Introduction
You often assume that extreme violence stems from the dark fringes of society rather than from elite drawing rooms. Shana Alexander examines the chilling 1978 murder of auto parts tycoon Franklin Bradshaw, exposing a brutal conspiracy orchestrated by his own daughter, Frances Schreuder.
Beneath the polished veneer of high society and immense wealth, unchecked mental illness and severe domestic tyranny can drive family members to orchestrate the ultimate betrayal.
You will trace the collapse of a wealthy dynasty from early pioneer roots to the New York ballet world. The book investigates how maternal psychological coercion turned teenage sons into reluctant killers.
You will explore these central questions:
- How does extreme wealth warp family dynamics?
- What drives a mother to manipulate her children into murder?
- How do investigators uncover hidden family conspiracies?
1. The Utah Empire and the Murder
Franklin Bradshaw accumulated vast wealth while his family fractured under severe domestic strain.
You see a man who quietly built one of the largest fortunes in Utah through auto parts and massive land holdings while projecting an image of poverty. Franklin Bradshaw set up his auto parts business in 1929 and aggressively acquired federal oil and gas leases across multiple states. He accumulated vast wealth while avoiding the Internal Revenue Service and living frugally.
Franklin Bradshaw traveled by Greyhound bus and bought clothes at Army-Navy stores. Yet he owned twenty-eight automotive stores and amassed an estate valued between 60 million and 400 million dollars.
Extreme work ethic, geographical monopoly, and structural diversification built this massive auto parts and oil-leasing fortune. Recognizing the future of automobile culture, Franklin borrowed money to open unrepresented stores. He organized divisions akin to General Motors to insulate against failure, and aggressively reinvested cash into stocks and oil leases to evade high tax brackets.
Doug Steele recalled that Franklin operated thirty-one auto parts locations by war's end. He became one of the largest individual oil leaseholders in the United States.
The Auto Parts Empire
By setting up his empire, Franklin faced strict federal rules. A single individual was permitted to hold a maximum of 200,000 acres of federal oil and gas leases in a single state. High tax brackets reaching 70 percent prompted these aggressive oil lease investments. Typical warehouse inventory values ranged between 750,000 and 1,000,000 dollars across operations like All Car Parts and Wasatch Chemical.
Deep-seated family tensions and conflicting lifestyles characterized the relationship between Franklin Bradshaw and his devout relatives. While the wider Bradshaw dynasty adhered strictly to Mormon practices, Franklin married outside the faith. He avoided church duties and maintained a distant relationship with his wife Berenice and their four children. His parents had ten children between 1880 and 1910. Berenice Bradshaw was regarded as a gentile by the Bradshaw clan. Memorial service arrangements required careful navigation of these religious and familial divisions.
The Autopsy Findings
Medical examiner findings and crime scene photographs revealed the brutal nature of Franklin Bradshaw's murder. Dr. Serge Moore performed the autopsy and determined that Bradshaw was shot twice at close range in the back and the base of the skull using specialized ammunition. The autopsy commenced at nine o'clock on Monday morning. Dr. Moore recovered two hollow-point, copper-jacketed Remington-Peters bullets from the body of Franklin Bradshaw.
2. Pioneer Heritage and Hidden Cracks
Utah operates as a unique church-state where society and culture are entirely built around the Mormon religion, deeply influencing local attitudes, justice, and family values. Three out of four residents in Utah are Mormons. The state's population is predominantly Mormon, shaped by historical religious persecution which fostered xenophobia and a strong emphasis on patriarchy, ancestor tracking, and strict family structures. By 1984, there were 47 Mormon temples built around the world. Mormons established the World Center for Ancestors, a massive genealogical library containing over a billion names to facilitate proxy baptisms for the dead. About 70 percent of public land in Utah consists of federal oil and gas leases.
Rigorous family histories and hidden neurological disorders set the stage for later domestic warfare.
Both sides of the family preserved extensive genealogical records detailing ancestors who converted to the Mormon faith in England and crossed the plains by oxcart to settle in Utah, enduring extreme hardship. Samuel Briggs was born in 1826 and left Nottinghamshire lead mines after being overcome by poison gas, eventually settling in Utah as a high priest. Mary Wagstaff walked across the plains in 1861, arriving after an arduous journey that started in New Orleans in 1849. You can trace these pioneer treks through preserved journals and family archives.
