri-Stevenson School, Marc 378

Schreuder at, 126-27, 152.  154 Baldwin, Ernest T."  386, 394, 399

Allentown State Psychiatric Hospital,402, 407, 415-16, 417-18 272, 273
Banks, Jay.  333, 342

American Savings & Loan, 47 Barrett, Smith, Schapiro, Simon &

Ancestors, Mormonism and, 25-27 Armstrong, 291-92, 296

Anderson, Steve, 203, 208 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 207

Armstrong, Michael, 291-92, 295, Beck, Bertha Bradshaw, 20, 21, 45,
296, 303 58, 99, 120

Attfield, Gillian, 215 Behrens, Herman, 89, 91, 246-47, 344,

Autopsy, 18 413

Behrens, Joan Bloom, 266, 344, 413

Balanchine, George, 207, 210-12, Behrens, Richard, 105, 109, 125-26,
214-15, 216-19, 223, 226-27, 170, 174, 184-85, 190 230, 236, 237, 259,
201, 272, background of, 89-91 317.  322.  372-73 France% and, 90-91,
91-94, 125-26, arrest of Frances and, 320-21 143-44, 154, 204

Choreography by George Balanchine,first meeting, 88 224-25,379joint
bank account and money

Davidsbiindlertdrize ballet by, 249-owed to Behrens, 227, 235,
52246-47, 261-62, 339, 390, 403, funeral for, 383 409

 INDEX 435

testimony at trial of Marc embezzlement of husband's funds,

Schreuder, 342-46 94-95 trial of, 262, 389, 390, 395-97,forged tuition
checks, 171, 317, 400-2, 402-4, 405-6, 408-11, 325 412-14 family
background of, 52-53 inheritance as obsession of, 91, 125family
feelings of, 52-53

Marc Schreuder and, 278 Frances and, 109, 137, 380-81, 400. proposition
to kill Behrens's See also Schreuder, Frances stepmother, 266
Bradshaw-relationship with trial of, 262, 340-41, 341-48, mother
348-50,350-52abduction of Marc and Larry, murder of Franklin Bradshaw
and, 110-14 182-83, 184-85, 261, 278, 430bail for Frances, 322 33child
abuse, Berenice accused of, extradition fight, 296-97 276-78 gun used
in murder, 263-67, 268 communications severed by "hit man," attempt to
hire a, 170"Frances, 171, 176 263,300,301-3correspondence between Larry
jailed after recantation, 273 and Berenice, 17642

Marc accused of killing, 263, 264,divorce from Frederik Schreuder,
266-67 139 phone conversations with Marilyndivorce from Vittorio
Gentile, 93

Reagan, 261-65 94, 97-98, 101, 102 police investigation, 267-68,
282-Elaine on, 283-84 83, 299-301, 302, 314 excretory functions of
Berenice, reaffirmation of original conversation with sons on, 198
statement, 300 99 recantation of confession, 269-70,financial affairs
of Frances, 100 390Gracie Squareco-op, 221-22, 229, personal
characteristics of, 88-92,231-32, 243, 289-91 296-97law firm retained
for Frances,

Behrens, Robert, 89 321-22

Benson, Ezra T."  41 letters to Larry, 177-82 marriage to Vittorio
Gentile, 66

Bone, Mary Wagstaff, 41-42 67, 83, 86-87

Bone, William, 41-42 mental health of Frances, 81-82,

Boyce, Alma, 336 108-9, 423-25

Bradshaw, Berenice Jewett (wife), x,money given to Frances, 94-96, xi,
23, 22599, 101, 102, 103, 122, 126, author's relationship with,
423-24,131, 142-43, 148-49, 154-55, 426,428170, 179-81, 184-85, 259,
336,

"Autobiography" of, 40, 51-52, 62-337 63,73after murder, 199-205, 221

Bradshaw family and, 20, 56-57.  58,in 1960s.  86-87, 92, 96-97, 98 66
99,"9 childhood and adolescence.  52-56 prison visits, 425-26

Chips and, 271raids on Berenice's bedroom daily routine of, 15-16
(1980), 257-58 disclaimer of interest in family trust.  religion
Frances's interest in, 156 208, 339, 340, 341 in Southampton (1979),
229, 230 at Elaine's wedding, 66 Thanksgiving (1979), 238

 436 INDEX

transfer of Berenice's money to Bradshaw, Elaine (daughter).  See

Morgan Guaranty bank, 227 Drukman, Elaine Bradshaw trial of, 30, 400-4,
423, 424 Bradshaw, Emma Briggs (mother), 19, will, 258, 385 41,43-44
funeral for husband and, 20-21 Bradshaw, Franklin, 37 granddaughter
Ariadne and, 132, See also Bradshaw Auto Parts 177, 259, 276-77, 423,
432 Autobiography" of, 39-40 grandsons Marc and Larry and, 98,autopsy
of, 18 107, 110-11, 117, 118, 120, burial of ashes of, 202 121, 137.
See also Schreuder, business acumen of, 46--47

Lawrence-grandmother childhood and adolescence, 19-20,

Berenice and; Schreuder, Marc 43-44, 99grandmother Berenice and in
college, 44-45 abduction of, 110-14 daily routine of, 15, 38 money for
school, 146--47, 170, employees, relations with, 50 231, 325estate of.
See Estate of Franklin summer of 1968 in Salt Lake Bradshaw

