It is a thoughtful caper-thriller of a crime gone wrong. But the
outcome has been known for years. The real mystery is one of human
understanding: what was it like to live through hell, who would create such
a hell and why?
The initial mystery, of the Seales' motivation and of Mr. Reso's fate,
persisted through May and June of 1992. The captive's wife, Patricia, issued
televised pleas for his return. The authorities said they had no leads. Then
suddenly it was over.
After what the United States attorney called ''a merry chase through the
night,'' the F.B.I. seized the Seales in Hackettstown. They turned out to be
ordinary people -- not the eco-terrorists they had claimed to be. Both were
45 years old and jobless, the parents of two teen-agers. They had crushing
debt and few prospects except the corrupted optimism -- or desperation --
that had led them to demand $18.5 million for Mr. Reso's safe return. The
ransom was never paid. Mr. Reso was found dead.
The Seales, for a brief time, had become two of the
most wanted criminals in the country. Now, through Mr. Scribner's
imagination, they have been reincarnated as Theo and Colleen Wolkoviak, two
feckless strivers, not so different from many others, perhaps. Except that
they committed an unspeakable crime in a very public way.
''How could these people, who seemed to me so basically normal,
middle-class American people do this? To feel this was their only choice.''
Mr. Scribner said. ''When I first heard about it I thought, 'How
interesting. It's a corporate executive who's been kidnapped' -- a lot like
what goes on in, I don't know, Brazil. It didn't happen so much in this
country. Right away I thought of the social implications. Does this indicate
something about class unrest?''
It was more complicated than that, of course, and in time it would
become, in Mr. Scribner's hands, a story with the trappings of
classic tragedy: how the Wolkoviaks's tortured dreams of the good life --
their tragic flaw -- had destroyed the lives of another couple.
Mr. Scribner stayed close to the basic plot of the real case, but
compressed time, zeroing in on the implications of both couples' pursuit of
the American dream, which the Wolkoviaks believed their captive had
achieved.
At the time of his disappearance, Sidney Reso, 57, was president of Exxon
International, directing the oil company's operations outside North America.
He and his wife lived in an expensive housing development in Morris
Township. In the book, the couple are named Stona and Nunny Brown.
Arthur Seale had been a police officer in Hillside, where his father had
once served as deputy chief. He possessed a departmental record clouded by
misconduct and left the force in 1977 with a disability pension after being
hit by another officer's car. Later, he became a security officer at Exxon
-- in Florham Park, where Mr. Reso worked -- earning about $60,000 a year.
He and his wife had a son in college and a daughter in high school. But the
Seales, both blond and fit, wanted more. They left New Jersey in 1986,
living far beyond their means in the resort towns of Vail, Colo., and Hilton
Head, S.C. Their ski-and-sail businesses failed. They returned to New Jersey
to live with Mr. Seale's retired parents in Hunterdon County.
The Seales abducted Mr. Reso from his driveway in Morris Township on an
ordinary Wednesday morning, April 29, as he was about to start the short
drive to work. They shoved him into a crudely built coffin-like box in the
back of a rented van and drove to a storage locker, where they held him for
five days. Meanwhile, they tried to project the image of a normal home life
while negotiating for ransom with Exxon.
Mr. Reso, who had suffered a gunshot wound in one arm during the
abduction, remained bound and gagged with duct tape, lying in his own waste
in 100-degree heat in the storage locker. During periodic visits, Mrs. Seale
would dress the wound and give him water. When he died, five days after his
abduction, the Seales buried his body in the Pine Barrens in South Jersey.
When the Seales were finally arrested, still angling for their windfall,
Mr. Reso had been dead for seven weeks.
For Mr. Scribner, the tale proved hypnotic, but would not work as
a standard narrative. ''I wanted to be able to explore the dreams and
justifications and passions and ambitions of these people from inside their
own heads,'' Mr. Scribner said. ''The only way to do that was five
points of view. There was no way, with a single narrator.''
Mr. Scribner's account takes place over just three days, during
which time he lets the reader see and hear the Browns, the Wolkoviaks and
Theo's father, Malcolm, who loves his son but is locked in a lifelong battle
to understand the younger man's impetuousness, his penchant for failure.
Mr. Scribner writes cinematically, with scenes alternating among
the hapless but curiously sympathetic Wolkoviaks, Nunny Brown's hopeless
vigil and Stona Brown's cruel captivity.
''Another thing, as it evolved, was the pronounced suffering of Reso in
that box,'' Mr. Scribner said. ''Is it possible to imagine that? It
was a chance for me to reveal that particular man's experience of being
locked in this box and dying and also what his response would be, which
mainly is this guilt about his past and his wish for redemption. You know we
talk about character changing, or just revealing character. It gave me an
opportunity to do both.''
The Seales's transgressions are obvious, those of Stona Brown less so,
initially. And here, Mr. Scribner, who, like Stona Brown, grew up
Roman Catholic, decided to make Mr. Brown's final days a dual struggle --
the struggle to stay alive and the struggle to atone for both corporate sin
and those of a more personal nature.
At first, Mr. Scribner had envisioned the Reso case as part of a
longer novel; ultimately it became the novel itself. Although to anyone who
followed the case closely, it appears that Mr. Scribner could be
simply fleshing out details, his account came solely from his imagination.
