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Overview
In August of 1983 Shana Alexander, acclaimed journalist and chronicler of the lives and criminal trials of Jean Harris and Patty Hearst, wrote to New York City ballet patron Frances Schreuder on the eve of her murder trial. Schreuder stood accused of unlawfully causing the death of her father, Franklin Bradshaw, and of soliciting, encouraging, and aiding her prep school–student son in the homicide in the hope of financial gain. Alexander never received a response, but she flew to Salt Lake City and met with Schreuder’s mother, the matriarch of the Mormon dynasty—eighty-year-old Berenice Bradshaw.
Nutcracker is the true story of this crime—the twisting four-year police investigation, the derailed cover-up and conspiracy, the dramatic trials. It is also the tale of a family riven by greed and madness. Drawing on interviews with all the major players, Alexander paints a powerful portrait of a psychopathic woman driven by avarice, so depraved that she persuaded her own son to commit grand-patricide.
A finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, Nutcracker is “a Chekovian family tragedy [that] builds in intensity around this uniquely twisted woman” (The Washington Post Book World).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504006811 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 444 |
| Sales rank: | 561,987 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Shana Alexander (1926–2005) was a writer and commentator for Life, Newsweek, and 60 Minutes, as well as the author of seven nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album, which was made into a television miniseries, and Very Much a Lady: The Untold Story of Jean Harris and Dr. Herman Tarnower, a winner of the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. The daughter of song composer Milton Ager and entertainment-industry journalist Cecelia Ager, Alexander chronicled her coming-of-age in a privileged, unconventional family in her acclaimed memoir Happy Days.
Read an Excerpt
Nutcracker
Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album
By Shana Alexander
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1985 Shana AlexanderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0681-1
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
Overtures
1981
... THE GREAT GOLD HALL ablaze with lights, the red velvet seats alive with children ... rows and rows of children's faces, all upturned, a Christmas candy box of nougats, cherries, caramels, peppermint creams, and almost all of them the shining, scrubbed faces of little girls ... delectable would-be ballerinas, brushed and shining and trembling. For one month every year during the holiday season, such is the impression looking down from the balcony into the orchestra section of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center when, night after night and every matinee, the New York City Ballet puts on its Christmas classic, The Nutcracker.
Lights darken, noises dim, Tschaikovsky's overture pours fourth in creamy swirls of sound, audible Nesselrode. The gold curtain pleats upward in damask swags to reveal a gay party in nineteenth-century Germany—mothers in hoopskirts, dashing, mustached papas, daughters in ball dresses, little boys in velvet suits—all rushing happily about the stage, bowing, curtsying, whirling with glee.
A crooked old man enters, leaning on a stick. The children flock around him. He is Herr Drosselmeier, and he has brought to the party with him a very special Christmas gift, a magic nutcracker. Soon he will tell them a story about it, an elaborate and cracked tale first penned by E. T. A. Hoffman: that is his nutcracker suite. But first he distributes nuts, real nuts, to the eager children. In the Balanchine staging, a restaging of the master's own dream of magical childhood, seven tiny girls in mauve pantaloons cluster around the old man's knees. In fact they are seven infant ballerinas, rigorously chosen, the crème de la crème of very young students at the ballet school which trains many of the dancers who will one day join the Company's corps de ballet, one of the best the world has known.
The seven child ballerinas tease, plead, twirl, cajole. The candy box of audience children holds its sweet breath. To which one of the seven will Herr Drosselmeier present his very first nut? The child ballerinas themselves do not know. Indeed, they have made it a game, a very secret game, just between themselves and the gnarled old man. Which one will he choose tonight? they wonder as they dart enchantingly about. Lately, though, the game has gone flat. Lately he always chooses the same dancer. He always gives the first nut to the tiniest one of them all. She is a grave child who never smiles. She is eight years old. Her name is Ariadne.
