ox
Index to pertinent excerpts from FIRST DEGREE, by
William M, Kunstler; New York: Oceana Publications,
Ine., 1960,
1) John White Webster, hanged in Mass achusetts, August 30, 1850
2) chester E, Gillette, electrocuted, New York, March 30, 1908
3) Charles Becker, electrocuted, New York, July 30, 1915
4) Snyder-Gray, both electrocuted, New York, January 12, 1928
5) Bruno Richard Hauptmann, electrocuted, New Jersey, April 3, 1936
6) Major Raymond Lisenba, hanged, California, May 1, 192
7) Louis Buchalter (Lepke), electrocuted, New York, March ), 19h)
8) Edward Lester Gibbs, electrocuted, Pennsylvania, April 22, 1951
pp 13-21
17-58
59=73
126=136
137=150
151-161
162-175
185-193
eam pees
MURDER IN PAYMENT
College. He had grown suspicious of John White Webster, the
college’s professor of chemistry, who had arranged an appoint-
ment with Dr. Parkman for 1:30 p.m. on the day the latter disap-
peared and who had acknowledged that Parkman had visited him
at the scheduled time. According to Prof. Webster, he had paid
the missing man almost five hundred dollars which he owed him.
Littlefield’s suspicions had been aroused mainly by some questions
Webster had asked him about a basement vault in which the
medical students had been in the habit of depositing parts of
bodies used in their anatomy courses, and an unusual request he
had made for a pint of blood. ;
Littlefield’s curiosity, once kindled, would not down without
further investigation. Accordingly, he broke through the wall of
a small washroom that adjoined Webster’s laboratory after having
observed the professor's nervousness whenever the Boston police,
in searching the Medical College, came near this room. He was
horrified (as well as somewhat gratified) to find some human
bones in the washroom, and a further search of the furnace in
Webster's laboratory uncovered more bones as well as a set of
dentures. The janitor promptly reported his findings to the police,
and Webster was immediately arrested.
On December 13th, 1849, Prof. Webster was formally indicted
for the murder of Dr. Parkman and, some six weeks later,
pleaded not guilty. His trial, which was presided over by Lemuel
Shaw, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court, began on Tuesday, March 19, 1850, before an all-male
jury. The Attorney General—and future Governor—John H.
Clifford, opened his case by putting a number of medical experts
on the stand to prove that the portions of bone found in the de-
fendant’s washroom and laboratory were parts of Dr. Parkman’s
body. Although most of the witnesses agreed that the bones could
have been those of a man of Parkman’s age and build, several
admitted on cross-examination that it was virtually impossible to
be certain about this.
Dr. Webster’s case received a strong boost when one of the
Commonwealth’s medical experts insisted that the small stove in
his laboratory was an extremely poor one in which to burn a
body. But the doctors who testified, including Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes, the Dean of the Medical College, all insisted that who-
14
FIRST DEGREE
ever had separated the bones which the janitor had found had
known exactly what he was doing. According to Holmes, only an
anatomical expert could have severed the joints connecting the
various bones with the dexterity indicated by the condition of
the remains. Webster, he remembered, was, for a chemist, no
mean hand with a scalpel.
When the last of Clifford’s experts stepped down, it was clear
that the prosecution had not established that the pitiful pile of
bones found in Webster’s rooms was all that remained of the miss-
ing man. However, the Commonwealth had not shot its bolt on
this score. It called to the stand Dr. Nathan C. Keep, Parkman’s
dentist, who, when he was shown the dentures found in the labora-
tory furnace, immediately identified them as a set he had made
for the doctor in 1846. But he did not rely on his memory of what
he had observed more than three years before the trial. Dr.
Parkman, it seems, had visited his office just two weeks before his
disappearance in order to have his teeth fitted with a new spring.
On cross-examination, Keep insisted that Dr. Parkman’s teeth
were extremely easy to recognize because of what he termed “a
great irregularity on the left side of the lower jaw.” When he was
shown the teeth that had been found in Webster's furnace, he said
that he recognized them immediately as Parkman’s because “the
block belonging to the left side of the lower jaw” had survived
the fire. He still had the mold upon which Parkman’s teeth had
been made and the surviving teeth fitted it exactly. Asked why he
had kept this mold so long, he replied, “For future use, in case of
accident to the teeth.”
With the dentist's testimony in the record, Clifford had estab-
lished his corpus deliciti. Now he could turn to the second stage
of his case—proof that the defendant had murdered Parkman on
the day of his disappearance. For this he relied on the Harvard
Medical College janitor whose inquisitiveness had generated the
case against Webster. On March 22, 1850, Ephraim Littlefield
shuffled up to the witness chair and awaited the Attorney Gen-
eral’s first question.
However, before Littlefield began what was in effect an eight-
hour monologue, the proprietor of Holland’s Grocery testified
that Dr. Parkman had visited his store shortly after 1:00 p.m. on
the day of his disappearance and had purchased some butter and
5
|
CR at AN a ae Re oe
Murder in Payment
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts
versus
John White Webster
The unexplained disappearances of well-known persons are
often as intriguing as they are baffling. That of New York Su-
preme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, who was last seen step-
ping into a taxicab on Manhattan’s West 45th Street at 9:15 on
the night of August 6, 1930, has been the subject of flamboyant
speculation ever since. More recently, the case of Dr. Jesus de
Galindez, the Basque scholar, who vanished into thin air one
March evening in 1954 after teaching a class at Columbia Uni-
versity, remains unsolved even though many people believe, de-
spite Morris Ernst’s arguments to the contrary, that his anti-
Trujillo activities may have had a great deal to do with his dis-
appearance.
But more than 100 years ago—1849 to be exact—the City of
Boston was aroused by advertisements appearing in local news-
papers offering five thousand dollars for information about: the
whereabouts of one Dr. George Parkman who was last seen alive
at 1:45 o’clock on the afternoon of November 24th. Sixty-year-old
Dr. Parkman, one of Harvard’s most devoted graduates, was, at
the time of his disappearance, involved in financing its new medi-
cal college. However, although his family offered a substantial
reward for news of the missing man, he was never found and, but
for an inquisitive janitor, he could be mentioned today in the
same breath with Crater and Galindez. _
The janitor in question was one Ephraim Littlefield, who per-
formed his chores for Dr. Parkman’s beloved Harvard Medical
13
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138865
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
LAW LIBRARY
FIRST DEGREE
BY
WILLIAM M. KUNSTLER
NEW YORK
OCEANA PUBLICATIONS, INC.
1960
MURDER IN FLIGHT
work paid off. That morning, Walter Lyle, the manager of a
Warner-Quinlan service station, following Finn’s instructions,
had written the license number of a car on a ten-dollar bill with
which its owner had paid for gas. Three days later, a teller at the
125th Street branch of the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust Com-
pany reported to the police that a ransom bill had been deposited
by the service station. What appeared to be a New York license
number—4U-13-41—was written in pencil on the back of the
banknote.
When Lyle and John Lyons, his assistant, described the man
who had passed the bill, the police felt that, at long last, they
were on the right track. The description corresponded to those
they had already received from other recipients of ransom bills.
Furthermore, in view of Finn’s theory as to the kidnapper’s resi-
dence and the fact that both Lindbergh and Condon thought that —
“John” had spoken with a German accent, the owner of the
plates seemed to be ideal—he lived in the Bronx and he had a
German name. According to the records of the Motor Vehicle
Bureau, 4U-13-41 had been issued to one Bruno Richard Haupt-
mann, a journeyman carpenter.
A police cordon was immediately thrown around Hauptmann’s
home at 1278 East 222nd Street. Early the next morning, he was
arrested in his car where he was handcuffed and searched. A
twenty-dollar ransom bill was found in his wallet, and, when his
apartment was ransacked later that day, nearly fourteen thousand
more in Lindbergh money was discovered hidden in a wooden
block under the garage floor. Condon’s 1932 telephone number
as well as his address were written on a piece of wood in a closet.
When a handwriting expert claimed that Hauptmann had writ-
‘ten the various ransom notes, and Koehler insisted that one rail
of the top section of the ladder came from the Suspect’s attic, it
was time to think in terms of grand jury presentments.
A month after his arrest, Hauptmann was extradited to New
Jersey where he was lodged in the Hunterdon County. jail at
Flemington under an indictment that charged that he “did wil-
fully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought, kill and mur-
der Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr.” After some preliminary skirmish-
ing between his lawyer, Edward J. Reilly, and Attorney General
David T. Wilentz, the defendant's trial began on January 3, 1935
144
Cie ee a aa ee Oe Se Ee
be
ii
FIRST DEGREE
in the century-old white-columned courthouse in Flemington. A.
lone telegraph pole just outside the building was so loaded with
wires installed by the various news services covering the trial
that there were fears—unrealized—that it would collapse before
Wilentz had finished his opening to the jury of eight men and
four women. :
Wilentz had so much incriminating evidence against Haupt-
- mann that he almost fell over his own feet trying to get it all in.
For identification, he had Colonel Lindbergh, Condon and an
army of lesser lights. Albert S. Osborn, one of the country’s best
known handwriting experts, was prepared to name the defendant
as the author of the ransom notes. Treasury Department ac-'
countants were available to show that Hauptmann’s financial
picture had suddenly and inexplicably brightened after April 2,
1932. Koehler would demonstrate why he believed that part of
the ladder came from the defendant’s attic, and representatives
of J. P. Morgan were there to identify the money found in Haupt-
mann’s garage as being part of the ransom packages they had
assembled for Colonel Lindbergh two years before. It would take
a pretty bumbling prosecutor to lose this one and Wilentz was
far from an amateur. zi |
After Anne Morrow Lindbergh had identified the sleeping suit
sent by “John” as the one her son was wearing when he was
put to bed on March 2nd, Colonel Lindbergh took the stand. ig
was positive that the voice he had overheard in St. Raymond’s
Cemetery on April 2, 1932, “was Hauptmann’s voice.” Condon
was even more definite:
Q. Who did you give the money to?
A. John. ;
Q. Who is John?
A. John is Bruno Richard Hauptmann. |
Several other witnesses claimed that they had seen Hauptmann
in the vicinity of Hopewell shortly before the baby’s disappear-
ance. Charles B. Rossiter, a traveling salesman, had observed him
on Route 31 near the Princeton airport on Saturday, February
28th. Millard Whited, who lived a mile away from the Lindbergh
house, thought he had seen him in the area late in February.
Eighty-seven-year-old Amandus Hochmuth, a former Prussian
soldier, claimed that, on the morning of March Ist, he had no-
14
5
MURDER IN FLIGHT
had been raised to seventy thousand dollars because “we have to
take another person to it and probably have to keep the baby for
a longer time as we expected.” The writer promised to “inform
you later where to deliver the money but we will not do so until
the police is out of this case and the pappers are quiet.” A third
note, which contained much the same information, was sent to
Colonel Henry C. Breckenridge, Lindbergh’s lawyer, in New
York.
Although every prominent person in the metropolitan area
was prepared to act as the intermediary between the kidnapper
and the boy’s family, an obscure Fordham University lecturer,
who had announced in an interview in the Bronx Home News
on March 8th that he would gladly exchange his life savings of
one thousand dollars for the child’s return, was ultimately se-
lected. The day after his interview appeared, seventy-two-year-
old. John F. Condon, who claimed to be a doctor of pedagogy, re-
ceived a letter at his Decatur Avenue home. In it he found a
sealed envelope which he was to “handel . . . personally to Mr.
Lindbergh.” The note addressed to Dr. Condon told him “if you
are willing to act as go-between in Lindbergh case, follow strictly
instructions.” After he received the ransom money from Lind-
bergh, he was to “put them words in the New York American;
money is ready.” If he would “be at home every night between
_ 6-12,” he would receive further instructions from the kidnappers.
The sealed letter contained directions for the packaging of
the money. It also warned the Lindberghs to stay away from
the police or “there will be a further delay.”” As soon as the money
was paid over, “we will tell you where-to find your boy... It is
about 150 miles away, but before telling you the adr. a delay of
8 hours will be between.” It was signed with the now thoroughly
familiar perforated red circles.
After consulting Colonel Lindbergh, Dr. Condon placed an
ad in the March 10th American which read, “I accept. Money
is ready. Jafsie.”. The name, “Jafsie,” was coined from the go-
between’s initials, J.F.C. The next night, he received a telephone
call from a man who refused to identify himself. He was told
to remain home on March 12th when another message would be
sent to him. A few minutes after 7:30 on the twelfth, a cab-
driver, named John J. Perrone, delivered a letter which instructed
140
FIRST DEGREE
Condon to “drive to the last subway station from Jerome Avenue
Line.” There he would see an “empty frankfurter stand sorts
big open porch around. You will find a notice in senter 4 the
porch underneath the stone. This notice will tell you where to
ee started out fifteen minutes later. When he reached
the closed frankfurter stand, he found. a note sticking out from
under a stone in front of it. In it, he was directed to go to the
Woodlawn Cemetary gate near 233rd Street and Jerome Avenue.
As he walked toward the gate, he noticed a man standing inside
the cemetery. This man identified himself as “John” and asked,
“Did you get it, the money?” Condon answered that he had not,
and. that the Lindberghs would not make any payment until
they were sure that “John” was the right man. The eee men
talked for more than an hour and, before they parted, “John
promised to send proof that he was the kidnapper. Condon told
Lindbergh that he was certain that the man had spoken with a
“foreign accent.”
on ee later, Condon received a package which contained
the baby’s sleeping suit and two letters. One of the letters com-
plained about the fact that no money had exchanged hands in
the cemetery and suggested that, if the Liisi Sie were now
prepared to pay the ransom, an ad saying, I accept. Siete!
is ready’’ was to be inserted in the American. The noted ende
with a warning: “If there is any trap you will be responsible
for what will follow.”
On March 20th, Condon received another letter telling him
that “we will not communicate with you or Mr. Lindbergh
until you will... write in the paper.” Two days later, he told
the kidnapper in the pages of the American, “I accept. Money
is ready. You know they won’t let me deliver without getting
the package. Let’s make it some sort of C.O.D. transaction. Come.
You know you can trust Jafsie.” Finally, on April 2nd, Condon
was told in another letter from “John,” to have the money ready
that evening. As for his acceptance, “‘If it is too late to put it in
the New York American for Saturday morning, put it in the
New York Journal.” That afternoon, an ad appeared in the Jour-
nal which read, “I accept. Money is ready. Jafsie.” |
Toward evening, a messenger delivered another note. Condon
141
MURDER IN FLIGHT
was ordered to go to Bergen Greenhouses, a nursery located at
3225 East Tremont Avenue. Under a table near the front door
“you will find a letter . . . covered with a stone. Read and follow
instructions.”” Lindbergh and Condon, with a box containing
fifty thousand dollars, drove to the nursery. Condon found the
note where his correspondent had said it would be. It directed
him to “‘cross the street and walk to the next corner and follow
Whittemore Avenue to the south. Take the money with you.
Come alone and walk. I will meet you.”
After showing the note to Lindbergh, Condon crossed East
Tremont Avenue and then walked east until he came to Whitte-
more Avenue. He had just turned down Whittemore when he
heard a gutteral voice say, “Hey, Doctor, over here!” He walked
in the direction of the voice, taking a little path that led from
Whittemore into nearby St. Raymond’s Cemetery. When he came
to the hedge some ten feet past the entrance to the cemetery, he
heard the voice say, “Here, Doctor.” In the darkness, he could
see that it was the same man he had met at Woodlawn, the man
he knew only as “John.”
When “John” asked, “Have you got it, the money?,” Condon
told him it was in the car with Lindbergh but that, because of
the depression, the colonel had been able to raise only fifty
thousand. With the philosophic observation that “if we can’t get
seventy, we take fifty,” “John” agreed to accept this amount, and
told Condon that he would be back in ten minutes with written
directions as to the child’s whereabouts. Condon returned to the
car to pick up the money. When he came back to the hedge,
“John” was there and the intermediary handed him the box in
exchange for an envelope.
Lindbergh was so nervous that he was unable to open the en-
-velope when Condon turned it over to him. He started the car
and drove for a mile or so until they reached Westchester Square.
There he parked and the two men eagerly read the note. It was
short and to the point. “The boy is on the boad Nelly. It is
a small boad 28 feet long. Two persons are on the boad. They
are innocent. You will find the boad between Horseneck Beach
and Gay Head near Elizabeth Island.”
This was the end of the trail. Although Lindbergh flew two
flights over the Buzzards Bay area mentioned in the note, no
142
FIRST DEGREE.
boat named Nelly was ever found. Condon inserted several fran-
tic ads in the newspaper, begging for more explicit directions.
“What is wrong? Have you crossed me? Please better directions.
Jafsie.” But no more letters bearing interlocking circles were ever
received by him. On May 12th, William Allen, a truck driver,
discovered the half-buried body of a child in a thicket near Hope-
well’s Mount Rose Road, from which the Lindbergh home could
be seen “straight ahead.” The search for Charles A. Lindbergh,
Jr., was over.
More than two years were to pass without any appreciable
progress in the case. There was a little flurry of excitement when
Violet Sharpe, one of the Morrow maids, poisoned herself a
month after the baby’s body was found, but her death was due
to an indiscreet love affair rather than any involvement in the
kidnapping. Except for an occasional false alarm, the police had
little to report and each passing day made it seem more unlikely
that the crime would ever be solved. But, despite its apparent
moribundity, the case was far from a dead issue in certain quar-
ters. In the Spring of 1932, the three-piece ladder had been turned
over to Arthur Koehler, a wood technologist for the Department
of Agriculture, who spent the next eighteen months trying to
trace the lumber used in its construction. He eventually tracked
it down to a South Carolina mill which had sold two thousand
board feet to the National Lumber and Millwork Company, a
Bronx lumber yard, in November of 1931. But National had
thousands of customers and it was impossible to tell who had
purchased any of this particular wood from it.
But if Koehler wasn’t successful in finding the man who had
constructed the ladder, he did give credence to a favorite theory
of Lieutenant James J. Finn of the New York Police Department.
Since all of Condon’s contacts with “John” had been in the
Bronx, Finn was firmly convinced that the kidnapper was a resi-
dent of that borough. He was also certain that whoever had ab-
ducted the Lindbergh baby owned an automobile and that,
sooner or later, he would purchase gas and oil with one of the
ransom bills. Since their serial numbers had been registered, it
would not be a difficult matter to: keep track of the gold certi-
ficates if they were passed in the New York area.
Finally, on September 15, 1934, the two years of patient police
143
SE Fe oe on eae CONE. kn ae es
Mate Te a ane <> ie
MURDER IN FLIGHT
ticed Hauptmann driving on the road that led to the Lindbergh
place.
Walter Lyle, who had serviced Hauptmann’s car on September
15th, recognized the defendant as the motorist who had bought
five gallons of gasoline at his station that day. He had paid for
the gas with a ten-dollar gold certificate. When Lyle remarked,
“You don’t see many more of these,” Hauptmann replied, ‘‘No,
I have only about a hundred left.” As Hauptmann was driving
_ off, Lyle wrote his license number on the back of the bill. Cecile
M. Barr, a cashier at Loew’s Sheridan Square Theatre, remem-
bered Hauptmann as the man who bought a ticket from her on
November 26, 1933 and paid for it with a peculiarly folded five-
dollar bill, which later proved to be one of the ransom notes. John
S. Perrone, the cabdriver who had delivered one of the kidnap-
per’s notes to Dr. Condon’s home, was sure that Hauptmann was
the man who had given it to him.
Then Wilentz turned to Albert S. Osborn, who had examined
all the ransom notes in May of 1932. He had also been furnished
with samples of the defendant’s handwriting. The attorney gen-
eral came right to the point.
Q. Have you made a careful comparison and examination of
the so-called ransom notes with the conceded writings and
the request writings of Bruno Richard Hauptmann?
I have.
A
Q. Based on your examination and comparison, what is the
opinion you have reached?
A. My opinion is that the ransom notes were all written by
the writer of the various papers signed “Richard Haupt-
mann.”
Q. Have you examined these various ransom letters for the
special purpose of determining whether or not they were
all written by the same writer?
A. I have.
Q. What is your opinion regarding that matter?
A. My opinion is that all the ransom letters were written by
the same writer.
' Osborn’s son, who had followed in his father’s holographic
pursuits, agreed that “Bruno Richard Hautpmann wrote all the
ransom notes.”
146
epee i,
FIRST DEGREE
Next it was Arthur Koehler’s turn. The wood expert was shown
a rail from the top section of the ladder and a joist taken from
Hauptmann’s attic. He stated. that he had found that four nail
holes in the rail ‘corresponded exactly with four nail holes in
the joists in that attic and the grain of the wood in that rail cor-
responded exactly with the grain of wood of the board next
to it.’
Q.... I ask you what, if any, is the relationship between that
rail and the exhibit just referred to? :
A. Asa result of a careful study of the two, I have come to
the conclusion that those two pieces at one time were one
piece. They have been cut in two.
According to Koehler, some of the other lumber in the hiidee
had come from a South Carolina mill which had sold several
thousand feet of it to the National Lumber & Millwork Company
in the Bronx. Earlier, David Hirsch, one of National's employees,
had testified that Hauptmann had purchased $9.32 worth of
lumber in December of 1931.
Before Wilentz turned the lead over to the defense, he called
on William E. Frank, an agent of the Intelligence Unit of the
Treasury Department. Frank had made a thorough investigation
of the Hauptmanns’ financial status before and after April 2,
1932. The results were quite interesting. On the day the ransom
money was paid to “John” in St. Raymond’s Cemetery, Bruno
and Anna Hauptmann had only $203.90 on deposit with the
Central Savings Bank, and fifty shares of Warner Brothers Pic-
tures stock with a market value of one hundred dollars. On Sep-
tember 19, 1934, the day he was arrested, Hauptmann had assets
of more than forty thousand dollars. Since he had spent about
fifteen thousand dollars in the two-year period and earned only
$1,167.81, there were some fifty thousand dollars unaccounted for.
On January 24th, the seventeenth day of the trial, the state
rested. Reilly called the defendant as his first -witness and ~
Wilentz agreed that, while he was testifying, he would be guarded
by the sheriff's plainclothes deputies and not by the uniformed
state police. On March 1, 1932, Hauptmann said that he had
reported to the Majestic Hotel for work as a carpenter. The fore-
man told him to come back on the fifteenth “because he said he
147
FIRST DEGREE
better part of discretion to take in the union baseball game at
Vineland, N. J., over the weekend. Thirty-six hours later, Rosen
was shot to death.
