If the fixture that overheated had been on the Christmas tree, there might have been enough early pop and crackle to wake the man sleeping just a few feet away. But the fire started in a makeshift lamp swaddled in macrame that was hanging from the underside of a stairwell. So it likely smoldered in dry rope, then burned into old wood, slow and noiseless, poisoning the air before the fire raged. The house was still. The house stayed still too long.
The call went out at 3:02, phoned in from the home of the family across the street, relayed by a dispatcher simultaneously to both the police and the fire department. The pumper truck had to be roused, manned, and maneuvered, which is why patrolman Marty Eickhoff was first on the scene, in his cruiser.
In most places, the house at 1224 Morton Street would be called a bungalow, but that term’s too pretentious for small-town Nebraskans. In Falls City, population 4,990, the cheerless home on a street corner near the southern side of town was called a one-and-a-half, which describes it adequately, a cheap clapboard box with a rickety porch and a second half-story on top, with a slope-roofed attic bedroom. Rent was under a hundred a month.
As he approached in his car, Eickhoff saw the little house throwing way too much light into the darkness. Then flames tonguing out of the front, worryingly near the gas meter. A car stood at a weird angle in the street, as though the driver had come in fast, saw the fire, braked hard, and fishtailed. Finally Eickhoff saw a young woman in the front yard, screaming. The car was hers. There were people trying to console her.
Eickhoff heard “babies,” and “inside,” and bolted to where he was directed, the bedroom on the right side of the house.
A second patrol car skidded up. This was Duane Armbruster. In time, Armbruster would become a lifer on the city’s small police force—its main crime investigator and eventually its chief—so he would see his share of bad, but this would stick as the bleakest night ever.
The bedroom window was smashed in. Investigators would later learn the screaming woman was the babies’ mother, and she had pulled up to the house after a night out with friends. Desperation overcame caution. She had done that to the window with her fists.
Hot air from inside hit Eickhoff as though from a bellows. Because he moonlighted as a firefighter, he knew the peril he faced: Superheated air can take out your lungs in one breath. The fire truck was en route, with its protective gear and breathing packs, but there was no time to wait for it. Eickhoff took a gulp of cool night air, held it, and pushed his face into the furnace.
The room was filled from the ceiling down with black smoke. Midway, where it thinned some, the policeman could make out two small shapes on a bed a few feet away. The children were just beyond his reach, so he grabbed the headboard and tried to shimmy the whole bed toward him. It went maybe a foot, then stopped, as though something were blocking it.
Back out, grab a breath, back in. Armbruster was beside him now, and two neighbors. The men managed to seize the sheet and reel it in toward them until the shapes were close enough to grab and pull through the window. An ambulance was on the way, but it would not be needed, at least not for the children.
The men gently laid the two-year-old boy and one-year-old girl on the ground. A small mercy: They were not burned. But they were baked.
By now the firemen had arrived, and from the neighbors they learned there was probably someone else in the house. Protected by gear, cooled in the mist from the fire hose, they went in and found a male adult on the floor.
Firefighters carried Todd Thrane out of the building. He was limp and unconscious, but there was a faint pulse, so they tried CPR. He made it into the ambulance alive but did not survive the ride to the hospital. The coroner would report that all victims had died of smoke inhalation.
On this slowest weekend for news, three dead in a house fire in the middle of nowhere was enough to make it onto the national wires. The UPI story identified the dead man, who was only nineteen, as the babysitter.
Wire service articles tend to be written in what journalists call an inverted pyramid. That means that you cram the most important facts at the top and let the story taper down from there. This permits busy newspaper editors, with limited space, to cut from the bottom without worrying that they’re losing salient details.
Most papers—among them, The New York Times—carried just a paragraph. Three dead, two infants and their teenaged babysitter. Where the story ran a paragraph or two longer, readers learned the additional puzzling fact that the babysitter had lived in the house.
As it turns out, Todd Thrane was babysitting, but he wasn’t the babysitter. No one got the whole story, which was poignant and textured and deep. And of course no one could have known of the Gothic shadows it would cast.
TODD THRANE WAS as complicated as it gets and as simple as they come. He liked things loud—fireworks, pro wrestling, motorcycles, deer hunting, heavy machinery, heavy metal. First he liked girls, and then women. He liked cars and he liked drinking, and he didn’t mind mixing the two.
He was a cipher, a deeply good-natured boy who, at fifteen, had become a recidivist truant and ambitious carouser, so wild and contrarian that his mother sent him from her home in Lincoln to live with her brother on a farm in Falls City, to straighten him out. He was so laconic nobody could really tell you what he was thinking about anything important, yet so sensitive and vulnerable he never got over his parents’ untidy divorce, which started with an infidelity so blatant it couldn’t be hidden or minimized or talked around.
That’s where most of it started, with the divorce. Just about everyone who knew Todd Thrane agrees on that, if not on much else. In the extended Thrane family, some hard feelings remain and some regrets linger, much of it over what happened to its youngest son.