City, 114-16family background of, 39, 40-41 summer of 1977 in Salt Lake
family feelings of, 51

City, 157, 159-63 as father, 58, 59, 61, 64-67, 71, 74, health of, 203,
234 75, 77

Jackson Hole, visit to (1946), 64 Frances and.  See also Murder of

Marilyn and, 85, 86, 148, 196-97, Franklin Bradshaw 234,
259correspondence, 96-99, 100, 101 marriage, 44-46.  See also Married 2
life of Berenice and Franklin divorce from Frederik Schreuder,

Bradshaw 138 as mother, 37-38, 58-62, 64, 71-72, divorce from Vittorio
Gentile, 73, 75, 109.  See also under 94-95, 97, 98, 101-2, 103 names
of individual children financial affairs, 83, 86, 100, 101, murder of
husband and, 193, 194, 120, 121-23 195, 196-98, 203, 295 Frederik's
debts, 143

Elaine on, 284Gil mer Drive house offered to

Frances, 176 estate matters, 200-2 horror stories told by Frances,
learns of murder, 16 169 police investigation, 284-85, 286mental health
of Frances, 81-82 round-the-world cruise after, 221suit and counter
suit over stocks "nervous breakdowns" of, 63--64, 66and bonds,139

Robert's death and, 72-73 Wasatch stock incident (1958), 83 travels,
50, 65--66, 120, 142, 221, will and estate matters, 150, 151, 271, 376,
380169-70, 175, 339 trial of daughter and, 371-72, 399frugality of, 50
400, 402-3, 417funeral and memorial service for, at trial of Marc
Schreuder, 348-5018-23 will, 119-20, 150-51, 258, 381, 385, grandsons
Marc and Larry and jobs, 401-2, 411, 426offers of (1977), 157-58,
165-66

Bradshaw, Bernard (brother), 83 money given by Franklin, 122

Bradshaw, Blair (nephew), 197 poisoning Franklin, plan for

Bradshaw, Craig (nephew), 21-23, 155(1977), 158-59, 163, 167, 262,

Bradshaw, Don (nephew), 195-97 387 INDEX437 stealing, forgery, and
mental illness and hospitalization, embezzlement, 158, 160-66, 69-72
334,387-88relationship with father, 71-72 summer of 1968 in San Lake
relationship with mother, 58-59,

City, 113-16 71-73 health of, 50 Bradshaw, Thornton W."  235 marriage,
44-45.  See also MarriedBradshaw, Mrs.  Thornton W."  235 life of
Berenice and Franklin Bradshaw Auto Parts, 334

Bradshaw employees of, 49, 50 mining interests of, 47-48 first store
(Provo), 45-46, 59 murder of.  See Murder of Franklinheadquarters and
warehouse, 48-49

BradshawMarc and Larry's summer jobs at oil and gas leases of, 18,
47-48, 86(1977), 157-58, 163, 165, 166, personal characteristics of,
49-5 1,334 77second store (Salt Lake City), 61 records and documents
kept by, 39-Bradshaw family, 37-40 40a s addicted to power politics,
100-1 stock investments of, 46 correspondence among members of, trusts
set up by, 121-22, 155, 339,39, 96-97, 101-2, 282-83 401reunion after
murder of Franklin weahh of, 17, 120-21, 145-47 Bradshaw, 193-94.  198
will, 120-21, 150, 193, 431 stealing among members of, 257-58

Frances left out of, 169, 175, 187Brand, Maxwell, 138, 151, 171
original copy of, 341 Briane, Mireille, 315, 320, 371.  384 trial of
Franco, Schreuder, 411"Brian sky Oleg, 21&-19, 315.  370, 384 412
Briansky School, 315-16 trial of Marc Schreuder, 334-37,summer camp,
327-28, 370-71, 384 338-43,355-57 Briggs, Emma Thomas, 42, 43, 44 work
habits of, 48-50, 51, 63, 143"Briggs, Hannah Dean, 40-41 179 Briggs,
Samuel, 40-41

Bradshaw, Frederick (brother).  47, 335Briggs, Samuel.  Jr."  40

Bradshaw, Jack (nephew), 196 Bryn Mawr, Frances at.  81-83, 322-23

Bradshaw, Jean (wife of Don), 195"Burial of Franklin Bradshaw's ashes,
196,197 201-2

Bradshaw, John Franklin (father), 19, 42,57 Campbell, Joel, 194-95,
198, 263-65,

Bradshaw, Larry (grandson).  See 266-67, 282, 342, 343, 402

Schreuder, Lawrence Cannon.  Ted, 366

Bradshaw, Marilyn (daughter).  See Carey, Hiram Bissle (Ted), 111,
268,

Reagan.  Marilyn Bradshaw 269, 292, 351-53

Bradshaw, Mary Ann (grandmother), Cavenaugh, Jon, 185, 186-87, 266,
41-42 268,337

Bradshaw, Richard Travis Cavenaugh, Mrs."  185-86, 336 (grandfather),
41-42 Cavenaugh family, 265, 293

