CRIME: Examples

Last week New York’s Governor Herbert H. Lehman announced that, in the course of his conference on Crime, the Criminal & Society at Albany next week, he would appeal by radio for the support of the State’s schoolchildren. If he should wish to liven his speech by a few examples, the Governor could choose from the following items in last week’s news:

¶In Orange, N. J., Rocco Marano, 30, walked up to a policeman, said: “I’ve just shot and killed my father. He’s lying in the gutter on Henry Street.” Son Marano explained that his father had threatened to cut his mother’s head off, eat her heart. Father Marano. whose mother was found beheaded in Italy some years ago and whose brother is wanted for murdering his wife & son. had just returned from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for murdering a saloonkeeper’s wife.

In Portland, Me.. James Morrill, 11, helped convict his mother of murder by telling how, after she had killed his father with an ax in their shack on Falmouth’s Underwitted Road, she made her small son help trundle the body down to the cellar in his toy cart. “She asked me to help bury him,” said James Morrill. “I threw on a few shovels of dirt, but I didn’t feel like doing it.”

¶In Westwood, Calif., a 16-year-old girl, who said he had knocked her on the head with a wrench and raped her twice, got Thomas Alton Tully, son of Jim Tully (Jarnegan, Beggars of Life), arrested for the fifth time on charges of criminal assault, sentenced to from one to 50 years in jail.

¶In Chicago, a masked, kid-gloved gunman broke into the apartment of Orlando and Helen James, newlyweds, bound & gagged the groom, turned up the radio, beat the bride with a lead-studded whip, raped her three times, munched candy, departed chuckling.

¶In Union City, N. J., on the chance that he might be a counterfeiter, U. S. Secret Service agents raided the apartment of a man whom they had observed buying engraving chemicals in Manhattan. They found a complete counterfeiting plant, discovered their captive was William Watts, 42, long sought by the Treasury as No. 1 U. S. counterfeiter. A one-time druggist who began by engraving labels for bootleg liquor, Watts turned out banknotes so perfect they fooled tellers. In the last four years it was estimated he had circulated about $1,000,000 in bogus bills, including a $20 note with which Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau fooled his underlings (TIME, Sept. 9).¶In Newark, N. J. police headquarters, a telephone rang and a man’s voice said: “I’ve just killed three men. Come and get me.” Police sped to the address he gave, found four slug-riddled corpses. After investigation they concluded that Charles Geary, angry because an aunt had left him out of her will, had killed his brother and two uncles before turning his shotgun on himself.

¶In Oxford, Miss., a judge dismissed a jury debating the case of Negro Ellwood Higginbotham, accused of murdering a white man. After awaiting the jury’s verdict for more than 24 hours, an impatient mob had hauled Negro Higginbotham out of jail, hanged him to a tree.¶In Manhattan, detectives arrested Gustave Freeman when he stepped off the S. S. Ile de France, found in his trunk 100,000 French National Lottery tickets, apparently forged.

¶In Atlanta. Ga., Jimmy Rosenfeld of Brooklyn was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a stranger whom he mistook for his sweetheart’s husband.¶In Sioux Falls, S. Dak., on the stage of the State penitentiary chapel, Convict Glen Murray stabbed Convict Florence Turner to death with half a pair of scissors, cried: “I did it because I loved her.”