Bill Thrane had a master’s degree in special education, but he worked in the grocery business. His wife, Judith, was a licensed hairdresser, but worked as a bookkeeper. The three Thrane boys grew up understanding that life sometimes entails compromise; also, that there were rules, and you lived by them, and if you didn’t, there were consequences. When he was little, Todd once lit a remarkably competent bonfire under the backyard deck and almost burned it down. “I don’t think he sat down for a week after that,” his brother Allen recalls. “Didn’t do it again.”
As a child, Todd had cherubic altar-boy looks, with a chubby face, a diffident smile, and a lush mushroom cap of corn-silk hair. He was a scamp, but he could surprise you with his tenderness. One summer he worked on a farm pulling weeds from the bean fields; it was clear he wanted money of his own but unclear why, and he wouldn’t say. Suspicions mounted. It turned out he was saving for a fancy birthday present for his mom, a wicker chair he’d known she wanted.
There’s no “good” age for a child to weather a divorce, nor is there consensus among experts about which age is the worst. But you won’t get many arguments that eleven stinks. It is when you are solidifying a sense of self; a stable, structured, loving home life provides a template for how to adjust to adulthood. Divorcing parents of preadolescents are particularly urged to strive for normalcy: Tamp down the drama. Avoid accusations of betrayal. Eliminate the tawdry.
Todd was eleven on the day his mother took him and his middle brother, Tim, to visit their father in the hospital, where Bill Thrane was being treated for a minor problem. When the boys walked into the room, a young woman was on the bed, too.
As Tim remembers it, not much talking ensued. No introductions were offered. The woman just got up and left, and afterward, the conversation between their mom and dad seemed dreadfully strained. “We’ll discuss it when I get home,” Bill said to Judy under his breath.
But he never came home. He was just . . . gone.
There wasn’t much conversation in the Thrane home about what had happened, and things stayed that way—an oppressive secret too awful to articulate—until one day when Tim and his older brother, Allen, were out for a drive and happened to see their father’s car outside a house they didn’t recognize. Allen remembers the moment frozen, as though it were an old-fashioned snapshot, the kind from those primitive harsh flash cameras that shattered the bulb in the process of taking the photo: Dad, sheepish in the front yard, that lady at the front door, backlit in a floral pastel dress. That’s when the boys in the family knew for sure that their father was not coming back, and why. The older brothers made peace with this over time, but Todd never really did.
One day not long afterward, Judy Thrane came home from work to find that her husband had let himself in during the day and hauled away their bedroom furniture. That night Todd watched his mother go to sleep on the floor. The next day he found and confronted his father with all the tight-lipped, chin-quivering, beetle-browed righteous indignation an eleven-year-old could muster. It was apparently formidable. Bill Thrane wound up ponying up for a new bed.
Todd didn’t talk much about the divorce, or the incident at the hospital, or the news of the lady in the floral dress, or any feelings he had about any of this. There was fury, but it was inarticulate. One day, after quarreling with Allen over some trifle, he calmly walked outside and kicked a big dent in the fender of his big brother’s car.
It was all part of a nihilistic shift of attitude. Todd began acting as if rules no longer had any meaning.
Curfews were imposed and ignored. School attendance became, in Todd’s judgment, optional. His bedroom was in the basement, and it had a window that could pivot open, so it became his doggie door to freedom. He found ways to get beer. Judy remembers warning her son that he was flirting with juvenile delinquency and seemed destined for Boys Town. She meant it as a warning; he seemed to take it as a compliment.
The strange thing about Todd’s misbehavior was that he seldom tried to hide it. There was a system: He announced his intentions, his mom freaked out and forbade it, and then he did it. It was after he informed her that he was not going to be attending school anymore that Todd found himself living a hundred miles away, on Uncle Benny’s farm in Falls City.
Falls City was founded in 1857 at the southeastern corner of what was then the territory of Nebraska. It wasn’t much to look at, and by 1986 it was even less. The dinky four-foot-high waterfalls for which the city was grandiosely named had long gone dry. The population was dwindling, and the economy—once built around railroads and oil—was in decline. Falls City still had its farmers, and its farmers still had a certain stubborn pugnacity, a trait dating to the Civil War era, when the townspeople conspired to keep a dangerous secret. A barn in Falls City was the first Underground Railroad stop in Nebraska for fugitive slaves from Kansas. According to lore, radical abolitionist John Brown, though wanted on capital charges, was said to have strode through Falls City without fear.
Benny Sickle grew up on his father’s farm a few miles out of town, and he was still there but running the place in 1982 when his likable but incorrigible nephew arrived one day from Lincoln. It was a Sunday. Benny took one look at Todd, of whom he was about to take legal custody and full disciplinary responsibility, and phoned a friend. The friend was a barber. The Lord’s Day notwithstanding, Todd got his moppy, mullety mess shorn close, right that day. New sheriff, new rules.
