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CHAPTER 1
A Collision Course with Infamy
DONALD DEFREEZE WAS BORN IN Cleveland, Ohio, on November 15, 1943. His mother, Mary, worked in a convalescent home as a nurse. Any nurturing she provided her son, the eldest of eight, was obliterated by his father, a tool maker whose blind rages at his son included attacks on the boy with a baseball bat and a hammer. DeFreeze once told a prison therapist that his father broke his arm on three occasions, twice when he was ten and another time when he was twelve.
By the age of fourteen, DeFreeze's internal rage reached its first boiling point. He finished the ninth grade in Cleveland, but his animosity toward his father was so great that Mary DeFreeze, to avoid any more domestic violence, arranged for young Donald to live with a cousin in Buffalo, New York. After a brief stay, the sullen DeFreeze was then bounced to the home of a fundamentalist black preacher, the Reverend William L. Foster, and his family.
This was the chance for DeFreeze to follow a path of normalcy and acceptance. He studied the Bible with the commitment of someone yearning for a lifeline. Foster described him as a "get up and go kid" who made spare money by collecting and selling junk and scrap metal.
But the neighborhood took hold of DeFreeze in a way religion could not.
"He had a heart as big as a house," Reverend Foster said. "But some of the boys he used to hang out with I didn't care for. You just knew," he insisted, paraphrasing an old Ivory Snow soap advertisement, "they were 99 and 44/100 percent bad."
The boy who would be on the FBI's Most Wanted List began his criminal career with a gang called the Crooked Skulls. In August 1960, he was arrested attempting to break open a parking meter. A mere nine days later, when he attempted to steal a car and pistol, DeFreeze was again arrested. This time, stripped of the warm embrace of the Foster household, he was sent to a boys' reformatory in Elmira, New York. In a fourteen-page, 1970 letter to Superior Court Judge William Ritzi, detailing much of his past and asking for leniency in a bank robbery sentencing, DeFreeze referred to the Elmira reformatory as the beginning of his political consciousness.
"Life in the prison, as we called it, was nothing but fear and hate, day in and day out." He was denigrated by all the boys at Elmira because "I would not be a part of any of the gangs, black or white. ... I didn't hate anyone, black or white, and they hated me for it."
In another genuine attempt to settle down and find a way to fit into society, he returned to the Fosters after two years, at the age of eighteen. In love with their daughter, Harriet, he asked her parents for her hand in marriage. She was fourteen years old. They refused, and he left Buffalo, bitter, rootless, and brokenhearted.
He drifted to Newark, New Jersey, where he met Gloria Thomas, who was twenty-three and already had three children. The father was nowhere in sight. "She was nice and lovely," he wrote in the 1970 letter. "I fell in love with her, I think. I believe I was just glad and happy that anyone would have me the way I was."
DeFreeze was legally obliged to get his parents' permission for the nuptials. They consented but told him he was a fool. In 1963, Donald and Gloria were married. He was nineteen years old, a high school dropout, and suddenly a father of three with no marketable skills.
The Reverend James A. Scott, who presided over the ceremony in Newark, observed the woman as being "very talkative while DeFreeze was quiet, passive, reserved."
"Things were lovely all the way up to a few months," DeFreeze stated in his fourteen-page autobiographical sketch sent to the aforementioned judge, but after a fight, Gloria yelled "she didn't love me at all, but that she needed a husband and father for her kids."
He hoped their first biological child would mend the rift in their marriage, "but as soon as the baby was born, it was the same thing, I had begun to drink very deeply but I was trying to put up with her and hope she would change. But as the years went by [she] never did."
Less than one year after the marriage, DeFreeze was ordered to appear in court for desertion.
DeFreeze and his wife eventually added a total of three children to the family, but his struggles to find steady work led Gloria to berate him and, according to DeFreeze, after a mere seven months, to be unfaithful.
"I came home sooner than I do most of the time from work and she and an old boyfriend had just had relationships." In disgust, DeFreeze claimed he told Thomas to go live with the boyfriend, who refused. He fought with her. He forgave her. But then he learned "that none of my wife's kids had the same father and that she had never been married," contrary to what he had been told.
"I was a little afraid but I said I would give her a good chance. ... I really put faith in her but somehow, little stories kept coming to me. One was that my boss had come to my home looking from [sic] me and that my wife had come to the door in the nude."
DeFreeze abandoned his family once for a two-month trip to Canada, but when he returned, he learned that Gloria was pregnant. He obtained two jobs to try and pay for the overdue bills.
He heard rumors about Gloria being promiscuous during his Canadian trip. Concluding that the child she had just given birth to was not his, DeFreeze separated from Gloria, and for four months she lived with another man. Unable to bear it, she returned and begged DeFreeze to forgive her. DeFreeze took her back, even if he did not fully forgive her.
