Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story
By Ron Franscell

The crime:

In 1976 Alice Prunty met Gerald Uden and they were married soon thereafter. It was the fourth marriage for both, and both had children from their earlier marriages. What Alice didn’t tell Gerald until after the wedding is that she’d killed her last husband, Ron Holtz, claiming abuse at his hands. Gerald was understanding. Later, Gerald became tired of making support payments to his ex-wife Virginia, who had custody of his two sons. So, perhaps egged on by Alice (who disliked his ex-wife intensely), he killed all three of them in 1980.

Authorities strongly suspected Alice of killing Holtz and Gerald of the triple homicide of Virginia and his two sons, but none of the bodies were found so after moving to Missouri the homicidal couple went on living the rest of their lives in peace as the case grew colder. But police never lost interest in it, and after much digging around (literally and metaphorically) they managed to find Holtz’s body where Alice had thrown it in an abandoned mine shaft. That was in 2013. Alice was charged and convicted of Holtz’s murder and would later die in prison. Gerald would confess to the murder of Virginia and the two boys and be sentenced to several life sentences. The bodies of his victims were never found.

The book:

By coincidence I came to Alice & Gerald after reading a series of books about criminal couples, each of which raised the same question about the apportioning of guilt. Here’s a recap:

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel: Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus lived together and had a side hustle stealing works of art from museums all around Europe. Anne-Catherine seems to have operated mostly as a lookout while Stéphane did all the work.

Guilty Creatures by Mikita Brottman: Brian Winchester killed Denise Williams’s husband Mike and then married her. After a few years together they split up and Brian copped a plea, implicating Denise in Mike’s murder. She was initially found guilty of first degree murder but then had the judgment overturned, though her conviction for being an accessory to murder remained.

American Fire by Monica Hesse: starting in November 2012 Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick went on a months-long arson spree, burning abandoned homes on Virginia’s East Shore. At trial, Smith claimed he did it all for love and that torching houses was Tonya’s thing. Tonya didn’t have much to say.

In Alice & Gerald the issue of who was the dominant partner is again raised, and it seems as though most of the people close to the case agree that Alice was the one pulling the strings. That’s the sense I had as well, but it’s possible that the way Ron Franscell was telling the story led me to that conclusion. Plus, after reading some of the discussion in Guilty Creatures, I was on my guard against the “Eve factor”: “The way that when a man and a woman are part of a crime together it is generally the woman who is thought to be the mastermind, the Eve who tempts Adam.”

What makes it hard to say in the case of Alice and Gerald, especially given how cold a case it was, with the murders having taken place forty years before being brought to trial, is the fact that Alice played everything close to the chest. In this she was very much like the women in the other cases I just mentioned. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, Denise Williams, and Tonya Bundick all clammed up after their arrest, not talking to police or to reporters. If nothing else, this suggests they were at least smarter than their partners in crime. As I’ve said before, if you’ve been arrested, for pretty much anything, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut. Taking this principle a step further, I was particularly impressed by the fact that Alice refused to take a polygraph or lie-detector test as “a matter of principle.” When Gerald was later brought in for questioning he kept to the same line: “No polygraph. It’s not about my guilt or innocence. It’s just a matter of principle.” The detective questioning Gerald noted the similarity in response and assumed, probably correctly, that they’d been coaching each other. But, for them, this was absolutely the right move. In the first place, polygraphs are worthless (Alice later told investigators that she’d researched them and found they were “notoriously unreliable”), and in the second they didn’t want to answer questions or talk to the police anyway.

On the question of guilt, you could argue it either way. Taking Alice’s side, her murder of Ron Holtz could be seen as being what she said it was: a response to domestic abuse. Holtz was a violent head case who had spent a lot of time in mental hospitals (which is where he met Alice, where she worked as a nurse). On the other hand, Alice was a killer before she even met Gerald, and given her hatred of Virginia it’s hard to believe she wasn’t encouraging Gerald to do something to get rid of her. And it’s also pretty obvious that she knew what Gerald had done after the fact and didn’t just keep quiet about it but helped him to cover his tracks by writing phoney (and cruel) letters to Virginia’s mother.

