Reading Local Seattle

“Are you trying to ask me what happened to the boy?”
“Well, yes. But I don’t mean to —”
“I told you, I understand. After all, he was here for a while, and you are aware that while he was here I screwed him for everything he was worth. Aren’t you? Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“And now he’s gone. So you’re worried.”
“Right. I just mean …”
“You just mean that you want to know what in the hell happened to him. Don’t you, Sanford?” Uncle Stewart was still standing within kicking range, but his face remained calm and his manner easy. “Because I’m telling you, I am confessing this to your face right here, my dick is so sore from doing that boy’s brown butt that I can barely hold it! If I need to pee, I’ll just have to drop trousers and let it swing like a monkey. Ha-ha! You realize that? Ha-ha-ha!”
“But it would be good if he just went off somewhere … I mean, if you let him go off somewhere … if you realized that he’s not going to want to speak about any of it.”
“Because you aren’t inclined to speak about any of it?”
“Well, I guess so.”
— Excerpt from The Road Out Of Hell

{ Flacco at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, noon, 11/14/09

[ The Road Out Of Hell: Sanford Clark and The True Story Of The Wineville Murders | Anthony Flacco | Union Square Press | $24.95 ]

If The Road Out Of Hell, the newest book by Bainbridge Island author Anthony Flacco, had come out in 1966, it might have been the most controversial book in America. That’s because 1966 was the year Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood came out to a near-universal crush of critical bouquets and brickbats. The national spotlight, when not on the publicity-happy author, fell on Capote’s technique of creating dialogue and facts — especially to dramatically develop scenes at which no surviving people were present. To wit, who knows what really happened? And if the author’s way of telling what really happened is colorful and compelling enough, who really cares?

So, because In Cold Blood was so beautifully written and boldly told, the brickbats— most notably from another Bainbridge Island true-crime author, Jack Olsen— were quickly buried under the bouquets.(Olsen later publicly admitted that he was jealous of Capote’s success, and that he had been assigned by his publisher to write about the same murders before Capote and pal Harper Lee took over. Olsen, who died in 2002, never gave up his crusade against sensationalist bottom-feeders in true crime, however.) Today, In Cold Blood, if a trifle uneasily so, sits near the top of the heap of the true-crime genre — as befits the book that created the genre.

Today, the incorporation of novelistic techniques — including created dialogue within a factual framework— is widely accepted in true crime, a genre which is looked upon as entertainment as much as journalism. It’s a good thing, because without it, The Road Out Of Hell simply wouldn’t work. The book, a dramatic recreation of the sex-driven child-murder spree in the late 1920s that inspired the Clint Eastwood-Angelina Jolie movie vehicle The Changeling, is told in a breathless you-are-there style that depends almost exclusively on dramatically recreated scenes between the book’s hero, teenager Sanford Clark, and its villain, homicidally sadistic uncle Gordon Stewart Northcott. It’s a style that well suits Flacco, a onetime stage actor. In an interview, Flacco said that he develops characters and scenes the same way he did as an actor, by taking what he learned through interviews and research and then trying to make both characters come alive within him.

Trying to relate horrific scenes of rape and murder and punishment the way they actually happened on Northcott’s chicken ranch east of Los Angeles in journalistic fashion just wasn’t going to cut it, the author says. In one scene, for instance, Sanford Clark— months after being kidnapped from his family home in Canada and brought down to Wineville (now Mira Loma), California as an amalgam of accomplice, apprentice and anal rape victim — is locked in a dirt pit as punishment after refusing to help “Uncle Stewart” murder a family of six. (The family was sent on their way after Stewart decided he couldn’t do all the hard physical labor of murder himself.)

“So, there you are. You’re thirteen, abandoned and alone in the desert, beaten senseless, raped with sticks, your rectum doesn’t work right … what are you thinking and feeling?” Flacco asks. He further explains his technique: “A reporter says, ‘He was locked in the pit and left there for twenty-four hours.’ Can you imagine reading two hundred or more pages of that? We’re thinking, ‘Yeah, but what about those twenty-four hours? It’s bad enough to sit in line for the ferry and wait thirty minutes.’”

Flacco didn’t have Sanford Clark, who died in 1989, to recount such harrowing moments during the two years he was his uncle’s captive and slave before his rescue. But he had the next best thing: Sanford’s adopted son Jerry, who still lives in the family home in Saskatchewan, heard the entire story from his father, and hadn’t shared it with the world before. But Jerry Clark did shared those memories with Flacco, a self-described stickler for research who says he did his best to verify everything he was told through the public record. “What the transcripts gave me was ‘He was thrown in a pit,’ ” Flacco explained. “What Jerry gave me was the boy who was there.”

For nearly two-thirds of The Road Out Of Hell, Sanford Clark’s story— which includes unsparing pages about the rape and murder of Walter Collins, the boy at the center of The Changeling— is hard to take. Extremely hard to take. Imagine a version of In Cold Blood in which the murder of the Clutter family is drawn out over 160 pages. In fact, there was a point around page 160 at which I had just about decided I couldn’t finish Flacco’s book because I couldn’t take the monstrous brutality a moment longer. And then Flacco, with the intuitive sense and timing of the fine actor he was, and the first-rate novelist he is, seemed to sense my reader’s need for rescue. I won’t spoil the rescue in the book by saying what happens next, but the fact that Sanford lived for another sixty-one years should tell you a lot. The last 100-plus pages of The Road Of Out Of Hell strongly resemble the road out the hell inside the pages. Or, as Flacco’s partner, veteran nonfiction literary agent Sharlene Martin, put it: “It’s one long exhale.”

The 59-year old Flacco, whose oeuvre includes two historical novels also dealing with the California of the early 1900s (The Hidden Man and The Last Nightingale), uses his novel-writing talents to suspend whatever disbelief the reader may have about the verbatim accuracy of the scenes between Sanford and Uncle Stewart on the chicken ranch. It helps that he discloses his technique in the foreword: “Any guessing of my own regarding the portrayals of the people in this story is done within the parameters of documented evidence.”

And all of this talk of technique should not give short shrift to the story itself, which is nothing short of incredible. And highly relevant today, in a time when revelations of childhood sex abuse are depressingly common and Stockholm Syndrome seems to be an everyday survival strategy. As Flacco put it: “The takeaway is the strength of the human spirit.” Applied to the experience of almost anyone but Sanford Clark, those words might sound unbearably trite. But Sanford Clark’s story, as told by Flacco, makes them anything but.

Author: Jim Thomsen

Raised on Bainbridge Island, Jim Thomsen has been a Pacific Northwest newspaper reporter and editor for 22 years. Currently the night and weekend news editor at the Kitsap Sun in Bremerton, he's working to parlay his experience into longer-form journalism. His current project is a true-crime book that rounds up some of the most dramatic stories of crime, punishment and redemption to have passed through the state's Clemency and Pardons Board. He is also plugging away at a mystery novel, and will offer reviews of books in both genres here — as well as interviews with their authors. So, if you're planning to kill anybody and are willing to be interviewed about it before, during and after the trial, let him know and he'll get on the case. His blog about his journey to publication can be read at http://jimthomsen1.wordpress.com.

Jim Thomsen has written 2 articles for us.