Reviews -- Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders



	Evil among Us The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders

Booklist, Marlene Chamberlain
What happens when good intentions and a need to help and reach out intersect with pure evil? Sometimes disaster. This is what happened when two young Mormon missionaries tried to "fellowship" and bring into the church a man named Bob Kleasen in 1974. In retrospect, there were warnings about Kleasen and his odd and violent behavior. Even a Mormon Bishop had advised Gary Darley and Mark Fischer not to have further contact with Kleasen. Yet they both decided to have one last dinner with the strange man they had befriended. After their murders, the investigations of many law enforcement bodies and the efforts of Mormon Church leaders all led back to Kleasen. To be sure, Kleasen had a history marked by his odd and violent behavior. Given his background, the murders themselves were not the surprise, but the young men who set out to meet with him in October 1974 had no real knowledge of this. What is at the heart of this true-crime story is the investigation and the eventual outcome for Kleasen. Was justice served? When two young men are killed in such a grisly manner, can it ever be?

Journal of Mormon History
In 1974 two young elders in Austin, Texas, Gary Darley and Mark Fischer, went off to keep a dinner appointment with a contact, Bob Kleasen, a man alone in a trailer house in a rural area. They never came back. The bishop, warned by church headquarters in Salt Lake City that Kleasen might be a con artist and alarmed at Kleasen's collection of guns and verbal fight with another member, counseled the missionaries to drop him. This was to be their last appointment. They were not missed for more than twenty-four hours, but the police were not informed until later. Kleasen was charged with the murders when a search of his property turned up a name tag with a bullet hole through it, an unexpired temple recommend (both accidentally disposed of), and grisly evidence on a band saw that Kleasen had cut the bodies apart. They were never found, and Kleasen was convicted and sent to death row. Two years later when he was freed on a technicality, prosecutors failed to exercise their option to refile the murder charge.

Ken Driggs, an attorney specializing in death row appeals, has carefully investigated and documented this true crime, establishing Kleasen's long history of violence both before and after he became a Mormon, including breaking his elderly mother's leg and repeated episodes of marital violence with his several wives. After Kleasen completed his parole, he went to England where he married a woman he had written to from prison, who also left him, and was arrested in 2001 for stockpiling weapons (illegal in the United Kingdom). A British judge has ruled that Kleasen can be extradited to answer new charges based on DNA analysis of blood found on clothing outside Kleasen's trailer in 1974. Because Britain does not have the death penalty, Kleasen, if convicted, would not face the death penalty again.

Driggs, who describes himself as "opposed to all executions," acknowledges that "justice was frustrated in this case. However, it also illustrates how cases can work out in the real world of criminal law. And while I believe Kleasen was a murderer and, like everyone else, would prefer that he be locked up, I found considerable evidence of the forces that shaped him. I believe that understanding these forces—however much we may want to ignore them or tell ourselves they could never affect us—may help to prevent future Kleasens" (v-vi).

The Salt Lake Tribune, Kevin Cantera
On a Saturday morning in November 1974, hundreds of Mormon volunteers congregated in the windswept countryside west of Austin, Texas, to scour nearly 200 miles of highway, rural roads and barren fields.

They came from all over the state to search for clues in the week-old disappearance of two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The police lieutenant who directed the search could not tell the volunteers what to look for, but suggested they note anything unusual—perhaps a human finger.

One group found a trash bag with $50,000 in counterfeit money. Others discovered sacks containing deer heads and hides—discards of the Texas hunting season. But they uncovered no evidence of the missing missionaries, and the disheartened volunteers returned home at nightfall.

More than 25 years later, the search continues, kept alive by Ken Driggs, a Georgia defense lawyer and sixth-generation Mormon who has written Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders.

Driggs' book—due out Monday from Signature Books—examines the circumstances surrounding the Oct. 28, 1974, disappearance of Gary Smith Darley, 20, and Mark J. Fischer, 19, LDS missionaries serving in Austin.

The book also surveys the violent history and ongoing criminal odyssey of the man once convicted in connection with the pair's murder—67-year-old Robert Elmer Kleasen, currently serving a three-year sentence on weapons convictions in England, waiting to see if prosecutors in Texas will refile murder charges against him.

"It is a fascinating story in a macabre way," Driggs told a Sunstone Symposium audience in Salt Lake City earlier this month. "It just called to me. The story had meaning for me on so many levels."

As a death-penalty lawyer, Driggs took scholarly interest in the case. Kleasen—sent to Texas' death row in 1975 for Fischer's death—was the third person sentenced under the Texas statute that reinstated capital punishment after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia effectively threw out existing death-penalty laws nationwide.

But Driggs also found himself drawn to tell the story as a member of the LDS Church.

