his mother, who now has no income, with her husband, Bill, in jail. (When I talked to Becker about Julian's new life, he paused for a moment, then said, 'I hope I had an effect on him, getting him to help out his family, because that's what it's all about.') Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Dwayne, Becker's Judas, told me when I went to see him in Florida that as soon as he gets out of prison, he is going to get his dog back from his girlfriend and move to Tennessee. 'I'm going to get started again,' he said. 'Find a nice house in a nice neighborhood and not drink or anything.'
'It sounds just like the life Todd wanted you to live,' I said.
There was a pause. 'Well, no,' said Dwayne. He paused again. 'I don't know. Maybe.'
I went to see Becker and his wife for the last time this past November, just before he left for federal prison. The IRS had decided not to confiscate his Stonebridge Ranch home, which still had a sizable mortgage, because real estate values had decreased in the area and the home would be difficult for the federal government to sell at a profit. As a result, Cathy and the children were going to be able to stay in the house. (Although Cathy, who has gone back to work as a real estate agent, said she was going to make the mortgage payments with her income, some detectives speculate that the Beckers still have a secret stash of stolen money.) When I walked through the front door, Cathy was busy decorating the house for Thanksgiving and Becker had just returned from his next-door neighbor's home, where the woman there had locked herself out of the house. 'I used a flat-head screwdriver to pop open her back door,' he said with a shrug.
Becker had been busy that week-cleaning out the attic so that Cathy wouldn't have to do it for the next five years, going to the school cafeteria to eat lunch with his children, and attending church. I asked Becker if he could imagine ever returning to the craft that he does so well. There are plenty of police detectives who believe he will go right back to burglary when he gets out of prison, because it's the only profession he knows. But Becker firmly insisted that this time, he was going to go straight. When I asked what he might do for a living after prison, he mentioned a seminar he had given a few months earlier to a group of detectives on the burglaries he had committed. The audience was so attentive that he had begun to ponder the idea of becoming some sort of paid consultant to police departments and businesses that wanted to know how to stop good burglars.
'I think that's a good idea, honey,' said Cathy, coming in from the kitchen.
'There could be some money in it,' Becker agreed. 'We might finally get the money to open that Chuck E. Cheese's.'
He grabbed Cathy's hand, and the two of them smiled at each other. For a moment, they looked just like Ward and June.
Skip Hollandsworth has been a writer for Texas Monthly magazine for fifteen years. He is completing a history of the city of Austin in the year 1885, when a Jack the Ripper-like killer ripped apart seven women over the course of twelve months, sending the city into chaos, exposing one major political scandal after another, and setting off a rip-roaring and, at times, completely comic hunt for the killer.
When this story was published, many of the people who lived in Stonebridge Ranch called me to ask how much of what I had written was true. They had no idea about the extent of Todd Becker's criminal life. They simply assumed I was exaggerating. Many of them also refused to believe that Todd's neighbor Joey Thompson had been involved in the safe-stealing ring. They still didn't believe Joey was involved until Todd was brought back from Florida to Texas in 2004 to testify at Thompson's trial. Meanwhile, Kathy and the children still live their pristine suburban life in the home Todd had bought for them, and rumors are flying about how she is able to afford the mortgage payments. CBS has bought the rights to her life story, and a television movie about the Beckers might be made soon.
David Grann
Mysterious Circumstances
The Strange Death of a Sherlock Holmes Fanatic
from The New Yorker
Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes, believed that he had finally solved the case of the missing papers. Over the past two decades, he had been looking for a trove of letters, diary entries, and manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes. The archive was estimated to be worth nearly four million dollars, and was said by some to carry a deadly curse, like the one in the most famous Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The papers had disappeared after Conan Doyle died, in 1930, and without them no one had been able to write a definitive biography- a task that Green was determined to complete. Many scholars feared that the archive had been discarded or destroyed; as the London Times noted earlier this year, its whereabouts had become 'a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street,' the fictional den of Holmes and his fellow-sleuth, Dr. Watson.
Not long after Green launched his investigation, he discovered that one of Conan Doyle's five children, Adrian, had, with the other heirs' agreement, stashed the papers in a locked room of a chateau that he owned in Switzerland. Green then learned that Adrian had spirited some of the papers out of the chateau without his siblings' knowledge, hoping to sell them to collectors. In the midst of this scheme, he died of a heart attack-giving rise to the legend of the curse. After Adrian's death, the papers apparently vanished. And whenever Green tried to probe further he found himself caught in an impenetrable web of heirs-including a self-styled Russian princess-who seemed to have deceived and double-crossed one another in their efforts to control the archive.
