Dave Pitts rumbled east in his brand-new 1963 GMC Suburban Carryall — an automobile big enough to haul trunks filled with dozens of costumes, props and his prized possession: Spanky, “the world’s only ice-skating chimpanzee.”
On that May morning in 1964, Pitts and Spanky were heading to Duluth, Minnesota, to begin rehearsals for their third season of Ice Capades, a glitzy traveling show featuring former world and Olympic ice skaters. Pitts and Spanky were among the headliners.
Pitts planned to stop in his hometown of Evanston to see his parents and show off his new automobile. Accustomed to the rigors of a 65-city annual ice-skating tour, Pitts was an athlete — handsome in a young Mickey Rooney kind of way.
He and Spanky set out before sunrise from Los Angeles and were skirting the northern edge of Las Vegas, when Pitts saw a man with his thumb out. He looked like a “preppy, teenage college kid,” Pitts would later say. Perhaps Pitts took pity on the youth, who had jug ears, a slight build and a wannabe James Dean pompadour.
The hitchhiker might even be a Mormon missionary, Pitts thought, noticing the man’s white shirt and black tie. The youth said he was trying to get to Michigan.
“Hop in, and I’ll take you as far as Chicago,” Pitts said.
If nothing else, Pitts thought, he’d have human company on the long journey east.
Pitts didn’t know his companion for the next three days was a 19-year-old high school dropout named Larry Lee Ranes nor that Ranes had killed three people — two gas station attendants and a man who, like Pitts, had just been kind enough to offer him a ride.
But Spanky knew. The chimp that could leap over 20 barrels on ice skates and jump through a fiery hoop understood something was wrong. Spanky started screaming — a behavior primate experts call a “pant-hoot.”
“Spanky knew this person should not be in this van,” says Jonathan Pitts, 64, Dave Pitts’ son and an improvisational comedy instructor and performer living in Albany Park.
Nearly 60 years after that improbable road trip, the story of Spanky, Dave Pitts and the serial killer now has been made into a movie. The heavily fictionalized “He Went That Way,” starring Zachary Quinto (“Star Trek”) as the trainer and Jacob Elordi (“Euphoria”) as the hitchhiker, arrives in theaters Jan. 5 and on services for on-demand home viewing on Jan. 12.
Also in January, Jonathan Pitts will tell his own version of the story of the road trip during Lifeline Theatre’s 27th Annual Fillet of Solo Festival.
The ‘wonder chimp’ arrives on the scene
Dave Pitts always wanted to be famous, according to his son. There’s a photograph of him in a 1971 Ice Capades program. Pitts is on the ice in a tangerine suit, arms outstretched, giant fluffy rabbit ears jutting from his head and an expression almost pained in its plea for attention.
His parents had two boys. But they could afford to send only one to college. They sent Dave because he showed artistic promise.
“My dad was handsome, creative and charismatic,” Jonathan Pitts says.
Dave Pitts studied musical theater at Northwestern University but dropped out after landing a gig singing as part of a trio at the Conrad Hilton hotel in downtown Chicago. When the trio broke up about a year later, Pitts sang solo at fairs across the United States.
“At one of those state fairs, he sees this chimp act with five chimps roller-skating,” Pitts’ son says. “He’s fascinated by it.”
Pitts was drawn to one chimp in particular — a juvenile male brought to America from its native West Africa. Spanky had a “sense of playing to the audiences” that the other chimps didn’t, Jonathan Pitts says.
“There are chimps, and then there was Spanky. Spanky really liked people, really liked performing.”
Dave Pitts paid $1,000 for Spanky. The fee included instruction on how to get the chimp to do tricks, mostly by offering an array of treats.
Chimps are like toddlers, Pitts told The New York Times in 1969.
“You use psychology where possible but always have in the back of your mind that old parental rule: Spare the rod, and spoil the child,” Dave Pitts told the Times.
At first, Spanky could only roller skate, performing with Pitts at fairs and at nightclubs — until another performer told him the chimp’s talent was being wasted. Pitts and Spanky auditioned for Ice Capades, getting hired after the second try. They were an instant hit in a show that once, in the mid-1960s, drew 30,000 people to New York’s Shea Stadium.
“My dad was a celebrity, but, if anyone was famous, it was Spanky,” Jonathan Pitts says.
Spanky had his own fan club. A $1.25 membership fee came with an “I’m a Little Ape Over Spanky” pin.
Spanky appeared on the same ice rink as Olympic skating champions. He and Pitts were on national TV shows.
Pitts said in The New York Times interview that it took “hours of special exercise and games” to bulk up a chimp’s leg muscles for ice skating.
Jonathan Pitts doesn’t remember his life on the road in a trailer with his dad, mother Judy Pitts — the first of Pitts’ four wives — and Spanky. He was too young. His memories come from his mother, who died in 2013.
“If I was fussy, he would tickle me,” the son says of Spanky. “If a stranger came into the trailer home, Spanky would come stand next to me by my crib to protect me.”
