FOUR

Exactly when Auto Club employees Alan Palliko and Sandra Stockton caught each other’s eye, no one at the office remembers. By early 1965, though, several months before Sandra walked out of the Ballard Street house from Henry and filed for divorce, it was clear to all the Auto Club secretaries that Alan and Sandra were friends, though it would be a year before they began dating. Lunching together often, Alan became something of a mentor in Sandra’s determined plan to diet and exercise and at long last become one of L.A.’s beautiful people. To be sure, Alan’s flattering ways, shown to many women routinely and accepted by most of them as merely an idle part of the man’s nature, were to Sandra quite new, their impact dizzying.

Sandra was three years younger than Alan, born in August of 1940. Her parents lived at that time in South Gate, a Los Angeles community that even then was beginning to choke with industry. Its residents worked hard just to keep their heads at the smoggy surface line of middle class. The neighborhood blocks formed rows of similarly boxy, pastel houses. Sandra’s father was a supervisor at the 7-Up bottling plant. Her mother’s ambitions to be a stage star had been abandoned for selling real estate, getting married, and having a family.

Harriet Bingham had never gone beyond small parts in the San Diego Civic Light Opera or as a faceless extra in a few B movies. Like her first daughter, Sandra, she was overweight. But ambitions run high in a city like Los Angeles; for some, children can provide a second audition. Harriet Bingham passed a chatty gregariousness on to Sandra. She saw to it her daughter took dance lessons and learned all the social amenities. Sandra’s knack for drawing was nurtured.

Sandra was a chubby, giggly little girl. She never lacked for friends and was always a ready joiner, active in the Brownies, and afterward the Girl Scouts until as late as eighteen. But Sandra was never truly confident. Her Scout leader was always troubled by the little girl’s refusal to attempt new skills. Invariably, Sandra begged off with a pouting, “I can’t do that. I’m too dumb.”

Sandra was a daddy’s girl. She lived for each afternoon when her father would come home from work and she could sit on his lap like a queen. When Sandra was only five, Ted Bingham was drafted. The effect on the child was devastating. She became rueful and withdrawn, believing her father had left because she had done something wrong and that he no longer loved her. Harriet Bingham recognized that her daughter needed a more trained eye to help combat the situation, and along with Sandra, she began visiting a psychologist. The advice was simple—lavish affection upon the child in the father’s absence. Mrs. Bingham did just that, and the results were marked. Sandra returned to her outgoing ways, and no one had reason to suspect any emotional scar would remain.

Two years after Sandra was born, Mrs. Bingham gave birth to twins, Tracy and Pat. Though the mother did her best to keep all the children close and show no favoritism, it became clear to everyone that Sandra was gradually being left out. Not by her parents, but by her sisters. The twins often played together without Sandra, and as they all grew older, Tracy and Pat, both of them slim and fetching, went out on dates together while Sandra stayed home. Somehow the twins did everything right, and Sandra did not. Where they learned responsibility and thrift, Sandra squandered her allowances. The profligacy was concentrated on clothes that could never quite hide the fact she simply was not like her lithe younger sisters. But those who knew Sandra said if she harbored resentment, she never showed it.

When Sandra was fifteen, the family took a trip to Snow Valley, a winter resort area in the mountains east of Los Angeles. On an early morning toboggan slide, with all three sisters aboard, Sandra saw that they were swerving toward a boulder, and it was Sandra who put her leg out in an attempt to avoid the accident.

Suffering sixteen fractures in the heel and ankle, and requiring several operations for metal pins to be inserted, Sandra remained in a wheelchair for over fourteen months. Her overweight turned to obesity.

After graduating from high school in 1958, Sandra worked part-time as a salesclerk at Bullocks, a downtown department store. For a year and a half she took art classes at East L.A. City College. Thoughts of becoming a fashion designer did not go unencouraged by her mother. Living at home, Sandra led an almost nonexistent social life.

