LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE

Nonfiction

Troubled marriage, nanswered questions

LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE

The Story of a Crime

By Cutter Wood

242 pp. Algonquin Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Author Cutter Wood, previously known as a magazine essayist, makes his debut with his first nonfiction book, but don’t let the subtitle fool you – it isn’t really a true crime book, though true crime plays a big part in it. It isn’t even a nonfiction book entirely; that will become evident later.

A few months after his college graduation, before he became a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa, (in the creative nonfiction program) Cutter Wood received a newspaper clipping in the mail from his mother. It was about the motel on Anna Maria Island, Florida, where he’d just stayed.

The accompanying photograph showed the motel engulfed in flames, the result of a suspicious fire. What made it suspicious was the fact that a car belonging to one of the motel’s owners, a woman named Sabine Musil-Beuhler, had been previously discovered in the possession of a car thief – stained with blood. But the thief was quickly cleared as a suspect in the woman’s disappearance.

Sabine, a German immigrant, owned the motel with her American husband, Tom Beuhler, and as the police would soon discover, their marriage was less than ideal. Sabine had a lover on the side, a man named Bill Cumber. The Beuhlers’ loveless marriage was already over by then, but the couple stayed married so they could keep running their motel.

Their arrangement would give the police two equally viable suspects in Sabine’s murder – judging by the quantity of blood found in her car, it was obvious that she was dead. The police didn’t have a body or any evidence to tie either her husband or her lover to the crime, but Bill Cumber was still the prime suspect.

An ex-convict with a long criminal record – including a prior arson conviction – Cumber seemed the obvious suspect, though he claimed that Sabine’s husband killed her and framed him. Tom Beuhler stood to gain a lot from his wife’s death – full ownership of their motel plus a big life insurance payoff.

The crime struck a chord with Cutter Wood, since it took place at the very motel he had just stayed at. To his credit, he puts a human face on all three people in this tragic triangle. Sabine’s childhood was shattered by her parents’ divorce, and her older brothers never paid much attention to her.

Starved for affection, but unable to maintain lasting relationships, she would meet and fall in love quickly with a man, then fall out of love with him just as fast. Her affair with Bill Cumber was the latest in a succession of bad relationships.

While Sabine was a strong and intelligent woman, Bill was a career criminal with below average intelligence (as seen by his frequent misuse of words and his love of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of teen vampire / romance novels) and trouble controlling his impulses, though he could be a hard worker and wanted a better life for himself, free of trouble with the law.

Some speculated that Sabine’s marriage to Tom Beuhler was more about gaining American citizenship than love, but if they ever did love each other, it didn’t last long. Tom didn’t care if she had boyfriends, but asked that she not carouse with them at the motel in front of the guests – a request she ignored.

The murder of Sabine Musil-Beuhler makes for a compelling true crime story, and though it’s the inspiration for this book, the author chose to turn it into a memoir, making it more about himself than the crime. He talks about his grief over his grandfather’s death and devotes a great deal of pages to the story of his rekindled romance with his seventh grade crush, Erin.

As Wood rambles on and on about irrelevant topics, he loses focus on the main theme of the book, which almost becomes a subplot. He does offer a contrast between his fulfilling relationship with Erin and the train wreck that cost Sabine her life, which gives the reader some interesting psychological insights.

The author certainly has talent; his prose is dazzlingly poetic at times, but he overdoes it with the unfocused, rambling narrative, (which smacks of pretense and feels like text taken from different books and combined into one volume) and slows the pace of this short book down to a crawl.

Here’s the kicker: after striking up an uneasy friendship with Bill Cumber, Wood agreed to help try to get an admission of guilt by wearing a concealed recording device during his visits to Cumber, who’d been sent back to prison on a parole violation. Bill later made a full confession to strangling Sabine and led the police to her body.

But, because “there were a lot of questions that I never found the answer to in Florida,” - yes, that’s what the author actually wrote – Wood concludes his nonfiction book with a fictionalized dramatic reenactment of what mayhave happened to Sabine Musil-Beuhler during the last moments of her life.

Good creative nonfiction should read like a novel, and Love and Death in the Sunshine State desperately wants to be the nonfiction equivalent of an artsy novel. Unfortunately, this meandering memoir, alternately compelling, boring, insightful, and pointless, is basically a jumble of ideas that don’t jell into a coherent narrative. As a true crime story, it’s poorly researched and offers more fiction than fact. Skip it.

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com