September 8, 2025 • 59 mins
Our story this week is set in the 1920s in Westchester County, New York…it’s a Jazz Age mystery. A young ex-sailor is found dead on a desolate road. A suspect from a wealthy family admits to the murder, but he claims that he was trying to protect a dangerous secret. Author James Polchin’s book, Shadow Men unravels a mystery more than a century old.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
He would have his own personal bootlegger come with large
trunks of gin. Ward told the doorman of the building.
Anytime this guy comes by with his trunk, just let
him in.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Our story this week is
set in the nineteen twenties in Westchester County, New York.
(01:14):
It's a jazz age mystery. A young ex sailor is
found dead on a desolate road. A suspect from a
wealthy family admits to the murder, but he claims that
he was trying to protect a dangerous secret. Author James
Pulchin's book Shadowmen unravels a mystery more than a century old. Well,
(01:35):
let's go ahead and get into this case. You know,
you open the book with a discovery. Why open it
with such a I feel like grand opening when people
love to sprinkle breadcrumbs everywhere and then really reveal the victim.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, I thought a lot about how to tell this story.
That to me is that is fascinating. I'm always reading
these crime books to think about how do you tell
the story? Where there are many ways to start this
story right, And this book opens with the discovery of
a body on the side of the road in Westchester
County in May of nineteen twenty two, And I thought
(02:15):
that was really I wanted to take the reader from
how readers at the time would have encountered this crime, right,
And so they would have encountered this discovery of a
body in a small newspaper article, which then would have
evolved over the weeks and months after. And so I
(02:36):
thought that was a good place to start. How would
people at the time have encountered this crime and tell
the story in that way? And so, yeah, it's this
discovery of a body that has no identifying papers on
it has no idea. The people who found it don't
know who this person is. And that's where we start.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Was it immediately obvious that this is a homicide or
why would it be small just because there was almost
no information about it.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yes, the way that the eyewitnesses talk about finding the body,
it was laid out fairly staged, right, one of the
eyewitnesses said it. It was laid out as if an
undertaker had put it there, right, very very formal, formal
there on the side of the road. And so it
was curious to everybody who discovered it how a body
(03:24):
could just be laid out that way, right, So there
was a mystery around this whole case. Initial reports of
it in the newspaper had all kinds of speculation. This is,
of course, prohibition time, and most of speculation went to bootlegging,
some kind of crime related to bootlegging. The bootleggers would
(03:46):
would often use these back roads. This body was found
on King Street in Westchester County, which is just near
Kensico Reservoir, which has lots of back roads, little alleyways,
and it was a great way to transport bootlegd alcohol
from Canada down into New York City without getting noticed, right,
(04:08):
And so that was a lot of the speculation early
on about what happened here until they did find some
identifying feature.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
So let me talk about that real quick. Prohibition had
only been really in play since nineteen twenty maybe nineteen
nineteen is really you know, they were trying to gear
it up by nineteen twenty two in New York. Was
their organized crime already forming around bootlegging? Or was it
literally the backyard stills where people were blowing themselves up
(04:38):
that I wrote about, or would this have been some
kind of a mob hit? Is that what people were thinking?
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think both were going on, right. I think that
there was a early efforts for mob profit off of
bootlegd alcohol, but I think it was in its early stages, right,
and so it was a little more chaotic at these
early years. In the reports about this murder, early reports
about this murder's no mention of a gang or of
(05:08):
a mob style kind of bootlegging operation, right. I think
that's a later twenties evolution. As such. This was more
of a maybe it was a bootleg truck that was
coming and that this person had been either hit by
that truck. There was even speculation that he might have
been working for the government trying to nab a bootleg
(05:31):
truck and then was shot in that encounter. Right, But
there wasn't a sense of like organized crime around this
around this case in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Who was handling the investigation into this this is pre
FBI and probably that it would be local police, right,
would it be Westchester police?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah? Exactly. So the sheriff, George Warner at the time,
took the lead on investigating this. There was also eight
police who were called onto the scene because this road
was both a state road and it was in the county,
so it had a couple of different investigating groups for it.
(06:13):
Initially the corner, a man named Edward Fitzgerald was on site.
He came to investigate the body. But interesting, I love
Fitzgerald in many ways because at the time people don't
remember this, but at the time, to be the corner
in Westchester County, and this was the case in many
(06:33):
districts around the country, you didn't need to be a doctor.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Still sometimes don't need to be a doctor, even current corners.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
It'scted office, right, And so Edward Fitzgerald was not a doctor,
and here he was thrust into this very complicated case
early on. The body that was found was shot once
in the chest, but it was an odd sort of
condition because he was wearing a suit and his suit
(07:04):
jacket did not show any bullet hole, or his vest
didn't show any bullet hole, only through the shirt, right,
And so there was all these questions about what exactly
happened here. How could it be shot on the side
of the road but not shot through his suit jacket,
only shot through the shirt and so forth. So Fitzgerald
was there to investigate. But as I said, he was
(07:24):
not a doctor. He later became known as the Last
Corner of Westchester County because after his appointment, the laws
changed in the county and it became you needed to
have a medical degree to be what was then newly
termed medical examiner, right, And so Fitzgerald has the dubious
(07:44):
distinction of being the Last Corner of Westchester County, but
he was one of the first to be on site
to investigate.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I was just talking to my co host Paul Holes
on our other podcast about a case from eighteen ninety
nine where we had a coroner who didn't have a
medical degree, but they brought in in eighteen ninety nine.
They brought in to really experienced pathologists to examine this
young woman's body. Did Fitzgerald have access to somebody? I'm
(08:13):
surely the state police, right.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yes, right, so that's my sense for this case. They
did bring in two doctors who examined the body. What
they did was actually from the crime site. They took
the body to undertaker's facility look at parlor, Yeah, exactly,
to the undertaker's parlor, and that's where it was examined
by these two doctors, right, who determined the cause of
(08:37):
death and different markings. Because this was the big question,
what are the distinctive markings on the body. And one
of the distinctive elements of this body was that he
had US issued military issued underwear. Okay, at the time,
you think, well that's curious, but it did lead them
to take his fingerprints and send the fingerprints down to
(08:59):
wash In, DC to the Naval Intelligence. We had just
come out of World War One. The US Army was
the largest database for fingerprints at that time because they
fingerprint everybody who was enlisted, and from those fingerprints and
photographed they were able to identify who the body was.
And it was of nineteen year old Clarence Peters, who
(09:20):
had spent about three months as a naval intern when
he was about seventeen years old. And so they had
a record of him, They had his fingerprints, and they
had information about him and an address of his family.
And so that's how they were able to identify him
and then contact his family.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Now, when does Hearst media the machine which is alive
and well in the twenties, When does Hurst media think
this is interesting enough? Are we at that point yet
or are we still talking about we now identified that
body that we told you about a couple of days
ago on the road in Westchester.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's a really good question. When does a bd get
interested in a crime? Right that? That was a question
for me with the first book. When does a victim
become something that's newsworthy? Right? So, even after being identified
and so, Clarence Peters was from a small town in
Massachusetts called Haverll, just on the border with New Hampshire.
(10:22):
It was industrial town. It was known for shoemaking. In fact,
the local chamber of commerce called the town Slipper City
because it was known for its shoemaking.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
There were things to be known for I think Slipper.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
City, absolutely right, and that's the world he grew up in.
It was from a large family. They were dirt poor family.
His father, Elbridge Peters, had a lot of health issues
and so couldn't really work full time. And Peters, Clarence Peters,
was the oldest son, and so there was an expectation
here that he was meant to bring money in for
(10:59):
the That didn't really attract the press until a few
days after his identity was made known in the press
that someone came forward to confess that he had shot Peters.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Let me ask you a couple of medical things before
we get into all of that, because I know that
that's really the hook in your book, because you know
the rest of the story gets pretty wild, much bigger
than somebody on a desolate road in Westchester? Was there blood?
Were they curious about how much blood there would be
on the road? Did it seem apparent? I guess I'm
(11:35):
asking whether or not he was killed there. We know
he was wearing a jacket, so obviously he had his
jacket off and then he was redressed, I assume. But
I mean, does this look like the crime scene where
he was lying.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So even at the crime scene, there were different theories.
So the state troopers had one theory that he was
murdered somewhere else and dumped there on the side of
the road. Others I believe Fitzgerald had a theory that
he was shot there on site, given the way that
the impressions impressions of his shoes in the sand and
(12:08):
the gravel on the side of the road looked. There
had been a farmer not far from the crime scene,
as well as a couple of farm hands who were
sleeping about two three hundred feet from the crime scene
up a hill from the road, and they were also
there at the crime scene. They didn't report hearing any shots, right,
(12:31):
and so there were a lot of conflicting kinds of
evidence at the crime scene because of the way he
was shot. The bullet didn't exit the body right, and
so he was bleeding internally more than at the crime
scene itself. But we also have to remember that forensics
at that time were very limited in how they would
(12:54):
pursue this, so there wasn't a lot of tools at
their disposal.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Did anyone have a sense before we have the person
come forward, did anybody have a sense for just what
kind of a crime was this. Now they know this
is a nineteen year old sailor, you know, from kind
of a poor working area. Did anybody have any idea?
And what was he doing out there? And was there
a theory before we have the confession?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Right, So his parents, Inez and Elbridge Peters, they were baffled.
So when the local paper asked them, you know, well,
how did your son end up in New York State
and how did he you know, what was he doing?
To their understanding, he was enlisting in the Marines. He
had gone south to South Carolina to the Marine training
(13:37):
base at Parris Island, and that's the last they had
heard of him from letters that he sent. So they
had no clue how he would have ended up in
a empty road along the Kensico Reservoir in New York.
It was a mystery to them.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
No defensive wounds, it didn't look like he had been
in a fight, nothing else. Just this one shot.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Right, just this one shot. There was no other bruising
that they found in their examination. He had a dollar
and thirty two cents on him, along with some other
details they pulled out of his pockets, such as a
broken comb and a pack of cigarettes and those kinds
of things. Because he had so little money, the press
(14:23):
started to call him the penniless sailor. So really no clues.
There was one element, one thing they pulled out of
his pocket, which was they called a lady's handkerchief because
it had pansies embroidered on it. And I found that
to be an interesting detail because it never really comes
up again in the investigation, but it is a curious detail,
(14:46):
like why he had this particular kind of handkerchief on him?
