The Colonel Read online

  There is not a single shred of evidence to tie Andre van Kuijk to the murder of Anna van den Enden. His name does not appear anywhere in the police report, and until the anonymous letter arrived at the Breda newspaper fifty-one years after the fact, no one in Holland had spoken of his name in connection with the crime.

  Yet a set of circumstances makes it impossible not to speculate that Colonel Tom Parker in fact may have gotten away with murder.

  Although Andre had been living in Rotterdam and America for several years, it was almost certain that he knew Anna Cornelia Hageners before she married, either in childhood or during his return to Breda at age eighteen. Only three years apart in age, they apparently attended the same church, St. Josefkerk. Andre also knew her husband’s family. Johannes van den Enden ran the café where Adam van Kuijk spent his Sunday afternoons, and the elder van den Enden’s home on the Beyerd was just around the turn from the van Gend en Loos stables. Furthermore, Anna’s twenty-four-year-old husband, Willem, was fond of kermis, or fancy fair. Like Andre, he traveled as far as Oosterhout when the kermis came to town.

  And there was another connection. The van den Enden greengrocery was located at Nieuwe Boschstraat 31. Nieuwe Boschstraat is merely the continuation of Boschstraat, where Andre went to public school. What schoolboy, and especially one as fond of fruit as Dries, would not have stopped off at the market for an apple after school?

  Certainly he would have known the shop, even if it had been in the hands of a previous owner when he was a child. And he would have remembered that of the two doors in the front, only the middle door led inside the shop. Then, too, the van Kuijk family is unsure which grocer employed him for deliveries when he first left school. Had this been the one?

  Boschstraat is also where his mother moved after van Gend en Loos evicted her from the stables. It was that house that Andre visited whenever he returned home to Breda after the age of sixteen. And he was likely in town the weekend Anna was murdered. She was killed on the Friday before Whitsunday, or Pentecost—to Catholics, an important high church occasion accompanied, like Easter, by a longer school holiday, which made it a good time for travel and spending time with family. Surely Andre would have come home rather than spend it alone in the dreary hostel above his Rotterdam employer’s office.

  Anyone familiar with the habits and interests of both Andre van Kuijk and the older Colonel Tom Parker will find several small points of the police report most absorbing. Witnesses described seeing a man in a “fancy costume . . . a dark fantasy jacket costume” come out of the shop at the hour the murder was committed, though one thought he recognized him as Jan van Enden. Another talked about seeing a well-dressed man “in a gray-colored overcoat and fancy trousers, and I do believe a black hat.” And still another described a man leaving the shop who wore a “light yellow” raincoat.

  Any of those outfits might have belonged to Andre: a “fantasy jacket” reflects his obsession with kermis. He wore a gray suit to his father’s funeral, and in a letter he wrote to his mother when he first moved to Rotterdam, he talked about his plan to buy a raincoat and hat. And in the 1950s, when his closet held a variety of large overshirts, worn loose and over the belt, the majority of them were his favorite color—light yellow.

  In the days after the murder, another witness, a meat delivery boy, came forth to testify seeing the same man in the yellow raincoat exit the fruit shop around the time Anna was killed. Shortly after, he encountered him again, this time elsewhere in the neighborhood, in a “conflict of words” with a woman approximately sixty years of age, “pretty chubby around the hips and a very slim face. She had gray hair which she wore in a twist on the head.” With the addition of eight years, that description fits Maria van Kuijk to perfection. Had she had an altercation with her son, a young man who had changed so much during the years he was away that he might not be immediately recognizable to others?

  And perhaps a matter that most puzzled the police, according to the report, can be easily explained. Whoever snuffed out Anna van den - Enden’s brief life sprinkled white pepper around her body and then left a “very thin layer of corresponding gray dust”—again pepper—on the floor going into the bathroom, as well as “on the marble top of both drawers in the bedrooms, and in the hall from the bedroom to the stairs and descending into the hall which led from the shop to the kitchen.” A young man who had worked with the training of dogs surely knew that police used German shepherds in the tracking of criminals, even in the Holland of 1929. And he also might have thought that a snout full of pepper would have prevented them from picking up a scent.

