A Cold-Blooded Business: Adultery, Murder, and a Killer's Path from the Bible Belt to the Boardroom

by Marek Fuchs

Overview

In 1959, Olathe, Kansas, was made famous by the murder of the Clutter family and Truman Capote’s groundbreaking book on the crime, In Cold Blood. Olathe achieved notoriety again in 1982, when a member of Olathe’s growing Evangelical Christian population, a gentle man named David Harmon, was bludgeoned to death while sleeping—the force of the blows crushing his face beyond recognition. Suspicion quickly fell on David’s wife, Melinda, and his best friend, Mark, student body president of the local Bible college. However, the long arms of the church defended the two, and no charges were pressed.

Two decades later, two Olathe policemen revived the cold case with startling revelations that rocked not only Olathe, but also the two well-heeled towns in which Melinda and Mark resided. David’s former wife and friend were now living separate, successful, law-abiding lives. Melinda lived in suburban Ohio, a devoted wife and mother of two. Mark had become a Harvard MBA, a high-paid corporate mover, a family man, and a respected community member in a wealthy suburb of New York City. Some twenty years after the brutal murders, each received the dreaded knock of justice on the door. A Cold-Blooded Business provides fascinating character studies of Melinda and Mark, killers who seemingly returned to normalcy after one blood-splattered night of violence. A fast-moving true crime narrative, A Cold-Blooded Business is a chilling exploration into the darkest depths of the human psyche.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628738667
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	01/07/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	18,908
File size:	851 KB

About the Author

Marek Fuchs is a teacher, journalist, and volunteer firefighter. After six years as a stockbroker, he became a journalist, in which role he has written columns for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, and TheStreet. Fuchs speaks regularly on business and journalism issues, and currently serves as a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in a loud house with three children in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Read an Excerpt

A Cold-Blooded Business

Adultery, Murder, and a Killer's Path from the Bible Belt to the Boardroom

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By Marek Fuchs

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Marek Fuchs
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62873-866-7

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CHAPTER 1

David Harmon was a product of Chili, pronounced with long "i"s — CHI-lye — a downtrodden cow town in upstate New York off the Erie Canal Expressway, a highway in name only. The town's forefathers appeared to have chosen both the name and its pronunciation on a whim. An old timer will say the name may be the same as the bean dish, before letting a smile creep up one side of his mouth: "But we pronounce it right."

Sitting unnoticed along the way from Syracuse to Buffalo, near Rochester, Chili was always a modest place, even for a rural outpost whose northernmost regions once served as a stop along the Underground Railroad. Its winters are bleak, with billows of Canadian snow. Farming is a stubborn act of survival, with depth-charge temperatures in January and February and crop-killing frosts in spring.

Chili has been home to generations of Harmons, whose lives centered largely around prayer and farming. Like most Chili residents, they were known for a remoteness and stoicism, even when the "big stuffs," as government officials were called, annexed the family homestead to expand the local airport. There were howls of local protest, though little from the Harmons themselves. Were it not for the confiscation of the farm, young John Harmon (David's father) would have been land-rich by inheritance. Then again, tilling the land was a lifelong commitment. And even if farming were performed with diligence, the backbreaking labor would not have produced more than a modest livelihood; and that's if the weather held. Which it might not — no matter how often or hard he prayed.

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The Harmon family settled in Chili in 1838, and John, who remained long after the others had moved away or gone to glory, was born there during the Great Depression. Bred into John were all the proper Christian convictions about how we live in a created order. He was reticent by nature and upbringing, and born into a family whose routine was work, pray, sleep, and fish. His father, without the family farm to tend, became an engineer.

When the time came for John to choose a college, he went to Roberts Wesleyan College in North Chili. Wesleyan is a Christian school founded by Benjamin Titus Roberts, a lawyer turned missionary. For some of his more liberal stands on slavery and women's rights, Roberts had been kicked out by the faithful of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but landed as a bishop with the Free Methodists. He started the school as Chili Seminary in 1866, and while the college changed name and location several times over the years, its overall approach of educating under the eyes of God remained the same. At Roberts, John felt in place and at peace.

John got his masters degree in education at the secular University of Rochester and chose to teach elementary school, drawn to both the security he felt the job offered and the meaningfulness he felt it imparted. Working with children was ideal for John, since he was socially strained with adults.

He married Sue, the first girl he met in college. From the outset of their marriage, a slight hint of irreverence, even wickedness, in Sue always brought a quick — if sometimes embarrassed — smile to John's face. Once, while hiking up a mountain with their dear friends, the DeHavens, John passed wind at an unintentionally loud volume.

"Geez Louise, John," Sue piped up, "that's the most you've spoken all day."

