Drake the Flake

On Nov. 8, 1992, the revenge-driven crime spree ended when the man I remembered as Drake the Flake blew out his brains with a .32 caliber revolver. In the 11 hours before taking his own life Lynwood C. "Woody" Drake III had shot and killed six people, wounded a seventh and beaten his former landlady with a blackjack.

It had been over 20 years since I last saw him in 1972. It was in the lobby of the movie theater I then managed, the Biograph Theatre. Still, when I saw the AP photo of him in the Richmond Times-Dispatch 29 years ago (in 1992), Drake was instantly recognizable.
 
More about Woody Drake later, but it should come as no surprise to most film buffs that sometimes there is a dark side to the business of doing business after the sun goes down. Some regulars saw the Biograph (1972-87) as a movie-themed clubhouse. Then again, movie theaters attract all sorts of people who are hiding from reality. 

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Although nearly everyone who worked at the Biograph during my almost-12-year-stint as its manager was on the up-and-up, there were a couple of rotten apples. As I hired both of them, I have to take the blame there. But those are stories for another time. Some of my favorite people worked at that cinema in those days, but mostly at night.

Then there were the customers. Plenty of them were fine, but this piece isn't about them. It's about troubles. 

One man died in the Biograph. His last minutes among the living were spent watching "FIST" (1978), starring Sylvester Stallone. The man died in an aisle seat in the small auditorium -- Theatre No. 2.

Yes, the movie was bad, but was it really THAT bad?

At the time I was 30 years old. The dead man was about my age. His eyes were open. As the rescue squad guys shot jolts of electricity into his heart, his body flopped around on the floor like a fish out of water. Meanwhile, down in Theater No. 1 "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" was on the screen delighting its usual crowd of costumed screwballs. The juxtaposition of the two contrasting scenes was surreal.

There was the night someone fired five shots of high-powered ammo through one of the back door exits into Theatre No. 1. Five bullets came through the door's two quarter-inch steel plates to splinter seats. This all happened just as the crowd was exiting the auditorium, at about 11:30 p.m. 

No one was hit and it seemed no one even caught on to what was happening. Later the police were baffled, leaving us to speculate as to why it happened.

Another night, a rat died in the Coca-Cola drain and clogged it up. Not knowing about the rat, and thinking I knew what to do to clear the clogged drain, I poured a powerful drain-clearing liquid -- we called it "Tampax Dynamite" -- directly into the problem.

Soon a foul-smelling liquid started bubbling and backing up all over the lobby's carpet. A flooding mess ensued. The disaster ran everybody out of there on a busy Saturday night. We had to replace the carpet. Oops.

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Back to Drake: The 1992 news stories reported that Drake, who fancied himself as an actor, had compiled a long list of people he intended to pay back, someday. Drake wore theatrical grease paint on his face when he committed his murders. As the cops were closing in on him Drake punched his own ticket to hell.

From what I found out, Drake's childhood was straight out of a horror movie. Apparently he was always a problem to those around him. The photo above -- it was a publicity shot he used to apply for work as an actor -- ran in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on November 16, 1992. What follows are excerpts of a piece I wrote for SLANT a couple of weeks later.

...The November 16th edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch carried Mark Holmberg's sad and sensational story of Woody Drake. As usual, Holmberg did a good job with a bizarre subject. In case you missed the news: Lynwood Drake, who grew up in Richmond, murdered six people in California on November 8. Then he turned the gun on himself. His tortured suicide note cited revenge as the motive.

An especially troubling aspect of Holmberg's account was that those Richmonders who remembered the 43 year old Drake weren't at all surprised at the startling news. Nor was I. My memory of the man goes back to the early days of the Biograph Theatre (1972). At the time I managed the West Grace Street cinema. So the unpleasant task of dealing with Drake fell to me.

Owing to his talent for nuisance, the staff dubbed him 'Drake the Flake.' Although he resembled many of the hippie-style hustlers of the times, it was his ineptness at putting over the scam that set him apart. Every time he darkened our door there was trouble. If he didn't try to beat us out of the price of admission or popcorn, there would be a problem in the auditorium. And without fail, his ruse would be transparent. Then, when confronted, he'd go into a fit of denial that implied a threat.

Eventually that led to the incident in Shafer Court (on VCU's campus) when he choked a female student [Susan Kuney] who worked at the Biograph.That evening he showed up at the theater to see the movie, just like nothing had happened. Shoving his way past those already in line, the cashier-choker demanded to be admitted next. I told him he couldn't come in at all. 

An argument ensued that became the last straw. Drake the Flake was physically removed from the building, tossed onto Grace Street, and banned from the Biograph.

The next day, Drake made his final appearance at the Biograph. He bolted in through the lobby's exit doors and issued a finger-pointing death threat to yours truly.

Although I tried to act unruffled by the incident, it made me more than a little uncomfortable. In spite of the anger of his words, there was an emptiness in his eyes. In that moment he had pulled me into his world. It was scary and memorable.

Using a fine turn of phrase, Holmberg suggested that, "Whatever poisoned the heart of Woody Drake happened in Richmond..."

If you want more evidence of the childhood poisoning, take the time to look him up in his high school yearbooks (Thomas Jefferson 1967/68). I did, and right away I noticed that same empty expression in his eyes.

Looking at a couple of Drake’s old TJ yearbook photos reminded me of a line in the movie 'Silence of the Lambs.' In reference to the serial-killer who was being sought by the FBI throughout the film, Dr. Lechter (a psychiatrist turned murderer himself) tells an investigator that such a man is not born; he is created.

A process made Drake like he was. So while we can avert our eyes from the painful truth, we basically know where the poison is administered to the Woody Drakes of the world.

Yes, we do. The assembly line for such monsters runs through their childhood homes. 

The story went that Drake liked to beat up women. After I literally threw him out of the Biograph and he disappeared, 49 years ago, several people came in and told us stories about various females the future serial killer had hurt.

Shortly before Drake ended his wretched life, he woke up a 60-year-old woman by smacking her in the head with a blackjack. She scrambled to hide under her bed, and she lived to tell the story.

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