Although most writing is a lot of work, there is one time when it really is fun. That's when you've basically written the first draft of the story and you can see that the structure is right and the story more or less works. At this point, the pressure's off. You've done all the grunt work of nailing the canvas to the frame. Now you can start painting on it, which is to say relax, let the creativity flow while you add the subtle touches that make a story go from from being a mere narrative to a real story.

Return with us now to t hose thrilling days of yesteryear when his blog actually worked.

San Jose Mercury News, Sunday Magazine, 1992

Undercover operations are dangerous, stressful and morally ambiguous. And certain kinds of police officers shouldn't be involved in them at all. Unfortunately, Belmont police officer Lisa Thomas didn't know that in January of 1985 when she volunteered to go undercover against a happy-go-lucky bike- riding serial killer. In her naiveté, Thomas threw her whole heart and soul to the project. She made getting an admission of murder a matter of her personal and professional honor. And when she failed to get it, she totally fell apart.

"I just about lost it for a while," Thomas tells me as she drives around Sacramento one bright clear morning. She started neglecting work, wearing wrinkled old jeans and T-shirts, sleeping around, dating an ex-con, and pushing the limits on her credit cards till the plastic cracked.

Sometimes at night, she says, she'd go out drinking in the fields and fire off her service revolver. She suffered from insomnia, only getting 3 or 4 hours sleep for weeks on end, alternating with periods of depression where she'd sleep 18 hours a day. She found herself bursting into tears for no apparent reason.

"I don't understand," I tell Thomas. She had gone undercover to try and catch a serial killer. It didn't work out. But later the killer was caught anyway. "It doesn't sound very traumatic to me."

"I'm not a psychiatrist," protests Thomas, who alternates between cool detachment and fragile vulnerability. "I don't know how it affected me. I haven't dealt with it yet."

"But what was there to deal with? You went out and did a good job. You were a little bit disappointed."

"A little bit disappointed ?" says Thomas, with a flash of irritation as she downshifts for a traffic light. "Can you imagine, the feeling of guilt and responsibility you can feel when a 12-year-old loses his life because you failed to do your job?"


AS THE FBI REPORT would later note, Lance Turner was not someone who was a "high-risk" candidate for murder. Capable and responsible, he was interested mainly in Dungeons and Dragons, Lego blocks, Apple II computers and Garfield the Cat. He was 12 years old, 5 feet tall, 96 pounds, athletically lean, blond- haired, blue-eyed with unusually long lashes and so handsome he was pretty. He lived in Belmont, California, a quiet sun-drenched upper-middle-class bedroom community for San Francisco lawyers and Silicon Valley engineers, characterized by curving shaded residential streets, hillside homes with bay views, and a small steep-sided hillside reservoir known as Water Dog Lake.

The lake had been built in the middle of the last century as an irrigation pond for the orchards and grounds of William C. Ralston, a wealthy banker who drowned himself in the San Francisco Bay when an 1875 audit revealed his accounts were $4.5 million short. Eventually, his lake became a city park, favored by generations of hikers, joggers, picnickers and adventurous students from nearby Ralston Elementary School a quarter mile through the woods and up the hill.

On Tuesday, Oct. 2, 1984 at 4 P.M. Lance Turner was half-an-hour early for soccer practice at Ralston School. Telling his friends he wanted to swing on the rope over Water Dog Lake, Turner disappeared down the trail. When Turner failed to come home after soccer practice, Lance's father, Quincy Turner, and a family friend, attorney Bill Russell, went to search for him on the trail to Water Dog Lake.

Around 8:30 p.m. at a sharp bend in the trail, Russell's flashlight picked up the glow of a pair of blue soccer shoes 25 feet up a gully. It was Lance, lying on his back, eyes rolled back, feet crossed, stabbed, sliced and slashed some 25 times in the legs, arms, chest and throat.

The Belmont police department wasn't geared up for murder investigations. In those days, it was a small force--32 sworn officers jammed three to an office in a cramped wing of the Arts Council building. The detective in charge of the investigation, Sgt. Jim Goulart, was a genial outgoing cop with tousled curly hair, a walrus mustache under black wire rim glasses and a belly laugh that sometimes trailed off in a giggle. Unlike some cops from larger more violent cities, Goulart wasn't hardened or bitter, which is one reason perhaps he so quickly came up with a suspect.

On the afternoon that Lance Turner was killed, Goulart discovered, four girls had snuck out of Ralston School to smoke marijuana at the big tree behind the athletic field fence. There they ran into a friendly young man, 17 to 20 years old with a chunky build, 5'8" to 5'10" tall, wearing faded blue jeans and a blue polo shirt, sitting on a low branch and drinking Budweiser from a 16- ounce can. He had hazel green eyes and sandy blond hair which he wore unparted over his forehead. He said his name was John and that he'd gone to Belmont's main secondary school--Carlmont High. From the girls' descriptions, a forensic artist drew a composite sketch of the suspect. When the police showed it around Carlmont High School one of the counselors said: "That looks like Jon Dunkle."


DUNKLE WAS A WELL-REMEMBERED CHARACTER around Carlmont High. Although he was 24, he acted more like 15--he used to ride around Belmont in a little white Honda Civic hatchback playing a five-speaker stereo at full blast. He loved that car. The only problem was his temper. "That's why it has so many dents," he once told a friend. "I kick it when I get mad."

Dunkle had a 130 IQ, but had such a severe case of dyslexia he could barely read or write. Perhaps because of this, he became easily frustrated in the classroom. His face got red. He blew up. Sometimes he'd go in the counselor's office, put his head down and cry. Most adolescent males have a turbulent emotional life, but Dunkle's was boiling over. After he learned to drive, he was convicted so many times of drunken driven he lost his license (once when a police officer tried to give him a field sobriety test, he ripped the form out of the officer's hand and tore it up).

He suffered from recurring nightmares in which demonic figures with red glowing eyes carried him off in the night. He believed God spoke to him (including warning him of danger on the freeway and smiting drivers who annoyed him). Once at San Francisco airport, God spoke to him with such force that it knocked him down.

Like many young males, he thought he'd been chosen for a special mission, but he just hadn't figured out what it was yet. Despite his desperate need for affection, he had no girlfriends. He had doubts about his own masculinity and was embarrassed by his penis which, he complained, even when fully erect was only 4 3/4" long. Once when he was drunk in Half Moon Bay, he injected it with bacon fat to make it larger. He ended up in a hospital over that.

Although all this was vastly fascinating to Sgt. Goulart, it was ultimately less pertinent to the murder case perhaps than the fact that three days after the murder, Dunkle moved from Belmont to Sacramento where he was now living with his older sister and working as a Carl's Jr. fry cook in charge of french fries and onion rings. Goulart and his investigators interrogated Dunkle several times but nothing ever came of it. It wasn't that he wouldn't talk or even seemed offended by police insinuations about his sexual orientation or alleged responsibility for the death of Lance Turner.

In fact, for a murder suspect he was astoundingly cooperative, allowing detectives to make videotapes of him to show witnesses and take his pants and shoes for evidence. He never asked for an attorney. And although he was free to go at any time, he enjoyed sparing with the cops. "He liked all the attention," says Goulart. "We didn't have as much finesse as we should have. He beat us at our own game."

Concluding that pressure didn't really work on Dunkle, Goulart decided to try to earn his trust instead. For that he needed a female undercover officer who was warm, personable, more than a little ballsy and smart enough to convincingly act dumb.


LISA THOMAS IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who like to frame mementos. In the hallway of her home in a Sacramento housing tract, there's a display under glass of 8 over-extended (and now canceled) credit cards on which she ran up $25,000 in charges. There are a dozen little simulated wood plaques on the hallway ("With my luck, when my ship comes in, I'll be at the airport.") There's a book of spiritual meditations on the kitchen counter. But the most prominent feature of the house are lion photographs: the living room, hallway and bedroom walls are covered with pictures of lions sitting, sleeping, walking, nursing, fighting and otherwise looking magnificent, regal and self-assured.

"What is it you like about lions?" I ask."

"Because they're so majestic," says Thomas, "and they don't take any shit."