Jonathan Pitts’ cousin Tracy Garcia was living in Morton Grove when her famous uncle and Spanky pulled their trailer into the driveway during an Ice Capades tour stop in Chicago.
Garcia, who now lives in Texas, was 5 or 6 at the time.
“We would be sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast,” Garcia says. Spanky “came in and sat down. They gave him a bowl of cereal. He’s eating just like we are — with a spoon. He got up, went to the bathroom and washed his hands.”
Pitts and Spanky returned for another visit two years later. The house guests took Garcia and her brother skating at an outdoor ice rink.
“Here was this chimp skating circles and twirling,” Garcia says. “I remember getting off the ice, saying, ‘I’m not skating again!’ because Spanky skated better than me.”
In 1962, Pitts’ parents divorced.
“My mom got me; my dad got Spanky,” Jonathan Pitts says. He and his mother went to live with her parents in Oak Park.
For many years, Jonathan Pitts would see his dad only once a year — when Ice Capades came to town. The boy and his mother would always have the best seats, though, and backstage passes.
“My dad was a concept to me,” Pitts said. “I would see him on TV commercials. I would see him on talk shows more than I would see him in person.”
The jug-eared kid who became a confessed serial killer
Larry Lee Ranes — a Kalamazoo, Michigan, kid who got the nickname “Dumbo” in school because of his jutting ears — also had a strained relationship with his father.
The elder Ranes was a drunkard who, despite only having one functioning arm, liked to beat and break things, according to author Conrad Hilberry, whose 1987 book “Luke Karamazov” tells Ranes’ story and that of his older brother, Danny Ranes, also a serial killer.
Ranes told Hilberry that his dad, again drunk, had run over the family dog with a truck.
“I looked at the other kids and I thought, how could they be so attached to a dog to cry ... or have a tantrum?”
Ranes went to Parchment High School in southern Michigan.
“He had a friendly smile, but he was a bully,” says former classmate Dave Marunycz, now 77.
They were in art class together. One time, Ranes came at Marunycz with a chisel.
“He was trying to stick that thing in me,” Marunycz says. “He had this s- -t-eating grin on his face. Do I take him seriously or not?”
The confrontation fizzled. No one was hurt.
Ranes dropped out of high school, according to an August 1986 profile in the Detroit Free Press. At 17, he stole a car. The judge in the case offered juvenile lockup or the Army. Ranes took the latter but got the boot 11 months later after brandishing a pair of butcher knives while chasing two other soldiers, Hilberry wrote.
Ranes has said he didn’t know what drove him to kill. A lover’s rejection is hinted at in the book; so is the inconvenience of leaving alive witnesses to robberies.
By the time he found himself on a dirt road May 25, 1964, just outside Las Vegas, he’d left bodies in Michigan, Kentucky and Nevada — crimes he would later confess to, though he couldn’t always remember where he had killed each victim.
‘The more people you kill, the easier it gets’
How Ranes ended up in Las Vegas is anyone’s guess. Two days before Christmas the previous year, he’d tried to kill himself, surviving thanks to a Michigan state trooper who found Ranes in the front seat of a 1958 Plymouth convertible — a hose poked into the car and spewing carbon monoxide, according to the Free Press.
Ranes didn’t expect to live. He’d already planned another suicide attempt.
He surely didn’t expect, while standing on the edge of that road with his thumb out, to meet Dave Pitts and possibly the most beloved chimpanzee in America.
Pitts slowed and pulled to the side. He asked Ranes where he was heading.
“Michigan,” Ranes said.
Hop in, Pitts said.
Ranes didn’t see Spanky at first, but he heard him.
“I get in, and there’s this ungodly howling and screeching, and ... what? A chimpanzee? What kind of people is this?” Ranes told Hilberry.
Spanky was in a cage in the back. Ranes wasn’t afraid; he was thrilled. He’d seen Spanky on TV. And now he was on the road with the chimp and Dave — two celebrities.
But Dave Pitts knew little about his new companion, other than he was heading to Michigan.
The road took them north through Utah and then into Wyoming. They stopped for the night at a motel. Pitts and Spanky went inside. Ranes slept in the Suburban, Pitts wrote to a step-daughter many years later in a lengthy account of the journey.
The next day, they crossed into Colorado, then Nebraska. There’s no record of what Ranes shared about himself as the Suburban rumbled over the Rockies and onto the Plains.
As darkness fell on the second day,
Ranes’ old instincts kicked in. He pulled out a pistol — a chrome-plated Derringer, according to Pitts’ letter.
“Do you see what I got in my hand?” Ranes said.
Pitts, who was driving, said he couldn’t see anything.
Ranes put the gun to Pitts’ head.
“It looked as big as a cannon,” Pitts recounted.
Then, the truth spilled out. Ranes said he’d been killing people — people like Pitts who’d stopped to give him a ride.
“You know, the more people you kill, the easier it gets,” Ranes told Pitts.
Pitts didn’t believe the skinny kid with a weak chin could be a serial killer. Still, he told Ranes he was welcome to the $150 he had in his wallet.