The two were Nazarene Christians. The Church of the Nazarene is a Protestant church in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, tracing its roots to 1908. It was founded to spread the message of "scriptural holiness," or "Christ-like living," throughout the world. Nazarenes believe in a higher purpose in life through victory over sin, in evangelism, in a strict interpretation of the Bible, in preaching the gospel to the poor, and, most of all, in salvation, or "perfection," through a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Though Sue and John considered themselves saved, they didn't believe themselves invulnerable. The two assumptions they allowed were that life was not ruled by chance, and that all souls can be saved from even our darkest sins.

The couple had one child. David Harmon was born on a windy day of malicious cold on January 3, 1957. He grew into a big, tall, handsome, dark-haired boy who was doted on by his parents. David grew up playing in his modest backyard, without the freedom or the burden of ancestral fields. Artistic, but with a linear mind, he made a hobby of sketching buildings. He dreamed of a professional life in architecture, or in engineering like his grandfather — but his real passions were sports and Jesus.

David played hockey both indoors and, given the frozen tundra that was the Chili landscape, outdoors on ponds that froze up most of the winter. In high school, David would have liked to play varsity football. With his size, the football coach had his eye on him, but David had a trick knee that prevented him from playing. Instead, David devoted himself to pick-up sports and competitive Bible study.

David competed on a Bible Study Quiz team, where teams of five contestants raced to be the first to the buzzer with the correct answer. He studied for the competitions for hours every day. Even though the game had been a second choice to football, David never did anything in a detached way, and his team won the state championship.

When David was fifteen, he met a girl, Melinda Lambert, at Brooktondale Church Camp, a Nazarene summer camp outside Ithaca, New York. Melinda was the youngest child in her family, but with her older sister eleven years her senior, hers was not a "secondborn" childhood. She grew up in Syracuse like an only child in a doctrinaire household.

Her father, Dr. J. Wilmer (William) Lambert was a top Nazarene Church official, essentially an archbishop of the region including New York. Due to his prominence, Melinda was looked upon as the princess of the Nazarene Church, which certainly helped her social standing at camp.

Melinda could be controlling and rule-bound. At Brooktondale Church Camp, she alerted supervisors to the names and actions of boys and girls she found in compromising situations. Once, when she happened upon a group of teenagers throwing sticks and stones at a skunk to try to scare him into the Tabernacle, Melinda told a supervisor. In fact, telling on others was common at Bible camp, a practical function of the rules under God. Forbearance was essential.

Ironically, Melinda also came off as a flirt and a tease. Blonde and quick with a smile and a touch on your arm while talking or even while listening — which she always did with appreciative laughter — Melinda was a stunner. She was talkative — maybe even too talkative — but if you were a boy, and you wanted her attention, it paid to listen to her.

Melinda did not have an overly purposeful mindset, and one was not required of her. Nor did she do particularly well in school. She was, however, broadly ambitious — for a suitable boy, a good marriage prospect and all that union might bring home to her.

God, she was always told, has a way of making a way for you.

Bible camp was a complicated place for a pubescent teenager. Dating in this conservative environment, where there could be no public displays of affection and very little privacy was allowed, was no easy trick. They were teenagers in the 1970s, but in no way part of that era. Luckily, everything about Melinda — including her sexuality and her ambition — was made less sinful by the absoluteness of her faith. She was overt in her declarations of spirituality, and absolute in her observance of her church's prescriptions. She was excited about camp, God, and boys — specifically an agreeable and somewhat pliable one named David Harmon.

Melinda pursued David throughout her time at the camp. Whenever possible, she sat next to him in the Tabernacle, cuddled up close, and laughed at all his jokes. David was prominent because of his Bible Quiz accomplishments, his size — he was 6'3"— and his good looks. He was clearly going places, which was more than you could say for the many less impressive boys who spent the summer with their noses buried in the Bible. And who, after all, could land Melinda if not David? Smart and athletic without being cocky, David was also witty and fun. He loved a well-executed practical joke.

One year at Bible camp, he and Chad DeHaven — three years older than David and a friend from Chili who acted like a de facto older brother — drove a Volkswagen to the altar of the camp's Tabernacle. Turning the car off before the Tabernacle filled with fumes, David and DeHaven affixed a sign to the rear bumper, facing the pews, that read, "Shhhh. I'm praying." They ran back to the bunk and waited for the surprise at Sunday morning services.

Almost immediately after camp ended, David and Melinda began a long-distance relationship. The two wanted to see each other nearly every weekend, so with David in Chili and Melinda two hours away in Syracuse, their parents stepped in to help. Often, the Harmons drove David to meet the Lamberts halfway. Almost always, David went home with the Lamberts. Melinda's family was impressed with David. He was humble, religiously observant, and gentle with their daughter. They welcomed without hesitation this inherently decent young man.