Louis Stamler, a tailor who lived at 720 Sutter Avenue, directly
across from Rosen’s candy store, would never forget that Sunday
morning. Shortly after 6:30 a.m., he had awakened his son and
sent him off to his job as a grocery clerk. Fifteen minutes later,
he heard some shots coming from the direction of Rosen’s shop.
He looked out the window and saw a dark car driving down
Sutter Avenue and turning into Wyona Street. He noted that its
license number was L-16-67. Then he rushed across the street and
looked into the candy store. Joseph Rosen was sprawled on his
back, his arms and legs outstretched, with his head toward the
rear of the store. He was bleeding from a great many wounds, and
his eyes were wide open and staring up at the ceiling of what
had suddenly become the most important candy store in
Brooklyn.
- Stamler was soon joined by Harry Regenbogen, the owner of
the grocery store in Rosen’s building, who had also heard the
shooting. Stemler noticed Patrolman Guglielmo Cappadora, the
of'-er on the beat, coming down Sutter Avenue and shouted,
“Potice! Murder!” Cappadora turned in the alarm and, before
long, the little candy store had become the center of attraction
for Captain John J. Gowan’s Homicide Squad. After Harold
Rosen had identified his father’s body, it was taken to the Kings
County Morgue, where an autopsy revealed seventeen bullet in
the ex-trucker’s head and chest.
At 10:40 that morning, a two-door black Chevrolet, bearing
license No. L-16-67,.was found abandoned on Van Sinderen Ave-
nue, about twenty-five feet north of Livonia Avenue. The owner
of a newsstand at the BMT-IRT station in the vicinity remem-
bered that four men had parked the car there earlier that morn-
ing. He didn’t see anything unusual in this and had not noticed
what the men looked like. The police later verified that the car
belonged to one Max Kaufman and had been stolen from in
front of 621 Lefferts Avenue some time between Friday night and
Saturday morning. The license plates had been lifted from a
Ford that had been garaged at 384 East 96th Street, Brooklyn, by
Abraham Wax, its owner, just after Labor Day. At eleven a.m. a
164
SY iri
FIRST DEGREE
pedestrian found a gun in the grass near Ralph Avenue, one
hundred feet north of Church Avenue. Four of the bullets in
Joseph Rosen’s body had been fired from this gun. ;
From the moment Rosen’s body was found, it was hardly a
secret that Lepke was the prime suspect. By October, assistant
district attorneys were spreading the word around Brooklyn that,
they were about “to make one of the best pinches . . . ever made,”
and that they were “going to collar Buchalter and Gurrah for
the Rosen murder.” A few days after the shooting, a newspaper
article did eyerything but name Rubin as one of the killers, and
Lepke ordered him to leave town until things quieted down. He
was sent to Glens Falls but returned to New York, a week later,
to see his family.
After a conference with Lepke in a Manhattan hotel, Rubin
began an odyssey that was to last more than three months. Reas-
sured by Lepke’s maxim that, “if witnesses are not available, in-
vestigations collapse,” the business agent left for Salt Lake City
on October 30th. After a lonely month at the Carlton Hotel, he
returned to New York and told Lepke that he couldn't stay away
any longer. He was persuaded to leave town again, this time going
to New Orleans. A week later, he was back in New York but,
- when Buchalter reminded him that he had lived to “a ripe age,”
- he took the hint and went to Pi elpis where he was to con-
Re pe
tact one Zenreith.
Zenreith and Rubin left Philadelphia by car on what turned
out to be a seven-week barnstorming trip. Every week, a money
order for fifty dollars would be picked up at a post office in a
different town. But the constant moving began to get on Rubin’s
nerves and, when he ran into Lepke in Washington, he begged
to be allowed to return to New York. “Lep, I got to be around
somewheres where I can be near my wife and kid,” he told the
racketeer. Lepke finally gave in and Rubin took a room at a
Brooklyn hotel under an assumed name and then rented an apart-
ment where, disguised by a mustache and glasses, he stayed until
August of 1937.
Toward the erid of that month, accompanied by a union law-
yer, he visited Dewey's office in Manhattan where he revealed
what he knew about the Rosen murder. Early in the evening of
October Ist, four days after he had testified before the New York
165
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MURDER FOR SILENCE
Rubin promised to make the necessary arrangements, but no ap-
pointment was ever made.
_ She remembered the night in July when her husband had come
home with two hundred dollars in his hand. At that time, the
family bank balance stood at $1.20. The next day, she said, he
left town without telling her where he was going. Then he tele-
phoned her from Reading, Pennsylvania, and told her that he was
coming home. The following morning, he was back at 725 Sutter
Avenue. He was never to leave Brooklyn again.
The Saturday night before Rosen was ee Mrs. Rosen had
been in the store with him. She recalled that her husband had
gone home “about 11 or 11:30,” and that she had closed up. At
ten o'clock a man she had never seen before, “walked into the
store in his shirt sleeves and walked to the back of the store. I
followed him and he bought a cigarette for a penny, a single -
cigarette, and he just looked around the place.” Some time later
that evening, he came in again and bought another penny
cigarette.
Q. Coming back to the man who was in the candy store that
Saturday night, who was that man?
The man sitting there.
Point him out.
With the glasses, right in the front row.
Indicating the defendant Emanuel Weiss, alias Mendy.
He was not so heavy at the time.
Barshay tried to shake her identification by showing that she had
been brought into the courtroom by police officers to look at
Weiss while the jury was being selected. But Mrs. Rosen was not
one to change her mind and insisted that Mendy Weiss had been
the man who had been in the candy store on the last Saturday
night Joe Rosen was ever to know.
After the prosecution had shown, through the testimony of Dr.
M. Edward Marten, that Rosen had been shot seventeen times
and that death was due to bullets in the brain and lung, it
called the first of the lesser lights who had lent their talents to
PO P.O >
the eradication of the too garrulous candy store operator. Thirty-
year-old Sholem (Sol) Bernstein had had a small but vital role
in the murder. At one p.m. on Friday, September 11th, he watched -
a Brooklyn conference between Capone, Weiss, Harry Strauss and
168
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FIRST DEGREE
Farvel Cohen. Bernstein had been sitting in his automobile at
Sackman Street and Livonia Avenue, chatting with Strauss, when
the other three men approached. They asked Strauss to walk away
from the car with them and Bernstein watched them talking for.
almost an hour. When Strauss returned to the car, he ordered
the witness to “steal a car and get a drop.” At this point, Turkus
noticed that the jury was having some difficulty with Bernstein’s
vernacular—and decided that a little clarification was called for.
Q. The jury doesn’t know what a drop is. What is a drop?
A. A garage for stolen cars.
The two men made an-appointment to meet the following after-
noon at the same place.
After renting a garage at Lincoln Place and Ralph Avenue,
Bernstein contacted Mugesy Cohen, a professional car and radio
thief, and arranged for the theft of the two-door black Chevrolet.
The next afternoon, he met Strauss and Capone at Livonia and
Sackman. Capone said, “Come on, I will show you the job you
have to do.” When the three men drove past Rosen’s store,
Capone informed Bernstein that “here is where somebody is going
to be killed.” Then, they went over the escape route which was
designed to end up at Van Sinderen and Livonia Avenues where
the car was to be abandoned after the killing.
The rehearsal over, Strauss and Capone told Bernstein to steal
some license plates for the car and come back at 10:30 p.m. Not
one to disregard instructions of this sort, he promptly broke into
a garage on East 96th Street and stole a set of plates and disposed
of the ones that had been on the Chevy. When he returned to
Sackman and Livonia that evening, Weiss took one look at the
car and shouted, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did
you get a two-door car for? You know for a job like this you need -
a four-door car!” Strauss put a package of pistols in the glove
compartment and ordered the now thoroughly abashed Bernstein
to put the car in the drop for the night, as it had been decided
that it would be safer to kill Rosen on Sunday morning, when he
opened his store, than on Saturday night when Sutter Avenue, be-
cause of a nearby soda fountain, was heavily populated. Joe -
Rosen never knew it but he had been granted a twelve-hour
reprieve.
Bernstein spent the night at Farvel Cohen’s place on Eastern
169
MURDER FOR SILENCE
Parkway. Early the next morning, he was awakened by Weiss
who told him to get the car. He then drove Weiss, Ferraco and
Strauss to Bradford Street, between Blake and Sutter Avenues,
where he parked the Chevrolet. While the others waited in a
little park at the corner of Blake and Bradford, Weiss stationed
himself in the hallway of a nearby apartment building from
which he could see the entrance to Rosen’s house on Wyona |
Street. A few minutes after 6:30, he returned to the park and
announced that “that rat just came out of the house and I think
he is going to open up the store.” Bernstein was told to “go over,
get the car and stop it in front of Rosen’s store and make sure
the motor is running.” ; |
As he drove slowly down Sutter Avenue, Bernstein watched
the three gunmen walking toward the candy store. While he
waited with his motor idling outside the candy store, Strauss and
Weiss walked into Rosen’s, leaving Ferraco outside on the side-
walk as a lookout.
Q. Then what happened? ~
A. Lheard a lot of shots and Mendy Weiss and Harry Strauss
came running out of the store.
Q. After they climbed in... what happened?
A. Istarted on the route Lou Capone had showed me.
When he reached Van Sinderen and Livonia Avenues, he stop-
ped the car, removed the key, and the four men got out and
walked over the railroad bridge into Junius Street. There, they
met Capone and Farvel Cohen, who were waiting in two cars—
Bernstein’s and Cohen’s. Capone, Weiss and Strauss drove off in
Cohen’s car, after instructing Bernstein to drop Ferraco off at his
home and get rid of Weiss’s gun. He threw the gun out of the
car window just before he reached Church Avenue.
Bernstein had left New York after O’Dwyer’s election in No-
vember of 1939. He had gone to Miami Beach, then to Los An-
geles, and, before returning to Brooklyn, had spent time in San
Francisco, Dallas, St. Louis and Chicago. After surrendering to
O'Dwyer, he became almost as ubiquitous a witness as Louis
Budenz. He was used in the Sullivan County murder trial of a
hood by the name of Gangy Cohen, as well as in the Lepke prose-
cution. Alfred J. Talley, one of Weiss’s lawyers, used his testi-
mony in the Cohen trial to discredit a less than savory witness,
170
Suara ACNE teed _
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FIRST DEGREE
who had even resorted to a little blackmail while being held
supposedly incommunicado by the police in a Coney Island
hotel. :
You don’t deny taking part in the Rosen murder, do you?
No, sir.
But you haven't been indicted for the Rosen murder, have
you?
No, sir. ; .
Did you testify at the trial of Gangy Cohen .. -
Yes, sir.
Did you tell the truth there?
All the truth, no, because I did not want to give the mob
any information . . . they were not picked up yet.
After taking an oath to tell the truth, you testified falsely
in that case, didn’t you?
About some matters because I did not want to give infor-
mation.
With the pious observation that “I knew I was doing wrong,”
the man who personified Judge Taylor’s observation that, ‘when
rogues fall out, it is a wise man’s delight,” slipped out of the
witness chair and back to the luxurious protective custody that
O’Dwyer had so obligingly arranged for him at the Half Moon
Hotel.
Max Rubin followed Bernstein in the witness chair and told
> 0 POPO> OPO
the now familiar story of his attempts to placate Lepke and save
Rosen’s life. Time and time again, he said, he warned Lepke that
Rosen was desperate and urged the racketeer to do something
about him. It was his suggestion that Rosen be given some money
and sent out of town. He visited Rosen in the candy store in July
and said, ‘Here is $200.00 from Lepke. He wants you to go away
and you are to stay away until he tells you to come back.” Every-
thing would have been fine if Rosen had stayed in Pennsylvania
with his son until things cooled down.
But this was not to be. Less than a week after the witness had
turned over Lepke’s “two bills to him,” Rosen was back in town.
On Friday, September 11th, Lepke finally blew up. As Albert
Tannenbaum, one of his flunkies, recalled it, Lepke told Rubin,
“This is one son of a bitch who will never go down to talk to
Dewey about me.” Rubin tried to soothe the ruffled gangster.
171
MURDER FOR SILENCE
County Grand Jury, he was shot through the head as he was
walking toward his Bronx home. This experience had a sobering
effect upon him and when, he was again questioned by Dewey’s
investigators on December 17th, he now said that he had never
told Rosen to leave town or given him money—in short, he knew
nothing whatsoever about the Rosen killing.
In June of 1937, Lepke had told Paul Berger, an employee of
the Cutter’s Union, that “things were getting too hot, he will
have to lam.” A week or so later, he left town and was not to
return until his trial for Rosen’s murder almost four years later.
In the interim, he was indicted and convicted of extortion by a
federal court and sentenced to thirty years in Leavenworth
Penitentiary. ee
On May 28, 1940, the Grand Jury of Kings County returned
Indictment No. 23855, which accused Louis (Lepke) Buchalter,
Emanuel (Mendy) Weiss, Louis Capone, Harry (Pittsburgh
Phil) Strauss, James Ferraco and Philip (Little Farvel) Cohen of
the murder of Joe Rosen. The indictment’s formalistic language
was ultra-concise: “The defendants, on or about September 13,
1936, in the County of Kings, wilfully, feloniously and with
malice aforethought shot and killed Joseph Rosen with revolv-
ers.” For some reasons, which the New York Times stated were
“never fully explained,” Cohen’s name was removed from the
indictment. Nine years later, he was shot to death in New York
after being released from the federal penitentiary at Atlanta
where he had served seven years of a ten-year sentence for vio-
lating the narcotics laws. Since Strauss had already been electro-
cuted for another murder, and Ferraco couldn’t be found, only
, Buchalter, Weiss and Capone were tried for Rosen’s murder.
When the Grand Jury returned the indictment, O'Dwyer
gloated to the press, “At last I've got Lepke and Capone on their
way to the electric chair.” Fully conscious that his own career
might begin where Lepke’s ended, he named Burton B. Turkus
and Solomon A. Klein, who already sported the scalps of Pitts-
burgh Phil Strauss, Buggsy Goldstein, Happy Malone and Dasher
Abbandando, as the assistant district attorneys in charge of the
Lepke prosecution.
Lepke, after trying unsuccessfully to retain Sam Leibowitz at
a reputed fee of $250,000.00, countered with Jesse Climenko,
166 —
“3 fe ane as
FIRST DEGREE
Bertram Wegman and Hyman Barshay. After monumental—and
fruitless—efforts by the nine lawyers representing the three de-
fendants to change its venue to another county, the trial began,
on August 4, 1941, in the Kings County Court before Judge
Franklin Taylor and a blue ribbon jury. Capone had been ar-
rested in New York and had pleaded not guilty to the indictment
on the day it was handed down by the grand jury. Weiss, who
had left the city in May of 1940, was picked up on April. 6,
1941 by federal narcotic agents in Kansas City where, under the
name of James W. Bell, he was posing as the vice-president of the
Chihuahua Tungsten Mines. He told the Treasury agents that
he didn’t mind going back to New York but that he hated “to
sit between O'Dwyer and Dewey.” He had intended, he informed
them, “to surrender himself at a later date when O’Dwyer would |
be out of office.” On April 11th, he mumbled, “Not guilty” when
he was arraigned in Brooklyn. A little more than a month later,
federal marshals returned Lepke to New York, and, although
~~ he refused to plead to the indictment, a not guilty plea was auto-
matically entered in his behalf.
At the time of the trial, Lepke was forty-four years old and
gave his address as 427 West Street. A public school graduate,
he listed himself as “retired” and described his habits as “tem-
perate.” Weiss who claimed that he lived at the same address as
Lepke, was thirty-five and had previously been convicted of two
misdemeanors and a felony. Capone, who was the same age as
Lepke, lived at 2780 Stilwell Avenue. A native of Naples, he, too,
eschewed drugs and liquor. All three men were married.
When Rosen was killed, he and his wife Estelle had been mar-
ried for almost twenty-five years. When she took the stand, almost
four years after his death, she still remembered the hardship of
the bitter days that followed the destruction of the New York
& New Jersey Transportation Company after the delivery stop-
page ordered by Lepke in early 1932. Mrs. Rosen, who was not
a woman to let her husband fight his battles alone, had gone
down to the garment center to see Louis Cooper after Rosen had
been fired. She asked him, “after all these years my husband
worked for you and he was an honest and a good fellow, why
did you discharge him?” He advised her to “go over and see
Lepke,” and she asked Max Rubin to take her to see the racketeer.
167
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MURDER AT A PREMIUM
A. He said, “if you don’t let me go through with it tonight,
I am going to get the pair of us... it’s either him or us.”
She persuaded him to go downstairs to the living room where
she pleaded with him to leave the house.
Q. Did you and he have any further talk downstairs?
A. I tried to plead with him... to change his mind. Then I
went upstairs to the bathroom. I had been there five or
ten minutes when I heard this terrific thud. I immediately
opened the bathroom door and ran down the hall and I
saw Mr. Gray leaning over my husband.
What did you do?
I ran in and I grabbed Mr. Gray by the neck .. . he pushed
me. to the floor and I fainted and remembered nothing
until I came to.and saw my husband all piled up with
blankets and blood all over the place.
Q. What took place then?
A. Gray said, “I have gone through with it and you are just
as much to blame as I am.” Then he said, “We can frame
up a burglary and we will both get out of it.”
Then she described Judd’s attempts to disarrange the living
room so that the police would believe that a burglary had
occurred.
Ruth did not fare too well when Gray’s attorney began to
question her. No, she hadn’t warned her husband that Judd was
coming to the house that night to kill him. Neither had she
gone to the police. When she was asked why, if she didn’t want
her husband murdered, she hadn't told Gray to stay away from
the house that night, she sighed, “because I made up my mind
that I was going to see him and break it off right then and
there.” She had cooperated with Gray because “I didn’t know
what it was all about. I was too confused myself. I didn’t know
what he was doing.”
When Gray, whom Judge Scudder later described as having
“the appearance of a divinity student,” settled himself in the
witness chair, he lost no time in reaffirming that it was Mrs.
Snyder who had planned the murder and even set the date. It
was she who had tiptoed into Mrs. Brown’s room on the night
of March 19th and beckoned him to follow her.
Q. What happened then?
ao)
134
FIRST DEGREE
A. She took me by the hand and we went into the hall; the
door of her husband’s room was closed. She opened the
door and I followed. her. I don’t know how long I stood
there trying to get my bearings and I struck him on the
head, just one blow.
And then?
He got me by the necktie and [ hollered, “Momsie, Mom-
sie, for God’s sake, help me!” I had dropped the weight
and she picked it up and hit him on the head ... the next
thing I remember was being upright on the floor again.
What did you do. then?
I went through the dining room and then the living room
and I know I did a lot of senseless things such as throw-
ing cushions around because I was intoxicated.
And then?
She asked me if I would hit her on the head to make it
look as if she had been struck, too... I couldn't doit...
then she asked me to tie her up and I tied her hands and
feet.
It was Mrs. Snyder’s “magnetism” that led him on, an attrac-
tion so strong that he was completely oblivious of his wife and
daughter back in East Orange. When her attorney sarcastically
asked, “Were you so dominated that you forgot your own flesh -
and blood?”, Judd’s answer became him. “I am ashamed to say,
I did, yes.” As for his alibi, he had prepared one “just to cover
myself in Syracuse due to my absence” and not in connection
with Snyder’s murder.
But it was clear that nothing could save Judd and Ruth.
Their efforts to impeach their confessions by claiming that they
had been kept without sleep for more than two days fell on
obviously unreceptive ears. Even putting Lorraine on the stand
had no appreciable effect on the all-male jury. On May 9th, the
trial’s twenty-second day, the jury took only an hour and forty.
minutes to find both defendants guilty of murder in the first
degree. Four days later, Scudder sentenced them to die in the
electric chair, judgments that were unanimously affirmed by New
York’s highest court on November 22, 1927.
Their executions were originally scheduled for December 13,
1927, but Governor Alfred E. Smith granted a thirty-day reprieve
135
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MURDER AT A PREMIUM
fice manager of the Waldorf-Astoria, sheepishly testified that his
hotel had been used as a lovenest by the homicidal couple for
many months and that everybody, from the chambermaid to the
cashier, thought that they were a singularly happy married pair.
Harriet Mulhauser, who lived next door to the Snyders, had
called the police after Lorraine came running over on the morn-
ing after the murder. Mrs. Mulhauser and her husband were the
first adults to see Mrs. Snyder on March 20th.
Q. Did you see an indication of a blow or bruise on Mrs.
Snyder’s head?
A. None at all. I looked all through her hair.
Q. You said there was a rope around her ankles?
A. © ¥eés.
Q. Did you notice whether that was tight or loose?
A. Very loose.
Q. Did you see any rope on her wrists or hands at all?
A. No.
Gray’s strategy to show that Ruth had engineered the murder
suffered a sharp setback when a traveling salesman acquain-
tance of his from Syracuse swore that Judd had prepared an
elaborate alibi for the evening of the murder.
Did Gray say anything about leaving Syracuse?
Yes, sir.
Tell us what that was please?
Judd told me that he expected he would go to Albany
that afternoon to keep a dinner engagement, and he
wanted to know if I would help him out.
What did he say he wanted you to do?
He asked me to hang a sign on the door which said, “Do
Not Disturb.” He asked me to rumple his bed and to
mail some letters which he would leave on the bed for me.
Judd’s obliging friend, suspecting that an affair of the heart
was in progress, lived up to his promise and entered the hotel
room after 5:30 that afternoon, placed a telephone call, and
then mailed the letters he found on Gray’s bed. When Judd
returned from New York the next morning, he explained that
his tryst had been interrupted when the girl’s husband returned
home unexpectedly, and that he had been forced to hide in a
POP ©
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132
FIRST DEGREE
closet from which he was horrified to see two Italian burglars
break in and kill the other man.
Newcombe’s case was complete when he called an insurance
agent to disclose Mrs. Snyder’s fervent belief in the proposition
that a wife’s best friends are her husband’s policies. Trusting
Albert signed the blank applications his wife slipped under his
pen without being concerned with the amounts of the policies.
