The House on Primrose Lane

The Man from Primrose Lane lived a lie and died a millionaire.

By Phil McIntyre

The door was unlocked, even though the dead man inside was a notorious recluse. Patrolman Thomas Sackett stepped inside.

It was June, 21st, 2008. Minutes earlier, sixteen-year-old William Beachum had phoned 911 to report that the old man who lived in the house was not answering the door. As Sackett had learned that morning, Beachum sometimes ran errands and did grocery shopping for the old man. Beachum’s older brother, Albert, had passed the job onto him some time ago.

As his eyes adjusted, Sackett looked around. He called out for the old man but received no answer. He looked inside a coat closet by the front door and found boxes of mittens stacked there—the hermit was often seen shuffling down Merriman in West Akron, wearing knitted mittens, even in the middle of summer.

Then he noticed the blood.

It coated the foyer floor as if a bleeding body had been dragged across it. The blood began in the kitchen, where the old man’s fingers were discovered in a blender, ground to pulp.

Patrolman Tom Sackett discovered the man’s body in the living room.

The Man From Primrose Lane, as he was known in the neighborhood, was still sitting up. He’d been shot in the gut, his fingers chopped off. Dead for at least a couple days.

“Most of the blood had come from the open wounds on the man’s hands,” says Sackett. “He would probably have survived the gun shot.”

Akron’s Homicide team was called in.

“We couldn’t find any prints,” says Sackett. “We only found two partials. One in the tank of the toilet, the other on the back of the bedpost. Someone scrubbed the house clean before we got there, the doorknobs and walls wiped of fingerprints. It’s likely it was the Man From Primrose Lane, himself. ”

But who was the Man From Primrose Lane, and who would have motive to murder a fiercely private man in such a gruesome manner?

The house on Primrose Lane is listed under the name Joseph Howard King, according to records obtained from the Summit County Auditor’s Office. It was purchased in 1979, for $15,000 and the buyer paid cash. At first, detectives assumed that Joe King was the true identity of the Man From Primrose Lane.

Police also used the information provided to the Auditor’s office thirty years ago to find an account and safe-deposit box at a local Charter One bank, under King’s name.

“The Man from Primrose Lane died with at least $3.4 million in stocks and bonds,” says Mike Weger of Confidential Investigations, the private investigative firm hired by Albert Beachum. “And another $700,000 in a personal savings account.”

That’s three million reasons someone would want to kill the man. “It’s definitely a possible motive,” admits Lieutenant Mark Gareau. But first, someone would have to come forward and identify themselves as the man’s next-of-kin, and that seems unlikely considering what the private investigator discovered next.

Weger tracked King’s birth certificate to a hospital in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Using the city’s birth records, he located a possible relative, another King born to the same parents listed on Joe King’s certificate, at the same hospital, in 1928, two years after King was delivered there. The woman’s name was Carol. She has since married and changed her last name to Dechant. Weger found her in Pennsylvania. “And that’s when things got really weird,” says Weger.

Dechant informed the investigator that her younger brother had died in a car crash, along with their parents, in 1932. Whoever the Man from Primrose Lane was, he wasn’t Joe King.

The P.I. had uncovered a decades-old crime. The Man from Primrose Lane had stolen a dead boy’s identity and had used it to lay low in Akron for at least thirty years. Perhaps this old crime had something to do with his murder.

Police returned to the scene and swept the house again for new clues. Detectives were shocked to discover, inside the dead man’s home, a box of composition notebooks that detailed the life of a young woman named Katy Keenan from age six to her eighteenth birthday. According to a source close to the investigation, Keenan claims she has never met the Man from Primrose Lane. She refused comment for this story. However, she posted this message on her Facebook wall: “I’d like people to respect my privacy. Something that hasn’t been respected, apparently, for the last ten years.”