Norman Rockwell Façade
Families often maintain an idealized, wholesome image to the outside world while deeply concealing internal fractures and chaotic realities. The Bradshaws appeared like a classic Saturday Evening Post illustration, yet behind closed doors, they dealt with severe epilepsy, rheumatic fever, postpartum depressions, financial destitution, and profound marital coldness. While neighbors saw a picture-perfect family, older daughter Marilyn had to sit on her brother Bob's epileptic body on the basement floor to hold him down during seizures.
Berenice Bradshaw composed a massive, one-hundred-year autobiography starting in the late 1930s and resuming in the late 1950s, using it to process her exhausting struggles of raising children alone and her yearning for her own past family life. Writing extensive personal histories can be a therapeutic mechanism for women attempting to overcome chronic loneliness and domestic overwhelm. Berenice meticulously detailed her parents' harsh pioneer life in Idaho, her mother Florence's musical background, and her own childhood spent with her grandmother Tacy across 142 pages spanning from 1876 to 1976.
Robert's Tragedy
The eldest son, Robert, suffered from severe epilepsy and progressive schizophrenia, enduring harsh discipline and eventually undergoing an irreversible prefrontal lobotomy before spending eighteen years in veterans' hospitals. Severe neurological and psychiatric disorders, when inadequately addressed by families and medical professionals, can result in permanent institutionalization and tragic outcomes. Marilyn recalled waking up to the sound of thirteen-year-old Robert collapsing on the basement floor in violent grand mal seizures, which the family attempted to handle without proper medical intervention. Robert spent 18 years in and out of hospitals before he died at the age of 38.
Assisted by attorney David Salisbury, Franklin and Berenice established marital trusts, family trusts, and limited partnerships like the F & B Corporation to shield assets from heavy taxation while distributing dividends to descendants. Complex legal and corporate structures are frequently deployed by wealthy individuals and estate attorneys to minimize tax liability and manage erratic heirs. Franklin signed his will on April 13, 1970, creating irrevocable income-accumulator trusts that allowed minor grandchildren to cash out at age twenty-one with Berenice's approval for approximately 50,000 dollars.
3. The Warehouse Heists and the Murder Plot
During her divorce from Frederik Schreuder, Frances retained her former husband's aggressive lawyer, Erdheim, and composed a 47-page answering affidavit filed by Frances against Frederik accusing him of severe criminality, physical abuse, and perversion. She utilized court postponements and endless countercharges to block Frederik while securing protective orders and financial leverage. Frances obtained five postponements of hearings over nine months, effectively locking Frederik out of the home and out of the country, leading him to abandon the legal battle entirely until the spring of 1976 when her second divorce finally was granted.
Isolated in boarding school and rejected by his family, Larry Schreuder coped with obsessive hoarding and chronicling behaviors to maintain an identity. He spent summers walking to around 50 neighborhood banks visited by Larry to buy and sort thousands of pennies in search of pre-1959 rare coins, and he handwrote, illustrated, and published a one-man family chronicle magazine called The Occupier. Larry collected some 6,000 wheatbacks netted in three years using $10 used to buy a thousand pennies at each bank, accumulating a $200 value of the collected wheatbacks and publishing 60 issues of The Occupier published monthly until December 1979.
Berenice Bradshaw attempted a personal declaration of independence by accessing her own bank funds to secretly finance her grandsons' schooling against her husband's wishes. Discovering she had a $38,000 balance in Berenice's bank account, she visited a bank in Lehi, withdrew thousands from her own substantial balance without her husband's initial knowledge, and issued cashier's checks directly for her grandsons' private school tuitions. Berenice immediately issued a $3,800 cashier check for Eastern Military Academy and a $3,200 cashier check for Allen-Stevenson school, leaving a $30,791.15 remaining balance after her withdrawals.
Frances Schreuder and her sons escalated petty theft and forgeries into a calculated parricide.
The Family Game
The Schreuder-Bradshaw family dynamics operated as an escalating game of bluffing, psychological control, and systemic theft. When sent to Salt Lake City to work at Franklin's auto parts warehouse for $4 an hour offered as wages for the boys at the warehouse, Marc and Larry treated theft of cash, checks, and Fortune 500 stock certificates as a competitive sport to win their mother's approval. The brothers stole around $150,000 in common stocks like Martin Marietta, General Electric, and IBM, hiding them inside decades-old Life magazines as part of a $200,000 total loot accumulated by the raiders by August 1.
