Born to Be Wild

By Barry Bowe

A distinct line exists between right and wrong. Some people never dream of crossing that line. Others cross it willingly.

At nineteen, Bobby Nauss joins the Warlocks Motorcycle Gang and plunges into a life of crime.

At 2:30 a.m. on December 12, 1971, he has sex with his girlfriend. At 3 a.m. he kills her and disposes of her body.

As time passes, four teenaged girls are kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Because their bodies are found in or around the Tinicum Marsh, they become known as “The Marsh Murders.” The victims share three things in common - sex, drugs, and an association with members of the Warlocks.

It takes the mobilization and galvanization of local, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies across the country to deal with the outlaw bikers and determine who did what, where, and when.

Born to Be Wild is a true story of rape, murder, and deception. The book drags you into the misogynistic world of outlaw motorcycle gangs, places you behind prison bars, and pins a badge on your chest to pursue the bad guys.

Justice takes twenty years to reach Bobby Nauss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Bowe
• Release date: Feb 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310523632

Barry Bowe

My name’s Barry Bowe and "21 Years" is my baby. Written in screenplay format for Netflix, I transposed each episode into both ebook and paperback format for your reading pleasure. My first book "Born to Be Wild" was published in 1992 and translated into German as "Der Wilde." Three sports books: "1964," "Birth of the Birds," "Eagles QBs A to Z," and two crime novels: "Caribbean Queen" and "Stosh."

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

My job in writing this book was to record what I saw, what I heard, and what I uncovered by doing extensive research; to assimilate that information; and then to synthesize the disparate voices into one harmonious tone that best described what happened ─ and to do it as objectively as possible.

Therefore, this book was written with a dispassionate look at the circumstances and events that transpired over a period of more than twenty years. I had no axe to grind. Whatever happened, happened. I was neither perpetrator, nor witness, nor investigator, nor judge, nor juror. I was merely someone on the outside, looking in, and revealing what I saw.

Some of the people interviewed may have withheld major or minor points for any number of reasons. Others may have distorted facts to a greater degree, or eliminated them entirely, to make themselves look better. Some people outright lied to me. I couldn’t control any of those situations, but wrote what was told to me.

In writing this book, my purpose was neither to distort nor destroy any basic facts or fundamental truths. Other than an occasional editorial comment, I’m not the one doing the talking throughout the story. The people who lived this story are the ones doing the talking.

The Marsh Murders

Something out there is killing them. Something dark and menacing and conspiratorial is damning them, young and beautiful, to shallow graves in the oozing mud of Tinicum Marsh.

Something profitable enough, or powerful enough, to have killed five times, is still at work, and this killing machine, this terribly efficient apparatus of death, is still unknown.

─ Mike Mallowe

Philadelphia magazine

May 1976

PART ONE

The Marsh Murders

December 1971 – December 1975

"Society wants crimes; needs crimes.

We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy, and to stoutly punish. Criminals represent our alter egos ─ our bad selves ─ rejected and protected.

They do for us the forbidden, illegal things that we wish to do, and, like the scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment."

─ Karl Menninger

American psychiatrist

CHAPTER 1

December 12, 1971

Bobby Nauss was having sex with his girlfriend at two-thirty in the morning. The sex-act was taking place in Folcroft, Pennsylvania, a tiny suburban borough of some 10,000 inhabitants, a mixture of both blue-collar and white-collar workers. Folcroft was located two miles outside the Philadelphia city limits.

It’s important to note that the year 1971, in pop culture, was part of the Age of Aquarius ─ the Psychedelic Age.

The 1950s was the decade of I Like Ike.

Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States, served in that capacity from 1953-1961. It was a period of soda fountains, milkshakes, drive-in movies, Elvis Presley, and domestic tranquility. Kids grew up watching I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It to Beaver. At sock-hops, teenagers jitterbugged to 45 RPM records and made out in parked cars.