Benny’s daughter LeAnn was just about Todd’s age. She remembers her friends’ fascination with this young city slicker, particularly the girls. To the teenagers of Falls City, Lincoln was Babylon, USA, and LeAnn’s cousin was a tantalizing mystery. He wasn’t cherubic anymore. His face had thinned. Farmwork was hardening his body. His mouth was taut, like Clint Eastwood’s. His emerald eyes squinted out at you with a promise of mischief. He was glib, almost too glib for his own good. He didn’t care for school and he never read a book he didn’t absolutely have to, but he picked things up and could talk about most any subject, or at least artfully bullshit around it. He once told his mom that he’d probably stop drinking when he hit twenty-one, because then it would be legal, and what’s the fun in that?
Show a group of women a photo of Todd Thrane from his late teens, and you get a consistent reaction, customized by age. Each compares him to a sandy-haired, bad-boy leading man with whom she is or had once been smitten. James Dean, for some. For some, Leonardo DiCaprio or Heath Ledger. Jude Law. The youngest summon Ryan Gosling. Todd’s good looks were cinematic, and there was a half-hitch in his walk, a kind of swagger.
For a time, he took well to the greater structure at his uncle’s home. He was a reliable farmhand who worked prodigiously when he worked. But the city, such as it was, beckoned. There was some nightlife there, and once again, curfews became optional. Familiar cycles ensued: escape, punishment, atonement, escape. Too often Todd came home drunk.
He somehow made it through high school, which ended Uncle Benny’s responsibilities, none too soon for the Falls City Thranes. Briefly back at home in Lincoln, Todd got a job in a meat market, a job he lost when he picked up a DUI. Then he returned to Falls City, where he got a job in a grocery store, a job he lost when he picked up a DWI. Two drunkenness arrests in three months. It was May 1986, and things were out of control.
Something complicated was bedeviling Todd, and he was using booze as an anesthetic. He showed up at his court appearance amiably but obviously smashed. Unamused, the judge instructed him to sober up and afforded him ample time to accomplish that—thirty days in the county jail. It was the low point in the short, troubled life of Todd Thrane.
His older cousin Donna O’Grady visited him in jail. She talked to him in his cell. He looked small. It was the first time she had ever seen him scared. “Don’t let this be your life,” she implored him.
It’s anyone’s guess what Todd’s life might have been, had he survived the fire, or had there been no fire at all. The most optimistic guesses come from those who were familiar with the events of Todd’s final summer and fall, beginning on the day he first walked into that flimsy one-and-a-half on 1224 Morton Street. Becky Gill lived there.
Todd had gone there with his friend Ron Gill, who was getting a divorce from Becky but still hung around some, hoping for a reconciliation. Ron had somewhere else to be, so for a time he left Todd with Becky, which turned out to be a tactical error, romantically. They became an official couple soon after, and not long after that, Todd moved in.
Becky was twenty. She was smallish and appealing in a hot-blooded sort of way—think Stockard Channing in Grease. She drank and smoked. She kept rowdy company. She took crap from no one. She was refreshingly cynical. You could have called her wild and hard and loose, or you could have called her scrappy and sassy and free-spirited, depending on how much you liked her.
Todd liked her, but what he seemed to like most of all were her moppets—Savannah, the one-year-old, and older brother, Tony, who was two. When he was around the children, Todd softened. Everyone saw it.
There are photos of Todd on the Sickle farm that year, with Becky’s two children, his arms protectively around them. In one snapshot he’s on a three-wheeler dirt bike, with a pig-tailed Savannah in his lap. She is jubilantly pointing toward the sky, as if just discovering clouds. Todd looks not at her but at the camera. He’s smiling confidently, with what looks very much like pride.
It was as though the children had broken through to some vulnerable part of Todd that had been stashed away, around age eleven, for safekeeping.
Not all of Todd’s relatives were crazy about Becky—in their view, she was part of the party crowd from which they were trying to wean Todd. But they couldn’t deny or dislike the change that was coming over him. He was drinking less, and also less purposefully; sometimes it seemed he’d made that change for the children, with whom he was aligned in friendly conspiracy. There was the time Becky sent Todd out with money to buy her cigarettes. He returned instead with candy canes for Tony and Savannah, and got chewed out, but took it with a grin.
A week before his death Todd went to visit his parents in Lincoln for the Christmas holidays. He spent the first day with his father, with whom he was reconnecting, followed by a boisterous Christmas Eve with his mother and brothers, where three young men became boys again. They arm-wrestled. Allen let Todd drive his motorcycle around town, which was risky and arguably irresponsible, but also a welcome sign of trust: Not only did Todd have no motorcycle license but his driver’s license had been suspended for a year over the drinking mess.
As it happens, Todd wasn’t supposed to be back home on Sunday the twenty-eighth. His plan had been to stay in Lincoln through New Year’s. But he changed his mind and asked his mom to drive him back early, on Friday. When she told him that her car was in the shop, he said he’d hitchhike. So she borrowed a friend’s car.
