35 years after murder, UF professor lives on in food class

Howard Appledorf was known for defense of junk food.

GAINESVILLE — On Labor Day weekend in 1983, Howard Appledorf ’s neighbor noticed the celebrity professor’s back door was broken in, and it looked as though the house had been burgled.

Appledorf, who had been honored by the University of Florida as Teacher of the Year in 1974 and Distinguished Lecturer in 1978, was best known as the “junk food professor” for his defense of the nutritional value of fast food.

Gainesville police responded to the neighbor’s call. What officers found reads more like a scene from the 1980 horror film “The Shining” than a robbery report.

They found Appledorf dead on his couch, bound and asphyxiated with his shirt off, a cigarette butt snuffed out in his stomach. Across his living room walls, the words “MURDER” and “REDRUM” had been scrawled in red. Beside the body, the murderers had laid out a dining set, apparently having eaten Subway while they watched Appledorf die.

News of the death rippled through Gainesville, and then the country, morphing as quickly as it traveled: Appledorf had been asphyxiated with junk food, reporters wrote, a gruesome homage to his nickname. The murderers had written their messages in peanut butter; no — ketchup; no — red ink. They had killed him with a frying pan while listening to Soft Cell’s 1981 hit, “Tainted Love.”

Every version extended the allure until the killers gave themselves up in bizarre fashion after leaving a sloppy trail — driving Appledorf ’s car and using his credit card. Who were these psychopaths?

Gainesville soon found out, and the answers would shock the city’s 1980s conscience. This was seven years before the deaths of five students at the hands of Danny Rolling would snuff out any remaining civic naiveté.

Gary Bown, Paul Everson, and Shane Kennedy were a trio of gay prostitutes from San Francisco. They had traveled to Gainesville on Appledorf ’s invitation, staying with him at his lakefront home for two nights before their arrest for forging his signature on a $900 check.

While in jail, the three requested Appledorf pay their bond, threatening to contact a local reporter and out him to the community if he didn’t. Kennedy was only 15 years old, after all; would Appledorf ’s life ever return to normal if community members knew he was gay and that he had slept with a child?

Appledorf dropped the charges. As a part of the agreement, the three were to leave Gainesville permanently. Instead, upon their release — while Appledorf boarded a plane headed for a conference in New York — they walked six miles to Appledorf ’s home.

Two days later, after Appledorf ’s return, officers would find his body.

“It was quite a shock to everybody and it was right at the start of the semester,” recalls UF Emeritus Professor and friend of Appledorf ’s, Robert Bates. “After his death ... (the class he taught) came almost to a screeching halt.”

According to Bates, Appledorf had grown the UF course, Man’s Food, from a “sleepy little thing of 15 students” to a wait-list-only auditorium lecture with over 100. It was a testament to his enthusiasm as a teacher, said Bates, that enrollment dipped so considerably the year of his death. “Without Howie, there was just no draw,” he said.

The department would eventually recover, and Man’s Food today brings in hundreds of students each year. Its appeal began with Appledorf.

In the months that followed Appledorf ’s death, Bown and Everson received life sentences for murder. But Kennedy, because he had left the house during the murder to vomit, was only sentenced to four years for grand theft. After serving his time, he returned to Manhattan, where he committed a series of strange offenses, ranging from trashing a Blockbuster video display to biting a chunk out of a security guard’s leg. Eventually, after multiple arrests for stalking fashion designer Todd Oldham (sending the designer condoms, erotic art, and leaves, loitering outside his studio, etc.) Kennedy was committed to a Manhattan mental hospital.

Bown and Everson still live in cells at the Martin County Correctional Institution.

Appledorf had served as a member of the faculty in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition since 1960. He was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in nutrition. He came to UF following post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, according to a biographical note by the George Smathers Libraries at UF.

The story of his death survives in True Crime retellings. But in Gainesville, there are a handful of people, like Bates, who remember a friend instead of a sensation.

“He was very bright, very friendly, a great speaker ... the resident intellectual at the Red Lion (a local watering hole),” said Bates. “He really put this school and this department on the map.”