When off duty, Thomas dresses very casually--plaid wool lumberjack shirts over T-shirts and blue jeans. She lives alone with two large rambunctious dogs and three cats ("My family," says Thomas.) Like Dunkle, Thomas goes through tremendous mood swings, light and bubbly one minute and moody and abrupt the next. It had never had occurred to her to be a police officer when she was a child growing up in Sacramento--she was too shy, fearful and self-effacing. "My parents separated when I was a year old," she says. Her mother, an IBM programmer, was gone a lot. In the meantime, her father was remarried with a new family and she didn't see him much either. "I didn't feel like I had a family at all."

Instead Thomas spent most of her time home alone with a hamster for company. When one died she would get another: Sam I, II, III & IV. Her jeans were from K-Mart, cheap, green and embarrassing. Once a group of girls took Thomas out in a field where the leader of the group, a popular girl named Cindy (now a successful attorney) punched her in the shoulder and said: "We don't like you."

Thomas had never had much confidence to begin with but that, says Thomas, made her feel "like a geek." After that, she sat by herself in the back of the classroom, remained inconspicuous and kept her mouth shut. Thomas didn't really blossom till she graduated from the police academy and got a job at the Belmont Police Department in 1983. She loved her work. She won the Rookie-Of-The-Year award. She really felt for once in her life she was helping people. She was the kind of police officer who, when she stopped you for drunken driving, would hand you a brochure Alcoholics Anonymous along with the ticket.

Which is not to say she couldn't be tough when she had to be.

In Sept. 1984, when she and her partner went to quell a domestic disturbance, the man of the house fought with Lisa's partner and pointed a gun at her. Taking no chances, Lisa dropped into a cover position behind the couch, fired her .357 revolver and both shattered his femur and ripped a major artery. The victim who nearly died from blood loss, was so indignant to have been shot by a woman that all he could do was scream: "You bitch! You bitch!"

After that, the guys in the department treated her with renewed respect. "I remember thinking," Thomas recalls in amazement, "Hey, I'm one of the guys because I shot someone.'"


AT FIRST, THE DUNKLE UNDERCOVER OPERATION didn’t seem to Thomas to be any big deal. Sgt. Goulart happened to mention one day in the department photocopy room that this guy Jon Dunkle, whom they suspected of killing two boys from Belmont, was now working at a Carl's Jr. fast food outlet in Sacramento and they were thinking that if they could arrange for a female undercover cop to become his girlfriend, perhaps he'd relax enough to confess.

"I don't know whether he asked me or I offered," says Thomas. "That was obviously something way out of the norm for a small department like ours. But if we could pull it off, 'Yeah,' I said, 'I'd be willing to do it.'"

With the assistance of the restaurant management, Thomas got a job as Dunkle's assistant. That first night they went out for a beer. "It was amazing," says Thomas. "He just started in talking about everything: the case, the investigation, his bicycle trips, this that and the other thing. He had a newspaper clipping that said he was a suspect in this case but that he didn't do it. He would just go on and on and on talking about. He was just flattered to be the source of so much attention."

Quickly the undercover operation fell into a routine. They would work together till late-afternoon. Then they'd go bicycling, walking along the Sacramento River, playing monopoly at Dunkle's sister's house or, most frequently of all, drinking beer and playing pool for hours on end at the Wit's End, a small low-ceilinged bar in one solitary corner of a sprawling asphalt parking lot. Thomas would wear a hidden transmitter and Sgt. Goulart or his partner Sgt. Joe Farmer would be waiting in a van a block or two away tape recording the transmissions.

Most of the time, says Thomas, Dunkle was actually a quite "pleasant person to be around, very jovial, always happy and laughing and joking ... but the things he would laugh at were sick."

To ingratiate herself with Dunkle, Thomas had told him that she was currently on probation for cracking the ribs of two little girls one day while babysitting. That ticked Dunkle's funny bone. "Hey, all right ... that's pretty good. At least I got the right girlfriend... What did you do--pick 'em up and throw 'em against the TV set?"

For Thomas, Dunkle was a fascinating study: when cutting up big blocks of lard for the french fries, he noted in her nightly reports, he held the butcher knife like a dagger. Once when he got mad, he threw a basket of Carl's Jr. french fries clear across the kitchen. Still, says Thomas, the hardest part of the operation wasn't the danger--he never threatened her or laid a hand on her in anger--but the need to submerge her own personality.

It amazed and frightened Thomas how easily she dropped into the role of Dunkle's girlfriend. She would talk in this pouty little voice, like a 13 year girl in her first relationship, leaving endings off "ing" words and mangling her grammar. "I just played dumb, naive and not let myself be outspoken about what I thought or felt," says Thomas. "We always did what he wanted to do. If he had an idea and I had an idea, his idea would always go. He was the center of attention. I played a stupid bubbly girl ... a puppy dog," says Thomas, still rankled by the memory. "I followed him around every day and laughed at his stupid jokes."

Because Thomas didn't want to be fighting off Dunkle's sexual advances all the time, she dressed down--no makeup, big loose sweaters both to hide her figure and the transmitter she wore taped to her abdomen. But Dunkle was frisky anyway. "He had the sexual mind of a kid," says Thomas. They'd be playing pool in the Wit's End bar and he'd be poking her in the butt with his pool cue.

"Would you mind if I squeezed your boobs?" Dunkle would say.

"Yes," Thomas would answer.

"That's what I thought you'd say."

For Dunkle the whole investigation was one big joke, a game. "He would see what he thought was an [unmarked police car go by] and he'd laugh and wave," says Thomas. But he was shrewd too. He worried about the $45,000 reward being offered the killer's arrest and conviction. Given the police's suspicions about his involvement in murder, he asked Thomas one day, "Why would a girl be hanging out with me?"

"Is it against the law or against God to like somebody?" replied Thomas.

For Thomas, the pressures never stopped. As the Belmont chief of police pointedly observed three weeks into the operation--there was no evidence against Dunkle. The cost of the operation had postponed the department's computerization plan for an additional three years. How did they know they even had the right man?

Nor was her job made any easier by the opinion of a forensic psychiatrist that Dunkle was a sexual psychopath who liked killing, was getting better at it and was certain to kill again. In recent years he'd attacked two friends (one with a 2X4 and the other a butcher knife) and he was the prime suspect in the disappearance of another Belmont boy--15-year-old John Davies three years before.

Dunkle used to hang out at the Davies's house, eat dinner with the family, call John Davies's parents "mom & dad." Then one day John Davies simply disappeared. Over the next three years his parents, Jim and Joan Davies, spent so much time scouring the Bay Area in search of John they were forced into bankruptcy, losing both their home and their business. Finally one day in the fall of 1985, Joan Davies picked up the newspaper and saw a composite drawing of the suspected killer of Lance Turner. Suddenly it hit her. They'd wasted three years looking for their son when he'd been dead all the time. And the killer was Jon Dunkle.


GIVEN THE PRIDE with which Dunkle volunteered information about the murder investigation, Thomas had assumed that he could be induced to confess in the first couple of weeks. Instead, when he talked about the murders he would say, "If I did it, which I didn't" or "if it was me, which it wasn't." Thomas tried being empathetic and supportive, playing on their alleged "relationship majigger, or whatever you want to call it."

But Dunkle, says Thomas, "totally unpredictable. He would cancel plans at the last minute or else suddenly call you up and want to do something else." No one in the department had ever come up against anything like this before. Since it was clear that Dunkle was not going to volunteer a confession, Thomas decided to confess to a ficticious killing herself, hoping that Dunkle, in trying to top her story, would then admit to the murders of John Davies and Lance Turner.

One lazy balmy afternoon in February, while they were sitting on a log on a muddy bank of the Sacramento River drinking Jack Daniels and Coke, Thomas told Dunkle that any frank and open relationship depended on trust and that was the reason why, she said, she was now going to entrust him with her worst sins. "This is heavy duty we're talking here, I mean you could still turn me in and I'd get in trouble for this."

Dunkle was intrigued. "Give me a hint."