After all, he wasn’t paying the premiums—his budget-minded
wife was going to take care of them out of her household money.
But, just to be sure that her husband continued to be blissfully
unaware that he was being set up as a golden goose, Ruth had
struck a bargain with the postman, under the terms of which
letters from the insurance company were to be delivered only
to her. Even Albert might have wondered why his wife was cut-
ting their food rations to give his accidental death a six-figure
value.
When Ruth took the stand, she described her husband as an
edgy, withdrawn man who had become very bitter when their
only child turned out to be a girl. But, with the exception of
her affair with Judd, she had remained faithful to Snyder, despite
the fact that her marriage had been deteriorating for many years.
Then, she turned to Gray and his part in the murder.
Q. Did Judd Gray ever say anything about getting rid of
your husband? |
Yes.
When was the first time?
Early this year.
What did he say to you?
He sent me poison and told me to give it to my husband
... he said that would be an easy way of getting rid of
him.
When she found her lover in Mrs. Brown’s room on March
19th, she still had no idea that he intended to kill her husband.
Q. What did he say to you and what did you say to him
when you found him in your mother’s room? :
A. When I walked over to him, he kissed me and I im-
mediately felt the rubber gloves that he had on his hands
and I said, “Judd, what are you going to do?”
Q. What did he say to you?
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PO PO Pp
MURDER - AT A PREMIUM
when it was claimed by their attorneys that they could prove that
the couple were insane when they committed the crime. Un-
fortunately, they couldn’t find a physchiatrist to agree with
them even though it was rumored that Mrs. Snyder was busy
making plans for her resurrection with adrenalin after her execu-
tion, a happy scheme that was forestalled by the post-mortem
required by state law.
But the most bizarre aspect of the Snyder-Judd case was still
to come. When Smith refused to grant any more stays, the couple’s
executions were scheduled for January 12, 1928, in Sing Sing
Prison. One of the official observers, a photographer for the
Daily News, had entered the death house with a miniature
camera strapped to his leg. Just as the executioner threw the
switch which sent two thousand volts through the body of Mrs.
Snyder, the reporter lifted his pants leg and snapped a picture.
The front page of the next morning’s Daily News contained a
horrifying photograph of the dead woman’s body straining
‘against the straps which bound her to the electric chair. This
incident led to the practice of searching all witnesses to New York
executions, and it is extremely doubtful that another such photo-
graph will ever grace a newspaper page. Everything in Ruth
Snyder’s troubled life seemed to go awry—her marriage, her
dreams of wealth and her hopes for romantic bliss—and even her
death was denied the comparative privacy which the State of
New York tries to furnish those whose lives it takes.
136
11
Murder in Flight
The State of New Jersey
versus
Bruno Richard Hauptmann
For some as yet unknown reason, the kidnapping of children
for ransom has been almost an American monopoly. So much so
that the French press referred to the abduction of four-year-old
Eric Peugeot as a “kidnapping 4 l’'Américaine.” Despite the
frequency of such crimes in this country, however, it was not
until the summer of 1932 that the federal government and most
of the states made kidnapping a capital crime. Unfortunately,
the legislative catalyst was a small boy’s life.
Tuesday, March 1, 1932, was a cold and blustery day. In Hope-
well, New Jersey, Anne Morrow Lindbergh was about to make a
most fateful decision. Because of the weather and the fact that
her twenty-month-old baby, Charles Junior, had a bad cold, she
had nearly made up her mind not to go to her mother’s house
in Englewood as she had previously planned. At noon, she tele-
phoned to Betty Gow, the baby’s nurse, who was waiting for her.
at the Morrow home, and asked her to come back to Hopewell.
After unsuccessfully trying to call a sailor with whom she had
a date in Englewood that evening, Miss Gow started out for
Hopewell in one of the Morrow automobiles.
Shortly before 1:30 that afternoon, she arived at the unfinished
manor-style house which the Lindberghs were building in the
isolated foothills of the Sourland Mountains. Two and a half
stories high, the building sprawled over part of a virtually tree-
less plain which had not yet been fully landscaped. The first
floor included the kitchen, living room, library and dining room.
137
MURDER IN FLIGHT
The family’s sleeping quarters were upstairs, with the nursery
in the southeast wing.
Miss Gow gave the baby his supper at six o'clock. Mrs. Lind-
bergh “came in at the end of the meal... {and] stayed in the
nursery until the baby was in his bed.” She watched the nurse
dress him in “a homemade flannel shirt,” over which she put a
woolen sleeping suit. By 7:30, the infant was in his crib and the
two women “closed all the shutters tight except the one at...
the southeast window; this one we couldn’t quite close; it had
evidently warped so we closed it as best we could and left it
that way.” After Mrs. Lindbergh left the nursery, Miss Gow
turned out the light and went downstairs where she had supper
with Elsie Whateley, who, with her husband, Oliver, took care
of the domestic chores at Hopewell.
At 8:25, Colonel Lindbergh came home from a business ap-
pointment in New York. A few minutes later, he joined his wife
in the dining room where Oliver Whateley served them their
dinner. While they were eating, Betty Gow’s sailor telephoned
and the nurse spoke to him for “not more than five minutes”
on the extension in the servants’ sitting room. After supper, the
Lindberghs went into the living room where they talked for a
while. At 9:10, they heard a crash which, according to Colonel
Lindbergh, sounded “like the top slats of an orange box falling
off:.a chair.” Although it startled him enough to ask his wife,
“What is that?”, he assumed that the noise had come from the
kitchen and did not investigate it further.
Five minutes later, the couple went upstairs. Mrs. Lindbergh
went right to bed, but the colonel, after taking a bath, decided
to read for a while and, at approximately 9:30, settled down in
the library. A few minutes before ten o’clock, Miss Gow, who had
been helping Elsie Whateley make up her mind as to whether to
Keep a dress she had bought that afternoon, went into the nursery
to take her last look at the baby before retiring. When her eyes
became accustomed to the darkness, she saw that the child was
not in his crib. .
The nurse was not particularly alarmed because the boy’s
-parents frequently took him into their room at night. She went
first to their second-floor bedroom, which was connected to the
nursery by a bathroom, but Mrs. Lindbergh did not have the
138
FIRST DEGREE
baby. She suggested that Betty check with the colonel, who was
still reading in the library. When Lindbergh was told that his
son was neither in the nursery nor with his mother, he ran up
the stairs to the baby’s room. “From the appearance of the room
and... the crib, I realized that something had gone wrong,” he
was later to tell a Hunterdon County jury. While Whateley called
the Hopewell sheriff, Lindbergh, armed with a rifle, searched
frantically outside the house for some trace of the baby but
Charles Junior was nowhere to be found.
Then he went back to the nursery. On the sill underneath
the east window, he saw an envelope which he did not touch.
When Major Charles Schoeffel of the New Jersey State Police
arrived, he opened the envelope and found a note which or-
dered Lindbergh to get fifty thousand dollars and await instruc-
tions. “We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the
police. The child is in gut care.” The letter concluded with the
phrase, “Instruction for the letters are singnature.” At the bottom
of the page were two interlocking red circles with three holes
punched into their perimeters.
The first person to respond to Whateley’s telephone call was
Harry Wolfe, Hopewell’s Chief of Police. He and Lindbergh
walked around the house and found a three-sectioned ladder
lying on the ground some sixty feet away from the nursery wing.
Directly under the baby’s room, the two men saw “the imprints
of the end of the ladder” in the soft earth. In the nursery itself,
muddy footprints led from the crib to the sill of the window
whose warped shutters Miss Gow and Mrs. Lindbergh had been
unable to close scarcely two hours before.
The top rung of the lower section of the ladder was badly
split, which might have accounted for the “crashing” noise Lind-
bergh had heard after dinner. A little more than a foot away
from the indentations made by the ladder, police found a.man’s
footprint facing toward the house. The print was so blurred,
however, that it was impossible to tell what type of shoe the
man had been wearing. Near the ladder, a 3/4-inch chisel was
discovered, but the make was so common that the police were
unable to trace it. :
A second note, addressed to Hopewell, was received by Lind-
bergh several days after the kidnapping. The ransom demand
139
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MURDER IN FLIGHT
‘March 31st, 1936, did not take place until the night of April 8rd.
As the electric current wrote finis to the career of the journey-
man carpenter, three thousand miles away, in a cottage in Kent,
the Lindberghs and their new son, Jon, were looking forward to
their first English Spring. ;
150
12
Murder for Profit
The State of California
versus
Major Raymond Lisenba
California has always been a state noted for the flamboyant.
From its faddists to its flagpole sitters, it has often set the fashion
for the rest of the country in the grotesque and the extraordinary.
Even its murders have been spectacular. Winne Ruth Judd, prob-
ably its best known specialist in the gentle art of homicide, stuf-
fed parts of the bodies of two of her girl friends into trunks and
then shipped them from Phoenix, Arizona, to Los Angeles on the
Golden State Limited in October of 1931. She was tried and con-
victed of their murders by a California court, but she was later
declared insane and lived out her years in an Arizona sanatorium.
But four years later, an almost illiterate barber, who went by
the name of Robert S. James, was to give the state one of its most
fascinating murder cases which, for sheer grisly detail, was a wor-
thy successor to Mrs. Judd’s mayhem in duplicate. James, who
had been given the colorful name of Major Raymond Lisenba by
his sharecropping parents in rural Alabama, learned his ton-
sorial trade at a barber college in Birmingham. By 1932, after
three unsuccessful marriages, he had gravitated to Los Angeles
where he met a girl named Winona Wallace, who soon became
the fourth Mrs. James. She was seriously injured in an automo-
bile accident during a September honeymoon trip to Pike’s Peak,
Colorado. Thanks to the skill of some Colorado Springs physi-
cians, she mended rapidly and was well enough to leave the hos-
pital in early October. During her convalescence, her husband
rented a cabin in nearby Manitou Springs, a Colorado summer
I51
ery
MURDER IN FLIGHT
only hires men on the first and the fifteenth.” He returned on the
fifteenth and worked through April 2nd.
Q. Now on April 2, 1932, after you came home from work in
the neighborhood of six o’clock, did you ever leave your
home that night?
A. No, sir.
Q. You were in your house all the time?
A. All the time.
As far as the night of the kidnapping was concerned, he had
called for his wife at the Dyer Avenue bakery where she worked
as a counter girl and waitress “around seven o'clock.” While he
was waiting for her to finish her chores, he walked her employ-
er’s police dog “to the corner of the Boston Post Road” where
he had a conversation with ‘a gentleman . . . in the gasoline
station.” He brought the dog back to the bakery at 8:30, and he
and his wife arrived home “after nine o’clock.”
Q. Did you stay there? '
A. Took the car in the garage, went right away to bed.
Q. So that on March 1, 1932... were you in Hopewell, New
Jersey?
A. I was not.
Hauptmann denied everything—that he had kidnapped the
baby, that he had received any money from Dr. Condon, that he
had built the ladder, that he had ever been in Hopewell. As for
the ransom money, it had been given to him by a friend, °
Isidor Fisch, whom he had met “the early part of March or the
early part of April, 1932.” On December 2, 1933, the Haupt-
manns gave a farewell party for Fisch who was sailing for Ger-
many four days later. It was at this party that Fisch gave the
defendant a shoe box with the request that he “keep care of it
and put it in a tight place.” The. box was put in a broom closet
and was forgotten until one day in August, when it was accident-
ally struck by a broom. It was only then that Hauptmann real-
ized that it contained a great deal of money. Since he knew that
Fisch had died in a Leipzig hospital earlier that year, he saw no
reason why he shouldn’t spend the windfall, particularly since
the dead man, who had been his partner in a fur business, owed
him a large sum of money.
After Wilentz had established, on cross-examination, that
148
“Ge
hate,
FIRST DEGREE.
Hauptmann had a sizeable criminal record in Germany and had
entered the United States illegally three times, the attorney gen-
eral showed the witness an account book he had kept on a trip to
California in the summer of 1931. Hauptmann admitted that
“it looks like my handwriting.’’ Then Wilentz asked him “Now,
tell me, how do you spell ‘boat’? “B-o-a-t’” was the answer.
“Then, why did you spell it b-o-a-d?” The witness offered the
suggestions that “this book is probably eight years old” and every-
one “make improvement in your writing.” No, he insisted, there
was no sinister connection between the “‘b-o-a-d” that appeared
in the account book and the ‘‘b-o-a-d Nelly” that was referred to
in the last note received by Dr. Condon from “John” in St. Ray-
mond’s Cemetery.
Several people swore that they had seen Hauptmann in the
Dwyer Avenue bakery on the evening of March Ist, and one man
remembered talking to him about dogs at a. gas station that
night. A handwriting expert testified that Hauptmann had not
written the ransom notes, and a family friend said that he had
played cards with him until midnight on April 2, 1932. The rest
of the defense’s case seemed to consist of innuendoes that per-
haps Betty Gow’s boy friend or Violet Sharpe had been respon-
sible for the baby’s abduction.
On February 13th, Judge Thomas W. Trenchard charged the
jury and it retired at 11:23 a.m. At 10:44 that night, it returned
a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree without a recom-
mendation of mercy. Judge Trenchard sentenced the defendant
to death and he was taken to the New Jersey State Prison at
Trenton to await execution. On October 9th, the Court of Errors
and Appeals refused to disturb the sentence and it looked as if
the Hauptmann story would soon be over.
But a strange sequel was brewing in Trenton. Governor Harold
G. Hoffman suddenly announced on December 5th, after visiting
Hauptmann in his cell, that he did not think that the Lindbergh
case had been solved. He granted the condemned man a thirty-
day reprieve, during which a disbarred attorney by the name of
Paul H. Wendel supposedly confessed that he was the guilty
party. Although Wendel later repudiated any such confession, the
Mercer County Grand Jury decided to investigate the incident,
and Hauptmann’s execution, which had been rescheduled for
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MURDER FOR PROFIT
resort that was practically deserted at that time of year. A few
days later, a Manitou Springs delivery boy found Winona
drowned in the bath tub.
James collected more than fourteen thousand dollars from
several insurance companies which had insured the dead woman's
life. With this money, he bought a barbershop in downtown Los
Angeles. In 1935, he married Mary Emma Busch, one of his mani-
curists, and settled down with her in a bungalow which he had
rented in La Canada, a Los Angeles suburb lying at the foot of
the Sierra Madre mountains. Early on the evening of August 5,
1935, Mary Emma’s body was discovered by James and two friends
whom he had invited for dinner that night. She was lying face
down in a fish pond which was to the right of the house in a
‘clump of trees. The case was marked closed when the coroner
ruled that the woman’s death had been accidental.
Like Winona, Mary Emma had been persuaded by her hus-
band to take out several insurance policies, both of which con-
tained double indemnity provisions. One of the companies re-
fused to pay because of some technical defects in the policy and
James brought suit against it. He lost his case but the thirty-five
hundred dollars he received from the other company which had
insured his wife’s life somewhat assuaged his ruffled feelings. He
used this money as a down payment on a modest house in south-
western Los Angeles where he settled down with Lois Wright, a
niece who had followed him to California from Alabama.
The Los Angeles police were openly suspicious of James, not
only because of the suspicious nature of his fifth wife’s death,
but because it followed the equally mystifying drowning of
Winona James. But there was no evidence that would justify
arresting him for Mary Emma’s murder. Even after renting the
house next to James, detectives, who were recording every word
that was spoken next door, heard nothing that would indicate
that he had killed his wife. But what they did hear was that
James was having sexual relations with his niece (and some non-
relatives as well) , and he was finally arrested on an incest charge
on April 19, 1936. .
The resulting publicity did more than all the microphones that
had been used to bug James’ house. It flushed’ out the owner of
a liquor store who remembered that a man by the name of
152
FIRST DEGREE
Charles H. Hope had been in his store hours before the body
of Mary Emma had been found. Hope had been in an excited
state and had been talking about.a woman who had been bitten
by a rattlesnake and whose body had been put into a pool. At
the time, the liquor store proprietor thought that Hope was in a
drunken stupor but, now that the case had been revived, he
decided to turn his information over to the police.
, Hope was discovered working as a short order cook at a Los
Angeles beach. As soon as he was picked up, he poured out a
story as fantastic as it was welcome to police officers who had
been waiting for more than eight months to pin Mary Emma's
murder on her husband. In June of 1935, Hope said that James
had asked him to get some rattlesnakes because he had ‘“‘a friend
who had a wife that had been annoying him quite a bit and he
was going to kill her.” Hope found some snakes in Long Beach
but they were too tame for James, who ordered him to get some
“fighters.” He finally brought two from “Snake Joe” Houtenbrink
in Pasadena, that seemed to be quite potent. He gave these snakes
to James who successfully tested them on some chickens in his
backyard.
On Sunday morning, August 4, 1935, Hope arrived at the La
Canada bungalow. James had persuaded his pregnant wife to con-
sent to an abortion and had told her that Hope was a doctor
who would perform the operation. Before Hope arrived, he had
strapped the apparently unsuspecting Mary Emma to the kitchen
table and sealed her eyes and mouth with adhesive tape. Mary
Emma was evidently a woman of infinite gullibility. Not only
had she believed that a mock marriage arranged by James was
the real thing (he later married her legally to safeguard his status
as the beneficiary of her life insurance) , but she never questioned
Hope's qualifications as a gynecologist.
James took Hope into the kitchen and ordered him to place a
box containing one of the rattlers next to his wife's foot.and then
open the lid. After the snake had struck, Hope sold both reptiles
back to Snake Joe in Pasadena at half-price. Then he returned
to La Canada where he and James waited in the garage for Mary
‘to die. As the day wore on, it became apparent that it would be
some time before the now unconscious woman succumbed to the
venom. Towards midnight, James, who had been drinking more
153
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MURDER FOR PROFIT
heavily as the evening wore on, could wait no longer and told
Hope that he was “going to drown her” and went into the house.
Just before dawn, he returned and informed Hope, “‘that is that.”
He asked Hope to help him carry the corpse out of the house and
to the fish pond where it was placed with the head and shoulders
in the water. Then, he drove Hope home and disposed of the
adhesive tape and ropes that had been used to prepare Mary
Emma for the supposed abortion.
When James was confronted by Hope, he refused to either
confirm or deny the story. But a week or so later, he admitted
to the police that he had planned to kill his wife for the insur-
ance and divide the money with Hope if the latter would help -
him with the details. He claimed that Hope had dreamed up the
idea of the rattlesnakes, and that the actual killing had occurred
when he, James, was away from the house. “I couldn’t kill her;
she had been too good to me,” he told the police, so he had left
the house when Hope arrived and spent that Sunday at the
barbershop. When he returned the next evening, he was sur-
prised to find that Hope had gone through with it and murdered
Mary Emma under the guise of aborting her.
James was swiftly indicted for his wife’s murder, and his trial
began on June 22, 1936 in the Superior Court of California for
Los Angeles County before Judge Charles W. Fricke and a jury
of eleven men and one woman. After Mr. and Mrs. James Pem-
berton, the two friends of the murdered woman who had been
invited for dinner on the night of August 5, 1935, testified that
the defendant had seemed broken up by the discovery of his
wife’s body, the prosecution called its star witness, Charles H.
Hope. At the time of the trial, Hope had already pleaded guilty
to Mary Emma’s murder and had been sentenced to life imprison-
ment. He repeated much the same story he had told the police
when he was first arrested.
On cross-examination, the defense tried to intimate that the
witness had been carefully coached by the district attorney’s staff.
Q. Now, Mr. Hope, it was suggested to you by the officers,
was it not, that you give as much of a story as you can in
response to my questions? .
A. That is what I was doing, sir. ;
Q. Yes, and you were coached right here in the back room as
154
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| FIRST DEGREE.
to the manner in which you should reply to some of my
questions? ;
A. That is not truel ;
But, in the main, Hope stuck to his story that James had asked
him to buy some rattlesnakes and had promised him one hundred
dollars if he would do so. He insisted that he had helped the de-
fendant to kill his wife but that he had had nothing to do with
planning the murder.
Hope was followed on the stand by the physician who had
performed an autopsy on the dead woman. He attributed the
cause of death to drowning, but also stated that he had found a
puncture on the big toe of Mary Emma's left foot. The foot itself
was blackened and swollen to twice its normal size, a condition
that could have been caused by a rattlesnake bite. A letter in
Mary Emma’s handwriting was found after her death which in-
dicated that “my leg is all swollen—something bit me—I cut my
toe.”
Then the clerk called out the name of Joe Houtenbrink, the
Pasadena snake dealer from whom Hope said he had purchased
the pair of rattlers which had met James's high standards. Houten-
brink brought with him into the courtroom a wooden box, from
which an occasional rattle could be heard by the astonished
spectators in the front row. Defense counsel objected vigorously
to the exhibition of any snakes on the ground that “there would
be no other purpose than just to excite the passions of the jury,”
but Fricke refused to exclude them if Houtenbrink would iden- |
tify them as the very snakes which he had sold to Hope.
Snake Joe said that Hope had purchased the snakes from
him two days before Mary Emma’s death. Hope had told him
that “he had a bet on and he wanted to kill a dog and he said
if it would kill a dog, he would collect quite a bit of money.”
The next day, Hope returned the snakes because, as he told the
dealer, the Humane Society had stopped the fight. Houtenbrink
was then asked if he still had the snakes.
Yes, sir.
Are they in this courtroom?
If I can see them, I will tell you if they are here, yes, sir.
Now, Mr. Houtenbrink, will you step down and examine
the box. Are those the snakes that you sold to Mr. Hope?
155
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MURDER FOR SILENCE
away and I thought I would be recognized.” Capone reassured
him: “I worked on the Rosen thing,” he told Magoon, “and it
was right on Sutter Avenue and I was not made.”
The state’s case had taken almost three months to present.
The defendants were more merciful and their handful of wit-
nesses tock one-tenth of that time. Nat Sobler, the former secre-
tary of Rosen’s trucking firm, testified for Lepke and said that
the firm was practically broke at the time of the work stoppage
in 1932, and that the dead man hadn’t put a nickel into the busi-
ness. But he had to confess that Rosen had had five or six “fairly
good size customers” in Pennsylvania. Gurrah’s brother, Carl
Shapiro, said he had been in Lepke’s office on the afternoon of
Friday, September 11th, and that neither Rubin nor Weiss nor
Tannenbaum had been there that day. Capone put no witnesses
on the stand but Weiss paraded two brothers, his mother and a
girl friend before the jury. The upshot of their testimony was
that he had attended his brother’s twenty-sixth birthday party
which had lasted all day Saturday and Sunday on the weekend on
which Rosen was killed. He just couldn’t have been in a candy
store on Sutter Avenue that Sunday morning.
