MARCHING TO EMPORIA : Steamy Tale of Murder Attracts a Hollywood Swarm to Kansas

The countryside here is lush, vibrant green, vast and nearly empty beneath an unpolluted, cloudless sky. Almost too placid for murder.

But at night, as a visitor drives along shadowy gravel roads outside of town, passing farmhouses that are dark by 11 o’clock, he can imagine death sprouting as easily as the stalks of corn and milo that waltz in the humid summer breeze.

Deadly violence did come to this town of 29,000 people and 40 churches, germinating in a mix of lust, greed and ambition.

And then Hollywood came, descending like the proverbial plague of locusts to pick clean the dramatic rights.

How could Hollywood resist? The real-life tale is as gothic as it is convoluted.

The Rev. Thomas Bird stands convicted of viciously murdering his bright, career-minded wife, Sandra, on a lonely country bridge. He and Lorna Anderson (now remarried as Lorna Eldridge), his one-time secretary at Faith Lutheran Church and his mistress, have been judged guilty of using $5,000--apparently from Sandra’s life insurance payoff--to finance a murder plot against Lorna’s husband (a plan that fizzled). Eventually, Marty Anderson (whose life was insured for $300,000), was killed execution-style--and while no one has been charged, a gun thought to be the murder weapon has been found in a pond near the death site. And Lorna has given a prison confession to a newspaper reporter--claiming that Bird pulled the trigger.

For extra spice, add local gossip that raced like wildfire ahead of a plodding and botched investigation; keen detective work by others that would later seem heroic; a couple of local characters--one of them Lorna’s ex-lover/ex-hairdresser--convicted of solicitation in the failed murder plot, and a female church member, and Bird supporter, arrested for attacking a prosecution witness outside the courtroom.

At the core of Tom and Lorna’s story is the chilling question: How could evil lurk in the heart so close to piousness? And why did evil triumph? It makes for a saga one investigator calls “so steamy and full of good stuff you don’t have to make anything up.”

The TV networks became aware of the story last January when the New Yorker ran an article by celebrated author and crime aficionado (and ex-Kansan) Calvin Trillin (“I’ve had other options taken on my work,” Trillin said, “but there was an extraordinary amount of interest in this piece”). Producer Marcy Carsey (“The Cosby Show”) optioned Trillin’s piece, but apparently failed to go agressively after individual dramatic rights.

Then, said a network executive, “the whole ball game changed” on the morning of March 17, when the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page account of the case by staff writer Scott Kraft, complete with Lorna’s jail-house confession. (Trillin later heard that some producers saw the Times’ photos of Tom and Lorna and instantly visualized John Malkovich and Debra Winger in the roles.)

On that day, Kraft got “25 to 30” calls from Hollywood at his office in The Times’ Chicago bureau (he’s now the Nairobi bureau chief); more calls came in the ensuing days. Most callers weren’t interested in his article, Kraft said--they wanted to get to the principal figures, and fast. And they wanted iron-clad, exclusive contracts permitting them to portray those figures on screen--rights that could help them swing network deals.

The invasion of Emporia had begun.

Lorimar Television dispensed “an attorney with a checkbook,” according to one witness. Dick Clark made a visit trying to entice holdouts to his side. Henry Winkler laid out his offer to Lorna Anderson Eldridge in a phone call to Kansas State Correctional Institution. There are now separate development deals at all three networks, with each producer claiming to have the best tale to tell (see score card on next page).

In their assault on Emporia, they almost tripped over each other. Landing at Kansas City International Airport, one producer hurriedly rented a car, only to discover that two competitors had gotten theirs at the same counter that morning. Others recognized each other moving furtively in and out of rooms at the Emporia Holiday Inn. Down on Merchant Street, where metered parking costs a nickel an hour, a representative for Interscope Communications got a $2 parking citation in front of the Emporia Gazette--not long after one of Clark’s representatives was ticketed in the same spot.

