THE MUSCLE MURDERS
WHEN BERTIL FOX, A FORMER MR. UNIVERSE, WAS ARRESTED FOR DOUBLE HOMICIDE LAST YEAR, HE BECAME ONLY THE LATEST ACCUSED MURDERER AMONG HARD-CORE BODYBUILDERS, WHOSE SUBCULTURE IS A VOLATILE MIX OF FRAGILE EGOS, ECONOMIC HARDSHIP AND ANABOLIC STEROID ABUSE
WILLIAM NACK
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORIGINAL LAYOUT
ORIGINAL LAYOUT
In a cell in the west wing of the Basseterre prison on the West Indies island of St. Kitts, behind lava-brick walls rimmed with coils of concertina wire, Bertil Fox is melting away in the Caribbean heat. Of the two-time Mr. Universe, a former bodybuilding prodigy who was once the Mozart of muscles, all that appear to retain their former size and shape are the mole below the right side of his lower lip and the gap between his two front teeth. Fox has lost his armor, the blood-filled sinew of those days during which he waged the battle for the perfect bulge--for the ribbed striations and popping vascularity that were his hallmarks. A sculptor bereft of his tools, he now wraps towels over the prison bars and pulls on them to exercise his once diamond-cut back.
He does push-ups for his arms. He lifts buckets filled with water for his triceps and his delts. But anabolic steroids, the Wheaties of most pro bodybuilders, aren't served in prison along with the chicken and the rice. So the 270-pound man they used to call Brutal Fox is just a 205-pound Bertil.
He has even lost the timbre of his voice. Facing him behind a sheet of perforated Plexiglas in the narrow visiting room of the prison--a bastille built in 1840 to entertain captured pirates--one has to press an ear against the barrier to hear him speak. "Everybody here is lonely for freedom," Fox, 47, says. "So am I. I've never been in prison before. I'm locked up all day. I come out to shower in the morning and come out to shower at night. I work out in the cell. That's all there is to do. I've never been in trouble in my life. Overnight, I'm a monster."
In the last eight months Fox has gone from being the Arnold Schwarzenegger of St. Kitts to being the island's O.J. Simpson. On Sept. 30, 1997, he allegedly shot and killed his former girlfriend, model Leyoca Browne, and her mother, Violet, in Violet's dress shop on Cayon Street in downtown Basseterre. He was charged with double murder and imprisoned without bail. During a four-day trial in February, Fox, facing a possible sentence of death by hanging, testified that the shootings were an accident that occurred when he struggled with Violet over his pistol. His best friend, Edmund Tross, testified that Fox had admitted the killings to him and to an associate without making any claim of self-defense. "He said he had shot Leyoca and her mother," Tross told the court. "He said Leyoca's mother was pushing him out the door. At that point he pulled out the gun and started shooting." A seamstress at the dress shop also gave testimony incriminating Fox. Nevertheless, only the nine-member jury ended up hung. Fox faces a retrial in the near future.
While news of the killings and the subsequent proceedings riveted St. Kitts and Nevis, a two-island nation of 41,803 souls, it also sent chillingly familiar reverberations through the insular, narcissistic subculture of hard-core bodybuilding. It's a bizarre world of beetle-browed loners with eggshell egos who are engaged in an obsessive quest for self-mastery; of men posturing before wraparound mirrors, casting illusory reflections of strength, masculinity and virility from which hang, metaphorically, their steroid-shrunken testicles; of cartoonish characters chiseling and tanning and oiling their hairless bodies to camouflage impoverished self-esteem; of fat-free, high-protein starvation diets that can heighten the irritability and anxiety brought on by steroid abuse; and of all those needles and vials and pills--whole families of anabolic steroids, hormones and diuretics, insulin and speed. Not even Wrestlemania achieves such a triumph of illusion over substance.