Thomas, who was so nervous she was giddy, explained that in San Jose a year before she and her girlfriend had gone out drinking. It was dark and rainy. There was this lonely intersection. "I was pretty messed up and like I was driving on the wrong side, okay, and .... there was a little old lady crossin' in the street."

"And you ran her over?" joked Dunkle.

"Yeah."

Dunkle was flabbergasted. "You ran her over!! "

"She was old," explained Thomas. "She was ready to die anyway. I just kinda helped her along."

"What did the paper say? Hit and run?"

"Yeah," said Thomas, showing Dunkle a phony newspaper clipping which the department had prepared. "`Little old lady, 79 years old, dies of a hit and run.' I guess some of my paint came off, you know, because the paper said they were looking for this light green car... I don't know. Maybe it stuck to her nose or something."

Dunkle was ecstatic. "That's good; that's good--`Stuck to her nose.'"

Now it was Dunkle's turn to share an intimacy. But instead of talking about Davies and Turner, says Thomas, Dunkle told some ridiculous story about "a hit and run accident where he hit this kid, dumps him down a ravine and [leaves] him for dead."

Thomas was so frustrated, she says, she wanted to shake him till his teeth fell out. Either that or kill him herself. Not that she really could have done it, says Thomas, but sometimes when she was alone with Dunkle these idle thoughts would cross her mind--"Why don't I just kill him and scream 'self-defense' on the tape?"

Then at other times she felt so guilty about the constant surveillance, the interminable lies about trusting one another, that she would wonder, "Am I ruining his life?" It was so hard to reconcile such brutal vicious murders with the happy dippy kid she saw in front of her. "Maybe," she told herself, "he did it in a blackout."

Having failed to entice Dunkle to confess by winning his trust, in april Goulart went back to pressuring him again, this time by posting the police artist composite of the killer on every telephone pole from Dunkle's house to Carl's Jr, on the bulletin board at the local library where Dunkle used to go to read his clippings, in the back room at Carl's Jr, and most prominently on the wall at the Wit's End bar.

It really hurt Dunkle to find his composite at the Wit's End. He couldn't believe they would do that, he told Thomas indignantly, given all the money he spent in the place. When Joanne, the bartender, came over the first thing she said was that the composite sure looked a lot like Dunkle.

"It does," Thomas helpfully agreed.

Dunkle was miffed. The cops, he complained, were putting up posters all over town. Even the girls at work were saying the composite sure looked a lot like him. In that case, said Joanne, Dunkle had better be real careful because there were lot of "nuts out there" and Dunkle could get hurt real bad. "Anyone in their right mind can look at those posters and see that it's you."

Dunkle spent the rest of the evening pouring down beer like Gatorade. He kept looking at the poster, then he'd look away and then he'd look back again. The more he drank, the more morose he became. He didn't have a college degree. The only jobs he could ever get were minimum wage. "Why was life so hard?" he asked Thomas over their third pitcher of beer. He said he was going to call a meeting with the cops--"cause there's really no call for this."

There was only one thing for them to do, he told Thomas, rob some houses, tie up the kids, steal the jewelry and move to Alaska. Either that or Africa. By this time, Dunkle was so drunk he was sliding off the bar stool. He started playing with Thomas's hair, trying to force her hand between his legs, pawing at her breasts. "Would you like to feel my balls?" he asked.

"No."

And then the next thing Thomas knew Dunkle was out the door walking fast towards the river in a strong determined stride while Thomas behind him struggled to keep up. As they passed a remote residential area near the river, Dunkle saw a house with an open sliding door. Telling Thomas to keep a lookout, Dunkle said he was going inside to steal the stereo.

When he came back out again, Goulart was waiting. He shined a flashlight in Dunkle's face, threw him down, dragged him through the open doorway into the house and arrested him for burglary. But there was still no direct evidence connecting Dunkle to murder. and after 5 frustrating days they had to let him go on bail.


THOMAS HAD GIVEN the undercover operation everything she had and nothing had come of it except a third-rate burglary case in which nothing was even stolen. Her department canceled the operation and Thomas moved back to Belmont where early one July morning three months later, she got a call from a police investigator: Dunkle had done it again. A blond 12 year old boy had been found naked along a Sacramento bicycle path, stabbed to death.

As Sacramento Co. Sheriff's deputies later reconstructed the third murder, Dunkle spent the afternoon in a park along the Sacramento River with two other men, drinking sixpacks of Coors and Michelob and smoking marijuana. At 8:30 pm, July 3, 1985, shortly after the party broke up 12-year-old Sean Dannehl, blond- haired and hazel-eyed, wearing a polo shirt and soccer shorts, came riding by on his way home. Dunkle raced after him, rammed his bike and knocked Dannehl down. Dannehl, who was 5'4" tall, weighed 90 pounds and was wearing a cast on his left arm, pleaded with Dunkle not to hurt him.

"What are you going to do?" he asked. Dunkle ordered him to take off his clothes and lie on his back.

When he did, Dunkle picked up a 2X4 and cracked him in the skull. He took out a pipe cleaning knife and stabbed Dannehl in the chest, in the heart and in the corners of both eyes. According to a former cellmate of Dunkle's he also had oral sex with the boy.

Because Dannehl's remains weren't found for six days in the summer heat, they had turned a dark mahogany color. The arms were partially mummified and maggots had eaten away much of the flesh from the back of the shoulders to the buttocks.


IN OCTOBER, Thomas made one final attempt to get Dunkle to confess. She bought fried chicken and mixed drinks and invited Dunkle on a picnic at Folsom Lake. But now instead of playing some humble little waif anymore, she was forceful, direct and blatantly accusatory: "You know the cops told me about you. They said you liked little boys and that's why you killed them. Although I don't think they were right about that. I don't think you have the balls to kill anybody. Although, maybe you killed the little kid cause he wouldn't give you a blow job?"

"Not hardly," answered Dunkle.

"Well that's what you say."

In order to maintain Thomas's cover, it had been pre-arranged that on the way home, the Sacramento Sheriff's would pull over Thomas and arrest her as an accessory to burglary.

"Jon," screamed Thomas right on cue, "There's a cop behind us."

When Thomas pulled over, the deputy handcuffed her and threw her in the back of the police car. "I started screaming at Jon," says Thomas. "I was really making a scene: 'You got me into this!' It was the only time I got to be aggressive with him and really enjoy it."


AFTER THAT, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department put Dunkle under what they called "bumper-to-bumper" surveillance. Patrol cars followed him down the street. If he tore a poster off a utility pole, another officer would follow along behind, putting up another one. When he went into the Wit's End bar, as many as four deputies would follow him and sit silently at the other end of the bar. Dunkle was so beside himself he burst into tears. On another occasion, he blindly walked into traffic.

Dunkle finally went to court on the burglary charge in May 1986. Dunkle had thought he might get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all--he was drunk at the time, nothing was taken and no one was hurt. But the judge, in the meantime, had been appraised of not only of police suspicions regarding the Davies, Turner and Dannehl murders but also of a savage hit and run case which so far had gone unsolved.

When Dunkle told Thomas that time at the river about having hit a kid one night and left his body for dead, Thomas had at first dismissed the story as one more twisted filament from Dunkle's fevered brain. But Belmont Detective Joe Farmer later discovered that 18 months previously a 16-year-old Belmont boy named Steve Murphy had been walking home from a party when someone slammed into him with his car, leaving him with a concussion, broken pelvis, shattered kidney and ruptured spleen.

First offense residential burglary charges are usually treated lightly. But in light of all the other testimony regarding Dunkle's character, which included personal pleas by the parents of the boys he allegedly killed, the judge gave Dunkle the maximum sentence permitted by law--six years in state prison.

Goulart was relieved. They didn't get him for murder yet but at least he'd be of the streets for the next six years. As to whether they would ever be able to solve the murders, Goulart honestly couldn't say. "In my own mind, I know who did it," Goulart told a newspaper reporter at the end of July. "I just can't prove it in court."

Then in September, Sgt. Goulart got stunning news. After being convicted of the burglary, Dunkle was sent to the mens' colony at San Luis Obispo where he was placed in a cell with a slender soft-spoken young man named Charles Rice. According to what Goulart later heard on the prison grapevine, Dunkle fell so deeply in love with Rice that he unburdened his soul and confessed to all three murders.