When summer returned, David and Melinda went back to camp, drawn both to each other and to the feeling of acceptance the camp offered them. Inspiration and public displays of spirituality — such as carrying around Bibles, praying openly, and talking about God and faith — were expected and prized among that generation of evangelicals. At camp, David always had in hand a guide book to soul-winning, which, as the second sentence of its Foreword put it, is not soul-scalping. The Church of Winning Souls: A Handbook for Personal Evangelism in the Local Church, by V. H. Lewis, was less than a hundred pages, but in that space was a complete, albeit somewhat repetitive, guide to being a good evangelical Nazarene.

"Evangelicalism," wrote Lewis, "must be our method of advance as a church. We offer neither ritual nor ceremony as a substitute for salvation. Souls can know Christ as a personal Savior in a personal experience, through evangelicalism. We must not and shall not fail to evangelize! Our church was brought into being through the fires of evangelicalism. May its flame burn high on the altars of our church!" Later, Lewis wrote, "When the church loses its fervor and drifts in a parallel course with the world, the Holy Spirit withdraws."

Mr. Lewis, David soon learned, was one of many of Melinda's cousins who were highly placed within the church. But David was most intrigued by Melinda's father, Dr. Lambert, who was aggressive and worldly in a way his own father was not. Lambert had an air of quiet superiority and a reputation for being demanding, tight-fisted, judgmental; he also took good care of relatives by finding them work in and around the church, as well as housing them, accumulating properties as he went along.

David graduated high school in 1975, earning a National Merit Scholarship among many other awards. His future was a wide-open road. He and Melinda began taking classes at Olivet Nazarene University in the fall. Nazarene teens commonly paired off and married by the age of twenty, and David and Melinda were no exception.

The wedding was beautifully arranged; David and his wedding party looked ascendant in their powder-blue tuxes and yellow corsages. It was all as innocent and perfect as any parents — especially fastidiously religious ones — could hope for.

It was no surprise that David and Melinda left Chili shortly after they were married. David would not follow his own father out into the world, but rather Melinda's. Dr. Lambert had just received a promotion in the church hierarchy, rising to become the general superintendent of Zone Two, as it was known in church parlance. The Nazarene headquarters in Kansas City was thriving, and Lambert would soon become its central figure.

Nazarenes were migrating in droves to Kansas, where development was replacing farming, and new opportunities abounded. Kansas seemed like the right place for David and Melinda to begin the next stage of their lives. David could finish his degree at the University of Kansas. Melinda could easily put the secretarial degree she received at Olivet to good use. The decision was a natural one.

God was making a way for Melinda and David Harmon.

CHAPTER 2

When Dick Hickock and Perry Smith killed four members of the Clutter family in the western reaches of Kansas in 1959, the pair chose Olathe (pronounced oh-LAY-thuh) as their staging ground. The two career chiselers, who had met in the penitentiary, set out from Olathe the day of the murders and, afterward, late that night, melted right back into town, all but unnoticed. The murders unsettled Kansas and the farm states surrounding it like little before. For weeks the Clutters' murderers could not be found. But frightful as it was, Hickock and Smith's run of freedom was brief and unproductive, involving nothing more than six weeks of petty crime and fizzled murder plots. The larcenous buddies had become killers when they took the lives of the Clutters, but — and there was at least comfort to be had in this — they never killed again. Hickock and Perry were hanged in the early 1960s at the Kansas state prison in Lansing and, were it not for Truman Capote, who documented their crime in the pages of In Cold Blood, that would have been the end of that.

Since the 1850s, when the Kansas School for the Deaf opened in Olathe, the town had stood home to an unlikely mix of farmers and deaf-mutes. Families tilled the flat land that had been handed down through the generations. The people were churchgoing folk. The more affluent ones — which was not to say wealthy — were those who had dairy farms in addition to wheat fields. In the evenings, the farmers and their families went into town to walk, which meant around the courthouse square. Girls married the boys they had grown up with and, if their husbands happened to die, say, in a farming accident, they married other boys they had grown up with.

The Church of the Nazarene came to Olathe in 1930, when it was chartered with twenty members. Things were put together with string and wax at first; for years, revival services were held in various spaces, including a creamery, an abandoned church, and a munitions depot. The latter was famous locally for its swayback roof.

The Reverend C. J. Garrett, who migrated from Ottawa, was the church's first pastor, and his sermon topics, reported in the local paper, were all variations on a single theme (subjects from "A Trip Through Hell" to "Is Olathe Hell?"). His flock grew exponentially.

The pivotal moment for the church came in the 1950s when the national Church of the Nazarene decided that God wanted them to open up their world headquarters just one-half hour from Olathe, across the border in Kansas City, Missouri, to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19).

The arrival of the world headquarters ushered in a period of migration of Nazarene Christians to "little Olathe," as Truman Capote called it. Olathe was becoming a hub for the church.