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What did his parents say he was like, why was
he only in for three months? And you know, was
he a good kid? Or is there anything besides being baffled?
Is there anything that they thought, Well, I don't know,
he was a ladies man or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
So no, of course the parents were baffled because he
was you know, they they talked of him as a
as a decent kid. Yes, he had his problems, and
that's something that then would start coming out more in
the press. He stole things. He stole a bike, He
stole a car from Boston and drove it up to Hibyrell.
(15:25):
He he stole checks from people's mailboxes, right, He spent
time in reform school in Massachusetts. He was not an angel,
He was not a choir boy in any way. But
his parents and they did, you know, admit that he
had these this past, but they did recognize that he
(15:45):
didn't own a gun. He committed petty crimes. He wasn't
a violent person. But also what I found interesting about
his background from from the research, he was also someone
you know, looking for different kind of life, I think
than what Heroal could offer him. He did spend some
time working in one of the shoe factories, but not
(16:08):
very long. It seems clear that that was not interesting
to him. He didn't want to do that work. So
he went to enlist in the navy, right but he
only was there for about a month and he stole something,
and once they found that, he was discharged dishonorable, discharged
from the navy, you know, and when he you know,
(16:28):
came out back to Harol from there looking for work again.
He worked many temporary jobs. He moved furniture for a time,
he worked on a farm for a time. All those
people who employed him thought he was was a bit strange.
He didn't really do the work that they asked him
to do. In some ways. You know, I think he
(16:52):
was a dreamer. He wanted to get away from that
town into something bigger and petty. Crime was a real
for him, it seemed. But of course, because he was
discharged from the Navy, by the time he went down
to the Marines, they found out that he'd been discharged
from another branch of the military, and that disqualified him
(17:12):
from being in any branch of the military once you
get discharged.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
We talk about in true crime a lot of times
of the imperfect victim, which is so annoying because there's
just no such thing as the perfect victim. I mean,
the idealized virginal woman or you know, the choir boy.
How do you take that person and make people want
to get to the end of the story. If you've
(17:38):
got a kid, you know he has probably potential somewhere,
but he hasn't been exactly stellar. Did you feel like
you really had to find some really good attributes about
him for people to kind of say, Okay, I can
roll with this story because I want to know what
ends up happening. You know, if anything, at the end
of the book, that's.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Interesting because there are so few folks in this book
that I feel are good people.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Now I've written about those books and those books too.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
And it's tough, you know, I you know, how do
you pitch it? I mean, for me, Peters is kind
of a he's a kid, he's he's I can definitely
identify with his desire to find a better life. Here.
It is the post World War One. The country's kind
(18:29):
of in an ascendancy of wealth, of entertainment, of newness.
And I can see this kid from an industrial town,
and the shoe factor industry is also suffering and shrinking
because of this broader national economic expansion, right, and so
(18:51):
shoes are being made elsewhere around the country, or even
being made outside the country increasingly, And so I can
see this Peters the way I wrote it about him
as someone who really was searching for something, and crime
was the petty crimes that he was committing was a
way to find an exit. Yeah, And I think he
(19:11):
knew very well that going down to Paris Island to
enlist in the Marines that he wasn't going to they
were going to kick him out. But I thought, I
think that he thought that the train travel paid for
going down to South Carolina. Hey, that will be fun
and then I'll see what happens after. So there's it's
a mixed and I'm sure you and others have felt
(19:33):
this way when you're writing about these folks, Like there's
a mixture of why did you do that, Clarence, but
also I can understand what you were after.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, Okay, So we have body on the road and
one press clipping, and then a couple of days later
we've identified this young man, he's from Massachusetts. And then
is it a few days after how long is it
after the after Clarence's body is discovered, that we now
have inexplicably a confession, the easiest shut and open and
(20:04):
shut case for the sheriff and the state police.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
That's what they thought. Yes, about three days later, a
man called Walter Ward comes to the Westchester County office
of the DA and the sheriff. They're in the same
complex in the courthouse, the old Westchester courthouse that's been
demolished now, and he comes with his lawyers for lawyers
(20:31):
with him with a statement, a three hundred and thirty
one word statement that's less of a confession and more
of a description of what happened on the road, And
Walter Ward claimed that Clarence Peters, along with two other men,
one called Charlie Ross and one called Jack, had been
(20:51):
blackmailing him for months and they had extorted one thousands
of dollars from him, and he went to confer front
them to put an end to this, because they had
recently were asking for about seventy thousand dollars of cash
from him in nineteen twenty two cash right, so hundreds
of thousands of dollars today. So he was driving there
(21:15):
in his car with Peters next to him. He picked
up Peters somewhere and then drove. Peters told him where
to go on King Road to meet these other blackmailers.
At some point, Peters was getting out of the car
holding his pistol directed to Ward. Ward grabbed his own
pistol shot Peters in the chest, at which point the
(21:38):
other two blackmailers, who had pulled up in front of
Ward's car on the side of the road, got out
and started firing. And so there was this, he described,
his volley of bullets between his car and their car.
Ward got out, got behind his car, continued to fire
at them. They ultimately jumped back in their car, drove off,
(22:00):
and Wore got back into his car and drove home.
He lived in New Rochelle, about thirty minute drive from
where this crime scene was. So that was his confession
that he was being blackmailed, that he felt threatened, that
he felt his family was being threatened, and this was
an act of self defense when Peters had asked him
(22:21):
to come out of the car, that he felt was threatening,
and so this was all in self defense, and that
he and his lawyers were actively pursuing those other two
blackmailers to try to track them down.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
This is the spot where Clarence Peter's body was found.
He's saying, all that happen, yes, okay, So then now,
of course, we have so many inconsistencies. I don't know
what you want to start with. I'm sure there's a
lack of bullets. I mean, there's a lack of tire tracks.
There's the you know, was he wearing a shirt and
you guys put his jacket on for some reason, or
there's all of that.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Right, It is such a fantastical story, and as I
write in the book, it's almost as if he pulled
it from one of the Saturday afternoon silent films, you know,
the swashbuckler kind of hero kind of films. It just
seems so fantastical to everyone except the sheriff and the dah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
More bad people. I see. I was hoping Sheriff Warren
was going to be one of the good ones, but
I guess not Sheriff Warner.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I think he had come up through Westchester County Republican Party,
which at the time was really the machine of the county,
and he was a good member of that party, and
he had worked in other government roles, parks commissioner, working
with sort of children's aid societies, and that there was
(23:43):
rumors that he never wanted to be sheriff, but that
the party bosses had put him up to be sheriff,
and so he did. He went and he was elected sheriff. Again,
not someone who comes out of police, not someone who
has much experience in policing, who was then made sheriff.
So again, these weird alignments of all these individuals who
(24:06):
were in government and authority, right, who were more aligned
with party allegiance than they were to say finding the
truth or the justice here, right. And so Warner really
just bought this story and the DA Frederick Weeks also
bought this story. This is what happened. We have a body,
(24:26):
we have someone confessing. Okay, So there's another context here,
which is Walter Ward was the son of a very
wealthy family. The press called him the Seon of the
House of Ward. And the Wards had made their millions
by industrializing bread. So they had bread factories across the
(24:48):
northeast and into the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
There had not been bread factories before.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Not until late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Oh interesting, Yeah, I mean, you know, I just wrote
a book that's set in eight teen thirty two, and
that's when really the mills started popping up. A lot
of that was fabric and stuff like that. Hadn't thought
about bread, Okay, So it took a while to figure
out bread. There's so many components to it. Again, what
(25:16):
tell me about the Wards and where they fit into
society and New York. Is this wealthy but considered kind
of blue collar, sort of new money. This isn't Rockefeller
Vanderbilt stuff, right, No.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
They're not of the old school, but they do definitely
fit into kind of a new wealth, a new money Carnegies, Rockefellers,
those kinds of folks who made their fortune in industry. Right.
And so when the Wards moved to New York. They
(25:51):
left Pittsburgh. They had started the company there, it had
been successful, and then they knew that New York was
the place to expand. And they came to New York
early twentieth century and they and they fit in very well.
They bought a large apartment on the Upper West Side
for a while, and then they had built a house
(26:12):
up in the Bronx along the Hudson River. Walter Ward
married a woman called Beryl, who was a socialite, a
Brooklyn socialite back in the day, from also a wealthy family.
Her father made her his wealth from lumber. Walter and
Barrel settled in New Rochelle in a very kind of
(26:34):
exclusive community called Sutton Manor and had two kids. So
they were quite of the moment in terms of the
kind of new wealth that New York was making at
that point between the nineteen hundreds and the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Okay, now that we understand Walter and Clarence, and we
know that Walter's details are completely inconsistent with the crime scene.
What the investigators are saying, even though the sheriff is
the DA are both sort of signing on to what
he's saying. What happens next when you know, we really
(27:14):
kind of kick in with your book. You've got Ward
who's saying these things, and I'm assuming facing the death
penalty or no, he's saying it self defense. I didn't
even know if they had self defense in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Right, he would be facing the death penalty if they
were to convict him of murder. So this statement he
presented in self defense was carefully choreographed by his attorneys,
and there's no evidence that Ward even had a hand
in writing it. So it was very crafted by his attorneys.
(27:46):
He had a very expensive team of lawyers Wall Street
lawyers at his side to do this, and so because
of the family status, the sheriff, Warner and Weeks kind
of just agreed to it. They charged him with manslaughter,
I believe, first, and they secured bail for him ten
(28:09):
thousand dollars, which was unheard of at the time to
give bail to someone who's confessed to murder. But Ward
pays it. And there's a great scene in the book,
and great scene that the newspapers report on where Walter
pulls out ten thousand dollars bills from his pocket and
pays his bail and walks out of the courthouse. So
(28:30):
again that the acute disparities here of wealth are just
so evident in this story. And then the press starts
asking questions, and that's when things start to unravel for
Ward and for the sheriff. You know, The New York
Times sends reporters to the crime scene. They interview the farmer,
(28:54):
they interview others, they talk to the State troopers. The
State troopers don't believe Ward's story. Wow, they're very dubious
of this, and they're.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Willing to talk to a New York Times reporter about
this on the record.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
They spoke to the Times reporter. So once Ward came
forward and said this is what happened, Sheriff Warner goes
to the State troopers barracks and he takes all the
evidence that they had gathered from the crime scene. And
Warner tells the State troopers, we're going to have this
case fixed up in a few days, so you all
(29:32):
don't need to worry yourselves about this. We got this,
and he takes all the evidence with them. He takes
the one bullet casing they find at the crime scene.