Then came the 1960s.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK in Dallas. That single event precipitated a flow of innuendo, theory, and speculation that would continue to this day ─ and beyond. Jack Ruby shot Oswald in a Dallas police station and hatched the Conspiracy Theory. LBJ inherited the Oval Office, created the Warren Commission, and introduced Arlen Specter and his magic-bullet theory. The Zapruder film made you scratch your head, and the Grassy Knoll became legendary.

Spurred on by Martin Luther King, integrationists marched throughout the South, sat-in at lunch counters, went to the bathroom in rest rooms marked WHITE ONLY, and Rosa Parks resisted bus segregation by riding in a front seat. Afros sprouted, riots flared, and inner cities burned from Los Angeles, to Chicago, to Detroit, to Philadelphia, to Newark, New Jersey.

The Beatles invaded the U.S. and in the words of John Lennon became more popular than Jesus. Through their lyrics, Lennon and Paul McCartney shared their newly gained philosophies about mind expansion with their worshipping masses. Not coincidentally, drug use and abuse soared throughout the country during the Beatles rise in popularity.

Flower children bloomed, hippies flashed peace signs and donned love beads, and teenagers were running away from home in droves to join communes. A generation of teenagers started smoking pot, copping ludes, popping speed, dropping acid, shooting dope, huffing glue, and doing their own thing with banana peels and mushrooms.

Peaceniks burned draft cards, draft dodgers crossed the Canadian border to avoid the military, and National Guardsmen gunned down protesting college students at Kent State. Halfway around the world, medics kept shipping home brave American patriots in body bags.

Broadway Joe Namath signed with the New York Jets for the unheard of sum of $400,000.

On Broadway, actors and actresses stripped off their costumes and paraded around the stage totally nude in productions of Hair and Oh, Calcutta.

At public demonstrations, liberated women burned their bras, and from those lace and whalebone ashes sprung the sexual revolution. By coupling those liberated women with the development of birth-control pills, there came a wild spree of free sex, daisy chains, wife-swapping, and sport-fucking.

Into this arena, some of our fighting men started returning home from Vietnam, many of them bringing back exotic Southeast-Asian strains of gonorrhea. Despite 5,000,000-millimeter doses of penicillin, penises kept dripping, and a VD epidemic spread among the heterosexual population. While at the same time, gays were coming out of closets from Greenwich Village to San Francisco, and syphilis was running rampant in the homosexual communities.

Monogamous relationships bottomed out, divorce skyrocketed, religion lost its appeal, and the American family started to disintegrate.

Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy near the rear exit of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and James Earl Ray sniped Martin Luther King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

Woodstock happened.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons published The Godfather by Mario Puzo.

And outlaw motorcycle gangs began forming throughout all parts of the country.

As the 1970s began an epidemic of criminal activity would directly and indirectly escalate as the gangs became more and more organized, more and more popular, more and more powerful, more and more evil.

This cavalcade through the decades brings us right back to December 12, 1971, to when Bobby Nauss was having sex with his girlfriend in the wee hours of the morning.

By 3:30 a.m. on the night in question, the sex-act was over and Bobby Nauss, with beads of perspiration dotting his forehead, was standing outside a friend’s door. He was knocking on the door so loudly it sounded like a matter of life and death.

Bobby Nauss was five months shy of his twentieth birthday, a skinny kid with a boyish face who hadn’t begun to fill out yet. He was five-eight and weighed a slim 128 pounds.

Sound asleep inside the apartment was one of his best friends. The friend’s name was Bill Standen, but people who knew him called him Stanley.

Standen, twenty-one and an eighth-grade dropout, worked for a company that manufactured doors, preparing the doors for the installation of hardware. Standen stood six inches taller than Nauss but was every bit as skinny.

Nauss’s knocking not only succeeded in awakening Standen, but it also roused Standen’s wife in the process, and that irked her.

Not again, she said to her husband.

Relax, Standen said, trying to soothe her distress. Nuthin’s wrong. Just go back to sleep.