Accounts differ about the events of those final few days, and they are likely influenced by what feels comfortable in the memory. Judy says Todd was anxious to get home because he’d had a tiff with Becky and they’d made up over the phone, so he just wanted to be with her. Becky says there was no tiff, that everything was great between them at the end. Tim says that when Todd couldn’t reach Becky by phone and learned the children were with grandparents, he began to worry about where Becky was and with whom. Allen remembers that Todd was just “homesick.” Allen is the diplomat in the family.
There is also the question of just what Todd brought back with him that day. There were definitely Christmas presents for him, Becky, and the kids. Becky remembers one gift in particular that came into the house that day, but Judy says no, that Todd had had it long before the fatal weekend. Judy was good at needlework, and she had made the decorative part of it herself. It was a hanging lamp festooned with homemade macrame.
Fire investigators never figured out exactly what went wrong with that lamp. It’s possible the socket was faulty, or maybe the bulb. It’s also possible that the bulb being used was of too high wattage to be safely nestled near combustible sisal. Understandably, the family doesn’t like to dwell on these details, because what does it matter?
Here’s what matters. About fifteen minutes before three A.M., Todd Thrane awoke to an all-too-real nightmare. He was likely already dizzy from smoke. The front door lay eight feet to his left; the children’s bedroom eight feet to his right. He moved right.
In the Thrane family, this moment is recounted with reverence. Allen remembers being told that Todd’s body was found on the floor, tantalizingly close to the front door, with a baby under each arm. It is not true, but it is not far from the truth. The truth needs no embellishment. Todd Thrane died a hero.
His sooty handprints were on the edge of Savannah’s crib; Becky saw them when she numbly inspected the scene in the ruined house the day after the fire. The house would be bulldozed soon after.
Todd had evidently gone for the little girl first, lifted her from the crib, then lurched with her over to Tony’s bed. Todd had to have been operating on adrenaline and pure stubborn will, because he was approaching unconsciousness. The air was thick with toxins: carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide, all of which would have had his head pounding. His eyes would have been red and watering, his vision a blur. He would have been alternatively gasping for air, then seized with a paroxysm of coughing. His lungs were burning, literally.
Smoke inhalation can take you down in a second. When Todd dropped, he managed to roll Savannah onto the bed with her brother. We know that because he was right there with them. It had been Todd’s body, right below the babies, that had prevented patrolman Marty Eickhoff from pulling the bed to the window.
Wouldn’t anyone have risked his life to save two infants left in his care? Maybe. Probably. But can anyone really know that about himself, unless he’s faced such a stark choice in a moment of blind terror?
So that’s what can be said, at the very least, of the likable, exasperating, incorrigible Todd Thrane. With his last breaths, he turned toward the flames and the children he’d come to love, and his life ended on that note of grace.
But Todd Thrane’s story doesn’t wrap up that easily, and it doesn’t end with his death. The end hasn’t been written yet. It could go any number of ways.
Only a few people knew it, but on the day she lost her young lover and her two children, Becky Gill was pregnant with Todd’s baby.
IT IS 2013. Todd’s baby is twenty-six. At the moment he’s backing a dump truck down a driveway. He’s got three tons of gravel to deliver.
Mark Gill has hazel eyes that squint out at you with a promise of mischief. His mouth is taut, like Eastwood’s. He’s got his father’s chiseled musculature, which he carries on his father’s smallish frame. Women look at him and think bad-boy leading man. There’s a half-hitch in his walk, a hint of a swagger. He’s glib, sometimes too glib for his own good. He grew up a chronic truant with a taste for booze and pills. He seems to know a little about every subject, or at least can artfully bullshit around it. He likes things loud. He likes motorcycles and owns one—a Suzuki GSX-R1000—his “crotch rocket,” he calls it. It can approach 200 miles an hour, which he says he’d never, ever do because it’s illegal and you could get in real trouble, and then he smiles big and looks away.
Mark lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he is operations manager for a garden supply company. He lives in a camper on the company’s eighteen-acre property, which is fine with his bosses, especially since it lets him work an eighty-hour week if he wants to, which he often does. His mom, Becky, lives close by with his stepfather, and they’re all friends. Until this particular weekend, when a writer came to town with questions for Becky, Mark had never heard the full story about what happened to his father. He got it from her at a Waffle House, sitting silently, the third person at the table, taking it in, intense but emotionless and stone-faced, which is his customary expression. He is preternaturally self-possessed, which seems masterful, but also a little off-putting. It’s as though he is part Zen master and part sociopath. He doesn’t challenge that description. He says it sounds about right. It’s the place you get to, he says, when you grow up like he did.
AFTER THE FIRE, before the funeral, there was a viewing just for the family. Outside the room, Bill Thrane approached Becky, and what he snarled at her remains indelible: “Are you going to beg my forgiveness for killing my son?”