There's just one bullet casing, not a volley of bullets,
but one bullet casing. He takes it all, takes it
back to Westchester to his office, and sort of pushes
(29:52):
out the state troopers. Right, So whatever doubts or questions
they had didn't matter anymore because the DA and Warner
we're going to be handling this. But the newspapers started
to explore more and more in finding all these discrepancies
between what boards said and the crime scene itself. Right,
this couldn't possibly have happened this way. The most important
(30:15):
discrepancy is how does how do you shoot Peters from
your car? And he kind of falls back and lays
out perfectly on the side of the road, as if
an undertaker had put him there. You know, there's so
many obvious discrepancies that the press couldn't avoid asking questions
about it.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So when did the press get a hold of this
When we find out that Clarence is a pennyless sailor,
or when Walter Ward gets involved in the big Ward family.
Because you know, I'm sure you concluded this too in
your book. Where I think the press really starts to
pay attention and dig in is when it's the quote
unquote unexpected victim, the person who's not supposed to be there,
(30:57):
but also quote unquote unexpected kill. You know, the data
five who lives next door, who cuts your yard when
you're sick, turns out to be a serial killer. Then
all of a sudden, the press is making up, you know,
names and stuff for it. So is the is that
the case here?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Certainly, once Ward came forward, this wealthy family whose entire
public and business image was purity and cleanliness. It's bread
was pure, comes forward to confess to a murder, and
to confess to some secret that's so horrible that murder
(31:37):
was better than revealing it. I can come forward and
say I killed this man, but I'm not going to
tell you why. I'm not going to tell you what
that secret was. Right. Once that happened, then the press
was all over it. Then the press was really interested
in it because, as you said, right, it seemed like
an open and shut case. But what Ward's statement did
was open up this whole other can, which was what
(32:00):
was the blackmail? What caused you to do it? You say,
it's self defense, but how do we know it was
self defense? Right? So that's where the press latched on.
That's where hearst News American. That's where these newspapers really
latched on to say, what's behind this murder, what's behind
this blackmail?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, what is his family saying? They don't want any
of this to happen? Are they speculating about what this
secret is? Because I'm sure they just think this is
insane that he confessed to something that it doesn't sound
like he was a part of.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
So that is the other sort of fascinating element here.
Early on, the family really just clams up. George Ward,
the head of Ward Baking, he leaves, he leaves town,
he leaves the state, and for various excuses. Right, oh,
I have a conference here. Oh I'm visiting my plants
in Massadon in Pennsylvania. I'm visiting my plants in Ohio.
(33:00):
George Ward stayed out of the state for the entire
time this was being investigated, for over sixteen months. He
just traveled about and never came back to New York State.
From all that we know, Beryl Walter Ward's wife was
at first very chatty with the press, and she was young,
(33:23):
and she was you know again, she comes from a
wealthy family. She was a socialite. She was very attractive.
She's used to being in the press, in the society pages,
and so when newspaper reporters came around, she thought, oh,
let me just talk to them, and she would say
things like, oh, well, I know everything about it, and
if if I could just speak, I'm sure everyone would
(33:44):
would be happy with the outcome. And quickly wards attorneys said, okay, no, no, no,
you can't talk anymore. Let's let's get Beryl away from
the reporters and keep her in the house in New Roshell.
So the the entire family kind of organize themselves around
ward to protect this secret as well. So there was
(34:08):
really no one in the family who would speak out
or speak forward other than to the statement that he gave.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Do we find out conclusively what the secret was?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
The mystery of the blackmail has many theories, and I
tried to unpack all those theories through this book. To
this day, we don't know what is the right theory.
I think one of them is the right theory that
I lay out in the book, but we don't know
which one is the right theory. As soon as the
press got hold of this of the discrepancies here, it
(34:44):
put a lot of pressure on the DA to start
really investigating, and so at the time his office didn't
have the manpower, even the Sheriff's office didn't have the
manpower to do this kind of investigation, which was not
only in Westchester but also went into New York City,
went into the Bronx where Walter Ward office was. That's
(35:05):
where one of the major bread factories were in the Bronx.
They had won in Brooklyn, so they had to hire detectives.
They hired an army of private detectives, mostly from Pinkerton's,
which you know, they're they're famous. Most of the research
I was able to get to were all these detective
reports from the Pinkertons and from another agency that they hired,
(35:27):
a smaller agency located in Times Square, you know, And
there was just they were following every lead they came to,
right And there was just a maze of leads and possibilities,
some from disgruntled workers of the Wards, some from random
a bus boy in a restaurant in Midtown who claimed
(35:50):
a woman came in to ask him if he would
want to murder Walter Ward. It was just a real
net of information and leads that they were pursuing, most
of which led nowhere, but there were sort of a
number of theories that would eventually develop.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Why would Walter confess to something that theoretically would never
be connected to him? Why would he think that this
would be anything that he needed to be afraid of exactly?
Speaker 2 (36:22):
That was a big question that I had as I
was researching initially, like why would you come forward? And
what I thought, what I determined was he definitely did
not think about the underwear. He didn't think that Peters
was going to be identified, okay, And so once that happened,
something in him or some fear in him, said, I
(36:45):
will be linked to this. And so what that statement,
that three hundred and thirty one word statement did was
put him and his lawyers ahead of this story. Because
what happened was that statement. What then became the only
thing to disprove because they they made an effort to
find the other two blackmailers, Charlie Ross and Jack, a
(37:09):
very weak effort to find them, and they never do
find Charlie Ross and spoiler, they never do find Charlie
Ross and Jack.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Or were they real people? Could they even prove they
were real?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
That's the question. Were they even real people? Were they
even there, you know, you know, as one detective told
a newspaper reporter, the Lower east Side is filled with
Charlie Ross's and Jack's. You know, these were names that
petty criminals would just take on, the sort of indescript
names that were easy to hide in the game of
(37:41):
grifting and so forth. So, because there was no witness,
we only had this statement. Ward knew that by putting
the statement out, and his attorneys knew by putting the
statement out, they would have the narrative, they would have
the story, and then the prosecutors and everyone else would
have to disprove that story. That became the problem.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
So what do you think their involvement was? Clarence and Walter?
They actually knew each other. He was actually scared that
Clarence was threatening him with something. I mean, was there
any kind of a relationship that could be proven?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
There were stories from some of the newspaper investigations in
New York City. There were stories that Peters had traveled
to New York City and knew Walter Ward from his
encounters in New York City. One in particular, and again
this is coming from the Hearst publication. So grain of salt, Yes,
(38:41):
always wanting the challenge with researching this kind of case
as you're looking at the newspaper reports and you're going, Okay,
what's factual here? What is really a newspaper? Yeah, drumming
up sales, right, So I'm always having to guard against Okay,
what what could be accurate here? But one story that
(39:03):
they did post was about this ex sailor who knew
Clarence Peters and used to hang out with him in
New York City, and Peters introduced him to a wealthy
man who lived in New Rochelle. And apparently the story
was that Ward had offered this guy money if he
(39:26):
could work for him, right, And so there was a
thread here that Ward was somehow involved in using young
men to blackmail other men, sexual blackmail of men in
the city, right, or that Ward might be somehow involved
in blackmailing not only men but women as well. So
(39:50):
there there is that kind of possible connection. Clarence Peters
family says he never did that. He never went to
New York. He never did he was you know, he yes,
he stole bike, but no, he never he never did that.
We would know, And I doubt that because I think
Clarence Peters was an ambitious and adventurous person, and I
think he wouldn't have told his parents. If he gathered
(40:12):
some cash together and spent a week or weekend in
New York, he probably wouldn't have told them. So there
are possibilities that Walter and Clarence knew each other before
that encounter. My sense is, so when you were discharged
from the marine base in Paris, Island and you were
(40:33):
going north, which is where Peters was going, they only
got you a government issue ticket to Philadelphia. From there,
you're on your own. Not sure why. I never got
a sense of like, why did the military just drop
in Philly.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
I wonder if it had like the most transportation options
going every which way possible or boat easy. I don't know,
who knows true. Probably not out of convenience. I'm assuming
not going, oh, this would be great for you guys.
Must be some sort of group discount.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
I don't know, right, no, exactly. So what a lot
of guys would do who are going to New York
or New England, they would just hitch hike their way
back home. And I think that's probably what happened to Clarence.
He got dropped off in Philadelphia. And he either knew
he could get to New York or because he knew
(41:24):
he knew Walter Ward there, or he was pursuing Walter
Ward there, or a more random possibility is that he
was hitchhiking his way to New York and walter Ward
picked him up.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Are either of these men known to be gay in
this time period?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yes, and no. One of the first threads the private
detectives researched around Walter Ward was his sexuality, which I
found was interesting. So they were asking his neighbors in
Sutton Manner do you think Walter Ward is a degenerate?
(42:02):
At one point they ask one of his colleagues in
New Rochelle they say, do you think he's a cocksucker?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I didn't even know they had that phrase in nineteen
twenty two.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
There it is, It's in a Pinkerton report.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
And what do you think? What was the flag? Is
it like some affect stereotype thing or what do you think?
Speaker 2 (42:22):
I'm not sure. I mean I think that because of this,
because this relationship between this nineteen year old sailor and
this thirty one year old, wealthy, married business guy, I
think that class difference that was strange to the investigators,
and what world would they have circulated to know each other? Right,
(42:43):
And so they imagine that that connection was somehow a
sexual or commercial of some sort.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
I would think it's some sort of criminal. I don't know.
If I would go there, I would think there's a
criminal enterprise happening, or he's a drug runner or something
rum runner or anything like that. Sure I would have
gone there. What was it like to be gay in
nineteen twenty two illegal?
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It was a felony. You could be sentenced to prison
for years if you were caught. So, yes, it was.
It was definitely something that if that was the secret
of the blackmail, that definitely would be something you wanted
to keep quiet. It would have been better to say, yes,
(43:26):
I am a gambler and I lost millions of dollars
and my family's in ruin. That was better than to say, yes,
I have sex with men.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
When I talked to Paul Hols, you know, the forensic
investigator on my other show about this kind of thing,
he'll say that he's encountered, and we have in history
encountered men who will They will cop to a murder,
but not to the sexual assault that police know they did.
In conjunction with the murder. And I always say why
(43:56):
is that? And he said, because it's not as socially acceptable.