1978
... AT SIX FORTY-FIVE Sunday morning, Berenice Bradshaw heard the ancient Ford pickup cough and gargle in the driveway and knew her husband was leaving for work. Mrs. Bradshaw was seventy-five years old, and slightly deaf. She did not actually hear the old man leave his small room just across the hall from her own, or run his tepid bath. She did not hear him do his thirty-one pushups, or stir up his breakfast of oatmeal with evaporated milk, or hack off and brown-bag the chunk of her meat loaf that would become his lunch. But she knew he had done each of these things. The Bradshaws had moved into the bungalow on South Gilmer Drive one April day in 1937, and every single morning since then Franklin Bradshaw had followed precisely the same routine, Saturday and Sunday mornings included: 15,055 tepid baths, 15,055 pots of oatmeal.
Franklin Bradshaw would not return home from the disheveled old Bradshaw Auto Parts warehouse, hard by the Union Pacific railroad tracks, until after nine o'clock. Time was when he did not get home from work until ten or eleven or even midnight, but he was seventy-six now, and lacked the energy he once had. By the time he came home she would have eaten supper and be down in her small split-level basement office, pasting snapshots into her photograph albums or working on her genealogy charts. He would warm up his own supper: more meat loaf, which she had prepared for him during the day, and Jell-O with fruit, and perhaps a homemade bran muffin. While he ate, he would read his newspaper. 15,055 copies of the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Weekdays or weekends, year in and year out, the routine never varied. So on this particular Sunday morning, July 23, 1978, when she heard Franklin's old blue Courier truck starting up, Berenice Bradshaw did what she had done on so many other identical Sundays: she rolled over and went briefly back to sleep. At 8:30 A.M. Mrs. Bradshaw got up and went down to the basement to awaken her seventeen-year-old grandson Larry, who was spending the summer with his grandparents. She warned him not to be late for his ten-thirty flying lesson out at Skyhawk Aviation, near the Great Salt Lake. Larry was never easy to awaken, and this morning it took longer than usual. Larry had worked at the warehouse with his grandfather the evening before, the only time this summer the boy had set foot down there. The rambunctious Schreuder grandsons, Larry and his brother Marc, were not popular with the other employees. Last year, after the two sixteen-year-olds had spent the summer working at Bradshaw's, some employees had threatened to quit. That was why this summer Granny Bradshaw was paying $3,500 for Larry to take flying lessons instead.
A few minutes past ten o'clock Mrs. Bradshaw's doorbell rang. On her front porch was a police officer accompanied by a Mormon elder and Doug Steele, manager of Bradshaw Auto Parts and her husband's oldest friend. She asked them in and the elder told her to sit down. He knelt down beside her. "We hate to do this, Berenice," he said. "We've had a tragic accident. It concerns your husband ..."
"I don't understand." She turned to Doug Steele. "What's he trying to say, Doug?"
"Berenice, Frank's been shot. He's been killed."
"Oh, my God! My God!"
"Now, help us out, Berenice. I know you've got some tranquilizers around here. Where are they?" Steele brought the pills and some water and Mrs. Bradshaw calmed down somewhat and the policeman said it looked like a robbery. The cash register was open, Frank's wallet and some coins and credit cards were scattered on the floor.
"What'll we do, Doug? What'll we do?"
The grizzled manager put his arm around her heaving shoulders. "We have to reach out for the family now, Berenice. Get hold of the girls."
All day long Mrs. Bradshaw, assisted by her grandson, tried to reach her three married daughters, two in New York City and one in Oregon. But this was July and a Sunday. Nobody was at home. It would be past midnight before she spoke to them all.
At 5:45 P.M. Mrs. Bradshaw and Larry went down to the Hall of Justice to give their statements to the police. No gun had been found, they were told, and there were no witnesses, no clues of any kind. The old man had been ambushed, shot in the back. It could have been anyone.
"I believe in capital punishment, so help me," Mrs. Bradshaw said. The widow answered all the police officers' questions. She told them her daughters' names and addresses. She described her husband's work habits, his business, his employees, "all very, very fine ... wonderful men ..."
They asked about her husband's will. She had not yet had time to look for it, she said. "Nothing but callers and phones all day." But she thought a copy was somewhere in her basement files. "I've seen it ... but my family didn't like it, and he didn't like it. And so it is still there, but nobody likes it."
"Was your husband a rich man?"
"He told me we were poor."
