Lowell Cauffiel - Eye of the Beholder: The Almost Perfect Murder of Anchorwoman Diane Newton King

Eye of the Beholder

The Almost Perfect Murder of Anchorwoman Diane Newton King

Lowell Cauffiel

For my brother John, the closer.

And I have heard she is beautiful: Is she?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

from Molly Bawn,

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

INTRODUCTION

On its best blocks, Marshall makes the Midwest seem like the sweetest place on earth.

The New York Times, June 23, 1991

A mass media instructor explained to me once why people will keep glancing at a television thats on in the background, though they may be fully engaged elsewhere and nothing of any real interest is on the screen.

The TV has this moving electronic beam, he said. It scans left to right across more than five hundred lines of the picture tube, creating a complete image every twenty-fifth of a second. The conscious eye sees this as a TV picture. But the unconscious picks up that demonically fast moving beam. Since the dawn of man, movement has meant be on alert. So you keep checking that TV set in the local bar or storefront or your friends living room, whether you want to watch it or not.

A twenty-eight-year-old man named Michael Perry from the Cajun country of Lake Arthur, Louisiana, wanted to watch television very much. When authorities tracked him down in a Washington, D.C., hotel, they found seven television sets, stacked one on top of another in a pyramid, like some kind of electronic altar at the foot of his bed.

A few weeks earlier, Perry had blasted his mother, father, brother, and two neighbors into oblivion with a shotgun. His rampage came after hed returned from California where hed unsuccessfully tried to contact singer Olivia Newton-John at her Malibu ranch. After his Lake Arthur murders, Perry drove north to the nations capital to stalk Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor. Hed become obsessed with both women by watching them on TV.

The killings landed Michael Perry on Louisiana Death Row. The Eye, Perry used to call himself. He drew big single eyes on his TV screens in blood-red magic marker. He wrote slogans like War and Why in reverse, as if the images on the picture tubes were trying to write him back.

It was one of those strange coincidences that journalists get when they spend months obsessing on a subject. I was looking at police photos of Perrys TV pyramid when a free-lance reporter from Kalamazoo, Michigan, Id met at a conference, called. It was early February 1991. The reporter had breaking news about a Battle Creek anchorwoman named Diane Newton King.

Another victim for your book, she said. Diane King was being stalked by an obsessed fan. She was shot to death right in front of her kids in the driveway of her home.

But Diane Newton King would not be another candidate for the book Id been planning about the celebrity stalking in America.

In the days ahead, I waited for news of an arrest, the apprehension of some reclusive schizophrenic or possessed loner. Thats the way it usually went.

No arrest came.

The Diane Newton King case lingered on as the latest in a series of highly publicized, violent cases: John Hinckley and Jodi Foster. Mark Chapman and John Lennon. Arthur Jackson and Theresa Saldana. Robert Bardo and Rebecca Schaeffer.

In the two years preceding the King murder, stalking coverage was everywhere from talk shows to The New York Times. Theresa Saldana was lobbying against the prison release of her knife-wielding attacker. A twenty-eight-year-old shipping clerk sent more than five thousand threatening letters to Michael J. Fox. David Letterman dodged visitations from Margaret Ray. There were stalking stories about Johnny Carson and Janet Jackson and local deejays and TV news people and folks who hardly qualified for Andy Warhols fifteen minutes of fame.

At times, it seemed America was paying a price for its worship of celebrity. But public figure obsession also had been one of the entertainment and TV industrys best kept secrets. Reporting the phenomena only encouraged it, the conventional wisdom went for many years.

That philosophy changed in 1989. Behind the scenes, new research for the Department of Justice was fueling the star stalker flap in the mass media. The study was conducted by Newport Beach psychiatrist Park Dietz, one of the countrys leading criminal experts. (Dr. Dietz led the psychiatric team in the prosecution of John Hinckley.) The psychiatrist delineated the stalking phenomena by studying the files of Gavin de Becker, a Hollywood security expert who provided protection and threat assessments for dozens of top Hollywood stars. Both Dietz and de Becker gave interviews around the country for two years, helping lobby for new statutes. In 1990, California passed the countrys first stalking law. More than forty states have followed.

Michigan did not have a stalking law when Diane Newton King was killed. And Battle Creek, the western Michigan city where she worked, was not a city known for obsessive pathology, but for the American quest for healthy breakfasts.

In 1991, metropolitan Battle Creek was Michigans third largest city geographically, but had a population that hardly exceeded ninety thousand. Its roots remained solidly agrarian. Kelloggs, the Post Division of General Foods, and Ralston Purina were still the main employers. Ralstons grain silos as well as office buildings defined the modest downtown skyline. City limits gave way to rural countryside rather than suburban sprawl.

Celebrity sickness seemed to have hit the heartland with the murder of the citys most popular anchorwoman. This became only more poignant when I drove out to the nearby small town where Diane, her two preschool children, and her husband, Bradford J. King, lived.

The headline in the Marshall Chronicle read: DIANE KING HARASSED BY LETTERS, PHONE CALLS . It Was topped by: Music Boosters plan spaghetti supper, See page 2.

Marshall, Michigan, was typical of small-town America. The Town of Hospitality, as the town of 6,900 calls itself, was also much more than that. The former stagecoach stop midway between Detroit and Chicago is a Midwestern testimony to the pursuit of excellence, when it comes to appearances at least.

Named after John Marshall, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the town was so sure it would be the states capital in 1839, a white pillared governors mansion was built on the towns high ground overlooking the Kalamazoo River. The district became known as Capitol Hill. But one vote in the state senate put the capital in Lansing in 1847. However, Marshall prospered as a trade and farming center for the lower region of the state.

Now, much of the town is a National Historic Landmark District. There are forty-six historical markers, at last count. The coming of the Michigan Central Railroad inspired the nations first railroad union and launched a thirty-year building boom that ceased just in time to preserve Marshalls small-town character. A lawyer and a minister conceived the states public education system under a local oak tree in Marshall. A runaway slave named Admad Crosswhite was tracked down in Marshall by Southern bounty hunters in 1846, but town elders refused to turn over the fugitive.

But visitors didnt need markers to find Marshalls classic heritage on its maple-lined streets. Historians consider the town one of the nations foremost representations of the best in smalltown American architecture, its designs brought west by New Englanders who settled many of Michigans communities. Today, Marshalls biggest event is its annual house tour, which draws people from around the United States to walk through meticulously kept Victorians, Queen Annes, Gothic Revivals, Italianates, Carpenter Gothics, Romanesques, and Tuscan and Italian Villas.