When funding needs grew, Frances and the boys forged checks on Franklin's business accounts through the F & B Corporation. Secretary Nancy Jones opened a bank statement and found two forged checks for $10,000 each signed with a crude forgery of Franklin's signature and endorsed by Frances, revealing $22,000 in forged checks discovered on August 1. Despite the extreme domestic chaos and criminal plotting surrounding her, young Ariadne remained an outwardly untouched and enchanted child successfully enrolled in the prestigious Episcopal School as a four-year-old when accepted into Episcopal School in the spring of 1977.
Orchestration of Parricide
Frances subjected Marc to intense psychological coercion, convincing him that murdering his grandfather was necessary to protect their family and lifestyle. Facing eviction, loss of financial support, and the threat of returning to poverty or living in Harlem, Frances framed the murder of Franklin Bradshaw as a vital necessity. She brainstormed methods ranging from poison to contract killers before tasking Marc with purchasing a firearm and executing the crime. Marc flew to Texas, purchased a .357 magnum Smith & Wesson revolver using funds from his grandfather for $175 paid for the .357 magnum Smith & Wesson revolver in Midland, Texas, and traveled to Salt Lake City to commit the murder on July 22, 1978 date of the murder events under his mother's threats of permanent abandonment.
4. New York Ballet Patronage and Arrest
Frances leveraged inherited wealth to buy status in the ballet world while investigators closed in on the murder.
The Ballet Patronage
You see how Frances poured vast sums into the New York City Ballet. She funded dinners, books, and major new productions to blind the administration to her instability.
Frances sent a $2,000 contribution in addition to ticket purchases for a gala. She later underwrote a large portion of the book Choreography by George Balanchine. The total production cost reached $420,000, with $315,000 raised from individual contributors. Frances also pledged $360,000 for the production of Davidsbündlertänze.
George Balanchine created his final major neo-Romantic ballet, financed by Frances. The work reflected themes of mortality, madness, and the alienated artist.
Reviewing the premiere, Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times described the ballet as a world of love mixed with pain and artistic angst.
The Arrest
You watch as investigators finally close the net around the family. Detectives and family members traced the financial and travel records that exposed the conspiracy.
Detective Joel Campbell interviewed family members and employees who pointed away from a daytime robbery. Clive Davis told police that a robber would not strike in daylight on a Sunday morning and pointed to $40,000 in forged checks from 1977.
Berenice financed the purchase of an expensive duplex apartment in New York City to house Frances and her grandchildren. Berenice appeared alone before the co-op's board of directors, omitting mention of the family's troubled background, and successfully secured apartment 6 in Building III at 10 Gracie Square for $525,000.
Marc Schreuder began secretly recording family conversations and domestic scenes to document the chaos. Marc recorded discussions in his mother's bedroom where Frances and Larry mocked Berenice's personal hygiene issues and discussed the details of past crimes.
Larry Bradshaw suffered a severe psychiatric episode at college, attacked his roommate with a hammer, and was convicted of attempted murder. At his trial, a psychiatrist testified that Larry was psychotic at the time of the crime, and Larry was sentenced to serve two and a half to five years in prison.
5. Trial and Psychological Analysis
To secure a first-degree murder conviction, the prosecution had to prove that Frances Schreuder had a direct financial motive to solicit her father's death. Under Utah law, murder for profit is treated as a more heinous crime than passion-driven murder, requiring the state to establish pecuniary interest while facing rigorous defense strategies. Berenice Bradshaw placed thirty lawyers on her payroll for the trial and paid one million dollars in advance for the trial defense.
Marc's testimony and expert psychiatric evaluations exposed the destructive power of maternal manipulation.
Marc's Proxy Confession
At 22 years old, Marc Schreuder dramatically changes his legal strategy to testify against his mother, admitting that he executed his grandfather solely because Frances ordered him to do so. Marc takes the stand on the first day of testimony, publicly stating that his mother spent three years talking about the murder before it happened. Vittorio Gentile testifies that Frances said "I am going to put a contract on my father" while leaving Gino Restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Vittorio returned home in 1963 to find his apartment empty, and their divorce became final in Idaho in 1968.
