(1 of 6) Disappearance of John Iverson
Neuro...@aol.com
(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.
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From: Edit...@aol.com
The following article, "The Strange Life and Bizarre Disappearance of
John Iverson," written by Robert F. Sabin, appears in the June/July
1994 issue (Issue 96) of THE ABSOLUTE SOUND, THE HIGH END
JOURNAL(tm). We are posting it here as we trust you will find it to
be of extraordinary interest.
Anyone with further information on Iverson should contact
Edit...@aol.com.
For TAS subscription and back issue information, drop us a line at
TASb...@aol.com.
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PART 1 OF 6
TAS Journal
Special Report
The Strange Life and
Bizarre Disappearance of
John Iverson
At 9:30 on the evening of January 4, 1991, Charlie Downs heard a call
go out on his police scanner about a possible kidnapping. The crime
reporter for the Lake Havasu City, Arizona Herald jumped to his
feet. Lake Havasu-a factory town and retirement village of 30,000
about three hours south of Las Vegas-was not known for frequent
kidnappings. But Downs also recognized the address, 1770 South Palo
Verde, as the home of the late Jerrold Munro, a well-known Havasu
physician. The house was owned and occupied by Munro's widow.
Minutes later, Downs parked his car and walked up Palo Verde in the
darkness. The Munro house was among the most prominent on the
suburban street. It was not particularly large, nor was the white
stucco, Santa Fe ranch atypical of the local architecture. But its parcel
was bigger than most and, unlike the others on the block, the house
was set way back, atop a hill at the end of a steep driveway. There
was also the tall cyclone fence surrounding it on three sides, and the
ominous black electric gate which protected it from the street. It all
combined to give 1770 an air of exclusivity not shared by its
neighbors.
Downs arrived on the scene with the first police officer. They
peered into the driveway and saw a motor home parked out front.
As he listened on the scanner with his headphones, the dispatcher
identified the victim as 42-year-old John Iverson, and Downs
instantly recalled the brusque engineer whose Electron Kinetics
stereo amplifiers he had photographed eight years earlier for a
product brochure. He remembered Iverson as an eccentric and
difficult client, the kind who wanted Downs to "design the brochure,
as long as it was exactly the way he wanted it designed."
The reporter waited as more officers arrived and began their search.
Inside the house, they found a broken door frame on the family
room, as though the door had been kicked open. Everything else was
in order, but the house was empty.
"Iverson Missing, Believed Abducted," was the headline over
the page-one story in the Herald, and it marked the bizarre
disappearance of what may be the most enigmatic character in the
history of the High End.
A truly gifted audio designer, Iverson first rose to fame
pushing the envelope of solid-state electronics in the mid-70s under
the Electro Research name, and later sold a more affordable line as
Electron Kinetics. At the moment he dematerialized, he had a small
but dedicated following-despite the fact that he'd kept a low profile
in recent years, introducing no new designs and earning much of his
keep doing upgrades on earlier versions of his amps.
Even in the High End's sheltered world of iconoclastic brilliance,
Iverson's in-your-face manner had managed to alienate many who
crossed his path. His supporters represented the remains of a long
and rocky career largely sabotaged by Iverson himself. And when
the news of his vanishing spread through the industry, they were
concerned.
Many of these people had worked with Iverson in the past, or
partied with him, or spent countless hours as one of his long-distance
telephone acquaintances. Even those who had borne the brunt of his
propensity for friction in business remembered him fondly. They
recalled the stocky blond powerhouse from the industry's early
days-greeting people at his CES exhibit room, hotel mattresses
stuffed into corners for room treatments and an omnipresent bottle
of Jack Daniels in his hand. And they wondered if this was just
another of John's wild stories.
God knows, there were plenty of those. Since first emerging in
the world of hi-fi, Iverson had used his intelligence, his quick
imagination, his taste for the outrageous, and his charisma in
building his own myth. For reasons which can only be speculated-
whether deep insecurity, the sheer sport of toying with his target, or
both-he told his tales.
"When I first started to know John, I quickly realized he was
capable of telling some stories, and in the later years I knew him, his
yarns became ever more phenomenal," recalls Dan Seifert, who met
Iverson in 1972 and became both a friend and a technician for his
first company.