Standen rolled out of bed, walked down the hall, and entered the kitchen. He crossed the room to the back door, pulled the curtain aside, and peered through the window. Standen saw Nauss standing outside and opened the door to allow his friend to enter.

Stanley, Nauss blurted out, almost out of breath, and obviously driven. I want to show you something.

Can’t it wait till morning? Standen complained, hoping to get rid of Nauss and crawl back into bed.

No, you gotta come now, Nauss told him, and the way Nauss said it, Standen knew he meant it.

Okay.

Out back in the garage, Nauss specified.

Okay, I’ll be right out.

Standen and his wife lived in an apartment at 1564 Chester Pike.

The pike was the main drag through town and two buildings stood end-to-end on the west side of the pike. One of the buildings stood four stories tall, the other two stories.

During business hours, a red-white-and-blue-striped pole revolved five feet above the sidewalk, inviting regular customers into a shop where barbers still cut hair, rather than styling it, and strummed straight razors on thick leather straps before trimming off the hot shaving foam that softened the sideburns and stubble from around customers’ ears and behind their necks.

Next door to the barber shop, a buxom, leotard-clad proprietress taught tap, jazz, and ballet to enthusiastic pre-teens and adolescents in a large room with a hardwood floor, surrounded on three sides by walls of mirrors and ballet bars.

Further up the block, a drug store and a hardware store dispensed their goods.

There were a dozen apartments above those storefronts. But aside from the mailman and the paperboy, not many people in town knew any of the families who lived in the apartments, or paid much attention to their comings and goings.

The pike bustled with traffic during the day, but it died at night, forsaken during the midnight hours by car dealers, gas stations, and a day-care center that surrounded the two buildings.

A narrow driveway between the two buildings led from the pike to a secluded garage another forty feet behind the apartments. That’s where Bobby Nauss was waiting for Bill Standen to meet him.

Standen got dressed and went outside.

The night was mild for December, and moonless. As Standen walked through the darkness he wondered what could possibly be so urgent that it couldn’t wait until morning.

When Standen reached the garage, he opened the squeaky door and entered. It was pitch-black inside and smelled from stagnant oil that seeped into the dirt floor over the years and found a permanent home in the musty soil.

There were no sounds or movements in the darkness.

A tiny flame appeared overhead.

Standen looked up and saw Nauss standing at the edge of the loft above, holding a candle. The flickering glimmer of the candlelight highlighted Nauss’s face in an eerie spectrum of blacks and yellows.

Up here, Nauss called down. Come on up.

The stairway leading to the loft was retractable. Standen tugged on a rope and pulled it down. Then he climbed the steps slowly, each stair creaking as he shifted his weight from one tread to the next. By the time Standen reached the top step, his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Nauss and Standen were now standing a few feet apart and the candle was the only source of illumination.

Stanley, Nauss said calmly, come and take a look at what I done here.

As Nauss was talking, he started taking a few steps away from Standen, moving across the loft, further into the shadows. Then Nauss stopped abruptly and raised the candle so Standen could see what he was talking about.

Standen saw a nude woman hanging by a rope from the rafters. A noose was around her neck and her lifeless head was drooping over her chest, her neck tilted at a grotesque angle. Long billows of golden hair were hanging downward and her skin was as white as a sheet. Her jaw was slack and slobber was drooling out of her mouth. Her toes were dangling two feet above the wooden floorboards.

I killed her, Nauss said with a touch of triumph in his voice. I hung her. Now she won’t bother me anymore.

The sight of the hanging body not only startled Standen, but it also frightened him.

I’m gettin’ the hell outta here, Standen told his friend.

Standen’s reaction displeased Nauss. It was the opposite of what he expected.

I want you out of here, Nauss shouted. Get the fuck outta my sight.

Standen raced down the stairs and walked back through the moonless night to his apartment.

But Nauss just stood there, holding the candle, staring at the hanging body, grinning at his accomplishment like Leonardo da Vinci must have stared at the Mona Lisa.

