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.