Read Online Never Let Them See You Cry by Edna Buchanan - Free Book Online Page B

the edge of the roof at the federal courthouse. Then she let go.
    Even puppy love will sometimes go horribly awry. Two high school sweethearts told friends they could not face a summer apart. The girl was being sent to Italy. The boy was to start summer school. Both were sixteen. The Italian trip was designed in part to separate the pair, in love for three years. They had asked permission to marry, but were told they were too young. They wanted to become engaged, but were told they were too young. They were also too young to die, but when the girl said, “I’d rather be dead than in Italy,” the boy believed her. He took a gun from a house where she babysat and shot her five times. Then he shot himself.
    â€œThey were such sweet little children, childhood sweethearts,” a shocked neighbor told me.
    Love makes some people crazy.
    The death of Lance Christian Anderson is a perfect example. An airline pilot, as handsome as a movie star, he wheeled his brand new champagne-colored Mercedes Benz into his circular driveway, where a ski-masked killer waited in shadowy ambush.
    This is a story of a love triangle and sudden death. The scenario is pure Hollywood, the stuff movies are made of. Beautiful people, illicit romance, money and murder—even, indirectly, an Academy Award winner. The assassin was an Eastern Airlines pilot. So was Lance Christian Anderson. Both loved the same woman. She was an Eastern Airlines stewardess, married to the victim.
    The murdered pilot, forty-two, was stalked and killed with his own gun.
    The victim and his killer scarcely knew one another, yet they had a great deal in common. Both were New Englanders, both had resettled in Miami, both loved to fly, and both wanted the same thirty-nine-year-old flight attendant, Kathleen K. Anderson.
    Her husband, Lance, born on the Fourth of July, was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. A whiz at business, he owned boat, marine-supply and seaplane firms. A natural athlete, a crack shot and an expert sailor, he was at home on the water and in the sky.
    â€œThere was no facade about Lance,” said Jeane Kates, who lived with her husband, Jack, next door to the Andersons’ ranch-style home on two and a half acres. “He was what he appeared to be.” Lance thought it “terrible” to keep a bird in a tiny cage. He once drove his parents’ new puppy all the way from Miami to their Bradenton home rather than see it endure an airline flight.
    â€œHe was a classy sort of person, always thinking of ways to improve things,” said retired Commander Richard Jaffee, Lance’s superior in the Coast Guard Reserve. “He was such a good-looking guy, he could have been a movie star.”
    Lance was twice invited to escort Miss USA contestants at the pageant in Miami Beach. That was before he married—and before another man fell in love with his wife.
    The man in love with Lance’s wife, Kathi, was Gerald John Russell, thirty-nine, a boyish former Air Force captain who had won two commendations for bravery in Vietnam, one of them for landing a burning aircraft. He had a degree in psychology from the University of New Hampshire and moonlighted as a home contractor. He is the son of a famous man, the only actor to ever win two Oscars for the same role.
    His father, Harold Russell, seventy-seven, a handless World War II veteran, won the awards for his classic 1946 performance in The Best Years of Our Lives . He went on to become a successful executive and chairman of the President’s Commission on Employment of the Handicapped.
    He once confided to Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons that he had adopted his wife’s tiny son by a prior marriage. “He’s ours now,” he told Louella proudly.
    Lance and Kathi married in June 1966. Their only child, Lisa, was seven at the time of his murder. Shortly before his death, Lance bought a matched pair of Mercedes; his a station wagon, hers a