For years, Green continued to sort through evidence and interview relatives, until one day the muddled trail led to London-and the doorstep of Jean Conan Doyle, the youngest of the author's children. Tall and elegant, with silver hair, she was an imposing woman in her late sixties. ('Something very strong and forceful seems to be at the back of that wee body,' her father had written of Jean when she was five. 'Her will is tremendous.') Whereas her brother Adrian had been kicked out of the British Navy for insubordination, and her elder brother Denis was a playboy who had sat out the Second World War in America, she had become an officer in the Royal Air Force, and was honored, in 1963, as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
She invited Green into her flat, where a portrait of her father, with his walrus mustache, hung near the fireplace. Green had almost as great an interest in her father as she did, and she began sharing her memories, as well as family photographs. She asked him to return, and one day, Green later told friends, she showed him some boxes that had been stored in a London solicitor's office. Peering inside them, he said, he had glimpsed part of the archive. Dame Jean informed him that, because of an ongoing family dispute, she couldn't yet allow him to read the papers, but she said that she intended to bequeath nearly all of them to the British Library, so that scholars could finally examine them. After she died, in 1997, Green eagerly awaited their transfer-but nothing happened.
Then, last March, Green opened the London Sunday Times and was shocked to read that the lost archive had 'turned up' at Christie's auction house and was to be sold, in May, for millions of dollars by three of Conan Doyle's distant relatives; instead of going to the British Library, the contents would be scattered among private collectors around the world, who might keep them inaccessible to scholars. Green was sure that a mistake had been made, and hurried to Christie's to inspect the materials. Upon his return, he told friends that he was certain that many of the papers were the same as those he had uncovered. What's more, he alleged, they had been stolen-and he had proof.
Over the next few days, he approached members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, one of hundreds of fan clubs devoted to the detective. (Green had once been chairman.) He alerted other so-called Sherlockians, including various American members of the Baker Street Irregulars, an invitation-only group that was founded in 1934 and named after the street urchins Holmes regularly employed to ferret out information. Green also contacted the more orthodox scholars of Conan Doyle, or Doyleans, about the sale. (Unlike Green, who moved between the two camps, many Doyleans distanced themselves from the Sherlockians, who often treated Holmes as if he were a real detective and refused to mention Conan Doyle by name.)
Green shared with these scholars what he knew about the archive's provenance, revealing what he considered the most damning piece of evidence: a copy of Dame Jean's will, which stated, 'I give to The British Library all…my late father's original papers, personal manuscripts, diaries, engagement books, and writings.' Determined to block the auction, the makeshift group of amateur sleuths presented its case to members of Parliament. Toward the end of the month, as the group's campaign intensified and its objections appeared in the press, Green hinted to his sister, Priscilla West, that someone was threatening him. Later, he sent her a cryptic note containing three phone numbers and the message: please keep these numbers safe. He also called a reporter from the London Times, warning that 'something' might happen to him.
On the night of Friday, March 26, he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that 'an American was trying to bring him down.' After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.
The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn't pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.
'I will lay out the whole case for you,' John Gibson, one of Green's closest friends, told me when I phoned him shortly after learning of Green's death. Gibson had written several books with Green, including My Evening with Sherlock Holmes, a 1981 collection of parodies and pastiches of the detective stories. With a slight stammer, Gibson said of his friend's death, 'It's a complete and utter mystery.'
Not long after, I traveled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him-narrow shoulders, long face, unruly gray hair- seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported by an invisible cane. 'I have a file for you,' he said, as we drove off in his car. 'As you'll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of answers.'
He sped through town, past a twelfth-century stone church and a row of cottages, until he stopped at a red brick house surrounded by hedges. 'You don't mind dogs, I hope,' he said. 'I've two cocker spaniels. I only wanted one but the person I got them from said that they were inseparable, and so I took them both and they've been fighting ever since.'
When he opened the front door, both spaniels leaped on us, then at each other. They trailed us into the living room, which was filled with piles of antique books, some reaching to the ceiling. Among the stacks was a near-complete set of The Strand Magazine, in which the Holmes stories were serialized at the turn of the twentieth century; a single issue, which used to sell for half a shilling, is now worth as much as five hundred dollars. 'Altogether, there must be about sixty thousand books,' Gibson said.
We sat on a couch and he opened his case file, carefully spreading the pages around him. 'All right, dogs. Don't disturb us,' he said. He looked up at me. 'Now I'll tell you the whole story.'
Gibson said that he had attended the coroner's inquest and taken careful notes, and as he spoke he picked up a magnifying glass beside him and peered though it at several crumpled pieces of paper. 'I write everything on scraps,' he said. The police, he said, had found only a few unusual things at the scene. There was the cord around Green's neck-a black shoelace. There was a wooden spoon near his hand, and several stuffed animals on the bed. And there was a partially empty bottle of gin.
The police found no sign of forced entry and assumed that Green had committed suicide. Yet there was no note, and Sir Colin Berry, the president of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, testified to the coroner that, in his thirty-year career, he had seen only one suicide by garroting. 'One,' Gibson repeated. Self-garroting is extremely difficult to do, he explained; people who attempt it typically pass out before they are asphyxiated. Moreover, in this instance, the cord was not a thick rope but a shoelace, making the feat even more unlikely.
Gibson reached in his file and handed me a sheet of paper with numbers on it. 'Take a look,' he said. 'My phone records.' The records showed that he and Green had spoken repeatedly during the