  But even more coincidental is the fact that the author of the anonymous letter referenced 1961 as the year he was told this story. That was the year that Ad van Kuijk, Andre’s younger brother, flew to Los Angeles and met with the man who called himself Colonel Tom Parker. It was the first time anyone in the family had seen him since 1929. And yet when Ad returned to Holland, he refused to talk about his trip, arousing suspicion with his siblings that he had either been bought off or threatened.

  The more important question is whether the letter writer really knew his facts, or if he was simply reporting a rumor that had, through the years, become “truth.” In 1982, Parker claimed he came to America in 1928, a year before these events. Was that to cover his involvement in the murder of van den Enden, or could the anonymous author just have been wrong?

  There is no way of knowing whether Andre van Kuijk visited the fruit shop on the morning of May 17, 1929. But if so, had he merely meant to rob Anna, to knock her cold and steal money to return to America? Was that the money Andre left behind in the trunk? Had he been too scared to change the guilders to dollars after things had gone so wrong? Once inside the building, the intruder had locked the door between the shop and the living quarters. Had he not expected to find anyone there—Willem was out with his cart making deliveries—and panicked when he saw her?

  Standing at the sink, she was struck several times from behind and hit with such force that, as the police report vividly put it, “part of the brain came through the right ear.” Immediately, the burglar realized his awful mistake and attempted to bind her wounds with a piece of material torn from clothing later found in the hall. But the housewife was dead where she fell, her slippers askew on the coconut mat by the sink, a dark puddle under her head.

  Yet was Andre truly capable of such a brutal deed, a sudden psychotic act? And one so bold?

  “I really don’t think there was a murder in him,” says Todd Slaughter, who as president of the official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain, grew to know Parker well in the last twenty-five years of his life. “He was a noisy character, but I don’t think there was any brute force within his psyche at all.” But others disagree.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he killed that woman,” asserts Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia, assigned to the Colonel in the 1970s. “He had a terrible temper. He and I got into some violent, violent fights. We fought all the time. When we started arguing, people would get up and leave the table. Everybody was just a nervous wreck.”

  “I never saw him hit anybody, other than to shove his assistant [Tom Diskin] one time,” remembers Byron Raphael. “But he did have a violent temper and a terrible mean streak, and it took very little to set him off. In those fits of rage, he was a very dangerous man, and he certainly appeared capable of killing. He would be nice one second, and stare off like he was lost, and then—boom!—tremendous force. He’d just snap. You never saw it coming. Then five minutes later, he would be so gentle, telling a nice soft story.”

  Such fury is often triggered by frustration, and Anna’s killing seems too horrific and personal to have been done by a mere burglar. Had Andre just learned of her five-week-old marriage and gone to the fruit market for a confrontation, perhaps after a night of drinking? Might she have said something that unleashed a torrent of emotion, something that drove the humiliated Andre, in a flash of anger, to pick up a heav
y tool and strike all sense out of her, then rob the house to mask his motivation? Only Andre and Anna know that now, speaking the truth with no tongue, no mouth, and no throat, nestled in the cool, dark folds of death.

  On a purely emotional level, Parker’s family in Holland refuses to entertain thoughts of Andre as a murderer. His sister Marie, the former nun, says it could not possibly be true. Besides, she adds, Mother would have known.

  And yet this odd tale had a postscript, some fifty-three years after the fact. In the course of his research, Dirk Vellenga wrote to the American journalist Lloyd Shearer for help in piecing together the facts of Andre’s strange odyssey to America. Shearer had at least a working relationship with Parker, who had refused to reply to Vellenga’s letters, and Vellenga hoped that Parker would answer some preliminary questions if they were put to him by someone he knew.