Barshay’s summation on Lepke’s behalf epitomized the stand
taken by all the defendants. “I said I did not represent an angel.
I meant just this: I condemn the defendant Buchalter’s past life
with as great vehemance as I possess. I am not in sympathy with
his activities in the past... 1 condemn every act of the defendant
Buchalter’s past life .. . so gentlemen, do you get my point—that
Buchalter who was being looked for by Dewey as king of the
flour racket and king of the crime racket . . . he had so many
charges hurled against him that everybody in this universe was
searching for him, that he would possibly worry about a possible
misdemeanor? I say, ‘Possible misdemeanor’ at the hands of Rosen.
What proof is there in this case by anyone that Rosen was roam-
ing the streets of Brownsville threatening to go to Dewey? What
could he tell Dewey? Nothing ... What was there that Buchalter
had to fear at the hands of Rosen with thousands of complaints
running to Dewey in extortion totalling a half a million dollars.
Would he worry about Rosen, an ordinary poor truck driver?”
Judge Taylor turned the case over to the jury at 10:15 on
the night of November 28, 1941. Four hours later, it filed back
174
Sane
FIRST DEGREE
into the courtroom and announced that it had found all three
defendants guilty of murder in the first degree. The Court of
Appeals, in a close four-to-three decision (the minority thought
the jury had been misinformed by Judge Taylor) , affirmed the
convictions, and Lepke died in the Sing Sing electric chair on
March 4, 1944. Of all the murders which were laid at his door
over a long and bloody career, it is ironic that the one that sent
him to his death was that of an obscure Brooklyn candy store
owner who probably could not have told Dewey anything he
did not already know.
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MURDER FOR SILENCE
“Take it easy,” he told him, “take it easy, I will talk to Joe
Rosen. He’s all right.” But ‘as far as Lepke was concerned, the
time for talking was past. “I’m fed up with that son of a bitch
and I will take care of him. That is one fellow that will never go
downtown.”
It was after this conversation that Rubin was ordered to find
Paul Berger and send him to Lepke. The results were immediate
and conclusive. “Two days later I read in the papers that Rosen
is killed.” Now, he began to worry in earnest. He went to see
Lepke and told him, “I was there in July and now I am in real
trouble.” It was shortly after this visit that Rubin began the en-
- forced travelogue that was to take him from Brooklyn to New
Orleans and back again.
After the shooting, Weiss reported back to ‘Lepke at his Fifth
Avenue office. Tannenbaum heard Weiss say, “Everything is O.K.
but that son of a bitch, Harry Strauss. I. gave him strict orders
not to do any shooting and after I shot Rosen, he was lying on
the floor, Harry Strauss started shooting him.“ Lepke then ponti-
ficated, “All right, what's the difference as long as everyone is
clean and you got away all right.” Over coffee a few minutes
later, Tannenbaum asked Weiss who Rosen was. He was told
that “he was some fellow used to be in the trucking business
and he was threatening to go to Dewey and talk about Lep.”
Paul Berger was a forty-one-year-old hood who had a long his-
tory of strikebreaking to his credit. Under one name or another,
he had been arrested for countless cases of felonious assaults in
labor disputes. He had gone to Lepke’s office on September 11th
when he received the message from Rubin that the boss wanted
to see him.
Q. What did Lepke say to you then?
A. He asked me; “Do you know Joe Rosen?”, and I said,
re “Y Gs,”
Q. Then what did he say?
A. He said, “I want you to point him out.”
Berger was only too happy to oblige and, later that day, he took
Weiss to 725 Sutter Avenue.
Q.. When you got to the candy store with Weiss, what hap-
pened?
172
time,” Weiss told him,
FIRST DEGREE
A. Joe Rosen was coming out of the candy store and I said
to Weiss, ‘“That’s him, there he is.”
For his help in the Lepke case, he admitted that he had been
promised that he would not be prosecuted.
Berger remembered another conversation with Weiss in the
Fall of 1937. Weiss told him that Rubin was “singing to Dewey”
and that his liquidation order had been received. Berger was to
point Rubin out to a killer by the name of Schlermer. Never one
to overlook the social niceties, Berger invited Rubin to lunch at
a midtown restaurant where Schlermer happened to be dining.
But Schlermer had his difficulties in finding Rubin alone long
enough to give him his quietus. The moment juste arrived on
October Ist, but, by this time, Schlermer was so nervous that his
aim was off and he only wounded the union official.
The mob waited impatiently for Rubin to recover. Schlermer
had evidently disappointed the higher-ups and been supplanted
by another executioner with the inappropriate name of Seymour
Magoon, one of Buggsy Goldstein’s hatchet men. Berger was
again pressed into service to identfy Rubin to Magoon. “This
“the son of a bitch ain’t going to be so
lucky.” After Berger did his fingering, Magoon began to follow
the intended victim but was unable to get a shot in due to
Rubin's belated police protection.
Magoon complained to Weiss that progress would be impos-
sible as long as Rubin had a bodyguard. Weiss ordered him to
put on old clothes and watch Rubin’s house in the Bronx.
Capone told him that “Rubin is hurting Lep and we got to hit
him in the head and get rid of him.” For three days, Magoon
watched the Bronx apartment house until a patrolman became
suspicious and started to question him. He reported this incident
to Weiss and complained that he would be unable to deliver the
goods so long as Rubin had a policeman tailing him. Nothing
causnited, Weiss said, “then we will have to whack him and the
cop.” Before they could get around to it, Rubin had a regiment
of cops around him.
Magoon also had something to say about Capone. In April of
1939, the latter had engaged him to help out in the killing of a
hood named Whitey Friedman. Magoon was a little leery about
the job because, as he told Capone, “I hung out about a block
'73
he Ree NY YS
Ee
4,44
hat @ SE
MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE
her... 1 knew what must have happened, because I can see, after
I remember it, after I came to myself again, I can remember how
it was, but I am not absolutely sure of it. The next thing I ac-
tually remember is looking down and seeing blood on my hands
and the lug wrench alongside of me.”
Tuesday, January 10th, 1950, was a bright wintry day in Lan-
caster. Marian Baker hurried to her job in the Franklin & Mar-
shall Treasurer’s Office, hoping that the morning would pass
quickly so that she could go downtown. There were several er-
rands she had to do, not the least of which was to pick up the
engagement ring she had received from Edgar Rankin, her
fiancé, and which she had left at the jeweler’s several days before
to have the stone set more securely.
After a late lunch, she took a bus and rode to Penn Square,
which is in the heart of Lancaster, a city of some 70,000 souls in
- southeastern Pennsylvania. She picked up her ring and then went
to the Farmers’ Bank where she deposited some checks in the
college account. She next visited the post office to register and
mail a letter to Canada for one of the secretaries who worked with
her in the Treasurer’s Office. Shortly after two o'clock, as she was
leaving the post office, she passed the time of day with a local
~ newspaperman who had done some part-time publicity work for
the college. She was never seen alive again.
On Saturday, January 14th, Marian was found lying beneath |
some corrugated sheeting under a summer cottage a few miles
south of Lancaster. Her watch had stopped at 2:35. She had been
dead for more than four days, and two large wounds were found
in her skull. The body was removed in a hearse to the Lancaster
General Hospital where an autopsy revealed that “the cause of
death was multiple compound fractures of the skull . . . there
was a massive hemorrhage into the brain . . . two fragments of
the skull were driven into the brain.”
Just before Marian’s body was discovered, an undertaker’s son,
who was attending Franklin & Marshall, had reported to the
Dean of Men that a senior student had been pumping him for
information as to the length of time necessary for a corpse to de-
- compose. The senior’s name was Edward L. Gibbs, and the Dean
turned it over to the police on Monday, January 17th. For some
unexplained reason, Gibbs was not immediately apprehended or
186
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Sd ape 8 et 9 A
Seip.
FIRST DEGREE
even questioned. It was not until the following Wednesday after-
noon that he told a startled friend that he had killed Marian
Baker, and then burst into the office of Franklin & Marshall’s
President and announced that he was the murderer everyone
was looking for. He was quietly turned over to the Lancaster
police and the legal machinery that -would lead to his trial two
months later began to grind into action.
His trial began on Monday, March 13th, 1950, in what is un-
doubtedly the court with the longest name in the United States,
the Court of Oyer and Terminer, General Jail Delivery and
Quarter Sessions of the Peace of Lancaster County. After the clerk
had read the indictment to the defendant, charging him with
deliberate and premeditated murder, Gibbs was asked what plea
he wished to interpose. Since Pennsylvania requires a mandatory
plea of not guilty in capital cases, the clerk's question was merely
a formality and Gibbs’s case was immediately assigned for trial.
It began in earnest the next day—Thursday, the 14th—after a
middle-aged jury of seven men and five women had been selected.
Two alternates were also chosen—both male—but this precau-
tion proved to be unnecessary.
Unlike most other states, Pennsylvania permits the jury in first
degree murder cases to fix the penalty if it returns a guilty ver-
dict. Therefore, it was the strategy of the district attorney, John
M. Ranck, to try to convince the Gibbs panel that the defendant
deserved nothing less than the death penalty. With Gibbs's con-
fession in his pocket, he had an open and shut case insofar as
identification of the murderer was concerned. What bothered
him was the knawing possibility that W. Hensel Brown, Gibbs’s
attorney, might persuade the jury that his client had ‘blacked
out’ when he killed Marian, and that he was either guilty of some
lesser degree of murder or, assuming a first degree conviction, that
he did not deserve the death penalty. Ranck was determined to
put Eddie Gibbs in the electric chair and he never once lost sight
of this goal during the four-day trial.
His plan was simple—to prove that Gibbs was a callous, would-
be rapist who had killed Marian when he could not subdue her.
On the first day of the trial, the prosecution offered in evidence,
over Brown's strenuous objection, photographs of the dead girl,
emphasizing those that showed that her clothing had been dis-
187 | aS
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MURDER FOR MERCY
story. First of all, he demanded, why was he worried about John
being harmed by the extension cord when the boy was away at
the Kent School? And, if he had destroyed the baby’s clothes to
spare his wife the necessity of seeing them, why didn’t he also —
incinerate the socket on the trouble cord? If he wasn’t guilty of
his son’s death, why did he feel that he had to write out answers
to questions which he thought the police might ask him? And,
after writing out these notes, why did he then tear them up and
throw < ti into a waste basket?
On the subject of the extension cord, Noxon aa not recall
buying it at Kresge’s several weeks before his arrest. Yet, Ida L.
Royce, a saleslady at the store, remembered that he had pur-
chased such a cord in early September. He had also been noticed -
in the store by Mary L. Faucher, another Kresge employee, but
Miss Faucher did not see him make any specific. purchase. The
defendant also denied that he had told Camille L. Marcel, a
police officer, that the trouble cord was lying a foot away from the
baby when he went to the garage to find a screwdriver.
~ At 12:25 on the afternoon of July 6, 1944, the jury retired to
consider Noxon’s fate. Exactly six hours later, it filed back into
the hot courtroom. Its members found the defendant guilty of
murder in the first degree and he was promptly sentenced by
Judge Pinanski to die in the electric chair. On May 10, 1946, the
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts affirmed this judgment,
and it looked as if John Noxon’s unhappy life was to be climaxed
by the same type of death the jury thought he had inflicted upon
his Mongoloid son. But public pressure against the execution of
a man who had yielded to an impulse that only a purist could
call malicious, mounted so rapidly that Governor Maurice Tobin
commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in 1946, and he was
finally paroled on January 7, 1949.
sreneemenpreaninien ashes
4) SE RRS 4 a eR ORR
ES
Murder without Motive
~The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
versus
Edwatd Lester Gibbs
_ Despite Darrow’s monumental efforts in the Leopold- -Loeb case
to forge an entente between the law and modern psychiatry, most
states have adhered to the McNaughton Rule as the criterion of
criminal insanity. Almost a century and a half old, the rule has
only simplicity and tradition to commend it. Under it, a person
is not excused from criminal liability unless, at the time of the
offense in question, he was laboring under such a defect of reason
as 1) not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing;
or, 2) not to know the act was wrong. Such a definition, of course,
excludes the Leopolds and Loebs of this world who, for one awe-
some moment, yield to elemental forces beyond their control, and
then must answer for their actions to a frightened public which
is convinced that it can deter the undeterrable and thus prevent
the unpreventable. |
This was the central problem raised by the trial of twenty-five-
year-old Eddie Gibbs in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in March of
1950, for the apparently motive-less murder of a young Franklin
& Marshall College secretary. Like Leopold and Loeb, Gibbs
freely admitted his guilt, but maintained that he did not know
what he was doing when he bludgeoned Marian Louise Baker to
death at half-past two on the afternoon of January 10th, 1950.
According to Gibbs, ‘‘... something just happened inside of’ me,
I don’t know, I don’t know what happened, I can’t explain it,
but I just reached over and grabbed her and started to choke
185
commence
MURDER IN JEALOUSY
dence in the case, we have reached a point where . . . there is no
likelihood that we shall agree.” The jury was discharged and the
third trial of Nan Patterson was over. There was saver to be a
fourth one because the district attorney decided it was time to
quit the field since, as he told Goff ten days later, “another trial
would be unavailing.”
After a brief—and unsuccessful—fling on the stage, Nan remar-
ried the husband she had divorced to make erselt available for
her expected role as Mrs. Young. After Harry K. Thaw shot and
killed Sanford White in the roof garden on top of Madison
Square Garden on the night of June 26, 1906 because of White's
attentions to his model-wife, Evelyn Nesbit, Nan and her case
were pushed off the front pages. Evidently she married again be-
cause she turned up in Seattle in 1913 with a nbweodnd much
wealthier—husband. She died in 1946, a forgotten relic of an
old news story.
2a
oe,
4
Murder in Despair
The People of the State of New York :
versus
Chester E. Gillette
In 1925, Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” was pub-
lished by Boni'& Liveright. It proved to be the most successful
of his novels and, for the first time in his life, brought him a
measure of financial security. “The greatest American novel of
our generation,” according to Joseph Wood Krutch, it told the
story of Clyde Griffiths, whose lighthearted love affair with Rob-
erta Alden resulted in her pregnancy and death. Clyde, who was
eventually executed for her murder, was, in Dreiser’s eyes, the
victim of a characteristically American social dream, sacrificed
to the very values worshipped by his contemporaries.
For more than three decades, Dreiser had been troubled by
the frequency of a type of murder that was the result of what
he regarded as.a perverted Horatio Alger strain. The ingredients
were stock—a young, simple and usually impoverished girl, an
ambitious youth, a heated love affair, an inconvenient pregnancy,
and a desperate murder. In the world of the ’twenties and ‘thir-
ties, he watched young men moving inevitably toward the wait-
ing electric chair, impelled by the most natural of desires, to
attain goals wholly approved by the society in which they lived.
Blocked by one obstacle or another, their attempts to clear the
paths to the beckoning golden dream often generated the crimes
that closed the road forever. Like Darrow, Dreiser believed that
the free agent was one of life’s most perfidious illusions. :
In 1906, he had followed the newspaper accounts of a trial that
took place in Herkimer, New York, late that summer. For sixteen
47
Pe ey AN oe Sh
MURDER IN PAYMENT
sugar. Then Elias Fuller, who, with his brothers, owned the local
foundry, said that Parkman had nodded to him at 1:40 p.m. as
the doctor hurried up the street that led to the Medical College.
According to Fuller, Parkman was obviously in a great rush and
the two men did not speak to each other. Lastly, the Attorney
General proved that Dr. Webster’s bank account did not, at any
time in November of 1849, show a balance sufficient to cover the
five hundred dollars which the defendant insisted he had paid to
Parkman on the day of the latter’s disappearance.
Littlefield’s story began with his account of a meeting between
Webster and Parkman in the former’s study four days before the
doctor disappeared. According to the witness, who apparently
considered eavesdropping one of his more important janitorial
duties, Parkman had asked Webster for money and the professor
had told him that he could not pay him at that time but that he
would attempt to do so the following day. Dr. Parkman then re-
marked that “something must be done tomorrow” and left. —
Webster’s financial transactions with Parkman extended back
as far as 1842, when he had borrowed $400.00 from the wealthy
physician. In 1847, he had given Parkman a ‘note for $2,432.00,
which sum represented the unpaid balance of the 1842 loam as
well as additional advances. To secure this note, Webster had also
mortgaged his personal property, including a cabinet of minerals.
In 1848, Webster borrowed $1,200.00 from another acquaintance
and gave him the minerals as security. When Parkman heard of
this, he evidently became furious and began to press his debtor for
prompt payment of his loan, threatening to have him discharged
from the faculty of the Medical College if the money was not
forthcoming at once. During all this time, Webster’s annual
salary as Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy was
$1,200.00 and he received a few hundred dollars more a year from
the sale of tickets to his lectures at the Massachusetts Medical
College. With seven children to raise, he was perennially in hock
to one creditor or another.
On the morning of Dr. Parkman's visit to Webster's study, the
latter had asked Littlefield about the condition of a basement
vault where Dr. Holmes’ anatomy students disposed of the rem-
nants of corpses used in the College's dissection rooms. The rea-
son for his interest, he told the janitor, was because he wanted to
16
rie t52.
be Otter osu
sabe ig)
FIRST DEGREE
obtain some gas for’an experiment. Two days later, on Wednes-
day, the janitor said that Dr. Webster had given him a note to
deliver to Dr. Parkman, inviting the physician to visit him the
coming Friday. The next day, he asked Littlefield to get him a
pint of blood from the nearby Massachusetts General Hospital.
Littlefield also remembered that Parkman had visited the de-
fendant at about 1:45 on Friday afternoon, November 23rd. An
hour or so later, he found that the walls near Prof. Webster’s lab-
oratory were so hot that he could hardly touch them. “I knew
that it must proceed from the assay furnace, where I never made
a fire and never knew a fire to be.” When he checked Dr.
Webster’s laboratory, the janitor found the door locked although
he could hear water running and someone walking about. He
also recalled that, a few hours earlier, when he had swept the de-
fendant’s study, which was located to the rear of the Chemical
Lecture Room on the second floor of the College, he had found
a sledge hammer behind the door. He had taken the hammer
downstairs to Webster’s laboratory and left it there and he had
never seen the tool again “though I have hunted the building all
over.” .
About 5:30 that evening, Webster left the Medical College.
Littlefield then departed for a party and returned to his apart-
ment in the basement a few minutes aften ten o'clock. Dr.
Webster’s laboratory door was still locked which surprised Little-
field because “I never knew Dr. Webster’s door locked before, on
the night of a lecture-day since I have been in the college.” The
next day, Saturday, he heard the defendant moving about in his
laboratory as well as water running in his sink.
The next time that the witness saw Webster was the following
Sunday evening when he met him on North Grove Street, the
road that led to the College. Webster asked him, “Mr. Littlefield,
did you see Dr. Parkman during the latter part of last week?”
When Littlefield answered that he had seen the missing man at
1:30 on Friday afternoon walking briskly toward the College,
“Dr. Webster had his cane in his hand, struck it down upon the
ground, and said ‘That is the very time I paid him $483.60."”
According to Littlefield, Webster seemed ‘“‘confused and agitated.
I never saw him look so before. His face was thoughtful; he
looked pale.”
17
MURDER IN PAYMENT
The following Tuesday, Webster did something which con-
vinced Littlefield that his suspicions were correct. He gave the
janitor a turkey for Thanksgiving. Since the chemistry professor
was a notoriously penurious man who conducted his experiments
by candlelight rather than using the more expensive oil lamps,
Littlefield was certain that he had been given a subtle bribe.
Then the janitor testified in great detail about his herculean
excavation efforts in burrowing under Webster’s laboratory with
a hatchet, a chisel, and later a crowbar, in order to break through
the wall of the defendant’s washroom. Finally, after two days of
digging, he opened a small hole in the washroom and “I man-
aged to get the light and my head into the hole, and then I was
not disturbed by the draft. I held my light forward. The first
thing which I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg.
The water was running down on these remains from the sink. I
knew that it was no place for these things.”
Littlefield was unshaken on cross-examination. The best the de-
fense could do with him was to raise the inference that he had
been angry with Dr. Webster because the professor had discovered
that the janitor was gambling in his study. :
Q. Had you made use-of the Doctor's room that night to play
cards?
I decline answering that question.
Had you not been there gambling?
I decline answering that question.
Do you know that the Doctor found out you were gam-
bling?
A. I don’t know. He never said anything to me about it.
Finally, he barked at his tormenter, “If you ask me if I played
cards there last winter, I can truthfully say I did not.” When the
OPO >
_ defense asked the janitor whether he knew of the reward being
offered by Parkman’s family, he admitted that he had seen it in
the newspapers but insisted that “I never have made any claim to
any reward. I say now that I never shall claim it.”
Mrs. Littlefield followed her husband on the stand and added
little to his story except to say that he had told her that he
thought the defendant had murdered Parkman. Then, the At-
torney General called one Nathaniel Waterman, a tinsmith, who
identified Webster as the man who had purchased a thick tin
18
FIRST DEGREE
box “... eighteen inches square and thirteen inches deep, to pack
things in,” four days after Parkman had disappeared. He was fol-
lowed. by James Edgerly, a hardware dealer, who remembered
Webster as the man who had bought twenty fathoms of two-
threaded marline and some very large fish hooks that same day.
It was the state’s hypothesis that these hooks had been used by the
defendant to fish up pieces of Parkman’s body from the wash
room to the furnace in the laboratory. This theory was strength-
ened by the testimony of a twine manufacturer who identified
some marline wrapped around the corpse’s leg as identical with
that purchased by Webster. 3
The prosecution then cailed Nathaniel D. Gould, a handwrit-
ing expert. After Dr. Parkman had disappeared, Boston's City
Marshal had begun to receive mysterious notes indicating that
the missing man had been murdered in various parts of the city.