Though police do not consider Keenan a suspect, one detective, who asked to remain anonymous, believes she holds the key to this unsolved murder. He points to a passage from the notebooks in which the writer admits to following her into a movie theater because he wanted to protect her from other men who might be interested in her. In another, he admits to being in love with her.

“I don’t believe that the killer’s motive was money,” says Sackett, who was recently promoted to detective. “There is no relative who stood to inherit his fortune. So what is the motive? One possible motive might be someone close to Keenan finding out about those notebooks and confronting the man about it and then things escalated and got out of hand.”

It’s worth noting that Keenan’s father has refused to speak with investigators. He has a prior record for assault in Cuyahoga County. He did not return repeated calls for comment.

But that still doesn’t answer the question on everyone’s mind—just who was the Man from Primrose Lane to begin with?

“Look, that’s not my concern,” says Lt. Gareau. “My job is to find out who killed this man. I don’t care if the guy was running from the law, or from creditors, or a nagging wife. Someone murdered him. And we’re going to find out who did it.”

(Mandy Dissell contributed to this story.)

Email Phil McIntyre: philmcintyre58@hotmail.com

Last week, a beautiful EP by new artist Arms&Suites went up for free download. Lush, deep bass, floating vocal snippets, and sublime synths careen around an echoing space. The four track EP is available through Bandcamp and well worth the effort to snag.

Arms&Suites EP (Download)

Tracklisting
1. My Masterpiece.mp3 04:07
2. Brainwash 03:36
3. 925 04:39
4. Royal Courtyard 04:39

What the eff just happened?

Like all good revolutions, ours started in a bar.

            A year ago, we met inside the Spitfire Saloon at the edge of Cleveland, on West 117: the bar’s owner, Stosh Burgess; former Free Times marketing guy, Ray Leonardi; former Free Times classifieds sales leader, Alice Leslie; and me, a guy who had written for Scene and Free Times before being fired by New Scene’s owners when I suggested they couldn’t run a newspaper if they didn’t have the cajones to publish real stories.

            Our new alternative weekly, The Independent, launched last August. We divvied up 8,000 copies and distributed them hap-hazzardly around NE Ohio. By our last issue, we were printing 20,000 copies and had a distribution system that got the paper out across Greater Cleveland and A-K-Rowdy in 24 hours. What started as a once-every-six weeks pamphlet had become 24 pages of unrivaled free content that came out every three weeks.

            But today, we’re stopping the presses.

            What happened?

            Advertising.

            Miraculously we managed to pull together enough advertising to break even on the issues towards the end. The only problem was that some advertisers could only be bothered to pay once every few issues. Eventually you can only float and juggle so much capital to pay the printers while you’re waiting for the checks to come in. In the meantime, there are writers and sales reps to pay—those of us with a share in the company, by the way, never saw a dime.

            That’s not to say all our advertisers were cheapskates. The majority were wonderful to us. Melt was reliable from the first issue. The Improv and Funny Stop funded an entire section of the paper. Water Street Tavern in Kent was loyal from the start. Things like Roc Bar closing up didn’t help—they were our biggest advertiser. In the end, the paper became a monster that wanted more than we could feed it.

            This isn’t how papers are started. You can’t do it a piece at a time. We learned that the hard way. You have to start with a sizable investment, allow yourself some time to grow. It’s amazing it lasted as long as it did—a testament to the hard work of our sales team and writers who brought the good stories—and, of course, to Stosh who kept us afloat for so long.

            So what happens now?

            The hope is that we can find some investors who realize Cleveland needs another voice, who see the vacuum left by the loss of the Free Times. There have been talks…

            But it could take awhile.

            I hope we’ll be back.

            There’s even a part of me that’ll miss delivering. Sometimes, Morgan, the bartender and owner of Moriarity’s bar near Short Vincent, would give me a dash of scotch when I dropped off his copies of the new issue.

            I love that stuff. And I fucking love Cleveland. I love that it’s so hard to make it here.

            So, we’ll see.

