Arms and the Man

By R. Z. Sheppard

IT GAVE EVERYBODY SOMETHING TO DO by LOUISE THORESEN with E.M. NATHANSON 346 pages. Evans. $8.95.

It was a blind date in a thousand. On Jan. 29, 1958, Louise Banich, a carpenter's daughter, was what the dating-game pragmatists of the day called "fixed up" with William Erness Thoresen III. He was not only a son of the president of Chicago's Great Western Steel Corp. but tall, handsome and charming as well. At 20, Bill Thoresen was also something of a cutup. He already had a record for shoplifting violations and assault-and-battery arrests. But, as Louise explains in her account of the twelve years she spent trying to wear William's dangerously cracked glass slipper, "He made my life exciting, and he needed me."

Just how much William needed Louise became evident during their two-year courtship. On a motor trip through Maine in the summer of '59, he got her to help him steal three brand-new canoes and a trailer. By the time they were married on New Year's Day, 1960, she had evolved from a dutiful daughter, honor student and respected Chicago schoolteacher into an accomplished shoplifter and companion of an obviously disturbed boy.

Bags and Bullets. William's father refused to give his son the more than $600,000 in securities that he was supposedly keeping for him in a duffel bag stashed in a large basement vault at the Thoresens' North Shore mansion. Other duffels containing Mother Thoresen's share and more than $1,000,000 worth of stocks and bonds were earmarked for William's younger brother Richard. William got what he considered his share by stealing all the bags and refusing to return any of them until his father agreed not to press larceny charges.

After the birth of their son Michael in 1962, Louise had to play mother, but William carried on much as before. He buttered up his brother Richard, who had got hold of his own duffel bag containing $1.1 million. Then William conned Richard into believing that he was his partner in a drug-stealing scheme. He also got him to make his older brother the beneficiary of a new will. In 1965 Richard was found dead in a parked car with a bullet hole behind his right ear.

The police could never decide whether Richard's death was murder or suicide. William, meanwhile, set out to become the largest private collector of military weapons in the country. He had an unfocused plan to become a dealer and director of his own gun museum, a sort of cross between Abercrombie & Fitch and a National Guard armory. Even though he could not secure the necessary federal license, William was still able to acquire weapons from legitimate arms dealers, and he steadily collected scores of pistols, rifles, machine guns, mortars, land mines, plus crates of ammunition and even a 37-mm. antitank cannon.

Both he and Louise were repeatedly arrested on an assortment of gun charges. Still, the growing Thoresen arsenal spread from room to room in their large half-renovated mansion in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. When the police and Government agents finally confiscated his 70 tons of weapons in April 1967, a U.S. Attorney remarked: "The guy has so many munitions, I don't know whether the Government should prosecute him or negotiate with him."

For Louise, the years between '67 and '70 were a blur of legal entanglements, beatings by William and attempts to care for their young son, as well as inner conflict about whether to leave a deranged and increasingly brutal husband.

The last problem was solved on the morning of June 10, 1970. According to

Louise, William, under the influence of LSD, beat her and then confessed that he had arranged his brother's death and later killed the hired assassin himself. As William started toward her again, Louise shot him with a revolver that had been sitting casually on the dresser for months. After a lurid trial, she was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mrs. Thoresen now lives with Son Michael in a rented house not far from the site of the mansion/arsenal. She is in the antique business.

A bizarre story, even by California standards. It gathers strength by piling up appalling facts. But, as told to Film Writer and Novelist E.M. (The Dirty Dozen) Nathanson, It Gave Everybody Something to Do fails to convince a casual reader of the author's contention that from first to last, charming William "manipulated" her into doing bad things. If anything, her plight seems to have been compounded by a confusion between her love for William and her need to be needed by him (a conflict that should not be too facilely dismissed).

Charming William emerges as a grotesque blowup of the consumer ethic vainly trying to fill the emptiness of his life with meaningless objects. Of course, from the point of view of those who willingly serviced his obsessions for a price, he was the customer who was al ways right.

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