This subculture offers unusually fertile soil for aggression and, in some cases, deadly violence. Now that bodybuilding is being considered for inclusion in the Olympics, it will come under increasing scrutiny by the international athletic community. Studies have shown that the ingestion of large quantities of anabolic steroids--many bodybuilders take up to 3,000 milligrams a week, 500 times more than the male body produces--can trigger episodes of violent rage in certain people. Researchers who have studied both bodybuilders and the effects of steriod abuse agree that these athletes seem more inclined to extremely violent behavior than performers in any of the more conventional sports, including college and pro football, where steroid abuse has also been widespread. Murder in muscledom isn't uncommon. Fox isn't the only bodybuilder doing reps in jail these days.
Former amateur bodybuilding champion Gordon Kimbrough, 35, trains clients by telephone from Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, Calif., outside Sacramento, where he's serving 27 years to life for the first-degree murder of his fiancee, Kristy Ramsey, with whom he won the 1991 USA pairs title. Meek and shy when not on steroids, Kimbrough, according to a family member, becomes short-tempered and violent when using them. On June 20, 1993, after Ramsey told him in their San Francisco apartment that she'd had sex with another man and that the wedding was off, the 250-pound Kimbrough struck his 137-pound fiancee on the chin, wrapped an electrical cord three times around her neck, tying it in a knot, and stabbed her twice in the throat with a paring knife. He spent the night with her corpse while trying to kill himself by injecting into his neck a prescription diuretic, Lasix, and a household cleanser, Lysol. When police found him the next morning, with Ramsey lying at the foot of their bed, Kimbrough was holding a large kitchen knife to his throat and muttering, "She found someone else, another guy." He surrendered quietly.
Kimbrough is one of two prominent former bodybuilders in the California prison system. John Alexander Riccardi of Venice, Calif., has been on death row in San Quentin since 1994, after a jury convicted him of the '83 murders of his estranged girlfriend, Connie Hopkins Navarro, and her best friend, Sue Marshall Jory.
It was in the gyms of Santa Monica that Riccardi built his quads and abs and started seeing Navarro, a former cheerleader at Santa Monica High. They dated for more than two years. But then Navarro ended the relationship, and Riccardi's behavior toward her grew increasingly malicious and bizarre, according to prosecutors. Afraid to go home, Connie sometimes stayed with her former husband, James Navarro, who later testified that Connie said Riccardi once raped her at knifepoint and another time kidnapped her for a few hours. She also claimed, according to prosecutors, that on another occasion Riccardi handcuffed to a toilet the Navarros' 13-year-old son, David, who would later become a guitar player with the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers. According to James, Connie was about to seek a restraining order against Riccardi when, on March 3, 1983, he broke into her West Los Angeles apartment and shot her and Jory (who just happened to be visiting) in what LAPD detective Lee Kingsford described as "a jealous rage."
Connie's body was found half-stuffed into a linen closet. Riccardi fled town. An L.A. homicide detective conducting the manhunt placed an ad in Muscle & Fitness magazine, appealing to readers for help in finding the missing gym rat. Riccardi wasn't captured until eight years later, in Houston, after a viewer spotted his mug on America's Most Wanted.
Not all the muscle murders have been committed by men against women. About 100 miles southeast of San Quentin, at the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, Calif., former strength champion Sally McNeil is serving 19 years to life for the murder of her 256-pound husband, pro bodybuilder Ray McNeil, three years ago. She had earned her prophetic nickname, Killer Sally, by making easy money wrestling schmoes--the word used for men who worship female bodybuilders--in the couple's tiny apartment in Oceanside. The McNeils used the 150-pound Sally's income as a so-called apartment wrestler to help support their appetite for bodybuilding chemicals.