Two dozen producers eventually joined in the bidding for the exclusive rights to dramatize the life of State Trooper John Rule, whom CBS wanted to build a four-hour script around. Spurred by aggressive Lorimar, the stakes soared to $80,000, said sources--an unusually large sum for individual rights in an ensemble production, especially since Rule was not a central figure in the real-life drama. Rule has received an option of $25,000, with $50,000 more due if and when production begins, plus several thousand more as a technical adviser (a more customary option would be in the $1,500-$5,000 range, good for one year, with an option to extend the contract another year for more money).

Payments to two Emporia newspaper reporters and a Kansas Bureau of Investigation officer pushed the total for rights in the deal to $145,000. It almost certainly exceeds what Winkler is paying Tom and Lorna, and what Clark is shelling out to Sandra Bird’s family for her story (neither producer is revealing financial details).

Such figures caused smaller production companies to drop out of the bidding like minnows in the path of hungry sharks.

“It was like a feeding frenzy down there for a couple of weeks,” says Triad Artists agent Robert Lee, who had a head start until the Times article appeared and “destroyed me.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen all three networks going after a story like this,” says Dan Paulson, a Clark vice-president.

“It was overwhelming and it was annoying,” says Roberta Birk, a news reporter who covers five counties for the Gazette and worked the Bird-Anderson case. (She signed with Interscope.) “They kind of thought of us as monkeys in a cage, and I guess we thought of them the same way. They were everything you’d imagine Hollywood would be.”

To understand the impact of this show business assault, you need to know a little about this community.

Founded in 1857, Emporia sits on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, just off quiet Interstate 35, on the edge of the low, rolling Flint Hills. The heart of town is red-brick Emporia State University (enrollment 5,500) and the tree-shaded neighborhoods around it, where fences are scarce and yards meticulously kept. Cable TV keeps the town plugged in to the outside world, but one of three movie theaters is boarded up. Alcoholic beverages are not sold on Sundays, and, except for the restaurant at the Ramada Inn, cafes are closed by 10 on weeknights.

The biggest recent surge in crime has been vandalism--about 60 cases already this year. One rarely hears a public argument, or even a car horn. Walk down a dirt alley in town and you’ll see children working with parents and grandparents in backyard gardens, where pumpkins are plentiful now. Perhaps because they are faced with the vast emptiness of the surrounding plains, residents seem to cling to church, school and family with a need that urban outsiders might not understand.

The principal industry is cattle ranching--at night, when the slaughtering houses are busy, the thick, sweet smell of blood fills the air. But there is also a cultural flavor, thanks to the college and the legacy of legendary editor William Allen White, who was born and died here. White, who bought the Emporia Gazette in 1895, is probably best remembered outside Kansas for an editorial written in 1921 about the death of his young daughter Mary in a horseback riding accident. It was the inspiration for a 1977 ABC movie, “Mary White” (Kathleen Beller had the title role), which was shot here, and about which many Emporians still speak with unabashed pride.

The Rev. Thomas Bird, then 32, arrived with his wife, Sandra, and three children in 1982 to form a new congregation for the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, the most conservative of the major branches of American Lutheranism. The son of a preacher, Tom Bird was an intense, charismatic leader; church membership grew quickly, and the congregation soon moved into a modest but modern brick building, with pretty Lorna Anderson as part-time secretary. Lorna, married and the mother of four daughters, already had a “reputation,” according to later accounts. Her close relationship with Bird became an openly discussed concern of church members.

According to a much talked-about series in KS. Magazine, Tom Bird also had a problem with “ego and ambition” and dreamed of building a retreat for troubled families in New Mexico that would require considerable financing. The series by Joan Stibal Baker pictured Lorna as a woman who was “dependent” on men--but also a manipulator.

