CRIME: Petterkiller

Fortnight ago a man appeared in the secluded spot where Joseph Mozynsky and Catherine May, lovers, sat in a parked car near Little Neck, L. I. He ordered Mozynsky into the front seat, then shot him. The girl he escorted to a bus, sent her home. Next day, the New York Journal received a letter signed “A V 3X,” which confessed the slaying, said the motive was to recover important international documents.

Last week in Queensborough, L. I., Noel Sowley and Elizabeth (“Betty”) Ring, lovers, sat parked among trees in an automobile. A man stepped up, demanded papers, shot Sowley dead, escorted Miss Ring to a bus, sent her home. Before Sowley’s body had been discovered, the Journal had received, but not yet opened, a letter from “A V 3X” describing the murder.

Immediately 700 police were sent to scour Queensborough. That night, patrolmen dressed as women sat with plainclothesmen in parked cars wherever lovers were known to hold trysts. Suspects were arrested in New York State, New Jersey, even as far away as Philadelphia, but the Misses May and Ring failed to recognize any of them. More wild, coded notes to the police and the Journal kept special police squads rushing about Long Island and Westchester, to no avail.

Then this message came to the Journal: “The last document, NJ 4-3-44 returned to us. . . . MY MISSION IS ENDED. The first sign of this signature means A, the supreme tribunal of the order. The second, V, its special agent. The two combined (forming a diamond) form the Red Diamond of Russia, a secret order all over the world. . . . Quiet your people and tell them 3X is no more.”

Following many trails, police placed most faith in their hunt for Mad Joseph Ustica, escaped inmate of the Kings Park State Asylum for the Insane, who was sent there after he had killed a man accompanied by a woman, and who continuously had babbled about secret papers and codes.

Last week one Dewey Ede, tramp, told the Lancaster, Pa. police that he had bunked overnight with a man answering the description of the maniac. The man had said: “They call me the 3X slayer. . . . Now that my mission has been completed I will head for Harrisburg and then to New Orleans and take a boat back to the old country.”

Meantime, New York’s police kept hunting, and New York’s press mourned the end of a ten-day wonder story. However, the romantic aspect of 3X diminished when Misses May and Ring revealed that his motive with them had been sex at pistol point.