April 12, 2022 • 24 mins
The District of Columbia was dealing with rampant illegal rackets and Karen finds out just how much corruption was going on. The detectives start working with an informant, who finds out key information about the Car Barn Murder case.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Throwing her off the bridge. I mean, that's just you'll
do that because you're have an argument great depression. Not
long after prohibition, they're worrying about bootlegging gangs. I don't
want a single word written abide that date. Do you
understand there's a possibility it could be solved one day.
(00:25):
Welcome back to Shattered Souls the car Barn Murders. I'm
Karen Smith. This is episode four. This podcast may contain
graphic language and it is not suitable for children. Previously
on the Carborn murders, Montgomery County lead Detective Theodore Volton
(00:46):
ran down lead after lead on the Carbarn case. Detective
Bolton tracked down every car that had been stolen around
the night of the murders, except for a green Buick
that was taken from the area of fifteen and Irving
Streets on Sunday night. I witness Ernest Carter recalled seeing
a green Buick flee the Chevy Chase Lake Ticket office
(01:07):
northbound on Connecticut Avenue with three white men inside. As
the detective's tracked down suspects, they went back to an
attempted robbery of the Brightwood ticket office that happened a
few months before the Carborn case, and they used a
description given by the overnight accountant to run down some potentials.
Edwin O'Connell was arrested based on that vague description. Then
(01:30):
he was released when O'Connell's father called in and said
that his son had been a patient at St. Elizabeth's
psychiatric Hospital. O'Connell's handcuffs were removed and he was placed
back into St. Elizabeth's. The detectives found out that O'Connell
had befriended Paul Berry and George Riddlehoover while he was
being treated for an unknown mental health issue. Paul Berry
(01:54):
had been committed in nineteen twenty after a successful insanity
defense for killing a trolley conductor, and he escaped from St.
Elizabeth's In nineteen thirty four, Paul Berry was found in St.
Louis after he freeloaded on a freight train, and he
was arrested in Missouri. There wasn't any family money to
have Paul Berry sent back to Washington, and as alibi
(02:16):
was solid for the night of the murders, considering he
was fifteen hundred miles away. George Riddle Hoover had been
released from St. Elizabeth's on January twelfth, just nine days
before Emery Smith and James Mitchell were killed, and the
psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth's considered him to be a gangster type.
Nobody knew where George riddle Hoover was. The information on
(02:39):
Edwin O'Connell and George Riddle Hoover was passed along from
Detective Volton to the others to run down, but that
lead got dropped along the way and no further investigation
was completed on either one of them. The attempted robbery
of the Brightwood ticket office remained unsolved. In the days
after the orders, people were dropping names, piecemeal information and
(03:04):
saying that so and so was a no good guy
and this other man would be the type to do it.
It was a discordant orchestra of crap leads and what
seemed to be old grievances getting new air. What better
way to get rid of an enemy than to pin
a double murder on him. Phones rang off the hook,
random memos were tossed onto desks, miles were put on vehicles,
(03:25):
and shoe leather eroded on the pavement. Twenty hour grinds
were bolstered by burnt Dinon Dash coffee, and pack after
pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. Some of the information did seem
to have teeth, and Volton, Rogers, Deal and Brass did
their very best to run all of it down, But
there was a serious problem. Back in the nineteen thirties,
(03:50):
and certainly before that, the District of Columbia was a
virtual den of duplicity. I did some unearthing of Washington's
teeming rackets and found wormhole after wormhole of Wanton scandals,
political malfeasance, official bribery, and corporate corruption. I realized that
(04:10):
some underhanded deals took place. D C was a big city,
and big cities did come with their fair share of turpitude.
But the grit and grime of the district underworld extended
its tentacles further and wider than I ever imagined. Racketeers
ran rough shod all over the place, with gambling halls,
horse racing, wire rooms, storefronts of seemingly legitimate businesses with
(04:35):
secret doors to hidden back rooms, and those rooms served
as speakeasies and meet up joints. And there were also
rooming houses read prostitution, all running rampant. Seven Those rooming
houses were filled with young women who traveled to d
C looking for a better life from the poverty stricken
(04:57):
towns across the country, and those women fed an insatiable
appetite for cheap sex. Downtown hotels doubled as pay as
you stayed, dens of inequity, and brothels operated in every
corner of the district. Some of them were out in
the open in the red light neighborhoods, and others operated
in secret for the elites who had to be a
(05:17):
little more discreet with their extramarital transgressions. These young girls
were sometimes entrapped into a life of flesh trading and
the pimps, the rooming house owners and these vile grannies,
posing as motherly figures to bait the hook, would increase
the cost of keeping a roof over their head exactly
(05:39):
commensurate with the amounts the girls brought home by design,
they could never get their heads above water, and many
of those girls fell into the drug trade, They overdosed,
or they evolved into the next generation of vile grannies
who lured more young girls into the net, completing the
endless circuit. Even though prohibition had been repealed in nineteen
(06:02):
thirty three, Bootlegging was still alive and well in d C.