CHAPTER 2

Thirty-six hours earlier

Elizabeth Lande walked out the front door of the family home with her parents Frank and Frances Lande. It was around noon on Saturday and she was in the habit of going to the neighborhood beauty parlor on Saturdays.

Elizabeth, usually called Liz or Lizzie, was twenty-one years old and lived with her parents in the Overbrook Park section of West Philadelphia.

They lived at 7651 Overbrook Avenue.

Overbrook Park was seven miles from the Philadelphia City Hall.

It was a neighborhood that bordered the western edge of the city limits, sat across the street from predominantly white, middle-class Delaware County (Delco), and was adjacent to predominantly black West Philadelphia. It was more like the suburbs than the city, mostly white and middle class, with a high percentage of Jewish families.

The streets were tree-lined. The homes were arranged in strings of two-story brick row-houses running from one end of the block to the other, on both sides of the streets, with small, manicured lawns in front. Behind the homes were concrete alleyways instead of back yards.

Out back, safe from what little traffic there was on the street, neighborhood kids played and dogs barked. Housewives hung the wash on racks resembling inverted Christmas trees, with aluminum poles that popped in and out of metal sleeves set into the concrete.

A shopping center was within walking distance, containing specialty shops, restaurants, recreational facilities, and service establishments.

Liz Lande was completing her first semester as a full-time student at the Community College of Philadelphia. Final exams were scheduled to start on Monday, and her first exam was scheduled for 10 a.m.

Make sure you study over the weekend, her mother told her as they walked down the front sidewalk.

To Liz, it seemed like the millionth time her mother uttered those exact same words in the last hour and they riled her every time she heard them. Her parents were leaving for a week’s tropical cruise and Liz was going to be on her own for the first time in her life.

Don’t worry, Liz said, raising her voice, trying to conceal her annoyance. I will.

It was an awkward farewell and there were no good-bye kisses. Liz simply waved as her parents pulled away in the family car.

Then she walked the four blocks to her noon appointment at the beauty shop.

Liz stood a tad over five-five and weighed 110 pounds, proportioned just so, with green eyes, a peachy complexion, pearly teeth, straight and even, and a face pretty enough to have competed in a handful of teenage beauty contests. But it was her blond hair that was her trademark, long and luxurious, cascading over her shoulders and wavy at the ends.

After her regular wash-and-set at the beauty parlor, Liz returned home and started addressing Christmas cards. When she finished licking and stamping, she walked to the corner and dropped the cards in the mailbox.

She came back home and studied for a while.

For dinner, she ate a container of strawberry yogurt. Afterward, she went back to her studies until two of her best friends came over to keep her company. Their names were Terri Levanthal and Juan Pacheco, and they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

Liz’s phone rang around midnight. She excused herself and went upstairs to take the call on her private line.

Her living quarters occupied most of the second floor. Her parents remodeled the area into a two-room apartment for her. One room had a desk and some bookshelves, the other had a bed with her teddy bears scattered about. Posters of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were taped onto the walls.

There was also a private bath.

Liz was compulsive about things. She kept her beauty aids and cosmetics in an organized tray, with each item having its own special compartment. She ate diet foods and took diet pills to maintain her figure, and she was meticulous about her personal habits and appearance. It seemed to take forever whenever she got dressed, and that night was no exception.

By that time, Liz’s parents had flown to Miami, boarded an ocean liner, and were cruising on the turquoise Caribbean Sea more than 1,000 miles from home. Their itinerary included some of the most romantic destinations in the northern hemisphere — Saint Thomas, Tortola, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Antigua, and Saint Maarten.

Frank Lande was fifty-two years old and stood several inches below six-feet tall. He was a stocky, balding man with a confident stride and a bulldog’s determination. He worked as a complaint manager for Perfect Photo Corporation, a film-processing company in the city, where he solved customers’ problems and tried to turn complaints into compliments. Frank was good at his job, a troubleshooter with a knack for getting to the bottom of things.

