Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

movies were based on a suspenseful novel by Joseph Hayes.
    In the mid-fifties, Frank Sinatra played against type as a home invader in the movie Suddenly . His character was an insane fanatic who held a family captive as he waited in their home to shoot the president as he made a whistle-stop speech.
    Perhaps the most frightening pair of same-titled movies about a criminal stalking and threatening a family are the two versions of Cape Fear . The 1962 version starred Gregory Peck as a prosecutor and a father trying to protect his family. Robert Mitchum was the alleged rapist who was out for revenge. In 1991, Martin Scorcese’s production of Cape Fear starred Nick Nolte as the father and Robert De Niro as the heartless convict who insinuated himself into Nolte’s home.
    I happen to love these movies, probably because they scared me. I was suitably afraid and in suspense as I watched them.
    However, what happened to a real family who lived in a quiet neighborhood in eastern Washington State is more compelling—simply because this is a factual story that seemed certain to end in horror.
    Even though many years have passed, I have changed the names of the actual victims who survived to save them embarrassment and to avoid invading their privacy.

Tuesday, April 18, 1978, was a warm spring day in Pasco, Washington, but few residents in Pasco left their doors or windows open. They were all afraid, and the comfortable home of Martha and John Carelli* was closed up as tightly as their neighbors’. The Carellis were aware that four prisoners had escaped from the Franklin County Jail on Sunday, two days earlier. They kept close track of what was happening at the jail because they lived only six blocks away. Actually, everyone in the Tri-Cities area—which includes Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick—knew of the escape because it had been featured on the news as the headline story for days. The prisoners had managed to hide a razor blade, which one of them had held to the throat of a jailer. Once out of their cells, they waited while twenty-four-year-old Michael Anderson (AKA Johnny Hart, AKA Johnny Mimms) used the code he had memorized to operate the jail elevator. In a calm voice, he shouted, “Coming down,” into the intercom, and unfortunately, an officer on duty pushed three door buzzers, not realizing it was four escapees and not corrections officers who were descending.
    The newly free prisoners walked out and disappeared into the streets of Pasco.
    The community had reason to be nervous. Anderson had been in jail awaiting trial for an armed robbery of a Safeway store, where he’d netted $21,000. He was also charged with sexual attacks on couples who had unwittingly opened their doors in local motels, and for credit card theft. He was on parole from prison in Joliet, Illinois, having completed a sentence for robbery and attempted murder in that state.
    Although people in Franklin County were jittery, they had begun to relax a little. Two days had passed with no sightings of the tall, husky Anderson; the other fugitives’ crimes hadn’t been as serious, but they appeared to have gone underground too. Probably, people figured, all four of the men had left the Tri-Cities region, heading east toward Spokane, west to Seattle, or even south to cross into Oregon, across the Columbia River.
    If they were smart, they wouldn’t want to stay around Franklin County, where their mug shots had been flashed on television screens and printed on the front page of the Tri-City Herald .
     
    On that Tuesday morning, April 18, Martha Carelli had seen her sons and husband off to school and work as usual, cleaned the house, and then gone off to join her bowling team. She had no inkling that someone who didn’t belong there was in her house. Without knowing it, her family hadn’t been alone there for the past thirty-six hours.
    Michael Anderson had spent his first night out of captivity at a friend’s home, and the friend had thoughtfully provided him with a gun and holster. But when a massive police door-to-door search got too close, Anderson left his friend’s house and searched for another hiding place.
    The Carellis’ garage was the first spot he’d chosen. Martha had almost discovered him—although she wasn’t aware of it—when she’d noticed the garage door wasn’t quite closed. She’d tugged at the handle, straining to pull the door down, while Anderson waited only a few feet away, holding his breath, on the other