"The story spoke to me as a Mormon," he said. "The church community [in Austin] was small and relatively obscure when the murders occurred. The case suddenly put them in the spotlight, [but] they held up. ? They put forth a positive image for the entire country to see."

In addition to scores of newspaper clippings and legal records, Driggs dug through a thick, yellow file in the LDS Church Archive, as well as letters, diaries and the missionaries journals.

He gained new insight into the power of deeply held faith when he met Mark Fischer's parents.

"Think of it," he said. "Your kids are out doing the Lord's work—doing what they are supposed to be doing—and this horrible tragedy strikes."

The Darleys and the Fischers sent children on missions subsequent to the deaths of their sons.

"Here are ordinary people visited with the worst kind of human tragedy for no reason whatsoever. Drawing upon their faith? they refused to give in to bitterness and blame," he writes.

Written in journalistic style, Driggs' book offers details left out of news reports at the time. Driggs painstakingly reviews the wealth of evidence seized by Travis County prosecuters and their efforts to link that evidence to Kleasen. Ballistics investigators from the Texas state crime lab shot bullets through more than a dozen missionary name tags and compared the results with Fischer's bullet-pierced name tag, which was found in the yard around Kleasen's trailer.

"The more details that fell out of the cracks, the more intrigued I became with the story," Driggs said.

Central to Driggs' book is the volatile character of Kleasen, whose history is related as a series of violent outbursts. Driggs describes Kleasen as obsessed with the LDS Church and suggests the fixation may have begun in the late 1960s when he and his mother took up residence in a farmhouse near Palmyra, N.Y., the birthplace of Mormonism.

But Kleasen did not join the church until 1973, when he lived in a 10-foot trailer parked in a field behind an Austin taxidermy shop. Soon, Driggs relates, Kleasen's relationship with the Austin First Ward deteriorated as church leaders began investigating his history of assaults, which included an attack on the daughter of a Danish LDS family who had befriended him during a visit to Denmark.

"[Kleasen] ranted that Mormon leaders were unwilling to work with him and hinted at revenge," Driggs writes. "Kleasen insisted, 'I do not want a pat on the head and a paw shake, I want blood.'"

Against advice from the ward's bishop, Darley and Fischer kept a dinner date with Kleasen and were never seen again. Although the bodies have never been found, a jury decided Kleasen had killed Fischer and deliberated just two hours before sentencing him to die.

But by the time Driggs began compiling his chronicle in the mid-1990s, Kleasen himself had long since disappeared.

In 1977, Kleasen was released from death row after a Texas appellate court threw out the search warrant used to enter his trailer. Although other evidence remained—including blood and hair linked to the missionaries found in the housing of a taxidermist's band saw—prosecutors declined to retry the case. Kleasen, turned over to federal authorities, spent the next 15 years in prison on assault and firearms charges.

As a free man at age 58, Kleasen left the country in 1990 and headed to England to meet a woman he met through pen-pal correspondence while serving time. After that, he seemed to vanish, leaving Driggs' book with a mysterious ending.

"I told the story up to the point where I had lost him," said Driggs, who received no response to letters he mailed to Kleasen's last known address in England.

But in September 1999, before Driggs' book was published, Kleasen suddenly turned up, arrested by police in North Lincolnshire, England, on weapons violations. By representing himself to British authorities as an American military hero, Kleasen had acquired a license to own and sell firearms, tightly restricted in the United Kingdom. In June, Kleasen was sentenced to three years in prison.

Their interest reawakened by Kleasen's reappearance, Texas prosecutors announced they are investigating whether DNA technology could allow them to reopen the case against Kleasen.

But Driggs, now satisfied with the ending of his account, does not think prosecutors have much of a case. He suggests the families of the murdered missionaries would not appreciate the opening of old wounds.

"It has been too long," he said, adding, "I would love to be the defense attorney who gets to say, 'So where has this evidence been for the last 25 years?'"

The London Times, Giles Whittell
The most embarrassing Christmas card sent by Humberside Police must be the one dispatched to Robert Elmer Kleasen in 1998. “To Bob and family,” it said. “Love and best wishes from the firearms department.”

It became embarrassing only with hindsight. At the time as far as anyone in the firearms department know, Kleasen was an esteemed if overweight American visitor to Humberside who happened to be hugely knowledgeable about guns and whose service to his country as a test pilot, CIA agent and government assassin had been recognized by three former Presidents.

Kleasen owned a large arsenal of firearms, all legally, He used them regularly as a member of most gun clubs in the region. He was even "effectively called on to advise police" on how to use them, as one of his defense lawyers argued.

Only later did it emerge that he had once been convicted of an unspeakably gruesome double murder in Texas. ...