Frank met Frances Klingman thirty years earlier, and they were married in 1942. But there was no time to take a honeymoon back then because the United States was suddenly embroiled in World War II and most red-blooded, able-bodied men were going off to war to fight for their country. Frank was one of those men, and Uncle Sam sent him to Europe where he eventually fought daredevil missions over Germany as a fighter pilot in the Army Air Corps. Frank served in that capacity until soon after the Japanese surrendered three years later.

Frances Lande, forty-nine, was a woman with hair as dark as her daughter’s was blond, and she weighed a few more pounds than made her happy. Not unattractive, she reached the point in her life where she no longer spent hours in front of a mirror primping and preening.

Now that their daughter was old enough to take care of herself, Frank and Frances Lande decided to indulge themselves with the honeymoon they never got to take.

The honeymoon lasted for six days beneath tropical sun and skies. They lounged on deck chairs around the ship’s pool as the ocean liner sailed from port to port, and they smeared themselves with Coppertone to protect their fare skin.

At each port-of-call they dressed in bright clothing, went ashore for duty-free shopping expeditions, and snapped pictures at all the tourist attractions on the islands. In the evenings they fancied up their attire, gambled in the casinos, took in floorshows, and danced in the ballrooms. And at every turn, there was all that sumptuous food, which they ate while swearing oaths to begin dieting just as soon as the honeymoon ended and they returned home.

Frank and Frances Lande arrived home from their cruise shortly before 7 p.m. on December eighteenth.

They were gone for one week.

Frank inserted a key and unlocked the front door. He tried to push it open, but the door resisted. So he pushed harder, until it finally gave way and opened.

When we opened the door, he explained, "there was mail piled up behind the door, and the cat was crying because it was very hungry.

Liz was closely attached to the cat. She was constantly worried about it. She had gotten the cat from an animal refuge center. It was a sickly cat and Liz had nursed it back to health, so she was concerned about it at all times.

As soon as I walked in, Frances Lande recalled, I saw the mail, mail that was on the floor, that we pushed with the door when we opened it. The mail included Christmas cards addressed to Liz, but none of the cards had been opened.

We looked in the kitchen, Frank explained. We checked the refrigerator. Liz was a big drinker of milk and we had left a lot of milk, but it hadn’t been touched. The same amount was still there.

Liz’s parents went upstairs.

Her bedroom was intact, Frank Lande continued, exactly as when we’d left, and her school books were all where she’d left them. Her bed was still made, and there was no indication that she’d slept in the bed all week.

Everything was there, Frances Lande recalled. "Her makeup, eyelashes, erase ─ no lipstick ─ she would have had the lipstick in her pocketbook.

She kept her makeup in a little box with holes in it for each piece. Each item had its own place. She usually carried the eye makeup with her and, I think, the erase.

Nothing was missing, Frank Lande said, except a pair of dungarees, which we assumed she was wearing, and a pair of platform shoes and an overcoat.

It was what they called a maxi, Frances Lande explained, "a maxi-length brown coat, cloth, with fake fur, black fake fur, curly lamb fake fur, around the hem and up the front.

"First thing I did, I called my mother. She lives in the same neighborhood. You could call it within walking distance, but at the other end of the area where we live.

"Then I called Mrs. Nauss, Bobby Nauss’s mother, because I knew that Liz had been seeing him.

In between the phone calls to my mother and to Mrs. Nauss, several calls came into the house. We were answering calls, and the calls were all from Liz’s friends. But no one had seen Liz all week, or heard from her.

Frank Lande fed the cat, then went down into the basement to see if Liz’s suitcases were still there.

They were. So, he reasoned that his daughter hadn’t run away from home.

Frank and Frances Lande were now convinced their daughter had disappeared while they were gone, and not of her own volition.

They feared the worst.

Liz Lande was a Baby Boomer. Born in 1950, her recollections of childhood were all pleasant. Her parents loved her and her early life was happy and uncomplicated.

All through school she was an average student. At thirteen, she auditioned for the lead in a repertory theater production of My Sister Eileen and she won the part. While not exactly raves, the reviews about her performance were encouraging enough that Liz and her parents began fantasizing about her becoming a movie star one day.

