mother- who had wired the cash required for bail-swore to the bondsman that she was as shocked as he was by her son's disappearance.
Robert Eisler, the lawyer, suggested to me that Nordahl would tap into his savings and disappear, perhaps to a tropical island. Mason and Abruzzini predicted that he would go looking for silver immediately. 'My gut feeling is he's back in Camden,' Mason told me. 'He's got a number of safe houses there, criminals and junkies. He throws them money when he's around so they can buy their stuff, and they let him stay.' He added, 'Blane is a creature of habit. In my opinion, he'll have done a job by this weekend.'
On a Friday morning less than two weeks after Nordahl jumped bail, the police in Princeton Borough, New Jersey, were called to investigate a meticulous burglary of sterling silver. A week later, several similar thefts were reported in Bergen County, just across the river from Manhattan. These were followed by burglaries in Concord and Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Neither Mason nor Abruzzini had any reason to get involved. Abruzzini had no more Greenwich cases to clear; Mason was no longer a cop. But, just as Nordahl left his signature on his crimes, Mason and Abruzzini wanted to leave their signatures on the Nordahl case, and the detectives went back to work.
Their collaboration had not always been easy. Abruzzini, as smooth and fastidious as Greenwich itself, approaches his job like a clinician. He likes to draw diagrams and flow charts depicting a criminal's activity. Mason is more intuitive, a believer in street smarts and grunt work. But now the two men combined their strengths: Mason became the lead general in the Nordahl manhunt, while Abruzzini coordinated the efforts of various detectives. Police officers in several states went looking for any paper trail that Nordahl might have generated-a rental car, parking tickets, motel check-ins. They studied surveillance tapes from motels near the various silver burglaries; they watched the homes of his girlfriends around Camden.
Mason suggested a replay of the flip-the-girlfriend trick. The police caught up with Lisa, the blond woman in the photograph that Mason had shown Luanne back in 1996. Lisa had recently violated probation herself, so the police picked her up in Camden for questioning. The manhunt had by now yielded a motel surveillance video of Nordahl with another woman. When the police showed a photo still of the video to Lisa, she cursed: the woman was her best friend. Lisa began to talk. Nordahl had stayed with her after jumping bail in Ohio, and he had gone back to stealing and was flush with cash. She told the police that Nordahl was now fencing his silver with some Russian mobsters on Canal Street.
'Once we have that exact location, we'll go in there, show Blane's picture,' Mason told me in mid-January. 'We'll say, 'We know he's fencing here, and when we arrest him he's facing a life term and he'll turn on you.' Within a week, we'll find Blane in a drum in the East River, because that's how these guys play.' Mason said he would be comfortable with that outcome. 'I'm cold and calloused,' he said. 'The bottom line is, Blane's gotten away too many times. Maybe this would be the fitting end to a life in crime.'
Mason's reply stunned me: he had never struck me as remotely hard-hearted. I knew that he had grown tired of pursuing Nordahl. I began to think, too, that Mason, who had offered to help Nordahl turn straight, was disappointed in him. Months earlier, I had asked Mason what other kind of work Nordahl might be suited for. 'With his mind?' Mason said. 'I honestly don't think there's anything Blane can't do.'
If Mason was right about the Russian mobsters, then it was the police who saved Blane Nordahl's life. Lisa told them that Nordahl had occasionally stayed in Philadelphia with her sister and her brother-in-law. The police had Lisa and her sister set Nordahl up- call him, tell him everything was okay there, and invite him to come by.
Nordahl drove up that night in a black Ford Explorer and circled the block. He parked, approached the house, and once inside was set upon by three cops. A dozen more waited outside. He fought hard, and wound up in a Philadelphia jail cell with a face like a smashed tomato and the sour knowledge that the police had been helped by his close friends.
In the coming weeks, various police jurisdictions began to fight over the right to prosecute Nordahl. He entered his jailhouse-lawyer mode, hoping once again to roll up the assorted charges into a single light plea. But on March 23, he was finally extradited to Poughkeepsie. At his arraignment, the Dutchess County prosecutor said he planned to argue that Nordahl should serve twenty-five years to life if convicted for the Rhinebeck burglaries. Nordahl flushed when he heard this. Later, after he was photographed and fingerprinted at the trooper barracks, I tried to ask him a few questions. 'Now is not a good time for me' was all he would say.
For months, I had put off calling Nordahl's mother, Sharon Fitzsimmons, who now works as an accountant in a state prison in Indiana. The police warned me that if Nordahl found out that I had called her he would stop talking to me-and that Fitzsimmons would never talk anyway. But now I tried her.
'He's not a completely bad person,' she told me. 'He's a very likable person. I think his big problem was intelligence and no common sense. I just wish this would all come to an end. The last time I talked to him about what he was doing-this was a few years back-his response was that it's an excitement thing. He said he got bored. So I said, 'Well, why don't you take up skydiving?' I said, 'We're not wealthy people, but we'll back you up. We'll support you morally, we'll be there for you.' '
Lonnie Mason once told me about his hunch that Nordahl had walled up his savings inside his mother's house when he renovated it, and I asked Fitzsimmons if this was true. She laughed hard. 'I've heard it all. 'You've probably got cans of money buried in your backyard!' You think with six dogs they wouldn't have dug something up?'
She told me what a good and smart and interesting kid Blane had been, but mostly she talked about how disappointed she was. 'What I've had to do is basically realize these are his decisions,' she said. 'I've told him I can't help him anymore. He's over forty now, and his decisions are his own.'
Although Blane had always written to her regularly, Fitzsimmons said, he rarely discussed his troubles. But his recent letters 'have a different edge to them,' she told me. 'He's concerned that it's going to be a life thing. I think basically he's scared. He's saying he wants to get on the right path now, for good.'
