The Road Out of Hell

The Road Out of Hell

Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville Murders

Anthony Flacco

with Jerry Clark

Click here for the Reader’s Guide for Discussion.

Copyright

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright © 2009 by Anthony Flacco
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For more information, email
[email protected]

First Diversion Books edition November 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62681-172-0

Foreword

By Dr. Michael Stone
host of the Discovery Channel’s
Most Evil

Anthony Flacco’s splendid book about the Wineville murders in the mid-1920s manages to be both chilling and uplifting. How is this possible? The reason is this: Though it is one book,
The Road Out of Hell
is two interlaced biographies—one of an uncle and the other of his nephew. Gordon Stewart Northcott, the uncle, is one of the worst human beings you will ever encounter—even in true-crime literature, which does not shy away from evil acts and evil people. Sanford Clark, the nephew, is one of the most heroic persons you are likely to read about, due to his steadfast adherence to what is good and noble during the months he was subjected to unimaginable torture from his uncle—and for the remaining sixty-two years of his life.

When he was twenty (just seven years older than his nephew), Northcott lured Sanford from Saskatchewan, where they both lived, to an isolated chicken ranch near Los Angeles. There, effectively cut off from the outside world, Northcott subjected Sanford to systematic torture, anal rape, degradation and humiliation, and—in some ways, worst of all—forced participation in the cover-up of Northcott’s more than twenty murders of other boys and young men.

Since I already mentioned evil acts and evil people, let me say a few words about evil. Evil is not something instilled in a few unlucky persons by a malicious Lucifer. If we are to understand “evil” at all, we must think of it as a word—an emotional word—we use to describe actions performed by other humans that we experience as breathtakingly horrible, shocking, and, often enough, nauseating. We learn of evil actions aplenty through the papers and the six o’clock news. But it is extremely rare to learn of a person whose actions are evil
all the time.
This is truly an “evil person.”

The Road Out of Hell
is the 633rd true-crime book I have read in the past twenty years. Alongside my work in forensics and as host of the Discovery Channel show
Most Evil,
this extensive reading has made me familiar with thousands of men and women who have committed murder in peacetime. (Wartime is a different story.) Northcott is only the sixth whom I would describe as an
evil person.

All six killers I’ve identified as evil have certain features in common: All are men guilty of serial sexual homicide; all are psychopaths; all are sadistic. The psychopath is quintessentially callous, manipulative, deceitful, and a stranger to compassion and remorse, though not necessarily violent or cruel. It is sadism that adds the quality—and this is its key feature—of
enjoying the suffering of others.

Most readers will be familiar with the iconic Jeffrey Dahmer, also a homosexual pedophile serial killer like Northcott. But Dahmer anesthetized his victims with “knockout drops” before killing them, and then had sex with the corpses. No such delicacy in Northcott. And no such luck for his victims—those murdered as well as his nephew Sanford, who endured almost two years of his uncle’s sadism in its full panoply and extreme severity. One of the nastiest elements of sadism involved forcing Sanford to choose between participation in an evil act (smashing the skulls of the victims and scattering the fragments over the fields, to avoid detection) or being killed himself.

A mere teenager at the time, Sanford did the right thing: He chose life, albeit at the price of doing things utterly repugnant to him, things that he knew were wrong—under any but the bizarre circumstances in which he was held captive. Understandably, yet unnecessarily, he carried guilt about his participation to his grave. Sanford had nightmares and flashbacks for the rest of his life about the atrocities he had witnessed, and he had self-recriminations for the things his uncle had forced him to do. (In psychiatry, we push all that into the pigeonhole of “post-traumatic stress disorder”—a pretty pale label for all that Sanford suffered.) The consistently good, caring, and charitable life Sanford led after his uncle’s arrest was never enough to put his mind at ease, no matter that he served honorably for six years on the European front in World War II, was married for fifty-five years, and raised two sons. His story reads like one of redemption—though, as author Flacco points out, redemption somehow isn’t the right word, since Sanford had done nothing wrong to atone for.

What I find fascinating about
The Road Out of Hell
is not only the hell that Stewart created, but the road that Sanford was able to take out of it. In the last few years, psychiatry has come to understand more about the factors that nudge certain people into committing the outrageous acts we label “evil.” By no means are they all psychopaths and sadists. Some are self-centered schemers who plot to kill a spouse for insurance money; others are paranoid loners who lose a job or a lover and then explode into massacre. We know about heredity and birth complications, about bad families and childhood head injury, and even about some of the brain abnormalities that spell trouble in certain cases. So oddly enough, Northcott—as rare an exemplar of evil as he is—is less a mystery than his nephew Sanford, whose goodness is almost inexplicable.

Both uncle and nephew, in addition to having a fourth of their blood in common, had mothers who were abusive, unscrupulous viragos. Both had fathers who were tyrannized by their wives and indifferent toward their children. And yet, one ended up evil and the other transcendently good. Why? I don’t know. Most people are compassionate, have empathy, and live their lives without succumbing to violence or cruelty. A certain measure of goodness is, so to say, our default position. Most of our brains are wired for being morally upright and good. Only a few are wired for wickedness. For the super-goodness of Sanford, we have no word in the language and little understanding. But we’re also wired to feel
awe,
when we hear of either the terribly bad or the astonishingly good. That’s what makes Flacco’s book what it is: awesome.