Attractive and popular, Liz was the kind of girl who got along with both sexes. It seemed like all the boys wanted to go out with her, and she started dating at thirteen. Her parents trusted her and never once felt the need to limit her contacts with boys.

She avoided any serious relationships until she was seventeen, when she started seeing one boy regularly and fell victim to puppy love. As will happen, he began pressuring her for sex. Liz resisted, until she was afraid of losing him, and then she gave in.

She allowed him to have intercourse with her. It happened just once and he never called her again.

The rejection came as a shock to Liz. She was emotionally traumatized, and the timing was horrendous.

This was a time of racial protest across the United States. This was when Martin Luther King was at the peak of his freedom marches across the South. Racial tensions were running high throughout the country and the civil unrest spread into the public school systems.

The kids who lived in Liz’s neighborhood attended Overbrook High School in West Philadelphia. This was the high school best known for producing star basketball players like NBA all-time great Wilt Chamberlain, Wayne Hightower, Walt Hazzard, and Wally Jones.

Seventy percent of the school’s 3,000 students were black.

This was no longer the right place for a pretty white face, long blond hair, and a fragile ego. Liz felt threatened. She started coming home with tales of black male students taunting her and pulling her hair. She complained to her father.

But Frank thought her complaints were unfounded. He also thought she should be able to resolve her own problems.

Cut your hair, he told her, "and the schwartzes will leave you alone."

Are you crazy? she screamed at him. I’ll never cut my hair. Why can’t I just go to parochial school?

Because you’re not Catholic.

They let Jews in Catholic schools today, Daddy, Liz pleaded with him. All you have to do is pay the tuition and I can get in.

Over my dead body, he said. Case closed.

Liz suddenly felt abandoned and started to withdraw. In rebellion, she began associating with a new group of peers — teenagers her father described as troubled kids.

To her credit Liz survived high school and graduated. But after graduation her life turned from bad to worse.

She applied for a job at an insurance company and was hired. But her heart wasn’t into working. That job lasted just three days before she quit.

But instead of looking for another job, Liz stayed home all day and started hanging out with her new friends at night; kids who lived two miles away in Upper Darby; kids who were friendly with bikers; kids who were experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and sex.

She had two elements of friends, her father explained, the goodies and the baddies, and that was her undoing. She was a troubled girl, a mixed-up girl, and I think it made her feel better to seek out people like herself ─ people with problems.

Her relationship with her mother deteriorated. They argued about many things in Liz’s life that displeased her mother. Her mother accused her of being a bum because she refused to get a job, and she didn’t like the kids Liz was hanging out with. She criticized Liz for keeping late hours every night and accused her of taking drugs.

Countless shouting matches ensued. There was name-calling and threats going in both directions. And her mother sometimes resorted to slapping Liz for being disrespectful.

For the first time in Liz’s life she felt totally unloved and totally unwanted.

CHAPTER 3

At nineteen, Bobby Nauss’s facial features were delicate and his beard was still patchy. His hair was dark and coarse, and like everyone else in the family he was good-looking.

He lived with his parents in the small borough of Darby, pressed against the border of Southwest Philadelphia and situated two miles east of Folcroft.

With a population of 15,000, Darby was a small town caught in transition between the City of Philadelphia and the suburbs of Delaware County.

By city standards Darby was backyards and barbecues. By suburban standards it was an extension of growing inner-city blight and decay. In truth, it was a blue-collar borough with a racial split of forty percent white and sixty percent black residents. It was unlike most of the boroughs comprising southeastern Delco at that time, most of which were predominantly white.

With the Christmas holidays only a week away, the mood around the Nauss home was festive. The tree was trimmed, the halls were decorated with mistletoe and holly, and most of the chitchat was about which family member wanted what for Christmas.