Because black market liquor was much cheaper to buy than
the good stuff legally imported from Canada and from across
the Pond, so people continued to frequent the bathtub gin
joints instead of paying out the nose for a buzz.
Then they nursed monstrous hangovers the next morning. People also
(06:24):
chanced being poisoned by ingesting methanol or would alcohol that
was sometimes used in the illegal distillation process rather than
the four human consumption ethanol that legitimate manufacturers sold. Bootleg
moonshine or firewater burned like gasoline, and it tasted even worse,
(06:46):
and it was often masked with juniper oil or other
flavors to make it scarcely palatable, but it did the job.
There were thousands of arrests for bootlegging, and the majority
of violators were let off with a small fine do
to the overflowing justice system, only to go right back
to their business the next day. Gin and whiskey stills
(07:07):
were found everywhere under trapdoors in the woods, tunnels and
saloon basements, behind secret bookcases, on barn rafters, underneath chicken
coops under tarps and work trucks shoved into hedgerows. Maryland
farmers stopped selling their crops on the side of the road,
and instead they mashed their corn to manufacture mule kick,
(07:30):
a fitting nickname. Wealthy families turned their basements into speakeasies,
and they entertained high society in those low down cellars.
People from all walks of life were in on it,
including the people inside of the United States Capitol Building.
That's right, Senators and congressmen were dealing in bootleg liquor
(07:51):
inside of the people's house. If you don't believe me,
here's proof. A man named George Cassidy, also known as
the Man in the Green Hat. He was the personal
bootlegger to the folks in the US Capital. He had
his own office in the basement of the Capitol Building,
and he would deal to those in power directly from
his office, or he would pay a personal visit with
(08:13):
his briefcase filled with bottles of liquor. Even the staunch
supporters of prohibition, the representatives who shouted from the rafters
about the insidiousness of alcohol, the sin of the drink,
the scourge of the public, would pay George Cassidy's office
a visit and purchase a fifth of whiskey for personal use.
George Cassidy made a good living for ten years until
(08:36):
he was eventually busted, and he told the whole sordid
story in a series of six front page articles in
the Washington Post. So before you believe that the illegal
rackets involved only underworld criminals, think again. Washington, d C.
Was a haven for gambling, prostitution, the numbers racket, which
(08:56):
was a forerunner of the legal lottery we play today,
horse racing wires, and tons of other scams that ran
a muck during the depression. Desperate people will do desperate things.
Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to just take
that left turn at the Primrose Path. For some quick statistics,
in nineteen thirty five, Washington, d C's crime rate was
(09:19):
worse than every other city of comparable size in the
entire nation. Murder was three times worse, grand larceny was
four times worse, and robberies in d C. Well, They
outranked Pittsburgh, Newark, and Cincinnati three to one. The District
of Columbia had a serious problem. The car Barn case
(09:42):
left the headlines and got shoved into the interior pages
of the papers because another notorious crime took over the
lead and captured the nation's attention, the sensational trial of
Bruno Richard Hofftmann, who was in court for the kidnapping
and murder of the Lindbergh baby. But Washington, d C.
Had no shortage of sensational cases during that time either.
(10:05):
There was a series of lone woman murders that got
front page attention for weeks or even months at a time.
All of these cases remain unsolved today. Virginia McPherson was
found dead inside of her apartment with the cord of
her pajamas wrapped around her neck and blood stains were
all over the bathroom. The detectives immediately ruled her death
(10:27):
a suicide, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Even the
public was convinced that her murder was swept under the
rug to prevent another black eye to the d C
police force and their abysmal solver rate. Bullah Limerick was
also found dead in her house in her bed. The
blanket was pulled up to her chin and her hands
(10:49):
were neatly folded across her abdomen. She had blood in
her mouth and the coroner ruled that she suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage and he would just bypass an autopsy. When
the embalmer otised blood coming out of the side of
her head, he called the coroner back, and the coroner
found a bullet hole just behind her ear and a
caliber slug in her head. Her murder is still unsolved.
(11:13):
Corinna Loring disappeared two days before her wedding and her
body was found on Saddleback Ridge on the outskirts of
Mountain near Maryland. There were triangular shape stab wounds in
each of her temples. Twine had been wrapped around her
neck to strangler after the perpetrator tried to kill her
with his own bare hands. Her future husband was suspected,
(11:34):
but nobody was ever indicted, and finally Mary Baker, Her
case was dubbed the Mystery of One One Clues. Her
body was found in a ditch at Arlington National Cemetery.