Mel Schilling, an old business partner, remembers Iverson on
several occasions telling Schilling's young son that he'd been a
member of the Olympic swimming team. "John always liked to tell
stories, and one could never pinpoint as to whether they were true
or false," he says. "But you could be laughing in the aisles for days,
because it was just John, and it all came out of his head."
Coupled with his entertaining stories was a brashness that could also
offend. "He was a loud, lewd, profane, utterly frank individual," says
audio writer Dan Sweeney. "Everyone who knew him had a vivid
impression of him. You either loved him or hated him."
Yet, while Iverson's foul mouth added color to his personality,
it went beyond simple profanity. In select company, he was known
to go off about jews, blacks, Asians, or homosexuals. "He was very
bigoted," says Charlie Downs, who kept Iverson as a photography
client for about six months. "We would go out, and John would drink
his lunch and I'd eat mine, and he'd talk about niggers and Jews and
how they were the cause of all the world's problems. Not in a loud or
abusive way, but he'd talk about it."
Sweeney remembers Iverson as "violently racist and anti-
Semitic," and recalls him carrying on during one interview about
"niggers on welfare." "I said 'John, you tell this to a member of the
press? You probably have black clients out there.' He stopped for a
second and said, 'Yeah, you're probably right, but any guy who would
buy my product is not a nigger-he's a good man.' "
And yet, despite the ugly persona he projected, Iverson
maintained business relations and friendships throughout his career
with people from all these diverse groups-seemingly without ever
demonstrating bias. Perhaps because they saw through his crass
masquerade, or in appreciation of his transparency, people forgave
him. Sweeney, who has an interracial family, was truly offended by
Iverson's comments, "but I liked the guy anyway," he says. "There
was sort of an innocence about him. He was childlike."
Mark Schneider, publisher of the High End newsletter In Terms
of Music, and one of Iverson's phone friends, was another who saw
through the exterior to someone beneath who was unique, likeable,
and genuine. "I admired his honesty and I admired his products," he
says. "He was the type of guy that everything he told me panned out.
If he said use this wire instead of that, it usually worked. There
aren't too many people like that around."
"John, under it all, was a very mild, warm-hearted person and
had a hell of a lot of emotions," explains his aunt, Jo Fenn. "He never
displayed them, though. He was always rough and tumble and he
could be belligerent. He'd say, 'I just love to get people rattled.' "
Iverson could be particularly loyal to friends. Stan Rosick, for
example, who was close with Iverson until the two had a falling out
in the early 1980s, remembers him driving three hours once to tow
Rosick back home when his car broke down.
Nor was Iverson beyond thoughtfulness toward strangers.
Transients knocking on the door to his shop in an industrial area of
Lake Havasu found a friendly face. At the moment of his
disappearance, he was allowing one to live in an old motor home he
kept parked on the property, and, earlier that day, had taken him to
shop for groceries. "I never saw John not act kindly toward his fellow
man, particularly a man in need," says Russell Sherwood, another
close friend who had worked for him in Havasu.
To those he knew, both in his business and personal life,
Iverson fancied himself a genius, an Edison-like inventor who was
incessantly tracked by "the Gov," as he derisively coined the federal
government. He claimed the FBI had picked his brain on at least two
occasions, stealing or squashing his inventions by citing military
privilege. These experiences had, supposedly, left him a bitter man
and a strong libertarian, morally opposed to virtually all authority,
from that of the local electric utility to the Internal Revenue Service.
With regard to his background, he liked to tell friends and
acquaintances he had attended MIT, though he also alluded that he'd
been thrown out for getting physical with a professor with whom he
disagreed over a class lecture. He claimed to have worked for various
military contractors before getting into audio design, and sometimes
said he'd worked for NASA at the White Sands National Laboratory
during the Apollo program.
In fact, many of Iverson's stories have at least some elements
of truth behind them. But-as the police quickly learned-getting a
firm handle on the man is like trying to shape a mass of warm Jello.
The harder you squeeze, the more loose ends you come up with.
The Case That Wouldn't Go Away
At this writing (5/94), the Lake Havasu City Police Department has
been trying to find John Iverson for more than three years. Detective
Rich Funder and his associate Kris Knudtson have filled several large
loose-leaf binders with documents, and spent many hours trying to
make some sense of the conundra that compose the case.