So we've seen this before, that there are people who
have such a terrible secret to hide that it's less
about the morals of murder and more about just I mean,
dooming your family. And so it sounds like the family
if this is what happened, then the family would have known.
(44:18):
Surely the Ward family, right.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
They might have. Right, they might have known of it.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Because the dad took off. I mean, what kind of
reaction is that to leave and to abandon your son.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Right, Yes, clearly his father knew something about this case
such that he could not be subpoenaed to testify. As
this rolled along and the grand jurys were convened in
that the father stayed far from any subpoena around that
and never actually did testify about what he might have known.
(44:51):
I don't know how much the family knew, but they
might have known. Ward was a playboy. He was very
much of the era, right, And I think he worked
for his father's company, he worked for Ward Bakery, But
really I think it was a figurehead kind of position.
I don't think he had a lot of responsibilities. He
(45:13):
was not given a vice president position. His brother Ralph
was given a vice president position. He was a much
more stable and diligent son. Ward was a playboy. He
liked to gamble, he liked to drink.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Can you describe him as Gatsby? Basically?
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yes, Yes. He could walk out of a Gatsby party
without a problem. For a brief time in nineteen twenty one,
he claimed to be a bachelor and he rented an
apartment on the Upper West Side. When his wife and
his children went on holiday for two months and he
had parties and he had women, and he had drink,
(45:50):
he would have his own personal bootlegger come with large
trunks of gin and bring them into the apartment. Ward
told the dorman of the building, anytime this guy comes
by with his trunk, just let him in.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
But no evidence from all of these parties that a
young man stayed behind when everybody else left.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
No evidence of that. And there's extensive detective interviews with
the African American staff of this apartment building, really fascinating interviews.
And what I love about writing about crime is how
you get these windows into people's lives that would never
be in the historical record any other way except from
(46:34):
these detective notes, right, and what they saw, what they witnessed,
and also who they were. But there was no evidence
at that point. The detectives did go to Boston, and
they were suspecting that when Peters was in the navy
there stationed that that's where he might have met Ord,
because Ward would go up to Boston apparently and frequent
(46:59):
these all male parties that were held in these hotels.
So the detectives interview the owner of the hotel, and
of course the owner of the hotel said, oh, no, no, no,
we don't have those kind of parties here. We don't
do that. No, no, no, that's not possible. But of course,
who would admit to having an all male party in
(47:19):
your hotel when you're trying to attract you know, wealthy
elite clients. I mean, that's crazy. So there's all these
whiffs of possibilities. There's a young man, a neighbor of
Wards in Sutton Manner, about seventeen years old, who talked
to detectives and he told the detectives that he and
(47:41):
his friends knew that Walter Ward was a pervert, that
he liked boys and I put a lot of credence
in that interview because there's no reason why that neighbor
needed to come forward and tell the detectives that. And
in fact, he was told by his family not to
talk to the detectives, like, don't talk to them, but
(48:04):
he did anyways. So there's all these little hints and
whiffs of possibility here that I feel like is undeniable.
There is this other individual that comes forward later in
the investigation who claims that he and Ward quote knew
all the faggots in New York City, right, And New
(48:26):
York Times publishes that on the front page of their newspaper.
But they have to at a clarifying phrase what a
faggot means because it was a very new term. I
think it's a very colloquial term that most people wouldn't know.
So there's again all these little hints that the relationship
between Peters and Ward might have that sexual undertone.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Well, tell me the rest of the story. He goes
for manslaughter, is that right?
Speaker 2 (48:55):
So eventually, yes, you know, he pays that ten thousand
dollars bail, and then the press comes out and this says,
that's crazy. There's so many discrepancies, Judge, you just let
this guy go, and so there's a lot of pressure
on the DA. They rearrest him, they charge him with
manslaughter and a fifty thousand dollars bail, but it lingers
(49:18):
for months through the summer of nineteen twenty two, all
the way through the fall of nineteen twenty two. It
just lingers, and the DA never brings the case forward
to trial. In the meantime, Ward spends a long time
in the Westchester County Jail and what's called the luxury
room for their wealthy clients. That's more like a hotel
(49:39):
room with a nice bed and a sofa, and he
orders all of his meals out from local restaurants, and this,
of course fans the flames. Right. So by the end
of nineteen twenty two, there's no movement in the case
because the DA can't find any legitimate evidence to disprove
Walter ward statement.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
He's up the crime scene.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Except the crime scene right, which again still I guess
he felt it wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
They don't have a weapon or anything like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
So in the fall of nineteen twenty two, it's an
election year. The governor, who is a Republican is voted
out of office and Al Smith, Populist is voted in
for a second term from he was governor earlier and
then lost and came back and took another term. Al
Smith born on the Lower east Side, working class immigrant family.
(50:33):
He becomes this sort of voice that the Peters family
is hoping will take this case on the state level
and really investigate it. Because the question was the DA's
office in Westchester's two immersed in the Republican Party, they
were not interested in making really any progress on this.
(50:54):
It became an election issue. One of the reasons why
the Democrats won big in New York State in that
election is because this case was seen as evidence of
Republican corruption, that they were trying to cover up this
murder and trying to accommodate a wealthy a wealthy family.
(51:14):
So that really changed once there was a new DA
because Frederick Weeks decided not to run again for DA,
there was a new DA in place, and he dropped
the case and the judge dismissed the case in January
nineteen twenty three, and Walter Ward walked free. So that,
of course didn't sit well with a lot of people.
(51:37):
Most notably the New York Daily News editor, who had
been pretty vocal on this case from the start. But
once it was dismissed, that's when the editor, Joseph Patterson
really took on the case and made it a cause
for his newspaper to bring Walter Ward to justice and
(51:57):
to find some justice for the Peters family. And he
knew that Al Smith in the Governor's office, could you
make that happen? Right? He knew that al Smith was
very sympathetic to this case and sympathetic to Ana's Peters.
And so as Peters, with her lawyer, travels to Albany,
(52:19):
her neighbors put together a few dollars for her to
take a train to Albany and go meet with the
governor and plead her case. You need to open this
case on the state level and get me justice. And
that ultimately does happen. The governor does ultimately open it up,
and there is in the state Attorney General, the first
(52:41):
Jewish man to hold that office in New York State,
who was elected in nineteen twenty two, moves forward with
a case against Walter Ward.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Wow, okay, well, can you tell us if there was
justice served or sort of justice or not at all.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yes and no. This is what's the fascinating. So there
is a jury trial, and a little side note. The
jury trial here is fascinating because the biggest crowd of
people who came to this trial were women. The newspapers
called them murder fans.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
They would stand outside the courthouse and really jockey for
the best seats in the courtroom. It was a kind
of a small courtroom. They would bring their knitting, they
would bring their lunch so they didn't lose their seat.
At one point they were angered because they didn't think
the bailiffs were giving them the best seats, and so
they started to shout, we want our rights, we want
(53:36):
our rights to have the best seats in the courtroom.
Many of these women, I think were just really enamored
with Ward and Burrell. So they bring the case to trial.
Ward offers nothing, no defense other than his three hundred
and thirty one word statement. The state offers up a
(53:58):
number of witnesses to point to the discrepancies at the
crime scene. But there's no new evidence and there's nothing
really powerful to discount Wards statement, and so the jury
finds him not guilty.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
How does everything turn out for him. Do they just
live to a ripe, happy old age and they've got
these kids and all of that is monky.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Dory, you would think. But the one thing that is
really fascinating so key towards defense was that he jumped
back in his car and he drove back home, got
home around four am in the morning, and that's where
Beryl was waiting for him, right and Barrel always stated, yes,
I was there when he came home. About a year
or so after his acquittal, Ward goes missing. His cars
(54:45):
found in Philadelphia again, Philadelphia for some reason, and there's
a big man hunt wears Walter Ward for about six months.
We don't know where he is. He turns up in Havana, Cuba,
where his father had already stepped down as president of
the company of the bakery and opened a kind of
a farm of some sort down in Cuba. So Ward
(55:09):
basically fled with his father down to Cuba and lived
the rest of his life there. Beryl, on the other hand,
left alone with two kids. She was like, Okay, that's it.
I'm going to Reno and I'm getting a divorce. So
she gets a divorce and about a week later she
marries a Wall Street investor whoa okay, Beryl fascinating, right.
(55:30):
So she comes back from Reno and the last interview
she gives is with the local newspaper, and she says,
I wish no ill will on Walter Ward. I want
nothing to do with him anymore, though, and then she said,
I just want to clarify one thing. I was never
there when he came home.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
Here goes, you're alibi, and it's too like he's already
in Cuba.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
Right wow. And so I do tell in the epilogue
that different characters here what happened to them in the end.
But definitely, you know, the twist and turns of the
story seemed unending for me. Yeah, in researching and writing
it and just trying to piece together all the parts
of this of this saga really as it as it unfolded.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Well, just to wrap this up, Arthur Conan Doyle, the
author of Sherlock Holmes you know, said that this was
such a great mystery and that he would start digging
into the Ward family because it's so you know, fascinating,
all of the different layers and the way people react
and everything. And this book really, even though it sounds
like there are a lot of unanswered questions. I feel
(56:38):
like there's so much kind of evidence around that you
can kind of piece together logically, logical people, not the
sheriff and not the DA but logical people can put
together a lot of the pieces. And you know, in
a way, you don't have all of your answers, But
you know, did you feel like by the end you
were ready to leave this book? Because I'm pretty sure
(56:58):
you could probably look at newspapers, dot com or wherever
you were and all the archives forever and ever to
try to solve this case that's literally one hundred years old.
Were you able to stop and say, I got to
be down with Walter Ward.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yes, there is a never ending story kind of quality
here wherein I think that I'm going to come across
some information that has been buried somewhere, or someone's going
to come out and say, oh wait, I have this
letter here somewhere right. And there definitely was a point
where I wanted to wrap this up in a way
(57:34):
that gave readers all of the known evidence. As you said, logically,
sort of present all the known evidence, and I want
it readers to kind of piece it themselves. Really, I mean,
I do offer some insights at the end, but I
want it readers to also see these different theories and
see what makes sense to them, because there is a
lot of evidence here, but nothing that conclusively draws to
(57:57):
what really happened on that road in Westchester.
Speaker 1 (58:11):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(58:32):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(58:53):
and Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at
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authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
He would have his own personal bootlegger come with large
trunks of gin. Ward told the doorman of the building.
