The Garden State Parkway Murders by Christian Barth

Author:Christian Barth [Christian Barth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mark Thomas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 16, 1950, to William and Alvera Thomas. The family lived in York, Pennsylvania, for a time before his father, a Dun & Bradstreet salesman, moved his brood to their spacious two-story home on Thayer Drive in Whitpain Township.

Tall, with a rangy frame and large protruding ears, as a boy Thomas was taunted by classmates who noted his resemblance to the Ichabod Crane character from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The eldest of three children, he was neither quiet nor shy, despite the skinny awkwardness he portrayed. Former neighbors recalled a glib, towering boy impressed by own his quirky behavior, such as crawling through the sewer tunnels beneath Thayer Drive and expertly tying complicated string knots. His eccentricities drew a devoted following of neighborhood peers, though an equal number kept their distance from the mercurial youngster.

He dropped out of school after his eighth-grade year at Shady Grove Junior High School in Ambler, where Gerald Stano had attended before shipping off to military school. Given their closeness in age, with Thomas less than a year older, the two likely roamed the halls at the same time, even if their relationship remains somewhat of a mystery.

Long after he had become a well-known figure in civil rights groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, Thomas was asked about his background by several reporters in the wake of his surging notoriety. Interviewed by reporter Vince Rause in an August 1994 Philadelphia magazine feature article, he said “I knew then that schools are BS, that they’re just places where they turn people into sheep.” Instead of attending high school, his teenage years in the late 1960s were spent wandering the East Coast, he explained, working odd jobs and protesting the Vietnam War as a member of the militant organization Students for a Democratic Society. “I hit the road,” the former hippie mused, “did my Jack Kerouac thing.”

Thomas told Morning (PA) Call reporter John Martin that he’d fled basic training in North Carolina after speaking at length with returning combat veterans who were bitter toward Uncle Sam. “I would have nothing to do with the Army after I realized what was going on,” he said, ironically admitting to Martin that he often invoked the U.S. Armed Forces Constitutional Oath. Jack Kreps, however, steadfastly maintained that Thomas shot for the border when he learned that the tenacious detective was on his way down to question him again, not due to any ideological objection.

He undertook an odd assortment of jobs to sustain his itinerant wanderings about North America, consumed vast quantities of peyote, and shared quarters with a Native American woman in Ottawa. For a while Thomas joined the crew of a traveling carnival and worked as a cook in a Canadian logging camp, the latter admission eerily echoing Detective Kreps’ disclosures in a 1970 Courier (NJ) Post newspaper interview.

His immersion in the liberal counterculture also included stints loitering in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and fraternizing with beat poets in Greenwich Village.

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