Free The Colonel by Alanna Nash

noisy character, but I don’t think there was any brute force within his psyche at all.” But others disagree.
    “I don’t think there’s any doubt that he killed that woman,” asserts Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia, assigned to the Colonel in the 1970s. “He
had a terrible temper. He and I got into some violent, violent fights. We fought all the time. When we started arguing, people would get up and leave the table. Everybody was just a nervous
wreck.”
    “I never saw him hit anybody, other than to shove his assistant [Tom Diskin] one time,” remembers Byron Raphael. “But he did have a violent temper and a terrible mean streak,
and it took very little to set him off. In those fits of rage, he was a very dangerous man, and he certainly appeared capable of killing. He would be nice one second, and stare off like he was
lost, and then—boom!—tremendous force. He’d just snap. You never saw it coming. Then five minutes later, he would be so gentle, telling a nice soft story.”
    Such fury is often triggered by frustration, and Anna’s killing seems too horrific and personal to have been done by a mere burglar. Had Andre just learned of her five-week-old marriage
and gone to the fruit market for a confrontation, perhaps after a night of drinking? Might she have said something that unleashed a torrent of emotion, something that drove the humiliated Andre, in
a flash of anger, to pick up a heavy tooland strike all sense out of her, then rob the house to mask his motivation? Only Andre and Anna know that now, speaking the truth
with no tongue, no mouth, and no throat, nestled in the cool, dark folds of death.
    On a purely emotional level, Parker’s family in Holland refuses to entertain thoughts of Andre as a murderer. His sister Marie, the former nun, says it could not possibly be true. Besides,
she adds, Mother would have known.
    And yet this odd tale had a postscript, some fifty-three years after the fact. In the course of his research, Dirk Vellenga wrote to the American journalist Lloyd Shearer for help in piecing
together the facts of Andre’s strange odyssey to America. Shearer had at least a working relationship with Parker, who had refused to reply to Vellenga’s letters, and Vellenga hoped
that Parker would answer some preliminary questions if they were put to him by someone he knew.
    To Vellenga’s delight, he soon received a telephone call from Lloyd Shearer. At first, the men chatted about the weather and exchanged pleasantries. But as Shearer talked on, Vellenga
noticed that Shearer spoke with a familiar accent—something about the way he pronounced his
R
s and
J
s—and that he seemed hoarse, like a man who might be trying to
disguise his voice. Vellenga dismissed those thoughts momentarily, as Shearer was most intrigued by the Dutchman’s questions about Parker’s past, and the two journalists agreed to
correspond about the matter.
    Vellenga kept his end of the bargain, sending letter after letter. But he never again heard from Lloyd Shearer—lost today to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease—or, for that
matter, from Colonel Parker. Or did he? Today, Vellenga is convinced it wasn’t Shearer who called him after all, and Mrs. Shearer agrees. That phone call was between two Dutchmen, both wildly
curious about an investigation into the murky life of one Dries van Kuijk.

4
MISSING IN ACTION
    W HEN Andre returned to America in the late spring of 1929, much had changed in the two years since his
first trip. Chautauquas were now almost exclusively a thing of the past, soon to be finished off by the October 29 stock market crash, which would plunge the American economy into the Great
Depression, with its accompanying unemployment, homelessness, and starvation. Everywhere, the talk was doom and gloom. But for a young man who had already led a marginal existence for years, it
hardly mattered.
    Almost immediately, Andre left Mobile, Alabama, where he had sneaked