She had been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted, and shot with
a thirty two caliber handgun. Several men were arrested, but
(11:58):
nobody was ever indicted or to into trial. The district
did have a serious problem. Rumors circulated that the reason
that all of these murders were going unsolved was because
somebody didn't want them solved. But the DC Police Department
was painfully underfunded and understaffed. How much could the police
(12:19):
do in the face of the worst crime rate in
the nation and rampant corruption that undermined every effort. Going
back to the scene of the Carborn murders, a detailed
diagram of the shoeprints in the snow around the ticket office,
the carbarn, and the areas to the north was provided
in the case file. The snow was fresh that morning,
(12:40):
which made the shoeprints easy to track on the grassy areas.
Connecticut Avenue had been cleared by the time the detectives
got there, and it was just wet and muddy. A
set of vehicle tire tracks showed that a car had
turned left into a series of vacant lots to the
north of the ticket office. The tracks turned left and stopped.
(13:00):
Shoe prints exited that car and went south, passed a
miniature golf course, and turned left again, following the B
and O railroad tracks out to Connecticut Avenue. Another set
of shoe prints went north from the ticket office back
past that miniature golf course and to the waiting car
at the vacant lots. The tire tracks then continued south,
(13:22):
turned left again, and then left one more time. The
car did a big loop through the lots and came
out on the same street it came in on. Detective
Volton made a note in the margin. After following those
shoe prints to the empty lots and then back to
the ticket office. At one place where there's a small ravine,
one party had stopped and sat down. This was determined
(13:43):
by the fact that the thumb prints of each hand
were on the outside. Somebody sat down on a rock
and waited, leaving impressions of his hands and his thumbs
in the snow. It sounded to me like somebody got ditched.
Following some of the leads that were phone in, Montgomery County,
Officer James mccauliffe received an anonymous call about a man
(14:05):
named Kenneth Conlin. Official records for Capital Transit showed that
Kenneth Conlin had applied for a job. His description fit
the bill of the Brightwood ticket office robbery, so the
detectives went to the listed address. The apartment manager said
he'd never heard the name Kenneth Conlin. After a little
more digging, they found out that Conlin had a bum
(14:27):
leg from jumping out of a window during a sting
in Baltimore, where he ran a house of prostitution. He
hardly had the physique needed for a quick getaway or
for carrying twenty two pound money bags. A few people
were questioned about Kenneth Conlin's current location, which went nowhere.
Another tip was phoned in that seemed a little more promising.
(14:48):
A trolley car conductor was held up at gunpoint by
three men in February of nineteen thirty. The conductor's name
was Percy Mangum, and he was now an officer on
the District Police. Sure he might have valid information about
his own robbery, Mangam said that he was working the
Connecticut Avenue trolley line when he was robbed of the
day's cash intake. As he made his way to the
(15:09):
main office in Georgetown, Mangam named Emery Lynwood Letterton as
a likely suspect. Letterton had worked for Capital Transit and
his criminal history showed an arrest in North Carolina for bootlegging.
He actually did a stint in an Ohio prison, so
it must have been one hell of a bust. Percy
Mangam was called into the Captain's office to recount what
(15:31):
happened during that robbery in nineteen thirty. Mangam told the
captain that Letterton was good for it and resembled one
of the suspects. Another tip from a cab driver whose
taxi was stolen and then used in Percy Mangam's robbery
gave the name John Cross. John Cross quit working for
Capital Transit just three days before Percy Mangam was robbed.
(15:55):
John Cross had a criminal record in Richmond, Virginia, so
detectives Brass and Bolton took a road trip. They met
with John Cross, who was doing time in a prison
camp in nineteen thirty five. Cross admitted to being in
d C in nineteen thirty when Percy Mangum was robbed,
and he gave the detectives little nuggets of information, but
(16:16):
he stopped short of confessing. Cross refused to give any
other names, saying he had way too much to lose
since he already had twelve more years to serve at
the prison. Volton and Brass struck out and without any
further information on Letterton and with John Cross's obvious alibi
of being imprisoned. During the carbarn robbery and murders, they
(16:38):
moved on. Dozens of the usual suspects were arrested and
hauled into various police precincts, given the third degree, then
released when their alibis checked out. But oddly, one man
didn't have to be hunted down. Instead, on the afternoon
of the murders, he strolled into the d C Lee's
(17:00):
headquarters and volunteered to be interviewed. His name was William
Franklin Clark. He wasn't a stranger to the DC police,
and he'd been arrested for armed robbery in the past.