Her sister Pat was dating a man named Tim Barnes, whom she would eventually marry. Tim had a friend from high school and the army named Henry Stockton. In December of 1958, Henry and Sandra went out on a blind date to the County Fair. Henry was a husky, shy fellow with a dollar-seventy-five haircut, and below the short clipped brown hanks, a face helpful and common as a Nebraska drugstore clerk’s. The relationship that resulted from the blind date was never one of torrid passion, but it was steady, and it was reliable. Sandra had something new in her life—a boyfriend.

Nearly every evening when Henry came home from work, he found Sandra waiting for him on the front porch steps of his parents’ home where he was still living. Some nights she kept him company in the chilly, floodlighted garage while he tuned and polished his new Plymouth. Dates out were sandwich dinners in South Gate, or long slow drives—their reserved conversation quiet and regardful of each other.

Henry and Sandra, no longer school kids, did not fool themselves about the circumstances of their lives. Henry, the round-faced stock clerk, and Sandra, unable to shed her curseful weight, still going to sleep every night in the bedroom she had as a child, now walked into friends’ parties together, glanced over at each other often during the evening—and were appreciative.

Despite both families’ lack of enthusiasm, Sandra and Henry were wed July 16, 1960. Their honeymoon was a one-day trip to Newport Beach.

To be sure, there were good times in the marriage, but one suspected they were better for Henry than for Sandra. On camping trips to Lake Cachuma he enjoyed teaching her how to fish. Sandra’s pleasures—dinners out, shopping for new clothes, and her still unfulfilled desire for a sporty car—cost more than their combined incomes could afford. They were nearly always in debt. Grating at Sandra were her parents’ clumsily disguised reminders of the material good fortune the twins had found in their own marriages. Inevitably, Sandra’s and Henry’s marriage began to falter. The baby Sandra thought would save it did not help, nor did buying the little home on Ballard Street. Henry worked on the house on weekends, painting and fixing it up, but by then Sandra’s eyes were already peering at a different lifestyle. While Henry was satisfied to spend nights home, Sandra began to spend more and more evenings out—some at the League of Women Voters, more at Weight Watchers, and most just with nightlife friends. Losing weight and dyeing her hair blond, she suddenly found she was becoming attractive to men. Not all, but more every day. Sandra’s five-year-old marriage to Henry Stockton was near collapse by the time she became friendly with Alan Palliko.

Alan’s sleepless nights did not improve. They got worse. Often Katherine was awakened in the early morning hours to the sound of her husband moaning, “No . . . no.” Alan drove himself ragged with his long days at work and nights at law school. Even his oddly shuffling, head-bobbing walk became faster, his forward lean greater, as if he were walking into a wind. By the summer of 1965, he had to enter a hospital for treatment of a duodenal ulcer. Convalescing in bed at home, he railed at Katherine for not showing him enough sympathy.

Even before the ulcer, their sex life had diminished to a cipher. Katherine tried to talk to him about it, but the subject aroused anger. Once, she suggested they were perhaps not meant for each other.

“I’d kill you before I’d give you a divorce,” was Alan’s answer, his neck muscles tightened and red.

At first Katherine regarded that kind of language as just part of Alan’s blustering ways. It was just an expression with him. But she began to wonder. Words like that came so easily to him. “Somebody should kill my mother,” he would say. “She’s a drain on dad.” Sitting in front of the late night news, polishing his guns, he muttered to himself at hearing about the riots in Watts: “They should all be shot.”

Katherine visited her minister, Reverend Vigeveno, and by those visits summoned the courage to tell Alan that their marriage would soon be in jeopardy if the psychological and sexual problems Alan wrestled with could not somehow be faced and beaten.

Alan only responded with two more stories from his childhood. A day after a terrible argument between his parents, he said, he sat nervously in class, waiting for an exam to begin and unconsciously rubbing his legs together. It was there in class, he said, that for the first time—and accidentally—he had masturbated.

He also told her something of a corollary, his voice anguished in the telling. As a boy he had once gone to visit a friend. His friend was not home, but the boy’s sister was. The girl was taken with Alan, but Alan was not interested in her. She was skinny and shapeless. At one point in the afternoon the sister invited a girlfriend over, and the girlfriend, curvaceous and sexy, quickly won Alan’s attentions. When an argument ensued, the skinny sister threw the other girl to the floor, ripped off her clothes and proceeded to beat her. Alan did nothing. He sat and watched as the girl got beaten up. Even today, he would fantasize two women physically fighting, and derive sexual stimulation from it.

Now as an adult, Alan told Katherine, he would frequently masturbate when he sat before violent movies on television. His habit of rolling a pin between his fingers, his psychiatrist had told him, was another form of masturbating. The long slow confession to his wife seemed to bring Alan a sense of relief. On her part, Katherine could not keep her heart from going out to what she was beginning to consider a seriously disturbed man. Alan promised that with her help he would work things out. Nothing came of his promise.

Alan spent more and more evenings away from home, and Katherine could not help questioning whether all that time was really being devoted to study at the law library.

As Katherine sat home by herself one humid summer night, the phone rang.

“Is Alan there?” a woman’s voice asked.

“No, he’s not,” Katherine said. “Can I say who’s calling?”

“Mamie.”

“Who?” Katherine asked.

“Mamie Van Doren.” The woman began to giggle, then broke the connection.

Friday, August 13, 1965, was the day before Alan’s and Katherine’s first anniversary. As Katherine drove home for lunch that day, she wondered how they would celebrate the occasion the following evening. Alan had not mentioned anything. For all of his rigid habits, Alan still liked to think of himself capable of some spontaneity when it came to the night life; his reputation among friends was for being where the action was. Despite his constant grumblings about money, he relished their evenings in a good restaurant—wine and a New York strip. He played the bon vivant, snapping his fingers for service and leaving enough of a tip to have his name remembered.

Katherine put her VW in the carport that Friday noon and started up the sidewalk toward their apartment’s front door. The roar of a car engine made her stop and turn her head. All she saw was the glint of sunlight off a metal grille, and her own shriek was the last noise she heard as the car leaped the curb and slammed into her body. She tumbled over and over along the sidewalk, her head and arms and legs smacking against the cement. She rolled to a stop, and was alive.

Neighbors heard Katherine’s cries and called for help. It was only a matter of minutes before she was bundled into an ambulance and rushed to Central Receiving Hospital. All things considered, the limited extent of her injuries was miraculous. Katherine suffered a severe concussion, numerous head cuts, a gash on her right leg, a broken big toe, and what doctors would later diagnose as partial amnesia. She was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she remained for three weeks.

When Alan arrived later that afternoon his knees were buckling so, he had to grab hold of her bed rail and sit down. There were tears in his eyes.

“Please don’t cry, Herbie, or I’ll start too,” Katherine mumbled through the cotton swabs in her mouth.

When Katherine was released from the hospital, Alan took her to his parents’ place where she remained for another week. Alan did not want her to be alone during the day. Around dinner time he came over to help nurse her and get whatever she needed before putting his law books under his arm and leaving for the evening. It seemed it had taken a hit and run driver to jolt their marriage into working again.

When she signed over the $5,000 insurance check to him which she had received for pain and suffering above and beyond medical expenses, he told her with a grin meant to cheer her up, “Well, Wurf, at least you got us out of debt for awhile.”

Back in their own apartment, however, Alan gave Katherine a disquieting piece of news. The accident had so upset him, he said, he had dropped out of law school. Finding that hard to believe, Katherine phoned the administrators at Southwestern and learned that Alan had in fact dropped out of school, but some weeks before the accident.

That, of course, explained why they had not had Sunday brunch with Jack Dodd and his wife for over three months. What it did not explain was where Alan had been spending all of his evenings.

Alan Palliko was not the only man Sandra Stockton, who had filed for divorce from Henry a half year earlier, was seeing by the beginning of 1966. Almost indefatigable, she took her new shapely body out on the town every night after dinner like a kid who had been the last on her block to get a bicycle. The evenings generally began at the Stardust Lounge. In her diary, which she kept up only sporadically, she wrote: “Met and dated many fellows—names and faces I don’t remember. Only a few did I date more than once. Met a restaurant owner named Mark and dated him for awhile—said he’d give me a hostess job. Never came about. Dated two fellows from the Auto Club. It’s so hard to remember dates and places in retrospect. With my new figure, I’m tasting more of life than I ever have & I like it.”