''The original title for this was 'American Ethic','' Mr. Scribner
said. ''It was a line right out of Arthur Seale's mouth.'' The full quote,
made in a jailhouse interview with Barbara Walters, was: ''My whole life
I've been a hard-working, moral, decent individual. And we really epitomized
the American ethic.''
But ''The GoodLife'' won out, being as it is a bit of wordplay on the
Wolkoviaks's aspirations. In the universe Mr. Scribner has
constructed, Colleen dreams of becoming the enormously well-compensated
captain of a highly motivated sales squad for GoodLife products, a
home-sales program.
The idea, he said, came from a man he met in Turkey, where he lived for a
time.
''This Turkish guy that I knew was trying to get me to sell Amway,'' Mr.
Scribner said. ''And as soon as he made his presentation to me -- he
was just so loaded with this stuff that I'd been making up about Colleen,
all of the aphorisms, that business self-help speak -- this just fell into
my lap.''
Mr. Scribner, who graduated from Vassar College in 1984, grew up
in Troy, N.Y. He majored in economics, intent on a business career -- ''it
was the '80's, I was ready to jump on.'' But a writing course in his senior
year turned his head.
He went to Japan to teach English, came back and worked as a carpenter
and as a teacher, but continued to write. He even taught, briefly, in New
Jersey, at Saddle River Day School. At Stanford, he met his wife, a poet,
Jennifer Richter. They have a 5-month-old son, Luke.
So far, he said, his plan to skip the business world has worked out.
''O.K.,'' Mr. Scribner said he told himself. ''I'm going to give
this 10 years. And basically, that's how long it took.''
The New
York Times Dec. 1, 1992
MORRISTON, N.J., Nov. 30 -- In appearances before Federal and state
judges today, Arthur D. Seale was sentenced to life in prison for the
kidnapping, extortion and murder of Sidney J. Reso, a senior Exxon official.
''What you have done is thoroughly evil,'' said Judge Garret E. Brown
Jr. of United States District Court in Trenton. ''Your actions were not for
any cause. They were not rash or impulsive. They were cold-blooded and
calculated. To the extent you seek mercy you will be given the same you gave
your innocent victim -- none.''
Then, totaling the seven conspiracy and extortion counts in the
indictment, Judge Brown imposed the maximum sentence, requested by the
United States Attorney, Michael Chertoff: 95 years with no parole and a fine
of $1.75 million.
''You will spend the rest of your life in custody,'' Judge Brown told
Mr. Seale, who pleaded guilty to both sets of charges in September, after
his wife, Irene, confessed to their roles and led investigators to Mr.
Reso's body. Referring in part to the Seales' treatment of Mr. Reso, Judge
Brown added, ''You will be fed, medical treatment will be provided, but you
will not be bound, gagged, shot or placed in a coffin.''
Moments before Judge Brown passed sentence, Mr. Reso's son,
Christopher, was permitted to address the court. Speaking of the family's
anguish, he said: ''When Arthur and Irene Seale were arrested and the
answers finally came, they seemed more cruel and perverted than even our
tormented dreams could conjure.
''After all,'' he said, ''these are people with their own family.
Couldn't they realize the depth of the wound that this would inflict on our
family? Shouldn't they have known in the core of their beings that what they
contemplated was a violation of all that family and decency stood for?''
''The Goodlife''
''Isn't it unique to think we could make loads of money for the
reason being that we're better people?'' In Vail, in their living room,
Colleen had arrayed before Theo the products she'd bought at the GoodLife
informational meeting that afternoon at the Sheraton in Denver. ''But this
is the Goodlife philosophy.''
Theo examined the hefty bottle of car wash, the glossy picture on the
label and the bright red cap, weighing it in his hand. ''What makes you
think this stuff's any good?''
''They're excellent products. Everyone knows that. But the point
being most of your money comes from the plan, from the system you set up
below you, and not from your own sales.'' On the coffee table -- made from a
huge old blacksmith's bellows they'd found antiquing down toward Durango --
she's placed the various products: the car wash and wax, complexion soap
made from honey (a quarter the price of department stores), dish detergent,
metal polish, toothpaste, mouthwash, and the classic GoodLife product,
LiquidGold, the all-purpose cleanser that had made millions.
''Twenty wide and twenty deep is my initial plan. I comes out to four
hundred people below me at a maximum take of twenty-one percent. Plus
bonuses. Think about it. I've started the calculations, it's very complex.
Let's just say, for a ballpark figure, easily six digits within twelve
months.''
Theo smirked, looking to the side the way he did. Ready to suck the
wind out of her sails. To shoot her down. But she wouldn't let him, not this
time. She understood that her new income might emasculate him. The freedom
it would afford her. The entree into certain social circles. She would be
patient with her husband. ''GoodLife is about understanding your goals,''
she said. ''then setting out to fulfill them. It's about helping you get in
touch with your own desires, what's inside you. Otherwise, you spend your
life striving for some dream that might not even be your own. Do I want to
achieve Distinction Status in six months, or do I want to take more time
building a wider front line so I reach Laurel a little farther down the
road, but I roll through Prestige and Majesty Status like a tank? I honestly
don't know. So part of the system is that through my upline and my sponsor,
I'll get to know myself better as part of the business-building process. In
that sense, it's very gestalt.''