Actually, Charles Rice now says, sex had nothing to do with it. Right after they were put in the same cell, Dunkle asked Rice if he were bi-sexual. "I told him a definite no," says Rice. And that, by Rice's account, was the end of that.

So why did Dunkle confess?

"Jon never really knew me," says Rice. "I said I had come from an Italian family. He thought I was a member of organized crime."

Thinking Rice was someone he could surely trust, Dunkle began to talk obsessively, says Rice. Not that he admitted to killing anyone. His story instead was that he was just walking down the trail to Water Dog Lake when this big guy came along, took his knife and stabbed Lance Turner.

Rice was unimpressed. "If I was on a jury and you told that story, I'd vote to convict," he said.

The next night, says Rice, Dunkle apologized for lying. He had killed the three boys after all. In fact he went into so much detail, the next day Rice went to prison authorities to ask if it was true. They in turn wired him for sound and sent him back to find out more.

It wasn't any problem getting Dunkle to talk, says Rice. He kept Rice up all night long talking about the murders for weeks on end. Dunkle's biggest fear, says Rice, was that the police would find the body of John Davies, which he had left lying on the ground in the woods, and find a way to connect the crime to him.

Rice says he then concocted a story that he had a couple of friends in the FBI who might be able to help Dunkle out. "He thought they were crooked cops," says Rice, who for a price would dispose of the body.

Two FBI agents came to the prison and met with Dunkle and Rice in a private room. And, says Rice, Dunkle "bit"--in the process of explaining how to find the body of John Davies he signed a confession to all three murders.

Contrary to what Rice says, says Sacramento Sheriff's detective Bob Bell, trickery had nothing to do with the confession. Dunkle badly wanted to get the murders off this chest, but he was too mad at the Belmont Police Department to confess to them and he was too embarrassed to confess to Sacramento (he'd become close to Bob Bell and spent hours on the phone talking about his problems). On the other hand, Dunkle had always been thrilled by the notion of being investigated by the federal government. "So," says Bell, "we contacted the FBI."


ALTHOUGH LISA THOMAS’S LIFE had begun to fall apart right after the murder of Sean Dannehl, at first she didn't make any connection. What she did know was that for some inexplicable reason things kept happening to her. After the undercover operation was canceled in April 1985, she found to her surprise that she drove back to Belmont from Sacramento in a state of acute depression. "I cried all the way back and I don't know why," says Thomas. "I had a feeling of loss and a feeling of sadness. I felt like a failure."

Her department, on the other hand, was very pleased with the work she'd done--even though she hadn't gotten the confession--and they immediately sent her on another undercover operation, this time to buy drugs in Hawaii.

It was, says Thomas, the most incredibly stressful and demanding month- and-a-half. "If they had done anything else to me they would have had to kill me. I crashed two patrol cars. My partner killed himself. There was no trial. All the cases were dismissed. My cousin died of a cocaine overdose. I moved. This [ex-con] that I got involved with came back into my life. I told him to get back out of my life. He broke into my house and stole my [.357 and VCR]. Then he threatened to kill me. Then work found out about it and work was gonna fire me ... on charges of knowing and associating with a known criminal."

Finally, the department relented in favor of a year's probation and a 5% reduction in pay. "All this happened in a month and a half in 1988."

At the end of her probation, Thomas's chief sent her to Los Angeles for a three-day post traumatic stress seminar run by a local sheriff's deputy and Orange County psychologist. By the middle of the first session, she was so furious she went into a little room and "cried and cried and cried."

Thomas had never had a clue why for the last four years her life had been so screwed up, why she kept crying all the time, why all her relationships were such disasters. But now it suddenly dawned on her: when she was with Dunkle her undercover role required her to be the naive terrified lonely girl she was when she was a child. That's why she was able to drop into the role of a dumb kid so easily and that's why she cried all the way home once the operation was over. "I was relieving my childhood," says Thomas. "It was like the way I used to be in high school"--stupid, incompetent, naive, "a mouse."

At the same time, says Tom Maloney, a San Carlos police officer and Thomas's boyfriend during the undercover operation, Thomas felt guilty about deceiving Dunkle. Here she was talking him all the time about love and trust even as she was doing her level best to send him to the gas chamber. And suddenly in Thomas's mind, says Maloney, Dunkle went from being "a cold blooded murder to a poor guy who needed help. She began to feel sorry for him: "He thinks of me as a friend and I'm screwing him over."

But it was the news that Dunkle had confessed that left Thomas totally devastated. It proved what she'd feared and suspected all along. Dunkle had been on the verge of confessing to her half-a-dozen times. All he had needed was some little extra step, a little deeper intimacy, a little greater trust but she couldn't pull it off. And as a result, another boy was dead.


AFTER A THREE YEAR DELAY to determine if Dunkle was mentally competent to stand trial, Dunkle was finally tried for the killing of John Davies and Lance Turner last December in Redwood City.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Dunkle's attorney freely admitted in his opening statement that the trial was not a who-done-it--"Jon Scott Dunkle done it."

Instead he saved the jury's limited supply of sympathy for saving Dunkle's life. But by the time the jury had seen Dunkle's videotaped confession (he laughed and joked on part of it and at times seemed to be playing for the camera), they didn't have any sympathy left. The jury recommended the death penalty and this past February Judge Judith Kozloski, her voice trembling in emotion, pronounced the sentence, telling Dunkle to "look beyond this earth for forgiveness" because he certainly wasn't going to get any from her.


RECENTLY I VISITED DUNKLE in Sacramento County Jail where he is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Sean Dannehl. Whether he is genuinely insane or just acting is hard to tell. He wears a long dark beard and his hair combed forward over his forehead. Talking to him now is not unlike talking to Robin Williams on speed, except Dunkle's speech is darkly elliptical, full of allusions to "mind control," "CBS computers," "replicas," "sonic booms," "submarine explosions," "organized crime" and "toxic waste."

When I try to get him off this rap into something I can make sense of, he laughs and shakes his head disgustedly as if to say "You're pathetic. You don't understand anything I'm telling you."

First of all, he informs me, Lance Turner isn't even dead. "He is alive at the Ambassador in New York or Washington." And in any case, Jon Dunkle didn't kill him. "CBS computers is running at test in California. CBS has been conducting this test since the day I was born."

A lot of his conversation is flat-out wish fulfillment, if he is executed, Lt. Biondi will have his legs amputated "below the knees;" "Bombers will come from Philiadelphia"; "Jon dunkle can't be killed. He is the richest man in the world."

As to why Dunkle confessed when he knew it meant he could get the gas chamber, Dunkle (who often speaks about himself in the third person) says he confessed because he had "personal feeling regarding my body. I wanted find out why Jon Dunkle did these things. But as soon as they got [a confession] they forgot about him. All they care about is executing him. They threw him in a room with a bunch of homosexuals."

I repeatedly ask Dunkle about Lisa Thomas. But he refuses to discuss her. "She doesn't mean anything," he says, dismissing the question. "She's nothing."


LAST SPRING, Thomas began seeing a therapist to help put her life back in order. "I'm not a basket case," says Thomas, "but I have a lot of personal problems." She has totally repressed her feelings about the undercover operation--even about things as ultimately as devastating as that morning when the Belmont police officer woke her say that Dunkle had struck again. "I remember rolling over. 'Oh God! He did it again!' But I don't remember if I cried. I don't remember if I didn't cry. It's all gone too deep and I can't get to it."

What she can get to is the guilt feelings she still has about Dunkle. Sometimes, she says, she feels like she'd like to talk to him one last time. Not to apologize exactly--"apologize is too strong a word"--but she does feel "troubled" by all those hours she spent lying to him about trust and love. "Intentional deceit," says Thomas, "goes against the human grain."

On the other hand, she points out, so does murder. And Dunkle viciously slaughtered three little boys and forever wrecked their parents' lives. "It makes me sick," says Thomas, when she thinks about what he did those little boys. "It makes me want to rip this throat."