After Sandra Bird’s body was found face down in the Cottonwood River 7 miles outside town in July, 1983--and Marty Anderson was shot to death in nearby Geary County the next November--Emporians began to chatter about an even darker side to the preacher and his alleged paramour. According to numerous press accounts, gossip was rampant about the Birds’ troubled marriage (a potential problem for an ambitious preacher), adultery, murder contracts and even murder itself--much of which would be verified during the investigation and trials. But there were no witnesses to Sandra Bird’s murder--Tom Bird was convicted because of considerable circumstantial evidence--and many people in the area say they still believe in his innocence, despite Lorna’s press statements to the contrary. And, despite her confession, she, like Bird, has filed an appeal.

Emporians continue to seem titillated and disturbed by the violent affair. But there is no apparent antagonism about outsiders coming in to make a movie exploiting it.

“We look at it like it’s an aberration for the community, not the way daily life is here,” says Jerry Jones, director of the Topeka-based Kansas Film Commission. “If it wasn’t an aberration, you wouldn’t be here.”

Trooper Rule wasn’t scheduled to work the morning a canoeist found Sandra Bird’s body. Rule had taken Charlie Pankratz’s shift.

“That’s the strange thing about it,” Rule says, steering his patrol car through cornfields toward the Cottonwood River. “It could have happened to any law enforcement officer in the county. It could have been him (Pankratz) just as easily as me.”

Rule stops the car on the wooden planks of the Rocky Ford Bridge and points to where Sandra Bird was found in shallow water several feet from the family car.

To a traffic officer--and that’s all Rule really is, he says--it looked superficially like an accident. But checking further, he found much evidence that indicated otherwise. In fact, almost nothing seemed to make sense, including a trail of blood across the bridge. Rule told the county attorney that it looked like homicide. But the coroner ruled Sandy Bird’s death an accident, which is how it was left. John Rule was haunted by it and began to piece together more evidence on his own.

It was when Marty Anderson was slain four months later--and gossip about Tom and Lorna was epidemic--that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation compared notes with Rule. A new autopsy was performed by a pathologist brought in from Wichita and the cause of death was changed to homicide. At Tom Bird’s trial, John Rule’s evidence was crucial. One theory: Tiny Sandy Bird, on the night she and Tom were to celebrate her teaching promotion at the university, was bludgeoned, dragged fighting to the rail, and pushed and beaten until she dropped 50 feet to the river.

Times reporter Kraft began his article from Rule’s viewpoint, inspiring a stampede of producers wanting to portray the trooper on film.

“It was chaos, non-stop phone calls,” Rule says in a soft Kansas drawl. “I tried to call all of them back, but nine out of 10 have answering machines. They tell you to call collect, but of course answering machines won’t take charges.”

With dark blond hair and a boyish face, the disarmingly modest Rule could be a law enforcement poster boy in his powder blue trooper’s uniform. But for a time, his calm nature was tested.

“I had three different people call and tell me they’d written ‘On Golden Pond,’ ” Rule remembers. “You can’t tell (on the phone) who might do it right, or what.

“And, of course, I didn’t know anything about this (dramatic) rights business. It was so confusing. One guy would talk $25 or $30 and then the other guy would say six figures for my life’s rights. And you knew that one was just as crazy as the other.

“I was dumber than hell about this whole thing. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, the best thing to do is go slow and careful.”

He hired a local lawyer to sort out the callers until he realized that could cost him a couple hundred dollars a day. And the callers kept calling back.

“There was a period when they wouldn’t let you sleep or work. These people were after anybody who could get them inside this story. Boy, was it a relief when I got an agent.”

That happened on the first of two trips to Hollywood, paid for by producer Zev Braun. Braun sent Rule to his own agent, Arthur Axelman at the William Morris Agency, agreeing to match the highest bid (“Little did I know that I’d end up paying a good 10 times what I expected to,” said Braun). When Rule was introduced to executives at CBS, the network made sure some were from Kansas. The writer-director whom Braun wanted, Mike Robe, was also from Kansas. It wasn’t lost on Rule.