Anytime this guy comes by with his trunk, just let
him in.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Our story this week is
set in the nineteen twenties in Westchester County, New York.
(01:14):
It's a jazz age mystery. A young ex sailor is
found dead on a desolate road. A suspect from a
wealthy family admits to the murder, but he claims that
he was trying to protect a dangerous secret. Author James
Pulchin's book Shadowmen unravels a mystery more than a century old. Well,
(01:35):
let's go ahead and get into this case. You know,
you open the book with a discovery. Why open it
with such a I feel like grand opening when people
love to sprinkle breadcrumbs everywhere and then really reveal the victim.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Yeah, I thought a lot about how to tell this story.
That to me is that is fascinating. I'm always reading
these crime books to think about how do you tell
the story? Where there are many ways to start this
story right, And this book opens with the discovery of
a body on the side of the road in Westchester
County in May of nineteen twenty two, And I thought
(02:15):
that was really I wanted to take the reader from
how readers at the time would have encountered this crime, right,
And so they would have encountered this discovery of a
body in a small newspaper article, which then would have
evolved over the weeks and months after. And so I
(02:36):
thought that was a good place to start. How would
people at the time have encountered this crime and tell
the story in that way? And so, yeah, it's this
discovery of a body that has no identifying papers on
it has no idea. The people who found it don't
know who this person is. And that's where we start.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Was it immediately obvious that this is a homicide or
why would it be small just because there was almost
no information about it.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Yes, the way that the eyewitnesses talk about finding the body,
it was laid out fairly staged, right, one of the
eyewitnesses said it. It was laid out as if an
undertaker had put it there, right, very very formal, formal
there on the side of the road. And so it
was curious to everybody who discovered it how a body
(03:24):
could just be laid out that way, right, So there
was a mystery around this whole case. Initial reports of
it in the newspaper had all kinds of speculation. This is,
of course, prohibition time, and most of speculation went to bootlegging,
some kind of crime related to bootlegging. The bootleggers would
(03:46):
would often use these back roads. This body was found
on King Street in Westchester County, which is just near
Kensico Reservoir, which has lots of back roads, little alleyways,
and it was a great way to transport bootlegd alcohol
from Canada down into New York City without getting noticed, right,
(04:08):
And so that was a lot of the speculation early
on about what happened here until they did find some
identifying feature.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
So let me talk about that real quick. Prohibition had
only been really in play since nineteen twenty maybe nineteen
nineteen is really you know, they were trying to gear
it up by nineteen twenty two in New York. Was
their organized crime already forming around bootlegging? Or was it
literally the backyard stills where people were blowing themselves up
(04:38):
that I wrote about, or would this have been some
kind of a mob hit? Is that what people were thinking?
Speaker 2 (04:44):
I think both were going on, right. I think that
there was a early efforts for mob profit off of
bootlegd alcohol, but I think it was in its early stages, right,
and so it was a little more chaotic at these
early years. In the reports about this murder, early reports
about this murder's no mention of a gang or of
(05:08):
a mob style kind of bootlegging operation, right. I think
that's a later twenties evolution. As such. This was more
of a maybe it was a bootleg truck that was
coming and that this person had been either hit by
that truck. There was even speculation that he might have
been working for the government trying to nab a bootleg
(05:31):
truck and then was shot in that encounter. Right, But
there wasn't a sense of like organized crime around this
around this case in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Who was handling the investigation into this this is pre
FBI and probably that it would be local police, right,
would it be Westchester police?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah? Exactly. So the sheriff, George Warner at the time,
took the lead on investigating this. There was also eight
police who were called onto the scene because this road
was both a state road and it was in the county,
so it had a couple of different investigating groups for it.
(06:13):
Initially the corner, a man named Edward Fitzgerald was on site.
He came to investigate the body. But interesting, I love
Fitzgerald in many ways because at the time people don't
remember this, but at the time, to be the corner
in Westchester County, and this was the case in many
(06:33):
districts around the country, you didn't need to be a doctor.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Still sometimes don't need to be a doctor, even current corners.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
It'scted office, right, And so Edward Fitzgerald was not a doctor,
and here he was thrust into this very complicated case
early on. The body that was found was shot once
in the chest, but it was an odd sort of
condition because he was wearing a suit and his suit
(07:04):
jacket did not show any bullet hole, or his vest
didn't show any bullet hole, only through the shirt, right,
And so there was all these questions about what exactly
happened here. How could it be shot on the side
of the road but not shot through his suit jacket,
only shot through the shirt and so forth. So Fitzgerald
was there to investigate. But as I said, he was
(07:24):
not a doctor. He later became known as the Last
Corner of Westchester County because after his appointment, the laws
changed in the county and it became you needed to
have a medical degree to be what was then newly
termed medical examiner, right, And so Fitzgerald has the dubious
(07:44):
distinction of being the Last Corner of Westchester County, but
he was one of the first to be on site
to investigate.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I was just talking to my co host Paul Holes
on our other podcast about a case from eighteen ninety
nine where we had a coroner who didn't have a
medical degree, but they brought in in eighteen ninety nine.
They brought in to really experienced pathologists to examine this
young woman's body. Did Fitzgerald have access to somebody? I'm
(08:13):
surely the state police, right.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yes, right, so that's my sense for this case. They
did bring in two doctors who examined the body. What
they did was actually from the crime site. They took
the body to undertaker's facility look at parlor, Yeah, exactly,
to the undertaker's parlor, and that's where it was examined
by these two doctors, right, who determined the cause of
(08:37):
death and different markings. Because this was the big question,
what are the distinctive markings on the body. And one
of the distinctive elements of this body was that he
had US issued military issued underwear. Okay, at the time,
you think, well that's curious, but it did lead them
to take his fingerprints and send the fingerprints down to
(08:59):
wash In, DC to the Naval Intelligence. We had just
come out of World War One. The US Army was
the largest database for fingerprints at that time because they
fingerprint everybody who was enlisted, and from those fingerprints and
photographed they were able to identify who the body was.
And it was of nineteen year old Clarence Peters, who
(09:20):
had spent about three months as a naval intern when
he was about seventeen years old. And so they had
a record of him, They had his fingerprints, and they
had information about him and an address of his family.
And so that's how they were able to identify him
and then contact his family.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Now, when does Hearst media the machine which is alive
and well in the twenties, When does Hurst media think
this is interesting enough? Are we at that point yet
or are we still talking about we now identified that
body that we told you about a couple of days
ago on the road in Westchester.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
That's a really good question. When does a bd get
interested in a crime? Right that? That was a question
for me with the first book. When does a victim
become something that's newsworthy? Right? So, even after being identified
and so, Clarence Peters was from a small town in
Massachusetts called Haverll, just on the border with New Hampshire.
(10:22):
It was industrial town. It was known for shoemaking. In fact,
the local chamber of commerce called the town Slipper City
because it was known for its shoemaking.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
There were things to be known for I think Slipper.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
City, absolutely right, and that's the world he grew up in.
It was from a large family. They were dirt poor family.
His father, Elbridge Peters, had a lot of health issues
and so couldn't really work full time. And Peters, Clarence Peters,
was the oldest son, and so there was an expectation
here that he was meant to bring money in for
(10:59):
the That didn't really attract the press until a few
days after his identity was made known in the press
that someone came forward to confess that he had shot Peters.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Let me ask you a couple of medical things before
we get into all of that, because I know that
that's really the hook in your book, because you know
the rest of the story gets pretty wild, much bigger
than somebody on a desolate road in Westchester? Was there blood?
Were they curious about how much blood there would be
on the road? Did it seem apparent? I guess I'm
(11:35):
asking whether or not he was killed there. We know
he was wearing a jacket, so obviously he had his
jacket off and then he was redressed, I assume. But
I mean, does this look like the crime scene where
he was lying.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So even at the crime scene, there were different theories.
So the state troopers had one theory that he was
murdered somewhere else and dumped there on the side of
the road. Others I believe Fitzgerald had a theory that
he was shot there on site, given the way that
the impressions impressions of his shoes in the sand and
(12:08):
the gravel on the side of the road looked. There
had been a farmer not far from the crime scene,
as well as a couple of farm hands who were
sleeping about two three hundred feet from the crime scene
up a hill from the road, and they were also
there at the crime scene. They didn't report hearing any shots, right,
(12:31):
and so there were a lot of conflicting kinds of
evidence at the crime scene because of the way he
was shot. The bullet didn't exit the body right, and
so he was bleeding internally more than at the crime
scene itself. But we also have to remember that forensics
at that time were very limited in how they would
(12:54):
pursue this, so there wasn't a lot of tools at
their disposal.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Did anyone have a sense before we have the person
come forward, did anybody have a sense for just what
kind of a crime was this. Now they know this
is a nineteen year old sailor, you know, from kind
of a poor working area. Did anybody have any idea?
And what was he doing out there? And was there
a theory before we have the confession?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Right, So his parents, Inez and Elbridge Peters, they were baffled.
So when the local paper asked them, you know, well,
how did your son end up in New York State
and how did he you know, what was he doing?
To their understanding, he was enlisting in the Marines. He
had gone south to South Carolina to the Marine training
(13:37):
base at Parris Island, and that's the last they had
heard of him from letters that he sent. So they
had no clue how he would have ended up in
a empty road along the Kensico Reservoir in New York.
It was a mystery to them.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
No defensive wounds, it didn't look like he had been
in a fight, nothing else. Just this one shot.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Right, just this one shot. There was no other bruising
that they found in their examination. He had a dollar
and thirty two cents on him, along with some other
details they pulled out of his pockets, such as a
broken comb and a pack of cigarettes and those kinds
of things. Because he had so little money, the press
(14:23):
started to call him the penniless sailor. So really no clues.
There was one element, one thing they pulled out of
his pocket, which was they called a lady's handkerchief because
it had pansies embroidered on it. And I found that
to be an interesting detail because it never really comes
up again in the investigation, but it is a curious detail,
(14:46):
like why he had this particular kind of handkerchief on him?
Speaker 1 (14:50):
What did his parents say he was like, why was
he only in for three months? And you know, was
he a good kid? Or is there anything besides being baffled?
Is there anything that they thought, Well, I don't know,
he was a ladies man or something. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
So no, of course the parents were baffled because he
was you know, they they talked of him as a
as a decent kid. Yes, he had his problems, and
that's something that then would start coming out more in
the press. He stole things. He stole a bike, He
stole a car from Boston and drove it up to Hibyrell.
(15:25):
He he stole checks from people's mailboxes, right, He spent
time in reform school in Massachusetts. He was not an angel,
He was not a choir boy in any way. But
his parents and they did, you know, admit that he
had these this past, but they did recognize that he
(15:45):
didn't own a gun. He committed petty crimes. He wasn't
a violent person. But also what I found interesting about
his background from from the research, he was also someone
you know, looking for different kind of life, I think
than what Heroal could offer him. He did spend some
time working in one of the shoe factories, but not
(16:08):
very long. It seems clear that that was not interesting
to him. He didn't want to do that work. So
he went to enlist in the navy, right but he
only was there for about a month and he stole something,
and once they found that, he was discharged dishonorable, discharged
from the navy, you know, and when he you know,
(16:28):
came out back to Harol from there looking for work again.
He worked many temporary jobs. He moved furniture for a time,
he worked on a farm for a time. All those
people who employed him thought he was was a bit strange.
He didn't really do the work that they asked him
to do. In some ways. You know, I think he
(16:52):
was a dreamer. He wanted to get away from that
town into something bigger and petty. Crime was a real
for him, it seemed. But of course, because he was
discharged from the Navy, by the time he went down
to the Marines, they found out that he'd been discharged
from another branch of the military, and that disqualified him
(17:12):
from being in any branch of the military once you
get discharged.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
We talk about in true crime a lot of times
of the imperfect victim, which is so annoying because there's
just no such thing as the perfect victim. I mean,
the idealized virginal woman or you know, the choir boy.
How do you take that person and make people want
to get to the end of the story. If you've
(17:38):
got a kid, you know he has probably potential somewhere,
but he hasn't been exactly stellar. Did you feel like
you really had to find some really good attributes about
him for people to kind of say, Okay, I can
roll with this story because I want to know what
ends up happening. You know, if anything, at the end
of the book, that's.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Interesting because there are so few folks in this book
that I feel are good people.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Now I've written about those books and those books too.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
And it's tough, you know, I you know, how do
you pitch it? I mean, for me, Peters is kind
of a he's a kid, he's he's I can definitely
identify with his desire to find a better life. Here.
It is the post World War One. The country's kind
(18:29):
of in an ascendancy of wealth, of entertainment, of newness.
And I can see this kid from an industrial town,
and the shoe factor industry is also suffering and shrinking
because of this broader national economic expansion, right, and so
(18:51):
shoes are being made elsewhere around the country, or even
being made outside the country increasingly, And so I can
see this Peters the way I wrote it about him
as someone who really was searching for something, and crime
was the petty crimes that he was committing was a
way to find an exit. Yeah, And I think he
(19:11):
knew very well that going down to Paris Island to
enlist in the Marines that he wasn't going to they
were going to kick him out. But I thought, I
think that he thought that the train travel paid for
going down to South Carolina. Hey, that will be fun
and then I'll see what happens after. So there's it's
a mixed and I'm sure you and others have felt
(19:33):
this way when you're writing about these folks, Like there's
a mixture of why did you do that, Clarence, but
also I can understand what you were after.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, Okay, So we have body on the road and
one press clipping, and then a couple of days later
we've identified this young man, he's from Massachusetts. And then
is it a few days after how long is it
after the after Clarence's body is discovered, that we now
have inexplicably a confession, the easiest shut and open and
(20:04):
shut case for the sheriff and the state police.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
That's what they thought. Yes, about three days later, a
man called Walter Ward comes to the Westchester County office
of the DA and the sheriff. They're in the same
complex in the courthouse, the old Westchester courthouse that's been
demolished now, and he comes with his lawyers for lawyers
(20:31):
with him with a statement, a three hundred and thirty
one word statement that's less of a confession and more
of a description of what happened on the road, And
Walter Ward claimed that Clarence Peters, along with two other men,
one called Charlie Ross and one called Jack, had been
(20:51):
blackmailing him for months and they had extorted one thousands
of dollars from him, and he went to confer front
them to put an end to this, because they had
recently were asking for about seventy thousand dollars of cash
from him in nineteen twenty two cash right, so hundreds
of thousands of dollars today. So he was driving there
(21:15):
in his car with Peters next to him. He picked
up Peters somewhere and then drove. Peters told him where
to go on King Road to meet these other blackmailers.
At some point, Peters was getting out of the car
holding his pistol directed to Ward. Ward grabbed his own
pistol shot Peters in the chest, at which point the
(21:38):
other two blackmailers, who had pulled up in front of
Ward's car on the side of the road, got out
and started firing. And so there was this, he described,
his volley of bullets between his car and their car.
Ward got out, got behind his car, continued to fire
at them. They ultimately jumped back in their car, drove off,
(22:00):
and Wore got back into his car and drove home.
He lived in New Rochelle, about thirty minute drive from
where this crime scene was. So that was his confession
that he was being blackmailed, that he felt threatened, that
he felt his family was being threatened, and this was
an act of self defense when Peters had asked him
(22:21):
to come out of the car, that he felt was threatening,
and so this was all in self defense, and that
he and his lawyers were actively pursuing those other two
blackmailers to try to track them down.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
This is the spot where Clarence Peter's body was found.
He's saying, all that happen, yes, okay, So then now,
of course, we have so many inconsistencies. I don't know
what you want to start with. I'm sure there's a
lack of bullets. I mean, there's a lack of tire tracks.
There's the you know, was he wearing a shirt and
you guys put his jacket on for some reason, or
there's all of that.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Right, It is such a fantastical story, and as I
write in the book, it's almost as if he pulled
it from one of the Saturday afternoon silent films, you know,
the swashbuckler kind of hero kind of films. It just
seems so fantastical to everyone except the sheriff and the dah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
More bad people. I see. I was hoping Sheriff Warren
was going to be one of the good ones, but
I guess not Sheriff Warner.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I think he had come up through Westchester County Republican Party,
which at the time was really the machine of the county,
and he was a good member of that party, and
he had worked in other government roles, parks commissioner, working
with sort of children's aid societies, and that there was
(23:43):
rumors that he never wanted to be sheriff, but that
the party bosses had put him up to be sheriff,
and so he did. He went and he was elected sheriff. Again,
not someone who comes out of police, not someone who
has much experience in policing, who was then made sheriff.
So again, these weird alignments of all these individuals who
(24:06):
were in government and authority, right, who were more aligned
with party allegiance than they were to say finding the
truth or the justice here, right. And so Warner really
just bought this story and the DA Frederick Weeks also
bought this story. This is what happened. We have a body,
(24:26):
we have someone confessing. Okay, So there's another context here,
which is Walter Ward was the son of a very
wealthy family. The press called him the Seon of the
House of Ward. And the Wards had made their millions
by industrializing bread. So they had bread factories across the
(24:48):
northeast and into the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
There had not been bread factories before.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Not until late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Oh interesting, Yeah, I mean, you know, I just wrote
a book that's set in eight teen thirty two, and
that's when really the mills started popping up. A lot
of that was fabric and stuff like that. Hadn't thought
about bread, Okay, So it took a while to figure
out bread. There's so many components to it. Again, what
(25:16):
tell me about the Wards and where they fit into
society and New York. Is this wealthy but considered kind
of blue collar, sort of new money. This isn't Rockefeller
Vanderbilt stuff, right, No.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
They're not of the old school, but they do definitely
fit into kind of a new wealth, a new money Carnegies, Rockefellers,
those kinds of folks who made their fortune in industry. Right.
And so when the Wards moved to New York. They
(25:51):
left Pittsburgh. They had started the company there, it had
been successful, and then they knew that New York was
the place to expand. And they came to New York
early twentieth century and they and they fit in very well.
They bought a large apartment on the Upper West Side
for a while, and then they had built a house
(26:12):
up in the Bronx along the Hudson River. Walter Ward
married a woman called Beryl, who was a socialite, a
Brooklyn socialite back in the day, from also a wealthy family.
Her father made her his wealth from lumber. Walter and
Barrel settled in New Rochelle in a very kind of
(26:34):
exclusive community called Sutton Manor and had two kids. So
they were quite of the moment in terms of the
kind of new wealth that New York was making at
that point between the nineteen hundreds and the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Okay, now that we understand Walter and Clarence, and we
know that Walter's details are completely inconsistent with the crime scene.
What the investigators are saying, even though the sheriff is
the DA are both sort of signing on to what
he's saying. What happens next when you know, we really
(27:14):
kind of kick in with your book. You've got Ward
who's saying these things, and I'm assuming facing the death
penalty or no, he's saying it self defense. I didn't
even know if they had self defense in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Right, he would be facing the death penalty if they
were to convict him of murder. So this statement he
presented in self defense was carefully choreographed by his attorneys,
and there's no evidence that Ward even had a hand
in writing it. So it was very crafted by his attorneys.
(27:46):
He had a very expensive team of lawyers Wall Street
lawyers at his side to do this, and so because
of the family status, the sheriff, Warner and Weeks kind
of just agreed to it. They charged him with manslaughter,
I believe, first, and they secured bail for him ten
(28:09):
thousand dollars, which was unheard of at the time to
give bail to someone who's confessed to murder. But Ward
pays it. And there's a great scene in the book,
and great scene that the newspapers report on where Walter
pulls out ten thousand dollars bills from his pocket and
pays his bail and walks out of the courthouse. So
(28:30):
again that the acute disparities here of wealth are just
so evident in this story. And then the press starts
asking questions, and that's when things start to unravel for
Ward and for the sheriff. You know, The New York
Times sends reporters to the crime scene. They interview the farmer,
(28:54):
they interview others, they talk to the State troopers. The
State troopers don't believe Ward's story. Wow, they're very dubious
of this, and they're.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Willing to talk to a New York Times reporter about
this on the record.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
They spoke to the Times reporter. So once Ward came
forward and said this is what happened, Sheriff Warner goes
to the State troopers barracks and he takes all the
evidence that they had gathered from the crime scene. And
Warner tells the State troopers, we're going to have this
case fixed up in a few days, so you all
(29:32):
don't need to worry yourselves about this. We got this,
and he takes all the evidence with them. He takes
the one bullet casing they find at the crime scene.