  To Vellenga’s delight, he soon received a telephone call from Lloyd Shearer. At first, the men chatted about the weather and exchanged pleasantries. But as Shearer talked on, Vellenga noticed that Shearer spoke with a familiar accent—something about the way he pronounced his Rs and Js—and that he seemed hoarse, like a man who might be trying to disguise his voice. Vellenga dismissed those thoughts momentarily, as Shearer was most intrigued by the Dutchman’s questions about Parker’s past, and the two journalists agreed to correspond about the matter.

  Vellenga kept his end of the bargain, sending letter after letter. But he never again heard from Lloyd Shearer—lost today to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease—or, for that matter, from Colonel Parker. Or did he? Today, Vellenga is convinced it wasn’t Shearer who called him after all, and Mrs. Shearer agrees. That phone call was between two Dutchmen, both wildly curious about an investigation into the murky life of one Dries van Kuijk.

  4

  MISSING IN ACTION

  WHEN Andre returned to America in the late spring of 1929, much had changed in the two years since his first trip. Chautauquas were now almost exclusively a thing of the past, soon to be finished off by the October 29 stock market crash, which would plunge the American economy into the Great Depression, with its accompanying unemployment, homelessness, and starvation. Everywhere, the talk was doom and gloom. But for a young man who had already led a marginal existence for years, it hardly mattered.

  Almost immediately, Andre left Mobile, Alabama, where he had sneaked into the country, and headed out to find work with a carnival on its summer route. Occasionally when he earned money, he managed to send some to his mother, but always without a return address—he was moving too fast.

  Throughout his carny life, Andre would hook up with some eight traveling outfits, from the lesser-known Bruce Greater Shows, Dietrich Shows, and the L. J. Heth Shows, to the prestigious Royal American Shows. But for now, with little command of English and scant experience with American carnivals, Andre would settle for employment almost anywhere.

  “When he got off that boat,” says Gabe Tucker, a musician and talent manager who was associated with Parker on and off for some twenty-five years, beginning in 1939, “he got on the first carnival he come to, up in West Virginia.” Carnivals were the perfect blind. In an atmosphere that attracted people on the run, nobody cared if you had a passport or not. Better yet, the hustlers and the cons of the carnival protected one of their own if somebody came asking questions.

  The carnival that likely took Andre on was Rubin & Cherry Exposition Shows, a highly successful company that loftily referred to itself as “the Aristocrat of the Tented World.” As for which West Virginia town Rubin & Cherry was playing at the time Andre signed on, no one knows for certain. But a good guess would be Huntington, where the carnival pitched its tents at the end of May through early June 1929—precisely the time Andre is thought to have arrived in America. By the 1940s, the man who called himself Thomas A. Parker always listed Huntington, West Virginia, as his birthplace, as good a town as any to be “reborn” in.

  In 1929, the American carnival was thirty years old, with some two hundred outfits plying the circuit. Each moved on as many as forty railroad cars, eager to set up their midways on the cow pastures and fairgrounds around the United States and Canada. Many of those shows carried an elephant, the world’s largest land mammal.

  Long known as premier symbols of strength and power, elephants, which can weigh as much as seven tons and stand as tall as twelve feet, did more than simply perform in the carnival. They carried the support poles to set the show tents and often helped the horses pull the wagons. But the elephant is also a grand arbiter of fortune. With his trunk raised, he is said to forecast good luck; with it down, a turn of the fates. Naturally, the elephant captivated Andre’s attention.

  Indeed, his brother Ad van Kuijk said in 1961 that Andre started his career in America “working in a circus by lying on the ground in front of elephants,” a reference to that part of an act in which the great beast demonstrates both his gentleness with humans and his control over his massive bulk.

  In 1994, Colonel Tom Parker gave a list of his career affiliations to the Showmen’s League for a tribute page in their annual yearbook. Nowhere did he mention a specific circus, only carnivals, though he would announce at a 1988 Elvis Presley Birthday Banquet that he had worked for Ringling Brothers for “about two years when I was sixteen years old.” But he would allude to elephants and circuses again in a 1994 letter to Pam Lewis, then the co-manager of country superstar Garth Brooks. “Please tell [Garth] . . . I enjoyed the television show on NBC,” Parker wrote. “When I saw him on the high wire flying in the air, it reminded me of my circus days when I floated on top of an elephant.”