Bradshaw, Robert (son), 20, 50-51 Chapin School, 244

Berenice and, 58-59, 60, 71-73, 137Chase Manhattan Bank, joint checking
childhood and adolescence, 37-38,account opened at, by Frances 39,
58-59, 60-61, 64, 65, 68-70SLhreuder and Richard death of, 72-73,
109-10 Behrens, 227 epilepsy, 38, 62, 68-69, 70 Chiang Kai-shek,
Madame, 230

 438 INDEX

Choreography by George Balanchine, Erdheim, Irving, 94, 97, 135--36,
137, 224-25,379 144

Cimler, Annette, 3 18 Estate of Franklin Bradshaw, 200-3

Cohn, Roy, 29See also Trusts set up by Franklin

Coleman, Lee, 363-64, 408 Bradshaw's will; Will, Franklin

Coleman, Susie, 152, 190 Bradshaw's

Colombo, Jeannie, 384, 423 disclaimer of interest in family trust

CoppOia, 375signed by Berenice, 208, 339,

C6to Basque restaurant, 210, 219 340, 341

Craft, Randal R."  Jr."  213 Frances and, 200-2, 203, 246-47

Crux, Ernie, 318Marilyn Reagan and, 193, 200-1, 335, 339, 341-42,
347,

D'Amboise, Jacques, 374raise in her allowance requested by

Davidsbfindlendnze, 249-54 Frances, 221, 227

Davis, Clive, 48, 160, 194, 195 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 339,

Dragon's Hall, 166, 167-68, 171, 173, 340-41, 342, 347, 349-51 175
value of, 339

Drukman, Elaine Bradshaw, 67 Extradition of Marc Schreuder, 291
assassination of her sons feared by, 92, 294, 302-3 381-82 childhood
and adolescence, 37, 38, Fairview State Hospital for the 60-62, 64, 68,
69, 74 Criminally Insane, 258

Frances and, 82, 182 Family, Mormonism and, 26-27 embezzlement of stock
belonging F & B Corporation, 121, 155, 175, 200 to Elaine, 161, 207-8
Federal Bureau of Investigation

(FBI),

marriage, 66 207-8

Nixon, meeting with, 76 Ferguson, Dorothy, 351 on parents' married
life, 77 Fletcher, Madeleine Di Gorgonzo, 78 physical appearance of, 22
Ford Foundation, 213, 225, 237 relationship with father, 67 Frankel,
David, 292-96, 318-19, 351 relationship with mother, 76, 283- 52,
353-57, 390 85 Franklin, Joseph Paul, 281, 286 today, 67, 76

Friedrich, Caspar David, 250 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 340Funeral
and memorial service for 41 Franklin Bradshaw, 19-23 will of father
and, 340-41

Drukman, Mason, 22-23, 66, 67-68, Genealogy, Mormonism and, 25-26 76,
77Gentile, Jacqueline, 392

Drukman, Max, 23, 76Gentile, Lorenzo Jewett.  See

Drukman, Sam, 23, 76, 86, 380 Schreuder, Lawrence

Drukman family, 146 Gentile, Marco Francis.  See in Salt Lake City
after murder of Schreuder, Marc

Franklin Bradshaw, 193 Gentile, Vittorio, 23, 84, 369, 376-77, Eastern
Military Academy (EMA), as father, 94, 107-8, 377

Larry Schreuder at, 141, 184 Frances and, 81, 298-99, 369-70

Emerson School, Marc Schreuder at, divorce, 87, 93-94, %, 97, 98, 105
102, 109, 391-92

Episcopal Church, 156 fights, 94

Episcopal School, 157 first meeting and "whirlwind

Ariadne Schreuder at, 171, 172 romance," 90-81

 INDEX 439

Frances's and sons' leaving, 86-87Huguenot Society, 91 marriage, 83
Hurok, Sol, 237 visit to Frances (1973), 130

Marc and, 298-99, 310-11 International School (Vilstern), 120 murder of
Franklin Bradshaw and, 183, 298-99 Jackson, Robert, 415 trial of
Frances Schreuder and, 391-Jackson Hole, Bradshaw family's93 visit to,
64 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 377 Jewels (maid), 171, 173 visits with
Marc, 377-78, 383, 392Jewett, Florence Roberts, 52-53, 55,

George, Sgt.  Michael, 279-88, 297-58-59, 60 303, 317, 357, 378, 381,
393, Jewett, Fred Daniel, 52-53, 60 416,430-31Jewett, Maximilian, 20
attitude toward case, 299-300 Jones, Ernest W."  263, 278, 279, 28 1,
background of, 279-82 286-87, 296-97, 301, 309, 314,

Behrens and, 300-1 325, 348, 353, 355-58, 363,

Berenice and, 324-25 366, 386, 387, 393, 397, 400,

Elaine interviewed by, 283-84 402, 408, 410, 413.  417 extradition of
Marc Schreuder and' Jones Nancy, 49, 164, 185, 201, 337 302-3 38,404

Joseph Paul Franklin case and, 281, 286Kaiser, Mary Lou, 311-15, 325,
329,

Larry Bradshaw interviewed by, 368-70, 398 285-86Kaiser, Millard,
311-12, 315

Marc Schreuder and, 309-11, 324Kent School, 155, 227-29, 244, 360 25,
365-68, 369, 385-86, 393- Kirstein, Lincoln, 212, 213, 223, 224, 94,
397226, 237, 272, 317, 322, 374,

