• U.S.

CRIME: Senseless Killings

4 minute read
TIME

Eileen Fahey was blonde, pretty, 18 years old, a secretary and bookkeeper; now she was lying sprawled on the floor beside her desk, dead, with five .22-cal. pistol bullets in her body. To the band of New York homicide detectives who looked down at her last week, all this seemed less startling than her surroundings. The quiet offices of the American Physical Society at Columbia University seemed the most unlikely spot in Manhattan for murder.

Eileen had come to work at 9 o’clock, had found three letters from her boy friend, a young marine serving in Korea. She had opened only one before a secretary in the hall outside heard the pistol which killed her. After a moment a tall, dark-haired man in a grey suit had come hurrying out, the weapon still in his hand.

“You’d better call the police,” he announced importantly, “because I just shot somebody. You’d better call a doctor. I just shot a female.”

The Questions. With that he had bolted off toward a stairway and had vanished. Who was he? A disappointed lover? An enemy of the girl’s family? It was soon obvious that he was neither. Eileen had no enemies. Neither did her family. The young marine was her childhood sweetheart and she had never had another beau. The cops guessed that the killer might never even have seen her before —he had called her simply a “female?”

But this brought them into a blind alley. Murder without a clue? Perhaps. Murder without a motive? Deputy Chief Inspector James Leggett’s instincts refused the idea. Could the killer have been enraged, not at the girl, but at the American Physical Society? The inspector sought out the society’s treasurer, Dr. George B. Pegram. The doctor instantly suggested an oddly named suspect: Bayard Pfundtner Peakes, a former member, who had written a crackpot paper entitled “So You Love Physics” in which he argued that there was no such thing as an electron. Peakes had been railing at the society by mail for months for refusing to publish him. His letters had been mailed from six different Boston addresses.

The Answers. Two detectives who set out on his trail found that he lived at none of them. But at one they learned that Peakes’s parents were at Dover-Fox-croft, Me.: by telephone they finally got his Boston address. At 11 o’clock that night they eased themselves into his furnished room, found the murder pistol, then settled down tensely for his return. Peakes was amiability itself when he walked in. He admitted the killing.

He had served in the Air Force and been discharged because of a mental disorder. He had, he said proudly, decided to murder “a lot of physicists” to get publicity for his thesis. But he had found nobody but Eileen. He recalled that she had murmured, “It hurts,” after he fired two bullets, and that, lying on the floor, she had cried, before dying: “Oh, he’s unloading the damned thing, and he’s going to load it all over again.”

Only 63 hours had passed between Eileen Fahey’s death and Peakes’s confession. As the killer was led through New York’s Grand Central Terminal after being brought back from Boston, he smiled at the curious. “Yes,” he said. “I’m the naughty boy.”

. . .

New York’s police solved another senseless murder last week after an attendant at a shooting gallery reported that two boys were trying to sell him a .22 rifle for $3. The cops arrested the pair—16-year-old Edward Baldwin, 17-year-old Donald Ferrick—and almost immediately got a startling confession. While roaming a Brooklyn park, the boys had decided to shoot a young man who was walking along a shadowed path. One shot, fired by Ferrick, dropped him dead. Not until reading the papers later did they know he was a rabbinical student named Samuel Bernard London. Their reason: to prove they weren’t “chicken.”

. . .

Senseless death struck in San Antonio, too. One Jerry George Adrian, 29, who had come to Texas from a New York mental hospital, got into a cab. After a few blocks he fired five shots into the back of Driver Leo Rios. “God told me to do it,” he told the police. “I heard voices. I fought the impulse, but the voice said now or never.”

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