AFTERWORD

This case was never going to scoot off in little padded feet like some field mouse scampering along the Great Plains, where the murder of David Harmon occurred all those years ago.

Far from it.

The wholesale slaughter of a sweet, sleeping young Kansan was a case that defined sorrow, deception, and reversal from the start, so it was not surprising that, even after it appeared finally—mercifully—settled, perhaps for eternity, the story of David’s murder would still be suffering dramatic turns.

What else could you expect of the aftermath of a betrayal that could never be easily flattened into a straight-line tale of good and evil?

Life is never equitable, composed instead of complicated drives and contradictory impulses, but even so: from the first blow of the club against David’s skull to the more recent sight of David’s supposed defenders testifying at parole hearings on behalf of his killers, this case stood apart.

You can smite a sinner. But sometimes the sinners fight back. Less frequent, of course, is what also happened here: the prosecutors—charged with preserving the rule of law and speaking for those whose voice was taken—advocating for the sinners, all but fighting for their release. That these were Kansas prosecutors, of course, makes the turn of events even more singular. Prosecutors in Kansas are not quite known for their touchy-feely ways.

Kansas lawmen? Leniency is hardly the hallmark of their creed.

But there was Stephen M. Howe, the district attorney of Johnson County, Kansas, all but trumpeting the hope that the murderers of David—whose death left his parents childless and who, dead at twenty-five, never had the chance to have children of his own—should be released at first opportunity. This elicited headlines not seen too often in these parts: PROSECUTORS SUPPORT KILLER’S RELEASE read one from the Associated Press.

A parole board member termed the case “odd”—an understatement, to say the least.

“It is not typical,” allowed Howe, in a phone interview after the hearings, adding, “it is a little bit awkward. Was it uncomfortable? Yes.” A moment later, he demurred, saying, “I was duty bound.”

All those like John Harmon, David’s father, and Joy Hempy, his co-worker and mother figure, who long had a seeping sense, though no definite notion, that there had been a backroom deal that would align prosecutors and murderers, were validated, if still outraged.

“I would urge the parole board to disregard this bogus attempt to circumvent the justice system,” John had said at the hearing. Since receiving the phone call that David was dead in his bed, John had never understood anything about this case. The confusion, sadness, and tumult had effectively killed his wife; now it finally appeared to be bearing down on him.

How could the prosecutors want David’s murderers let loose on the land, and after only five years?

“If I ruled the world,” said Joy, “they’d both be in for life.”

But, she added, “I’m just thankful that they were there at all.”

In a certain sense, Joy’s perspective is understandable. At least they had served five years before prosecutors championed their cause. From the start in 1982, in Olathe, Kansas, close to the midpoint of America, the murder of David Harmon was never a story that unfolded in broad, predictable turns.

Here’s where we left off: Mark Mangelsdorf and Melinda Raisch were both sentenced to ten to twenty–year prison terms for their joint role David’s murder more than two decades earlier. The lovers had wanted to get rid of David, in order to live together in harmony, without the stigma of divorce in their solemn and exacting evangelical community, which was well-known for its outbreaks of pettiness.

Outrage came from all quarters: family, friends, and the judge. Mark and Melinda were told to rot. Society was finally going to shun the two, who had been such pivotal components of their respective communities in New York and Ohio. Unbeknownst to everyone, however, Paul Morrison, the district attorney who was engaged in a tight race for the state attorney general at the time, had promised his office’s support of parole in exchange for guilty pleas. A quid pro quo.

Even pulling back from the sordid circumstances of the plea, one could make no better sense of the larger picture. The passing of years since the murder—even since the sentencing—has hardly advanced our understanding.

Why would two otherwise functioning souls find murder more palpable than divorce? How can you lay siege to a sleeping man, then go on to not have more than a speeding ticket? How could two who did such bad go on to do so well?

Either they had, after descending into madness, ascended right back into sanity, or they had turned life into a piece of transgressive performance art, faking it for the nearly quarter century between crime and sentencing.

Perhaps the answer lay in some dark corner of the mind. Are there some of us who have the capacity for great evil, if the planets in our life are, even if only for a moment, aligned incorrectly? Mark and Melinda had passionate feelings for each other in a repressed religious environment. Did it all just detonate? Maybe if they hadn’t met—or met in an environment with looser mores—they never would have hurt a fly, the way they lived the rest of their lives. Do we dare acknowledge that many of us might, if put in a particular set of circumstances, do the unthinkable? And that we only skirt sin and transgression altogether in the absence of those circumstances?

If so, perhaps it strikes at the ancient foundations of the human capacity for both good and evil. Or not. Each answer in this case begets more questions.