Los Angeles is a sprawling collage of lifestyles. It is vibrant as only mixture and experimentation can be. It is the melting pot of a nation that is a melting pot. For a woman who had seldom ventured farther than South Gate and Downey, a place like West Hollywood could seem as exotic as Istanbul. Wide-eyed Sandra lapped up the drinks and stories men offered her. On weekends she took whirlwind trips with some of the men to San Francisco. The elder Stocktons were more than happy to babysit for their grandson.

Lonnie Rademacher, a short sandy-haired fellow from New England, was a kind and gentle man who rekindled the warm and stable side of Sandra. It was the side of her that had taken care of a friend’s children and house for several weeks while the friend was hospitalized for a serious operation. It was the side of Sandra that loaned money to friends and never asked for it back, indeed loaned them more when they again needed it. It was the Sandra who had been raised by her parents to be caring and thoughtful, who fell for Lonnie Rademacher.

But in February of 1966, the relationship ended. Lonnie was in night school in addition to working his full-time job at Cushman Motor Sales. He had neither the time nor the money to entertain Sandra the way she was beginning to expect from a man. Lonnie lost Sandra to someone whose influence upon her was growing by the week.

Though Katherine had known Alan Palliko for four and a half years and had been his wife for over one year, he had become no less a mystery to her. If anything, the cloudiness about his entire existence had only thickened. His moods of euphoria and depression were more intense, his plans for the future more vacillatory, his reasons for unexpected actions more suspicious. Once a month he departed with one of his rifles in a case for a weekend of “hunting,” yet never once returned with any bagged game.

On a Friday afternoon he called Katherine at work to tell her about a sale on mink coats he had seen advertised. Together they went down to the store to look at them. One stole that was regularly $1,200 and on sale for $800 caught Katherine’s eye. As she stood before the mirror in it, Alan walked in circles around her, nodding with a smile.

“Stunning, Katy. Downright stunning.”

Over the weekend they talked about how they could arrange for the financing.

“Maybe I’ll just go out and get hit by a car again,” Katherine laughed.

“Don’t ever joke like that!” Alan snapped. “Ever!”

Conversing with Alan Palliko was like rolling dice.

The following Tuesday, it was just after 5:00 P.M. when Katherine walked hurriedly through the parking lot at work toward her car, thinking of the luxurious fur coat Alan and she would go down and purchase that evening. Her heart sailed high as a schoolgirl’s. She had the key in the lock and her hand on the car door when she once again heard the sound of an engine roaring and tires squealing. What she had just a half a moment to see was a sharp featured man in a beige Valiant heading directly for her. Crying out, she threw herself against her little VW, hugging it desperately. In another moment she heard the crash of glass and metal. Smashed against her own car, she crumpled to the ground as if part of the debris. As she lay on her side, with an arm and leg twisted beneath her, she picked her head up from the pavement. Only semi-conscious, she saw the car slow up. The stranger looked back at her in the rear view mirror, then sped away.

It was the second time in five months that Katherine was rushed to Central Receiving Hospital. Her legs were cut, her pelvic bone broken. This time, though, her husband was like a stranger to her. He paced her hospital room, rolling his straight-pin in his fingers, interrogating her as if he were the police.

“You didn’t see anything?” he asked her over and over again. “You can’t give me any kind of a description?”

Katherine repeated her hazy recollections, and if Alan’s stony features seemed to relax any, she chose not to see it. The idea that Alan would have had anything to do with these accidents was wild, incomprehensible. Had he not been in tears the first time? Still, she began to sink into doubts.

Katherine had only two choices. One was to leave Alan and seek a divorce. But on what grounds? Not legal grounds (those were easy enough to come by in divorce proceedings), but on what personal grounds could she make sense of it to herself? She was twice a victim of a hit and run, and therefore Alan must be behind it?! It was too fantastic, paranoid. Her other choice was to do nothing, to live with the waves of fear until they subsided and she would see how silly she had been. Alan Palliko was eccentric, but not a murderer. Could a man hold her in his arms and sing her to sleep the way he did—“Button up your overcoat/when the wind is free/take good care of yourself/you belong to me”—and at the same time be considering how best to do away with her? A fantasy of hers, she tried to assure herself. But if true, it was nightmarish.