DC Detective Frank Brass interviewed William Clark and then released
him after he provided a seemingly airtight alibi. Clark said
(17:21):
that he was with his girlfriend and a buddy on
the night of the murders. They were brought in and
both separately substantiated William Clark's story. But my sixth sense
was irked with this guy. People don't willingly throw themselves
into the middle of a murder investigation unless they have
an ulterior motive. Was Clark front running something he wanted
(17:43):
to keep hidden or did he use that opportunity to
try to find out what the cops knew so that
he could pass that information along. William Clark's name was
the first one on my person of interest list. Meanwhile,
forensic leads were coming in. Detective Brass gave Volton a
five dollar bill that was covered in bloodstains. The bill
(18:06):
had come from the driver of a bakery wagon who
said that he got it from a garage in Rockville, Maryland,
a garage the missing green buick hadn't been found, so
that seemed like a good tip. Volton took the bill
to the Department of Justice laboratory to have species testing done.
Then he ran down the path of that money from
(18:27):
business to business, person to person until he finally found
the original owner, who bled all over it. That man
said that he was target shooting in his yard and
he cut his finger on the gun hammer. Detective Volton
substantiated that claim and he moved on. Now, imagine trying
to track down a single five dollar bill in today's world.
(18:51):
Forget it. We would just run DNA on the blood,
look for any ridge detail from a fingerprint, and call
it a day. More forensic were being done by d
C Metro Lieutenant John Fowler on the spent casings, bullet
and projectiles from the ticket office. Lieutenant Fowler determined that
the gun that was used was a nineteen o three
(19:13):
Colt thirty two caliber semi automatic. He said that the
gun was in pretty bad shape, but now that Fowler
had that information, if the gun used in the Carborn
murders was located, he could do microscopic ballistic comparisons to
declare a match. The detectives now realized that the gun
they were looking for was likely a street purchase since
(19:34):
it was in pretty bad condition. That wasn't much, but
it was better than all the dead end leads they'd
followed so far. Nothing the detectives did seemed to be
panning out with any solid information about who killed Uncle
Emery and James Mitchell, and the clock was ticking. Nobody
found the green buick that had been stolen the night
before the murders, and nobody claimed to have seen it
(19:56):
in a garage or parked in a back alley somewhere.
No clear establishments had come forward to say that bloody
clothes had been brought in, and the endless gossip on
the street hadn't given them anyone solid to investigate. Then
they got their first solid lead from an unlikely source.
Detective Frank Brass was contacted by an ex con informant
(20:18):
who Brass had used in the past. The informants name
was Bill. Bill said that he'd been contacted by two
men on January seventh, nineteen thirty five, two weeks before
the murders, about a robbery of the main office in Georgetown.
Bill said that he knew one of the men, his
name was Lawrence Pettit, but he didn't know the second man.
(20:42):
Bill told Detective Brass that both men had worked for
the Capital Transit Company previously and they knew the inner
workings of the main office, and told him that the
job would be worth twenty to thirty grand if they
timed it right. Bill, the informant, asked Lawrence Pettit for
more details, and Pettit gave him a laundry list of facts,
(21:02):
including the layout of the interior of the main office,
that an armored truck came for the money every morning
between ten thirty and eleven, and that only three men
were with that truck. Two of the men would go
inside to get the cash, which was brought down on
an elevator and through the lobby while the third man
stayed with the truck. Bill told Detective Brass that the
(21:23):
two seemed to have all of the details ironed out,
but Bill declined their offer to go in with them
because he said a broad daylight robbery like that sounded
like a suicide mission. A few days later, Lawrence Pettit
approached Bill again and asked him to purchase some guns
from his contacts on the street. Bill told Pettit he
(21:44):
still wasn't interested. After my uncle Emory's case hit the newspapers,
Bill contacted Detective Brass, thinking that Pettit and this other
guy might be good for the car Barn murders. Detectives
Brass and Volton decided to work with Bill and see
what else he could find out. Voulton and Brass told
Bill to make contact with Lawrence Petted again and tell
(22:06):
him that he'd given it some thought and because things
were getting tough on him financially, he'd changed his mind.
Bill did that and reported back that the second man's
name was George Bruffy and that he and Lawrence Pettitt
were still hell bent on committing the robbery of the
main office. Pettit and Bruffy bought Bill's change of hard
hook line and sinker. Voulton and Brass coached informant Bill
(22:30):
and told him to bring up the Carborn case during
a point in the conversation where it wouldn't be obvious.
On the third day, a lunch meeting was planned at
a sandwich shop downtown at thirteen o six North Capitol
Street to work out the particulars. Bill, Pettit, and Bruffy
sat at a table by the window. Bill listened to
(22:50):
their plans about timing, where to park the car, entry
and exit points, and other logistics, taking mental notes to
give to Volton and Brass. When there was a pause
in the conversation, Bill asked the others if it would
be ok to bring a friend of his from Baltimore
to help out. Pettit and Bruffy told him that would
be great since it would make the heist four on three.