In sum, while it’s hard to say who was the dominant partner I think the evidence shows that neither of them had much in the way of empathy, and thought nothing of murder as a way to dispose of people they found to be an inconvenience. Or an unnecessary expense. Gerald reckoned killing his boys would lead to savings in child support of $14,000: “He knew because he’d added it up: $150 for ninety-two more months.” As one of Alice’s children put it when describing his reaction to first meeting Gerald, “This guy is really weird. Not like a child molester weird or anything, just spooky weird . . . just spooky. . . . Like he has no feeling.” Not stupid then, but missing something.

I’ll confess that when I started in on Alice & Gerald it put my back up a bit. The Prologue felt overwritten in its evocation of place:

Wyoming [in the 1960s] was a place to land without baggage, where one could hide and never be found, a kingdom of dirt where giant hollows in the earth might swallow up a man (or woman) entirely, an ambiguous landscape of infertile dreams and pregnant hopes. The landscape was vast, desolate, and mysterious, festooned with hidey-holes that were forgotten or never known.

It was a spot on the edge of the Big Empty where your dog could bark forever or you could piss on the side of the road or shoot your gun at the moon or call yourself by another name. None of The World’s ordinary rules applied. Whatever your badlands fetish, you could practice it unmolested in this impossibly empty place.

I rolled my eyes at “infertile dreams and pregnant hopes,” but after a while Franscell’s voice grew on me. A native of Wyoming, he writes in a way that brings out the local colour. Here, for example, is his description of the spot where Virginia and the two boys will be murdered: “Virginia pulled off into the cheatgrass shoulder this side of the canal. The water ran sluggish and buckskin brown, full of sandrock dust, caliche, horseshit, and other high plains compost. There was so much dirt in the channel that you could damn near plow it.” In other places I had to look up the meaning of “butt-sprung” (old and worn out), and shook my head, smiling, at squalls that “can strike faster than a rattler on meth.” I entered into the spirit of this enough so that in a later ode to the “impossibly empty place” that is Wyoming I had no problems at all. And there was an important point being made connecting the murders to the desolate geography.

Wyoming poses a unique challenge for cops in all missing persons cases, cold nor not.

Anybody who’s driven through Wyoming’s boundless terrain has imagined how easy it would be to lose oneself in int.

And more than a few have fantasized about losing someone else out there.

The state’s average population density of six people per square mile (in contrast, New Jersey has 1,200 people per square mile) is an unfair mathematical measure. In fact, the state encompasses thousands of square miles where nobody lives, nobody goes, and nobody ever will.

In other words, Wyoming – the least populous and most incomprehensible of the lower forty-eight states – is the baddest of badlands. There are more places to hide dead people than live people will ever find.

Given this bad-ass landscape, all the more credit goes to the dogged police work that had to persevere through generations of different investigators to finally dig out the truth. They didn’t have much to go on, aside from their conviction that Alice and Gerald were guilty as hell. This was something that was obvious right from the first interviews they sat down for at the time of the murders, and it was reinforced in every subsequent interaction. But how to prove their guilt? For that the police would need a body, and even after identifying the probable location of Ron Holtz’s final resting spot, recovering his remains wasn’t easy, or cheap. It’s not often that I get a chance to compliment the police in these True Crime Files, so I’m happy to give them a shout out here.

In addition to the police work there was also the concern of Virginia’s mother, Claire, who did everything she could to keep the investigation going. “The universe loves a stubborn heart,” is Franscell’s tributary line. In a lot of the cases I’ve talked about you’ll find family members taking on this kind of a role. Mike Williams’s mother in Guilty Creatures and Kari Baker’s “angels” (her mother and sisters) who refused to accept the coroner’s verdict of suicide in her death (as recounted in Kathryn Casey’s Deadly Little Secrets). The sad irony is that Claire died shortly before Alice and Gerald were brought to justice, and the bodies of Virginia and the boys were never found. Instead, what undid the killers was the discovery of Holtz’s body, a man who nobody seemed to care about. Indeed, when the police tried to follow up on Holtz’s disappearance they found that his family were “so unconcerned about their son and brother, who’d been such an asshole all his life, that nobody even reported him missing.” The wheels of justice sometimes turn in mysterious ways.

Noted in passing:

The invocation of Shakespeare to lend weight to what are often just sleazy stories of domestic violence can be overdone. I mentioned this in my review of Guilty Creatures and it comes up again here. One of the three epigraphs comes from Macbeth: “The attempt and not the deed confounds us.” It’s a quote I’ve used myself on occasion, but what relevance does it have here? Alice and Gerald weren’t undone by their attempt to commit murder, but by the discovery of Holtz’s body. They weren’t convicted of attempting anything, but of committing murder. Then in his Acknowledgments Franscell refers to this as a “bizarre story of Shakespearean proportions.” How so? Bizarre yes, and tragic for the victims. But in what sense are the “proportions” Shakespearean? Does he mean heroic? Larger than life? Because I don’t see either.