Then he told her she didn’t belong there, and that he wouldn’t permit her in to see the body. Wordlessly, elegantly, Judy took Becky’s trembling hand, and the two women walked in together.
It’s hard to fault anyone for his or her behavior during those dreadful days; surely it was not the first time a grieving person found a scapegoat. Other Thranes wondered why Becky was out that night and with whom. She says it was a girlfriend, a woman who is now dead, and there is no evidence to doubt her or any reason to want to. And why would anyone really care?
Bill Thrane cared. Through his grief and likely his guilt—he wept through the funeral, the first time either of his remaining sons ever saw their father in tears—he saw Becky as a Jezebel whom he would put nothing past. One day after Mark was born, Bill arrived at Becky’s house and asked to see the baby. After a long scrutiny at cribside, Becky remembers, Bill turned to his new wife. “You can go get the presents from the car,” he said. “This is my grandson.”
In those final days of his life, Todd had known Becky was pregnant. He was ecstatic, telling his family that he and Becky were planning on marrying in the summer. Allen remembers his kid brother talking about baby names. He was partial to Oscar, everyone remembers.
At the funeral home, Allen Thrane recalls Becky couldn’t tear her eyes off him. He understood why. The two had not met before that day, and he and Todd looked very much alike.
Allen is fifty-six now; he’d worked most of his life in the printing business and now owns a restaurant in Branson, Missouri. You look at him, and there’s a good chance you’re looking at what Todd might look like today. He’s still got his hair, still a sandy blond, a little fleshy in the face, a little prosperous in the middle, still a handsome man.
He is talking about his nephew, Mark Gill. “I have a lot of guilt in my heart about him.”
Guilt?
“I think my brother would be upset with me.”
There’s something Allen’s trying to get out, and it isn’t coming easily.
“After the fire, and even after that, my wife and I talked about legally adopting Mark. We really wanted to do it.”
They thought they could make a convincing case that it would be for everyone’s good—both for the baby and for Becky, who had a lot to recover from without the stress of single motherhood. And it’s not as though the baby would be out of her life.
But Allen never had the heart or nerve to broach it. “How do you ask a woman who just lost two children to give up her third?”
Though the Thranes were part of the first few years of Mark’s life, Becky eventually moved to Colorado, and they lost contact. Allen wishes things had gone differently.
He is really struggling with this. He starts to explain, stops, starts again. He doesn’t want to say anything bad about anyone. He doesn’t want to be judgmental or sound elitist. But facts are facts.
“I have three children. One is a lawyer. One is a doctor. One is an accountant. My children grew up with opportunities. Mark grew up very poor. The house was dirty. He didn’t eat as well as we did. If Mark had been our son . . .”
His voice catches.
“. . . he wouldn’t have felt he had to rob banks.”
MARK GILL HAS DUMPED out the gravel in the driveway and is heading back to his work. It’s a Sunday. On his right upper arm is a big tattoo. It’s monochrome, a skull drawn in thin blue lines. It’s an okay tat job, considering.
“Unfortunately, it is the by-product of impatience,” Mark says with a tight smile. He means he should have waited for that particular procedure until he got out of prison. “I was young and I didn’t understand the ramifications.” He means walking around for the rest of your life with a semi-lame tattoo.
The first thing you notice about Mark Gill is how he speaks. He’s a high school dropout with a GED, but he’s got a lush vocabulary that he deploys preemptively, the way Frederick Douglass did, as though to controvert any assumptions you may have about his intelligence or sophistication. He learned to speak well in prison, from books. It was part of a plan that he hatched in the early months of his seven-plus years in custody.
“Don’t let this be your life,” Donna O’Grady had begged her cousin Todd in his jail cell. Mark Gill didn’t have a Donna. He was alone, but he gave himself that talk.
“I went to prison with the mentality that this was not going to become the defining point of my life,” he says. “I was not going to live a life of jackassery. Inside, I spent a great deal of time in inner reflection. I read an immense number of books. I studied philosophy, religion, architecture, civics, politics. I read Nietzsche. I read Marcus Aurelius. I read Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Surprisingly enough, I read Webster’s dictionary twelve times. I read books about living off the grid. I read books about gardening. Anything I could get my hands on.”
Todd Thrane’s unfinished life seemed circumscribed almost from the start, stunted by bad luck and then compounded by bad choices. He was a young man who seemed intelligent and charming enough to be more than he was, to aim higher than he did. It is tempting to think of the son as the father’s second chance. And when you do that, you find yourself in some interesting territory.
We are inside Mark’s camper, which is parked at the back of Don’s Garden Shop, a sprawling venue that sits under a breathtaking expanse of the northern Rocky Mountains. It’s dominated by Pikes Peak; the view from that summit is said to have inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful.” Had Bates looked out today and seen Don’s Garden Shop, the song might have had one more stanza, an oddball one.
