cover image TAILSPIN: The Strange Case of Major Call

TAILSPIN: The Strange Case of Major Call

Bernard F. Conners, , foreword by Joseph E. Persico. . British American, $26.95 (506pp) ISBN 978-0-945167-50-1

James Arlon Call was a distinguished Air Force major whose life veered off course after his wife's unexpected death in 1952: he went from career military man to career criminal. Drunk, drifting from city to city, using the spoils of his crimes to cover his gambling debts, Call committed serial burglary in the suburbs of Cleveland and upstate New York that culminated two years later in a deadly shootout with police. With his temerity and survival training, Call slipped through the East Coast dragnet (a newspaper termed him "the phantom killer of the Adirondacks") and was finally captured several months later in a Reno pawnshop. But this crime spree is not the bombshell here: tracing Call's fugitive days, Conners (Dancehall), a former FBI agent, posits that Call was in fact the notorious "bushy-haired intruder" wanted in connection with the death of Marilyn Sheppard, better known as the wife of Dr. Sam Sheppard. Marilyn's murder (and her husband's avowed innocence) provided the basis for the television show The Fugitive and its spinoff film franchise, and was recently reexamined—brilliantly so and toward a different conclusion—in The Wrong Man by James Neff. Part of the problem with Conners's account lies in his narration, a liberal dramatization based on the facts garnished with re-created conversations. Moreover, the Sheppard theory's evidence occurs not in the narrative but in an exhausting 150-page addendum compiled of largely circumstantial evidence, and the decision as to whether Call was involved in the murders is left to the reader's discretion. The result is a two-part book whose conclusions are far from satisfactory. 150 b&w photos. (May)