Whatever the case, the game was apparently up. Mark and Melinda were finally headed to prison. Mark, stiff and serious at sentencing, lamented that he had no idea what the next number of years would look like—and how could he ever?

As it turned out, Mark and Melinda, who had the most reputable defense lawyers money could provide, were hardly locked away in dark isolation chambers.

Mark, once so religious, had lost his observant soul along the Plains, turning instead to the theology of American business, attending Harvard Business School and rising to the top of several international corporations. Mark was soon a minimum-security inmate—a rarity for a murderer, needless to say. Then, in his own inimitable way, Mark, from behind bars, found his way onto the board of a nonprofit that finds businesses that allow prisoners to work before release. It might have been the first time in recorded history that a prison inmate ascended to a board of directors.

At the parole hearing, Reverend Chris Launius, a preacher who had known Mangelsdorf since college, said that Mark’s charity work to better the lives of inmates meant he needed no more rehabilitation. “The reality is,” Reverend Launius said to the same parole board the DA’s office had told to release the two, “he is the rehabilitator.”

The rehabilitator.

Mark Mangelsdorf: Harvard Business School graduate, murderer, rehabilitator. To some, Mark exists in an unlimited number of permutations.

One of those permutations is undoubtedly management consultant, a role Mark, to the further disbelief of many, also played from behind bars. Well, not exactly behind bars. Soon after Mark was remanded to custody, he began working outside the walls in a local business. As a well-seasoned strategist with an eye for organizational charts and cost-benefit analysis at Henke Manufacturing, an old-line snow removal equipment maker, Mark was widely credited with improving the business’s employee relationships and product cycles. Co-workers, asking for anonymity, praise his complacent and straightforward air as well as his big-ticket contributions to the business it sometimes seems he is running, getting it into peak form.

Henke is in Leavenworth, Kansas, about ten minutes from the prison in Lansing, where Mangelsdorf, hard at work back in corporate America, really only has to spend his nights and weekends.

Though the story of inmates and their families is normally one of snapped off and fizzled relationships, Mark’s wife, Kristina—accomplished in her own right with a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard and a post as vice president and chief marketing officer for Pepsi’s food business—secured a Kansas apartment so she and the two children she had with Mark could make regular visits.

Melinda, in a woman’s prison not far away, had her own Mark. In an early twist in the case, Mark Mangelsdorf and Melinda, who had killed to be together, had gone their separate ways. Perhaps they realized that together the lesser angels of their nature took hold and ran from each other frightened. Or maybe they were merely acting on the advice of attorneys; the two had been immediately suspected of David’s murder, even if they weren’t charged for a generation.

Whatever the case, Melinda found herself another Mark, who, like Kristina, bucked jailhouse tradition and stood by his spouse.

Mark, a wealthy cosmetic dentist of considerable spiritual pride, doted on her every reply in dozens of hours of recorded phone conversations with his wife in prison, assuring her of God’s magnanimous plans to open the prison gates. The righteous, he told her repeatedly, will be rescued. The conversations, filled with happy talk, often ended with the instruction to think of Jesus and swallow doubt.

Even as they shared their sorrow in being apart, Melinda—who was settling in for a long stay—became a moral steward of her cellblock, teaching Bible study to those she considered unenlightened. Melinda always plugged on, forever concerned with social appearance. When Steve James and Bill Wall, the detectives who broke the cold case of David’s murder wide open, got court orders to search her cell, Melinda greeted them like old friends.

Another in an endless series of absurdities about the case is this: despite support articulated by the district attorney and others, Mark and Melinda did not make parole in that spring of 2011. Maybe the political pressure against the parole surmounted pressure from the DA’s office. Or perhaps there is a randomness to parole decisions that we cannot even define.

But no worries.

The two will be released at the end of the lower portion of their term: ten years, even without a hearing. By May of 2016, both Mark and Melinda will be free, only a decade after being sentenced for brutally killing David with a crowbar. Mark’s wish, said his wife, Kristina, after his sentencing, is to head to Disneyland as soon as he is out.

Melinda’s daughter, a successful student at Ohio State University known for trusting in Jesus, can’t wait. She recently tweeted, “My mom is an absolute hoot. I can’t wait for you guys to meet her.”

A hoot. Perhaps. But in the Shakespearean sense, Mark and Melinda murdered sleep. Soon they will return to their places amongst us, for better—or possibly worse.

David was left in a modest grave along the Great Plains. But Mark and Melinda will go on in the privileged worlds, churning between venerated and venomous, deranged and ultimately decent, depending on which light you see them in and what, in the end, they decide to do next.

—Marek Fuchs
October 2013