(23:14):
Bill interrupted and made his play about the Carbarn case.
I'm willing to go along with you fellows on the
thirty sixth and M Street job, but I won't be
a party to any damned fools who blast a guy
for no reason like that Chevy Chase affair. At that point,
Pettit and Bruffy stopped chewing, went silent and stared at Bill.
(23:36):
After a brief moment, Laurence Pettit spoke up and said
that was all a mistake. Forget it. George Bruffy kicked
Petted under the table and growled, shut up, you talk
too much. If you have information about the car Barn murders,
(23:58):
go to the Shattered Soul's Facebook page age and leave
me a message. Opening music by Sam Johnson at Sam
Johnson live dot com. Shattered Souls as produced by Karen
Smith and Angel Hart Productions
Throwing her off the bridge. I mean, that's just you'll
do that because you're have an argument great depression. Not
long after prohibition, they're worrying about bootlegging gangs. I don't
want a single word written abide that date. Do you
understand there's a possibility it could be solved one day.
(00:25):
Welcome back to Shattered Souls the car Barn Murders. I'm
Karen Smith. This is episode four. This podcast may contain
graphic language and it is not suitable for children. Previously
on the Carborn murders, Montgomery County lead Detective Theodore Volton
(00:46):
ran down lead after lead on the Carbarn case. Detective
Bolton tracked down every car that had been stolen around
the night of the murders, except for a green Buick
that was taken from the area of fifteen and Irving
Streets on Sunday night. I witness Ernest Carter recalled seeing
a green Buick flee the Chevy Chase Lake Ticket office
(01:07):
northbound on Connecticut Avenue with three white men inside. As
the detective's tracked down suspects, they went back to an
attempted robbery of the Brightwood ticket office that happened a
few months before the Carborn case, and they used a
description given by the overnight accountant to run down some potentials.
Edwin O'Connell was arrested based on that vague description. Then
(01:30):
he was released when O'Connell's father called in and said
that his son had been a patient at St. Elizabeth's
psychiatric Hospital. O'Connell's handcuffs were removed and he was placed
back into St. Elizabeth's. The detectives found out that O'Connell
had befriended Paul Berry and George Riddlehoover while he was
being treated for an unknown mental health issue. Paul Berry
(01:54):
had been committed in nineteen twenty after a successful insanity
defense for killing a trolley conductor, and he escaped from St.
Elizabeth's In nineteen thirty four, Paul Berry was found in St.
Louis after he freeloaded on a freight train, and he
was arrested in Missouri. There wasn't any family money to
have Paul Berry sent back to Washington, and as alibi
(02:16):
was solid for the night of the murders, considering he
was fifteen hundred miles away. George Riddle Hoover had been
released from St. Elizabeth's on January twelfth, just nine days
before Emery Smith and James Mitchell were killed, and the
psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth's considered him to be a gangster type.
Nobody knew where George riddle Hoover was. The information on
(02:39):
Edwin O'Connell and George Riddle Hoover was passed along from
Detective Volton to the others to run down, but that
lead got dropped along the way and no further investigation
was completed on either one of them. The attempted robbery
of the Brightwood ticket office remained unsolved. In the days
after the orders, people were dropping names, piecemeal information and
(03:04):
saying that so and so was a no good guy
and this other man would be the type to do it.
It was a discordant orchestra of crap leads and what
seemed to be old grievances getting new air. What better
way to get rid of an enemy than to pin
a double murder on him. Phones rang off the hook,
random memos were tossed onto desks, miles were put on vehicles,
(03:25):
and shoe leather eroded on the pavement. Twenty hour grinds
were bolstered by burnt Dinon Dash coffee, and pack after
pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. Some of the information did seem
to have teeth, and Volton, Rogers, Deal and Brass did
their very best to run all of it down, But
there was a serious problem. Back in the nineteen thirties,
(03:50):
and certainly before that, the District of Columbia was a
virtual den of duplicity. I did some unearthing of Washington's
teeming rackets and found wormhole after wormhole of Wanton scandals,
political malfeasance, official bribery, and corporate corruption. I realized that
(04:10):
some underhanded deals took place. D C was a big city,
and big cities did come with their fair share of turpitude.
