The Prisoner's Song

As he discussed his troubles in a Santa Barbara jail cell last week, Dr. Gwynne Nettler, 38, moodily laid them to the difficulty of "seeing a channel . . . and moving upwards." He had been able to see a channel clearly when he was getting his Ph.D in sociology and psychology at Stanford, he said, and when he was teaching at the University of Washington. But when he came to Santa Barbara College (enrollment 1,634) four years ago, he began to "realize I wasn't growing."

Nettler gloomily recalled having been "trapped" before--as a student at U.C.L.A., as a riveter, as principal of a depression-era relief night school. At Santa Barbara, however, he tried new ways to grow. He began going out nights and burglarizing big homes, specializing in rugs, lamps and other bric-a-brac. Last year he also settled down to an adventure in extramarital living with a San Francisco divorcee named Francine Schaefer.

The professor was a wonderful burglar, but he and Francine got to fighting over such issues as who would pay the $150-3-month rent on their off-campus love nest. She spitefully threatened to expose his criminal career. Last July she even browbeat him into signing a confession. He sat down and typed out a list of his burglaries, blaming them on "neurotic individualism." Francine gave the confession to a Santa Barbara detective, who just as obediently kept a promise not to read it until she gave the word.

Last week Francine called the police station, complained that the doctor had been punching her around, and gave the go-ahead signal. The bluecoats opened the confession, stared at it with gaping jaws, and then took off after the doc like Keystone Cops after a pie-thrower.

Caught sunning himself at the beach, Nettler stonily denied all. Was he not a criminologist himself? Had he not delivered a lecture on "crime & punishment" only six days before to an overflow audience, and hammered home the need for a "moral community"? Indeed he had. Nevertheless, after three days of denials, he confessed, resigned from the college, and settled down in jail to read Henry Miller's Sunday After the War.

"None of us know really what or who we are,' he said, "but I believe that my burglaries were merely compensation for an ego deficiency ... I still don't know myself well enough to say. Who does really know himself?" As for Francine, Nettler was broadminded. "She has her own conflict," he said. "She's got talent. But she's all mixed up."

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