The murdered man was far from poor. Bradshaw was by training a geologist who in 1929 had been shrewd enough to go into the auto parts business at the dawn of the cross-country motoring era, and to set up shop at the edge of the worst stretch of automotive badlands between the Atlantic and the Pacific. One store soon became a chain, and the stores pulled in a small river of cash. Bradshaw was determined to sequester every dime from the hated Bureau of Internal Revenue. Over the years his money had been quietly and extremely wisely invested, and reinvested—first in the stock market and in the successful chemicals company he founded, but finally and most extensively in federal oil and gas leases on the public lands which constitute seventy percent of the state of Utah. When he had leased as much land as the law permits a single individual to hold in a single state, 200,000 acres, he branched out to other states. Slowly, and almost invisibly, Bradshaw built up a one-man archipelago of oil and gas rights that spanned every state between the Mississippi River and Hawaii. Because of the 200,000-acre limit, the leases were held not just in his own name but in the names of his wife, his children, his grandchildren. It had all been done in a very low-key manner, and by the time of his murder the old man owned twenty-eight automotive stores and unknown millions of acres of oil land. Single-handedly, he had accumulated the largest estate ever probated by the state of Utah. His net worth was estimated by the Salt Lake City Tribune to be at least $60 million, and some knowledgeable sources said that, when all was counted, the figure could exceed $400 million.
... THE FUNERAL could not be scheduled until noon on Wednesday. The day after the murder, Monday, July 24, was Pioneer Day, the biggest holiday on the Mormon calendar. It commemorates the arrival of the Mormons, after years of hardship and persecution, in Zion, the Promised Land, and on that day the entire city shuts down so the Latter-day Saints can attend the big LDS parade up Main Street to the Mormon Temple.
One of the handful of people to go to work on Pioneer Day was Dr. Serge Moore, Medical Examiner of the State of Utah. He commenced his autopsy of Frank Bradshaw at nine o'clock Monday morning and finished about two hours later. The old man had been shot twice, both times at fairly close range. One bullet had entered the middle of his upper back, the other the base of his skull. Either would have been fatal. The killer had used hollow-point, copper-jacketed Remington-Peters ammunition—bullets whose copper-sheathed nose peels back on impact into equal segments, like a lily.
The damage was fearful. The back of the skull and brains had been blown away. Police photographs of the scene, which the surgeon kept beside him for orientation as he worked, were almost surreal. On a worn and dirty floor, a skinny old man lay on his back in an attitude of terror. A penumbra of bright blood haloed his head and shoulders. His mouth was stretched wide in its final scream. His lower plate had come loose and dangled in the mouth opening. The eyes, also open, were wild. The arms were upflung in surprise or fright, but the open palms bracketing the gaunt gray face at ear level were in an attitude of benediction, and long strands of gray-white hair floated out across the surface of the crimson puddle. The agitated, red-edged figure resembled a sixteenth-century cardinal painted by El Greco.
But the portrait's ecclesiastical quality stopped abruptly at shoulder level. The body on the dusty floor was dressed in a ragged orange polo shirt with penguins on it, and cheap black-and-white-checked trousers. The front pockets had been pulled inside out. From the neck down it looked as if some elderly derelict had wandered into camera range, collapsed, and died.
Dr. Moore sealed the two bullets into plastic bags to turn over to Homicide, cleaned up, and went home to get ready for the big parade.
... WEDNESDAY JULY 26 broke bright blue and blazing, another furnace-like day of desert heat baking the high Wasatch Valley. By eleven o'clock, an hour before the service, the large parking lot at Eastman's Evans & Early mortuary, finest in town, was completely filled with the kind of sturdy, Detroit-built automobiles favored by Frank Bradshaw's relatives, friends and employees. These people, and their children, now sat sweltering and quietly fanning themselves on rows of pale blue folding chairs. For the first time any of them could remember, Bradshaw Auto Parts was closed in the daytime.
As more and more mourners arrived and overflowed the main chapel, attendants seated them in a backup funeral parlor where they could at least hear the service over loudspeakers. Even the first arrivals, in the main chapel, had nothing much to look at—no casket, no altar, just the stiff floral tributes massed at the front of the long, blue room, and a small wooden lectern. When it was time to begin, the immediate family members would be seated in a blue-draped semi-private niche off to the left, shielded from the larger public view. Organ music played softly.