The only point when I did feel Shakespeare’s presence was when Gerald confessed to shooting Virginia and his two sons in the head, with the unfortunate result that their bodies bled all over the inside of his car. “They didn’t suffer. But I had no idea the human body contained that much blood,” he tells the investigators. That does sound like an echo of Lady Macbeth’s “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

When the police had Alice nailed for the murder of Ron Holtz there was renewed interest in the premature death of her previous husband, ascribed at the time to hypertension and kidney failure. The husband’s corpse was exhumed so that pathologists could test for the presence of ethylene glycol in the tissues.

Ethylene glycol is the primary compound in ordinary automobile coolants and antifreezes. In the past century, it has also been a favorite poison – especially for husband-killing wives, according to forensic data – because it’s in every garage, it’s colorless and odorless, it tastes very sweet, and its toxic effects can be misdiagnosed as something else.

I guess if the forensic data says this is the poison of choice for husband-killing wives then it must be true. It was a point that made me think of the story “Antifreeze and a Cold Heart” in the collection Murder, Madness and Mayhem by Mike Browne about a woman who killed two husbands this way. Husbands may want to keep the antifreeze locked up if they think their marriage is on the rocks.

Takeaways:

One violent person without a conscience is bad enough, but when they find a soulmate it’s double trouble.

True Crime Files

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
By Michael Finkel

The crime:

From 1994 to 2001 Stéphane Breitwieser had a career as “one of the greatest art thieves of all time.” Usually in the company of his girlfriend Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus he stole nearly 250 works of art from over 170 museums in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He didn’t try to sell any of the items but kept them in the attic apartment in his mother’s house that he lived in with Anne-Catherine. While in prison after he was caught his mother threw many of the sculptures he’d stolen in the nearby Rhône-Rhine Canal (from where they were later recovered) and burned the paintings.

The book:

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Stéphane Breitwieser before this, but according to Michael Finkel, who I have no reason to doubt, he was one of the most prolific art thieves in history. That he didn’t consider himself to be an art thief but rather an “art liberator” or “art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style” was just a kind of criminal casuistry, though it is fair to say that he was a different kind of art thief. Whatever other lies and rationalizations Breitwieser gave for his looting of so many priceless treasures, it’s clear he didn’t do it for the money. And this despite the fact that he had no money of his own, only working odd, minimum-wage jobs like waitering or pizza delivery while sponging off of his mother and grandparents and collecting government welfare payments. It was the kind of life that, in addition to fostering his narcissism and sense of entitlement, freed him on a more practical level from caring about making a living and allowed him to spend most of his time doing what he loved.

At this point I want to step in and reassert a point I never tire of making: that for almost any criminal, or wicked person, to be successful they need help. Here’s how I put it in my review of A Plot to Kill:

Bad people are everywhere. But all too often the people who escape blame are their enablers.

…

It is not enough, to use the old line often misattributed to Edmund Burke, that for evil to succeed all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing. Evil needs a hand. Evil needs its suckers, dupes, and people who just want to be in on whatever the scam is because they think there’s something in it for them.

The question of to what extent Anne-Catherine was Breitwieser’s partner-in-crime remains open. Probably more than she let on, but perhaps not a lot more than just being a lookout. More interesting, and stranger, was the relationship between Breitwieser and his mother. To some extent she was his chief enabler. For starters she allowed him to live in her house, which is where he stored all his loot, turning it into an attic “treasure chest” or cave of Ali Baba. At least to some extent she must have known what was going on, but preferred to turn a blind eye. And then, after her son (her only child) was finally captured, she took it upon herself to destroy or attempt to destroy all the evidence. Out of hate, she told the court, but more likely out of love. With reference to this final crime, a French prosecutor would declare that “She is the central figure in this horrific disaster, the person who should be held most accountable.”