Once home, Katherine signed over another $5,000 insurance check to Alan without a peep. She went about her days as quietly as possible.

February brought Katherine the deepest depression of her life. Alan showed no concern for the pain she was still suffering from her second accident, and a friend from the Auto Club told her that everyone down at the office knew about another employee there being “Alan’s woman.” Katherine asked Alan about it. She told him about the Mamie Van Doren phone call as well. Alan appeared genuinely hurt that she would accuse him of infidelity.

“Anything else you’d like to run me through tonight? Don’t worry about me,” he sulked, “everyone knows I have no human feelings.” He handed her the phone as he dialed the Auto Club and had her listen to several of the secretaries’ voices. “There, are you satisfied?” he asked when she did not recognize any of the voices.

“Yeah . . . I guess,” Katherine lied. That was one of Alan’s problems, one of the cracks in what he considered to be his impenetrable wall of superior intelligence. He thought most people were stupid.

In March, Katherine phoned her friend in San Diego, the man she had dated before meeting Alan. They had a long confiding talk. Giving her the name of a lawyer in town, David Marcus, he told her if she would get a divorce, he would marry her. Once in April and again in June, Katherine went to see Marcus. Both times she brought herself to the brink of filing for divorce, and both times she could not follow through. A lawyer could get her her divorce, but no one, not even the police, could protect her. Every night she crawled into bed, her heart quickened with a rushing fear of the man who lay next to her under the covers.

The weekend of June 18, Katherine told Alan that as long as he was going hunting, she would drive down to San Diego to visit a girlfriend. Alan waited for her car to disappear around the corner that Saturday morning, then hopped into his own Chrysler 300. His rifle and scope were in the back seat.

Alan followed her onto the freeway, and for the two and a half hour drive managed to remain far enough back to be out of her sight. When she pulled into a San Diego motel, Alan waited a few moments, then parked his car across the street. As a man came out of one of the motel rooms and helped Katherine with her bags, Alan began loading his rifle. Calmly, not in any haste, he adjusted the scope. Alan was always meticulous.

He rolled down the window and waited. When the couple emerged just a few minutes later, they were holding hands and laughing. They paused at the doorway to embrace. Alan smiled to himself at how easy they had made it for him. One shot would do it—clear through her back and into the man’s chest. Alan leveled his rifle and brought the middle of his wife’s torso into the sight’s cross hairs. His finger tightened slowly on the trigger.

He never fired. Perhaps at the last instant he considered how ill conceived the crime was, how likely he was to be caught. That thinking appears odd, however, in light of what happened the next week—for the following week Alan did make up his mind to kill Katherine, but in the most haphazard manner of all.

The days following Katherine’s return from San Diego, Alan was quieter than ever, at times forbidding. He puttered endlessly around the den with his gun collection. More than once Katherine looked up from a magazine to catch him staring at her. Sometimes he smiled—faintly, almost derisively.

Katherine thought it was perhaps her imagination, her own feelings of guilt. Her self-condemnation was relieved only slightly by the fact that, as it turned out, her friend in San Diego had been impotent that Saturday night. To be sure, Katherine had been prepared to have sex with the man, and for Katherine, the willingness to commit adultery could not be easily rationalized.

The evening of June 24, a Friday, Katherine left their apartment for one of her Eastern Star meetings (the organization for female relatives of Masons). The night was sultry, and rather than changing as she customarily did into a long gown and the new mink she had finally bought, she left wearing the clothes she had worn that day to the office. Alan decided she was bound for another tryst.