Then she opened a recent letter and read me a bit: 'I don't want to die in jail, and I don't want you or dad to pass away without seeing my life change.' She paused, then said, 'I've never heard that from him before.' The letter was only a slightly different version of the story that Nordahl had pitched to me recently-and to Cornell Abruzzini, and to his lawyer, and probably to half a dozen others. But I didn't need to tell that to his mother. She sounded as if she didn't believe him, either.
Stephen J. Dubner is the author of the New York Times best-selling Freakonomics (2005, with Steven D. Levitt), Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family (1998), and Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003). He is now working on a book about the psychology of money, and another book about Jewish ethics. Most of his journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine but also in The New Yorker, Time, New York, and elsewhere.
It only took two years to write this article. I made my first phone calls in March of 2002. I was finishing up a book that concerned Pittsburgh, so I was in the habit of reading the Pittsburgh papers every morning. In the Post-Gazette one day was an article about some silver burglaries that, if pattern held, were likely committed by a certain Blane Nordahl, who had just been arrested outside of Philadelphia. A quick search of the Philly papers yielded a few more articles. So my first conscious act in writing this story about burglary was to burgle the work of those journalists in Pittsburgh and Philly. To them: apologies, and thanks.
I got to work, trying to reconstruct the past few years of Nordahl's life. I was happy to save string, see how things turned out. What I really wanted was an interview with Nordahl himself, which took forever to arrange. Finally he agreed. Then he changed his mind. Then he changed his mind again, but with conditions. By the time I finally sat down with him at a federal prison in Ohio, I knew more about Nordahl than I know about some of my own siblings. (This isn't as strange as you might think; there are eight of us, and some of the facts are pretty murky.) Nordahl was, without question, one of the dullest interviews I've ever conducted. His story was terrific, but he wasn't the guy to tell it. He was too arrogant, too paranoid, too controlling. The story came from Lonnie Mason and Cornell Abruzzini, from Bobby Eisler and Tom Fort, generous gentlemen each of them, and a small army of others.
Early one morning, soon after Nordahl jumped bail, went on a burglary tear, and got busted again, Lonnie Mason called me. He said that two of Nordahl's friends-the people he was staying with when he was arrested, and who had in fact set him up-were killed in a one-car crash. Police suspected the brake line was cut. Mason thought that Nordahl had arranged from jail to have them killed, to eliminate potential witnesses. He couldn't ever prove it; knowing Lonnie, he's probably still trying.
A few months after this article was published, Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran an episode based on Nordahl. Lonnie and I both happened to be watching. During commercials, we chatted on the phone. We couldn't believe how thoroughly they had lifted the story: every detail, every twist, every idiosyncracy. It made sense, of course. A story about a thief, which began in thievery, should surely end in thievery. It was a good episode, one of my favorites.
Philip Weiss
Stalking Her Killer
from New York magazine
At 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, I stood on the south side of Montague Street in Brooklyn watching the Social Security offices, waiting for Dennis to come out. I wasn't sure what he looked like. I had a number of photographs of him at age twenty-four, a thickly built blond guy with thinning hair and broad heavy planes in an intelligent face. Bearded, introverted. But what use were the pictures? They were from 1976. Dennis had lately turned fifty.
Having gotten a primer from a private-eye friend about tailing people, I followed a few fiftyish Dennises down the street. None of them seemed right. Then it got to be 5:20 and I was heading home myself when a man came out of the office door and everyone else on the rush-hour block seemed to vanish. Most of his hair was now gone, but the beard was still there, and so was the inward intensity, the determined anonymity. Dennis's oddball spirit was so distinct and strong that it had passed unchanged from the old pictures I carried. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, carried a knapsack, wore photo-gray glasses, as he had worn jeans and a T-shirt and carried a knapsack and worn photogray glasses twenty-six years before, on the night that Deb in one of her last acts had knocked his glasses off, breaking them. He had left them in the blood on the floor of her hut, got on his bike, bicycled off into the darkness.
He looked like what he had been then: a Peace Corps volunteer. I followed him down the street and into the subway, then lost him.
I'd first heard of Dennis more than twenty-five years ago. In 1978, I was twenty-two and backpacking around the world when I'd crashed with a Peace Corps volunteer in Samoa named Bruce McKenzie. He said that a year or so back in the Kingdom of Tonga, a tiny island nation in a crook of the dateline, a male Peace Corps volunteer had killed a female volunteer. There had been some kind of triangle. He was a spurned or jealous lover. He had stabbed her many times. The American government had moved heaven and earth to get him out of Tonga. Bruce didn't know any names, but he said the case had caused considerable friction between the Peace Crops and Pacific-island governments, and hearing this by the light of a kerosene lamp, with the heavy rain clattering on the roof, I formed a romantic idea of a story out of Maugham or Conrad, of something terribly wrong that had unfolded in an out-of-the-way place. A true idea, as things would turn out.
I returned to the story several times in the intervening years, learning the killer's name, Dennis Priven, and something of the government machinations that had given him his freedom. It became an occasional obsession, something that nagged at me all my adult life.
The victim's name was Deborah Gardner. She was twenty-three, a natural girl in a seventies way, with a laid-back Pacific Northwest vibe. In Tonga, in 1976, she rode her bicycle everywhere by herself at night, even when people told her she shouldn't, she didn't wear makeup, she put her thick dark hair up in a rubber band at night and took it down in the morning, washed her clothes by stamping on them barefoot in a basin with a Jethro Tull tape going. She decorated her one-room hut with tapa cloth and native weavings, and lay on her bed all afternoon reading Heinlein or Hesse.
Her hut was on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital city, alongside the home of a gangling, humorous Californian named Emile Hons, who was friendly with Dennis. Deb taught science and