I couldn’t help thinking of a criminal type I’ve identified as “the boys in the basement.” I did a post on this phenomenon here, and a follow-up here. What I was addressing in these posts was the number of cases where young men who became mass murderers were often found to have mothers who appeased, accommodated, and enabled them into a kind of adult babyhood. In many cases the mothers in question shared a lot of similarities, for example being divorced, professional care-givers who seemed to enjoy keeping their adult children at home. Mireille Breitwieser (née Stengel), divorced, had been a nurse specializing in child care (Anne-Catherine, perhaps not coincidentally, was a nurse’s assistant). In a description of a videotaped interaction between mother and son Mireille appears as a submissive servant for him to boss around, and I find it telling that she even continued to cook dinner for him all the time he was living in her house. Breitwieser himself admitted he was “spoiled rotten,” and a state psychiatrist assessed him as remaining “immature.” “Coddled by a mother who caters to his whims,” another doctor opined, he had remained (in Finkel’s paraphrase) “a brat.” One suspects Anne-Catherine finally broke up with him not because of his dangerous kink (that is, stealing precious works of art) but rather just because he was never going to grow up. His mother had a firmer hold on him than she ever would.

In sum, while Stéphane doesn’t tick all the boxes for a boy in the basement, as a “boy in the attic” I think he belongs in the same discussion.

Moving further into the psychodrama, Finkel spends some time speculating on the exact nature of Breitwieser’s obsession. Was the compulsion he felt to steal works of art, and it was a compulsion, a kind of kleptomania? One psychiatrist says no, as kleptomaniacs typically don’t care about the specific objects stolen, and their thefts are followed by feelings of regret and shame. Was he a case of Stendhal syndrome? No, because that was only a nineteenth-century literary conceit anyway.

Was he an extreme kind of aesthete? That was his own diagnosis: “Breitwieser’s sole motivation for stealing, he insists, is to surround himself with beauty, to gorge on it. . . . He takes only works that stir him emotionally, and seldom the most valuable piece in a place.” And if that sounds a bit sexual I don’t think that’s by accident. Stealing was, in its mix of compulsion and addiction, akin to sex, and the stolen objects had their own sort of afterglow that he liked to bask in back in the attic, placing favourites next to his bed. Or, better yet, “So many great works of art are sexually arousing that what you’ll want to do, Bretiwieser says, is install a bed nearby, perhaps a four-poster, for when your partner is there and the timing is right.”

I don’t know if there’s any way to sort this out. I like Finkel’s conclusion that Breitwieser more closely resembles the people we know who have made careers out of stealing books than he does a typical art thief (“In the taxonomy of sin, Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine belong with the book thieves”). And seeing collecting as an obsessive-compulsive disorder is also valid. What’s fair to say is that Breitwieser truly was passionate about art and that he felt absolutely compelled to steal it. He literally couldn’t stop himself, even in situations where he knew he wasn’t just being risky but stupid.

But for years he stayed lucky. Sure, he was good at what he did. He had several qualities that proved indispensable: confidence, dexterity, and the ability to stay calm under pressure, to think fast and improvise when he met with obstacles. Because he mainly targeted smaller, local museums those obstacles weren’t insurmountable. The works he “liberated” weren’t that difficult to snatch. Alarms seem rarely to have been in place, and the slicing of the silicone glue at the edges of a Plexiglas case or the undoing of a few screws was often all it took.

As for the security guards, I don’t want to trash people who are already the butt of so many jokes. In fact, the purpose of a security guard is mostly to act as a “visual deterrent.” Meaning that the site of them is supposed to scare would-be criminal types off. Not because a guard is a physical threat, but because they are potential witnesses. They are usually young people or retirees, with little to no training, and not very motivated because they’re making minimum wage. The hardest part of the job is fighting off boredom or just staying awake. Breitwieser had actually been a guard at one point so he knew they didn’t pose much of a challenge.

The final factor in Breitwieser’s spectacular run of success was luck. Everything just seemed to go his way, even when he was caught once in Switzerland and allowed to walk. But these things catch up with you. As Finkel puts it: “No one gets away with bold crimes for long. Luck always runs out, it’s inevitable.” After a spectacular run, Breitwieser’s luck turned against him in a big way. It was only a series of unfortunate (for him) events that led to his capture. After stealing a bugle from the Wagner Museum in Switzerland, Anne-Catherine insisted on returning to the scene of the crime so she could erase any fingerprints he might have left. She wants to go alone but he insists on driving her. She tells him to stay in the car but he gets out and goes for a walk around the grounds. He is spotted by an old man walking a dog who had noticed him the day before. The police arrive and take him away.

