Cravenomena

Fifty.

When you’re counting pennies in your change jar, that’s not a very big number.  But when you’re Craven, fixed and quivering like a fly in agar as the big five-oh barrels down upon him from the realm of What-Was-Once-Distant-Old-Age, it seems impossibly large.

Perhaps it would be closer to our experiential reality to measure our lives in seconds — in which case, my age is around 1,539,529,440 as I write these words.  It is surely true there are moments nowadays that I feel precisely that old.  (Don’t get me wrong — for someone who, in his youth, was sure he wouldn’t live past 946,080,000, I’m not complaining.)

As a consequence of shuffling upon this mortal coil for close to half a century, Craven has met many, many sorts of people.  I am lucky to have known folks of every racial stripe and almost every tax bracket.  I have met — and counted as friends, even — scientists and theologicians, artists and accountants (and accountants-turned-artists), skeptics and true believers, cops and junkies, stars and nobodies.  Engineers… exotic dancers… politicians… anarchists… over-eaters… bulimics… doctors… lawyers… cowboys… actors… born-again virgins… pre-op transsexuals… Craven has known them all.

Oh — and a serial killer.

This is the story of how Craven befriended a cold-blooded murderer — and, in the process, discovered the one absolute truth he holds with certitude as his semi-centennial birthday looms large.

This is the story of Bob.

See this picture?

This photograph was shot on the stage of the late, lamented Cabaret Dinner Theatre in Grand Junction, Colorado.  It was taken by actress Jeanine McConnell as part of a 1999 production of Craig Lucas’ PRELUDE TO A KISS.  There are some talented people captured in this snapshot.  The pretty blonde woman is Kori McConnell who is nowadays raising a brood of precocious youngsters in Eastern Colorado.  The young man next to her is Gene Eilebrecht; today, Gene works in Idaho as a “pagan comic artist” and budding filmmaker, with his wife Stephanie, who he met at the Cabaret.

Now take a look at the slightly goofy character leering over Gene’s shoulder.

That’s Bob.  Or, to be more formal, Robert Spangler, semi-retired radio personality and amateur actor…

And what we didn’t know then: Brutal.  Heartless.  Killer.

But I get ahead of myself.  To everyone who worked with him at the Cabaret, Bob seemed like a great guy — informed, relaxed, talented and handsome.  (Everyone, that is, except Jeanine McConnell, the woman who snapped this photo.  For reasons that no one else could really fathom at the time, Jeanine took a strong and vocal dislike to Bob during the rehearsals of PRELUDE TO A KISS.  Jeanine’s antipathy seemed contrarian and ungenerous then; later, after Bob’s dark secrets were revealed, it proved perceptive and prophetic.)  PRELUDE TO A KISS was Bob’s first show at the Cabaret, but not his last.

Enter Craven.

I met Bob when I auditioned for 1776, my first show at the theater, the following year.  I had only moved back to Grand Junction a few months earlier, after spending 15 years in New York City, where I worked as a filmmaker and animator.  I hadn’t performed onstage since my college days almost 20 years earlier, but I was inspired by friends and members of my family to try out for a role in the musical.  So, with a certain amount of trepidation, I prepared a song (”Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from OKLAHOMA!) and arrived at the Cabaret for open auditions.  It was there I first laid eyes on Bob Spangler.

Bob was tall, lean and fostered an air of unpretentious culture.  His middle name was Merlin, and there was a certain magician’s quality to him — although with his natty horn-rimmed glasses, close-cropped white beard and urbane manner, he was closer to Mandrake than Dumbledore.  As rehearsals ensued, it became clear he was one of the more talented actors in a cast which ranged from incandescent professionals to amateurs who could have stepped right out of WAITING FOR GUFFMAN.  He was the first castmember to be completely “off book” (which, for the non-thespians, means he had his part memorized early).  Bob was cast as John Hancock, the merchant and Massachusetts governor who served as President of the Second Continental Congress at the time of the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  I was playing Andrew McNair, the congressional custodian, and my character shared a good deal of business with Bob’s character.