One said:
“Dear Sir,
You will find Dr. Parkman
Murdered on brooklynt heights
yours truly,
M , Capt. of the Darts”
Another stated that “Dr. Parkman was took on bord the ship
herculun” and implied that he had been taken to East Cambridge.
Several witnesses indicated that Dr. Webster had often discussed
these letters and stated that it was his opinion that the missing
man had been murdered somewhere in East Cambridge.
These two notes were followed by a longer and better com-
posed letter, signed Civis, which recommended that the police
check “the cellars of the houses in East Cambridge.” Mr. Gould
testified that each one of these documents had been written by
Webster. The handwriting expert's testimony was buttressed by
evidence that the defandant owned a “cotton pen” which was
capable of producing the scrawls found on the first two notes.
The remainder of the prosecution’s case consisted in’ introduc-
ing evidence of Webster's guilty conscience and certain incrim-
inating statements made by him. For example, when he was ar-
rested at his home after the discovery of the bones in the wash
room, he asked the police, “Where did they find him? Did they
find the whole of his body?” When he was asked who had access
19
TOES
7 ¥ site
ee aed wer ee tee ae eng er ae =
th te
a oa re
oo re ee:
MURDER IN PAYMENT
to his laboratory, he shouted, “Nobody but the porter who makes
the fires. Oh, that villain! I am a ruined man!” He then reached
into his vest pocket and put something in his mouth. Although
he later insisted that it had been a strychnine pill, it seemed to
have had very little effect on him.
The case for the defense consisted almost exclusively of char-
acter witnesses who testified as to Webster’s good background and
reputation. He had been teaching at the Medical College since
1824 and had many influential friends in the Boston area. From
the President of Harvard to the former mayor of Cambridge, his
supporters paraded to the witness chair and affirmed that
Webster, although he had a quick temper, was a kind and gentle
person, utterly incapable of murder.
After a few completely unreliable witnesses had testified that
they had seen Dr. Parkman on the streets of Boston after the time
he was supposedly murdered, the defense called Dr. William T.
G. Morton, the discoverer of chloroform, who was probably Bos-
ton’s most celebrated dentist. Using some old plates from his own
office, he demonstrated to the jury that they fitted the mold of
Dr. Parkman’s jaw. He also insisted that there were no distin-
guishing-marks by»which the dentures found in the Webster’s fur-
nace could be postively identified as those of Dr. Parkman.
When both sides had rested, Chief Justice Shaw asked Webster
whether he had anything to say to the jury, an old Massachusetts
custom designed to give the defendant the last word. The profes-
sor wasn’t one to miss an oportunity to harangue a thoroughly
captive audience and, after castigating his attorneys for failing to
produce certain undisclosed evidence which he insisted would
have clearly shown that he was innocent, ended on a dramatic
note: :
“I have felt more distressed by the production of these
various anonymous letters ... and I call to God to witness
. I never wrote them! Since my trial, my counsel has re-
ceived on this day a letter from this very ‘Civis’; and, if he is
present, and has a spark of humanity, I call upon him to
come forward and acknowledge it.”
Nobody responded to this impassioned plea and, at 8 o’clock on
the evening of March 30, 1850, the jury retired. After almost
three hours of prayer and five minutes of deliberation, it filed
back into the courtroom and announced that it had found the
20
FIRST DEGREE
defendant guilty of murder. Two days later, Webster was sen-
tenced to be hanged on August 30, 1850, in the yard of the Suffolk
County Prison.
After an appeal to the Governor for a commutation of his sen-
tence was turned down, Webster astonished most of his friends
and supporters by confessing to a visiting minister that he had
indeed murdered Dr. Parkman. He claimed that, during a dis-
pute over the money he owed Parkman, he had struck the latter
with a piece of wood. After trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate the
physician, he had dismembered the body and burned it, piece by
piece, in the basement furnace. He admitted writing the first two
notes to the City Marshal to throw the police off the scent, but
still indignantly denied that he had written the Civis letter.
Accordingly, when he mounted the scaffold shortly before 9:30
a.m. on August 30, 1850, the more than 150 observers in the pri-
son yard had at least the satisfaction of knowing that, even
though the evidence against Webster had been largely circum-
stantial, he had, by his own words, dispelled any lingering doubts
about his guilt.
21
SED renee: SaOANy ea ese:
Stereenerr ts =
AEN EK 16 eT
MURDER IN DESPAIR
years, it simmered in his mind until, in 1922, after the publica-
tion of “A Book About Myself,” he decided to get it down on
paper. In the details of the drowning of Grace Brown, a twenty-
year-old factory worker, in up-state New York’s Big Moose Lake
on July 11, 1906, Dreiser thought he had found the material he
needed to prove his point that the Clyde Griffiths of this world
are the inevitable products of a materialistic society that demands
goals which many of its members are incapable of achieving.
Chester Gillette had just passed his twenty-second birthday
when he arrived in Cortland, New York, in the early part of
1905. His father’s brother owned a skirt factory there and Chester
was to learn the ropes from the hem up. He had been kind of a
rolling stone since he had left his home town of Wickes, Mon-
tana, seven years back, having, in the interim, done farm work
in Oregon, been a printer’s devil in Vancouver and San Fran-
cisco, spent a year and a half as a brakeman on the Chicago,
Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and served a hitch on a mer-
chantman to Hawaii. In between his peregrinations, he had man-
aged to sandwich two years at Oberlin College. As far as his fam-
ily was concerned, it was high time he settled down and perhaps
Uncle Noah’s steadying influence would turn the trick.
Chester was a very gregarious young man and his duties in the
stock room of the Gillette Skirt Factory left him more than
enough time to squire most of the village’s eligible young ladies
around town. A goodlooking, lively youth whose wanderings had
given him a certain wordly air, he was very much in demand at
the dances and hayrides that punctuated Cortland’s social calen-
dar. But he. was also a man of some heat who needed an outlet
for passions that occasionally became more than he could bear.
In an age when prospective brides were put on a pedestal that
kept them safely out of harm’s way, hot-blooded gallants had to
find what the novels of the day cavalierly referred to as “the
other kind of woman” to indulge their baser emotions.
Chester found his safety valve in Grace Brown, an inspector
in his uncle’s plant. Grace, who was known to everyone as Billy,
was a five-foot, hundred-pound brunette who had just turned
nineteen. Raised on her father’s farm in South Otselic, a hamlet
in neighboring Chenengo County, she had come to town in early
1904 to visit a married sister. Several weeks after her arrival, she
48
FIRST DEGREE
was working in the skirt factory and, when her sister moved away
the following year, Grace persuaded her father to let her stay In
Cortland. With her own room at Mrs. Wheeler's boarding house,
she proved to be a most convenient mistress for Chester and was
soon sleeping with him on a more or less regular basis.
There is little doubt that she was deeply in love with the boss's
, nephew. But it was equally clear that Chester had no illusions
about his relationship with her. Billy Brown was hardly the
permanent helpmeet for a young ‘man on the make, ane her
after-hours playmate made it quite clear to the world at large
that he was as free as air. Very few people in Cortland knew that
he was stealing over to Billy’s room night after night and even
at the factory, where he saw her every day, he made it a point
to spend no more time with her than he did with the other girls.
Ellen Melvin, one of the checkers at the factory, later said
that he was friendly with all the girls and she was not aware that
he paid any special attentions to Grace. Theresa L. Dillon, a
Gillette seamstress, remembered seeing him with Billy once or
twice but she knew that he joked with every woman in the plant
who was under sixty. Only Mrs. Wheeler, who undoubtedly ran
the most wide open boardinghouse in town, was conscious that,
in Grace, Chester had found the answer to Cortland County s
frigid winters.
But, worldly though he was, Chester had, unfortunately, never
learned the basic rules of birth control and it was only a matter
of time beforesGrace found herself indisputably pregnant. By the
middle of June, 1906, she had become so concerned over her con-
dition that Chester, who was, by now, equally upset, suggested
that she leave the factory and go home for a while. After a decent
interval, he would come for her and they would be married. She
docilely followed his advice and took up residence on her father’s
scrub patch, where she waited patiently for Chester to do the
right thing by her.
As the days went by, Grace ruminated in South Otselic, torn
between fears that her sharpeyed mother would notice her con-
dition and doubts that her non-communicative lover would ever
come for her. Back in Cortland, Chester, whose fears began to
down somewhat with Grace out of town, plunged back into the
social whirl which was about to reach its summer zenith. The
49
SO Oe. ane S eee
aoessinnl
MURDER IN DESPAIR
that Grace had entered the boat first and sat down in the stern
end. After Gillette had placed the suitcase and the other para-
phenalia he was carrying in the flatbottomed craft, he began
rowing straight up the lake. The older Morrison watched the
boat until it turned toward Punkey Bay. The boat was not
returned to its mooring that night.
Early the next morning, Mr. Morrison found the boat floating
upside down in South Bay. A girl’s jacket was lying on its up-
turned bottom and a handful of human hair was caught under
an oarlock. A few feet away, a girl’s summer skimmer was float-
ing in the water. Morrison turned in the alarm and Big Moose
Lake was soon covered with boats of all kinds. One of the craft
involved was the steamboat “Zilph“ and Frank Crabb, its en-
gineer, soon spotted something white lying at the bottom of South
pc nou the aid of grappling irons, he brought up the body of
eg, io ofate exw) iaeest nec ttua sie aL
an’: aking rooms in Frankfort
where, on July 14th, Dr. Allison O. Douglas and four other
physicians performed an autopsy. Their report concluded, ‘From
the findings of this autopsy, the cause of death was srimieail
concussion, followed by syncope and then asphyxiation.”
Two days later, Gillette was arrested at the Arrow Head Inn.
at Inlet, N.Y. Austin B. Klock, the under-sheriff of Herkimer
County and Bert Gross, a friend from Cortland, found him in
the lobby of the inn early Friday morning. When Bert said
“Hello, ranges do you know that Billy is dead?”, Gillette va
jou ld him, “Ba eye Woe pets ad ttle kere item
e lake?’”” When
Gillette could not give Klock any reasonable explanation of his
whereabouts from the time he left Cortland, on Sunday night
the under-sheriff placed him under arrest. ee
He was promptly indicted by the Grand Jury of Herkimer
County for the premeditated murder of Billy Brown. Governor
Frank W. Higgens convened an extraordinary term of the Su-
preme Court and Chester’s trial began on August 27th before
Judge Irving R. Devendorf in Herkimer Village. There were
rumors flying around town that some irate taxpayers were going
to storm the jailhouse and save the county the expense of a
trial, and District Attorney George W. Ward saw to it that
52
Shee
Re
2a
FIRST DEGREE
enough state troopers were in attendance to discourage any such
precipitous plans. Even Noah Gillette deserted his nephew and
Judge Devendorf was forced to appoint two local lawyers—Albert
M. Mills and Charles D. Thomas—to represent the defendant.
Ward took full advantage of the feeling against Gillette. He
put a whole flock of witnesses on the stand to testify to the fact
that the defendant was a perfect cad who ignored Grace in pub-
lic while monopolizing her favors in the privacy of her second
floor room. After an evening of socializing with the respectable
young ladies of Cortland, he would steal over to 7 Wheeler
Street where Billy was always waiting for him. According to
Olive, Mrs. Wheeler’s observant daughter, it was a rare night
that Chester wasn’t scratching on Billy’s door.
The letters that the couple had written to each other were
next on the agenda. Over the agonized objections of the defense
attorneys, the letters were. admitted by Judge Devendorf “for the
purpose of showing how the decedent regarded her relations
with the defendant.” When they were read to the jury, they
painted a graphic picture of a frightened and lonely girl who
refused to recognize that she had put her money on the wrong
horse. “If I could only tell Mamma,” she sobbed, “‘but I can’t,
I couldn’t break her heart like that. If I had the strength, dear,
I should walk to the river and throw myself in it. It would be
rather cowardly and I despise a coward, but I would not be a
bother to you any longer. Dear Chester, the thought that I am
in your way just drives me crazy. How I want to die no one
but myself knows.”
There were many people who had seen Chester and Grace in
Morrison’s rowboat during the long summer afternon. The boat,
with the girl still sitting in the stern, sometimes trailing her
fingers in the water, sometimes talking animatedly to her com-
panion, was observed in various sections of the lake. At 5:40, Ber-
nard Foster saw it drifting into Punkey Bay; Thomas Brant had
spotted it a few minutes earlier in a lily pond about twenty feet
from shore.
Marjorie Carey was spending that summer with her family
at Glen Spring Camp, diagonally across the lake from the Glen-
more Hotel. Just before six o’clock that evening, she had started
to row across to the hotel when she heard a noise coming from
53
AIS RPM REET:
Ltt te aa
Sa.
in s ~ ah iad mutates
MURDER IN DESPAIR
only fly in the ointment was the fact that almost every mail
brought him another letter from Grace, imploring him to get
her to a preacher before everyone in South Otselic began to rec-
ognize that her swelling girth was due to something more than
a big country appetite.
As June melted into July, the letters from South Otselic be-
came more frantic and Grace began to accuse Chester of every-
thing from infidelity to downright thoughtlessness. “You will
never know what you have made me suffer, dear,” she wrote him
early in July, “. . . please come and don’t let me wait .. .” Oc-
casionally, he would drop her a line and reassure her that he
would be there soon. By the middle of the first week in July,
Grace could stand it no longer and warned Chester that “I am
writing to tell you that I am coming back to Cortland. I simply
can’t stay here any longer. Mamma worries and wonders why I.
cry so much and I am just about sick. Please come and take me
away some place, dear.” ;
After receiving this letter, Chester, who until then had. been
the epitome of deliberation, galvanized into instant action. He
wrote Grace that the time was now ripe for their long delayed
elopment and that he would send her instructions very shortly.
That same day, he told his uncle that he needed a vacation and
asked his advice as to suitable resorts. Finally, he sent Grace a
letter, asking her to meet him on Monday, July 9th, in DeRuyter,
a crossroads town on the spur line to Utica, and they would start
out on a journey which, he assured her, would end in front of a
near-sighted justice of the peace. She was so certain of Chester’s
honorable intentions that she asked Maud Crumb, a South Ot-
selic dressmaker, to make a going-away suit for her.
Chester left Cortland on the night of Sunday, July 8th, and
checked into DeRuyter’s Tabor House, where he signed the
register as Charles George of New York. The next morning, a
neighbor drove Grace the fifteen miles from South Otselic to the
DeRuyter railroad station. The couple boarded the 10:37 to Utica
separately and Chester sat with two Cortland girls—Gladys West-
cott and Josephine Patrick—in one car while Grace traveled
alone in another. The two girls got off at Canastota after mak-
ing a date to meet Chester on Thursday or Friday at Seventh
Lake in the Adirondack’s Fulton Chain. When the train reached
50
438865
FIRST DEGREE
Utica, Chester and Grace took a room at the Hotel Martin where
they registered as Charles George and wife of New York City.
They left the Martin early the next morning, sneaking pas :
the dozing desk clerk because Chester didn’t have enough pen
to pay the bill. Before catching a train to Tupper Lake, the
next place on the itinerary, Chester took his soiled —e ,
a laundry and instructed the proprietor to forward it to “9
Forge in his own name when it was ready. Then he and Bi :
boarded the cars again for the long ride to Tupper Lake whic
lies some eighty miles northeast of Utica as the crow flies.
That night, they again registered as Mr. and Mrs. George, at
Tupper Lake’s Alta Cliff Cottage. Evidently the crisp mountain
air was too rarefied for a wedding (the Herkimer County district
attorney was to argue later that it was too populated for a mur-
der), and next morning, after a quick breakfast, the couple »
decided to retrace their steps in the general direction of Utica.
A few miles en route, Chester sent a post card to his uncle in
Cortland imploring him to “send $5.00 to Chester Gillette at
Eagle Bay, Friday.” In between Tupper Lake and Utica, they
stumbled on Big Moose Lake, a secluded area just southwest of
the Fulton Chain. They went right from the depot to the Glen-
more Hotel where they arrived some time between 10 and 11
a.m. While Grace rested on the hotel verandah, Chester signed
the register as Carl Graham of Albany and Grace Brown of
South Otselic.
Andrew Morrison, mine host at the Glenmore, remembered
Gillette well. When he walked into the hotel, Chester, who was
apparently prepared for any eventuality, had with him a heavy
suitcase, a tennis racket, an umbrella and an overcoat. After
registering, he asked Morrison if they were too late to take the
steamboat ride through the lake. When he was told that Morrison
“had nothing to do with the steamboat,” he asked if he could
rent a rowboat instead, “get his dinner at one of the other places
on the lake, and go out on the 11:15 train.” Morrison told him
that he could rent a boat at the dock and, when he last saw the
pair, they were heading toward the boathouse. As Gillette ignagit
the hatrack on the verandah, Morrison saw him hang Grace’s
hat on it. It was found the next day, still hanging there.
Morrison’s father was in charge of the boathouse. He recalled
51
Bie eae Te: 4
MURDER IN DESPAIR
the direction of South Bay. What she heard sounded like “a
penetrating cry—very short—it seemed to come from a distance.”
Can you illustrate the cry by one or two or three syllables?
Two syllables.
‘What was it, what sort of voice was it?
It was the voice of a woman or a young boy, I should say
the voice of a woman. It was too light to be anything but
a woman’s voice.
Some time after 7:45 that evening, Irving Crego, James Short
and Harold Parker, who were walking on the seven-mile dirt
road that led from Eagle Bay to Big Moose Lake, saw a man
with a suitcase walking rapidly toward the bay. Although Crego
was not sure that Gillette was the man he had seen, there was
no doubt in Short’s mind. The latter remembered that the defen-
dant had been wearing an “old black slouch hat with a wide
brim, and. yellow leggins.” An hour and a half later, Alfred J.
Styles, the purser of the steamboat “Uncas” which was tied up at
Eagle Bay, sold a one-way ticket to Inlet to a man who resembled
Gillette. Although he did not see any suitcase, Styles noticed that
the man had been wearing a black slouch hat and canvas leggings.
Later that night, Albert G. Boshart, who ran the Arrow Head
Inn at Inlet, rented Room 24 to the defendant who signed the
register as Chester Gillette of Cortland, N. Y. He described the
defendant as wearing a “dark suit, black soft hat, brown leggins.”
His new guest told him that he expected to meet some friends
at Seventh Lake on Thursday or Friday. Everett H. Johnson, the
Arrow Head bell boy who inadvertently put Gillette in Room 23
instead of 24, recalled that he had a suitcase with him and that
it was bone dry. 3
The next day, Thursday, Gillette was very much a part of the
inn’s social life. In the afternoon, he accompanied some fellow
guests on a nature walk and, after supper, joined an impromptu
songfest on the piazza. Several young ladies who had been sitting
on the verandah that night saw him in the middle of the piazza
chorus. Minnie F. McDuffy noticed him there but wasn’t sure
that he had participated in the singing. But Gertrude M. Dean
was certain that he occasionally had. |
Q. What was the defendant doing?
A. He sat there with us; he did not sing, except mere snatches
54
POPO
see
Poss
ee
ae
=
Ete
FIRST DEGREE
‘here and there; most of the time he sat apparently listen-
ing. ae.
Q. He did join in song?
A. Very rarely.
Q. Well, did he?
A. Yes, sir, he did. .
The next morning, Bert Gross and Sheriff Klock arrived at
the hotel. When Klock took the defendant to his room to collect
his things, he told him, “You know the girl is drowned as well
‘as I. What did you do this for?” Gillette told him that ‘‘the boat
upset, it was an accident”
Then what did you say?
I asked him if he couldn’t have saved the girl.
What did he say?
He said he couldn’t; he was afraid if she got hold of him,
they would both drown.
When the under-sheriff asked him how it had been possible
to “save the suitcase and lose the girl,” Gillette refused to answer
the question. He freely admitted, however, that Billy had been
pregnant and he had been having sexual relations with her for
about a year. But the drowning had been an accident; he loved
Billy and was going to marry her.
Did he say further about what happened on the lake?
Why, he said she got out on the lake and was picking pond
lilies, the boat tipped over. '
There was something said about the tennis racket?
Yes, he said it must have fallen in the lake.
Did you ask the question as to what caused the boat to
tip?
I did. He said he supposed he was to blame for it.
Did he say anything about an arrangement between him
and the girl?
He said they were to be married.
> PO
» OP OPO oF
The time had come to put the medical evidence into the record.
Five physicians had performed the autopsy in Getman’s mor-
tuary, and Ward paraded them to the stand to hammer home the
thesis that Billy had been beaten to death before being pushed
into the water. The weapon—Chester’s tennis racket which had
55
MURDER IN DESPAIR
seemed like a long time anyway—and I didn’t see her;
then I swam to shore.
This, then, was Chester’s story—Grace had killed herself and he
had panicked and ran away when he realized that she was dead.
Ward poked big holes into Chester’s apologia. If he loved
Billy, as he swore he did, how could he possibly have left her
under fifteen feet of water without telling a soul? Why did he
use pseudonyms until he arrived at Arrow Head and yet so care-
fully register Grace under her own name at the Glenmore? How
did the dead girl’s coat get on top of the overturned boat? Why
did the defendant claim that his tennis racket had gone down
with the ship when it was buried on the Eagle Bay road? If he
was going to marry Grace on Wednesday, why did he make a |
date on the Utica train to meet two other girls at Seventh Lake
the following Thursday or Friday? There just weren't enough
answers and Chester soon gave up trying. .
The long trial drew to an end on December 4th, when, at 4:15
that afternoon, the jury found Chester Gillette guilty of pre-
meditated murder. Without a recommendation of mercy, Judge
Devendorf had no alternative but to impose the death penalty.
On February 18th, 1908, the Court of Appeals affirmed the de-
fendant’s conviction and several weeks later he was electrocuted.
