TRIALS: The Unpunishable Crime

World War II produced few such chilling mystery tales as the case of OSS Major William V. Holohan—the big, brusque U.S. reserve officer who was killed by his own men in 1944 amid an atmosphere of partisan intrigue behind the German lines in Italy. Few crimes have been so well documented. But last week it became virtually certain that the murder of Major Holohan will forever remain a Completely unpunishable crime.

Holohan had parachuted into the northern Italian mountains with an Italian-speaking U.S. lieutenant, Aldo Icardi, and a U.S. sergeant named Carl G. LoDolce, to organize resistance in the enemy rear. A few months later, his subordinates rei ported by secret radio that Holohan was presumed to have been killed during an attack by German forces. Four years after the war, curious Italian police unearthed a shockingly different story.

Two Italian partisans said that Holohan was murdered because he had refused to supply money and arms to Communist guerrillas; under the urging of Lieut. Icardi, members of Holohan’s mission had fed him a bowl of poisoned soup. Holohan merely got sick. The plotters had then drawn lots, and LoDolce, the loser, had gone to the major’s bedroom and coldblooded y fired two pistol bullets into his head. The body had been weighted and sunk in the icy waters of the lake; the police found it where the witnesses said it was, dredged it up, found the two bullets and traces of potassium cyanide. They notified U.S. authorities.

Icardi denied the whole story. LoDolce confessed in detail. But no U.S. court had jurisdiction over a crime committed in Italy, and the Army, having honorably discharged both LoDolce and Icardi, had no legal means of bringing them to justice. Finally, however, the Holohan case was made public. Though LoDolce retracted his confession, the Italian government asked that he be extradited to stand trial for murder.

Last week in Buffalo, Federal Judge John Knight ruled that the Italian government had no legal grounds for asking LoDolce’s extradition. The crime, he said, was “so gruesome as to be almost unbelievable if [it] were not supported by the written and oral confessions” of LoDolce and others. But the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Italy could not apply, because 1) Italy and the U.S. were at war when the crime was committed, and 2) the area where it occurred was then in control of the Germans, not the Italians.

LoDolce, who is now married and the father of two children, received the news in a Buffalo veterans’ hospital—where, as an ex-soldier with an officially blameless record, he is receiving treatment for a wartime back injury. He was jubilant. Icardi, now working as a law clerk in Pittsburgh, announced that he hoped to publish a book giving the “true” story of his commander’s death. But, officially speaking, the Holohan case seemed closed for good.