From the get-go, I was impressed by Bob’s voice, which was deep and resonant, probably thanks to his broadcast training.  When I was assigned the task of producing a commercial for 1776 in my role as producer/animator at KKCO, I suggested to the Cabaret’s executive producers that we utilize Bob as the voiceover artist.

This is the spot we made.  Hear the voice of evil.

In 1776, Bob’s and my scenes were nearly always together; when he was offstage, so was I.  Since we both came from broadcast backgrounds, we did a lot of talking during down-time.  Once the production opened in June, 2000, we continued to spend much time sitting together and chatting in the green room.

He told me about his background in radio and television… about the house he was building… about his fiancee, Judy.  We talked about music and films.  He seemed like a good listener and a raconteur.

He never said a word about his family.

As 1776 played on through the summer, the cast grew pretty close.  It was a physically uncomfortable show; at the time, the Cabaret had no HVAC system and the only cooling was provided by stand-mounted fans.  This made the theater pretty warm for the audience, but almost unbearable for the actors who were working under hot lights in wigs and thick, multi-layered costumes crafted from furniture upholstery fabrics.  As is often the case, however, the challenging working conditions served to unite the cast.

I thought Bob did a good job in the role of Hancock.  He would occasionally drop or transpose some of his longer speeches, but he was usually spot on, and he managed to imbue often dry and utilitarian dialog with at least a modicum of humor and character.  In the 1776 script, Hancock does a lot of fly-swatting; one night, we all had a big laugh when the flat wicker end of Bob’s flyswatter went flying into the audience, and he broke the fourth wall to apologize.

I had known before 1776 opened that the Cabaret’s next production would be an unusual mounting of Neil Simon’s THE ODD COUPLE.  The plan was to produce both the traditional male and the lesser-known female versions of THE ODD COUPLE on alternate weekends.  This was an ambitious notion, since it meant casting and directing two separate shows in the time normally allotted for one.  I auditioned again and, a few weeks into the run of 1776, learned I had been cast as Roy, one of Felix and Oscar’s poker buddies.  I was very happy to hear Bob had also been cast, as Murray the cop.  All my scenes would again be played with him.

But when rehearsals started for THE ODD COUPLE, it quickly became apparent that something wasn’t right.  Bob was struggling with his lines and blocking in a way that surprised those of us who had shared the stage with him in 1776, and which was also clearly causing him a lot of consternation.

I knew Bob was in his sixties, but it was hard to watch him bumble through rehearsals, seeming older than he ever had before.  Eventually, on August 12, 2000, shaken by his inability to remember his lines, he went to see a doctor for a check-up.

A couple days later, my brother, Kevin McConnell, one of the Cabaret’s owners and executive producers, called me with the news: Bob Spangler had been diagnosed with extensive brain and lung cancer.  He was expected to live a couple months at the most.

To say we were devastated would be an understatement.  Everyone at the Cabaret was crushed.  Immediately, plans were made for a testimonial dinner to be held on Bob’s behalf during a dark night at the theater.  More than 50 people, friends and castmates, showed up to toast Bob and weep into each other’s arms.  Kevin announced the Cabaret’s auditorium would be renamed the “Bob Spangler Memorial Auditorium” and plans were drafted to have a plaque manufactured.  A loving profile, with a big photo of a smiling Bob, was written for the ODD COUPLE playbill.

We thought nothing could shock and startle us more than the news of Bob’s terminal condition… that is, until Saturday, October 7, 2000.  I happened to be in the KKCO control room at 5 pm that afternoon when Craig Hart, then the technical director of KKCO’s newscasts, rushed into the room.  “Hey, you’re a disc jockey here in town, right?” he asked me.

“Yes, at KAFM.”

“You ever heard of a Robert Spangler?  He’s apparently a disc jockey.  They just arrested him for murder.”

Robert Spangler?  I knew a Bob Spangler — but surely, it couldn’t be him!  Not good old Bob, kind old Bob… Bob, the fellow who, as my brother had put it, was “the man we all want to be when we turn 60.”  My mind raced.  Spangler… that’s not that uncommon a name, right?  I goggled at Craig.  “Do you have a picture of him?”