The family’s lifestyle was by no means opulent, but nobody wanted for anything. Every year at Christmas there were plenty of presents under the tree, and 1971 would be no different. A favorite amongst his siblings, he was teased that all he’d find in his stocking would be lumps of coal.

His father believed he raised his children properly and his mother never dreamed that any of her children could possibly do anything wrong.

The Nauss family moved to Darby from Philadelphia in the early 1950s. Bob Nauss, Nauss’s father, married a pretty woman, a smart woman named Pauline Schladensky.

Bob was a mechanic. Relying on skilled hands, he opened his own business, Bob’s Automobile Shop, specializing in transmission repairs. He worked five, six days a week, whatever it took to support his family.

They were good people, Bob and Pauline. The Darby police chief called Bob one of the most respected men in the area and the neighbors regularly saw them at church.

Robert T. Nauss, Jr. was born in a normal delivery with no complications on May 10, 1952. He was the third born of Bob and Pauline’s five girls and three boys. Nancy and Carol came first, followed by Marianne, Mike, Vinnie, Karen, and Sharon.

For the first nine years of Bobby Nauss’s life, his family lived on the seamier side of Darby. But by 1961 Bob’s business was flourishing. In April of that year he purchased a house at 1315 Main Street for $24,500, a handsome price at the time. It was a neighborhood of green lawns, mature trees, and well-tended houses that were a far cry from the rest of the borough.

At one end of the block was Mercy Fitzgerald, a hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy, where Pauline Nauss attended Sunday afternoon mass in the chapel. At the other end of the block was the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Called BVM by its parishioners, the church was a model of vertical Gothic architecture ─ gray stone walls, stained-glass windows, and a steeple rising majestically in the sky. It was where Bob Nauss and the children went to mass on Sunday mornings. Behind the church was the grade school the Nauss children attended.

Their home was one of the most impressive residences in town — two and a half stories of gray stone and white wooden trim, five to six bedrooms, with a semicircular portico out front and four white columns standing tall. A matching addition extended from one side, which through the years served as an apartment for one family member or another. To the rear of the property was a triple-wide garage.

Right up the street from their home, toward the hospital, lived Dr. Liberace, an obstetrician who delivered babies at the hospital. He was also a brother of the famous entertainer Liberace.

Bob Nauss was the sole wage-earner in the family. He came home from work, showered, ate, and watched sports on TV. He drank a beer or two at social functions, but never at home. In fact, beer and liquor were rarely kept in the house.

Pauline Nauss ran the household and raised the children.

All through grammar school most of Bobby Nauss’s classmates described him as a nice guy, someone who’d do anything for a friend. He was well-liked and funny, clowning around at times, yet usually on the quiet side.

Nauss was a bright boy. He joined the Boy Scouts and played Little League baseball. As the eldest son, it was assumed he’d take over his father’s business one day. So at the age of twelve he started working in the garage after school and on weekends, learning mechanics and getting grease underneath his fingernails in the process.

By the time he reached high school Nauss couldn’t have cared less about a formal education. He spent his study time at his father’s garage or working on his buddies’ cars. Yet there was just enough time left over to meet a girl who lived near the shop, and he started dating her. They went to house parties and the movies and did all the things normal teenagers did back then.

Before he knew it Nauss fell in love with the girl. In his mind he was sure that this was the girl for him, the one who was going to walk down the aisle with him in a long white gown. She was the one who was going to bear his children. He thought three or four kids was a nice number.

By the summer before his senior year Nauss had become an excellent mechanic. He got his hands on a junker of a Grand Prix and tore it apart. Then he put it back together, souped it up, and started racing.

This was also the summer of 1969, Woodstock Summer, and Bob Dylan was singing: The Times, They Are a-Changin’.

The Beatles were in their drug stage and impressionable teenagers throughout the country started experimenting with drugs. Nauss was no exception. He started smoking marijuana.

In 1970, Nauss graduated from Monsignor Bonner High School, an all-boys Catholic school less than two miles from home. His class consisted of 609 boys.