He was never to know that he was to be reborn again in the
pages of a novel that was to give his death a significance his brief
life never had. Perhaps Darrow summed it all up best when he
said, “T have always felt sympathy for all living things... I have
judged none and therefore condemned none. I believe that I have
excused all who are forced to live awhile upon the earth. I am
satisfied that they have done their best with what they had.”
i cca Soames Crs BO ie eS egee
- Murder for Hire
The State of New York.
versus
Charles Becker
The world of Damon Runyon was peopled by some of the
most uniquely named characters in all fiction. In such stories as
“The Idyll of Sarah Brown,” “All Horse Players Die Broke,”
and “The Brain Goes Home,” he delved into the not-so-private
ne lives of such denizens of mid-Manhattan as Harry the Horse, Big
Jule and Nicely Nicely Johnson. If there was ever any doubt that
such monickers were legion in the area which radiated out from
Runyon’s penthouse atop the Hotel Forrest on West Forty-ninth
Street, then step up and meet Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie, Dago ©
Frank and Whitey Lewis who, early on the morning of July 16,
1912, put four slugs into a New York gambler by the name of
Herman Rosenthal in front of the Hotel Metropole.
In 1912, Lieutenant Charles F. Becker was the officer in charge
of the Police Department’s “strong arm squad.” Commissioner
Waldo had ordered Becker to make some sort of an effort to soft-
peddle the gambling houses that operated everywhere in the city.
On April 17th, Becker's squad raided a place on Forty-fifth Street
owned by Herman Rosenthal, much to the chagrin of its portly
proprietor. What made the foray even more objectionable to
Rosenthal was the fact that Becker had been taking handouts
from him for many years and even held a chattel mortgage on
the raided premises. The gambler was not one to let a grievance
simmer and immediately called on Waldo and Mayor Gaynor and
offered to give them proof that Becker was very much a part of
59
I ci A Ba waste
MURDER IN DESPAIR
been found by Sheriff John M. Richards under a log on the
road between Big Moose Lake and Eagle Bay.
Dr. Allison O. Douglas led his colleagues to the stand and de-
scribed in great detail the bruises he had found on the right side
of Grace’s head.
Q. Can you say what caused the condition which you found |
on the right side of the head?
A. External violence.
Q. Can you say whether this violence had been suffered
before the death of the individual or after death?
A. Before death. :
Dr. Douglas was certain that any one of the blows which Grace
had received could have knocked her unconscious.
Q. Can you say whether such an injury in your opinion would
produce insensibility or unconsciousness?
A. It would be very apt +to.
Q. Would it be in your opinion?
A. I think it would.
As for the cause of death, Grace had died “from shock and
concussion resulting from the blow she had received on the head
before immersion; that if immersion did occur during life the
efforts of inspiration were so feeble that the symptons of drown-
ing were lacking.” The autopsy had also revealed the presence
of four-months-old foetus, “probably female.”
If Chester was to have a fighting chance with the stolid Her-
kimer County jury, he would have to convince it that Grace
had not been beaten into insensibility before she entered the wa-
ter. Dr. Douglas and the four medical experts who followed him
to the stand had to contend with attorneys for the defense who
had evidently been doing a lot of homework on the subject of
drowning. :
What did you find when you looked at the eyes of the
dead girl? . :
I found the pupils of the eyes moderately dilated.
Is dilation of the eyes one of the recognized signs of
drowning?
Not necessarily.
Will you answer my question, yes or no?
I believe it is.
Por OP
56
FIRST DEGREE
Q. Did you hear Mr. Getman testify something about a dis-
charge from the nose and mouth, a frothy mucous tinged
somewhat with blood? 4
A. Yes, I did hear that.
Q. That froth is one of the recognized signs of drowning?
A. It may be, yes, sir.
Dr. Douglas grudgingly conceded that there had been some wa-
ter-like fluid in Grace’s lungs and that some people bruise more
easily than others. But, to the end, he and the other prosecution
doctors never wavered from their conviction that Billy had been
a goner before she hit the water.
When Chester Gillette took the long walk from the defense
table to the witness chair, it was quite obvious to everyone in the
stifling courtroom that, unless what he said turned the tide, it
was the beginning of the end. lf the world traveler, the man
about town, couldn’t sell the twelve farmers in the jury box a
plausible story, he was as good as cooked. He did his best. After
- they rented the boat, he and Grace had rowed around the lake,
stopping only to put. the suitcase ashore when a slow leak threat-
ened to soak it.
Q. Then what?
A. We rowed around a short time—well, kind of drifted—
and then well, Grace and I got to talking. I finally said
the best thing we could do would be to get her home and .
tell her father and mother just everything that had oc-
cured. Then she started crying.
She began to cry?
Yes, sir, she said, “Well, you don’t know my father; you
never could tell him.” And then I said “Well, what shall
we do then; we can’t keep up this way?” Then she said
“Well; I will end it here” and she, well, jumped into the
PO
lake; stepped up onto the boat, kind of throwed herself in.’
What did you do? :
I tried to reach her. I went in the lake, too; the boat
tipped over as I started to get up. .
Go on and describe what you did?
Then I. came up; I halloed—grabbed hold of the boat.
Did you see her?
No. I stayed there at the boat but a minute or two—it
57
POPO FL
is
i
by
,
MURDER FOR HIRE
‘Becker and the other conspirators in a Harlem vacant lot, but he
had, fortunately, not heard a word of what was said. The Ar-
kansas traveler was easily persuaded to return to New York: in
exchange for a promise that he wouldn't be prosecuted for his
part in the killing. |
Thirteen days after the shooting, Becker and six other men
were indicted for the gambler’s murder and Governor John A.
Dix, a Republican who recognized a chance to make some poli-
tical hay when he saw one, decided to get Becker tried before
the November elections. He appointed an extraordinary term
of the Supreme Court and barely twelve weeks after Rosenthal’s
funeral, Becker, whose trial had been severed from that of the
other defendants, was brought into the old Criminal Courts
Building to face the stony eyes of Judge John W. Goff who was,
if anything, even more irascible than he had been six years before
when Nan Patterson’s third trial had unfolded before him. Whit-
‘man could hardly have arranged for a more propitious judge.
The District Attorney had no illusions about his case. He knew
that Becker had not killed Rosenthal himself and his hopes of a
conviction rested on the reedy shoulders of four of the shiftiest
witnesses any prosecutor ever had to contend with. Rose, Web-
ber, Vallon and Schepps, who had all been involved in everything
from smuggling opium to white slavery, would have been front
runners in anybody’s rogue’s gallery. If they held up, Becker
was as good as cooked; if they didn’t, Whitman’s political career
had seen its best days.
His first witness was Morris Luban, a hanger-on who earned
a steady if unspectacular living by running errands for his bet-
ters. Luban had been brought to the courtroom from the Essex
County Prison where he was being held on a perjury charge. He
had been in the Metropole on the night of Rosenthal’s sudden
exit. He had watched the gambler leave the hotel and started to
follow him. As he went through the revolving doors, a few steps
behind Rosenthal, he saw “four or five’ men approach him.
All the men had guns but, as he recalled it, only two had fired
as Rosenthal. After the shoting, the gunmen ran across Forty-
third Street and jumped into a gray car which careened off in
the direction of Broadway. Luban identified three of the killers.
Q. Did you know any of the men who fired the guns at hime
62
sritmaorleons.
As Ste
FIRST DEGREE
A. I knew them by sight. I know their names or what names
they are known by. One is Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie,
Whitey Lewis—that is all I know.
But Luban was not on the stand just to tell the court reporter »
-what everyone in New York knew anyway. He was there to put
the scaffolding around Whitman’s theory that Becker had plan-
ned Rosenthal’s murder and then, through Rose, hired some
killers to do the job. In this connection, Luban had heard an
- extremely interesting conversation between Becker and Jack
Rose in a Manhatan Turkish bath several weeks before the
-. murder.
Q. Did you ever see the defendant Becker and a man named
Jack Rose at the Lafayette Baths?
I did. Becker spoke it.
Give us the words that Becker used.
Becker said, “If that son of a bitch Rosenthal is not
croaked, I will croak him myself.”
Luban was far from the only witness to what must have been
one of the most public shootings in New York’s history. Jacob
Hecht, a Metropole waiter, also had watched Rosenthal leave
the lobby that night; then he heard a shot and ducked beneath
a table. When he looked up again, he saw Rosenthal falling to
the sidewalk and five men with guns in their hands running for
a waiting automobile. |
Hecht could not identify any of the men he had seen but,
Louis Krause, another member of the table-tending fraternity,
who had been walking on the north side of Forty-third Street,
was certain that he could recognize three of them. He said that he
had seen “four men shooting—shooting at the man who came out
of the Metropole, the second man who came out of the Metropole.
I saw two men come out; one man came out and gave a signal.
I saw four pistols; a pistol in the hands of each of these men. I
63
A... Yés, sir. :
Q. How long was it prior to the shooting of Rosenthal?
A. About two or three weeks.
Q. Did you hear any words spoken between them?
A. Yes, sir. ;
Q. Did you hear the name of Rosenthal mentioned in that
conversation?
A.
Q.
A.
MURDER FOR HIRE
the New York gambling scene. They gave him short shrift and
he then turned his attention to Charles S. Whitman, the ambi-
tious District Attorney of New York County.
Whitman exhibited a lively interest in Rosenthal’s story but
insisted on something more concrete than the gambler’s claims
that he had been doublecrossed. Before going to see Whitman,
Rosenthal had been trying to persuade the New York World to
publish an affidavit in which he promised to expose Becker's role
in the gambling complex that existed under the benevolent lead-
ership of Tammany’s Boss Charles -F. Murphy. Finally, on Sat-
urday, July 13th, the World announced that it would print
-Rosenthal’s affidavit in its Sunday edition. Late on the 13th,
Whitman issued subpoenas to Rosenthal and other prominent
gamblers to testify before the grand jury the following Tuesday.
During most of Saturday evening, Becker was busy trying to con-
vince the World that it ought to kill the story and even went so
far as to make a midnight visit to its editorial offices where he
renewed his pleas that Rosenthal’s affidavit be withdrawn.
His efforts were unsuccessful. On Sunday morning, everybody
in New York was reading Rosenthal’s confessional over their
breakfast coffee. As the edition hit the Streets, Becker and his
lawyer were busy planning a swift counter-attack and had talked
the Morning Telegraph into printing an affidavit of Dora Gilbert,
Rosenthal’s first wife (there were rumors that the alliance had -
not been entirely legal) , which would show that her ex-husband
was New York’s prize heel and wholly unworthy of belief. There
was also talk that the policeman was planning libel actions
against everyone concerned with the World story, a threat he in-
serted in a statement about the Rosenthal affidavit which the
newspaper published the next day.
Becker must have worn a path between police headquarters
and the World’s morgue on Monday because he was there on
at least three different occasions, borrowing and returning clip-
ping files. He was last seen leaving the newspaper’s offices late
Monday night after bringing back some clips on Rosenthal
which he had picked up earlier that day. Meanwhile, Rosenthal
was circulating around town and arrived at the Hotel Metro-
pole’s cafe, one of his favorite haunts, just before midnight. At
2 a.m., he strolled through the lobby, bought a cigar at the front
60
FIRST DEGREE
desk, and then walked through the revolving doors onto Forty-.
third Street. As he emerged, four men, who had obviously been
waiting for him, fired a number of bullets (the coroner found
four) into his body and then escaped in a cab that was waiting
for them across the street. a
Rosenthal was quite dead before his plump body hit the pave-
ment. Despite the fact that the area was liberally saturated with
policemen, the killers experienced no difficulty in getting away.
Whitman was as blunt as he was bitter. “I charge that the police
permitted the murder and allowed the murderer to escape,” he
told reporters. ““There were five policemen there—one of them
only ten or twelve feet away—when this crime was committed.
Others were twenty feet away, but not one of them attempted to
draw his revolver or do anything that a policeman would do un-
der the circumstances.”
But the sharp eyes of a bystander, who had jotted down the
license number of the getaway car, saved the day for the district .
attorney. The day after the shooting, its owner—one William
Shapiro—was picked up in a downtown garage and held as a~
material witness. Evidently, the Tombs didn’t agree with Shapiro
and he began to spill everything he knew about the crime-almost
as soon as the cell door closed behind him. He identified “Baldy”
Jack Rose, one of Becker’s collectors, as the man who had hired
him. Rose immediately surrendered and told Whitman that
Becker had ordered him to dispose of Rosenthal and that, with
the help of two old friends, Louis Webber and Harry Vallon,
he had made the necessary arrangements. Two days later, Webber
and Vallon were picked up.
Whitman promised Rose, Webber and Vallon immunity if they -
would testify against Becker. The trio were only too happy to
avail themselves of this generous offer. As Webber reportedly put
it, “How badly do they want Becker? We'll give them Becker.”
But since all of his songbirds were classed as conspirators, Whit-
man urgently needed the corroborative testimony of someone who
had not participated in the various meetings and conferences that
preceded the assassination. He found his man in Sam Schepps,
one of Rose's satellites, who had left New York two days after
the murder for the safer climate of Hot Springs. Schepps, Rose
told Whitman, had been present at the key meeting between
61
hinge sare
MURDER FOR HIRE
saw these pistols pointed at Rosenthal.” He identified three of
these men as Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louie and Dago Frank.
An off-duty policeman named William J..File had been eating
a late supper in the Metropole restaurant. When he heard what
he thought were four shots, he left the restaurant and ran to the
street where he saw two men climbing into a gray car on the
south side of Forty-third Street. When he first saw the car, it was
abet two hundred feet away, diagonally across the street el he
didn’t recognize either man. By the time he picid wbented an-
other car and started after the gunmen’s automobile, they were
out of sight. John J. Brady, a traffic patrolman on ducy in the
center of Times Square, also heard the shots (he said there were
five) and ran to the Metropole. He saw Rosenthal lying on his
naa under the hotel’s marquee. He could feel no lise ox heart-
eet ane placed the gambler’s silk handkerchief over the dead
man’s face. Talkative Herman was quiet at last.
John Spanech, who lived at the Royalton Hotel around the
corner on Forty-fourth Street, had been standing near the Cadil-
oi mene abt which was about forty feet down the block from
the Metropole. Whenhe heard the first shot, he was facing away
from the hotel. As he turned towards the Metropole, he enw fout
men around Rosenthal and he thought that he heard five differ-
ent shots. He was certain that one of the men had been Whitey
Lewis but he was unable to identify any of the others Thomas
Ryan, a chauffeur who had been about fifteen feet awa from the
Metropole entrance, had seen the shooting but could : identi
any of the murderers. ne
Jack Rose was by all odds Whitman’s most significant witness
Luban had supplied the inference that Becker was not vety
fond of Rosenthal, and Rose was there to pinpoint the extent f
the defendant’s animosity. He testified that Becker had sat
tacted him about getting rid of Rosenthal shortly after the A il
17th raid on the Forty-fifth Street place. ey
Q. Prior to the killing of Rosenthal, had Becker spoken to
you about him?
A. I had several conversations with Becker about Rosenthal
He said, “Rosenthal was going to the District Attorney ahd
he means to stop me if he can a
nd I must st im.”
Q. What else did he say? ee
64
Mewes
Pee ae
FIRST DEGREE
A. “There is only one thing to do with a fellow like Rosen-
thal and just stop him so that he will not bother any one
for all time.” I said, “What do you mean?” and he said,
“Well, there is a fellow that ought to be put off the
earth.” , ie
What was the date of this conversation?
Sometime between the 20th and 22nd of June. I made
the necessary arrangements and I told Becker that night
that he could expect any day now to read the papers and
find that Rosenthal had been found murdered and he
said, “I hope so.” : .
That same night, Rose went to see Whitey Lewis and Lefty
Louie, two gunmen who had done some jobs for him in the past,
in their Southern Boulevard apartment. There he told them that
“Becker said if they would agree to get rid of Rosenthal and
silence him so that he won't cause any further annoyance OF
trouble for Becker that then and only then would they be safe
to appear on the streets or downtown.” The two gunmen, who
had been involved in a shooting in Chinatown early in June, had
been kept off the streets by the police and were more than will-
ing to cooperate with Becker: As an extra inducement, Rose prom-
ised them $1,000.00, payable post obit.
When they told Rose that they would “do anything you or
Becker wants us to do,” he informed them that “there is only
one thing Becker wants and that is he wants Rosenthal put out
of the way. I will come here some night and get you and bring
you down where Rosenthal is and then you will do this.” But
the killers insisted on one condition—that a friend named Jack
Zelig, who was being held on $10,000 bail because of the China-
town affair, be liberated. On July 2nd, Rose raised the money
and Zelig (who was soon to be shot and killed by an erstwhile
friend) was released.
Just before Zelig’s release, Lefty Louie and Whitey Lewis left
their apartment and moved into a flat at 2529 Seventh Avenue
shared by two colleagues, Dago Frank and Gyp the Blood, who
had agreed to add their talents to the murder. Rose visited the
foursome there and “told them that Rosenthal was growing more
determined in his threats to expose Becker and that Becker was
all the time asking when those fellows were going to do the
65
Po
MURDER FOR HIRE
as soon as he heard the news and that the defendant said, “I con-
gratulate you.” Webber met the now thoroughly satisfied lieu-
tenant at four o’clock that morning, and he heard him say to
Rose, “Well, I congratulate you, Jack, on the good job.”
The gunmen holed up for the rest of the night at their Seventh
Avenue flat. At 7:30 the next morning when Schepps called on
them, they told him he’d better get them their money before
nightfall. Schepps made an appointment for Rose to meet Lefty
Louie and Dago Frank at 2:30 that afternoon.
Q. What happened? ae
A. Later in the day, I saw Lefty Louie and Dago Frank at
Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue. I saw a small package of
money passed to Rose by Webber. He passed it to Lefty
Louie. i
The package contained $1,000.00. After receiving it, the four
murderers split up, with everyone but Dago Frank leaving town.
They all were rounded up after the indictment against Becker ~
had been voted by the grand jury and later sentenced to death
for their part in the crime.
On July 18th, Schepps visited Becker at his apartment. He
said that the defendant asked him, “ ‘which of the four killed
Rosenthal?’ I said I don’t know. He says, ‘Well, it makes no dif-
ference; they have got to prove which bullet killed Rosenthal
before they can convict anyone of them’.’”” When Schepps took
out a cigarette, Becker seized his arms and said, “Don’t light that
match here; there is somebody across the street watching the
apartment and if they see a light they may suspect something.
They have been tailing me all over the past four days.” After
assuring the officer that the money had been paid over to the
four killers, Schepps said goodby and left. Several hours later,
Becker was arrested and charged with Rosenthal’s murder.
Despite Judge Goff’s open hostility toward Becker, his attor-
neys succeeded in spreading the sailent features of his defense
upon the record. In the main, they contended that the New York
gambling community had as much reason for getting rid of
Rosenthal as did the defendant. In fact, the Sunday before the
murder, the Sam Paul Association, a loose confederacy of pro-
fessional poker players, had charted a boat for an all-day ride up
the Hudson. Among the four hundred lightfingered gentlemen
BP a tans hg
be Ape 0k la
<a, RRNA “ann sncennaesnone
FIRST DEGREE
who spent the day shuffling cards to Indian Point and back were
Rose, Vallon, Webber and Schepps.
Rosenthal’s affidavit, which had appeared in the World that
morning, was undoubtedly the chief subject of conversation
aboard the floating card parlor. Webber remembered that “‘every-
body discussed the squealing of Rosenthal.” When the boat
returned to New York that evening, Rose said that he tele-
phoned Becker and told him that his brethren were very much
disturbed by the gambler’s “squeal” and that perhaps someone
else might assume the burden of liquidating him. But Becker
told him to go through with the murder as planned because “it
will look like the gamblers did it on account of his threatened
squeal.”
“There was also evidence that Rosenthal had been engaged in
activities which adversely affected some of the conspirators them-
selves. Webber, for example, admitted that he and Rosenthal
“had been unfriendly for three or four years” because the latter
used to borrow money from him and never repay it. Schepps had
complained that “Rosenthal used to steal other fellow’s girls in
the white slave traffic.” Rose, when he heard that the dead man
was threatening to expose Becker, was reported to have stated
that “the squealer should be put out of the way.”
And if Herman was out of the way, why not pin the job on
Becker who had been milking the underworld for years? Rose
could hardly object to this since Becker had closed his place in
1911 and forced him to collect his tithes for him. There probably
wasn’t a gambler in the Tenderloin who wouldn’t have given a
month’s take to get the insatiable lieutenant’s hand out of his
pocket.
But there was even a more fundamental reason for feeding
Becker to Whitman. For Rose, Vallon, Webber and Schepps, he
represented their only hope to escape the electric chair them-
selves and the defense consistently hammered away on the theme
‘that their testimony might have been influenced by Whitman's
promise of immunity. Rose frankly admitted that he was testify-
ing to save his own life. Vallon was supposed to have told a fellow.
inmate at the Fifty-third Street Jail that Becker had nothing to do
with the murder but that he had “to frame it on him in order
to get out.” The cross-examination of Webber was typical.
er igh to
Be aia i Ne
68 69
manana at aries oo 0 ~ nt
¥
sceemeneie eee
MURDER FOR HIRE
Q. Is it your object in testifying against the defendant to
obtain immunity?
A. I have been promised protection. es
Q. Would you tell a falsehood to get out of your present
predicament? ;
A. No, sir.
Q. You would not tell a falsehood?
A. No, sir.
To buttress Becker's insistence that he was being framed, his
attorneys called Jacob Reich who was, for some unaccountable
reason, also known as Jack Sullivan. He had been mentioned by
both Rose and Webber as having been present in front of the
latter’s gambling room when Becker arrived early on the morn-
ing of Rosenthal’s murder to discuss the method of paying the
killers. Two weeks later; he had been picked up by the police
and taken to the Tombs where he had a conversation with Jack
Rose in the Counsel Room.
Q. Did he say that Vallon and Webber had the chair fac-
ing them and that they wanted to implicate Becker? It was
their only chance to beat it?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did you say in that Counsel Room “Who are you going
to squeal on?” and did he say to you that they were going
to squeal on Becker?
A. He told me that he was going to frame Becker.
Q. What else was said?
A. When I was in the West Side Prison, Webber said to me,
“You had better come in and get immunity.”
Judge Goff gave the case to the jury at 5:45 on the evening
of October 24th. After deliberating for six hours, it announced
that it had found the defendant guilty of murder in the first
degree and the judge, with what reporters described as ‘‘unmis-
takable delight,” immediately sentenced him to die in the Sing
Sing electric chair. But on February 24, 1914, the Court of Ap-
peals reversed his conviction and ordered a new trial.
The appellate court was convinced that Goff’s undisguisable
antagonism toward Becker had prevented a fair trial. It didn’t
mince words. “Under the rulings of the court, the defendant dic
not have that manner of trial which the law guaranteed to him.