“I knew they wanted something from me. But they treated us real nice. You get a chance to meet them and look at their eyes, you can tell a little more about them. My main biggest interest is that it be done factually. If it’s done factually, it shouldn’t hurt anybody.”

But like some others close to the situation, Rule is mystified that they would offer him so much money to make a movie or miniseries from his viewpoint.

“Once you get away from that bridge,” he says, “I had very little to do with this case.”

Roberta Birk accepts a visitor into the reporter’s room of the Gazette with barely concealed distrust. Short, dark-haired, sturdily built, she answers questions tersely and tightly. Like other reporters in the region, she covered the case for nearly three years, only to have outsiders like Trillin and Kraft come in and steal the thunder. (“It’s a little disappointing when you work so hard for so long,” said Bill Norton, who wrote a two-part series on the case for the Sunday magazine of the Kansas City Star, “and it only gets noticed when it appears on the Coast.”)

Kraft, who attended Kansas State University, used that connection to gain the trust of Birk and co-reporter Nancy Horst--”We talked to him for hours (about the case),” Birk says bitterly--and his surprise interview with Lorna left the reporters stunned.

Birk and Horst have signed a package deal with John Rule. But her disenchantment with Hollywood lingers: “I hate to say it, but it was not that important to us. It wasn’t that Hollywood didn’t matter. We just wished that they would leave us alone and let us do our work. People were calling all the time. They didn’t seem to understand that we had jobs that were more important to us than seeing this story put on a screen.”

She also got a taste of Hollywood’s little white lies.

“There seems to be a tendency in Hollywood to say ‘We signed so-and-so’ when ‘we’ actually didn’t,” says Birk. “In the end, just about everybody (lied to us). But that was near the end of the bidding war, when things were a bit desperate.”

She and Horst made their deal with Braun and Interscope, she says, because they believed Interscope would handle the story less sensationally and because Rule wanted to sign with them.

“We thought they were going to do it honestly. We’ve been really concerned about how it’s going to be portrayed.”

So strong was that conviction, Birk says, that the two reporters turned down higher bids--something, she says, that baffled one producer she won’t name.

“He kept asking, ‘What’s it going to take? How much is it going to take?’ It was an extraordinarily famous person. It was very disappointing. We told his assistant that money was not the important thing. He didn’t believe us. (They felt) that rights to a story could be bought no matter what the truth of the story was.

“The fact that he assumed we could be bought was extremely offensive.”

Like most agricultural states, Kansas is suffering, and Emporia has not been spared. Tom Bird and Lorna Anderson have put Emporia back on the map, and local boosters smell an opportunity. When Calvin Trillin visited, the city rolled out the red carpet, and it’s ready to do the same if Hollywood decides to film there.

“I’ll be very up-front,” says Dale Stinson, president of the Chamber of Commerce, over fried chicken at the group’s monthly luncheon meeting. “We wish it had never happened. But if we have to have that kind of publicity, we’re going to make the most of it. If it’s going to be an economic opportunity, we’re going to take advantage of it.”

Like most locals, Stinson foresees no obstacles to filming here.

“We have our concerns about what the script’s going to say, but I think whoever does it, will find complete cooperation.”

Bill Jenks, city commissioner and mayor pro tem, agrees: “I don’t want to sound inhumane, but we do need the income (from a TV production). But we need that kind of publicity like a hole in the head.”

According to Lee Rowe, a city commissioner and 25-year resident of Emporia, “Everybody in this town would love to have them come in and do a movie. I personally wouldn’t want in any way to control the script. We’re not really a backwoods town.”

Besides “Mary White,” parts of “In Cold Blood” and “Bad Company” were shot in these parts.

“So we feel we’re pretty experienced,” says Stinson.

Adds Jenks: “I don’t think it will stir up any more animosity. It shouldn’t do harm to anybody who hasn’t been harmed already. It’s already been so raked over the coals.”