At one end of the spectrum of his classmates was John Cappelletti, who would go on to become an All-American football player at Penn State, win the Heisman Trophy in 1973, and become a pro football player with the Los Angeles Rams and the San Diego Chargers.

A book written by Richard Peck revealed Cappelletti’s relationship with a younger brother who battled against leukemia for years before finally losing the war. In 1977 there was also a made-for-TV movie. The book and movie were both entitled Something for Joey.

At the other end of the spectrum was Bobby Nauss who was one of the most anonymous members of the class. After four years of high school there was not one activity listed beneath Nauss’s picture in the yearbook.

At Bonner, Bobby Nauss flew so far under the radar that John Cappelletti had no recollections of him. But before long Bobby Nauss would become a household word throughout Delco.

After graduation he went to work full-time for his father and earned between $150 and $200 per week. He thought his life was headed in the right direction, and then one of the most significant events of his young life occurred when his girlfriend broke up with him.

When you’re from a small town like Darby and you’re only eighteen years old and your girlfriend dumps you for another guy, you feel like your whole world just ended. You think everybody’s laughing at you behind your back, your confidence is shattered, and you start doubting your manhood.

For a while Nauss felt sorry for himself. All he wanted was to love and be loved, get married, raise a family, and live happily ever after. Was that such an impossible dream?

Before long he started pointing fingers. He blamed his ex-girlfriend for the breakup, he blamed his mother because she wore the pants in the family, and he blamed his father because he allowed his mother to wear the pants.

But he never blamed himself for anything that happened to him. It was always somebody else’s fault.

Nauss started drinking and his drug usage escalated from marijuana to methamphetamines (meth). He bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and started associating with shady characters.

He’d love and lost, and now swore it would be a long time before he ever trusted another woman, or ever allowed himself to fall in love again.

CHAPTER 4

A year and a half before her disappearance, Liz Lande engaged in an especially emotional quarrel with her parents.

The date was July 2, 1970.

The argument culminated with Liz locking herself inside the bathroom and refusing to unlock the door.

I’m going to take a whole bottle of pills, Liz threatened through the bathroom door.

Her father was standing on the other side of the door. When he heard the water running, he panicked. He thought she was slitting her wrists. He ran downstairs to the basement, two flights below, to get a hammer and screwdriver.

When he came back upstairs he popped the hinges and opened the door.

Ha-ha, I fooled you, Liz mocked him. I was just going to take two aspirins.

Frank Lande took his daughter to see a psychiatrist the next day.

Over the next five weeks Liz was scheduled to receive psychiatric counseling. But counseling was the last thing she wanted. So she either showed up late for her appointments or skipped them.

Frank Lande knew his daughter needed help and knew that she was refusing to get it.

So five weeks after the initial blow-up between father and daughter, he had Liz committed to the Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital. At the time, he described his daughter as mixed up and troubled, and said he saw no recent signs of improvement in her condition.

Liz Lande spent seven weeks at the hospital.

During that period of hospitalization she was attended by Dr. Clancey McKenzie, a resident psychiatrist.

Dr. McKenzie wrote the following case history:

"This is the first Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital admission for this 20-year-old white female who was hospitalized involuntarily by her father and her psychiatrist because of her recent inappropriate behavior. It appears that she has been giving away her clothing, and that of her parents, and also furnishings in the house, to charitable organizations such as the Salvation Army, etc.

She, in a sense, just laughed it off as the things that she didn’t need but, of course, her parents said it had been invaluable objects, and expensive objects. It also appears that she has attempted to make sexual advances toward her father recently, when she disrobed and asked him to have intercourse with her which, of course, he denies.

She had always lived as an only child with her mother and father. Originally, she lived in West Philadelphia and subsequently moved to a better neighborhood in Overbrook Park. She described her mother as a very sick lady who had a lot of emotional problems of her own.

The patient feels that her

Reviews for Born to Be Wild

[Shirley Landis VanScoyk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The title is not great, there are hundreds of typos and printing errors. However, this book is worth reading if you are a true crime buff. Excellent research.