As to why Dunkle killed the boys in the first place, one psychiatrist who testified at Dunkle's competency hearing said the problem was that Dunkle was a paranoid schizophrenic. But for Thomas, as for many of the other people involved in the Dunkle case, that answer is too easy. Once at end of 1988, when Dunkle was in the County Jail in Redwood City facing murder charges, says Thomas, went to the jail on another case and while she was there she looked up saw Jon talking to his mother on the phone. "I was in uniform and he just waves and laughs and gives me a big old smile--no evil eye, no remorse, no nothing."

But at his murder trial, says Thomas, another side of him came out--one that was silent, sullen, sinister and evil beyond all comprehension. she didn't used to feel this way before, but since becoming a police officer it's become more than clear that for some people the death penalty is the only remedy.

"Look," she says. pulling out a newspaper photograph from Dunkle's trial. "isn't that the most evil look you ever saw?"

One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer--always on August 1st for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts.

I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot--the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure that the tarred road would have found it out and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated.

It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back. You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and sneak out into the sweet outdoors and start out in the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remembered being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral.

The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming although the shores of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That's what our family did. But although it wasn't wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.

I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before--I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor-boards the same freshwater leavings and debris--the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday's catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and wells. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one--the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn't know which rod I was at the end of.

We caught two bass, hauling them in briskly as though they were mackerel. pulling them over the side of the boat in a businesslike manner without any landing net, and stunning them with a blow on the back of the head. When we got back for a swim before lunch, the lake was exactly where we had left it, the same number of inches from the dock, and there was only the merest suggestion of a breeze. This seemed an utterly enchanted sea, this lake you could leave to its own devices for a few hours and come back to, and find that it had not stirred, this constant and trustworthy body of water. In the shallows, the dark, water-soaked sticks and twigs, smooth and old, were undulating in clusters on the bottom against the clean ribbed sand, and the track of the mussel was plain. A school of minnows swam by, each minnow with its small, individual shadow, doubling the attendance, so clear and sharp in the sunlight. Some of the other campers were in swimming, along the shore, one of them with a cake of soap, and the water felt thin and clear and insubstantial. Over the years there had been this person with the cake of soap, this cultist, and here he was. There had been no years.

Up to the farmhouse to dinner through the teeming, dusty field, the road under our sneakers was only a two-track road. The middle track was missing, the one with the marks of the hooves and the splotches of dried, flaky manure. There had always been three tracks to choose from in choosing which track to walk in; now the choice was narrowed down to two. For a moment I missed terribly the middle alternative. But the way led past the tennis court, and something about the way it lay there in the sun reassured me; the tape had loosened along the backline, the alleys were green with plantains and other weeds, and the net (installed in June and removed in September) sagged in the dry noon, and the whole place steamed with midday heat and hunger and emptiness. There was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain--the waitresses were still fifteen; their hair had been washed, that was the only difference--they had been to the movies and seen the pretty girls with the clean hair.

Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweet fern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end; this was the background, and the life along the shore was the design, the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp and the paths leading back to the outhouses and the can of lime for sprinkling, and at the souvenir counters at the store the miniature birch-bark canoes and the post cards that showed things looking a little better than they looked. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat, wondering whether the newcomers at the camp at the head of the cove were "common" or "nice," wondering whether it was true that the people who drove up for Sunday dinner at the farmhouse were turned away because there wasn't enough chicken.

It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father's enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden. (Arriving was less exciting nowadays, when you sneaked up in your car and parked it under a tree near the camp and took out the bags and in five minutes it was all over, no fuss, no loud wonderful fuss about trunks.)

Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. In those other summertimes, all motors were inboard; and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep. They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break and some were jump-spark, but they all made a sleepy sound across the lake. The one-lungers throbbed and fluttered, and the twin-cylinder ones purred and purred, and that was a quiet sound too. But now the campers all had outboards. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound; at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one's ears like mosquitoes. My boy loved our rented outboard, and his great desire was to achieve single-handed mastery over it, and authority, and he soon learned the trick of choking it a little (but not too much), and the adjustment of the needle valve. Watching him I would remember the things you could do with the old one-cylinder engine with the heavy flywheel, how you could have it eating out of your hand if you got really close to it spiritually. Motor boats in those days didn't have clutches, and you would make a landing by shutting off the motor at the proper time and coasting in with a dead rudder. But there was a way of reversing them, if you learned the trick, by cutting the switch and putting it on again exactly on the final dying revolution of the flywheel, so that it would kick back against compression and begin reversing. Approaching a dock in a strong following breeze, it was difficult to slow up sufficiently by the ordinary coasting method, and if a boy felt he had complete mastery over his motor, he was tempted to keep it running beyond its time and then reverse it a few feet from the dock. It took a cool nerve, because if you threw the switch a twentieth of a second too soon you would catch the flywheel when it still had speed enough to go up past center, and the boat would leap ahead, charging bull-fashion at the dock.

We had a good week at the camp. The bass were biting well and the sun shone endlessly, day after day. We would be tired at night and lie down in the accumulated heat of the little bedrooms after the long hot day and the breeze would stir almost imperceptibly outside and the smell of the swamp drift in through the rusty screens. Sleep would come easily and in the morning the red squirrel would be on the roof, tapping out his gay routine. I kept remembering everything, lying in bed in the mornings--the small steamboat that had a long rounded stern like the lip of a Ubangi, and how quietly she ran on the moonlight sails, when the older boys played their mandolins and the girls sang and we ate doughnuts dipped in sugar, and how sweet the music was on the water in the shining night, and what it had felt like to think about girls then.

After breakfast we would go up to the store and the things were in the same place--the minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed over by the youngsters from the boys' camp, the fig newtons and the Beeman'sgum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with a bottle of pop apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt.

We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.

One afternoon while we were there at that lake a thunderstorm came up. It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago with childish awe. The second-act climax of the drama of the electrical disturbance over a lake in America had not changed in any important respect. This was the big scene, still the big scene.

The whole thing was so familiar, the first feeling of oppression and heat and a general air around camp of not wanting to go very far away. In mid-afternoon (it was all the same) a curious darkening of the sky, and a lull in everything that had made life tick; and then the way the boats suddenly swung the other way at their moorings with the coming of a breeze out of the new quarter, and the premonitory rumble. Then the kettle drum, then the snare, then the bass drum and cymbals, then crackling light against the dark, and the gods grinning and licking their chops in the hills. Afterward the calm, the rain steadily rustling in the calm lake, the return of light and hope and spirits, and the campers running out in joy and relief to go swimming in the rain, their bright cries perpetuating the deathless joke about how they were getting simply drenched, and the children screaming with delight at the new sensation of bathing in the rain, and the joke about getting drenched linking the generations in a strong indestructible chain. And the comedian who waded in carrying an umbrella.

When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

IT’S THE SECOND PERIOD history class at Summerset high in Bellflower. The substitute teacher this morning, Dan Thompson, has just shown the shown the class a 30 minute segment from the ABC Civil War mini-series, "The Grey and the Blue." Now before the bell rings he is attempting to engage the dozen or so students in a discussion of the futility of war--which may be a losing battle itself. When Thompson asks the class if they liked the movie, one boy says, "Only the parts where people get blown up."

Thompson is undismayed. At 28, he's a big rugged guy, with a roughhewn cheekbones and the large knuckled hands of a professional quarterback. He's wearing a white sweat shirt, acid washed jeans and old leather sneakers. "Why do we fight wars?" he asks, sitting cross-legged on a table at the front of the classroom under a small American flag.

No one knows what to say at first. Summerset is a continuation school primarily for tough guys and pregnant girls and the origin of war is not a subject to which they've ever given any thought. Suddenly an exasperated voice from the back of the room blurts out "Disagreements, man."

This is Jason. He's a tall, dark-haired, handsomely baby- faced boy in a wool-lined denim jacket. "Like in the Middle East. Take Iraq and Iran having that war, not letting the ships go through and it's not even their water."

For Thompson, it's the first thoughtful response he's had all day. "Why are we in Nicaragua?" he asks. "If the Russians take over Nicaragua, they can put in nuclear missiles," says Jason. "Be here in five minutes instead of 30. Have us surrounded."