But the grit and grime of the district underworld extended
its tentacles further and wider than I ever imagined. Racketeers
ran rough shod all over the place, with gambling halls,
horse racing, wire rooms, storefronts of seemingly legitimate businesses with
(04:35):
secret doors to hidden back rooms, and those rooms served
as speakeasies and meet up joints. And there were also
rooming houses read prostitution, all running rampant. Seven Those rooming
houses were filled with young women who traveled to d
C looking for a better life from the poverty stricken
(04:57):
towns across the country, and those women fed an insatiable
appetite for cheap sex. Downtown hotels doubled as pay as
you stayed, dens of inequity, and brothels operated in every
corner of the district. Some of them were out in
the open in the red light neighborhoods, and others operated
in secret for the elites who had to be a
(05:17):
little more discreet with their extramarital transgressions. These young girls
were sometimes entrapped into a life of flesh trading and
the pimps, the rooming house owners and these vile grannies,
posing as motherly figures to bait the hook, would increase
the cost of keeping a roof over their head exactly
(05:39):
commensurate with the amounts the girls brought home by design,
they could never get their heads above water, and many
of those girls fell into the drug trade, They overdosed,
or they evolved into the next generation of vile grannies
who lured more young girls into the net, completing the
endless circuit. Even though prohibition had been repealed in nineteen
(06:02):
thirty three, Bootlegging was still alive and well in d C.
Because black market liquor was much cheaper to buy than
the good stuff legally imported from Canada and from across
the Pond, so people continued to frequent the bathtub gin
joints instead of paying out the nose for a buzz.
Then they nursed monstrous hangovers the next morning. People also
(06:24):
chanced being poisoned by ingesting methanol or would alcohol that
was sometimes used in the illegal distillation process rather than
the four human consumption ethanol that legitimate manufacturers sold. Bootleg
moonshine or firewater burned like gasoline, and it tasted even worse,
(06:46):
and it was often masked with juniper oil or other
flavors to make it scarcely palatable, but it did the job.
There were thousands of arrests for bootlegging, and the majority
of violators were let off with a small fine do
to the overflowing justice system, only to go right back
to their business the next day. Gin and whiskey stills
(07:07):
were found everywhere under trapdoors in the woods, tunnels and
saloon basements, behind secret bookcases, on barn rafters, underneath chicken
coops under tarps and work trucks shoved into hedgerows. Maryland
farmers stopped selling their crops on the side of the road,
and instead they mashed their corn to manufacture mule kick,
(07:30):
a fitting nickname. Wealthy families turned their basements into speakeasies,
and they entertained high society in those low down cellars.
People from all walks of life were in on it,
including the people inside of the United States Capitol Building.
That's right, Senators and congressmen were dealing in bootleg liquor
(07:51):
inside of the people's house. If you don't believe me,
here's proof. A man named George Cassidy, also known as
the Man in the Green Hat. He was the personal
bootlegger to the folks in the US Capital. He had
his own office in the basement of the Capitol Building,
and he would deal to those in power directly from
his office, or he would pay a personal visit with
(08:13):
his briefcase filled with bottles of liquor. Even the staunch
supporters of prohibition, the representatives who shouted from the rafters
about the insidiousness of alcohol, the sin of the drink,
the scourge of the public, would pay George Cassidy's office
a visit and purchase a fifth of whiskey for personal use.
George Cassidy made a good living for ten years until
(08:36):
he was eventually busted, and he told the whole sordid
story in a series of six front page articles in
the Washington Post. So before you believe that the illegal
rackets involved only underworld criminals, think again. Washington, d C.
Was a haven for gambling, prostitution, the numbers racket, which
(08:56):
was a forerunner of the legal lottery we play today,
horse racing wires, and tons of other scams that ran
a muck during the depression. Desperate people will do desperate things.
Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to just take
that left turn at the Primrose Path. For some quick statistics,
in nineteen thirty five, Washington, d C's crime rate was
(09:19):
worse than every other city of comparable size in the
entire nation. Murder was three times worse, grand larceny was
four times worse, and robberies in d C. Well, They
outranked Pittsburgh, Newark, and Cincinnati three to one. The District
of Columbia had a serious problem. The car Barn case
(09:42):
left the headlines and got shoved into the interior pages
of the papers because another notorious crime took over the
lead and captured the nation's attention, the sensational trial of
Bruno Richard Hofftmann, who was in court for the kidnapping
and murder of the Lindbergh baby. But Washington, d C.
Had no shortage of sensational cases during that time either.
(10:05):
There was a series of lone woman murders that got
front page attention for weeks or even months at a time.
All of these cases remain unsolved today. Virginia McPherson was
found dead inside of her apartment with the cord of
her pajamas wrapped around her neck and blood stains were
all over the bathroom. The detectives immediately ruled her death
(10:27):
a suicide, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Even the
public was convinced that her murder was swept under the
rug to prevent another black eye to the d C
police force and their abysmal solver rate. Bullah Limerick was
also found dead in her house in her bed. The
blanket was pulled up to her chin and her hands
(10:49):
were neatly folded across her abdomen. She had blood in
her mouth and the coroner ruled that she suffered a
cerebral hemorrhage and he would just bypass an autopsy. When
the embalmer otised blood coming out of the side of
her head, he called the coroner back, and the coroner
found a bullet hole just behind her ear and a
caliber slug in her head. Her murder is still unsolved.