            In the meantime, thanks for picking up The Independent when you could.

-James Renner

DOWNLOAD!/STREAM!

I’d really like to include a tracklisting, but it’s all kinda lost to time. There’s a bit of everything rock related, though. Anything garagey like the Box Elders or the Coachwhips crops up. But there’s some older, psych/beat sounds from Serge Gainsbourg, Unfolding and the Artwoods. Cop it well…

Bigfoot hates group photos!

The annual Ohio Bigfoot convention wrapped up yesterday. Among those on hand was Bob Gimlin, one of the men who captured the shaky footage of a Northwestern “bigfoot” jogging along a riverbank–his film remains the best evidence of this creature to date. The Bigfoot Field Reporter has the full review.

Fulgeance – Donky Pitch 1st Birthday Mix (Download)

Tracklist:
01. CHARLES TREES – MAHJONGG (Musique Large)
02. FULGEANCE – GLAMOURE (Musique Large)
03. FULGEANCE – GREY BLUE (Musique Large)
04. MUX MOOL – WOLF TONE SYMPHONY (Paul White Remix) (Ghostly Recordings)
05. AD BOURKE – FLIGHT DECK (Treble O)
06. JAY DILLA – HOT SHIT (I’M BACK) – The Roots Version (Okay Player)
07. DZA – SHIFTY (JustLikeMusic & Apple Juice Break)
08. SHLOHMO – ANTIGRAVITY (Fulgeance Remix) (Friends Of Friends Music)
09. EVERYDAYZ – DYSTOPIE 1.4 (cdr)
10. LANDO KAL – FUZZY ANKLES (Numbers)
11. MISEL QUITNO – PULL IT OUT SOMEWHERE (Dimlite Remix) (Eastroke)
12. CHRIS LATUL – NEW MORNING (Eye Records)

            The song and the video, soon to be viral, was the brainchild of Mike Polk, best known for his “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism” short. Christina Grozik, former director of the Ohio Film Office, produced. The song was a rewrite of “We Are the World,” featuring lots of grimace-inducing solos from recognizable faces.

            On hand were: Governor Ted Strickland, Cleveland City Councilmen Zack Reed and Anthony Brancantelli, Dick Goddard, Carl Monday, Bill Martin, Jeff Blanchard, Big Chuck, County Commish Peter Lawson Jones, and more.

            Sadly, though an invite was extended, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson passed (has anybody seen him lately? What’s it take to get him out of the house—other than a random shooting?). Also not present was Michael Stanley, who is still a little sore at Polk for his “Michael Stanley, the Musical!” schtick. C’mon, Stanley! Time to make up. It was created out of love.

            Look for it online soon.

-James Renner

            Billed as a discussion of the “role” of the new county council created by passage of Issue 6, the downtown forum featured Rawson, a self-proclaimed “framer” of the new county charter, and Kent State political science professor Pete Crossland, a veteran member of the Summit County Council. The forum began with repeated warnings to the audience, which included a number of council candidates, to behave themselves and be “respectful” – perhaps because Rawson herself and fellow “framer” Martin Zanotti had just dissed the candidates for council en masse all over Cleveland media as nothing but a bunch of retread hacks.

            Only thing Judy Rawson was missing was a tricorn colonial hat and a frilly wig as she waxed philosophic about how she and her fellow “framers” viewed the role of the council under the new charter – which amounted to no role whatsoever. Rawson seems to believe the charter created a board of trustees, not a legislature, despite Section 3.01 of the charter itself explicitly stating the council is a “co-equal branch of the County government with the executive branch.” When Rawson proclaimed the ideal staff for the entire 11-member council should be “2 or 3 people,” the room audibly snickered. 

            Crossland, himself a county councilor in Summit County for over two decades, contradicted Rawson on almost every single point, based on his own belief that a county legislature of the type created by Issue 6 really ought to be a “co-equal” branch of government, particularly given the number of governmental offices Issue 6 eliminated.