  In all probability, Andre joined a small, one-family circus or a carnival, and not a grand independent outfit. But whether he thought it sounded more impressive than a carny (circus performers traditionally look down their noses at carnival workers, whom they consider merely cheap hustlers), he was far more modest in recounting his pachyderm past to Byron Raphael in the late 1950s.

  “Colonel never invited questions about his past, but he would bring it up on his own,” Raphael recalls. “He would go into these periods of melancholy where all of a sudden he’d drop his aggressive business stance and become very soft and sentimental. Several times, Colonel said he was the guy who washed the elephants. He used to water them and take care of them, and he used to give kids elephant rides. Then he would bring it back and tie it up by the foot and wash it down.

  “He was pretty much of a loner, and he told me that he would be there with his elephants, or moving hay or dung around, and he would eavesdrop and listen in—what the carnies call ‘staying on the earie.’ That’s the way he learned a lot, just by listening to people.”

  But Andre the elephant groom was also already honing his entrepreneurial skills. “The story I heard,” says Mac Wiseman, the bluegrass star whom Parker booked in the mid-’50s, “was that the Colonel was smart enough to get the carnival owner to give him the elephant manure that they normally hauled away. He processed it and sold it as fertilizer, or took what everybody else considered trash and turned it into money. That sums up the Colonel to me.”

  While in many ways Andre’s association with the big “rubber cows” was reminiscent of his work in his father’s stables, he nonetheless found a great affinity with the elephant. More than that, as Tom Parker he seemed to form some sort of primal bond with the creature. He would more quickly cry over the fate of a doomed elephant than he would over the end of a human being.

  “Colonel was very loyal to his friends, and he didn’t forget,” offers Sandra Polk Ross, his daughter-in-law in the 1970s. “His memory was as long as an elephant’s.”

  Predictably, the Colonel’s detractors would find less flattering comparisons: the elephant’s enormous bulk and compulsion for food; its thick hide, which makes it impervious to barbs thrown its way; and especially its dangerous behavior when enraged.

  “He was like a giant elephant standing on flat ground,” says Memphis attorney D. Beecher Smith II
, estate and tax counsel to Elvis Presley near the end of the singer’s life.

  A 1993 made-for-television biopic carried the symbolism further, opening with a scene in which Parker demonstrates how to train an elephant by placing a rope around its neck when the animal is young. As the elephant grows larger, it can easily break away, but without the intellect to overcome its early training, it remains a passive captive. The scene was meant to foreshadow Parker’s command over Elvis, who could have broken off his relationship with his manager at any time, yet remained under his control.

  Whether Parker agreed with that characterization, during his days with Presley, he festooned his offices at the various movie studios with elephant memorabilia, from canes with elephant heads worked into their knobby tops to stools disconcertingly made from an actual elephant leg—a big, stubby foot with huge, splayed toenails. “The place looked like a carnival midway,” remembered Alan Fortas, a Presley entourage member.

  From his first weeks in America, then, on this, his second and final trip, Andre the elephant handler had found his personal totem. But he had yet to reinvent himself in the full persona of Tom Parker. For that, the young man with no education, no legal papers, and no real job prospects would need to slip away somewhere, to sequester himself where he could sharpen his language skills and have some time to think. At the same time, he would need to draw a modicum of pay, enjoy free lodging, and receive his required three squares a day. On the eve of the Depression, the solution seemed obvious. He would go for the security of his father’s early calling.

  On June 20, 1929, Andre made his way to Fort McPherson, southwest of Atlanta, Georgia. There, the boy who had wanted nothing to do with military life, drill, or taking orders back home joined the army.

  Or so he would later claim. On May 18, 1982, in legal papers filed in answer to a lawsuit brought against him by RCA Records, Parker contended: