Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shattered Souls | Episode Four: "Den of Duplicity"

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

The District of Columbia was dealing with rampant illegal rackets and Karen finds out just how much corruption was going on. The detectives start working with an informant, who finds out key information about the Car Barn Murder case.  Subscribe to the Shattered Souls podcast now to hear more. Episodes 1-13 available now! Apple Podcast iHeart Spotify Music: The New Real by Sam Johnson at www.samjohnsonlive.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm retired detective Karen Smith, the host of Shattered Souls, The Car Barn Murders. Follow my journey as I work to solve the 87-year-old cold case murder of my own great uncle. Download all of the episodes at Shattered Souls, The Car Barn Murders on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you for listening. Throwing her off the bridge, I mean, that's just, you don't do that because you're having an argument. Great Depression, not long after Prohibition,

they're worrying about bootlegging gangs. I don't want a single word written about that case. Do you understand? There's a possibility it could be solved one day. Welcome back to Shattered Souls, The Car Barn Murders. I'm Karen Smith. This is Episode 4. This podcast may contain graphic language and is not suitable for children. Previously on The Carbarn Murders. Montgomery County lead detective Theodore

Volton ran down lead after lead on the Carbarn case. Detective Volton tracked down every car that had been stolen around the night of the murders, except for a green Buick that was taken from the area of 15th and Irving Streets on Sunday night. Eyewitness Ernest Carter recalled seeing a green Buick flee the Chevy Chase Lake ticket office northbound on Connecticut Avenue with three white men inside. As the detectives tracked down suspects, they went back to an attempted robbery of the Brightwood ticket office that happened a few months before the Carbarn case, and they used a description given by the overnight accountant to run down some potentials. Edwin O'Connell was arrested based on that vague description. Then he was released when

O'Connell's father called in and said that his son had been a patient at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. O'Connell's handcuffs were removed and he was placed back into St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. O'Connell's handcuffs were removed and he was placed back into St. Elizabeth's. The detectives found out that O'Connell had befriended Paul Berry and George Riddle Hoover while he was being treated for an unknown mental health issue. Paul Berry had been committed in 1920 after a successful insanity defense for killing a trolley conductor, and he escaped from St. Elizabeth's in 1934. Paul Berry was found in St. Louis after he freeloaded on a freight train and he was arrested in Missouri. There wasn't any family money to have Paul Berry sent back to Washington, and his alibi was solid for the night of the murders, considering he was 1,500 miles away. George Riddle Hoover had been released from St. Elizabeth's on January 12th, just nine days

before Emery Smith and James Mitchell were killed, and the psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth's considered him to be a gangster type. Nobody knew where George Riddle Hoover was. The information on Edwin O'Connell and George Riddle Hoover was passed along from Detective Volton to the others to run down, but that lead got dropped along the way and no further investigation was completed on either one of them. The attempted robbery of the Brightwood ticket office remained unsolved. In the days after the murders, people were dropping names, piecemeal information, and saying that so-and-so was a no-good guy and this other man would be the type to do it. It was a discordant orchestra of crap leads and what seemed to be old grievances

getting new air. What better way to get rid of an enemy than to pin a double murder on him? Phones rang off the hook, random memos were tossed onto desks, miles were put on vehicles, and shoe leather eroded on the pavement. 20-hour grinds were bolstered by burnt Dynandash coffee and pack after pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. Some of the information did seem to have teeth, and Volton, Rogers, Deal, and Brass did their very best to run all of it down, but there was a serious problem. Back in the 1930s, and certainly before that, the District of Columbia was a virtual den of duplicity. I did some unearthing of Washington's teeming rackets and found wormhole after wormhole of wanton scandals, political malfeasance, official bribery, and corporate

corruption. I realized that some underhanded deals took place. D.C. was a big city, and big cities did come with their fair share of turpitude, but the grit and grime of the district underworld extended its tentacles further and wider than I ever imagined. Racketeers ran roughshod all over the place with gambling halls, horse racing wire rooms, storefronts of seemingly legitimate businesses with secret doors to hidden back rooms,

and those rooms served as speakeasies and meetup joints, and there were also rooming houses. Read, prostitution. All running rampant, 24-7. Those rooming houses were filled with young women who traveled to D.C. looking for a better life from the poverty-stricken towns across the country, and those women fed an insatiable appetite

for cheap sex. Downtown hotels doubled as pay-as-you-stay dens of inequity, and brothels operated in every corner of the district. Some of them were out in the open in the red-light neighborhoods, and others operated in secret for the elites, who had to be a little more discreet with their extramarital transgressions. These young girls were sometimes entrapped into a life of flesh trading, and the pimps, the rooming house owners, and these vile grannies posing as motherly figures to bait the hook would increase the cost of keeping a roof over their head exactly commensurate with the amounts the girls brought home. By design, they could never get their heads above water, and many of those girls fell into the drug trade, they overdosed, or they evolved into the next generation of

vile grannies who lured more young girls into the net, completing the endless circuit. Even though Prohibition had been repealed in 1933, bootlegging was still alive and well in D.C. because black market liquor was much cheaper to buy than the good stuff legally imported from Canada and from across the pond. So people continued to frequent the bathtub gin joints instead of paying out the nose for a buzz. Then they nursed monstrous hangovers the next morning. People also chanced being poisoned by ingesting methanol or wood

alcohol that was sometimes used in the illegal distillation process rather than the for human consumption ethanol that legitimate manufacturers sold. Bootleg moonshine, or fire water, burned like gasoline, and it tasted even worse, and it was often masked with juniper oil or other flavors to make it scarcely palatable, but it did the job. There were thousands of arrests for bootlegging, and the majority of violators were let off with a small fine due to the overflowing justice system, only to go right back to their business the next day. Gin and whiskey stills were found everywhere. Under trap doors, in the woods, tunnels in saloon basements, behind secret bookcases, on barn rafters, underneath chicken coops, under tarps and work trucks, shoved into hedgerows.

Maryland farmers stopped selling their crops on the side of the road, and instead they mashed their corn to manufacture mule kick, a fitting nickname. Wealthy families turned their basements into speakeasies, and they entertained high society in those low-down cellars. People from all walks of life were in on it, including the people inside of the United States Capitol building. That's right, senators and congressmen were dealing in bootleg liquor inside of the people's house. If you don't believe me, here's proof. A man named George Cassidy, also known as the man in the green hat. He was the personal bootlegger to the folks in the U.S. Capitol. He had his own office in the basement of the Capitol building, and he would deal to those in power directly from his office,

or he would pay a personal visit with his briefcase filled with bottles of liquor. Even the staunch supporters of Pro prohibition, the representatives who shouted from the rafters about the insidiousness of alcohol, the sin of the drink, the scourge of the public, would pay George Cassidy's office a visit and purchase a fifth of whiskey for personal use. George Cassidy made a good living for 10 years until he was eventually busted, and he told the whole sordid story in a series of six front-page articles in the Washington Post. So, before you believe that the illegal rackets involved only underworld criminals, think again. Washington, D.C. was a haven for gambling,

prostitution, the numbers racket, which was a forerunner of the legal lottery we play today, horse racing wires, and tons of other scams that ran amok during the Depression. Desperate people will do desperate things. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to just take that left turn at the primrose path. For some quick statistics, in 1935, Washington, D.C.'s crime rate was worse than every other city of comparable size in the entire nation. Murder was three times worse. Grand larceny was four times worse. And robberies in D.C.?

Well, they outranked Pittsburgh, Newark, and Cincinnati three to one. The District of Columbia had a serious problem. The Carbarn case left the headlines and got shoved into the interior pages of the papers because another notorious crime took over the lead and captured the nation's attention. The sensational trial of Bruno Richard Hauptman, who was in court for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. But Washington, D.C. had no shortage of sensational cases during that time either. There was a series of lone woman murders that got front page attention for weeks or even months at a time.

All of these cases remain unsolved today. Virginia McPherson was found dead inside of her apartment, with the cord of her pajamas wrapped around her neck and bloodstains were all over the bathroom. The detectives immediately ruled her death a suicide, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Even the public was convinced that her murder was swept under the rug to prevent another black eye to the D.C. police force and their abysmal solve rate. Beulah Limerick was also found dead in her house, in her bed. The blanket was pulled up to her chin and her hands were neatly folded across her abdomen. She had blood in her mouth and the

coroner ruled that she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and he would just bypass an autopsy. When the embalmer noticed blood coming out of the side of her head, he called the coroner back and the coroner found a bullet hole just behind her ear and a.25 caliber slug in her head. Her murder is still unsolved. Corinna Loring disappeared two days before her wedding and her body was found on Saddleback Ridge on the outskirts of Mount Rainier, Maryland. There were triangular-shaped stab wounds in each of her temples. Twine had been wrapped around her neck to strangle her after the perpetrator tried to kill her with his own bare hands. Her future husband was suspected, but nobody was ever indicted. And finally, Mary Baker. Her case was dubbed the mystery of 101 clues.

Her body was found in a ditch at Arlington National Cemetery. She'd been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted, and shot with a.32 caliber handgun. Several men were arrested but nobody was ever indicted or taken to trial the district did have a serious problem rumors circulated that the reason that all of these murders were going unsolved was because somebody didn't want them solved but the dc police department was painfully underfunded and understaffed how much could the police do in the face of the worst crime rate in the nation and rampant corruption that undermined every effort? Going back to the scene of the Car Barn murders, a detailed diagram of the shoe prints in the snow around the ticket office,

the Car Barn, and the areas to the north was provided in the case file. The snow was fresh that morning, which made the shoe prints easy to track on the grassy areas. Connecticut Avenue had been cleared by the time the detectives got there, and it was just wet and muddy. A set of vehicle tire tracks showed that a car had turned left into a series of vacant lots to the north of the ticket office. The tracks turned left and stopped. Shoe prints exited that car and went south past a miniature golf course and turned left again following the B&O railroad tracks out to Connecticut Avenue. Another set of shoe prints went north from the

ticket office, back past that miniature golf course, and to the waiting car at the vacant lots. The tire tracks then continued south, turned left again, and then left one more time. The car did a big loop through the lots and came out on the same street it came in on. Detective Volton made a note in the margin after following those shoe prints to the empty lots and then back to the ticket office. At one place where there's a small ravine, one party had stopped and sat down. This was determined by the fact that the thumbprints of each hand were on the outside. Somebody sat down on a rock and waited, leaving impressions of his hands and his

thumbs in the snow. It sounded to me like somebody got ditched. Following some of the leads that were phoned in, Montgomery County Officer James McAuliffe received an anonymous call about a man named Kenneth Conlon. Official records for Capital Transit showed that Kenneth Conlon had applied for a job. His description fit the bill of the Brightwood Ticket Office robbery, so the detectives went to the listed address. The apartment manager said

he'd never heard the name Kenneth Conlon. After a little more digging, they found out that Conlon had a bum leg from jumping out of a window during a sting in Baltimore, where he ran a house of prostitution. He hardly had the physique needed for a quick getaway or for carrying 22-pound money bags. A few people were questioned about Kenneth Conlon's current location, which went nowhere. Another tip was phoned in that seemed a little more promising. A trolley car conductor was held up at gunpoint by three men in February of 1930. The conductor's name was Percy Mangum, and he was now an officer on the district police. Sure, he might have valid

information about his own robbery. Mangum said that he was working the Connecticut Avenue trolley line when he was robbed of the day's cash intake as he made his way to the main office in Georgetown. Mangum named Emery Linwood Letterton as a likely suspect. Letterton had worked for Capital Transit, and his criminal history showed an arrest in North Carolina for bootlegging. He actually did a stint in an Ohio prison, so it must have been one hell of a bust. Percy Mangum was called into the captain's office to recount what happened during that robbery in 1930. Mangum told the captain that Letterton was good for it and resembled one of the suspects. Another tip from a cab driver, whose taxi was stolen and then used in Percy Mangum's robbery, gave the name

John Cross. John Cross quit working for Capital Transit just three days before Percy Mangum was robbed. John Cross had a criminal record in Richmond, Virginia, so detectives Brass and Volton took a road trip. They met with John Cross, who was doing time in a prison camp in 1935. Cross admitted to being in D.C. in 1930 when Percy Mangum was robbed, and he gave the detectives little nuggets of information, but he stopped short of confessing. Cross refused to give any other names, saying he had way too much to lose since he already had 12 more years to serve at the prison.

Volton and Brass struck out, and without any further information on Letterton and with John Cross's obvious alibi of being in prison during the Carbarn robbery and murders, they moved on. Dozens of the usual suspects were arrested and hauled into various police precincts, given the third degree, then released when their alibis checked out. But oddly, one man didn't have to be hunted down. Instead, on the afternoon of the murders, he strolled into the D.C. police headquarters and volunteered to be interviewed. His name was William Franklin Clark. He wasn't a stranger to the D.C. police, and he'd been arrested for armed robbery in the past. D.C. Detective Frank Brass interviewed William Clark, and then released him after he provided a seemingly airtight alibi.

Clark said that he was with his girlfriend and a buddy on the night of the murders. They were brought in and both separately substantiated William Clark's story. But my sixth sense was irked with this guy. People don't willingly throw themselves into the middle of a murder investigation unless they have an ulterior motive. Was Clark front-running something he wanted to keep hidden? Or did he use that opportunity to try to find out what the cops knew so that he could pass that information along? William Clark's name was the first one on my person of interest list. Meanwhile, forensic leads were coming in. Detective Brass gave Volton a $5 bill that was covered in bloodstains. The bill had come from the driver of a bakery wagon who said that he got it

from a garage in Rockville, Maryland. A garage. The missing green Buick hadn't been found, so that seemed like a good tip. Volton took the bill to the Department of Justice laboratory to have species testing done. Then he ran down the path of that money from business to business, person to person, until he finally found the original owner who'd bled all over it. That man said that he was target shooting in his yard and he cut his finger on the gun hammer. Detective Volton substantiated that claim and he moved on. Now imagine trying to track down a single five dollar bill in today's world. Forget it. We would just run DNA on the blood, look for any ridge detail from a fingerprint and call it a day. More forensics were being done by DC

Metro Lieutenant John Fowler on the spent casings, bullet, and projectiles from the ticket office. Lieutenant Fowler determined that the gun that was used was a 1903 Colt.32 caliber semi-automatic. He said that the gun was in pretty bad shape, but now that Fowler had that information, if the gun used in the Carbarn murders was located, he could do microscopic ballistic comparisons to declare a match. The detectives now realized that the gun they were looking for was likely a street purchase, since it was in pretty bad condition. That wasn't much, but it was better than all the dead-end leads they'd followed so far. Nothing the detectives did seemed to be panning out with any solid information about who killed

Uncle Emery and James Mitchell, and the clock was ticking. Nobody found the green Buick that had been stolen the night before the murders, and nobody claimed to have seen it in a garage or parked in a back alley somewhere. No cleaning establishments had come forward to say that bloody clothes had been brought in, and the endless gossip on the street hadn't given them anyone solid to investigate. Then they got their first solid lead from an unlikely source. Detective Frank Brass was contacted by an ex-con informant who Brass had used in the past. The informant's name was Bill. Bill said that he'd been contacted by two men on January 7th, 1935, two weeks before the murders, about a robbery of the main office in Georgetown. Bill said that he knew one of the men,

his name was Lawrence Pettit, but he didn't know the second man. Bill told Detective Brass that both men had worked for the Capital Transit Company previously, and they knew the inner workings of the main office and told him that the job would be worth 20 to 30 grand if they timed it right. Bill, the informant, asked Lawrence Pettit for more details, and Pettit gave him a laundry list of facts, including the layout of the interior of the main office, that an armored truck came for the money every morning between 10 30 and 11, and that only three men were with that truck. Two of the men would go inside to get the cash, which was brought down on an elevator and

through the lobby, while the third man stayed with the truck. Bill told Detective Brass that the two seemed to have all of the details ironed out, but Bill declined their offer to go in with them because he said a broad daylight robbery like that sounded like a suicide mission. A few days later, Lawrence Pettit approached Bill again and asked him to purchase some guns from his contacts on the street. Bill told Pettit he still wasn't interested. After my Uncle Emery's case hit the newspapers, Bill contacted Detective Brass, thinking that Pettit and this other guy might be good for the Carbarn murders. Detectives Brass and Volton decided to work with Bill and see what else he could find out. Volton and Brass told Bill to make contact with Lawrence Pettit again and tell him that he'd

given it some thought and because things were getting tough on him financially, he'd changed his mind. Bill did that and reported back that the second man's name was George Bruffy and that he and Lawrence Pettit were still hell-bent on committing the robbery of the main office. Pettit and Bruffy bought Bill's change of heart hook, line, and sinker. Volton and Brass coached informant Bill and told him to bring up the Carborn case during a point in the conversation where it wouldn't be obvious. On the third day, a lunch meeting was planned at a sandwich shop downtown at 1306 North Capitol Street to work out the particulars. Bill, Pettit, and Broughy sat at a table by the

window. Bill listened to their plans about timing, where to park the car, entry and exit points, and other logistics, taking mental notes to give to Volton and Brass. When there was a pause in the conversation, Bill asked the others if it would be okay to bring a friend of his from Baltimore to help out. Pettit and Bruffy told him that would be great, since it would make the heist four on three. Bill interrupted and made his play about the Carbarn case. I'm willing to go along with you fellows on the 36th and M Street job, but I won't be a party to any damn fools who blast a guy for no reason like that Chevy Chase affair. At that point, Pettit and Broughy stopped chewing, went silent, and stared at Bill.

After a brief moment, Lawrence Pettit spoke up and said, That was all a mistake. Forget it. George Bruffy kicked Pettit under the table and growled, Shut up. You talk too much. If you have information about the Carbarn murders, go to the Shattered Souls Facebook page and leave me a message. Opening music by Sam Johnson at SamJohnsonLive.com. Shattered Souls is produced by Karen Smith and Angel Heart Productions. This is an iHeart Podcast.