There's just one bullet casing, not a volley of bullets,
but one bullet casing. He takes it all, takes it
back to Westchester to his office, and sort of pushes
(29:52):
out the state troopers. Right, So whatever doubts or questions
they had didn't matter anymore because the DA and Warner
we're going to be handling this. But the newspapers started
to explore more and more in finding all these discrepancies
between what boards said and the crime scene itself. Right,
this couldn't possibly have happened this way. The most important
(30:15):
discrepancy is how does how do you shoot Peters from
your car? And he kind of falls back and lays
out perfectly on the side of the road, as if
an undertaker had put him there. You know, there's so
many obvious discrepancies that the press couldn't avoid asking questions
about it.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
So when did the press get a hold of this
When we find out that Clarence is a pennyless sailor,
or when Walter Ward gets involved in the big Ward family.
Because you know, I'm sure you concluded this too in
your book. Where I think the press really starts to
pay attention and dig in is when it's the quote
unquote unexpected victim, the person who's not supposed to be there,
(30:57):
but also quote unquote unexpected kill. You know, the data
five who lives next door, who cuts your yard when
you're sick, turns out to be a serial killer. Then
all of a sudden, the press is making up, you know,
names and stuff for it. So is the is that
the case here?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Certainly, once Ward came forward, this wealthy family whose entire
public and business image was purity and cleanliness. It's bread
was pure, comes forward to confess to a murder, and
to confess to some secret that's so horrible that murder
(31:37):
was better than revealing it. I can come forward and
say I killed this man, but I'm not going to
tell you why. I'm not going to tell you what
that secret was. Right. Once that happened, then the press
was all over it. Then the press was really interested
in it because, as you said, right, it seemed like
an open and shut case. But what Ward's statement did
was open up this whole other can, which was what
(32:00):
was the blackmail? What caused you to do it? You say,
it's self defense, but how do we know it was
self defense? Right? So that's where the press latched on.
That's where hearst News American. That's where these newspapers really
latched on to say, what's behind this murder, what's behind
this blackmail?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, what is his family saying? They don't want any
of this to happen? Are they speculating about what this
secret is? Because I'm sure they just think this is
insane that he confessed to something that it doesn't sound
like he was a part of.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
So that is the other sort of fascinating element here.
Early on, the family really just clams up. George Ward,
the head of Ward Baking, he leaves, he leaves town,
he leaves the state, and for various excuses. Right, oh,
I have a conference here. Oh I'm visiting my plants
in Massadon in Pennsylvania. I'm visiting my plants in Ohio.
(33:00):
George Ward stayed out of the state for the entire
time this was being investigated, for over sixteen months. He
just traveled about and never came back to New York State.
From all that we know, Beryl Walter Ward's wife was
at first very chatty with the press, and she was young,
(33:23):
and she was you know again, she comes from a
wealthy family. She was a socialite. She was very attractive.
She's used to being in the press, in the society pages,
and so when newspaper reporters came around, she thought, oh,
let me just talk to them, and she would say
things like, oh, well, I know everything about it, and
if if I could just speak, I'm sure everyone would
(33:44):
would be happy with the outcome. And quickly wards attorneys said, okay, no, no, no,
you can't talk anymore. Let's let's get Beryl away from
the reporters and keep her in the house in New Roshell.
So the the entire family kind of organize themselves around
ward to protect this secret as well. So there was
(34:08):
really no one in the family who would speak out
or speak forward other than to the statement that he gave.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Do we find out conclusively what the secret was?
Speaker 2 (34:20):
The mystery of the blackmail has many theories, and I
tried to unpack all those theories through this book. To
this day, we don't know what is the right theory.
I think one of them is the right theory that
I lay out in the book, but we don't know
which one is the right theory. As soon as the
press got hold of this of the discrepancies here, it
(34:44):
put a lot of pressure on the DA to start
really investigating, and so at the time his office didn't
have the manpower, even the Sheriff's office didn't have the
manpower to do this kind of investigation, which was not
only in Westchester but also went into New York City,
went into the Bronx where Walter Ward office was. That's
(35:05):
where one of the major bread factories were in the Bronx.
They had won in Brooklyn, so they had to hire detectives.
They hired an army of private detectives, mostly from Pinkerton's,
which you know, they're they're famous. Most of the research
I was able to get to were all these detective
reports from the Pinkertons and from another agency that they hired,
(35:27):
a smaller agency located in Times Square, you know, And
there was just they were following every lead they came to,
right And there was just a maze of leads and possibilities,
some from disgruntled workers of the Wards, some from random
a bus boy in a restaurant in Midtown who claimed
(35:50):
a woman came in to ask him if he would
want to murder Walter Ward. It was just a real
net of information and leads that they were pursuing, most
of which led nowhere, but there were sort of a
number of theories that would eventually develop.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Why would Walter confess to something that theoretically would never
be connected to him? Why would he think that this
would be anything that he needed to be afraid of exactly?
Speaker 2 (36:22):
That was a big question that I had as I
was researching initially, like why would you come forward? And
what I thought, what I determined was he definitely did
not think about the underwear. He didn't think that Peters
was going to be identified, okay, And so once that happened,
something in him or some fear in him, said, I
(36:45):
will be linked to this. And so what that statement,
that three hundred and thirty one word statement did was
put him and his lawyers ahead of this story. Because
what happened was that statement. What then became the only
thing to disprove because they they made an effort to
find the other two blackmailers, Charlie Ross and Jack, a
(37:09):
very weak effort to find them, and they never do
find Charlie Ross and spoiler, they never do find Charlie
Ross and Jack.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Or were they real people? Could they even prove they
were real?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
That's the question. Were they even real people? Were they
even there, you know, you know, as one detective told
a newspaper reporter, the Lower east Side is filled with
Charlie Ross's and Jack's. You know, these were names that
petty criminals would just take on, the sort of indescript
names that were easy to hide in the game of
(37:41):
grifting and so forth. So, because there was no witness,
we only had this statement. Ward knew that by putting
the statement out, and his attorneys knew by putting the
statement out, they would have the narrative, they would have
the story, and then the prosecutors and everyone else would
have to disprove that story. That became the problem.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
So what do you think their involvement was? Clarence and Walter?
They actually knew each other. He was actually scared that
Clarence was threatening him with something. I mean, was there
any kind of a relationship that could be proven?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
There were stories from some of the newspaper investigations in
New York City. There were stories that Peters had traveled
to New York City and knew Walter Ward from his
encounters in New York City. One in particular, and again
this is coming from the Hearst publication. So grain of salt, Yes,
(38:41):
always wanting the challenge with researching this kind of case
as you're looking at the newspaper reports and you're going, Okay,
what's factual here? What is really a newspaper? Yeah, drumming
up sales, right, So I'm always having to guard against Okay,
what what could be accurate here? But one story that
(39:03):
they did post was about this ex sailor who knew
Clarence Peters and used to hang out with him in
New York City, and Peters introduced him to a wealthy
man who lived in New Rochelle. And apparently the story
was that Ward had offered this guy money if he
(39:26):
could work for him, right, And so there was a
thread here that Ward was somehow involved in using young
men to blackmail other men, sexual blackmail of men in
the city, right, or that Ward might be somehow involved
in blackmailing not only men but women as well. So
(39:50):
there there is that kind of possible connection. Clarence Peters
family says he never did that. He never went to
New York. He never did he was you know, he yes,
he stole bike, but no, he never he never did that.
We would know, And I doubt that because I think
Clarence Peters was an ambitious and adventurous person, and I
think he wouldn't have told his parents. If he gathered
(40:12):
some cash together and spent a week or weekend in
New York, he probably wouldn't have told them. So there
are possibilities that Walter and Clarence knew each other before
that encounter. My sense is, so when you were discharged
from the marine base in Paris, Island and you were
(40:33):
going north, which is where Peters was going, they only
got you a government issue ticket to Philadelphia. From there,
you're on your own. Not sure why. I never got
a sense of like, why did the military just drop
in Philly.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
I wonder if it had like the most transportation options
going every which way possible or boat easy. I don't know,
who knows true. Probably not out of convenience. I'm assuming
not going, oh, this would be great for you guys.
Must be some sort of group discount.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
I don't know, right, no, exactly. So what a lot
of guys would do who are going to New York
or New England, they would just hitch hike their way
back home. And I think that's probably what happened to Clarence.
He got dropped off in Philadelphia. And he either knew
he could get to New York or because he knew
(41:24):
he knew Walter Ward there, or he was pursuing Walter
Ward there, or a more random possibility is that he
was hitchhiking his way to New York and walter Ward
picked him up.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
Are either of these men known to be gay in
this time period?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yes, and no. One of the first threads the private
detectives researched around Walter Ward was his sexuality, which I
found was interesting. So they were asking his neighbors in
Sutton Manner do you think Walter Ward is a degenerate?
(42:02):
At one point they ask one of his colleagues in
New Rochelle they say, do you think he's a cocksucker?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
I didn't even know they had that phrase in nineteen
twenty two.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
There it is, It's in a Pinkerton report.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
And what do you think? What was the flag? Is
it like some affect stereotype thing or what do you think?
Speaker 2 (42:22):
I'm not sure. I mean I think that because of this,
because this relationship between this nineteen year old sailor and
this thirty one year old, wealthy, married business guy, I
think that class difference that was strange to the investigators,
and what world would they have circulated to know each other? Right,
(42:43):
And so they imagine that that connection was somehow a
sexual or commercial of some sort.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
I would think it's some sort of criminal. I don't know.
If I would go there, I would think there's a
criminal enterprise happening, or he's a drug runner or something
rum runner or anything like that. Sure I would have
gone there. What was it like to be gay in
nineteen twenty two illegal?
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It was a felony. You could be sentenced to prison
for years if you were caught. So, yes, it was.
It was definitely something that if that was the secret
of the blackmail, that definitely would be something you wanted
to keep quiet. It would have been better to say, yes,
(43:26):
I am a gambler and I lost millions of dollars
and my family's in ruin. That was better than to say, yes,
I have sex with men.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
When I talked to Paul Hols, you know, the forensic
investigator on my other show about this kind of thing,
he'll say that he's encountered, and we have in history
encountered men who will They will cop to a murder,
but not to the sexual assault that police know they did.
In conjunction with the murder. And I always say why
(43:56):
is that? And he said, because it's not as socially acceptable.
So we've seen this before, that there are people who
have such a terrible secret to hide that it's less
about the morals of murder and more about just I mean,
dooming your family. And so it sounds like the family
if this is what happened, then the family would have known.
