Horror Palace

About a year after arriving in Texas in 1993 as an attorney, I chanced upon newspaper reports of the 1974 incredibly brutal murders of young Mormon missionaries Gary Darley and Mark Fischer. I recalled hearing about them years earlier in my own LDS congregation when the news first broke, and started investigating the case with an eye toward an article or two. The more I dug, however, the more compelling and heart-rending the story became. Stories, actually, of alleged murderer Bob Kleasen’s mental illness and pathetic life, of well-meaning Mormons responding to troubled new converts, of loving families dealing with unimaginable loss, and of a tortuous death penalty case.

In the mid-1970s death penalty law in the United States was unsettled. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court had invalidated all death penalty statutes because of the gross racism in how they were applied. Nearly every state was then attempting to enact new constitutional statutes which the Court was just beginning to rule on. This was the situation when Kleasen was brought to trial for killing Darley and Fischer.

Even though there seems to be little doubt Kleasen was the killer, his conviction was reversed on appeal and he was never retried. As a lawyer who specializes in death row cases, I was particularly interested in how the criminal justice system responded to such a situation. All of this clearly added up, I felt, to a story worth reading.

What follows isn’t intended to support the death penalty. Personally, I’m opposed to all executions. Nor is it an indictment of the American criminal justice system. In some ways, I realize, justice was frustrated in this case. However, it also illustrates how cases can work out in the real world of criminal law. And while I believe Kleasen was a murderer and, like everyone else, would prefer that he be locked up, I found considerable evidence of the forces that shaped him. I believe that understanding these forces–however much we may want to ignore them or tell ourselves they could never affect us–may help to prevent future Kleasens.

As with many religious and cultural communities, Mormons sometimes have a language of their own and concepts peculiar to Latter-day Saint life. I have attempted to explain these terms and beliefs for non-Mormon readers. Mormonism is more than a religious denomination; in many ways, it is close to an ethnic community.

Much of this book is drawn from Texas, New York, and federal court transcripts. Additional information comes from extensive newspaper coverage of Kleasen over the years. Quotations from those sources didn’t always translate neatly into writing, so I’ve occasionally taken the liberty of slightly rewording some to make them read more smoothly. In every instance, however, the plain meaning of the quotes has been preserved. Whenever the quotation is ambiguous, or its language is critical, it’s used exactly as found.

This book would have been impossible without the help of many people, some of whom were kind enough to revisit old, often unpleasant memories. I conducted about fifty interviews of varying lengths. For most, recalling events twenty years in the past in great detail was difficult. In many instances recollections didn’t always square with the existing documentary record. Whenever such conflicts were present, I chose to rely on the contemporary written record. Periodically, some of the people I spoke with still feared Kleasen or had other reasons for not wanting to be identified. In other instances I felt that some of the parties who couldn’t be located wouldn’t have wanted to be identified by their real names. For these reasons I’ve used several fictional names in the book. Each of these instances is identified.

Several Austin Mormons who knew Kleasen offered invaluable insights, along with a few former LDS missionaries who served in Texas and N

[amzn_product_inline asin=’ 1560851384′]