The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre (C4): AMERICAN Robert Kleasen described himself as "an average sort of guy".

Others would not agree. Certainly not Marie Longley who discovered that she had married not a CIA agent and war hero, but a convicted killer who'd been on Death Row for killing and chopping up two Mormon missionaries.

How this "paranoid schizophrenic with a gun fetish and anger problem" ended up living in a picturesque village in Lincolnshire made for intriguing, if scary, viewing. Even more worrying was the apparent ease with which the British authorities gave him a firearm licence without bothering to check whether he had any previous convictions.

That, until his recent death, he was behind bars awaiting extradition to America is little comfort to Marie and those who incurred his wrath. She was too ill and distressed to tell her story on camera for the programme, but friends and others who Kleasen had fooled did relate the whole sorry tale.

The title of the programme stemmed from the fact that Kleasen was believed to have murdered two Mormons in Austin, Texas, in 1974. He was an avid storyteller who claimed, among other things, to have been a Korean war veteran, fighter pilot, CIA operative, member of the French Foreign Legion and the man who assassinated Che Guevara. He omitted to mention that his third wife left him after finding him taking a bath with a disembowelled deer.

In Austin, he hung out at the taxidermist store near his caravan and learnt how to cut up animals. After being arrested for buffalo rustling, he complained that the Mormon Church had let him down. Worried by this attitude, two missionaries who'd befriended him were told to sever contact with him. They went to see him one last time, and were never seen alive again. The belief is that Kleasen killed, dissected and disposed of the bodies by putting the pieces in with animal carcasses.

Found guilty on circumstantial evidence, he was given the death sentence and spent three years on Death Row. Then a legal technicality - a dodgy search warrant - meant a retrial without much of the original evidence. This didn't happen. Instead he was given nine years on gun charges. Inside, he began a pen pal relationship with policeman's widow Marie Longley. Once he was paroled, he headed for the sleepy village of Barton on Humber, where she lived, and married her within four months.

He joined local gun clubs and was given a firearms licence. Some thought him a little eccentric. Odd Bob and Mad Yank were nicknames bestowed by fellow shooters. Following an incident in which he threatened a man with a shotgun, a gun dealer looked into Kleasden's background and found he'd been lying. After police confiscated his guns - 44 were found, including a sub-machine gun - he sat crying for five hours.

Yet police still had not found out about his murder conviction. It took some Internet sleuthing by the son of Marie's best friend Liz Butterfield to uncover his involvement in the Texas chainsaw massacre. Marie, aided by Liz, made her escape before her husband could carry out his threat to shoot her if she tried to leave.

Eventually, he was arrested for illegally possessing guns, although magistrates in their wisdom released him pending sentencing. He returned to Barton and became pen pals with a woman earmarked as wife number five.

When he died, Kleasen was in a British jail, fighting extradition to Texas where the authorities were confident new DNA evidence would link him to the Mormon missionary murders.

His story is much stranger and more frightening than anything in the movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Published: 24/04/2003