That wasn’t enough. Ranes had looked at a map. He knew that they were near a river. He’d decided to kill Pitts and the chimp, and dump their bodies in the river.
He told Pitts to pull over, ordered him to open Spanky’s cage. Pitts unlocked the cage. The stench of chimp feces hit them, Ranes later told Hilberry.
“The chimp jumps out right away, arms all around [Pitts’] neck, looking over at me just like a little kid,” Ranes told the author.
Ranes ordered Pitts to get in the cage with Spanky. Pitts begged Ranes not to put him in the cage, but the killer was unmoved.
So Spanky and his trainer spent the night together. Ranes climbed into the cab and drove on.
“I talked to Spanky like I always did — as a father talking to his son, telling him that everything was going to be all right,” Pitts would recall.
As the sun rose over Kansas, Ranes stopped the Suburban and came to the back.
“How does it feel to talk your way out of death?” Ranes told Pitts, according to the email the chimp trainer sent his step-daughter.
Ranes later said he couldn’t bring himself to kill Pitts and Spanky. He told Pitts that he saw something special in their human-chimp bond.
Jonathan Pitts has spent a lot of time mulling what happened. His theory: “Larry Ranes identified with the beast in the cage because that’s who Ranes was.”
But the journey wasn’t over. The travelers would spend the next 17 hours together before reaching South Haven, Michigan.
They stopped for breakfast at a roadside diner.
Then, back in the Suburban, Ranes dozed in the passenger seat — with the pistol in his lap.
Pitts was “terrified” the whole time, he later told his son. At stop signs or when a cop car pulled alongside, he considered jumping from the Suburban.
But Pitts stayed, thinking: “Even if you do get away, what happens to Spanky? No, you can’t risk it.”
In South Haven, Ranes told Pitts to pull over, Jonathan Pitts said. The chimp trainer had no money. He asked for $10 of the money Ranes had stolen from him.
Ranes handed him a $20, according to the trainer’s emailed account of the story.
Before parting, Ranes warned him: “You are not to tell anyone about this for two weeks. At that time, I’m going to kill myself. But, if you do, I have your ID and know where to find you. I will come kill you. Is it a deal?”
Pitts agreed — and lived.
Others later were killed by Ranes, including Gary Smock, a 30-year-old Michigan teacher who had offered Ranes a ride in Kalamazoo days after the killer left Pitts. Smock handed over his shoes, his watch and the $3 in his wallet. Ranes forced Smock into the trunk of his own car. He later confessed he shot Smock because he was making too much noise.
It all finally ended on June 5, 1964, after Ranes told a buddy he was visiting in Kalamazoo about the killing spree. The friend called the police.
Life on the road comes to an end
Ranes confessed to five murders and went to trial for Smock’s killing. Ranes “broke into a smile” when the jury foreman read the guilty verdict on Oct. 9, 1964, according to a news report.
Ranes got life without parole. He spent his time in prison watching late-night talk shows and reading news magazines. He told the Free Press in 1986 that he shunned most friendships in prison “because everybody you learned to care about leaves.”
A recent prison mugshot shows Ranes with his hair and beard long, wispy and white.
At one point several years ago, Ranes considered contacting Pitts.
“I know I could contact him through the Ice Capades,” he told Hilberry for his book. “But I don’t know — I guess I may be afraid of the answer. I’d rather cherish the thought of it.”
Ranes died Nov. 12 while an inmate at Saginaw Correctional Facility in Freeland, Michigan. He was 78. Foul play isn’t suspected, but the cause of death hasn’t been determined.
Pitts toured with the Ice Capades through 1972. He had four young chimps — all with the stage name Spanky.
“When chimpanzees start to reach sexual maturity, they’ve got hormones and other things cueing them to do other behaviors — display dominance,” says Maureen Leahy, Lincoln Park Zoo’s vice president of animal care and horticulture.
That’s what happened with the original Spanky. According to Jonathan Pitts, his father said Spanky ended up in a zoo in Philadelphia, though the Philadelphia Zoo’s animal records department has no documentation of ever having housed Spanky, leaving the final chapter of the chimpanzee’s life a mystery.
Chimpanzees have been known to live as long as 50 years after their entertainment days end, Leahy says.
After leaving the Ice Capades, Dave Pitts trained other animals, including working for the now-shuttered Marine World/Africa USA theme park in Redwood City, California.
Pitts quit animal training after he was attacked by a lion while working for a private zoo, his son says. He later sold car tires for a time before retiring and now has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in an apartment in Buenos Aires.
Jonathan Pitts thinks a lot about the trip with a serial killer his father somehow survived. He’s been poring over his father’s autobiography in preparation for his one-man show about what happened, which he says he didn’t learn about until he was 42.
In his youth, Pitts struggled to come to terms with an absent father who spent more time with chimpanzees than with his son.
But Jonathan Pitts is certain that his dad and three step-sisters wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Spanky.
“He lived because he had a chimp,” he says of his father. “If he had had a dog or a cat, Larry Ranes would have killed him.
“Like he killed everybody else.”