7O
AAR:
‘trip to Harlem as the prosecution's wit
FIRST DEGREE
e was dis-
. | embarrassed; his cas ;
His counsel was hampered and ; SLT RG
credited and weakened; full and impartial nee bee ee
peded and prevented. He never had a fair chance to deten
¢ i i r these
~~ life and it would be a lasting reproach to the state if oo
i ances it should exact its forfeiture.” oe :
es important, Whitman had not called me sa
who had driven the conspirators to the Farle wee : aa
had been identified by Benes : eee a : . gees
the trial, it was determined by john W. :
lawyers, that these drivers were, in cath harcore Ne
Isidor Schoenhaus, two partners who ra gpanal ste
Fourteenth Street. Rose, Vallon and Schepps had employ
chest almost daily since April of 1912. Cohen and ee
each submitted an affidavit that they seapeag clr graser iat i
that, although they had told a 7 ae Whitman’s assis-
had never been called at the trial.
ees second trial, Rose, Vallon and Webber ee
the stand and told much the same stories as eae
three years before. However, Schepps had been rep lace | ee
new witnesses to corroborate the conspirators rears we
Marshall, one of Becker’s stool pigeons, swore that he hac pat
Rose at the Harlem conference. Deputy ue noe a :
George A. Dougherty testified that he had been fa See a5
Becker on July 18th that he hadn't seen or heard os —
the Thursday or Friday before the murder. Charles “ son
former close friend of Becker's, was warned by the po aes
to stay away from Times Square on the night of gna ae
Marshall stated that he had been with Becker t ee
a raid on a gambling house in the neighborhood of 124t : sod
and Seventh Avenue. He was a young colored agin! ie
used by Becker to point out the location of Siew = ig os
At the first trial, Vallon had said, “Lieut. Becker told us bes
going to raid a crap game that night, and aq eee on
colored boy on the other side of the street, and oe eae
over and spoke to him. We stepped aside, Rose and |, =
the time he got finished talking to this boy Webber eit nee
_ Dougherty, who was Becker's superior officer, ha pra oae
him two days after the killing as to his knowledge o
71
MURDER FOR HIRE
job ... Becker wanted to know the cause of this long delay, par-
ticularly now that Zelig was out on bail.” The gunmen assured
Rose that they would pick Rosenthal off at the Garden res-
taurant on July 12th but this plan was called off when they
thought they were being watched too closely by the police. Fi-
nally, on July 16th, the killer quartet hit pay dirt in front of the
Metropole.
_ It was Whitman’s theory that the plans for the murder were _
formulated by Becker in a vacant lot in Harlem on the night of
June 27th. The meeting was called because Becker had been
growing increasingly impatient over Rose’s failure to liquidate
Rosenthal.
Q. What happened then?
A. We arrived at 124th Street and Seventh Avenue. We all
stood in the vacant lot, talking about Rosenthal.
Q. When you say we, who do you mean?
A. Becker, Webber, myself, .and two friends of mine named
Schepps and Vallon. |
“Bridgey” Webber, who claimed, with some degree of pride,
that “I have been a gambler for practically all my life,” dis-
tinctly remembered the vacant lot convocation. According to
him, Becker had pleaded with him, “Bridgey, who don’t you
speak to the boys and see that this son of a bitch Rosenthal is
croaked?” Webber assured him that “if you feel that way about it,
I will do it for you.” As Vallon recalled it, Becker said, ‘““Well, it
looks as if that son of a bitch Rosenthal is going the limit. He is
trying to see the Mayor and now he has gone to the District At-
_torney. Now the bum is going to be croaked.” Rose then assured
the police lieutenant, “Now, Charlie, leave that to me. I'll take
care of it." Schepps didn’t hear what went on in the lot because
he was busy talking to the chauffeurs who had driven the group
there and whose names, he thought, were Itch and Moe Levy.
But, despite the Harlem rally, things moved as slowly as ever.
Rose exhorted his four assassins to get rid of Rosenthal as soon
as posible and he was always promised swift action. For three
weeks, he commuted back and forth between Becker and the
gunmen with money, threats and pleas. At the trial, he claimed
that the real reason for the delay was that he tried to postpone
and, if possible, avoid Rosenthal’s murder. “I was betwen two
66
iS
a
-
a
=
*
a
ee
ae, ee
_ were at Sharkey’s saloon on Fourteent
FIRST DEGREE
“Becker on one hand and the gunmen
’* he told the court,
ni ’s pressure became more than he
on the other.” Finally, Becker sa
could take and the murderers were unleashee..
Webber ran a poker room at Forty-second Street and Sixth
Schepps
i cht of July 15th, Rose, Vallon and
ee eee ed h Street. Shortly after mid-
eft his taxi stand at Second Avenue and Tenth
~ 7 ] :
night, Shapiro ate at Sharkey’s. He drove them
Street and picked up the triumvir Rate 3
to 2529 Seventh Avenue where Dago Frank was waiting.
the four men went to Webber's poker room where prea ae
Lefty Louie, Whitey Lewis and Gyp the Blood sitting in : eS
way. Webber, who had been selected as the finger ws
room and circulated around the Times Square area until :
cated Rosenthal in the Metropole. He came back “to my P. RS
where the boys were waiting and I said that Rosenthal was : ae
Metropole. With that five or six people left. They figs ahd
Louie, Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis and somebody
aes wajted in the car across the street from Asus ed
his motor idling. At 1:30 a.m., Rose and the killers wit
runyonesque names got. into the car and ordered him eS a
around to Forty-third Street. The chauffeur drove to Sixth ve
nue and then turned west on Forty-third Street. Rose directe
him to stop near Cohen's theatre, which was across gee
from the Metropole, and Dago Frank & Company left t : -
and walked toward the hotel entrance. Fifteen sea es
Shapiro heard three or four shots. Then his passengers oe
back into the cab and Gyp the Blood put a gun to his heac =
shouted, “Hurry up, you boob, drive away!” Shapiro drove . °
north to 126th Street where they got out and told him to go bac
< stand. .
Oe aie. who had waited in his room, heard the shots and ea
strolled nonchalantly over to the Metropole. As he — : :
the hotel entrance, he gazed at Rosenthal’s body around w =
a crowd was forming. Schepps left the room shortly before bee
ber, drank a soda at the Times Square Building and then he € |
toward the Metropole. There he met Vallon who said, “They
j i is i lace for us.” Schepps promptly
just killed Rosenthal, this is no p te ip
agreed and went home to bed. Rose said he tele
67
10
Murder at a Premium
The People of the State of New York
versus
Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray
The recent trials in Los Angeles of Dr. R. Bernard Finch and
his mistress, Carole Tregoff Pappa, for the murder of the doc-
tor’s wife, Barbara Jean, revealed once more that an unhappy
marriage is sometimes a prelude to tragedy. During any one year,
the newspapers are filled with similar stories, all of which have
the common denominator of three people compressed into a
space that can safely be occupied by only two. Too often, the
answer is violent substraction and the public is treated to the
type of trial that makes newspaper editors forget their circulation
problems.
In 1915, twenty-year-old Ruth Brown was a secretary in the
office of Albert Schneider, the art editor of Motor Boating Mag-
azine. Schneider, who was twelve years older than Ruth, proposed
to her that year and she promptly accepted. After the birth of
their daughter, Lorraine, three years later, the couple bought a
modest two-story house on the corner of Madison and Spruce
Streets in Queens Village, New York. A few months later, Mrs.
Schneider's mother moved in with her daughter and son-in-law
and was given a second floor bedroom. For the next ten years, the
family led an apparently happy if unexciting life with Ruth
devoted to raising her daughter, and Albert contented with his
work and constructing model ships in the basement. Sometime
during this period, Ruth convinced her husband to change his
name to Snyder because of the anti-German feeling that per-
sisted after World War I.
126
FIRST DEGREE
As the years wore on, Snyder, who was a quiet retiring man,
became more and more preoccupied with rigging his model ships
while his high-strung Nordic wife began to tire of her réle as a .
suburban housewife. In April or May of 1925, her ennui seemed
to dissipate when she met a dapper thirty-two-year-old corset
salesman from East Orange, N. J., named Henry Judd Gray, in
a New York restaurant. Although Gray professed to be happily
married, he was obviously as bored with his home life as Ruth
was with her own, and the couple soon began to meet regularly
in the city. It wasn’t long before they transferred their rendez-
vous from restaurants to hotel rooms, and eventually rented a
suite on a more or less permanent basis in the Waldorf-Astoria
where, in a flush of indiscretion, they registered as Mr. and Mrs.
H. Judd Gray. By February of 1927, Ruth and Gray, whose
friends referred to him as Judd, had stayed so often at the hotel
that they were known to its employees as Mr. and Mrs. Gray.
As far as Albert was concerned, his wife was spending her nights
away from home with a girl friend in the city.
Ruth soon began to confess to her lover that she was thoroughly
dissatisfied with her life with her phlegmatic husband. So dis-
satisfied in fact, that she had tried to kill him six or seven times
She had poisoned his highballs and his cough syrup with no
permanent effects. Once, when she had found him sleeping on
the living room sofa, she had turned on one of the gas stove
burners and blithely gone shopping. When she returned, she dis-
covered to her dismay that Snyder had awakened shortly after
she left and turned off the jet. She had even tried to drug him
when he was repairing the family sedan in the garage, but he
managed to open the door which she had so carefully closed,
after bringing him a doctored drink, before the carbon monoxide
| fumes could solve his wife’s little problem.
Snyder was either oblivious of Ruth’s Medici-like attentions,
or he regarded her homicidal efforts as a kind of challenge to
his will to survive. Gray, on the other hand, was shocked at his
paramour’s deadly determination to rid herself of poor old Al-
bert, and suggested that she turn to Christian Science as an anti-
dote to her dreams of gory But nothing he could say had any
. effect on her, especially after she took out.two insurance policies
on her husband’s life in early 1927, policies which would pay
127
MURDER AT A PREMIUM
the crime and that she had played the major rdéle in its com-
mission.
_ The star-crossed lovers were swiftly indicted for murder in
the first degree, and their joint trial began on April 18th, 1927,
in the Queens County Supreme Court before Justice Townsend
Scudder, an avowed opponent of capital punishment. Both de-
fendants were represented by different attorneys, and it was ob-
vious, as soon as the trial began, that Ruth and Judd were each
going to try to prove that the other was the more guilty party. In
his confession, Gray had blamed Ruth for luring him into the
murder plot, and insisted that she had given her husband the
coup de grace. “I think it was in November or December of 1926,”
he told the police, ‘that she spoke about increasing the insurance
on her husband’s life.”
After she had arranged for the policies, she began to harass
Judd with complaints about her unhappy marriage. “As the thing
kept growing,” he said, “she made several attempts on his life.
I think in two instances she gave him sleeping powders and
turned on the gas. I think that she gave him bichloride of mer-
cury at a time he was sick with hiccoughs.” Then, she told him
that she had worked out a sure-fire plan of operation that in-
volved chloroform and a sash weight. At first, he refused to
help her but “she got me in such a whirl that I didn’t know
where I was at... I was in a literal hell.” Finally, he agreed
to buy the articles she needed, and to meet her at the Queens
Village house on the night of March 19th.
When he got there, he waited in Mrs. Brown's room for the
family to return home from Hollis. He had almost finished the
bottle of whiskey Ruth had thoughtfully left for him when he
heard the Snyder’s car in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later,
she whispered his name, and he opened Mrs. Brown’s docr and
stepped into the darkened hallway. Ruth was standing there
in her nightgown, looking for all the world like a dowdy Lady
Macbeth. “I followed her to the bedroom and it was I that hit
him the first blow with this window weight. He started to fight
me and she got very much excited. I scarcely knew what did
happen for a short time and she must have finished him off.”
At her suggestion, he ransacked the house to make it appear
that burglars had been responsible for the murder and then
130
FIRST DEGREE
took a taxi to Grand Central Station to make the 8:45 to Sy-
racuse. The cab driver remembered him well because of a five-
cent tip on a $3.50 méter.
Ruth, on the other hand, insisted that Judd had master-
minded the murder while she had merely been a helpless tool
in the grip of a misplaced love. It was he, she explained, who”
had persuaded her to plan her husband's death. “I had another
argument with my husband and he said he was going to blow
my brains out. I wrote to Mr. Gray and he wrote back to me,
in a code which only we two understood, that it was better for
us to get rid of my husband before he got me.” According to
the plan which he outlined, the hard-to-kill Albert was to be
knocked unconscious and then chloroformed to death. Then,
Judd was to tie Ruth up and disarrange the furniture so that the
police would be convinced that Snyder had been murdered by a
burglar. To identify the nationality of the thief, an Italian
language newspaper would be left in a conspicuous place.
After one date had been set and abandoned, Judd decided
that March 19th would be a propitious time. As Ruth remem-
bered it, “I received a letter on March 19th from Mr. Gray stat-
ing that he would be at my house that evening about 11:30 p.m.
for the purpose of getting rid of my husband.” Judd arrived and
found the sash weight, the chloroform and the bottle of whiskey
which he had instructed his collaborator to hide under her
mother’s pillow. Ruth would never forget what happened after
her husband fell asleep that night. “In the darkness I could see
Mr. Gray raise his arm holding the sash weight. I saw this weight
in Mr. Gray's hand travel and immediately heard a thud, and my
husband groaned twice after I heard the thud.” Ruth concluded
her statement with the observation that “if my husband hadn't
said that he would take my life, we would not have thought of
taking his ... but after talking it over a number of times with
Mr. Gray, we decided the only way out was to take his life.”
With these statements in his possession, Richard S. Newcombe,
the District Attorney of Queens County, had very little to do
except to let the defendants attempt to convict each other. He
went through the necessary formalities of having the body iden-
tified by Snyder’s brother and establishing the cause of death as
“asphyxiation due to strangulation.” Joseph M. Farrell, the of-
131
MURDER AT A PREMIUM
her almost one hundred thousand dollars if his death was ‘some-
thing less than natural.
It wasn’t long after these policies had been issued, that Ruth
began to plan in earnest for their imminent capitalization. She
plagued Judd with pleas to assist her in disposing of Albert,
and he, after urging her once more to seek her peace in religion,
agreed to lend a hand or two. March 7th was selected as the day
on which Snyder was to be shuffled off this mortal coil with the
_ aid of a sash weight and some chloroform, all of which Judd
promised to procure. He purchased the required items in Kings-
ton, New York, on March 4th, during one of his swings around
the hinterland, and delivered them to Ruth in a Manhattan res-
taurant the following day. Because Lorraine was with her mother,
Gray wrapped the bottle of chloroform and the weight in, ap-
propriately enough, a new corset, and passed the parcel to Ruth
under the table.
For some reason, March 7th did not prove to be suitable and,
since Gray was to begin a two-week selling trip the next day,
the couple revised their schedule and picked the night of Sat-
urday, March 19th, for the murder. On the afternoon of that day,
Gray, who was taking corset orders in Syracuse, boarded the
Empire State Express and arrived at Grand Central Terminal
at 10:10 p.m. He went immediately to the Snyder home, and
entered by a side door which his paramour had obligingly left
open for him. The house was empty, as the Snyders and their
daughter were visiting friends by the name of Fidgeon in Hollis,
Long Island, and Mrs. Snyder’s mother, Mrs. Brown, who was a
practical nurse, was on all-night duty in Kew Gardens. Mrs.
Snyder had hidden the sash weight and the chloroform, to-
gether with a bottle of whiskey, under a pillow in her mother’s
room where Gray nervously awaited the family’s return.
At the Fidgeons, Ruth saw to it that her husband drank
heavily and he became so intoxicated that he accused one of
the other guests of stealing his wallet. This resulted in an alter-
cation that led to Albert: being asked to repeat the remark out
of the presence of the ladies, a challenge that was to go un-
answered. The Snyders left Hollis just before two a.m. and, after
they arrived home, Ruth put Lorraine to bed while her husband
was garaging the car. Snyder fell into a drunken stupor as soon
128
OO tal Mima
FIRST DEGREE
as he got into bed and, a few minutes later, his skull was battered
in by the sash weight, a pillow soaked with chloroform was
placed over his head, cotton waste was stuffed into his mouth
and nostrils, and a curtain wire was wound tightly about his
neck. Needless to say, the combination proved fatal, even to a
man of Mr. Snyder’s proven resistance. 7
As soon as he was dead, the plotters scattered some Italian
newspapers around the living room and disarranged the furni-
ture. Gray then tied Ruth’s hands and feet, changed his blood-
stained shirt for one of Snyder’s, and returned to the railroad
station where he caught the early morning train for Syracuse.
After he had left the house, ‘Mrs. Snyder screamed, awakening
her daughter, who ran next door and asked neighbors to notify
the police. When the officers arrived, Mrs. Snyder said that
swarthy burglars with foreign accents (shades of Sacco and Van-
zetti) had broken into the house, killed her husband, and tied
her up. She had been so frightened by the intruders, she claimed,
that she had fainted. As soon as she regained consciousness,
which was several hours after the murder, she had began to
scream until her daughter came downstairs. :
There wereso many discrepancies in her story that the police
refused to swallow it. Why weren't there any signs of a forcible
entry? Why was Mrs. Snyder tied so lighly that she was able to
free her feet without any trouble? Why didn’t she call for her
husband, instead of her daughter, when she recovered conscious-
ness? Why did the burglers leave behind such tempting prizes as
Mrs. Snyder’s jewelry and her fur coat? When a freshly scrubbed
sashweight was found hidden in the basement coal bin, the
brand new widow was invited to continue her discussion with
the police at the neighborhood precinct house.
Finally, after more than thirty hours of questioning, she broke
down and confessed that she and Gray had murdered her hus-
band. But, she insisted that Judd had planned the crime and
that it had been he who actually killed Snyder. Since Gray had
returned to Syracuse, detectives arrested him there on March 2lst
and brought him back to New York. At first, he claimed that he
had been in Syracuse on the night of the murder, but soon admit-
ted that he had participated in Snyder’s demise. However, he
maintained that Mrs. Snyder had been the moving force behind
129
ee
~ RAC RYT RT PILE TT RTT aE.
MURDER FOR HIRE
whereabouts. Becker denied knowing where Rose was although,
less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had sent his lawyer to the
house where Baldy was hiding with an affidavit for him to sign
exonerating the defendant from any connection with Rosenthal’s
gambling houses. Despite this, Becker swore that he hadn’t seen
or heard from Rose since July 11th.
Plitt, who was a reporter for the Morning Telegraph, met
Becker the day before the murder. Becker asked him to go to
Dora Gilbert’s and get the affidavit about her ex-husband which
she was in the process of preparing. Then he told Plitt: “Just
as soon as you have this affidavit signed and sworn to, leave the
bunch. Remember who you meet tonight and where you were.
You had better make a memorandum as to your movements, so
as to be able to prove an alibi; and above all things, keep away
from Times Square tonight, and keep that under your belt.”
When Plitt, good newspaperman that he was, wanted to know
the reason behind this warning, Becker replied, “Do as you are
told.” Plitt asked him, “Is it about Herman?” and the police
officer said, “Perhaps. Never mind. Do as you are told. Be sure
to prove an alibi; you will learn more tomorrow, and will then
understand.”
Although the state did not call the chauffeurs who were sup- —
posed to have driven Rose, Schepps and Vallon to the Harlem
meeting, neither did the defense. The jury was apparently con-
vinced that Becker had been at that conference and that Rosen-
thal’s murder had been plotted there because it found him guilty
for the second time. Again, he was sentenced to death but this
time there was no relief coming from the Court of Appeals.
On May 25, 1915, it affirmed his conviction and he was trans-
ferred to the Death House at Sing Sing. A plea for executive
clemency was turned down by the new Governor, Charles S.
Whitman, who could hardly be expected to let his biggest fish
off the line. The day before he died on July 30, 1915, Becker
told the warden, “Sure, I told them to put Rosenthal out of the
way, but I didn’t mean they should kill him. I wanted them to
get him out of town so he wouldn’t blab. Killing him was Rose’s
idea and the others. They wanted to save their own skins.”
When he was executed, the lights throughout the prison grew
dim for the last time. After his death, a separate dynamo was
72
santa
er a ea
‘a
m4
ee
es
en
ny ARE abe RAO AEE
Sh are ae f
* + : _ A
FIRST DEGREE
installed to service the electric chair and it was no longer ee
for Ossining residents to tell when an execution was taking p . é
A year before, the Sing Sing lights had dimmed four times . .
row when Jacob Seidensher, Frank Cirofici, Louis eae f :
and Harry Horowitz, otherwise known as Whitey paicis -
Frank, Lefty Louie and Gyp the Blood, followed each other
Ce ae night of November 4, 1928, a little more than oon
years after Rosenthal’s murder, Arnold Rothstein, another ; .
hattan gambler, left Lindy’s Restaurant. Twenty ser ai
his bleeding body was found in a doorway of the Park Gen
Hotel. This time, there were no witnesses—and no convictions.
The Becker case had taught someone a lesson.
73
13
Murder for Silence
The People of the State of New York
versus
Louis Buchalter
In 1935, Governor Herbert H. Lehman appointed an extraordi-
nary Special and Trial Term of the Supreme Court to look into
New York City racketeering. Thomas E. Dewey was named
Special Prosecutor and a new era.in the investigation of organized
crime was underway. Before it ended, it was to see the end of
more than a dozen major criminals, not the least of whom was
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.
Four years after Dewey’s appointment, William O'Dwyer was
elected District Attorney of Kings County. Brooklyn was the head-
quarters of Murder, Inc., a loosely organized but highly effective
group of assassins for hire who promised quick, efficient and per-
manent results. Rumor had it that one of its major stockholders
was Louis Buchalter who, under the name of Lepke, had his
manicured hands on the throat of almost every legitimate busi-
nessman in New York. In 1935, Dewey had accused him and his
_ partner, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, of controlling all the major
rackets in the metropolitan area and, if the Special Prosecutor
exaggerated at all, he wasn’t very far from the truth. O’Dwyer
was more than aware that the man who succeeded in convicting
Lepke might well be the next Mayor of New York.
