Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 124

T-i, 'u 1- 1" 1 1 I Si MICHIGAN would sit around and listen to records, and I liked her kind of music Nat King Cole, stuff like that well, I'm a sentimental guy. We would sit and listen to music and talk. "She had beautiful fingernails, almond-shaped. Let me tell you about the night we decided to be lovers. I was sitting on the floor, and she was sitting on the couch, and I was holding her hand, painting her fingernails.

And for some crazy reason I just looked up into her eyes and kissed her hand. I was blowing on her fingernails to dry them, and it seemed like the thing to do, and I did it, and she just melted. "She was forever saying, 'What am I doing with a But with the lights out I wasn't a kid." He played house with Sue, babysat for her children, bought them presents, washed their dishes. He told one psychiatrist that he spent all his money on them. When he was 17 and a lOth-grade dropout, he and a friend stole a car.

The judge gave him a choice: juvenile home or the Army. He joined the Army, which kicked him out after 11 months and a drunken assault on another soldier. Returning to Kalamazoo, his hometown, he asked Sue to marry him. She refused. Each time she said no, he left her apartment in a rage, slamming his fist into the plasterboard in the hallway.

"I'd break all the bones in my hand," he says, "before I'd hit her." Two days before Christmas 1964, he tried to kill himself. A state trooper found him groggy and sick in the front seat of his 1958 black-and-white Plymouth convertible, carbon monoxide fumes flowing from a hose he had bought at Sears the day before. After 1 0 days in Kalamazoo State Hospital, his mother insisted he be released. Four months later, he began to kill. He was 2V4 months past his 19th birthday when he was arrested in the early hours of June 5, 1964, for the murder of Plymouth schoolteacher Gary Smock, who had picked (Continued on Page 14.) Breakfast might be a pizza roll, stolen from the kitchen, bought for a buck from a profiteer.

Occasionally, he has what he calls breakfast in bed: a dozen pancakes with syrup, stolen from the kitchen by one friend, heated in the cell-block microwave by another, delivered to his cell by a third. For dinner he might have a bowl of cereal while watching the news, with milk made from Coffeemate and tap water. He drinks coffee, "about three gallons a day," made from instant coffee and tap water. He no longer goes to movies. "I just don't like the auditorium.

I don't like the sound system. I don't like the way it's managed. I don't like the people that go to it. I don't know if they do it on the streets, but people in here, they have to comment on everything. I figure, what the hell, in a couple of years I'll get it on TV.

I got time to wait." He rarely hangs out on the yard, where convicts are prohibited from walking on most of the grass, or uses the prison library. "Nothing you'd want is there." He reads Time and Newsweek when he can get hold of one. Occasionally, he borrows a Playboy, for the articles and interviews, but says he finds the women unarousing "too professional, too posed." He reads three newspapers, subscribing to the Free Press and Jackson Citizen-Patriot and borrowing the Detroit News from another con. "I'm interested in the newspaper primarily for the editorial viewpoint section, and then obviously the cartoon page." His favorite strip is Calvin Hobbes: "They're always getting into some I love it! They're some funny little dudes." nce he loved a woman, 10 years older than himself, a divorcee with three toddlers. Larry Lee Ranes his given name was 13 when they met.

"Ten-thirty every night, I would be out my (bedroom) window, and I'd go down and hang out at Sue's all night. She was big on records. We 11 gets up each LJ I day about noon I and doesn't go I to bed until 4:30 -J or 5 a.m. Since there is no electricity in the cells from midnight to 3 a.m., he has attached his 12-inch RCA black and white TV to a battery. Occasionally he watches "Late Night with David Letterman." But usually, late at night, the TV is on only to provide a flickering blue light as he writes at his desk.

For the last several months, he has been writing his plan to fix the criminal justice system. It would require all convicts to choose a rehabilitation program or incarceration "going to school or playing hooky," as he describes it Those who chose prison could play basketball, soak up the sun, screw around for life, if they wanted. Those who chose rehabilitation would work "at meaningful jobs" for eight hours a day, spend three hours a day doing community service making toys for kids, for example and another three in group therapy. To be released, a convict would have to prove that he has learned to care again. It might take a year, 10 years, a lifetime.

The plan is intricate. Writing it has been difficult; words billow out of him crazily, like smoke from a grease fire. He is trying to hone the plan to three or four pages, because he wants to mail it to Larry Glazer, Gov. Blanchard's gal adviser, and fears he might be bored if it's too long. As he writes, an earplug from his Hitachi radio and tape player pumps music into his head.

He owns some 30 tapes; Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" is his favorite. Eventually, he will type his letter on his $700 used IBM Selectric, bought with special permission several years ago. No matter what he is doing, his TV is almost always on, "as a companion." When he watches it, he tunes in to PBS "The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour," other talk and news shows, and nature shows. He always has loved the woods: "If I allow my mind to go to the world, I dream of the woods. I guess I probably dream of a place where I'm in control, and the only thing that challenges me for control is Mother Nature Chain me forever to a fire watch-tower somewhere.

It'd be heaven." He can leave his cell at designated times each day to go to work, the mess hall or the yard, to make his allotted 15-minute phone call (which he must schedule 24 hours in advance), to have a visitor. But he more often chooses Photos from Steppenwolf file show how he has cultivated an intimidating appearance since he was sent to prison at 1 9. the solitude of his cell. He avoids the mess hall because "it's very authoritarian and arbitrary and regimented and I don't need all that garbage." He doesn't like it, for example, when female guards routinely squeeze his genitals to check for contraband. "That's not my idea of a good way to finish a meal." So, he snacks in his cell..