"Do you know how far we are from Russia?," counters Thompson, flipping open a map set to the Bering Straights. "Ninety miles."

"But why would someone want to nuc Alaska?" asks Jason. "There's nothing there to blow up."

"What about Seattle?"

"But that's a lot farther away."

"We keep nuclear subs there."

"They don't just sit there gathering dust," says Jason. "The Russians will target big cities like Los Angeles. And for that Nicaragua is a lot closer."

Besides, says Jason, "That place is no good. Just a bunch of diseased jungle. I wouldn't want that place if they gave it to me."

The bell ends any further discussion and, as the students file out, Thompson stops Jason to congratulate him on his familiarity with international issues. Jason is so pleased his face lights up like a liquor store marquee--all of which prompts Thompson to risk a little intimacy. "If you don't mind my asking, what did you do to get into trouble?" "It's really embarrassing," says Jason. "We threatened a teacher and blew up her car."


DAN THOMPSON never planned on being a schoolteacher. "I kept a journal since high school," says Thompson, "I wrote down all my goals. And one of my goals was to make a lot of money." Although he came from a working class family (his father was a carpenter from Bellflower), in high school he was, he says, a "bit of a prodigy," being class president and starting offensive lineman on the football team, earning a 3.8 GPA and acing out his SATs. Later, while in college at Whittier and Long Beach State, Thompson sold real estate for Coldwell Banker, which stood him in good stead when, after graduation in 1982, he applied for a brokerage job with Dean Whittier. "I had selling experience, which was just what they wanted." "Also," he says, "I got in at a good time. The market took off: 'Come along with me. We're going to make some money.'"

Thompson thrived on the thrill and excitement of his work, moving up quickly from Dean Witter, to Merrill Lynch and finally ending up at Kidder Peabody. But the pressure was intense. Only two of the 12 people who were hired with him lasted through the first year. Thompson worked seven days a week. He started work at 5 am. Sometimes he'd be so keyed up by the thrill and excitement he couldn't sleep the night before. He'd get out of bed, take a shower, put on a suit, drive to Century City and work all night. "I didn't drink before I was a stockbroker," says Thompson, "but now I started waking up with hang-overs and walking around the office wearing sun glasses all day."

Despite the professional image the company tried to cultivate, the brokers, says Thompson, were really just salesmen. "The company kept little graphs of the number of phone calls you made each day. And you had to generate a number of new accounts."

At other times, says Thompson, his supervisor would tell him to call up doctors or lawyers out of the blue and say, "The last time we talked, you told me to call back when I had a hot prospect. Well, I have something now I really think you'll be interested in." Of course, it was a fib. But the doctor or lawyer wouldn't know. They had people calling them all the time. They couldn't remember if they'd talked to Thompson or not. On some occasions, Thompson, "you'd be sitting in the bullpen. And a supervisor would come out, 'Hey, we have a special on XYZ stock. Let's sell it. You've got 2000 shares. We want to clean our inventories out.'" And then to make sure the brokers pushed the stock, he'd double their sales commission. Then to move the stock, says Thompson, the brokers were told to tell the clients that the stock had good "opportunities for growth. They don't come every day."

It wasn't that Thompson objected to a little salesmanship. It just seemed that there was something skewed in the system. It didn't seem to make any difference to the company if the clients made money or not. "That wasn't their big concern," says Thompson. What they really cared about were the brokers' commissions. And to spur their people to generate more of them they would post a monthly list ranking all the brokers in descending order of sales.

As for the clients, says Thompson, if they didn't spend enough, you dumped them for more wealthy ones. And this was another thing that bothered Thompson. Although you made the most money off the wealthy clients (``A trade of 100 shares takes as much time as doing 1000 shares''), the truth was, he didn't enjoy working with rich people. They were too greedy, says Thompson, and no matter what rate of return you got them, it was never good enough. In time, all the little compromises and deceptions began to wear Thompson down. His job didn't allow him to be himself. "I had to be an actor. I had to put myself on stage."

As a stock broker, Thompson was laboring right at the nerve center of capitalism and, he quickly discovered, compassion wasn't part of the job description. If the company wanted to fire someone, says Thompson, they never called you aside and said, "Look, I'm sorry, it's not working out." You'd just come back from lunch some day and your client book would be gone off your desk. "They fired one guy on his birthday. They fired another guy right before Christmas."

Not that the brokers were such innocents themselves. Thompson remembers one day in December of 1984 when T. Boone Pickins was attempting a hostile takeover of Phillips Petroleum. Thompson had put four clients into Phillips Petroleum options (short term speculative investments) a short while before. "And by Friday I was calling up my clients and telling them I've doubled their money." But then Sunday night, Thompson heard what to him was the stunningly unexpected news that Pickens had agreed to drop the hostile takeover. When the market opened Monday morning, Thompson was sitting in front of his terminal. Normally, says Thompson, you expect to see any given stock up or down an eighth of a point. But this time, Phillips opened down 10. "I turned white. My palms were sweating. I felt a wave of heat." In two minutes his four clients lost $60,000. But the worst part was the glee of the other brokers. They were so competitive. Every broker in the office came by to ask, 'Did you see what happened to Phillips," as if somehow he hadn't gotten around to checking the numbers himself.

"I was working on the 17th floor of a building at 1901 Avenue of the Stars (in Century City)." For a moment, says Thompson, he considered opening a window and stepping outside. Instead, he went in and told his manager, "I don't know what to do."

The manager's advice was succinct and unsentimental: "Get on the phone and get some new clients." Thompson considered quitting his job after that. The problem was, for someone who had grown up in a blue collar family in Bellflower, it paid an incredible amount of money--over $100,000 by the time he was 28, with the prospect in a few more years of seeing that double or quadruple. After moving over to Kidder Peabody, Thompson rented an apartment on Balboa Island in Newport Beach. "I had three cars," says Thompson, "an Alpha Romeo, Porsche Targa and Jeep Cherokee (that was for my dog)." He went shopping every day. He had crystal champagne glasses, two Rolex watches (one had a scratch so he used that for sports), 40 polo shirts and $1500 worth of Ralph Lauren sheets. "I was looking to buy a house on Balboa Island and going into partnership with someone on a boat."

His only problems were personal ones. Once when his girlfriend invited him to meet her parents, he spent the whole evening telling them about Rolex watches. On another occasion, they were riding in his Porsche when she tried to bring up the question of their relationship. Instead, he replied, "Isn't this a great car!" Then he downshifted and roared away into the night. After that, she broke off their relationship and moved to San Jose. To fill up the void she left, he bought a Springer Spaniel and named him Peabody (after Kidder Peabody).

The turning point in Thompson's life was 11 a.m., April 28th, 1986. His grandmother called him at the office to say that his father was hammering a nail at work when he suddenly kneeled over and died. Thompson was stunned and guilty. He'd been so busy making money in recent years he hadn't spent much time with his dad. At the time, he told himself it didn't matter. As soon as he got some breathing space, he'd take the whole family on vacation. Now it was too late.

Rather than give in to grief, Thompson decided to be strong. He arranged the funeral, wrote the inscription for his father's grave marker and then went back to work the next day. The following month, he made $13,000--the most money he'd ever made in a single month in his entire career. However, as Thompson discovered, when it came to matters of life and death money didn't matter anyway. "Your father separates you from eternity," he says. "When he's gone, you're right next door. All of a sudden, I felt mortal."

He started driving more cautiously, going to church every other day and developing a fear of flying. In the past when the pilot would announce that he was dropping down 10,000 feet to find smoother air, Thompson would just keep reading the magazine and not think anything of it. But now, he says, he found himself wondering whether they pilot was "just trying to make me feel comfortable my last few minutes alive."

By June, Thompson had come to a new realization. There were no guarantees in life. And whenever you put something off, you risked the possibility that you'd never get another chance. He walked into his boss's office and announced his resignation. "My boss was angry," says Thompson. "He said I was making a big mistake." Having worked seven days a week for the past six years, at first Thompson didn't know what to do with himself. He sold his Porsche and Alpha Romeo, gave up his apartment on Balboa Island and moved back home with his mother. He read "The Razor's Edge" by Summerset Maugham, joined a junior college tennis team and started writing a novel. To support himself, he got a job as a substitute teacher for $80/day. Finally, he called his old girlfriend. She was happy to see him. "Boy," she said, "you've changed."