Don’s sells custom-made soils, mulch, fertilizer, firewood, paving materials, deck lumber, landscaping stones, and prefab garden sheds, but what stands out are the gargantuan lawn ornaments. The place is a menagerie of gigantic concrete and iron figurines—bears, stallions, turtles, wolves, frogs, and people. Mark’s camper sits between a statue of St. Francis of Assisi and the shed that houses his shiny black Suzuki that can hit 200 but never does—wink wink, nudge nudge. The juxtaposition seems fitting.
The camper is a 26-footer, and it is so austere inside that it nearly landed Mark back in jail, because his parole officer took a look around and didn’t believe anyone was actually living there, as Mark had sworn he was. “I lived in a cell not much bigger than that,” Mark says dryly, pointing to the bed. “This is fine.”
His vices these days, other than the bike, are coffee and Marlboros. He’s a teetotaler; it’s a condition of his parole, and he’s tested frequently. He got out after serving half of a fourteen-year sentence he negotiated in return for a guilty plea. It was a pretty good deal for him, because he had indeed robbed banks—seven attempts, four successful—and they had him dead to rights.
HE WAS EIGHTEEN. He’d just dropped out of high school. He was living with the eighteen-year-old mother of his year-old daughter. He had a job as an auto mechanic. Like his father, he was good with cars. And like his father, he grew up missing a father.
By the time he was eight, Becky had remarried and moved from Falls City to Colorado. Mark got along with his stepfather, but his stepfather was a busy man. He worked in construction and was often away on big jobs for weeks or even months at a time.
At eighteen, “I was sort of looking for a father figure,” Mark says. He took what he could get, which was the company of his landlord, Thomas Bastian. Bastian, who was twenty-seven, had a criminal record for domestic abuse and assault. Man and young man became drinking and carousing buddies, and then conspirators in one of the more pathetic crime sprees Colorado Springs has ever seen.
Mark and Tom were heavily into crystal meth, Ecstasy, and ketamine. They wanted more, but hadn’t the bucks for it.
“We were just riding down the street one day,” Mark says, “and we said, ‘Well, let’s rob a bank.’” They laughed about it for a bit—until they stopped laughing.
Bastian’s wife had worked in a bank, and she’d told her husband something intriguing: In a robbery, tellers are instructed to hand over money and offer no resistance, even if there is no weapon presented, even if no overt threat is made. Being a bank robber sounded like being a panhandler in a neighborhood of bleeding hearts. You ask, they give.
Tom and Mark hit their first bank on October 4, 2005. It was the World Savings Bank on South Nevada Avenue.
Mark waited in the car while Bastian went in. The older man came out grinning with a thousand-plus in cash, and they drove away and that was it. No one ran out of the bank waving a gun or even shaking a fist. There was no police pursuit.
Here’s a koan that must be particularly fascinating when one is hopped up on meth and Special K: If you pull off a bank heist and no one seems to care, was there a crime at all?
They’d agreed Mark would pull off the next one while Tom drove getaway. Mark approached a teller at Key Bank, passed her a note informing her that she was being robbed and requesting the contents of the till. Request approved. Mark sauntered out to the car, heart pounding, heat nowhere in sight, a few more thousand in hand.
Days of chemically infused partying followed. Then things got a little nuts.
The newly minted bank robbers decided they weren’t getting enough money. Only so much could be filched from the till at a single teller’s station. They felt they needed to get into the little safes at the tellers’ feet, the ones full of cash to replenish the tills. And the only way to do that and to make sure there was no funny business with hidden alarms was to leap the counter, Dog Day Afternoon style. This required two men in the bank as well as a getaway driver, so Mark roped in a third guy named Richard, who happened to be his mom’s next-door neighbor. There was not a lot of quality control going on, on any level.
What they lacked in sophistication they made up for in melodrama.
“We became cinematic,” Mark says. “When we walked in, we put on masks. Shouted for everyone to freeze. We took over the bank.”
They were armed only with BB guns, Mark says. No life was ever in danger. But they also had loud voices and that sense of implacable evil conferred by masks. Mark’s was an army-issue gas mask. He looked like an alien with a gun.
These robberies were planned, but only haphazardly. The team thought ahead about some things but not about others. They knew to leave behind any stack of bills, however big and whatever the denomination, if it could not be riffled deep through to the center. That’s because those exploding dye packets are generally hidden in the middle of hollowed-out stacks. Also, they did enough research to know they should order people to freeze in place: Mark had heard that if you order a captive to move, you are technically taking a hostage, and it might trigger an additional charge of kidnapping.
But they never stopped to think that their lucky run of police indifference would probably end once they started acting like the Baby Face Nelson gang. They never considered disabling surveillance cameras. They never considered muddying their license tags. They never weighed what might have been a prudent strategy: expanding their ambit of operations to other cities, under different police jurisdictions. So in the space of six weeks they became one hellacious local crime spree for Colorado Springs, one that demanded task-force attention.
