Ex's obsession ends in murder of quadruplets' mom
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Ann Rule titles her latest book, "Every Breath You Take: A True Story of Obsession, Revenge and Murder" after the Police's 1983 hit single. I read it, though, listening to a recently deceased mixer who deliberately dragged his own turntable, producing a slow-motion, medicated patina on a fierce basso profundo. "I'm still a hustler from inside my sooooooul" he moans, and it sounds like the concealed spirit of Allen Blackthorne, business mogul, retired before 40, with a huge mansion, a slavish mate and a painstakingly concealed record of lying, cheating, stealing, violence and sexual obsession.
Painstakingly concealed, that is, until Nov. 7, 1997.
On that afternoon, Blackthorne's older daughter, Stevie, discovered her mother, Shelia Bellush, Allen's ex-wife, lifeless in a wash of blood. Shelia's toddler quadruplets by her second husband huddled weeping in a hall near the body. Tiny crimson footprints surrounded Shelia in the modest rambler's kitchen as Sarasota, Fla., sunshine shone down outside.
The tragedy behind those footprints nominally began 2,516 miles to the northwest, where Allen Blackthorne was born William Allen Van Houte in Eugene, Ore., in 1955. His father ran off before his birth. Allen grew up with a mother who drank and threatened suicide incessantly. She eventually blew off one arm bumping a shotgun she meant to use on husband No. 3 — after she'd pumped six .22-caliber slugs into his groin (oddly enough, No. 3 lived).
Allen's maternal grandparents doted on their daughter's little boy. But underneath his ready grin and intuitive, ingratiating manner lay a scheming mind fueled by a scarred heart. Getting his way satisfied him in the short haul. Corroding loving relationships became something of a life's work.
Shelia Leigh Walsh emerged in 1962 in Topeka, Kan. Like the man she would marry, she grew up in a scrambled family. Divorces, remarriages, half-siblings and the odd widowing littered the three generations around her. She met Allen in 1982. By their third date she decided to marry the dashing, vibrant stereo-store owner. Allen vastly expanded his business on a line of credit his in-laws gladly opened up for him. Michael Jackson's epochal, sinister "Beat It" blasted from Allen's many speakers that year, and, yes, the Police's "Every Breath You Take."
Five years, two daughters, two major moves and several serious beatings later, Shelia got out. Allen had maliciously ruined her parents' credit, and she'd broken their hearts by standing by him at first. (He'd also taken the surname "Blackthorne," from the protagonist of the novel "Shogun," in part to conceal his past.)
Allen launched all-out war. He fought any financial concession tooth and nail. He offered to help his ex get a home — carefully picked so he could monitor her movements day or night. When Shelia remarried, he turned the new couple's next-door neighbors against them.
And when Shelia, mother of quadruplets by her second husband, moved to Florida to escape Allen's omnipresent thumb, Allen quietly upshifted. He started by offering a bookie, Danny Rocha, money and big-shot status if Rocha could have Shelia beaten. Rocha scared up Sammy Gonzales and his cousin, Jose "Joey" Del Toro. Teenage Joey went Texas-to-Florida to pull a trigger and use a knife on a woman he'd never met.
"Allen's test results did not indicate that he was an antisocial personality," Rule observes. "He was far more complicated than that."
Rule usually offers a diagnosis of her villain in her final pages. The undeniable novelty and fascination of this tale aside, Allen Blackthorne's inscrutability only points up an incompleteness in her trope. We cannot pinpoint where he ticked over into lunacy, or from that state to homicidal determinism.
The hired guns, dismissed by a Blackthorne attorney as "The Three Stooges," look even stranger and sadder. None had been violent before; where and when did they say yes, inwardly, to destruction of a stranger for profit?
Hustlers inside their souls they may all be, but even so, that's hardly definitive. We can't see that far inside.
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