CRIME: Whitewash in St. Louis

No one was outraged or even curious when a petty thief named Edward Melendes died in a cell at St. Louis Police Head quarters on July 27, 1942. A chunky, good-natured, shiftless Mexican, Melendes had been arrested three nights earlier in a raffish nightclub (one with women hostesses and rooms upstairs). He had admitted his part in a $40 robbery. His cell mate and partner in the crime, Andrew Brinkley, testified at the perfunctory in quest that Melendes had fallen off his bunk, cracked his head on the concrete floor. The coroner’s verdict: death caused by kidney disease and congestion of the brain.

The Beaten. Newspapers recorded the death in a routine paragraph. The case might have ended there, but Melendes’ unclaimed body was sent to Washington University’s Medical School. Never had the University’s pathologists seen such a battered, pulpy corpse, such a sea of hemorrhages. Bruises were almost uncountable. Their autopsy showed that the entire body, from head to toes, had been pummeled and beaten, on the ears and neck, forehead and temples, arms, hands, chest,’ kidneys, thighs, legs. Scarcely a spot was untouched; hardly a blood vessel intact. The doctors noted that many a bruise was the exact width of a police club.

When results of the doctors’ postmortem were published (the bruises took two and a half typewritten pages to list), St. Louisans demanded to know: had the police clubbed Melendes to death? The Beaters. Newspapers dug up a photograph of Melendes taken at the nightclub shortly before his arrest, showing him gaily cavorting with a strumpet.

They published this side by side with the official police photo—a puffy, bloody, battered face (see cuts). The Civil Liberties Committee rounded up Brinkley and two others arrested with Melendes—a pert little whore named Wanita Johnson and a soldier named Private Edward Buckshot.

Safely away from police, all now swore that Melendes, a sullen prisoner, had been beaten unmercifully by police, with clubs, baseball bats. Said Brinkley: “They began beating him about 2 a.m. and kept it up until 7:30.”

On their testimony, a grand jury, under the energetic prodding of Circuit Judge Harry F. Russell, finally indicted three detectives for manslaughter. (One of them had been cleared of a charge of prisoner beating in 1934.)

Artificial Fog? Then a fog came up. First the charges against the detectives were dismissed on a legal technicality. Then police reported finding two convicts who swore that Brinkley had boasted he had killed Melendes in a fight in the cell. For a while Brinkley was hounded by police and FBI, charged with draft dodging, indicted for sexual perversion, perjury and, finally, for second-degree murder. Next came eminent physicians, who examined bits of skin tissue under a microscope, cast doubt that violence alone had caused Melendes’ death. The Civil Liberties Committee, taking up Brinkley’s case, could now find no witnesses who remembered anything. (The trollop who had posed for the picture with Melendes could not even recall what the $2 was for.)

Finally all except perjury charges against Brinkley were dropped. But last week a sixth grand jury completed the shoddy history, slapped police wrists, indicted no one. St. Louisans felt the case had gonefull circle—from outrage to outrage.