The Bottom Line: One of the most riveting criminal biographies of the 21st century. Fans of Mindhunter and The Wolf of Wall Street will fall hard for Vanishing Act.
Vanishing Act begins with a deadly road trip from Minnesota to California. A promising engineering student, his mother and another man were heading west to take positions at a wartime defense factory. They had advertised for a fourth traveling companion to share in gas money in exchange for a ride. A man answered the ad as Mr. Herbert Erickson. But when the car arrived in St Paul to pick him up, they were met instead by Dr. Robert Spears, who explained that the fictional Dr. Erickson had to take a last-minute trip to Washington, and he would be taking his place.
By the time they reached Weatherford, Oklahoma, the three original travelers had been tied up in the back of the automobile and rendered unconscious using ether fumes. They woke as they entered town and engaged in a violent struggle to take control of the vehicle. By the time the melee was over, they had hit multiple vehicles, three of the four passengers had taken a bullet, and Spears had fired teargas at multiple men, including the town’s mayor.
This insane event is only the beginning of two decades of truly speculator crimes perpetrated by a man with at least 26 aliases.
Author Jerry Jamison brings Spears’ outrageous-but-true story to life in 309 action-packed pages. Before becoming a novelist, Jamison began his career as an award-winning copywriter, and it shows. Each vignette is vividly written and carefully reserached.
Modern-day supplement scammers may owe a debt to Spears, who took the age-old concept of peddling snake oil to sophisticated new heights. Jamison documents how Spears, who faked a number of credentials to become president of the Texas Naturopathic Association, created “Milk Routes” in which he sold weight-loss milk to society mavens. He specialized in “female issues,” dealing in everything from illegal abortions to treatments from a “Radionics Machine.”
But by far the most engrossing tale is how Spears faked his own death in a plane crash. Jamison describes in rigorous detail how Spears convinced another man to take his place on the flight, and was in fact watching from his hideout in Phoenix, Arizona, when the news that the flight had crashed, killing all aboard, was announced.
But how exactly did Spears know the flight would crash? Should Spears be considered one of the most notorious mass murderers of all time? The answer to these questions alone is worth the price of admission.
Vanishing Act provides an impressive and exhaustively researched account of Robert Vernon Spears’ life and crimes, weaving together documentary-style precision with the pace of a psychological thriller. Using meticulous attribution, Jamison pulls Spears’ story together from local newspapers, arrest records, court records, police statements, conversations between Spears and his victims, accomplices and law enforcement figures, official findings from crash investigations, and more.