The pressure of half a dozen young children, sporadic employment alternating with welfare, and a contentious marriage led the twenty-two-year-old DeFreeze to a fantasy refuge, handling guns and explosive materials.
"I started playing around with guns and fireworks and dogs and cars. Just anything to get away from life and how unhappy I was. I finely [sic] got into trouble with the police for shoting [sic] off a rifle in my basement and for a bomb I had made out of about 30 fireworks from fourth of July. After I went to court and got Probation, I was really ashamed of myself. I had not been in trouble with the police for years and now I had even lost that pride."
DeFreeze's 1970 autobiographical statement convincingly laid blame upon his father, his wife, and the crushing poverty he had to withstand. But nowhere did he detail his own inability to talk with others, to discuss the difficulties he encountered and thus, perhaps, amend them.
In fact, DeFreeze hid details of his life from friends and coworkers. He worked intermittently for an Orange, New Jersey, painting contractor who never even knew DeFreeze and his wife had any children. He perceived DeFreeze as unusually quiet except when the subject of guns came up, and then the young man waxed rhapsodic about caliber, firepower, and the like.
While in New Jersey, DeFreeze worked for a few different painting contractors and then decided he wanted to be his own boss. He started his own business, House of DeFreeze, but overextended his credit and had to endure yet another failure.
In desperation to change something in his life, DeFreeze left his family behind in March 1965. But his obsession with guns and explosives continued unabated. While hitchhiking on Interstate 10, the San Bernardino Freeway, near West Covina, an act itself illegal, DeFreeze was stopped by police. The hitchhiking was the least of their concerns. As DeFreeze reached for his identification, the cops spotted a sharpened butter knife and a tear gas canister tucked into in his waistband. With probable cause, they asked to look inside his suitcase. It contained a sawed-off shotgun.
It was sixty-four days in the state prison at Chino before DeFreeze had his day in court for possession of the shotgun and tear gas bomb. A psychiatrist, hired by the state of California to evaluate DeFreeze's propensity for handling guns and small explosives, learned of his horrific childhood.
"DeFreeze states Father tried to kill him three times," the psychiatrist noted in truncated sentences. "Used to inflict human punishment — hit him with hammers, baseball bats, etc. He shows areas on his head where he was struck and had to receive sutures. Every time he went to the hospital, his Father told them he just got hurt. The time he was picked up with the gun [at age fourteen in Cleveland], he had planned to shoot Father who had been mistreating him."
DeFreeze was released after time served in jail.
Two weeks later, DeFreeze was back in New Jersey, standing in front of another judge for the bomb and gun charges in the basement of his home. The judge continued the case for a year, and in June 1966, DeFreeze received two years probation.
"All my friends and family knew of my wife's ways," DeFreeze wrote of this period of his life. "I moved all over New Jersey but everywhere I went someone knew me or my life or about my kids. I just couldn't take it anymore. I was slowly becoming a nothing." Again, he planned to leave his family behind for California, but Gloria begged him to bring the large, poverty-stricken clan with him and DeFreeze relented. In Los Angeles, in 1967, their sixth child and last child, doomed like the others to be neglected, was born. Relocating to the Golden State did not better their lives in the least.
In the spring of 1967, DeFreeze was laid off from a car wash job. Because he was not a resident of California, he was refused welfare payments from the state. An employment training program for which he applied turned him away because of his extensive police record.
DeFreeze continued to possess illegal weapons without using them for any criminal purpose. And he also put himself in the position to be discovered with them. It was as if having guns and explosives on his person gave him a sense of power, of purpose.
Somewhat incongruously, DeFreeze was stopped on June 9, 1967, for the relatively minor infraction of running a red light on a bicycle at the intersection of Vermont and 60th Street in the inner city. He gave a fictitious name to the arresting officers and they quickly discovered his falsehood. The ensuing search revealed a homemade bomb in his pocket and another in a bag in the basket of the bike, along with a .22 caliber pistol.
DeFreeze claimed he had found these weapons and was going to sell them to support his family. His reason for not doing so was highly ironic: "I thought about the nut that would buy them and what no good he would probably have in mind and of the possibably [sic] of him killing someone with the gun, it give [sic] me a very funny feeling, a bad feeling of death in my mouth."
DeFreeze further explained that his car was repossessed and, as a result, he had lost his last job. The case was sent to Superior Court Judge Bernard Lawler, in the South Bay city of Torrance. DeFreeze brought testimonials from the Community Skill Center, where a Head Start Project worker had written that the petty criminal was "very energetic" and able to communicate well with young people.
Arnold Kaye, the probation officer assigned to DeFreeze after these charges, interviewed him and was convinced that he was not a hardened criminal but a wounded and confused man. Recommending probation rather than jail time, Kaye wrote in part, "The difficulties which the defendant has encountered in his life are real and serious. He feels his responsibilities deeply and is overcome when he cannot meet them. He appears to have a warm relationship with his wife and children.