Marilyn Bradshaw Reagan, the eldest daughter, had planned her father's memorial service, reviewing with the undertakers the many available options, choosing the details she and her mother preferred, always mindful of certain tensions within the larger family. The Bradshaws are an honored Mormon dynasty. Franklin Bradshaw was one of the ten children born to John Franklin and Emma Briggs Bradshaw between 1880 and 1910. The family homestead was in Lehi, a pioneer Mormon settlement a few miles south of Salt Lake City, and from there Bradshaw uncles and cousins had prospered and branched out variously in banking, real estate, insurance, and farming.
As the youngest and last surviving brother, Franklin had inherited the position of family patriarch. But Frank was not much like his churchly, conservative brothers. He rarely attended family weddings or funerals, let alone regular Sunday services. He did not wear holy undergarments. Certainly Frank Bradshaw did not tithe ten percent of his earnings to the church. He was in fact known as something of a tightwad, a man who toured his auto parts empire by Greyhound Bus, a man who preferred to reoutfit himself, when it became absolutely necessary, at the Army-Navy store.
It is questionable whether he believed in the beautiful life eternal, life everlasting, which is the foundation of the Mormon faith. His wife Berenice said not; that he had just pretended to go along in order to keep peace within the devout Bradshaw clan. Bertha Beck, his deeply pious baby sister, said she knew better. "He told me he looked forward to meeting Mother again!" she huffed.
Certainly Franklin Bradshaw would have approved his wife and daughter's decision to have him cremated, that being both the most efficient and cheapest way to deal with an autopsied corpse. But the choice was viewed with disfavor by the Bradshaws. The entire edifice of the Latter-day Saints' belief rests on the certitude of a Second Coming, and as daughter Marilyn said later, "Whereas you don't have to have a body to come back to, it's considered definitely better if you do."
Most of the delicate problems in planning his memorial stemmed from the fact that Frank Bradshaw had married outside his faith. Idaho-born Berenice Jewett Bradshaw was regarded by the Bradshaws as a gentile—the Mormon term for all non-Mormons. Her husband's family, though always polite, had never fully accepted her. Berenice, serene and proud in the knowledge that her own ancestors were Huguenots, and that she was a direct descendant of Maximilian Jewett, a Yorkshireman who had settled in Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1638, did not particularly care what the Bradshaws thought of her. Her outspoken scorn for their religious views made that clear. "They believe the sky up there is all full of little invisible angels!" she would hoot. But she had bitterly resented the semiostracism accorded her children when they were growing up in Utah. To punish small children for their mother's intransigence was unfair and cruel.
It was nearly noon. Marilyn Reagan waited with her mother and two sisters in the stuffy family anteroom. On the whole, she was pleased with the way things were going. The ivory-colored programs had been nicely printed up, and the hired soloist would sing her mother's two favorite hymns. Berenice had studied voice before her marriage, and her children often heard her singing and accompanying herself on the family upright: "Oh, I come to the garden alone, While the dew is still on the ro-oses ... And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own ..."
But all that was long past. Franklin and Berenice Bradshaw had had four children. The firstborn, Robert, had died twelve years ago, and long before that his three sisters had scattered to lead their own lives. Even the old parlor piano was long gone ... After the hymn, Marilyn had asked her father's kindly cousin Wayne Hacking to be the first speaker, followed by Franklin's handsome young nephew, Craig Bradshaw. When Craig was finished, the soloist would sing "Going Home," and then the bereaved family would hasten back to Gilmer Drive to receive the numerous condolence callers who were expected. Aunt Bertha Beck was at the house now. She had volunteered to stay behind to answer phone calls and set out the many platters of food. Aunt Bertha didn't mind missing the funeral. She already felt very close to God, and to her brother Franklin. She certainly didn't need any memorial service to remind her of either one.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nutcracker by Shana Alexander. Copyright © 1985 Shana Alexander. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Part One: Overtures
- 1981
- 1978
- 1985
- 1983
- Part Two: The Family
- Part Three: The Boiling Up
- Part Four: The Boiling Over
- Part Five: The Closing In
- Part Six: The Closing Down
- Afterword
- Image Gallery
- Index
- About the Author
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