Jonathan Pitts, a Chicago-based performer, storyteller and teacher was four-and-a-half when his dad, Dave Pitts, was kidnapped by a hitchhiking serial killer, Larry Ranes, just outside Las Vegas.
The odd thing is that Pitts didn’t find out about his father’s kidnapping until 37 years later, when he happened across a 1964 article from the Chicago Sun-Times recounting Dave Pitts’ encounter with Ranes.
When he did, he did what any seasoned storyteller would do — he wrote a monologue about it.
The former Oak Parker performed it onstage earlier this month in Chicago.
“The year I found out about my father was the first year that I ever told it as a story on stage,” Pitts said. “And I told it at WNEP Theatre’s SKALD, which was a storytelling competition. And back then, it was a 10-minute slot.”
Over the years, Pitt has been performing the piece, adding to it at every iteration.
“I really identify with the Irish storytelling style which is you never tell a story the same way twice. Every time I tell a story in any storytelling event, I know my first line, I know my last line and then everything else changes based on the flow of the interaction from the audience.”
The lines go like this: Pitt’s father was at the time making a living performing in the Ice Capades with his partner, a charismatic ice-skating chimpanzee named Spanky. His home base was in LA, and he and Spanky would regularly drive from there to whatever city the Ice Capades was currently appearing in. He was only a few hours into a 2000-mile car trip from Los Angeles to Duluth, Minnesota, when he picked up Ranes.
Pitts’ father later told Pitts that he never stopped for hitchhikers, but Ranes looked so clean cut – button-down, white shirt; short sleeves; tie; short, carefully combed hair, “like a Mormon” – he thought nothing of pulling over and letting him in. He did not know at the time that Ranes was in the midst of a month-long killing spree. (Ranes later confessed to robbing and killing five men in Nevada, Michigan and Kentucky, and was sentenced to life in prison for one of the murders.)
“They were fine for the first day,” Pitts told me, “But on the second day, Ranes pulled the gun on my dad and made my dad get in the cage with Spanky for the night. In the morning when Larry Ranes let my dad out; he said to my dad that he was planning on killing him, but he was worried about what would happen to the monkey.”
At the time, Pitts and his mother were estranged from Pitts’s father. He and his mother were living in Oak Park with his mom’s parents. His parents had divorced a few years earlier, but before that, they all lived on the road (dad, mom, baby Jonathan, and Spanky), traveling from gig to gig. But the rigors of a life constantly in motion tore the young family apart.
Judy Pitts was only 19 when she married, only 20 when she had Jonathan. His mother got custody of the boy. His father got the chimpanzee.
“It’s up to you,” Pitts quipped, “to figure out who got the better deal.”
No jokes
Pitts does not joke about Spanky lightly. Spanky looms large in Pitts’ stories about his father and his kidnapping. Spanky gets second billing in the title for Pitts’ solo piece: My Dad, His Chimp, and a Serial Killer. Which is fitting. Spanky and his father were, in their day, a major act in the Ice Capades.
“You know,” Pitts told me, “one of the things I found is that Ice Capades made a matchbook cover with Spanky and my dad ice skating on it.”
The funny thing is, though, that Pitts has “no direct memories” of Spanky or of their time on the road.
“I have the stories my mom told me. She said that up until about the age four or five, when I got excited, I would bounce up and down like a chimp.”
She also told Jonathan that Spanky was protective of him. If strangers came into the trailer, he’d stand guard by the crib.
“Spanky was a very unique chimp,” Pitts added, “very much a performer who loved performing. My cousin Tracy went skating with Spanky and he was so good, she gave up skating.”
While Spanky was skating in the spotlight with his father, Pitts spent his childhood being a kid in Oak Park. He attended the same grammar school as his mom (Hawthorne School, later torn down to build Percy Julian Middle School), and the same high school, OPRF. She graduated in 1957; he graduated from the school, exactly 20 years later, in 1977. From kindergarten to graduation, Pitts had almost no contact with his father.
Pitts drifted in high school. Even though he was always doing comedy bits in the back of the classroom, he didn’t do theater at all at OPRF.
“The OPRF drama kids seemed very cliquey,” Pitt said, adding that among his classmates were three future stars: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Dan Castellaneta, and Amy Morton. Instead, Pitts was a wrestler for three years, played Lacrosse one year, took photos for the yearbook and wrote some articles for Trapeze, the school newspaper.
Pitts drifted after high school, too, first to Triton College, and then, while there, into Chicago’s improv scene, where he drifted first into performing, and then into teaching, directing, and then co-founding the internationally recognized Chicago Improv Festival. Then storytelling. For Pitts, drifting turned into an art — which was why the next turn in Pitts’ twisty life was hardly surprising for a professional drifter.
“Every time I’ve told the story of my dad from 2002 on, people in the audience always came up to me after, and said ‘this should be a movie.’” Pitts said. “And I’d be like, great, good idea. I don’t know how to do that.”
Then, in 2017, out of the blue, Pitts got a phone call from the two producers, Marc Bernardout and Hugh Broder, who were looking for his father.
“We want to make a movie based on your dad’s experience with Larry Ranes,” they explained to Pitts. “It turns out,” Pitts said, “they had bought the rights to a book called Luke Karamazov by Conrad Hilberry, which is a book written about Larry Ranes.”
Pitts was hired as a story consultant. He also provided narration for the movie “He Went That Way,” an independent feature released Jan. 5.
Now that the movie is out, Pitts has turned his attention to his live show. My Dad, His Chimp, and a Serial Killer performed as part of The 27th Annual Filet of Solo Festival, January 12 and 13, in Chicago.
“My pitch to them was this show is Silence of the Lambs meets Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia.”