By this point, however, Breitwieser may have just been growing tired of the game, no longer pursuing particular works of art out of some great passion but just grabbing items in a lazy and opportunistic way. At the end, Anne-Catherine would tell investigators, “his stealing had become ‘dirty’ and ‘maniacal.’ His aesthetic ideals about idolizing beauty, treating each piece as an honored guest, have descended into hoarding.” He treats the stolen works carelessly, damaging and even destroying them. The joy is gone. You have the sense in the end that he was only going through the motions, his addiction having reduced him to an automaton.

It’s often at this stage in any criminal spree that it’s suggested that the perpetrator, perhaps subconsciously, wants to be caught. I don’t think that’s what was happening here, but there may well have been something of the “rule of ten” I’ve written of before going on. Breitwiester wasn’t a professional thief. It wasn’t his job and he seems to have been a genuinely lazy fellow with a poor work ethic anyway. For him I think it was a sort of release of youthful energy, sexual or otherwise, and after six or seven years that energy had pretty much run its course.

The Art Thief is a really good book, well written, insightful, and a quick read. My only complaint would be that the full-colour photo section only contains pictures of some of the items Breitwieser stole. There are no pictures of Breitwieser or any of the other people in the book, or of the museum rooms he stole from, which I think would have been interesting. Leaving that one caveat aside, Finkel’s telling of the story also benefits from the ten years he spent covering it. That long a gestation allows for some distance, which is something I think most veteran readers of true crime appreciate. This isn’t a timely book meant to cash in on a sensational trial that’s making headlines. It has the luxury to be more reflective.

I also thought Finkel did a great job navigating the sources to come up with an objective account. This was all the harder as Breitwieser talked a lot. He allowed himself to be interviewed by Finkel and indeed even wrote his own book about his life as an art thief. His side of the story is all out there. But the women in his life, his mother Mireille and girlfriend Anne-Catherine, haven’t said anything to anyone. Some of the stolen pieces were never accounted for. Do either of them know what happened to them? How much did they know about what Breitwieser was doing? Everything? More, I’m sure, than they were willing to let on. “I am stupefied by her perjury,” one prosecutor declared in court about Anne-Catherine’s testimony. But by that time both women had gone into lockdown. I doubt interviewing them would have revealed much, but I was left with the sense that this is where the real story was.

Noted in passing:

While in prison in Switzerland Breitwieser does not “shower nude like everyone else,” but rather “washes in his underwear.”

I’m not sure why Finkel tells us this but I’m glad he did because it lets me talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while.

I grew up playing sports, and in particular was on the swim team both in intercity competitions and in high school. That meant spending a lot of time in locker rooms and in group showers. Everybody got naked. In the years after high school I became a bit of a gym rat and have almost always had a membership at a fitness club wherever I’ve lived.

Up until the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020 showering was as it has always been. You showered in the nude. Every now and then you might see someone showering in their underwear but this was very rare. And in the sauna or steam room you wrapped a towel around your waist, but otherwise that was it. Even if you were shy, there was no real need for modesty at the gym where I work out because the showers are all individual cubicles with closing doors. You’re all by yourself in there, and you can wrap yourself in your towel when you come out.

When the pandemic shut all the gyms down I took the next four years off, only returning in 2024. And I immediately noticed that norms had changed, dramatically. It is now the case that very nearly everyone is showering in their underwear. Everyone! Every now and then you might still see someone (like me) showering in the nude, but they are the exceptions. Just the day before posting this review a young fellow, I would say just into his early 20s, came out of the showers in his shorts and his t-shirt, soaking wet. I couldn’t believe it. Five years ago I think I would have asked him if he was OK. Now I was just glad he’d taken his shoes and socks off.

What has led to this change in behaviour? And how did it happen so rapidly? I note that it’s a practice that’s been adopted by men of all ages, from the very young to the very old. Are they watching so much porn that they feel body-shamed at only being average? I honestly can’t say. What I can say is that I think the whole idea of taking a shower while wearing clothes is ridiculous.

Takeaways:

With the high cost of housing more and more adult children are living with their parents out of necessity. And in some cultures this can even be a good thing, with intergenerational support working both ways. But a mother enabling or coddling a man-baby is always a bad idea, damaging to both parties. It usually turns into a poisonous and perverted love-hate relationship, with the family home becoming a nursery of vice.

True Crime Files