The Howard Appledorf Murder and Me

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A closeted prof murdered by gay hustlers.
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DeniseNoe
DeniseNoe
46 Followers

The Junk-Food Murder was the headline in a September 20, 1982 Newsweek. Looking at the article, I gave a start because the victim was Prof. Howard Appledorf and I had once taken a seminar class in which he gave a lecture. I remembered him as an authoritative lecturer who held audience interest. I also recalled a joke he made. "Someone will come to me and say, 'I can't understand why I'm fat. I eat like a bird,'" he remarked. "I tell them to keep a written record of everything they eat and find out that they do eat like a bird – a buzzard." At the time it only seemed funny. Thinking about it many years later, after I've been sensitized to discrimination against the heavyset – and after I have gained considerable weight with age – I tend to think of the remark as somewhat prejudiced.

Appledorf had been nicknamed the Junk-Food Professor because he publicly defended the nutritional value of fast foods. I read the article and found that he had been killed in a semi-ritualistic manner with the words "murder" and "redrum" – murder spelled backwards – written on the walls. Suspected were three young male homosexual prostitutes: Shane Kennedy, 15, Gary McNichols (actually an alias for Gary Bown), 21, and Paul Everson, 19. The article indicated that Appledorf had apparently been a customer and business had gone horribly wrong.

I cut out the Newsweek article and saved it. One reason I kept the article was that it included photographs of the three accused. To me, all three were very handsome and I could imagine a gay man seeing them together as a sensuous dream come to life. The youngest, Shane Kennedy, was especially attractive. He looks understandably pensive and suspicious in the photograph but with his layered, silky blonde hair, regular features, and sensuous mouth, I found him to reach a kind of golden mean in appearance. He looked extremely effeminate but I could not mistake him for a female because his jaw and nose had a masculine strength. Sometimes I would just gaze at Shane Kennedy's picture because I found him so enthralling.

However, beauty is notoriously in the eye of the beholder as the wise old saying goes. I showed the Newsweek photographs to a gay male friend and asked him what he thought of the young men picture. He made an expression of distaste. Indicating Shane Kennedy, my friend said, "Much too effeminate." Then about Gary Bown, "Too effeminate as well." He said about Paul Everson – whom I found the least attractive of the three – "He's OK but nothing to write home about."

Recently, I worked on the story of the Howard Appledorf murder for Court TV's Crime Library. As I researched it, I was struck, as I had been before when researching the story of Robert Lee Bennett, Jr. the "Handcuff Man" who tortured male prostitutes, (which I also wrote about for Crime Library), at how similar prostitution is when it is heterosexual and when it is homosexual.

We tend to think of prostitutes as women but prostitution flourishes in the male homosexual community. Moreover, the backgrounds of female and male prostitutes tend to be similar with both groups tending to be emotionally troubled and to have been reared in financially straitened circumstances.

There is a sense in which my Handcuff Man story and the Howard Appledorf story are reverse images of each other. In the former case, Robert Lee Bennett, Jr. preyed upon homosexual prostitutes. In the latter case, homosexual prostitutes preyed upon a client. Both tragic scenarios have their parallels in heterosexual prostitution.

I faced several challenges in writing these stories. One was to keep my own views on homosexuality out of them. I also had to balance the need to familiarize readers with the backgrounds of both victims and victimizers without seeming to excuse heinous actions. I would be very interested to know how well readers of this blog think I did and how they believe I could improve in the future.

To some extent, I had to speculate as to the motives behind these crimes. The crimes perpetrated by Robert Lee Bennett, Jr. were especially baffling for I could not come up with much to explain his motives and the sort of vicious mindset he must have possessed to commit such horrors. I had more to work with in the Howard Appledorf case but would like to know what others think of what led to his murder.

My Robert Lee Bennett, Jr. story is here and my Howard Appledorf story just went up here.

Readers, your thoughts?

DeniseNoe
DeniseNoe
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