In 1931, Buchalter had taken over Local No. 4 of the Cutters
Union of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Max
Rubin, who was instrumental in helping him obtain control,
was a member of the local’s financial committee and on its ex-
ecutive board. He was also the business agent of the Clothing
162
ia
Ss
MURDER FOR SILENCE
Drivers and Helpers Union, an affiliate of Amalgamated. In 1932,
Lepke ordered Rubin to stop all trucks which delivered clothing
. in and out of the city. As a result of this stoppage, the New York
& New Jersey Transportation Company, which was owned by a
Joseph Rosen, was forced out of business.
_ Rosen complained to Rubin that something had to be done
for him, or his family would starve. When Rubin reported this
conversation to Buchalter, he was told that Louis Cocper, who
controlled the Garfield Express Company, had a job for Rosen at
a hundred dollars a week. But after a year, Cooper fired Rosen
“because he was a loud-mouthed guy” and, for eighteen months,
the latter walked the streets of Brooklyn, looking for employment.
Rubin again persuaded Lepke to find a job for Rosen, but it was
only a matter of a few months before he was fired again.
In the Spring of 1936, Rosen opened a small candy store at
725 Sutter Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. How- .
ever, he was still bitter about the loss of his trucking company,
and his complaints became more and more vociferous. Finally,
he let word get around that, unless Lepke proved to be a little
more generous, he was “going down to Dewey’s office.” Rubin met
this threat by ordering members of the Clothing Drivers Union to
patronize Rosen’s candy store.
But even a sudden spurt of business didn’t satisfy Rosen, and,
by July, he was again talking about visiting the Special Pros-
ecutor. His family began to worry about the extent of Lepke’s
patience and, late in July, his daughter, Sylvia, contacted Rubin
and asked him to see her father and quiet him down. The busi-
ness agent visited Rosen at his store and, with two hundred dol-
lar’s of Lepke’s money, convinced him that it was about time he
visited his son, Harold, in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania didn’t agree with Rosen for long and he was soon
back in Brownsville, muttering the same threats about going to
Dewey. When word of this got back to Lepke, he told Rubin,
“Well, he is not going down to Dewey or any other place. He and
nobody else are going down any place or do any talking or any
talking at all.”” On Friday, September 11th, Lepke told Rubin to
find a man named Paul Berger and send him over to his office
at 200 Fifth Avenue. After finding Berger in Union Square and
giving him Lepke’s message, Rubin decided that it might be the
163
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MURDER FOR PROFIT
A. Yes, sir. :
The snakes were than, over the agonized protests of the defense
attorneys, admitted into evidence.
Houtenbrink admitted that he had never met James and that
his only transactions had been with Hope. He also stated that
the box for the snakes had been furnished to him by the State of
California and that he hoped to be paid $1.75 a day for his ap-
pearance in court. With almost every witness for the prosecution,
the defense tried to show that the state was paying his or her
traveling and other expenses. As far as Houtenbrink was con-
cerned, whether he was paid or not was “up to the court which
I appreciate.” But he was quick to remind Judge Fricke that he
was “losing every day.”
After an agent of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New
York told the packed courtroom that Mrs. James had been recom-
mended to him by her husband and had taken out a three-year
$5000.00 term policy, the state'called J. P. Rogers, the superin-
tendent of the Pike’s Peak Auto Highway. He remembered that
James had been involved in an accident on September 21, 1932
in which his first wife, Winona, had been severely injured.
State the condition of Mrs. James-at that time?
Her clothing was covered with blood.
What else did you see?
There was a hammar with blood all over it in the car seat.
Did you observe Mr. James’ clothing?
I didn’t see anything wrong with his clothing.
State whether or not his clothes were rent or disheveled?
They seemed to be neat.
James’ attorney also was keenly interested in the state of his
client’s clothing.
Q. Now, after the accident, did you observe the defendant's
clothing for the purpose of seeing whether there was any
blood stains on it or not?
A. I didn’t see no blood on his clothes, no.
Q. Did you look for any?
A. No.
Rogers remembered that James had told him that he had lost
control of the car and he had just managed to jump clear when
the vehicle went over the side of the road. It had plunged 150
POPOPrPO PO
156
FIRST DEGREE
feet down the hill until its forward progress was stopped by a
mammoth boulder. Mrs. James had apparently been thrown from
the car because she was found on the ground, near its right rear
wheel, bleeding from multiple wounds of the head.
Gerald Rogers, the Manitou Springs grocery clerk who had
found the fourth Mrs. James drowned in her bath tub, testified
that, on the day her body was discovered, the defendant had stop-
ped at the store and asked for help in getting the groceries back
to the cabin. He claimed that he had just come back from Colo-—
rado Springs and was dead tired. Rogers agreed to accompany
him to the cabin and, when they arrived there, carried the bags
of groceries into the kitchen. While he was putting their contents
away, James called to him to come into the bathroom. aie boy
saw the nude body of a woman lying in the tub on its back with
both feet dangling over the edge. When Rogers helped the de-
fendant carry the corpse into the bodroom, he noticed that the
water in the tub was lukewarm.
At this point, the prosecution proposed to have James state-
ment to the Los Angeles police read into the record by the
stenographer who had transcribed it. The defendant's attorneys
were on their feet en masse, claiming that anything he might
have said to the police had been beaten out of him. Cpe
Jack Southard, an investigator on the District Attorney's staff,
admitted that he had slapped the defendant once but insisted
that James confession had been freely and voluntarily made. On
cross-examination, he refused to retreat from that position.
Q. Now, Captain Southard, was any physical force used upon
James while he was in your custody?
I slapped his face once.
Slapping his face was the only thing you did to him?
That is right. : ;
Did you notice bruises upon his head when you took him
to the County Jail?
No, I don’t believe so.
Weren’t both his ears bruised and swollen at that time?
They were not.
Neither one of them?
That I wouldn’t say. One may have been. I know that both
were not.
rOrO>r OPO>P
MURDER FOR PROFIT:
Q. You saw the bruises when he was in court?
‘A. The left ear was a Ittle bit swollen at the top.
Southard claimed that he had not heard James ask for a lawyer
while he was being questioned, and that the defendant had not
been starved or prevented from sleeping during all the time he
was in custody before his indictment for Mary Emma’s murder
After Southard had testified, Judge Fricke decided to admit me
7 defendant’s statement. Although it put the lion’s share of the
blame on Hope, it also deeply implicated James. It put his neck
squarely in the hangman’s noose and, when he took the stand
his back was to the gallows. As his lawyer led him skillfully
through his life with Winona and Mary Emma, he denied, in :
soft southern drawl, that he had killed either woveasl ; °
Q. Now, Mr. James, with reference to your trip to Colorado
while you were on the mountainside, did you take a tinge
mer and beat your wife about the head?
I did not.
Did you have any intent to do such a thing?
I never thought of such a thing.
Mr. James, were you. happy with your wife?
We were just as happy as we could be.
Did you ev : : Ge
Mary? ever, at any time, consider killing your wife,
Absolutely not.
ar as Hope’s story was concerned, it was all lies.
Did you ever tell Mr. Hope that you wanted him to pur-
chase a rattlesnake for you? °
I did not.
And did you ever tell Mr. H
Mr. Hope that you were a kil
and wanted to kill your wife, Mary? ce
I never thought of such a thing.
Did you ever tell Mr. Hope that you had some life in-
acts ne in your favor on Mary’s life and that if he
would aid you in killing her, you would i
the insurance? Z ‘ Ps,
A. I did not.
ie confession” had been forced out of him by Southard fat
the other officers who questioned him interminably after his ar-
rest on the incest charge.
> OPOPOP
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“FIRST DEGREE
Now when you were taken into custody, were any threats
used upon you in connection with any statement concern-
ing your wife's death?
Yes.
Who made the threats?
Officers Southard and Griffen.
And what threats did each of them use?
They told me they were of the opinion that I had killed
my wife and I had just as well confess it or they were
going to beat the hell out of me.
How long were you questioned?
They kept me up from Sunday to Wednesday morning.
What time did they allow you to sleep?
I didn’t get any sleep.
Was physical force used on you?
Mr. Southard said I was lying like a dog and he hit me.
How long did he continue to hit you?
He jumped over and he began to beat me. I fainted and
passed out.
His statement was given “to end their further questions,’
“there-was none of it true.”
James painted a pretty picture of his marriage with Mary
Emma. They had been sublimely happy together, he said, and he
was joyfully looking forward to the birth of their first child. The
one fly in his ointment was Mary’s reluctance to have a baby. She
had begged him to let her have an abortion but this, he told her,.
was against his wishes. As for his wife’s insurance, he didn’t need
this money because his business was doing very well and he had
plenty of cash in the bank. »
But the district attorney left very little of his quarry’s story
intact. James admitted that his financial condition was not as
rosy as it had appeared on his direct examination. The money he
claimed to have in the bank was all in the name of a friend—
who turned out to be his amorous niece, Lois Wright—and the
reason for this was to shield it from a sizeable Alabama judg-
ment against him. As for his wife’s contemplated abortion, per-
haps Mary Emma had wanted her baby, after all.
Q. Did you agree with your wife that it would be all right
with you if she had an abortion?
159
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MURDER FOR PROFIT
I begged her not to.
And your wife suggested that she didn’t want to go through
with it and wanted an abortion.
She wanted to get rid of it.
or Op
death, “Mary is crazy to have a baby, but I don’t want
one.”
I don’t remember that.
Would you say you didn’t state that?
I would say I don’t remember stating it.
That is the best answer you can give?
. That is the best I can give you.
Naturally, feeling the way he did about the approaching blessed
event, he had never asked Hope to interrupt Mary Emma's
pregnancy. When Hope arrived at the La Canada house on that
crucial Sunday, he passed the time of day with him only long
POPrO >
enough to learn that the purpose of the former’s visit was to.
abort Mary Emma. He seemed to have taken this news rather
calmly, because, after telling Hope that the operation was
“against my wishes,” he drove into Los Angeles. When he re-
turned the next evening with the Pembertons, there was his
spouse in the fish pond.
Q. When you discovered her dead body in the fish pond you
knew that she and Hope had been discussing the matter —
of an operation on her by Hope, did you?
A. I did.
Q. And Hope told you that morning he intended to do some-
thing with her pregnancy?
A. He did.
Q. Did you believe when you saw her dead body that she
had died as a result of an operation performed by Hope
. on her? .
A. No.
Q. You didn’t believe that?
A. No.
~The “cut toe” that Mary Emma had written about in her last
letter was next on the agenda. James was certain that she had
injured it on a piece of tin can in the yard early on the morning _
of Sunday, August 4th. But hadn’t he told two deputy sheriffs
160
Didn’t you say on the Wednesday preceding your wife’s _
Pa
FIRST DEGREE
that “she hadn’t a swollen foot or cut foot or toe the Sunday
before.”? His answer was a quick one. “I don’t remember their
asking me about the cut. I told them she didn’t have any swollen
foot that I knew of.”
On July 24, 1936, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of mur-
der in the first degree. Since it did not recommend mercy, Judge
Fricke had no alternative but to sentence James to die by hang-
ing. But it was to be more than five long years before ‘Rattlesnake
Bob,” as the newspapers called him, was executed. He appealed
to the United States Supreme Court on the ground he had been
denied due process of law because, among other objections, live
snakes had been exhibited in the courtroom, the death of his first
wife in Colorado had been brought to the jury’s attention, and
his confession had been coerced out of him. But on December 6,
1941, his conviction was affirmed and, five months later, he was
executed in the courtyard of San Quentin Prison. He was the last
murderer to be hanged in the State of California as its legislature
voted a short time later to substitute the gas chamber for the
rope. Major Raymond Lisenba, alias Robert S. James, had at
least one distinctive moment in his somewhat less than honor-
able career.
161
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MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE
arranged. Liberally interspersed with these shots were close-ups of
Marian’s head, which clearly indicated the gaping holes in her
skull. Brown's objections were predicated mainly on the ground
that the pictures would “tend to inflame the minds of the jury,”
but Judge Joseph B. Wisler denied them all and admitted the
photographs in evidence.
Then Ranck called Dr. George J. Heid, Jr., the physician who
had performed the autopsy on Marian Baker. Dr. Heid identified
a pair of panties and a garter belt as having been worn by the
girl when she was killed. Again Brown protested, but Judge Wis-
ler admitted them in evidence. Dr. Heid testified that, when he
had examined the body, the garter belt “had been pulled down
partway. The upper portion was underneath the low margin of
the pants and the lower part had been pulled down .. .” But he
admitted that this could have been caused when the girl’s corpse
was dragged by Gibbs to the ‘cottage under which it was later
found. A microscopic examination of the genital area showed no
- evidence of damage, but it was impossible, he said, to tell whether
intercourse had occurred, because of the lapse of time between the
murder and the discovery of the body.
Next Ranck turned his sights on what he termed Gibbs’s “sexy
mood” on the day of the murder. To do this, he called John K.
George, one of the defendant's closest friends at Franklin &
Marshall, who said that he and Gibbs had seen an ad in the
morning newspaper, announcing that Anne Corio and Margie
Hart were starring in. two pictures at the Hamilton Theatre.
When Gibbs took the stand, he admitted, on cross-examination,
that he knew that both women were “well-known burlesque
girls.” :
Unfortunately for Marian Baker, the scheduled pictures were
withdrawn by the Hamilton management because of a protest by
college officials. If they had been shown, she would probably be
alive today, because it was shortly after Gibbs had arrived at the
theatre and been informed that the two films had been pulled
that he met Marian and invited her to go for a ride in his car.
According to his confession, he had driven some five or six miles
south of Lancaster to a secluded area, where he stopped the car.
After a few minutes of routine conversation, “something just hap-
_ pened inside of me... I just reached over and grabbed her and
188
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FIRST DEGREE
started to choke her.” Marian managed to break loose and get out
of the car, but Gibbs caught her after she had run a few feet and
killed her with a lug wrench.
George also testified that Gibbs had suggested to him, _after
Marian’s disappearance became known, that the two men were
together as late as 2:30 p.m. on January 10th.
Q. Did you have a conversation with him . . . concerning the
_ time you were down at the movies?
Well, he reminded me or said something to me to the
effect we were together until 2:30.
This was—was this after the body had been found?
I’m not sure of that. I don’t really recall.
But you were talking about the Marian Baker case?
Yes, we discussed it.
And the general conversation was if you were questioned,
he suggested you had been together until 2:30 on that
_ Tuesday?
A. Yes.
On the evening of Marian’s murder, George had visited the
apartment shared by the defendant and his wife Helen. Gibbs
was not there but he came in a little later, “sweated up a bit,”
and announced that he had been “over in the gym shooting
basketball.”
It was to George that Gibbs first revealed that he had killed
Marian. Ranck spelled this out for the jury.
OPOPO P
Q. Now, John, will you tell me what conversation you had
with this defendant on January 18, 1950...?
A. Well, I went to the Fraternity House about 3:00 in the
afternoon ... Ed came in, I am not sure what time it was,
it must have been around 4:30 or quarter of 5:00.
What .. . did he say?
... 1 asked where he was going and he sort of blurted out
he was going over to discuss to Dean Breidenstine, to con-
fess he had killed Marian Baker.
Then what happened?
PO
PO
Well, I didn’t believe him the first time, but the second
time he repeated it, I believed him because he said it in
such a way, I just believed him.
189
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MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE
Q. Did you intend to do any harm to her at all that day?
A. No, sir, I did not.
Evidently, Gibbs had been extremely nervous and upset during
the Christmas vacation that had ended a week before the murder.
_He was failing Psychology and Spanish, and was worried about
graduating . When he told his mother about this disturbing pos-
sibility, she started to cry and told him that she had waited all
her life to see him in a cap and gown.
Q. How did this affect you when your mother was upset?
A. It hit me very deep because I always tried to make good
for my parents and family, and I knew they placed a lot
of emphasis on my graduating from college.
On cross-examination, Ranck concentrated on trying to estab-
lish that Gibbs was just another sex criminal who deserved no
“sympathy from the jury. He forced the defendant to admit that
many other men had washed out of the Air Corps’ pilot training
program and that his war experiences were routine. Then he
came to the moment when Gibbs started to choke Marian.
Where had you touched her up to that point?
I hadn’t touched her until I reached for her throat.
Are you sure you didn’t reach any place else?
No, sir.
And you want us to understand that you did this on
impulse?
That is right, sir.
How much was impulse, and how much deliberate?
All of it was impulse, sir.
When did the impulse stop? After you got out of the car
and wholly choked her? .
I don’t recall anything until I came to and saw the blood
on my hands and the lug wrench.
After Ranck was unsuccessful in trying to ask the defendant if
he hadn’t told someone before the day of the murder that he
“would like to make Marian Baker,” he let him step down.
Gibbs was followed on the stand by the defense’s star witness,
Dr. Edward A. Strecker, a well-known psychiatrist, who had ex-
amined him twice in February. His diagnosis was schizophrenia.
Q. Will you give us your diagnosis again?
A. ...I therefore believe he did not have sufficient or average
> OPO OPOPO
192
FIRST DEGREE
capacity to understand the nature and quality of his act.
Dr. Strecker’s conclusion would bring Eddie Gibbs under the pur-
view of the McNaughton Rule, but the District Attorney suc-
ceeded in wringing out of the psychiatrist his opinion that the
defendant “... was legally sane under the strict interpretation of
the McNaughton Rule.” However, Strecker insisted that Gibbs
was suffering from mental disease even though it was “not...
a form of psychosis that makes one insane in the eyes of the
law.
Dr. Strecker’s place in the witness chair was taken by Dr.
Eleanor Ross, the psychologist who had administered a series of
Rorschach tests to Gibbs at the Lancaster County Penitentiary.
She said that it was her impression “that this man is in an early
schizophrenic state.” When she had finished, Ranck suddenly re-
called Dr. Strecker.
Q. Doctor, I have just one question. Do you feel that this de-
fendant, Edwards Gibbs, might kill again?
A. I think it is possible that he might. You couldn't be sure.
In rebuttal, Ranck summoned another psychiatrist who had
examined Gibbs just three days before the trial had started. It
was the witness’s opinion that the defendant was legally sane al-
though he admitted that he was below normal. Gibbs could dis-
tinguish between right and wrong, he said, and he was, therefore,
fully responsible for his actions.
At 4:28 on the afternoon of March 16th, the jurors were locked
up in the courthouse’s third floor jury room. Five hours later—
9:02 to be exact—they filed back into the courtroom to announce
that they had found Edward Lester Gibbs “Guilty of murder in
the first degree, with Death Penalty.” After the Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania brushed aside the defense’s contentions that the
photographs of Marian Baker’s body should not have been shown
to the jury, and that Dr. Strecker should never have been permit-
ted to give his opinion about the likelihood that Gibbs would
kill again, Governor John D. Fine scheduled his execution for
the week of April 23rd, 1951. On Sunday, April 22nd, he was
executed in Rockview Penitentiary’s electric chair. His parents
arranged a funeral for him in Pitman four days later, but his wife
Helen was not present. She had deserted him shortly after he
had confessed that he had killed Marian Baker.
193
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MURDER WITHOUT MOTIVE
And he said to you—what were his words, if you can re-
call them?
A. That he was going over to confess; that he was going over —
to Dean Breidenstine’s office to confess he had killed Ma-
rian Baker.
Q. He repeated it twice?
A. Iam not sure whether he repeated the same words twice,
but he repeated it.
Q. And the second time, you believed him?
A. I believed him.
Then Gibbs rushed off in the direction of the Dean's office, but
apparently changed his mind when he ‘reached the College’s ad-
ministration building and entered President Distler’s office in-
stead. A few minutes later, he was turned over to two police ofh-
cers who had been checking on possible suspects on the Franklin
& Marshall campus. .
Ranck called on one of these policemen—Corporal James Kane
—to describe how Gibbs had shown him where he had disposed
of the lug wrench and the dead girl's pocketbook and umbrella.
On the way back to the state police barracks, Kane remembered
that Gibbs had said, in answer to a question by another officer,
about Marian’s struggles, “I thought she would never die.” Then,
a three-page written statement, made by the defendant later that
afternoon, was introduced in evidence. At its conclusion, he was
asked:
Q. Edward, how have you been treated since you were taken
into custody?
Very fine. It couldn’t have been better.
Why did you make this statement?
Things build up in you when you do a terrible thing like
I have done, it just builds up inside of you. It’s not human
to keep it inside you.
Brown could do little with Kane on cross-examination except
to point out that the written statement did not mention the
defendant’s observation that Marian was difficult to kill. Kane
had also testified that an eyelet from the girl’s garter belt had
been uncovered some eleven or twelve feet away from where her
body was found. Brown tried to find out whether the witness had
questioned Gibbs about this eyelet.
190
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FIRST DEGREE
Did you ask him anything about that when you arrested
Q.
him?
A. . No, sir.
Q. There is nothing in the confession about that either, is
there? .
; ul.
a we didn’t say anything to Mr. Gibbs when you were
questioning him here on this 2% pages of individual ques-
tioning . . . as to how he could explain, if at all, if lain
was any disarrangement OF lost eyelet, or anything, in the
garter belt?
A. No, sir. .
Q. Did you make any accusations against him as to any sex
impulse on his part? ;
A. No, sir.
Later, a police chemist testified that the eyelet in question was
exactly the same as others on Marian Baker’s garter belt.
After the Commonwealth had rested, Brown called the de-
fendant to the stand. He took him through his early life, point-
ar : eye
ing out that, when his client had attended high school in Pit
N. J., he had suffered a head injury when he jumped off a class-
graduated from Pitman
mate’s speeding car. On the same day he
High, Gibbs had enlisted in the Army Air Corps for pilot ant
ing. He had washed out and then was sent to Italy as a pep aie
tower operator of a bomber group. He returned to the Unite
States in May of 1944 and, while he was on temporary duty in.
Demming, New Mexico, he was struck on the head by a thief
as he was returning to the post after a date. ;
Under his attorney's gentle prodding, Gibbs admitted knowing
Marian casually as someone who occasionally cashed his checks
at the Treasurer’s Office. He denied having assaulted her sexually
‘before the murder.
Q. At any time when you stopped the car, did you assault
Miss Baker, attempt to have intercourse with her?
-A. No sir.
Q. Did you tell Officer Matt you had made up your mind to
do something to her while driving down the highway that
day?
A. No, sir, I did not.
191
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