Defense attorney Mike Rosen employs a high-risk scattershot defense strategy, relying heavily on pointing out prosecution inconsistencies and avoiding defense witnesses. Mike Rosen delivers a three-hour closing argument dissecting the testimonies of Marc Schreuder, Richard Behrens, and Myles Manning to demonstrate holes in the prosecution's narrative, while Judge Baldwin gives 42 instructions to the jury. Following a brief deliberation lasting 5 hours, the jury returns a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder against Frances Schreuder, who reacts by brandishing a crucifix in court during sentencing. Frances and her mother made combined benefactions of 1 million dollars to the School of American Ballet.
Psychiatric Profiles
Dr. Louis Moench reviews Marc's case based on two interviews lasting a total of 4 hours, charging a $500 fee, and diagnoses Frances with narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders. The defense introduces the Ariadne Tape, featuring Ariadne at approximately 6 years old, to demonstrate the severe psychological pressure Frances placed on her children. Dr. Louis Moench testifies that Marc suffered from extreme emotional turmoil and indoctrination by an intensely controlling mother, whereas the prosecution later brings in Dr. Lee Coleman to debunk psychiatric diagnoses in court.
Frances Schreuder's mental illness aligns with the medical criteria for a bipolar mood disorder under DSM-III, noting symptoms like hyperactivity, inflated self-esteem, press of speech, and excessive involvement in high-risk activities without regard for consequences. Hypomania involves elevated mood, increased psychomotor energy, and reckless behavioral patterns.
- MOOD: elevated, expansive
- PSYCHOMOTOR: more energy than usual physical restlessness
- SPEECH: more talkative than usual
- SLEEP: decreased need for sleep
- COGNITIVE: inflated self-esteem sharpened and unusually creative thinking overoptimism or exaggeration of past achievement
- BEHAVIORAL: increased productivity, often with unusual and self-imposed working hours hypersexuality inappropriate laughing, joking excessive involvements in pleasurable activities with utter lack of concern for painful consequences: buying sprees, reckless driving, drug & alcohol abuse
Substantial wealth often dilutes severe mental illness into harmless eccentricity, shielding the wealthy from institutionalization, a phenomenon Dr. Moench describes as the green poultice. The murder of Franklin Bradshaw may have been a spontaneous combustion of madness requiring the confluence of several dreaming brains, involving a folie a trois or quatre with Richard Behrens, Frances, and her sons. Larry Bradshaw rented an apartment in Salt Lake City after the conviction to enroll at the University of Utah and major in political science. Frances Schreuder owed $3,700 to Richard Behrens, and Berenice made a profit of 3 million dollars from selling the duplex apartment. Sergeant Mike George takes Marc and his fiancée out for 3 orders of Chicken McNuggets and to see a movie as a reward for maintaining a 3.5 grade point average in his prison college courses.
10 Key Ideas
- Franklin Bradshaw accumulated a massive fortune valued between 60 million and 400 million dollars through an empire of auto parts stores and federal oil and gas leases while living a life of extreme frugality.
- Utah's dominant Mormon culture deeply shaped local society, justice, and family values through rigorous genealogical tracking and historical pioneer heritage.
- Behind a picture-perfect facade, the Bradshaw family endured severe domestic strain marked by hidden neurological disorders, financial destitution, and profound marital coldness.
- The eldest son, Robert, suffered from severe epilepsy and schizophrenia before enduring an irreversible prefrontal lobotomy and spending eighteen years in institutional care.
- Isolated in boarding school and neglected by his family, Larry Schreuder coped with chronic hoarding by collecting thousands of wheat pennies and publishing a family magazine.
- Frances Schreuder subjected her teenage sons to intense psychological coercion and systemic theft, escalating petty forgeries into a calculated parricide.
- Marc and Larry treated the theft of Fortune 500 stock certificates and cash from their grandfather's warehouse as a competitive sport to win their mother's approval.
- Frances leveraged her inherited wealth to buy high status and fund major productions within the New York City Ballet.
- Marc Schreuder dramatically changed his legal strategy to testify against his mother, admitting that he executed his grandfather solely because Frances ordered him to do so.
- Substantial wealth often dilutes severe mental illness into harmless eccentricity, a phenomenon Dr. Moench describes as the green poultice.