            During the Q&A, I asked Rawson who these “framers” of Issue 6 were, and she immediately barked out, Harriet Applegate of the AFL-CIO and Congresswoman Marcia Fudge. This would be news to them, given that both Applegate & Fudge endorsed against and fought to kill Issue 6. I then asked Rawson if there was any record of drafts of the charter, or these discussions among “framers” about their “intentions.” Rawson point blank said, “no”. I asked why. Rawson said they didn’t really expect a new charter to pass, and besides, that’s in the past, let’s move on.

            Rawson would like us all to believe that there is no document, electronic or on paper, no email traffic, no evidence of a single changed, revised, or discarded word from any draft of any part of the charter, anywhere, in the possession of any of these self-proclaimed “framers”.  

            Given that Rawson has lied to this newspaper about her knowledge of gambling trips Martin Zanotti took with Kevin Kelley, it’s not surprising Rawson would deliver a blanket whopper this laughable on its face in front of a room of potential county councilors. 

Who said county reform wasn’t entertaining?

-Tim Russo

Summer Reading Special Issue

We should never do special issues—that was one of Ray’s warnings when we launched The Independent last August. Ray is our marketing director. We worked together at the Free Times, where he was their marketing guy, too. Special issues, like “Best Of’s” and “Back to Campus” editions, are ridiculous undertakings for small publications. It requires changes in layout, promotion, advertising, and, of course, content. But, in the end, it sounded like a hoot.

            This edition—our Summer Reading issue—is our first special issue. It is a collection of new and unpublished stories by NE Ohio writers. Most of them still live here—and Lisa Black used to, but now writes about Cleveland crime from a safe distance.

            Hopefully, it serves as inspiration to aspiring writers out there. Here are a handful of authors who made it work from here.

            I thought this was an important issue to publish, too, because there are so many voracious readers around here who don’t realize how many great storytellers are living amongst us. People like Dan Chaon, Richard Montanari, Sarah Willis, Mary Doria Russell, Samrat Upadhyay, to name a few. And let’s not forget Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, who paints landscapes in and around Coventry these days.

            In fact, when you take a good look, we have more published authors here than a city of our size probably should. “It’s a little Mecca,” explains Jean Mansour, Executive Director of The Lit, a NE Ohio nonprofit that supports and trains new writers. “These are the quintessential crafts people that live here. Not people who just dabble. But writers who are dedicated to their craft.”

            I wonder how much this has to do with our struggles as a region; strife breeds creativity, after all. What would the 20^th Century be without The Grapes of Wrath? Or, for that matter, The Bell Jar? When I first heard that Cleveland was the epicenter for the Credit Crunch that brought about this Great Recession, my first thought was, ‘I wonder how many stories will come out of that?’ Already, you can see its influence thematically in a couple of the yarns found here—most notably, Scott Lax’s The Crack and Jen Hirt’s Glass Always Breaks.

            If there’s one thing Cleveland does really well, it endures. In many ways, this was the most fortunate place for the beginning of the banking industry’s collapse. We surely recognized it faster than other cities would have—we look for these things, because we are survivors—and we alerted the rest of the country. We don’t take luxury for granted, we understand it is fleeting. And for that reason, our writing can and should offer a bit of optimism for everyone else. Look—Cleveland’s starting to pick itself up!

            Psst, a championship might speed things up a bit, though!

            And perhaps this, too, is the reason why so many local writers never leave after they sell a book or two or three. NE Ohio knows endless hardship. To writers, that can be a well of inspiration that never runs dry. Just try to find something to say about the struggles of humanity in a place like San Diego. Sure, you don’t have to deal with the winters, but the winters here offer so much time for writing! What else can you do when you’re snowed in for three days?

            Whatever the real reason, we’re lucky to know so many good storytellers. Please take this newspaper with you so you can read it at your leisure—and when you’re done, go find their books!

-James Renner