Myles Manning and, 301-3 417 as narcotics cop, 279 arrest of Frances
and, 320-21 records and correspondence of Kisselgoff, Anna, 253

Bradshaw family subpoenaed Klein, Steve, 287-88, 302, 317-18,and
analyzed by, 281-83, 287 Knowlton, Winthrop, 225, 252 at trial of Marc
Schreuder, 333, 366-07 Kostelanetz, Andre, 230

Vittorio Gentile and, 298-99 Kurumada, Kevin, 325, 350, 386, 391,

Germain, Antoine, 138 416

Goldman, Larry, 296, 300

Goodfellow, Mr.  (lawyer), 382 Lang, John, 386, 388, 391

Gottlieb, Robert, 235-36, 321 Lassalle, Nancy, 379

Gracie Square co-op, 221-22, 229-30"Lehigh University, Larry Schreuder
at, 231-32, 243, 289-91 202, 231, 234, 240-42

Life (magazine), 4

Hacking, Wayne, 21, 23 Loughran, Jack, 239

Harkness, Rebekah, 237 Lowry, W. McNeil.  213, 226, 253, 417

Harman, Don, 297 Ludwig, Dan, 47

Hatch.  Orrin G."  269

Hearts (Thompson), 4 McMurrin.  Sterling, 24

Holland, the Schreuders in, 119 McPhail, Malcolm, 186

Horton, Beatrice, 54 Madsen.  Ron, 269, 340

Horton, Chubb, 67 Mantra, Tordella & Brookes (M.T.B.),

Hotchkiss School, 154 287-88,298

 440 INDEX

Manning, Mylm 300-2, 344-45, 348Berenice and, 193, 194, 195, 196--98,
49, 401, 410, 412-13 202-3, 296

Manzi, Ralph, 140Elaine on, 283-84

Married life of Berenice and Franklin estate matters, 200-2

Bradshaw, 45-46, 63-64, 336 learns of murder, 16-17 divorce action
filed by Berenice, 102police investigation, 284-85, 286

Elaine on, 77 87 financial affairs, 350 round-the-world cruise after,
221 letter from Berenice to Franklin discussed openly at Schreuder on
(1975), 145-47 household, 147-49, 156 first years of, 56-60 Elaine
Drukman and, 193, 194, 200, "nervous breakdowns" of Berenice, 201-2,
203, 207, 281, 283-84 63--64, 66estate matters after.  See Estate of in
1930s, 61 Franklin Bradshaw in 1940s, 64exclusion of Frances from will
and, physical violence, 102 169

Marymount School, 245 Frances and

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 253 arrest, 317-21

Moench, Louis G."  295, 326, 352, Behrens induced to recant 35", 390,
395, 408, 413-14 confession, 269-70

Moore, Serge, 18family reunion in Salt Lake City,

Morgenthau, Robert, 291 193

Mormon church (Mormonism), 18, "hit man," attempt to hire, 170, 19-20,
24-27 263, 300-1 capital punishment and, 30-31 police investigation,
194-95, 197 98, 265-66, 267, 282-86, 299 Mormon Temple (Salt Lake
City), 26303

Morris, Carolyn Karoliszyn, 297, 346See also Trial of Frances

Morse, Theodore F."  227-28 Schreuder

Morse, Wayne, 76Sun used for, 183, 184-86, 263-67,

Mountain Fuel stock, 121, 122-23, 268, 431 139, 142, 161Larry Schreuder
and, 185, 187, 193,

Murder of Franklin Bradshaw 195, 201-2, 262, 263, 265, 269, author's
conclusions about, 429-29294, 430-31

Behrens and, 183, 184, 261-68, 278, activities on day of murder, 195,
430-31 197-98 extradition fight, 296-97 grandmother's testimony, 325
gun used in murder, 263-67, 268 poisoning plan (1977), 159, 163, "hit
man," attempt to hire, 170, 167,387 263, 300, 301police investigation,
282, 284-87 jailed after recantation, 273-74 polygraph test, 202

Marc accused of killing by, 263, Marc Schreuder and, 176, 184-90, 264,
266-67284, 291-%.  See also Trial of phone conversations with Marilyn
Marc Schreuder, Trial of

Reagan, 26145 Frances Schreuder police investigation, 266--68, 282,
accused of killing by Behrens, 299-300, 301, 314263, 264, 267
reaffirmation of original arrest, 268, 288, 291-92 statement, 300-1
arrest of mother, 321 recantation of confession, 269-70, certified as
an adult by Utah, 278 390 charges dropped, 273-74

 INDEX 441

extradition, 291-92, 294, 302-3 Baryshnikov and, 207 fear of losing
mother's love and contributions of Frances Schreuder being locked out,
188-89 to, 209-10, 213, 215, 219, 222

Frances informed of renewed 25, 248, 249, 252, 305, 321 police
investigation, 265-66 Coppelia, 375 gun, 184-86, 264, 265-67, 268
"Festival d'Automne A Paris: in hiding, 274-75, 278 Hommage A Igor
Stravinsky," killing described by, 189, 389 259, 260, 261

Myles Manning on, 301 Frances as Board member, 252-53, phone call to
Frances, 187-88, 258-59, 320-22, 328-29 189, 389impression made by
Frances.  on poisoning plan (1977), 158-59, fund-raisers and Board 163,
167, 387members of, 214-17, 219, 222 police investigation, 265,
266-68,24, 226, 236 282-83, 285-89, 297-301, 317 International
Committee of, 258 reaction of Frances to killing, 190Nutcracker, The,
304-5, 306-7, 373 story told to lawyer, 268, 293-95publication of
Choreography by

