Ranes didn’t see Spanky at first, but he heard him. He surely didn’t expect, while standing on the edge of that road with his thumb out, to meet Dave Pitts and possibly the most beloved chimpanzee in America. He’d already planned another suicide attempt. Two days before Christmas the previous year, he’d tried to kill himself, surviving thanks to a Michigan state trooper who found Ranes in the front seat of a 1958 Plymouth convertible - a hose poked into the car and spewing carbon monoxide, according to the Free Press. How Ranes ended up in Las Vegas is anyone’s guess. ‘The more people you kill, the easier it gets’ A lover’s rejection is hinted at in the book so is the inconvenience of leaving alive witnesses to robberies.īy the time he found himself on a dirt road May 25, 1964, just outside Las Vegas, he’d left bodies in Michigan, Kentucky and Nevada - crimes he would later confess to, though he couldn’t always remember where he had killed each victim. Ranes has said he didn’t know what drove him to kill. Ranes took the latter but got the boot 11 months later after brandishing a pair of butcher knives while chasing two other soldiers, Hilberry wrote. The judge in the case offered juvenile lockup or the Army. Ranes dropped out of high school, according to an August 1986 profile in the Detroit Free Press. “He had this s-t-eating grin on his face. “He was trying to stick that thing in me,” Marunycz says. One time, Ranes came at Marunycz with a chisel. “He had a friendly smile, but he was a bully,” says former classmate Dave Marunycz, now 77. Ranes went to Parchment High School in southern Michigan. “I looked at the other kids and I thought, how could they be so attached to a dog to cry. Ranes told Hilberry that his dad, again drunk, had run over the family dog with a truck. The elder Ranes was a drunkard who, despite only having one functioning arm, liked to beat and break things, according to author Conrad Hilberry, whose 1987 book “Luke Karamazov” tells Ranes’ story and that of his older brother, Danny Ranes, also a serial killer. Larry Lee Ranes - a Kalamazoo, Michigan, kid who got the nickname “Dumbo” in school because of his jutting ears - also had a strained relationship with his father. I would see him on talk shows more than I would see him in person.” The jug-eared kid who became a confessed serial killer “My dad was a concept to me,” Pitts said. He and his mother went to live with her parents in Oak Park.įor many years, Jonathan Pitts would see his dad only once a year - when Ice Capades came to town. The boy and his mother would always have the best seats, though, and backstage passes. “My mom got me my dad got Spanky,” Jonathan Pitts says. “I remember getting off the ice, saying, ‘I’m not skating again!’ because Spanky skated better than me.” “Here was this chimp skating circles and twirling,” Garcia says. The house guests took Garcia and her brother skating at an outdoor ice rink. Pitts and Spanky returned for another visit two years later. He got up, went to the bathroom and washed his hands.” He’s eating just like we are - with a spoon. “We would be sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast,” Garcia says. Garcia, who now lives in Texas, was 5 or 6 at the time. Jonathan Pitts’ cousin Tracy Garcia was living in Morton Grove when her famous uncle and Spanky pulled their trailer into the driveway during an Ice Capades tour stop in Chicago. “If a stranger came into the trailer home, Spanky would come stand next to me by my crib to protect me.” “If I was fussy, he would tickle me,” the son says of Spanky. His memories come from his mother, who died in 2013. Jonathan Pitts doesn’t remember his life on the road in a trailer with his dad, mother Judy Pitts - the first of Pitts’ four wives - and Spanky.
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