(44:18):
Surely the Ward family, right.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
They might have. Right, they might have known of it.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Because the dad took off. I mean, what kind of
reaction is that to leave and to abandon your son.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Right, Yes, clearly his father knew something about this case
such that he could not be subpoenaed to testify. As
this rolled along and the grand jurys were convened in
that the father stayed far from any subpoena around that
and never actually did testify about what he might have known.
(44:51):
I don't know how much the family knew, but they
might have known. Ward was a playboy. He was very
much of the era, right, And I think he worked
for his father's company, he worked for Ward Bakery, But
really I think it was a figurehead kind of position.
I don't think he had a lot of responsibilities. He
(45:13):
was not given a vice president position. His brother Ralph
was given a vice president position. He was a much
more stable and diligent son. Ward was a playboy. He
liked to gamble, he liked to drink.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Can you describe him as Gatsby? Basically?
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yes, Yes. He could walk out of a Gatsby party
without a problem. For a brief time in nineteen twenty one,
he claimed to be a bachelor and he rented an
apartment on the Upper West Side. When his wife and
his children went on holiday for two months and he
had parties and he had women, and he had drink,
(45:50):
he would have his own personal bootlegger come with large
trunks of gin and bring them into the apartment. Ward
told the dorman of the building, anytime this guy comes
by with his trunk, just let him in.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
But no evidence from all of these parties that a
young man stayed behind when everybody else left.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
No evidence of that. And there's extensive detective interviews with
the African American staff of this apartment building, really fascinating interviews.
And what I love about writing about crime is how
you get these windows into people's lives that would never
be in the historical record any other way except from
(46:34):
these detective notes, right, and what they saw, what they witnessed,
and also who they were. But there was no evidence
at that point. The detectives did go to Boston, and
they were suspecting that when Peters was in the navy
there stationed that that's where he might have met Ord,
because Ward would go up to Boston apparently and frequent
(46:59):
these all male parties that were held in these hotels.
So the detectives interview the owner of the hotel, and
of course the owner of the hotel said, oh, no, no, no,
we don't have those kind of parties here. We don't
do that. No, no, no, that's not possible. But of course,
who would admit to having an all male party in
(47:19):
your hotel when you're trying to attract you know, wealthy
elite clients. I mean, that's crazy. So there's all these
whiffs of possibilities. There's a young man, a neighbor of
Wards in Sutton Manner, about seventeen years old, who talked
to detectives and he told the detectives that he and
(47:41):
his friends knew that Walter Ward was a pervert, that
he liked boys and I put a lot of credence
in that interview because there's no reason why that neighbor
needed to come forward and tell the detectives that. And
in fact, he was told by his family not to
talk to the detectives, like, don't talk to them, but
(48:04):
he did anyways. So there's all these little hints and
whiffs of possibility here that I feel like is undeniable.
There is this other individual that comes forward later in
the investigation who claims that he and Ward quote knew
all the faggots in New York City, right, And New
(48:26):
York Times publishes that on the front page of their newspaper.
But they have to at a clarifying phrase what a
faggot means because it was a very new term. I
think it's a very colloquial term that most people wouldn't know.
So there's again all these little hints that the relationship
between Peters and Ward might have that sexual undertone.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
Well, tell me the rest of the story. He goes
for manslaughter, is that right?
Speaker 2 (48:55):
So eventually, yes, you know, he pays that ten thousand
dollars bail, and then the press comes out and this says,
that's crazy. There's so many discrepancies, Judge, you just let
this guy go, and so there's a lot of pressure
on the DA. They rearrest him, they charge him with
manslaughter and a fifty thousand dollars bail, but it lingers
(49:18):
for months through the summer of nineteen twenty two, all
the way through the fall of nineteen twenty two. It
just lingers, and the DA never brings the case forward
to trial. In the meantime, Ward spends a long time
in the Westchester County Jail and what's called the luxury
room for their wealthy clients. That's more like a hotel
(49:39):
room with a nice bed and a sofa, and he
orders all of his meals out from local restaurants, and this,
of course fans the flames. Right. So by the end
of nineteen twenty two, there's no movement in the case
because the DA can't find any legitimate evidence to disprove
Walter ward statement.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
He's up the crime scene.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Except the crime scene right, which again still I guess
he felt it wasn't enough.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
They don't have a weapon or anything like that exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
So in the fall of nineteen twenty two, it's an
election year. The governor, who is a Republican is voted
out of office and Al Smith, Populist is voted in
for a second term from he was governor earlier and
then lost and came back and took another term. Al
Smith born on the Lower east Side, working class immigrant family.
(50:33):
He becomes this sort of voice that the Peters family
is hoping will take this case on the state level
and really investigate it. Because the question was the DA's
office in Westchester's two immersed in the Republican Party, they
were not interested in making really any progress on this.
(50:54):
It became an election issue. One of the reasons why
the Democrats won big in New York State in that
election is because this case was seen as evidence of
Republican corruption, that they were trying to cover up this
murder and trying to accommodate a wealthy a wealthy family.
(51:14):
So that really changed once there was a new DA
because Frederick Weeks decided not to run again for DA,
there was a new DA in place, and he dropped
the case and the judge dismissed the case in January
nineteen twenty three, and Walter Ward walked free. So that,
of course didn't sit well with a lot of people.
(51:37):
Most notably the New York Daily News editor, who had
been pretty vocal on this case from the start. But
once it was dismissed, that's when the editor, Joseph Patterson
really took on the case and made it a cause
for his newspaper to bring Walter Ward to justice and
(51:57):
to find some justice for the Peters family. And he
knew that Al Smith in the Governor's office, could you
make that happen? Right? He knew that al Smith was
very sympathetic to this case and sympathetic to Ana's Peters.
And so as Peters, with her lawyer, travels to Albany,
(52:19):
her neighbors put together a few dollars for her to
take a train to Albany and go meet with the
governor and plead her case. You need to open this
case on the state level and get me justice. And
that ultimately does happen. The governor does ultimately open it up,
and there is in the state Attorney General, the first
(52:41):
Jewish man to hold that office in New York State,
who was elected in nineteen twenty two, moves forward with
a case against Walter Ward.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Wow, okay, well, can you tell us if there was
justice served or sort of justice or not at all.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yes and no. This is what's the fascinating. So there
is a jury trial, and a little side note. The
jury trial here is fascinating because the biggest crowd of
people who came to this trial were women. The newspapers
called them murder fans.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
They would stand outside the courthouse and really jockey for
the best seats in the courtroom. It was a kind
of a small courtroom. They would bring their knitting, they
would bring their lunch so they didn't lose their seat.
At one point they were angered because they didn't think
the bailiffs were giving them the best seats, and so
they started to shout, we want our rights, we want
(53:36):
our rights to have the best seats in the courtroom.
Many of these women, I think were just really enamored
with Ward and Burrell. So they bring the case to trial.
Ward offers nothing, no defense other than his three hundred
and thirty one word statement. The state offers up a
(53:58):
number of witnesses to point to the discrepancies at the
crime scene. But there's no new evidence and there's nothing
really powerful to discount Wards statement, and so the jury
finds him not guilty.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
How does everything turn out for him. Do they just
live to a ripe, happy old age and they've got
these kids and all of that is monky.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
Dory, you would think. But the one thing that is
really fascinating so key towards defense was that he jumped
back in his car and he drove back home, got
home around four am in the morning, and that's where
Beryl was waiting for him, right and Barrel always stated, yes,
I was there when he came home. About a year
or so after his acquittal, Ward goes missing. His cars
(54:45):
found in Philadelphia again, Philadelphia for some reason, and there's
a big man hunt wears Walter Ward for about six months.
We don't know where he is. He turns up in Havana, Cuba,
where his father had already stepped down as president of
the company of the bakery and opened a kind of
a farm of some sort down in Cuba. So Ward
(55:09):
basically fled with his father down to Cuba and lived
the rest of his life there. Beryl, on the other hand,
left alone with two kids. She was like, Okay, that's it.
I'm going to Reno and I'm getting a divorce. So
she gets a divorce and about a week later she
marries a Wall Street investor whoa okay, Beryl fascinating, right.
(55:30):
So she comes back from Reno and the last interview
she gives is with the local newspaper, and she says,
I wish no ill will on Walter Ward. I want
nothing to do with him anymore, though, and then she said,
I just want to clarify one thing. I was never
there when he came home.
Speaker 1 (55:50):
Here goes, you're alibi, and it's too like he's already
in Cuba.
Speaker 2 (55:54):
Right wow. And so I do tell in the epilogue
that different characters here what happened to them in the end.
But definitely, you know, the twist and turns of the
story seemed unending for me. Yeah, in researching and writing
it and just trying to piece together all the parts
of this of this saga really as it as it unfolded.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Well, just to wrap this up, Arthur Conan Doyle, the
author of Sherlock Holmes you know, said that this was
such a great mystery and that he would start digging
into the Ward family because it's so you know, fascinating,
all of the different layers and the way people react
and everything. And this book really, even though it sounds
like there are a lot of unanswered questions. I feel
(56:38):
like there's so much kind of evidence around that you
can kind of piece together logically, logical people, not the
sheriff and not the DA but logical people can put
together a lot of the pieces. And you know, in
a way, you don't have all of your answers, But
you know, did you feel like by the end you
were ready to leave this book? Because I'm pretty sure
(56:58):
you could probably look at newspapers, dot com or wherever
you were and all the archives forever and ever to
try to solve this case that's literally one hundred years old.
Were you able to stop and say, I got to
be down with Walter Ward.
Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yes, there is a never ending story kind of quality
here wherein I think that I'm going to come across
some information that has been buried somewhere, or someone's going
to come out and say, oh wait, I have this
letter here somewhere right. And there definitely was a point
where I wanted to wrap this up in a way
(57:34):
that gave readers all of the known evidence. As you said, logically,
sort of present all the known evidence, and I want
it readers to kind of piece it themselves. Really, I mean,
I do offer some insights at the end, but I
want it readers to also see these different theories and
see what makes sense to them, because there is a
lot of evidence here, but nothing that conclusively draws to
(57:57):
what really happened on that road in Westchester.
Speaker 1 (58:11):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
Don't Forget. There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(58:32):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is
our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark,
Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram
(58:53):
and Facebook at tenfold More Wicked and on Twitter at
tenfold More. And if you know of a historical crime
that could give you some attention from the crew at
tenfold More Wicked. Email us at info at tenfoldmore Wicked
dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime
authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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