Marilyn Reagan and.  See Reagan, George Balanchine and, 224-25

Marilyn Bradshaw, murder of restaging of Sleeping Beauty father and
proposed by Frances, 372 1977 poisoning plan, 159-60, 163"Sunday
Afternoon M4 380 167, 262.  387See also Balanchine, George police
investigation of, 194-95, 197-New York City Ballet Guild, 222, 224 98,
262--65, 278, 281-89, 297New York Daily News, 292 303, 317New York
Police Department, 264-65,

Behrens, 300-1, 302 267, 287

Elaine interviewed by George, New York Society for the Prevention
283-84of Cruelty to Children, 276,

Frances, 194-95, 197-98, 265-66,277 267,283-85,297,300-1 New York
Times~ 252, 253, 292 "hit man," attempt to hire, 170"New Zealand, the
Drukmans in, 76-77 263,300-3 Nixon, Richard M."  76

Jerry Register and, 286 Nutcracker, The, 304, 307, 373

Larry Bradshaw, 285

Marc SLhreuder, 285-89, 297-300 O'Brien, Shaun, 328, 384-85 records and
correspondence of Occupier, The (magazine), 141-42,

Bradshaw family subpoenaed 230, 231, 374, 382, 383 and analyzed,
281-84, 287 Oil and gas leases, 17, 47-48, 86, 121

Vittorio Gentile, 298-99 Ostrow, Norman, 318 preliminary hearing, 317
press coverage of, 292, 320 Pent, Marwick & Mitchell, 200

Vittorio Gentile and, 183, 298-99Peemoeller, Helen, 80

Perlman, Arthur M."  87

National Auto Parts Association Perry, William Hart, 227-28 (NAPA), 45,
59 Plaza Hotel, 126

National Endowment for the Arts, 213Point of the Mountain, state prison
at,

Nephites, visitation from, 42 104

New York City Ballet (NYCB), 206-Poisoning of Franklin Bradshaw, plan
209-21, 222-27, 2130, 235-38, for (1977), 158-59, 163, 167, 259-61,
304, 316, 423 262 arrest of France-s and, 319-22 Pons, Lily, 230, 275

 442 INDEX

Porter, Mary, 417Robert and, 37-38, 68-70

Provo, Bradshaw Auto Parts store in, today, 67 46, 59trial of Frances
Schreuder and, 262, 390, 409-11, 417-18

Reagan, Marilyn Bradshaw, 88, 95, trial of Marc Schreuder and, 262, 381
339-40, 345-47, 347-48, 349apartments of, 122 57

Behrens and, 247, 261-65, 266, on Vittorio's marriage to Frances,
269-70,343,345-46 83-84, 87 childhood and adolescence, 37-38, Reagan,
Robert McMillan, 23, 67-68, 59, 61-62, 64, 6849, 73, 74-75 85, 88, 103,
107, 109, 118, 150 co-administrator of father's estate, 51 memo making
her, 193, 335 Reagan family, 148 estate matters and, 193, 200-1, 339,
Marc and Larry's stays with, 108, 341-42,347,349-50 118

Frances and, 85.  86, 96, 111, 128, Regan, Ed, 267 148,347-48Regi~ter,
Jerry, 186, 265, 286, 338

Ariadne's birth, 132 Register, Richard, 286 child neglect, Frances
reported Religion.  See also Mormon Church for, 108-9Frances's interest
in, 156-57 during Frances's college years, Richardson, David, 259-W,
304-9, 81-82 373-75,380 inheritance, 150-51 Robbins, Jerome, 237 after
murder, 200-2, 202-5 Roberts, Tacy Arabella Davis, 53-54 in 1950s,
79Roberts (Berenice Bradshaw's funeral for her father and, 20-21,
grandfather), 56 22-23 Roberts family, 57 Marc and Larry Schreuder and,
Rogers,

William, 227, 247 106-9 Rogers & Wells, 227, 385 abduction, 111-12, 113
Rosen, Michael, 376, 386, 391-93, marriage, 85-86394-98, 403-13, 416,
417 murder of father and, 193-94, 196Rosen, Mike, 29, 32 97, 202, 208,
262-65, 266-67, Rothwax, Harold, 303 270,284-85,295-96

Behrens's recantation of Sad ofF Robert, 254 confession, 269-70 St.
Hilda's and St.  Hugh's

Berenice blamed as ultimately Ariadne at, 204, 232, 245 responsible for
murder, 203-4 Larry Schreuder at, 118, 119 burial of father's ashes,
201-2 Marc Schreuder at, 110, 118, 119 estate matters, 200-1 Salisbury,
David, 120-21 phone conversations with Sallourn, Farid, 241

Behrens, 261-65Larry Schreuder's assault on, 241 police investigation,
194, 262-65, 43, 325-26 281-82, 283trial and conviction, 248, 254
return to New York, 202-3 Salt Lake City, 29 relationship with father,
96-97 Sawaya, James S."  333-34, 342, 352, business, hope to take over
354, 359, 360, 363-65, 367 father's, 68, 347,349 Saxe, Bacon & Bolan,
29, 372, 385 will and estate planning, 150-51, Schell, Orville H."  321
175,335.340-42 School of American Ballet (SAB).  260, relationship with
mother, 67, 148 272, 304, 322, 327

 INDEX 443

Schreuder, Ariadne Tacy Alexandra' David Richardson and, 304-9 14,23,
54,62,94, 145, 156-57, Don Bradshaw and, 198 171-73, 189, 190.209,221,
at Dragon's Hall, 166, 167-68, 171, 234.  240, 243, 244, 247-48, 173,
175 298, 348 'drinking of, 78-79, 80-81, 84, 130 as abused and
neglected child, 136,estate matters and, 199-202, 203, 275-77, 326-27,
360-61 246-47 in automobile accident (1977), 174-financial affairs,
100-3 75joint bank account with Richard ballet activities, 172-73, 181,
232"Behrens, 227, 235, 246-47, 272, 304-8, 315-17, 327-28, 261-62, 339,
390, 403, 409 371-72, 373-76, 380, 384-85, letter to David Salisbury,
150-51 423,432 school fees, 113, 116 birth, 132suit and counter suit
over stocks

English nanny of, 167-68 and bonds,139 grandmother Berenice and, 177,
trusts, 121 259, 276-78, 423, 432 Wasatch Chemical stock, 83

Marc and, 247, 275-77 wills of parents, 150-5 1 in school, 157, 204,
232-33, 244-45at funeral for father, 22-23

Frances's attempts to find a jewelry of, 257-58, 259 school for, 182-83
job as clerk-typist, I 11, 114 suicide attempt by her mother and,
319-20marriage to Vittorio Gentile, 66-67 at Sunday afternoon the.  380
mental health of.  81-83, 97, 100, taped conversations, 275-76~
294-95108-9, 119, 129-30, 424-25

Ariadne Tape at trials, 326-27, as diagnosed by Dr.  Moench, 362 353,
355, 358, 360, 364, 390 Frederik on, 137-39

Schreuder, Frances Bradshaw Marc on, 127-31 abduction of Marc and Larry
and, as mother, 86-87, 90, 91-93, 105-7, 110-13109, 126-27, 151, 233,
403-5, anonymous letter to the author 429.  See also under individual
from, 426-27, 428 children apartments in New York, 87, 92, Ariadne Tape
as evidence of 127, 155, 221-22 power over children, 295

Gracie Square co-op, 221-22, empathy with her children, 150 229-30,
231-32, 243, 289-91 Frederik on, 136, 139, 140 arrest of, 317-22 moves
out with sons (1963).  86-87 author's letter to, 7-8 murder of father
and.  See Murder automobile accident (1%9), 118-19of Franklin Bradshaw
automobile accident (1977), 174-75New York City Ballet and.  See New
bad drug reaction (1980), 277 York City Ballet

Behrens on personal characteristics note given to author (1983), 9 of,
92-94physical appearance of, 168, 222-23, at Bryn Mawr, 77-79, 81-83,
322- 260-61 23pregnant with Ariadne, 129-30 check forgeries, 183, 194,
198, 207-in prison, 425-26, 432-33 8..300, 336relationship with father,
75 childhood and adolescence, 37-38,relationship with mother, 64, 74,
77 61, 62--K 68, 74-76, 77-78, 98 Berenice on, 176-81 clothes, shopping
for (1958), 81 Marc on, 245--46 daily routine of, 171-72 after
murder,

 444 INDEX

parasitism and dependence in, changed name to Larry 149-50Brad shaw
15-16, 117-20, released on hail, 321 121-22, 126, 129, 148, 151,
religion and.  156-57 152, 238, 299, 328, 406, 432 reputation in the
neighborhood, 298abducted (1968), 110-14 return to New York City
(1958), alleged attempts to kill his younger 83-84 brother, 108, 117 in
Rikers Island jail, 321 at Allentown' State Psychiatric

Seconal addiction of, 117-18, 125Hospital, 285 as social climber,
90-91, 223 Ariadne and, 240 in Southampton, 166, 167-68, 171, assault
on Sallourn, 241-45 173, 229, 230trial and conviction for, 248, 254
stealing birth of, 86 by Marc and Larry, from childhood, 86-88, 93, 94,
103-4, grandparents, 160-66 105-9, 110 from Marc and Larry by, 152-53
in college, 202, 231, 233-34, 240-41 shoplifting, 170 in Dallas (1979),
230-31 suicide threats and attempts, 130denial of existence of, 286 31,
238-39, 318-19 divorce of Frances and Vittorio and, surgery, 123 94-95,
101 taped conversations, 204-6, 294 escape from mental hospital, 272-73
trial of See Trial of Frances at Fairview State Hospital for the

Schreuder Criminally Insane, 258 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 353first
trial of mother and, 28, 30, 32 54, 355-57, 368.  See also
TrialFrederik Schreuder and, 121 of Marc Schreuder, Frances at funeral
for grandfather, 23 and grandfather Franklin and, 125.  See

Williams & Connolly retained by, also Bradshaw, Franklin, 321,
322grandsons Marc and Larry and

See also specific topics and under grandmother Berenice and, 117.  See
names of other persons also Bradshaw, Berenice Jewett,

Schreuder, Frederik, 23 grandsons Marc and Larry and

Berenice Bradshaw and, 139 correspondence, 176-82, 317 as father,
137excretory functions of Berenice,

Frances and, 116-18 conversation with Frances on,

Behrens, Frances's relationship 198-99 with, 143-44money for school,
146-47, 179 divorce, 137-40 82,231 fights, 123-25, 126, 136-37, 144
after murder, 201 wedding, 117living with the Reagans, 118-19

Franklin Bradshaw and, 138 locked out of home, 166, 172-73, loans to
Frederik, 143 181, 208, 397 request for money, 122-23 magazine put out
by, 141-42, 230 stepsons and.  See Schreuder, 31

Lawrence, Frederik Schreuder mental health of, 105-8, 112-14, and;
Schreuder, Marc, Frederik 242-43, 258, 325-26

Schreuder and money and, 157-58

Schreuder, Fritje.  116, 117 murder of grandfather and.  See

Schreuder, Gloria, 116 Murder of Franklin Bradshaw,

Sc-hreuder, Lawrence (Larry; born Larry Schreuder and

Lorenzo Jewett Gentile; later name changes, 120, 230

 INDEX445

Nancy as first girlfriend, 240-41"Ariadne and, 247, 275-76 243
automobile accident involving paroled, 377, 382-83 Frances and (1977),
174-75 as penny collector, 141 beatings personal characteristics of,
118 by Frederik, 124-25 physical appearance of, 23 by mother, 127, 136,
370 pilot's license, 202 Behrens and, 246-47 in prison, 272-73 birth
of, 86 relationship with brother at Cavenaugh home, 185-86 alleged
attempts by Larry to kill childhood 86-87, 93, 103, 104-9,

Marc, 108, 117-18 110 barring of Larry from home, 172-in college, 244
73, 208 diary, 244 kept apart, 106-7, 128 divorce of Frances and
Vittorio and,

"Stalingrad" game, 141 94-95, 100 relationship with mother, 383.  Sceat
Dragon's Hall, 167-68 also Schreuder, Frances father's visit (1973),

Bradshaw, as mother on fights between mother and in Salt Lake City
(summer 1968), Frederik, 124-25 113-16Frederik Schreuder and, 116-17,
in Salt Lake City (summer 1977), 143-44 157-66 beatings, 124-25
departure for school, 165-66 grandfather Franklin and.  See also job at
Bradshaw Auto Parts, 15?"Brad shaw Franklin, grandsons 163, 164-65Marc
and Larry and; Murder list of rules, 159-60 of Franklin Bradshaw plan
to poison grandfather, 158-note sent by Marc (1976), 155-56 59, 163,
167grandmother Berenice and, 118, stealing, forgery, and 119, 129, 174,
175, 245-46, embezzlement, 157-58, 160--66, 284, 287, 313.  See also
334 Bradshaw, Berenice Jewett, in Salt Lake City (summer 1978),
grandsons Marc and Larry and 184, 185 bail money, 268, 309 in school,
117, 118, 119, 141 check forgeries, 325 graduation from Eastern
Militaryembezzlement of funds (198 1),

Academy, 183-84 287-88 sent to Holland (1969), 119 excretory functions
of Berenice, suicide attempt by Frances and conversation with Frances
on, (1979), 239-40 198-99 in taped conversations, 205-6 money for
school, 146-47 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 345,note sent by Marc to
Franklin 346, 349, 355 (1976), 155-56 trial of mother and, 396 prison
visit, 426 uncle Robert Reagan and, 1] 8 raids on Berenice's bedroom
will of Franklin Bradshaw in (1980), 257-58 possession of, 341 refusal
to talk to or answer her

Schreuder, Marc (born Marco Francisletters, 176, 178, 179

Gentile), 16, 23, 117-20 summer in Salt Lake City (1968), abducted
(1968), 110-14 113-16 as abused child, 127-28, 136, 139,in Holland, 120
140household chores done by, 148, 151

 446 INDEX

job as messenger, 234 from grandmother (1981), 287, locked out of home,
278, 391 288

Mary Lou Kaiser and, 311-15, 325, at Kent School, 227-28 329, 368-70,
398during summer in Salt Lake City mental health of, 36042(1977),
160-65, 334, 387 money and, 157-58suicide threats and attempts by his
murder of Franklin Bradshaw and.  mother and, 130-31, 238-39

See Murder of Franklin Susie Coleman and, 152

Bradshaw, Marc Schreuder and taped conversations, 198-99, 204-6, name
changed, 120 233,275,294 personal characteristics of, 104-5theft of his
things by Frances, 152 personal habits of, 228, 312-13 trial of.  See
Trial of Marc Schreuder physical appearance of, 104, 303, trial of
mother and, 369-70, 376, 333 385-92, 393-98, 399, 402-8, at the Plaza
Hotel, 126 413-14,429 in prison, 104-5, 128-29, 369, 377, Vittorio
Gentile and, 377, 392-93.  385, 394, 397, 432 See also Schreuder,
Frances relationship with brother Bradshaw, as mother alleged attempts
by Larry to kill Schumann, Clara, 251-52

Marc, 108, 117-18 Schumann, Robert, 249-53 barring of Larry from home,
173"Shalette, Benson, 117, 125 208 Shaw, Michael.  319 kept apart, 105,
106-8, 127 Sleeping Beaury, The, proposed

"Stalingrad" game, 141 restaging of, 372 relationship with mother, 129,
136, Smallwood, Graham T. (Chips), 271167, 228, 245-46 72, 380 "man of
the family," Marc Smith, Joseph, 25, 27 treated as, 126-27, 130, 140,
Southampton, Frances in, 16647, 168, 359 171, 173, 175, 229, 230

Dr.  Moench on, 359-63 Steele, Doug, 16, 48, 50-51, 70-71, in Salt Lake
City (summer 1968), 145, 146, 163, 169, 176, 404 113-16 on Bradshaw as
businessman, 46 in Salt Lake City (summer 1977), Marc's summer job
under 157-66 supervision of, 160-61 job at Bradshaw Auto Parts,
157murder of Franklin Bradshaw and, 58, 164--66 194, 195-%, 270 list of
rules, 159-60 at trial of Marc Schreuder, 334-36, plan to poison
grandfather, 158- 337, 351 59, 163, 167Sullivan, At, 302 returns to New
York, 166 Swindle, Stephen (Steve).  200, 201, stealing, forgery, and
208,340 embezzlement, 158, 160-66, 334,387 TatLm, Camilla Jones, 80
scars on head, 128 Ter-Arutunian, Rouben, 218, 250 in school, 105,
126-27, 153, 154-55, Tesch, Joseph (Joe), Jr."  309, 333, 337, 227-29,
360, 394, 397 342, 344-47, 354, 357, 359, sentencing of, 366-67 s 360,
363,365 sleeping in mother's bed, 127Thompson, Kirk, 6 stealing, 119,
152-53, 356-57, 359, Thompson, Larry, 6 395 Thompson, Scott, 6 accused
by mother of (1982), 311

Thompson, Tommy, 3-8

 INDEX 447

Trial of Frances Schreuder, 28-33"Marilyn Reagan and, 339-41, 345,
376,385-419 346-48,349-50

Ariadne Tape at, 294-95, 390 mental health of Marc, testimony

Behrens and, 389, 396-97, 401, 403,on, 361-64 406, 409-10, 412-13
Michael George at, 366-67, 369

Berenice at, 401, 403, 418 Dr.  Moench at, 358-64 defense strategy at,
398-99, 405-My les Manning at, 348-49 410 Nancy Jones at, 337-38 gun,
testimony about, 388-89, 409-plea changed to guilty, 352 10psychiatric
examination before, 326 "hit man," testimony about, 388 released on
bail while waiting for, instructions to jurors at, 400-1 309,314-15
jurors at, 31-33 sentencing at, 366-67 lawyers changed before, 372
Stephen Swindle at, 338-42 legal issues at, 29 summations at, 364-65

Marc and, 369-70, 376, 385-91, Ted Carey at, 352-53 394-98, 399, 403-8,
413-14, verdict, 365 429-30waiver of right to a trial by jury,
pecuniary interest, issue of, 30-31,333 32,400will and, 335-36, 338-41,
356 preliminary hearing, 376 Trinity College, 259 referendum on moral
character at' Trinity School, 154 416-17 Trusts set up by Franklin
Bradshaw's sentencing, 418will, 120-21, 155, 208, 339 summations at,
401-15 Tuck, Arthur, 55

Tueller, Paulette, 273, 277, 310, 318, verdict, 416 320,328

Vittorio Gentile at, 391-93

See also individual participants Unitarian Church (New York City),

Trial of Marc Schreuder, 309, 329,88 333-68 Utah, 24

Ariadne tape at, 294-95, 326-27, criminal law of, 31-32 353, 355, 357,
360, 365

Behrens at, 339, 342-46, 348-49, Van Dam, Paul, 278, 289, 291, 309, 351
333, 334, 335-36, 340, 347,

Berenice Bradshaw at, 349-50 349, 352, 353, 359, 363, 365,

Mrs.  Cavenaugh at, 336-37 366

David Frankel at, 351-52, 354-57 Vasiliadis, Stanley, 244

Dorothy Ferguson at, 351 VIA (Visual Investigative Aid), 282

Doug Steele at, 334-36, 337, 351 83 estate matters and, 339, 340-41

Frances and, 309, 310, 352-53, 354-Walsh, David, 362 57, 359-62,
364-65, 367-68 Waltemade, Wilfred A."  88

Behrens's testimony, 342-46 Wasatch Chemical, 37, 83, 121 gun,
testimony on, 338, 342-44, Weiner.  Herman, 109 345-46, 347, 355, 356
Will "hit man," testimony on, 344-45, Berenice Bradshaw's, 120, 150-51,
348-49257-58, 381, 385, 401, 412, 426

Jerry Register at, 338 Franklin Bradshaw's, 120-21, 150,

Jon Cavenaugh at, 337 193-94, 431

Larry Schreuder and, 346, 349, 355Frances left out of, 169, 175, 188

 448 INDEX

original copy of, 341 Women, Mormonism and, 27 trial of Frances
Schreuder and' Wood Herman, 155, 200, 402 411 World Center for
Ancestors, 26 trial of Marc Schreuder and, 235 36, 338-42,
356Yellowstone Park, 1946 trip to, 64 Williams, Edward Bennett, 321
Yengish, Ron, 432 Williams & Connolly, 322, 372 Young, Brigham, 25