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 (
Reviewed on: 02/25/2002
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 512 pages - 978-0-945167-53-2