(11:13):
Corinna Loring disappeared two days before her wedding and her
body was found on Saddleback Ridge on the outskirts of
Mountain near Maryland. There were triangular shape stab wounds in
each of her temples. Twine had been wrapped around her
neck to strangler after the perpetrator tried to kill her
with his own bare hands. Her future husband was suspected,
(11:34):
but nobody was ever indicted, and finally Mary Baker, Her
case was dubbed the Mystery of One One Clues. Her
body was found in a ditch at Arlington National Cemetery.
She had been beaten, strangled, sexually assaulted, and shot with
a thirty two caliber handgun. Several men were arrested, but
(11:58):
nobody was ever indicted or to into trial. The district
did have a serious problem. Rumors circulated that the reason
that all of these murders were going unsolved was because
somebody didn't want them solved. But the DC Police Department
was painfully underfunded and understaffed. How much could the police
(12:19):
do in the face of the worst crime rate in
the nation and rampant corruption that undermined every effort. Going
back to the scene of the Carborn murders, a detailed
diagram of the shoeprints in the snow around the ticket office,
the carbarn, and the areas to the north was provided
in the case file. The snow was fresh that morning,
(12:40):
which made the shoeprints easy to track on the grassy areas.
Connecticut Avenue had been cleared by the time the detectives
got there, and it was just wet and muddy. A
set of vehicle tire tracks showed that a car had
turned left into a series of vacant lots to the
north of the ticket office. The tracks turned left and stopped.
(13:00):
Shoe prints exited that car and went south, passed a
miniature golf course, and turned left again, following the B
and O railroad tracks out to Connecticut Avenue. Another set
of shoe prints went north from the ticket office back
past that miniature golf course and to the waiting car
at the vacant lots. The tire tracks then continued south,
(13:22):
turned left again, and then left one more time. The
car did a big loop through the lots and came
out on the same street it came in on. Detective
Volton made a note in the margin. After following those
shoe prints to the empty lots and then back to
the ticket office. At one place where there's a small ravine,
one party had stopped and sat down. This was determined
(13:43):
by the fact that the thumb prints of each hand
were on the outside. Somebody sat down on a rock
and waited, leaving impressions of his hands and his thumbs
in the snow. It sounded to me like somebody got ditched.
Following some of the leads that were phone in, Montgomery County,
Officer James mccauliffe received an anonymous call about a man
(14:05):
named Kenneth Conlin. Official records for Capital Transit showed that
Kenneth Conlin had applied for a job. His description fit
the bill of the Brightwood ticket office robbery, so the
detectives went to the listed address. The apartment manager said
he'd never heard the name Kenneth Conlin. After a little
more digging, they found out that Conlin had a bum
(14:27):
leg from jumping out of a window during a sting
in Baltimore, where he ran a house of prostitution. He
hardly had the physique needed for a quick getaway or
for carrying twenty two pound money bags. A few people
were questioned about Kenneth Conlin's current location, which went nowhere.
Another tip was phoned in that seemed a little more promising.
(14:48):
A trolley car conductor was held up at gunpoint by
three men in February of nineteen thirty. The conductor's name
was Percy Mangum, and he was now an officer on
the District Police. Sure he might have valid information about
his own robbery, Mangam said that he was working the
Connecticut Avenue trolley line when he was robbed of the
day's cash intake. As he made his way to the
(15:09):
main office in Georgetown, Mangam named Emery Lynwood Letterton as
a likely suspect. Letterton had worked for Capital Transit and
his criminal history showed an arrest in North Carolina for bootlegging.
He actually did a stint in an Ohio prison, so
it must have been one hell of a bust. Percy
Mangam was called into the Captain's office to recount what
(15:31):
happened during that robbery in nineteen thirty. Mangam told the
captain that Letterton was good for it and resembled one
of the suspects. Another tip from a cab driver whose
taxi was stolen and then used in Percy Mangam's robbery
gave the name John Cross. John Cross quit working for
Capital Transit just three days before Percy Mangam was robbed.