"(In the Sixties) you were told you could have everything and you could achieve anything you want. What they didn't tell you was it wouldn't be enough to fulfill you."

IN "THE RECKONING,"David Halberstam's 1986 book on greed, incompetence and sycophancy in the American auto industry, Halberstam writes that one of the two best jobs for a young ambitious MBA at Ford Motor Company in the 60's was running the slide projector at executive meetings. This would allow him to get the latest news firsthand, meet all the top executives and make connections which could help the rest of his corporate career.

Of course, writes Halberstam, there was a downside too. "Once one of them put in a slide upside down and the fallout lasted for weeks. It was spoken of, not as a mistake, but as a potentially ruined career." Such absurdities are not peculiar only to Ford (which has since over- hauled its management style). "The real irony of the modern corporation," says behaviorist Peter Vaill of George Washington University's School of Government and Business Administration, "is that it rewards qualities that we regard as immature: materialism, superficiality, (the need for) attention, variety, excitement, a short term orientation, (a tendency to focus) on commercial as opposed to intrinsic values and to see human relationships exploitatively and people as only valuable for what you can get them to do." Everything, says Vaill, gets sacrificed to getting the job done at all costs. "You sacrifice your own body and soul to it, all your time and all your relationships. Human relationships are valuable only as they contribute to getting the job done and making you look good.

And the result is, you become very political--you become obsessed (with making sure) that people in positions of power know who you are and that you are getting the job done." Making matters worse, says psychologist Mike Driver of USC's Center For Effective Organizations, "a lot of work that people do is meaningless, especially in the legal and financial communities." People become paper warriors. They work 20 hour days preparing glossy bound reports full of tables and charts which are skim-read by perhaps 10 people and never referred to again. They graduate first in their class from high powered law schools and then spend all their time sifting boxes of dusty files or taking stultifyingly tedious depositions.

But it's not only lawyers and bankers with the meaningless jobs, says Vaill. "There are people out there making $80,000 a year for increasing the market share of Tiny Taters by 1/10th of 1% in the LA market." Furthermore, they can't imagine leaving--how would they live? "When you are trained as an economic analyst for market trends in the toy business and thinking about getting out of the rat race, it is not clear what you can do," says Vaill. "The work is extremely specialized. It's not even a craft. Your knowledge is the network of people who influence trends in the toy business. If you leave that network, you have nothing. "You can't take it to a church or Third World country. None of these skills would be of any value in the Peace Corps."

These people are artifacts of the post-industrial society. They can't leave. There's no place to go. And the result, says Vaill, "is that they become very tightly focused on the shallow short term--their perks, their salary, their job security and portfolios. "Disillusionment is the word I would use to describe these people. It is not turning out to be what they thought it would be.

Ever since WWII, we have been led to believe to believe that economic security and physical and psychological well-being would lead to serenity and happiness and what we are discovering is that they don't. It is entirely possible to be very unhappy on $500,000 a year. And the symptoms we see are sexual promiscuity, alcoholism. bankruptcy, crime, obesity, substance abuse and divorce."


"I don't want to spend my life helping someone make their catsup zestier."

ONE OF THE MOST disheartening things about the soul deadening effect of the corporate lifestyle is that no one is to blame. If that were it case, one could at least hope that something might be done about it. Instead it's a problem that is built into the heart of our economic system.

"One of the most influential forces in the market is the California State Employees Pension Fund," says UCLA professor Jack McDonough. The managers of this fund are measured quarterly or monthly. And the criteria by which they are judged is how much value they accrue to their stock portfolio. "What you have is some of the biggest money around making big bloc decisions on what to buy and what to sell on the basis of short term performance."

As a result, for CEOs of public traded corporations, "it's no longer okay just to operate in the black anymore. It's no longer okay just to show increasing rates of growth or profit over time. What you're competing on now is your ability to earn a return on every asset that you have.

"This is an incredible standard," says McDonough. "It just upped the ante. And it's put on a short term basis." If a company can't delivery increasing profits and high earnings, the mega-managers of the huge pension funds managers simply dump their stock. There is no appeal. And the only way for a manager to look good is to show results, what they call "deliverables."

"Even little differences in earnings can make huge differences in the value of the stock," says McDonough. "Talk to those guys in the bars and on the trains. Listen to them talk about the oppression that comes from having to meet the numbers. That is the (new) rallying cry of Corporate America--meet your numbers.

The consequence, says McDonough, is "a generation of people who are only willing to commit to those values and those activities that can be easily and visibly traced to their input." In the process, "any ability to derive meaning from relationships gets squashed. People become very materialistic. Everyone wants to get into big jobs, big money, Wall street, clothes and cars. All value is derived externally. People don't have a lot of lasting relationships. A job is nothing more than a contracted commitment. It's a free agent cult with no loyalty and no commitment."


"I really only enjoy my work one day out of eight."

MANY CAUSES HAVE BEEN IDENTIFED for the erosion of this country's traditional values, including the loss of religious faith, the ubiquitousness of television advertising, secular humanism, rampant capitalism and the cyclical nature of human history. But USC's Mike Driver blames it on something a lot less profound--corporate and governmental incompetence.

In the early seventies, he says, "a tremendous disillusionment" set in. "People became frightened. People began to worry about surviving, about making it." What was so startling was that the experience of this generation was so drastically different from that of their parents who in most instances had been born in the depression and grown up in WWII. It was literally a shell-shocked generation. But then to their astonished surprise, as one newspaper reporter recently put it, "their low expectations were gloriously overfulfilled by the great postwar prosperity."

On the other hand, for the tail end baby boomers, the people who are now in their late 20s to mid 30s, the situation is exactly the reverse. Growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, they had been conditioned to expect constantly rising living standards and permanently low unemployment. But in the early seventies, just when they were ready to go to work, everything fell apart: we lost our first war; a president resigned in disgrace; a nation which had an enduring love affair with the automobile (and often in the automobile) suddenly discovered it couldn't even afford to buy gas for automobiles anymore. Unemployment reached double digits, interest rates went soaring (and by the end of the decade would reach as high as as high as 18%). There were shortages of everything from plastic pipe to fertilizer.

For this generation, the post-war promise of an every-rising standard of living suddenly came to a screeching halt. According to a recent Congressional study, the average income of two child families doubled between 1949 and 1978 from $14,000 to $28,000. But since that time, says the study, the average income when adjusted for inflation has actually fallen to $26,400.

Whereas in the booming post WWII years, young workers could expect to see their real income more than double over a decade, in the last 10 years the real income of this generation's workers has gone up a mere 16%.

This in turn has had a sobering effect on the attitudes of college students. When UCLA professor of higher education, Alexander Astin, first began surveying college students in the late sixties (he's done 7 million over the last 22 years), their primary concern, says Austin, was to develop a meaningful philosophy of life--``Why am I here. What is my purpose in life. What am I in college for? What's it all about, Alphie?"

Nowadays, says Austin, by overwhelming majorities they simply want to be "rich and famous."

"These kids are extremely competitive," says UCLA's Jack McDonough. At recruiting time, some of the new MBAs will keep interviewing until they have 15 job offers--just as an ego trip. "After five you don't need any more for leverage. But it's like a fix. Money becomes the over-riding object." Or else they walk into an employer's office and ask, "How long will it take me to make CEO?"

"What they don't realize," says UCLA sociologist William Roy, "is that there is a price to materialism. In the long run, material things don't give you any ultimate meaning." Only relationships do that.

The problem is, says Peter Vaill, there are "millions of Americans whose only friends are those you have on the job. Then when you change jobs you leave those people behind."

But it's not just the lack of relationships. Ever since college, says Vaill, these people have been "working at 150% efficiency under conditions of extreme competitiveness. They have to pay so much attention their image they can't be offstage even for a minute." And when they do, they "they discover they are living someone else's life." The fact of the matter is, says Vaill, the fast track young professionals have "sacrificed honesty and personal development" for BWMs and high-fi VCRs. "As to whether or not that gets to you," says Vaill, "depends on how sensitive and thoughtful and psychologically mature you are."