BBC News Online

click here for full story: "U.S. Extradition Bid for 'Odd Bob'"

BOB KLEASEN WAS CONVICTED OF THE MURDER OF TWO MORMON MISSIONARIES IN TEXAS IN 1974 BUT FREED ON A TECHNICALITY AND LATER CAME TO ENGLAND. IN FEBRUARY KLEASEN, NOW 69, WILL APPEAR IN COURT IN LONDON TO FACE EXTRADITION PROCEEDINGS FROM TEXAS, WHICH WANTS TO RETRY HIM. BBC NEWS ONLINE'S CHRIS SUMMERS TELLS THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF 'ODD BOB.'

Kleasen in court with band saw
Kleasen (seated) pictured at his trial with the band saw.

Bob Kleasen told one tall tale too many and it found him out. The American known to many as "Odd Bob" would regale members of his gun club near Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, with tales of how he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Korean War. He claimed to have been a pilot and to have shot down 34 Chinese MIG jets.

Gunsmith Tony Fox said: "A lot of his temperament was put down to him being American." But after a confrontation in 1999, Mr. Fox followed up his suspicions. He checked and discovered that whatever bauble Kleasen had worn when he married his fourth wife in Barton in 1991, it was not the Congressional Medal of Honor, America's highest military accolade.

Mr. Fox tipped off the police and his local MP, Shona McIsaac, who told BBC News Online: "Many of my constituents were very worried and frightened about his history and his behavior."

Shona McIsaac MP: Many
constituents "frightened"

The fourth Mrs. Kleasen, Marie Longley, was already seeking to escape her husband's possessiveness and temper. Her friend, Liz Butterfield, asked her son Chris, an internet buff, to check Kleasen out on the web. What he discovered was shocking and terrifying.

Kleasen had originally struck up a pen pal relationship with Ms. Longley in the late 1980s and explained his prison address by saying he was a college professor who taught inmates. Chris Butterfield found out he had actually spent more than a decade in jail for assault and firearms offenses.

Kleasen with wife, Marie Longley
Bob Kleasen pictured with
his fourth wife, Marie Longley

Most alarming of all, he had been convicted in 1975 of the gruesome murder of two Mormon missionaries in Texas. He had been sentenced to death but was later freed on a technicality. The bodies of Gary Darley, 20, and Mark Fischer, 19, who had vanished after agreeing to have supper with Kleasen, have never been found.

At his trial, prosecutors said Kleasen, a fanatical deer hunter and poacher, had dismembered them using a band saw in a friend's taxidermy shop to which he had access. Human remains belonging to Mr. Darley and Mr. Fischer were found on the saw.

When he came to England, Kleasen was given a shotgun licence by Humberside police, who also allowed him to become a registered firearms dealer and amass an arsenal of weapons. He even gave occasional advice to the force about guns.

After the Dunblane massacre, firearms legislation had been tightened considerably. But it took the Kleasen case to highlight a loophole by which foreigners could get guns after lying about their criminal convictions. Inspector Paul Griffiths, of Humberside police, told BBC News Online: "If a foreigner said on his form that he had no convictions, it was pretty much taken as read."

Forgiven

Kleasen has long ago been forgiven by the parents of Mr. Darley and Mr. Fischer, who share a deep Mormon faith. But the authorities in Texas now have DNA evidence which was not available at the first trial. They have promised to waive the death penalty at a second trial, but Kleasen's British lawyer, James Scobie, said guarantees were not legally binding and his client feared Texas would "dishonor those assurances."

Claire Dawson-Brown, from the Travis County District Attorney's Office in Texas, said the authorities often waived the death penalty to get suspects extradited from Mexico and had never gone back on such a promise. She said many of the exhibits at the first trial—such as the band saw—had been preserved.

She told BBC News Online they had been in contact with the Darley and Fischer families and said: "We would never do anything like this without talking to the victims' families. "You have to be aware of their feelings, and they have been very supportive."

'Faith Shaken'

Mr. Fischer's sister, Melissa Pietrzak, told BBC News Online: "When it first happened, it shook my faith in God." She said she was not a "vengeful" person but believed Kleasen to be very dangerous and would happily testify if it meant keeping him behind bars.

Ms. Longley divorced Kleasen when she discovered his background. He was later convicted of firearms offenses and jailed for three years. But while on bail, he married again, this time a German woman, and police suspect he was hoping to use her to secure a German passport and avoid deportation to the U.S.

'Still Afraid'

She too has divorced him, and he is waiting to find out if he will have to go back to face a second trial for the Texas missionary murders. Mrs. Butterfield said Marie, 70, still lived in fear of Kleasen and would not rest easy until he had been extradited back to the U.S. She told BBC News Online: "She still thinks he will either be released and will come after her or that he will put somebody up to kill her."

CLICK HERE FOR BBC AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR KEN DRIGGS: PART 1 AND PART 2