But the Rev. Clarence (Mick) Marquardt does see the harm. Since taking over at Faith Lutheran for Tom Bird, Marquardt has heard from CBS and two independent producers whose names he’s forgotten.

“I told them the church would not be interested in being involved in any kind of production,” he says, sitting in the dim, cluttered office once used by Tom Bird.

Marquardt has granted the interview with great reluctance; most others have been turned down.

“The healing is still going on,” he says, cordial but seemingly weary from having to defend the church. “I compare it to the death and grieving process. Time must heal. And every new article and certainly a movie disturbs the healing.”

He says there have been requests to use the church as a location and offers to let Marquardt advise on the script--all rejected.

“I understand why they’re so interested. The bottom line is money. But our counsel and I have talked about it and decided no. The feeling of the people (in the congregation) is leave it alone. There is a feeling (among us) that Hollywood is--maybe not anti-Christian, but that they bring stereotypes to certain roles. They may do an excellent job (with the Emporia story), but I don’t want any involvement. I have to be a healer.

“There are people in this congregation who strongly believe in Tom’s innocence. There are sides to the issue in this church. He was an excellent pastor. So I’m a fence-sitter. I have to be.”

Church membership, he says, is slowly climbing back.

“What’s remarkable is the Christian attitude that’s been evident. It could easily have polarized us. But it hasn’t.” He pauses, smiling. “It’s a little more severe than having Democrats and Republicans get together in the same room. But it’s in that category. We’re still a family. A lot of people thought the church might fold. But the Lord was with us and we’re coming together again.”

Fifty miles away in Geary County, Sheriff Bill Deppish wishes Hollywood would just be a little more patient.

It’s “much too soon” to be planning a movie or miniseries, says the beefy, good-natured sheriff, because the case is far from closed. Credited with detective work in Marty Anderson’s death that got the Sandra Bird case reopened, Deppish says the weapon found in the pond “is the gun we were looking for.” He expects indictments before long, but frets about Hollywood interfering.

“We’d like to have an injunction against Dick Clark and that type of thing, but of course we’re not going to get it,” he says pleasantly. “If Clark and those others go ahead, it’s going to help the defense attorney a whole lot. Their argument that they can’t get a fair trial for their client will really be bolstered if they put that on TV. Heck, those shows don’t just go to Los Angeles and New York and Chicago. People see them in Wichita and over in Emporia and down here in Junction City.

“I’m not saying any of these TV things will ruin our case, but it’s going to make our attorneys have to work a whole lot harder. If I was them, I wouldn’t want to go until all the questions are answered.”

He was reminded that Hollywood loves an eerie ending--like a gun being pulled from a murky pond.

“I guess then they could have a sequel and tell the rest of the story later,” Deppish speculates.

Show business small talk has become second nature to the otherwise folksy sheriff. In recent months, he’s been contacted by Lorimar Television, Dick Clark Productions, ITC Entertainment, Armand Hammer Productions and Interscope, among others.

“I just got a letter from Warner Bros. in the last few days,” he says, “saying all the options have been snapped up and the case is getting too drawn out and complicated. So they’re dropping out.”

Like so many Kansans with even the slightest connection to the crimes, Deppish has at least one good story to tell about his close encounter with Hollywood.

He recalls flying last spring to Los Angeles to pick up a prisoner in another case.

“I wasn’t in my hotel room three minutes when the phone rang. It was two gals named Debbie from Dick Clark Productions--they were both named Debbie, real nice gals.”

Clark wanted Deppish as a technical adviser and the Debbies hoped to get him to sign on the dotted line that night. But he begged off, saying he had to be in Ventura early the next morning to take custody of his suspect.

When he reached the Ventura County jail the next day, a captain was waiting with an “urgent” phone message. Since the mysterious caller had been unwilling to give a full name or any details, the captain was worried about a possible “hit” by a friend or relative of Deppish’s suspect.

Deppish, growing concerned, looked at the note.

“Call Debbie,” it said.