Following in his own car, he lost her in traffic and went on to the place where the Eastern Star met. Bolting out of the car, his eyes swept across the parking lot for Katherine’s VW. Not finding it, he got back behind the wheel, his temples throbbing, and tore away for home. Perhaps he had looked over the parking lot too cursorily, perhaps something inside him had not wanted to see his wife’s car—for it had been there. Back home, Alan opened up a new bottle of bourbon and sat by himself in the living room, drinking. No one could be trusted in this world. He had more respect for the pink-booted hookers on the Strip than the high-button phony Wasps like Katherine. Worse, it was people like Katherine who kept him from succeeding, who squandered money on mink coats instead of helping him build toward that business empire, people who kept dragging him, Alan Palliko, back down into failure. One shotglass after another, Alan kept pouring the drinks down. By midnight he had finished off the bottle. He went outside and began walking the streets.

Katherine knew the hour was getting late, but not wanting to be rude, she accepted the invitation from Mr. and Mrs. Donald Johnson, her Eastern Star “worthy patron” and “conductress,” to stop for a drink. She excused herself when she could, but by then it was after one o’clock.

A block and a half from home, Katherine saw a man, shirttail out, step off the curb into the street. Frightened, she braked. Her headlights revealed the man to be Alan. He walked over to the car and got in.

“You startled me,” Katherine said.

“Hmm?”

“I said you startled me, Alan.”

Alan pulled the car door shut and looked down at the floorboard. The rest happened so fast, Katherine did not even see his right fist come across as he turned toward her. The impact sent her head back against the driver’s window pane. One blow after another stormed down upon her, in the face, in the stomach, in the face again.

“What are you doing!” she screamed. “What are you doing!”

She tried to get out her door, but the seatbelt held her where she was. Alan’s fists slammed at her without stop, cracking against her right cheek and jaw. As she cried out for help, he unfastened her seatbelt and pulled her by the shoulders across to the passenger’s side. Putting his knees on the edge of the seat, his back to the windshield, he wrapped his hands about her neck, and with his thumbs and all the weight he could bring to bear, pressed down into the middle of her throat. When Katherine, struggling, had a chance to gasp and scream for help again, he punched her in the face. Katherine started to choke on her own blood which began filling into her mouth.

Suddenly Alan released her and yanked open the passenger door. He got out and stood for a moment beside the little VW. He grabbed his moaning wife again, pulled her from the car, and flung her to the pavement. He fell upon her, his knees in her belly. His breathing was labored, but his voice was even.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said.

He put her head between the vise of his two hands, and methodically began pounding her skull back against the pavement. Katherine lapsed in and out of consciousness.

She felt Alan drag her to her feet again. He tried to force her back into the car. With consciousness, the pain returned. With all the strength left in her she grabbed hold of the doorframe and resisted. ‘I’ll die,’ she thought. ‘If he gets me in the car again I’ll die. I don’t want to die.’ It would at that moment have taken five men to pry her hand from the doorframe.

Again Alan took her head in his two hands, and beat it against the car metal. Then he stepped back and gazed at her for a moment.

“Oh, my God,” he mumbled, and walked off into the darkness.

A small crowd had gathered—neighbors on front porches, a few passers-by. Through the blood streaming down past her eyes Katherine spotted a man on the corner, standing with his arms folded.

“Help me . . . ” Katherine gasped. The man studied her for a moment, a perplexed look on his face. His mouth opened, as if to say something. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

A woman in a Mustang pulled up alongside Katherine’s car that was still in the middle of the street.

“What happened?” she demanded. “What’s going on here?”

Katherine could not talk.

“Get in,” the woman said. Katherine tottered toward the car and collapsed in the back seat. As the woman pulled away, she asked Katherine where the nearest hospital was. From the back seat Katherine could only be made out to murmur, “Police station . . . police . . . ”

The woman drove along Colorado Boulevard in Glendale until she spotted a squad car outside Bob’s Big Boy. Inside the restaurant she found Officer D.J. Wheeler of the Glendale Police Department, who radioed for an ambulance to take Katherine to Glendale Memorial Hospital. She was examined in the emergency room by a Dr. Maatz. It was believed her neck was fractured.

Doctors attended to the multiple lacerations and contusions over Katherine’s face and scalp while two male nurses needed a file to cut the wedding ring off her swollen finger. A bruise one inch in diameter was found at the base of the neck, but X-rays revealed there was no actual break in the cervical spine. Only her zygomatic (facial) bone was broken—that in three places. Once fully conscious again, Katherine managed to tell police who was responsible. With her less injured right hand she was able to sign the criminal complaint. An hour later, Alan was apprehended.