“Yeah.  Hold on.”  He sat down at his terminal and punched some keys.  In a moment, a police mugshot popped onto the screen above his head.

I wasn’t used to seeing him look so like a deer in the headlights, but there was no doubt about it.

It was Bob.

I had to sit down.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, especially as the details of his purported crimes were unreeled.

Authorities had been monitoring Bob for more than two decades.  When they learned of his terminal illness, they knocked on his door and asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell them.  Bob, thinking he had only another month left, decided to confess to crimes that we who knew him at the Cabaret could barely conceive:

Apparently, in the 1970s, Bob had been living with his first wife, Nancy, and their two children, David and Susan, in Littleton, Colorado.  Bob and Nancy had married in 1955, but now, more than 20 years later, the marriage was disintegrating.  Bob was involved with another woman, Sharon Cooper, a co-worker at the American Water Works Association where Bob was employed.

On December 30, 1978, while their children slept in their rooms, Bob told Nancy to follow him into their basement, where “he had a surprise for her.”  Once there, he instructed her to sit down at the table where her typewriter resided.  Bob had previously typed a bogus suicide note on the typewriter and had gotten Nancy to sign an “N” on the page, under the pretense that it was a Christmas letter.  He told her to close her eyes.  She did so.  Bob then placed a .38 handgun a few inches from her forehead and pulled the trigger.

He then went upstairs to where his children slept.  He shot his 11-year-old daughter in the back as she slept, then moved on to his son’s room.  He shot 14-year-old David in the chest, gravely injuring but not killing his son, who now struggled with his father.  Bob knew he couldn’t shoot him again (”because Nancy wouldn’t do that”), so he suffocated the boy with his own pillow.  He left David’s body akimbo, the torso on the floor but his legs still in the bed.  Then Bob walked out of his home and drove around for a bit, before stopping at a local cinema to watch Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS.

The following morning, young Timothy Trevithick, Susan’s boyfriend, knocked on the Spangler door at around 10:30.  When no one answered, he crawled in through a basement window and discovered the bodies of Susan, David and Nancy.  By the time Bob finally arrived back at his home, it was crawling with police investigators.

Did I mention Bob was a pretty good actor?

That Bob wasn’t arrested for the murder may partly be due to his thespian abilities, but also to police missteps and perhaps the fact that he was good friends with Jack Swanburg, one of the investigating technicians.  (Bob even stayed at Swanburg’s home for awhile following the murders.)  He married Sharon seven months later.

Nor was the heinous murders of his family the last of Bob’s crimes.  On April 11, 1993, he accompanied his third wife, Donna, to the Grand Canyon — and shoved her off a 200-foot cliff.  It was “simply easier than divorce,” he told police, years later.

He has also been implicated in the 1994 death of his second wife, Sharon, who supposedly committed suicide by drug overdose after she had returned to live with Bob following Donna’s plunge into the Grand Canyon.  And there are some who suspect he murdered his own father in 1986; Merlin Spangler took a fatal tumble down four flights of stairs shortly after arguing with Bob over the latter’s request for an early inheritance.

So good old Bob, kind old Bob, had killed at least four and possibly six people before having his picture taken onstage in PRELUDE TO A KISS.  To say his castmates were staggered by these revelations is a major understatement.  Some of his friends at first refused to believe the accusations; acceptance only came when Bob stood up in court and admitted his guilt in the death of Sharon.  (Due to his cancer, he was never tried for any of the other murders.  Although his original prognosis gave him two months to live, he actually endured for almost another year, finally dying in the Federal Corrections Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, on August 5, 2001.)

So, as Craven nears his 50th birthday, here is what he learned from his old pal, Bob:

You can never, ever truly know another soul.

Oh, you may think you do.  You may trust your friend, your spouse, your brother or sister with adamant certainty — but you’re kidding yourself.  The truth is: Man is the only animal who can prevaricate, who can act, who can lie, who can whisper, “I have a surprise for you.  Close your eyes,” and then put a bullet in your frontal cortex.  Our knowledge of each other must always be provisional, open to periodic reinterpretation, or we run the risk of falling prey to the killer who lurked behind Bob Spangler’s sparkling eyes.