When Ray came home late at night on Valentine's Day 1995, Sally suspected that he had been with another woman. They began to quarrel, and then, she told police, "he was beating on me." Later, as Ray was cooking some chicken, Sally appeared in the kitchen doorway and fired on him with a 12-gauge shotgun, ripping a hole in his abdomen. After reloading, she shot him in the face as he crawled toward the front door. She called 911. On the tape of that call, police could hear Ray moaning, "Why, oh God, why?" She had blown away a pound of his liver and parts of his tongue and lower jaw. The toxicology report on Ray's corpse revealed that he had been using five anabolic steroids. Sally tested positive for one. "Ray got the best steroids, and I got the leftovers," she complained later.
All of this occurred in the middle of a particularly volatile season of muscle mayhem. In the early morning of Jan. 16, 1995, just a month before Sally killed Ray, two competitive bodybuilders with a history of violence toward one another--former Mr. America and Mr. Universe Warren Frederick and his onetime training partner Danny Flanagan--got into a fight after Flanagan cut off Frederick in a Tampa parking lot. The 260-pound Flanagan ended up sitting on Frederick and pummeling him. In the struggle Frederick reached out and grabbed an undetermined sharp object from the ground and stabbed Flanagan in the chest with it, puncturing his aorta. Frederick fled, not knowing that the wound was fatal. (Later that morning he called police to file an assault complaint against Flanagan.) Flanagan, bleeding profusely, struggled to his blue pickup truck and drove away. He was found soon after on the side of a road, slumped over his steering wheel, disoriented and trying to speak. He died before he could tell what had happened. Three weeks later the local state's attorney's office, after reviewing the evidence, called the stabbing an act of self-defense and didn't press charges against Frederick.
No wonder that with two musclemen killed since Jan. 1, 1995, what actor and former pro bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno did on March 24 of that year was viewed as comic relief. Ferrigno, who had played the title role in the TV series The Incredible Hulk, began popping his buttons when he saw Bernadine Morgan, an L.A. meter maid, writing a parking ticket for his pickup. Just as he might have on television, Ferrigno came bounding out of his house. He screamed, "Don't cite that truck!" As Morgan slapped the ticket on the vehicle, Ferrigno ran up to her scooter, loosed a Hulkian growl and shattered its windshield with a single punch. Ferrigno, usually a gentle soul, quickly grew contrite. "I'm sorry," he told Morgan. "I didn't mean to break the window--just punch it." Ferrigno, who is hearing impaired, later said that he tends to express himself with his hands. Police charged him with vandalism, and he paid a fine.
News of homicidal violence in the hard-core bodybuilding world came again on July 6, 1995, when former bodybuilder James Batsel pleaded guilty to the Feb. 10, 1993, murder of the owner of an Atlanta all-nude club. Batsel shot his victim nine times during a botched robbery attempt. The bodybuilder had been taking 3,200 milligrams of steroids a week--he was a buff 298 pounds, with 2% body fat--and he blamed his rage on steroids.
In light of all that had happened in recent years, few people in bodybuilding were taken aback when word came from St. Kitts that Fox had been arrested on charges of murdering his ex-fiancee and her mother. Certainly the string of killings didn't startle the academics who have studied bodybuilding.
"On one level I'm not surprised," says Alan Klein, a sociology professor at Northeastern and the author of Little Big Men, the definitive work on the bodybuilding subculture. "But if these murders had happened among baseball players, I'd be speechless." Indeed, no sport in America creates a world more fertilized for deadly violence than bodybuilding. The irony is that its passive contests--in which performers do nothing more violent than strut and grunt and grimace and flex upon the stage--make synchronized swimming look as perilous as bullfighting.
"It is very interesting that the vast majority of these violent episodes have been with bodybuilders," says Chuck Yesalis, a professor of health and human development at Penn State and an expert on steroid abuse. "You almost never see these types of extreme behavior in other athletes. Yes, football players get into fights, but they don't kill people. But is it the drugs? Or is it the bizarre subculture in which these people are immersed? When you talk to them, they generally talk about their diets, drugs and lifting routines. And they hang around people who talk about their diets, drugs and lifting routines.