"MY LIFE IS VERY LOW STRESS," Judy Rooney is saying as she stands in the galley of a 130 foot yacht ladeling out pea soup to the other members of ship's permanent crew. "All I own, are one pair of slacks, two jeans and these shorts" As she talks, overhead a dozen or so metal workers are hammering and welding as they remodel the superstructure and install a jaccuzzi on the flying bridge. Over the sink is a large picture window through which she can look out at the other yachts in San Diego's Mission Bay. And on the counter is a small color TV with built-in VCR for watching cooking class at sea. All this is quite a change for someone who, three years ago, was spending her entire salary on clothes.

At the time, Rooney was program director for an adult day care health clinic at Fresno's St. Agnes Hospital. "St. Agnes had a reputation for this polished professional look," says Rooney. "I wore designer clothes and high heels. I carried myself with authority and self-confidence. I thought people would respect me more. In truth, I was constantly broke. I was working so I could afford to buy clothes so I could continue to work."

What was worse, she didn't even like her work--running a physical education and socialization program for 40 elderly day patients who couldn't walk or hear or were senile. The problem, she says, was that they were trying to do too much with too little money and not enough staff. "We had resources to handle 25 patients." But since the clinic was required to pay it's own way, they had to care for 40 patients a day. The work was both physically and psychologically deadening. "Before I took this job I had only gone to one funeral my entire life. At St. Agnes, I went to 20. There was tremendous turnover, lots of burnout, an avalanche of paper work. It was a constant battle to meet deadlines."

Just to fill out a Medi-Cal form and get it approved took seven people, including a doctor. And even with that it was only good for three months. "We only had one bathroom, which was awful since half the people needed assistance. The whole time I worked there I didn't have an office. I put my desk in the corner of the room and learned to tune out interruptions."

Despite the demands of her job, Rooney never considered quitting. "I was doing what I thought people were supposed to do. During the week, I worked 10 to 12 hours a day. Then on weekends I went to health fairs to let people know we existed so they would use us as a resource. I was on the board of directors of the YWCA, I worked on campaigns of people running for Supervisor and District Attorney. I didn't even enjoy volunteering. It just seemed the thing to do."

In fact, says Rooney, she was so used to living up to other people's expectations she didn't always ask herself what made her happy, what would give meaning to her life? In those days, Rooney lived in a large house in Fresno with two other single young professionals. "When everyone was home," she says, "we had a Mercedes, Corvette and BMW parked in the driveway." "I used to admire people who had BWMs. I thought that I could get a BMW I wouldn't have any limits. I could set my sights on anything."

And in fact, she says, it seemed to be working. "I knew the right people. I wore the right clothes. I worked at the right hospital. I gave money to public radio. I bought tickets to the symphony and went to other people's fund-raisers so they would come to ours."

The problem, says Rooney, was that most of the time she was absolutely miserable. "Sunday afternoon, I used to get nervous. My mind would be racing. All my life I've suffered from insomnia. When I went to work I had a sense of fatigue. I couldn't remember when I wasn't tired. I had a constant pain in my stomach." The only thing she liked about her job was the fact that at 7:30 am, half hour before work, she would stop in a little cafe to get her morning cappuccino. "It was the most rewarding part of the day," says Rooney. Four or five other working women came every day. "We shared ideas and feelings. The communion I had with those people every day held a lot more meaning than my job."

Furthermore, they all felt the same way--``they wanted to escape. But what were the alternatives?"

In 1983 her own mother died of lung cancer. At the time, Rooney was finishing up a master's degree in organizational development and human resources at the Fresno branch of San Francisco State. She knew her mother was ill but Rooney was too busy with her thesis to take off time to visit. Her death really "took the starch out of me," says Rooney. "I didn't expect to miss her as much as I did." And what made it all the sadder to Rooney was the knowledge that her mother had never led her own life. She was too "acquiescent." Although she always wanted to live in California, where her family was, she lived in Seattle instead. The lessons of her mother's life made Rooney begin to rethink her own. And she came to some sobering realizations. "Life is a terrible trap. You have a beginning and an end and that's all we have. You have all this sensation and at the end is a brick wall."

A year later in the fall of 1984, Rooney was washing herself in the shower one morning, she says, and all of a sudden she had the oddest feeling. "I found myself wondering, 'Who is doing this?' It was so automatic. I felt like a automaton." That was it, Rooney decided. She definitely needed a change. She would take some time off, fly to Paris and try to get some perspective on her life. In order to finance the trip, she gave up her house and rented a single room from a postal clerk. "Towards the end," he says, "I didn't want any distractions. I didn't date. I got rid of most of my possessions. I slept on a mattress on the floor. I had a small TV. I read three novels a week. I sold my car and rode a bike to work." She set aside five changes of clothes and gave everything else to the WMCA. "It was embarrassing how many clothes I took in," she says, but it "felt wonderful. I enjoyed giving them away as much as I did buying them."

In Paris Rooney made her way to the Arab quarter where she rented a room in the Hotel Atlas, a rickety but friendly little pie-shaped hotel with odd- shaped rooms and the shower down the hall. "The other guests were Algerians and people from North Africa. The owner had been in the French Foreign Legion. Communication on any deep level was impossible." For the first time in her life, says Rooney, she made her own decision on how to use her time. "Up till then my routines had always been made by other people. I felt really disconnected and alone. It was very intense. I felt totally distanced from everything familiar. I kept a journal about the things I thought about. Even then I found it difficult to be honest. It was if I was writing for other people to read. I found I was glossing things over, making things better. Finally, I began to realize I had glossed over a lot of things in my life."

Traveling through the Italian Riviera on a train, Rooney met another American, a hospital administrator, as it turned out. "We began talking about hospitals," says Rooney. "And I got a pain in my side all over again." For Rooney, the train ride was a real revelation. Looking out at the countryside, she realized, filled her up, unlike her job, which only took something out of her. "Once I was distanced from my old life, I began to see what kind of things really appealed to me." And what she realized, she says, is that what she really wanted was a much more simple life."

But what really drove it home was her first day back at St. Agnes. "I went to work full of life." For the first time, she realized how tired and cynical the other people at the clinic were. "I realized that if I didn't take action right then, everything I had gained would recede and I'd be the same old person." That afternoon she told her boss, "I already know I won't be staying." Eight months later, Rooney retired from the hospital for good and moved to San Diego. One weekend her brother took her wind surfing in Palm Springs where she met a woman ship captain. "Her boyfriend was a shipwright," says Rooney. "They were the happiest, self-satisfied people I never met." At the time, says Rooney, the ship captain's boat was in overhaul. "She need a cook to cook lunch for the crew they wouldn't go off and drink beer and waste the rest of the day." Rooney loved working as a ship's cook. "That part of the day was so much fun and enlivening." Later, she got another position on another boat and fell in love with the captain. "He seemed like the nicest person I'd ever met-- playful and humorous. We've been together 24 hours a day for 2 years."

Now says, Rooney she can't imagine how she could be happier. "I like the simplicity." The other three crew members seem like family to her. They don't see the yacht owner for months on end. And in any case, she says, "the wealth and eccentricities of people who own yachts doesn't seem to filter down." Rooney doesn't worry about owning things any more. Instead of a yellow BMW, she now has a yellow mountain bike. "I save my entire salary. My only expenses are toothpaste, shampoo and an occasional dinner out. Everything else provided. The only bills I get are the remainder of a small student loan for my masters degree and $260 a year for car insurance."

She loves being at sea. "We forget about the problems of the world--we let them go their own way and we go ours." The best part, she says, is falling asleep to the sound of the engines. When she lived in a house she didn't like cleaning up and otherwise taking care of the place. "But it isn't a chore to take care of the mothership. I do it with a certain joy." "People tell me they couldn't do what I do because they need to have roots," says Rooney. "But the concept that a house and a mortgage gives you roots is an illusion. We live on the earth. Those are our roots."