For several years, Poe Ballantine has written essays about his life in the small town of Chadron, Neb., for The Sun magazine. His new book, “Love & Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere,†is part memoir and part true-crime story. In it, Mr. Ballantine writes about his own life â€" his chronic wanderlust, the many low-paying jobs he’s held, his rocky marriage to a Mexican woman and the challenges of raising an autistic son. He also chronicles a gruesome event that shocked his quiet corner of Nebraska. In December 2006, Steven Haataja, a math professor, went missing from Chadron. In March 2007, his body was found on a ranch south of the town, bound to a tree and severely burned. Police eventually and unofficially considered the death a suicide. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Ballantine discussed his belief that Mr. Haataja was murdered, his approach to writing about hs own life alongside Mr. Haataja’s death, and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Reviewers have compared you to Kerouac and Bukowski. Do you agree â€" or do you consider your influences and the tradition you’re working in to be something else entirely?
I’m compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there. I share more with Bukowski, who spent most of his life among the poor, started and blossomed late, loved the horses, worked menial jobs, revealed himself intimately to his readers, and did not adhere to any movement. Bukowski, however, was a misanthrope who never grew much and who relied too heavily for my taste on his boozing, hairy-chested persona. I’m that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm’s way.
You’re pictured on this book’s cover and much of it is devoted to your life as a writer, husband and father. But there’s also a grisly, tragic story here about a man who was a stranger to you. Were you, or are you, concerned about how easily those pieces fit together?
I knew pretty early on that Steven’s story, gripping as it was, could not stand on its own. I also wanted to avoid at all costs the myriad pitfalls of the true-crime formula. I had long been entertaining the notion of depicting Chadron and its fascinating residents, accompanied by highlights from the “Police Beat,†amusing snippets taken verbatim from the local police blotter and published in the weekly newspaper, The Chadron Record. (“1:01 p.m. Caller from Regency Trailer Court advised of a nest of birds in a nest.â€) The paramount challenge of this book was the tonal integration of parts that at first glance appear to be incongruous.
You say that most law enforcement officials were “thoroughly opposed†to your interest and involvement in the case. Why did they feel so strongly?
Before I’d even undertaken the book, the local police department was under fire for a lackadaisical missing person’s investigation. It must have been embarrassing for them when the body was found so close to town. By voicing the opinion that Steven’s death was a suicide, they perhaps thought their low scores and the possibility of a killer in our midst might go away. Our county sheriff, the only law enforcement officer who spoke to me candidly about the case, described the Chadron Police Department as possessing a “super-secret-James-Bond-if-I-tell-ya-I-gotta-kill-ya attitude,†and that combined with having recently lost its chief made it more prone to error than your average small-town police force. Wandering around with my autistic son poking my nose into their business must have have been an aggravation to them.
Mr. Haataja’s sisters have been very outspoken in their comments on things you’ve written online, saying they did not want you writing about their brother’s death. Did you talk to them when you were writing? And do you sympathize at all with their feelings about the book?
I had little communication with the sisters or their mother. I talked to Sheila (as I call her in the book) several times on the phone after her brother was found, and she told me she and her mother and sister would not cooperate. Many friends and acquaintances of Steven were dissuaded from participation “to honor the family’s wishes.†I never blamed or faulted them for their positions â€" imagine the horror of losing a loved one and being suddenly thrown into the middle of a media circus â€" but I was perplexed as to why they did not want to know more about the outrageous circumstances surrounding Steven’s death.
A filmmaker named Dave Jannetta went to Chadron and made a documentary about this case and about you while you were writing. Did the presence of a film camera cause any problems in getting people to open up?
If anything his presence helped, giving me the chance to re-interview many subjects, coax out a few who were reluctant, and fine-tune, rethink and sharpen my own account. Dave is a bright and talented young chap, and two heads are better than one. The objectivity of the camera lens was an entirely new perspective for me, rather like the philosophical exercise of learning another language. One cold, late winter night we retraced what we calculated to be the route of Steven’s last walk across that ranch, which only reinforced my belief that he wasn’t alone when he died.
Have there been any new developments in the case since the book went to press? And are you still actively investigating it yourself?
Outside of my conviction that one of my suspects is a sociopath, there is nothing noteworthy to add to the case, which is officially still open. The police are still very much in the mood to move on, but the book is just out, the documentary will soon follow, the people of my town (those who don’t want to punch me in the nose, anyway) are enthusiastic about the work Dave and I have done, and I’m confident someone will come forward and the truth will one day be known. I do, by the way, continue to actively investigate this case.
In your author’s note at the end of the book, you write that you used “fictive techniques†and “committed other extravagancies†in writing it. What do you mean by that?
The book appears to take place over the course of roughly a year, but my own investigation and composition spanned six years. My son went from 4 to 10 during that time, but in the book, until the last chapter, he stays 5 years old. In light of the astronomical volume of interviews, evidence, news articles, theories, notes, rumors and amusing police blotter excerpts, I’ve rearranged a good deal of it and also paraphrased in service to action, clarity and intelligibility.
You’ve said that this story fell in your lap and that you weren’t previously interested in true-crime stories. Did you read any true-crime books as you embarked on writing your own?
I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect. It is also typically rife with false sympathy and unconvincing parallels between the life of the author and his or her tragic subjects. There’s good money in true crime, I’m told, and plenty of it lying around, but it’s a devil of an art form.