Their final heist was a return to Key Bank, the scene of Mark’s first successful, gentlemanly, panhandler-type robbery. This one involved threats and gas masks and brandished weapons, and it went badly.
Richard had forgotten to riffle his stacks of bills. The robbers discovered this as they were driving away in Tom’s Honda when the bag exploded with an ominous whuump and the car filled with red smoke and tear gas. Dye bombs are triggered by an inverse-proximity fuse: At a certain distance from the bank, they detonate.
Gasping for air, eyes tearing, Mark threw the stinking, smoking sack out of the car, with its big stack of phony fifties—along with real money, too, now made unspendable by telltale red splatter.
Things got worse. Evidently someone had written down the numbers on their license plate. They were apprehended not long afterward. Because he had no criminal record, Mark was released on $10,000 bond, posted by his mother and stepfather.
The low point of Todd Thrane’s life had happened at nineteen, as he sulked in jail on two drunk driving charges. The low point of his son’s life may be what happened to him after his arrest. He skipped out on bond and fled to Florida.
How could he do that to his mother?
“At that point,” he says expressionlessly, with that curious detachment, “I was consciously cutting all ties to anyone I’d ever known and loved.” It was a simple, practical decision, he says, that seemed regrettable but necessary. Just do it. Don’t look back.
We can only speculate whether Todd Thrane was going to turn his life around, but we know that at a critical moment he made a critical decision, that it was the right thing to do, and that it ended his life. Mark Gill had a critical moment, too, of a different sort but of no less moment. It was also the right thing to do, and in his case it very likely saved his life.
It came in Destin, Florida, two weeks after he disappeared from Colorado. He was in the front seat of the truck he had stolen opportunistically, because someone had left his keys in the ignition. A police officer had stopped him and was approaching on foot. Mark knew the cop would run his name against a national database of fugitives, and that he would be going away for a long time. What Mark also knew, and the police officer did not, was that he had a loaded 9-millimeter handgun within reach.
“I considered shooting him in the head. I thought about it.”
Mark Gill meets your eyes. It’s still impressive and still disturbing, that emotional disconnect. He reminds you of Camus’s Meursault, the impenetrable protagonist of The Stranger, who acts but does not feel.
Mark has been talking for six hours over two days, and he’s expressed regrets but no remorse. He’s copped to having been stupid, but not to having been bad or immoral—not for stealing things, or for running out on his responsibilities, or for terrifying people. Not for having a child at sixteen and not really being around for her. He says he doesn’t feel guilty about anything he’s done, because it’s all in the past, and it has nothing to do with what he is now and where he is going. Like Meursault, he deals with his history as if it were a series of things that simply happened, as though to a completely different person. Which, in a sense, is true.
“I thought about shooting the police officer in the head,” he says blandly, “but then I did not.”
IN HIS BOOKING PHOTO, Walton County Inmate No. 06003797, DOB 7/18/87, is wearing an orange prison-issue jumpsuit and an expression that tries for bravado but looks a lot more like fear. He’s wide-eyed, up against a cinder-block wall. He seems like someone who has just been slapped awake. He’s got a ratty little perimeter beard on a face too young to support a mustache. He is a person who has just decided not to murder a cop. He is about to head into what he will later call the luckiest seven and a half years of his life.
The charges on which he’d been arrested included grand theft auto and possession of concealed weapons; together, they’d get him a year in Florida. The bank robbery would add six more in Colorado, which he would spend in the Bent County Correctional Facility, a privately run prison with, as it happens, an extensive program that lets you order books from city libraries.
After he got out in the winter of 2012 he started cold-calling for jobs. When he showed up at Don’s Garden Shop, he spoke with Paula Humphrey, Don’s wife and co-owner. He said he was a parolee living in a halfway house, that he had robbed banks, that he was determined to radically change the course of his life, that he had learned a little about gardening in prison, and that he desperately needed a job. To Paula, he seemed extremely intense but also extremely focused, which impressed her. She told him they don’t hire in the winter, but to come back on March 1 or after. On March 1, exactly, he was back. That impressed her, too.
What happened next impressed her even more. One of the crappiest jobs at Don’s Garden Shop is splitting tree trunks and branches into firewood, using a primitive gas-driven single-piston splitter device. The work is repetitive, boring, and dangerous, which is not a good combination. Typically, newbies dawdle, trying to parcel out the work at a tolerable pace. Don and Paula set Mark down with pieces of tree and the machine, and came back an hour later to find a small forest of cordwood. It was like the work of a man possessed.
He was hired on at minimum wage to do entry-level work. He watched, learned, and two years later is being groomed to take over the management of the place. He has become indispensable.
“He makes $850 a week, more than anyone else here,” Paula says. She mulls this, and laughs. “Actually, it’s close to what we make.”
Paula, sixty-two, considers herself a good judge of character. Beyond just liking Mark Gill, she respects and trusts him. He handles money. There has never been a problem.