"The type of behavior encountered in the present offense appears to be the defendant's way of compensating for feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness."
Kaye went on to conclude in his probation report that he was concerned about DeFreeze's mental stability and that it might be best to commit him, short-term, for psychiatric evaluation. He mentioned how ironic it was that only after the bicycle arrest did California's welfare department provide financial aid to the DeFreeze family and only after DeFreeze was out on bail did the job-training program make his case a priority.
To support this contention, Kaye quoted DeFreeze, who maintained, with unintentionally comedic effect, "If I had known that we could have got help by me going to jail, I could have did a lot of lesser things like broke a few windows or something." And then DeFreeze reverted to his default defense, "It would have been worth it to help my wife and kids."
Judge Lawler showed compassion. After DeFreeze pleaded guilty, the judge gave the wayward young man three more years' probation and stated, "You do have a bad record but I think you're entitled to a break in this particular instance, and I hope you will take advantage of it."
Donald DeFreeze became adept at convincing people like probation officer Kaye that he wanted to do right by his wife and children. That, coupled with no actual use of the explosives and weapons, kept him from a long sentence in jail.
But less than three months after the arrest at Vermont and 60th, DeFreeze came up with another criminal scheme. This time it involved engaging in infidelity, likely a response to being cuckolded by Gloria. In fact, the prostitute DeFreeze met shared his wife's first name. On December 2 at 3:30 in the morning, Gloria Yvonne Sanders went to a South Central Los Angeles motel with DeFreeze, where he paid her the going rate for that place and time, ten dollars, and they had sex.
Apparently less than content with Sanders's services, DeFreeze pulled out a small Derringer-style pistol, thrust it against her head, and demanded not only his ten dollars back but all the money she had made that day. Sanders stated that DeFreeze ordered her to have sex with him again, but this time, as she described it, they "performed unnatural acts."
Afterward, Sanders insisted she was cold and got DeFreeze's permission to get up and retrieve her coat. Seeing a fleeting chance to escape, she ran out the door and down the street.
DeFreeze did not flee the premises himself. He promptly fell asleep, his gun under the pillow.
He awoke to the reappearance of Sanders and to his surprise, two Los Angeles police officers. Sanders had called them on a pay phone, probably omitting the fact of what she did for a living. DeFreeze was arrested for robbery and obliterating the serial number of his stolen gun.
These charges were eventually dismissed. But DeFreeze made a crucial error in judgment as he was led away from the motel in handcuffs.
He asked Officer L. J. Henricks not to leave DeFreeze's own car at the motel for fear of it being stolen. The police obliged by impounding the vehicle. Naturally, they searched it, only to find in the trunk twelve stolen handguns in a blue canvas bag. The month before, the Western Surplus Store, 8505 S. Western Avenue in Torrance, had been robbed of about two hundred rifles and pistols. A major LAPD investigation of the weapons burglary was ongoing when they stumbled upon Donald DeFreeze and some of the two hundred firearms.
Two days later, on December 4, DeFreeze, looking at serious jail time but confident in his ability to gain probation, made an agreement with the LAPD. He promised to lead them to the man who sold DeFreeze the stolen guns in exchange for a recommendation of leniency in his sentence. The deal was accepted, and DeFreeze was escorted by officers to his home on New Hampshire Avenue, where he promised Gloria would lead them to the gun runner DeFreeze knew only as "Ron." But Gloria and the children were not at home.
DeFreeze suddenly broke and ran from his police escort. He hurled himself out of a screened window in the second floor apartment, landing in a roll on a garage roof. The stunned officers saw DeFreeze scramble off the garage roof, leap to the ground, and run. They pursued on foot, but he was gone.
The LAPD, now furious with DeFreeze, brought their wrath upon Gloria, who was in no position to resist, especially with six children to protect and raise. She suggested DeFreeze could be found at the apartment of a nearby acquaintance, a place where he often took sanctuary from his home life.
He was apprehended two days later, on December 4, 1967. In his arrest record, two officers are listed by last name, Toles and Farwell.
As will soon be seen in greater detail, DeFreeze's interaction with LAPD officer Ronald G. Farwell after the two-hundred — gun case at the Western Surplus Store drastically altered his life. Farwell entrapped DeFreeze in the life of an informant. It set DeFreeze on an inexorable path of living in constant fear of detection while trying to mentally compartmentalize the lives he ruined and the enemies he made. It was also his unendurable level of suspiciousness and intolerance for personal conflicts that eventually led him to kidnap the heiress Patty Hearst, whose secret liaison with DeFreeze ended with her abrupt rejection of him.
DeFreeze promised to lead the LAPD to his partner who ran guns. His full name, DeFreeze now remembered, was Ronald Coleman. It bought DeFreeze his freedom in the short run.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Revolution's End"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Brad Schreiber.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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