Jay Robert Nash - Murder Among the Mighty: Celebrity Slayings That Shocked America

BOOKS BY JAY ROBERT NASH

Fiction

ON ALL FRONTS

A CRIME STORY

THE DARK FOUNTAIN

Nonfiction

DILLINGER: DEAD OR ALIVE?

CITIZEN HOOVER

BLOODLETTERS AND BADMEN

HUSTLERS AND CON MEN

DARKEST HOURS

AMONG THE MISSING

MURDER, AMERICA

ALMANAC OF WORLD CRIME

LOOK FOR THE WOMAN

PEOPLE TO SEE

THE TRUE CRIME QUIZ BOOK

THE INNOVATORS

ZANIES

THE CRIME MOVIE QUIZ BOOK

THE DILLINGER DOSSIER

Published by M. Evans

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 1983 by Jay Robert Nash

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Available

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is for
Neal and Joan Amidei

I wish to express my deep gratitude to my research associate, Cathy Anetsberger, who labored long and conscientiously in archives and libraries on this books behalf, as well as obtaining and processing important graphics herein reproduced. Again, my tireless typist, Sandy Horeis, provided superb work in manuscript preparation.

Many friends and associates were extremely helpful in providing printed material, graphics, and correspondence, plus memorabilia in this work. They include Neil and Vicky Nash, Jack Jules Klein, Jr., Leonard Des Jardins, Phil Krap, Edgar Krebs, Jerry Goldberg, John McHugh, Mary and Tom McComas, Bob Howe, Curt Johnson, Marc and Judy Davis, Bill and Edie Kelly, Dan McConnell, Jim and Edie McCormick, P. Michael OSullivan, Sydney Harris, Hank Oettinger, Bob and Linda Connelly, Jack and Gladys Conroy, Ray Peekner, Bud Freeman, Bruce Elliot, Arthur Kluge, Michaela Touhy, George Spink, Karen Connor, Les Susman, Arnold L. Kaye, Raymond Friday Locke, Mark and Lois Jacobs.

Sources particularly helpful in providing all manner of graphics include Cinemabilia of New York City, the New-York Historical Society, the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Kiki Dokas and Bill Kelly of Wide World, and Pete Gregory of UPI. Newspaper librarians were especially helpful, including Lynette Francis of the San Francisco Chronicle; Susanna Shuster, editorial research librarian for the Los Angeles Times; Dorothy Frazier of The Denver Post; and the librarians of the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Atlanta Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Of particular help were the district attorneys offices in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, who provided trial transcripts and other pertinent data to the cases covered herein. Librarians and archivists throughout the United States aided the research for the book greatly and include Anne Salter of the Atlanta Historical Society; KevinCarey of the University of Illinois Library; Melanie Dodson and Rene Dedonato of Northwestern University Library; Jerry Delaney of the Chicago Public Library; Peter Weil, microfilm, and the staff of the Newberry Library; Pat Wilcoxon, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; the staff of the John Crerar Library at Chicagos Illinois Institute of Technology.

I wish also to thank specifically Rich Kaplan of the district attorneys office in Chicago and Sergeant Anthony Consieldi of the Chicago Police Department for their help.

T his book is not only a natural outgrowth of my writing and research in the crime field over the last decade but a work that logically stems from yesterdays and todays headlines. The stories here deal with murder or attempted murder and present some of Americas famous and sometimes infamous citizens, past and present, as slayer or victim. All manner of celebritiesfrom bankers to doctors, from movie stars to politicianshave captured the attention of the public with their involvement in that most heinous of crimes, murder. Their lethal acts have, in reality, enlarged their images as celebrities. The individuals depicted here, both good and evil, are, after all, products of our national imagination, but they loom so large in our minds eye that they take on, through the various tricks of publicity, legends that even the stark reality of homicide cannot easily destroy.

Even in their final acts of killing or being killed, these highpositioned creatures of the mind play out their parts with lofty dramafor the most part ever-mindful of their social place, their status among the heavens, some even keeping a jaundiced eye peeled for their niche in history, no matter how infamous that footnote might be. It is status that obviously propelled many portrayed herein into murder, as it did Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon, who actually lived the singers life for years before slaying him. As Lennons most devoted fan, Chapman imitated the Beatle almost to the last physical detail; he was a self-styled clone who even married a woman of Japanese extraction as had Lennon, and only days before he murdered his idol, took Lennons name to add to his adopted personality.

This was a case of personality envy that became a murderous mania. The same could be said of Dennis Sweeney, who murdered his political mentor, activist Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein failed in Sweeneys strange imagination to live up to the image that Lowenstein himself had implanted in his protgs mind. A similar identity problem existed in the mind of Paul DeWit, slayer of Chicago drama coach and onetime voice of The Whistler, Everett Clarke.

Even among the rich, money is often a prime motive, as in the case of Dr. Bennett Clarke Hyde who, in 1909, embarked upon the wholesale slaughter of his in-laws so that his wife could inherit a fortune and Claus von Bulow who, from 1979 to 1980, injected his wife with insulin in order to obtain the millions she had left him in her will.

Money, though in slightly lesser amounts, was also the motive in the slayings of Mrs. Theresa Mors in 1924 by onetime boxing champ Kid McCoy; New Yorks Mr. Big, gambler Arnold Rothstein in 1928; Atlanta banker Henry C. Heinz in 1943; film star Sal Mineo, who was stabbed to death in Hollywood in 1976; and physician-writer Michael J. Halberstam, who was killed by superburglar Bernard Welch in 1980. A lack of money, on the other hand, brought about the misguided-mercy murder of Nellie Chapin, wife of the editor of the New York World in 1918. Money mixed with sex in the killings of silent screen star Ramon Novarro in 1968 and newspaper heir John S. Knight III in 1975, although these were essentially homosexual killings.

A case where hatred for homosexuals and a lust for power combined to create murder was the slaying of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by former Supervisor Dan White in 1978a double killing that led to enormous riots. Political power was also clearly behind the murder of Detroits popular radio announcer Jerry Buckley in 1930 and, in the same year, the very public murder of