Paula acknowledges that Mark is not easy to get to know, that there is a remoteness about him, but she doesn’t see it as lack of empathy. She sees it as caution, as though there is a place he won’t let people get to, a vulnerable part of himself that’s tucked away for safekeeping.
“I think,” she says, “he’s afraid of being hurt.”
IT’S ANYONE’S GUESS what Mark Gill’s life would be like had his father not died in the fire, or had Allen Thrane worked up the nerve to make his case for adoption. One thing leads to another, which leads to another. Some connections are made, some are missed, and all of it shapes a life.
Bill Thrane, who started it all by walking out on his family, had a sense of all that near the end of his life. In 2005, he telephoned his grandson out of the blue. They had not seen each other since Mark was a baby. He identified himself as Grandpa Thrane. He was sick, he said, and he wanted to reconnect. It was part of an extended farewell tour Bill Thrane was conducting, trying to mend old wounds. Bill and Mark talked cordially for a bit, and agreed to talk again and maybe schedule a visit. But nothing ever came of it, because in just a few weeks, Mark would get the idea to rob a bank. By the time he got out of prison, his grandfather was dead, buried in Lincoln next to Todd.
THE STRANGER, the man who seems to be part Zen master and part sociopath, is digging into his steak. He eats Continental style—knife in the right hand, fork in the left, tines down, all smooth and transitionless. He taught himself that in prison, too. The reinvention of Mark Gill has been meticulously engineered.
If Paula Humphrey is right and Mark is vulnerable, it’s well disguised. He thinks highly of himself and isn’t bashful about saying it.
He says, “My work ethic is ridiculous.”
He says, “My mind is a sponge.”
He says, “I am extremely personable.”
He is. But there is the feel of a salesman to Mark Gill, the feel of a man perpetually trying to close a deal. He looks you straight in the eye all the time, and uses your name in conversation more than he needs to. He answers questions with disarming bluntness, yet you get the impression this is not so much a devotion to truth as a sense that bluntness impresses others.
You want to ask if this might all be part of that strategic reinvention. Is it possible this new life with its new focus is not so much a moral conversion as the next thing he’s trying because the last thing didn’t work out? Actually you do ask it, and he grins and does the bluntness thing.
“Someone once asked Edison how he felt about trying to make a lightbulb and failing a thousand times. Edison said it wasn’t failure, exactly. He said, ‘I learned something. I learned a thousand ways that don’t work.’”
After prison, Mark got a second tattoo. This one was inked by a pro. It’s bold Thai lettering running across his chest, a Buddhist motto he found in a book. Translated, it says, “Oneself is one’s own mainstay.” He interprets this to mean that in the end a person can rely only on himself. He sees it as a guiding principle, a hard reality summoning personal toughness and rigor.
He’s right about what it means, but it wasn’t meant to stand alone. It’s actually said to be from the writings of the Buddha himself, the beginning of a thought that is completed a few lines later: “Evil is done by oneself; by oneself is one defiled. Evil is left undone by oneself; by oneself is one cleansed.”
It’s not entirely clear if Mark has gotten there yet in his reinvention, or if he plans to. Maybe.
You ask him what the chances are that he will ever be in prison again.
“Slim,” he says, forking his steak into his mouth in that smooth, smooth move.
Slim to none?
“Slim,” he says. “Just slim.”
EPILOGUE:
It is late 2018. Mark doesn’t respond to emails. Mark doesn’t answer his phone. Paula Humphrey answers hers, at Don’s Garden Shop.
No, she says, Mark doesn’t work here anymore. He left over a year ago. He’d had some health problems, she said, and then his work began to deteriorate as he started to befriend some of her clients who happened to be in the pot-growing business.
Marijuana is now legal in Colorado. This opened new, legit opportunities for entrepreneurs. Mark, Paula says, hungered to be part of that. It became his main focus, and when Mark focuses on something, it is with blinding intensity.
Mark still lives in the area, but Paula hasn’t heard from him in a while. You should see what he’s up to, she says, with some concern in her voice.
Mark finally answers his phone.
“It’s pretty much what Paula says. I just ventured away and decided to do my own thing.”
He seems to want the conversation to end there. But he is courtly, open and accommodating, still. It’s his thing.
“Are you in the pot business?”
“Only to an extent, in a roundabout way. As a convicted felon, I can’t do it directly. I build greenhouses. I consult on custom soils, show ’em how to start up their plots.”
“Pot plots?”
“Mostly.”
“Have you stayed out of trouble with the law?”
“I wish I could say yes. I wish I could tell you that. But I am in litigation now. I have a criminal matter pending. Nothing’s been filed yet. We are hoping to avoid that. Under advice of counsel, I can’t say more.”
“Is it a violent crime?”
“No.”
Might you wind up back in jail?
There’s just a slight pause. A beat and a half. A momentary hiccup in his extraordinary composure.
“I might. Such is life.”