Besides Iverson, there are several others involved in the drama,
including Kathy Munro, Iverson's former wife as well as live-in
girlfriend, and Jack Weber, a 51-year old machinist from Las Vegas
who was supplying Iverson with cabinet parts. Both were present
the night Iverson disappeared.
Another bit player is a former Los Angeles-area hi-fi dealer
named Don Frick. Considered by Iverson's family to be his most-
trusted friend, Frick had relocated to Havasu just a day or two before
Iverson's disappearance to start a new business with him
manufacturing and selling loudspeakers. Iverson vanished before the
two could even meet. According to Lake Havasu
police, Frick subsequently moved back to California, then himself
disappeared a few months later and left no forwarding address.
They've been unable to find him since.
Also on the periphery is Sherwood, a former drinking buddy
and employee of Iverson's who is now a freelance engineer in
Kansas. After Iverson's disappearance, Sherwood bought the
remnants of his lab from Munro. Around the same time, he says, he
also purchased 18 new Electron Kinetics amplifiers for the modest
sum of $5,000-they were being held by a local bank in lieu of money
Iverson owed on an outstanding business loan, and the bank was all
too happy to dispose of the product.
Sherwood subsequently launched a company called Electron
Kinetics Service Center to service existing Electron Kinetics amps and
produce new products under the brand name. Coincidentally, it was
Sherwood who, in July of 1990, hooked Iverson up with Jack Weber
when Iverson found himself running out of cabinets for his amps.
Sherwood had seen the remarkable work Weber had done for other
firms Sherwood had worked with, and knew Weber's perfectionism
would please Iverson. "When it came to making cases, he was
Michaelangelo," Sherwood says.
Munro and Weber offer markedly different versions of the
circumstances surrounding Iverson's disappearance. What's known
for sure is that Iverson and Weber were talking business at the
house that evening. Weber-an avuncular-looking man with owl-
frame glasses- later told police that it was the fifth or sixth time
during their six months of doing business that he had made the trip
from his shop in Las Vegas.
That January afternoon, Munro says he showed up around 5:00
p.m. to drop off a special project he'd been working on for Iverson.
Normally, when Weber visited, Munro would call Iverson at his own
shop across town, and he would come home. But Iverson had stepped
out and was nowhere to be found. The police later determined he'd
been out food shopping with the transient. (The transient was
subsequently cleared of any connection with the disappearance.)
Munro told this reporter that as she and Weber waited alone in the
kitchen for Iverson to arrive, she poured him some coffee and tried
to make small talk. But she found him unusually uncommunicative
compared with the previous times she'd met him. "I just felt
something wasn't right," she says.
Her feeling was compounded when Weber asked if she could
open the remote control gate so he could pull his van close to the
house; presumably, he had Iverson's project in the back and thought
it would be more secure in the driveway than on the street. She
agreed, but when Weber came back inside, she was further unnerved
by the fact that he came in carrying a briefcase. "I thought it was
strange-it was the first time I'd ever seen him with a briefcase," she
says.
As the two talked, the subject of an outstanding invoice came
up. Munro, who was also Iverson's bookkeeper, says she couldn't
locate the bill from Weber that she'd had on her desk earlier in the
week. But she took it upon herself to write him a check for $1000,
using one of several blanks with Iverson's signature that she kept
handy. Weber's reaction, she says, was odd. "If you give somebody a
check for that amount, normally they'd pick it up, look at it, turn it
over, whatever," she says. "He didn't touch it. The only thing he
touched was the chair and his coffee cup. He wouldn't even take it
from my hand-I had to set it right in front of him."
Eventually, about an hour after Weber arrived, Iverson finally
showed up, Munro says. She says they had a small but pleasant
exchange, and she told him about the check she wrote; he told her
that was okay, kissed her on the head, and sent her off to bed.
While the two men talked in the kitchen, she fell asleep. She awoke a
while later and found them gone, but dozed off again. Then, around
9:30, she says, she saw a flashlight coming down the dark hallway
toward her bedroom, and assumed it was Iverson, who worked at
night at the shop and often used a flashlight to navigate the house on
his return so he wouldn't disturb her.
...continued...
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(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.