He had still been wandering the streets. His green pants and brown shirt were bloodied. He made no effort to resist arrest. The charge was wife beating; he paid the fifty dollar premium on a five hundred dollar bail bond, and was released immediately.

When Alan called Katherine at the hospital he was crying. Katherine hung up at the sound of his voice. He called again.

“Please don’t hang up, Katy. I know about San Diego,” he said quickly.

Katherine did not hang up. Alan pleaded for a chance to see her, and she relented.

To have won Katherine back in any meaningful way would have been impossible; to get her to drop charges against him, Alan was quite able to manage. His appearance before her at the hospital was nothing less than pitiful. He sat like a little boy, hang-dog, his feet drawing nervous patterns on the floor. There was something inside him that was wrong, he confessed, mixed up like the rest of his family. He confided to Katherine his constant fear of dying. What would he do in this world, he asked, if Katherine were to leave him?

He swore he would make up for the harm he had caused her. She did not even have to love him in return, only give him another chance. He admitted he had had her in the cross hairs of his riflesight down in San Diego, and that the previous night he had not just been trying to injure her, but had indeed been trying to kill her, to snap her neck. His mind had been addled by liquor; he vowed to never drink again.

The importance of the next thing he said to her would not be fully realized by Katherine or anyone else for another two years.

“I love you,” Alan said, then thinking, added, “as much as I’m capable of loving a woman.”

The police were aghast when Katherine told them she was dropping charges. They did all they could to change her mind, and left her hospital room shaking their heads.

“I just couldn’t be the one to send Alan to jail,” Katherine later told a friend.

She could not send him to jail, but she also knew that she had to get away from this man as quickly and as delicately as possible, without incurring Alan’s wrath. From a hospital bed a simple girl from Dearborn, Michigan, who had never really wanted much more than things like a back yard with a pomegranate tree in it and one address for a long enough time to know the mailman’s name, could now see it all with total clarity. Alan Palliko was virtually impelled through life by the energy of revenge. Whatever love there was in him was so repressed as to be unrecognizable. Human beings were like currency to Alan, to be exchanged at the best rate possible. Whether it was renting apartments or leasing cars he could not afford, his mission was always singular—to convince people he was more than he was. It always came down to money—money and women. If his victories were not conspicuous, they were not victories.

How and when Katherine would make the break, she did not know. She believed she would have some time to find her opportunity.

June 27, just two days after the beating and Alan’s hospital room begging, Sandra Stockton and a man allegedly named Dick Scott walked into Pachmayr Gun Works and purchased a Hi Standard .22 caliber revolver.

On one of the last nights in June, Sandra Stockton went out on a date with Lonnie Rademacher. Since she had broken up with Lonnie in February, the evening was really just for old times’ sake. They first dined at a Chinese restaurant, then went to a drive-in double feature. The story Sandra began telling over dinner, she finished as they walked around during the movies’ intermission. Lonnie could barely believe what he was hearing. It was as if Sandra were reading lines from a play, or repeating rumors about someone else’s life, certainly not hers.

“I picked him up in his own car,” Sandra said, “after he ran her over with the stolen one. She didn’t know it was him. It didn’t work, anyway. All she did was get banged up a little. Don’t you even want to know the man’s name?”

“No,” Lonnie answered her flatly. “I don’t want to know anything more about this.”

Sandra continued. “I have a gun in the house now, and I know how to use it, too. He’s going to take her target shooting with him—somewhere up in the mountains. But I’m going to be waiting there, and I’m going to kill her. I don’t even want any of the insurance.”

A long silence passed. “Well?” Sandra asked. “What do you think?”

“I think you have very serious problems, Sandra. You need help, don’t you see that?” Lonnie could feel the tightness in his chest. “You’d kill another human being—just like that?”

Sandra met Lonnie’s eyes and said, unflinching, “I want to know if I actually have the guts to pull the trigger. Anyway, haven’t you ever just wanted to get away with something?” she asked.