A coterie of mostly professional Evangelical Christians — including the Lamberts — was becoming a vital force in reshaping this part of Kansas, bringing with them not only the church, but all the businesses, politics, and concerns that accompanied the church. This was not the high-wheat plains of western Kansas, but east, closer to Kansas City, Missouri, where suburbs were replacing farmland.

The people of Olathe weren't hankering for any big changes. The big cities — Kansas City and, farther afield, the industrial bastion of Wichita — were for the middlemen with pickup trucks piled high with corn, the occasional day tripper, or the unlucky farmers who were reduced to seeking city work.

So the demographic shift — some might say lurch — that was transforming Olathe, Kansas, did not sit easy with the old timers. These newcomers — who came to the frontier a century or two after the initial heavy lifting was finished — were religious to a standard that unsettled even the locals, who responded, in their old-line prairie twang, "Those ones have all come down with a bad case of religion."

Located in the middle of Johnson County and close to the geographic center of the United States, Olathe (the Shawnee word for "beautiful") began to be known as the buckle of the East Kansas Bible Belt.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Cold-Blooded Business by Marek Fuchs. Copyright © 2014 Marek Fuchs. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Editorial Reviews

In his debut book, journalist Fuchs provides an underwhelming account of how a decades-old Kansas cold case came to be solved. In 1982, 25-year-old David Harmon was savagely bludgeoned to death while he slept in Olathe, Kans. His wife, Melinda, was unharmed and her flimsy account made her the prime suspect, along with family friend (and Melinda's possible lover) Mark Mangelsdorf. Despite stories full of holes, the two were not charged, due in large part, Fuchs says, to the power of the town's growing Nazarene Church, in which Melinda's father was highly placed. In 2001, the case was reopened and two Olathe detectives tracked down Melinda, happily married to an Ohio dentist, and Mark, a Harvard Business School graduate and former v-p at Pepsi. Melinda was convicted but reached a deal for a reduced sentence, and Mark eventually reached a plea agreement. Fuchs never delves deep enough into the crime or the killer(s)' motivation in this compelling case. Despite frequent references to In Cold Blood(murderers Smith and Hickock began their journey in Olathe), Fuchs fails to capture the intensity and lyricism of Capote's tale. 16 b&w photos. (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A brutal unsolved murder case is cracked after 20 years of silence. The town of Olathe, Kan., was already notorious for the 1959 slaying of the Clutter family-immortalized by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood-when it was again rocked by a vicious killing in the winter of 1982. An unknown assailant bludgeoned David Harmon, a newly married 25-year-old evangelical Christian, so severely that "his face had been rendered featureless," reports New York Times contributor Fuchs. Harmon's wife Melinda and her young friend Mark Mangelsdorf, a popular student at the town's MidAmerica Nazarene College, were the prime suspects; there were rumors of an affair between the two, but both had relatively solid alibis and were never formally charged with the crime. The case was eventually closed. Melinda and Mark left the area and went on to live separate, notably successful lives until late 2001, when the file was reopened and investigations resumed after an inquiry by Olathe Police Department Detective Bill Wall. Together with Sergeant Steve James and Assistant District Attorney Paul Morrison, Wall reexamined DNA evidence, reconstructed the crime scene and cautiously revisited both suspects in their respective residences. Melinda, "strangely malleable and yet equally manipulative," recounted a radically different scenario from her original story. Both her interrogation and Mark's contained enough inconsistencies to warrant indictments; ultimately, the investigation exposed a premeditated crime of passion. Readers will be riveted by Fuchs' debut, which begins with background stories on the major players and testimony by the Harmons' neighbors, but soon moves on to list key components surrounding the case. Abreakneck pace is maintained right up to the final pages, which describe Melinda's and Mark's convictions. Justice prevails in this focused true-crime drama. Agent: Albert LaFarge/Albert LaFarge Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews

In the tradition of In Cold Blood, this yarn is wonderfully reported, with a terrific sense that only business writer Marek Fuchs can bring to the narrative.

James Cramer

A killer of a story—tight, relentlessly compelling, and superbly reported.”

—James Kaplan, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller You Cannot Be Serious

“Readers will be riveted by Fuchs’ debut, which begins with background stories on the major players and testimony by the Harmons’ neighbors, but soon moves on to list key components surrounding the case. A breakneck pace is maintained right up to the final pages.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“In the tradition of In Cold Blood, this yarn is wonderfully reported, with a terrific sense that only business writer Marek Fuchs can bring to the narrative.”

—Jim Cramer, bestselling author and host of Mad Money

“Marek Fuchs has written a penetrating portrayal of twisted lust, eager betrayal, a savage murder, and a small town’s long memory. With the drama of a novel and the nuances of a seasoned reporter, he delivers a sober, blood-splashed narrative about justice delayed, but not denied.”

—Ron Franschell, bestselling author of The Darkest Night

From the Publisher