Preface

By Anthony Flacco

The events and characters in this book are real. All speculation and dramatization is bounded by the known facts and is employed to hold the story together without harming the truth of it.

Because the cruel deaths of kidnapped children are at the bottom of all this, the telling must be honest and fair. However, as with any infamous murder trial implicating multiple defendants, there were people lying, guessing, and speculating all around this case back in those times, and some of those conflicting accounts survive today. Anywhere I encountered incompatible versions of something, I let the accumulated research guide me as to which one to accept. Any guessing of my own regarding the portrayals of the people in this story is done within the parameters of documented evidence. As often as possible, the manner of each character’s speech is taken from transcriptions of their spoken words in court records, police records, and newspaper records dating from the year 1926 and forward. Imagination and extrapolation fill the gaps.

The research base for this book includes relevant portions of the case record from the arrest and prosecution of Gordon Stewart Northcott. His twenty-seven-day trial ended on February 7, 1929, and the facts that convicted him are widely available in the public record. Thus the various deposition documents and evidence photographs that are referenced here are used as they apply to Sanford Wesley Clark and his personal condition, not to the particulars of the criminal case against Gordon Stewart Northcott, which has long since been settled.

Access was provided to me for a number of Sanford Clark’s private family documents, photographs, letters, and notes by Sanford’s adopted son Jerry Clark. Jerry’s firsthand observations of Sanford’s personality form the primary basis for his portrayal as an adult long after the public record goes silent about him. I traveled to the former Whittier Boys School, where Sanford was rehabilitated. It is now closed to operation but still stands. The current occupants of the former Wineville murder ranch allowed me to visit the property. The patch of land felt tiny. It was painful just to imagine a little boy poking around on that flat piece of earth while trying to stay out of the way of a psychotic sadist. The ranch house originally built by the Northcott family also still stands, although it has been modernized and somewhat remodeled so that the dwelling that Sanford once knew is concealed.

These sources were vitally augmented by the advantage of having a firsthand observer of Sanford Clark in his adoptive son, Jerry, who is joined in his celebration of the man by Robert Clark, Sanford’s other adopted son. Family members and friends were also kind enough to each provide a piece of the answer to the riddle.

Introduction

By Jerry Clark

I had just turned seventeen when my father revealed his past to me, terrible in its gruesome details. His words completely altered my life. The descriptions were strong enough to burn the scenes into my memory and to leave them there, forever clear.

The night was a cold one. We were riding in the car, supposedly on our way to a local hockey game, when at some point he pulled over to the side of the road and said that he needed to have a talk with me. I wondered if I was in trouble for something. He left the engine idling, but the windows soon fogged over while he revealed that he had taken me out by myself that night because there were things that he needed to tell me, things that my adoptive brother was too young to hear. From that moment on, the only sounds were my father’s voice and the car’s low background rumble. I quickly stopped noticing the time and never thought about it again for the rest of the night.

He began with a sigh that made it clear that he was about to say something that he did not want to put into words. When he finally spoke, it was in a halting and defeated voice that I had never heard him use. “I need to tell you some things.”

By now, my sense of alarm was in overdrive. “Okay,” I said, hoping I sounded calm.

He sighed again. “You heard about that nurse in our neighborhood who disappeared, eh? Her body was found not too far from our place, close enough to where we live that the newspapers might, you know, make some comparisons to other cases. And if they do, they’re likely to pull up their files on a relative of ours named Gordon Stewart Northcott… and me.”

He then laid out a story of two years of madness and murder that had been visited upon him, beginning when he was a boy of thirteen. He explained everything. There was no way that he could give me a sanitized version. To soften this story would be to paint it in a lie. That was why he wanted to make sure I heard it from him first.

Before long, I was too stunned to ask any questions. I just sat and let him unwind the details, while he put an end to my boyhood by revealing the series of events that put an end to his.

JERRY CLARK

SASKATOON, CANADA

APRIL 2009

One

Thirteen-year-old Sanford Clark felt his stomach lurch when he realized that his mother was really going to send him away. He stared down at the floor and fought to control his breathing while his brain reeled from the news. Everything about it felt wrong. The atmosphere in the room took on a poisonous feel, as if a thin mist of acid had just rolled in through the window. He knew that his mother and uncle were telling him a pack of lies. It was all so off-kilter and strange that the moment belonged in a bad dream.

There was his mother, Winnie, doing more of that wink-and-grin whispering that she and her younger brother Stewart always fell into whenever they thought nobody was around. Today, for some reason, she didn’t appear to care that Sanford was standing right there—or even that her husband was in the room. She seemed determined to end Uncle Stewart’s visit with all the closeness that she could get from him. Sanford wondered how his father could fail to see it. But when John Clark was at home, he just kind of floated around in their lives. He had gotten himself bitched into silence at some point in the distant past, back when Sanford was too small to remember. Now he only knew his father’s ghost.