(15:55):
John Cross had a criminal record in Richmond, Virginia, so
detectives Brass and Bolton took a road trip. They met
with John Cross, who was doing time in a prison
camp in nineteen thirty five. Cross admitted to being in
d C in nineteen thirty when Percy Mangum was robbed,
and he gave the detectives little nuggets of information, but
(16:16):
he stopped short of confessing. Cross refused to give any
other names, saying he had way too much to lose
since he already had twelve more years to serve at
the prison. Volton and Brass struck out and without any
further information on Letterton and with John Cross's obvious alibi
of being imprisoned. During the carbarn robbery and murders, they
(16:38):
moved on. Dozens of the usual suspects were arrested and
hauled into various police precincts, given the third degree, then
released when their alibis checked out. But oddly, one man
didn't have to be hunted down. Instead, on the afternoon
of the murders, he strolled into the d C Lee's
(17:00):
headquarters and volunteered to be interviewed. His name was William
Franklin Clark. He wasn't a stranger to the DC police,
and he'd been arrested for armed robbery in the past.
DC Detective Frank Brass interviewed William Clark and then released
him after he provided a seemingly airtight alibi. Clark said
(17:21):
that he was with his girlfriend and a buddy on
the night of the murders. They were brought in and
both separately substantiated William Clark's story. But my sixth sense
was irked with this guy. People don't willingly throw themselves
into the middle of a murder investigation unless they have
an ulterior motive. Was Clark front running something he wanted
(17:43):
to keep hidden or did he use that opportunity to
try to find out what the cops knew so that
he could pass that information along. William Clark's name was
the first one on my person of interest list. Meanwhile,
forensic leads were coming in. Detective Brass gave Volton a
five dollar bill that was covered in bloodstains. The bill
(18:06):
had come from the driver of a bakery wagon who
said that he got it from a garage in Rockville, Maryland,
a garage the missing green buick hadn't been found, so
that seemed like a good tip. Volton took the bill
to the Department of Justice laboratory to have species testing done.
Then he ran down the path of that money from
(18:27):
business to business, person to person until he finally found
the original owner, who bled all over it. That man
said that he was target shooting in his yard and
he cut his finger on the gun hammer. Detective Volton
substantiated that claim and he moved on. Now, imagine trying
to track down a single five dollar bill in today's world.
(18:51):
Forget it. We would just run DNA on the blood,
look for any ridge detail from a fingerprint, and call
it a day. More forensic were being done by d
C Metro Lieutenant John Fowler on the spent casings, bullet
and projectiles from the ticket office. Lieutenant Fowler determined that
the gun that was used was a nineteen o three
(19:13):
Colt thirty two caliber semi automatic. He said that the
gun was in pretty bad shape, but now that Fowler
had that information, if the gun used in the Carborn
murders was located, he could do microscopic ballistic comparisons to
declare a match. The detectives now realized that the gun
they were looking for was likely a street purchase since
(19:34):
it was in pretty bad condition. That wasn't much, but
it was better than all the dead end leads they'd
followed so far. Nothing the detectives did seemed to be
panning out with any solid information about who killed Uncle
Emery and James Mitchell, and the clock was ticking. Nobody
found the green buick that had been stolen the night
before the murders, and nobody claimed to have seen it
(19:56):
in a garage or parked in a back alley somewhere.
No clear establishments had come forward to say that bloody
clothes had been brought in, and the endless gossip on
the street hadn't given them anyone solid to investigate. Then
they got their first solid lead from an unlikely source.
Detective Frank Brass was contacted by an ex con informant
(20:18):
who Brass had used in the past. The informants name
was Bill. Bill said that he'd been contacted by two
men on January seventh, nineteen thirty five, two weeks before
the murders, about a robbery of the main office in Georgetown.
Bill said that he knew one of the men, his
name was Lawrence Pettit, but he didn't know the second man.
(20:42):
Bill told Detective Brass that both men had worked for
the Capital Transit Company previously and they knew the inner
workings of the main office, and told him that the
job would be worth twenty to thirty grand if they
timed it right. Bill, the informant, asked Lawrence Pettit for
more details, and Pettit gave him a laundry list of facts,
(21:02):
including the layout of the interior of the main office,
that an armored truck came for the money every morning
between ten thirty and eleven, and that only three men
were with that truck. Two of the men would go
inside to get the cash, which was brought down on
an elevator and through the lobby while the third man
stayed with the truck. Bill told Detective Brass that the
(21:23):
two seemed to have all of the details ironed out,
but Bill declined their offer to go in with them
because he said a broad daylight robbery like that sounded
like a suicide mission. A few days later, Lawrence Pettit
approached Bill again and asked him to purchase some guns
from his contacts on the street. Bill told Pettit he
(21:44):
still wasn't interested. After my uncle Emory's case hit the newspapers,
Bill contacted Detective Brass, thinking that Pettit and this other
guy might be good for the car Barn murders. Detectives
Brass and Volton decided to work with Bill and see
what else he could find out. Voulton and Brass told
Bill to make contact with Lawrence Petted again and tell
(22:06):
him that he'd given it some thought and because things
were getting tough on him financially, he'd changed his mind.
Bill did that and reported back that the second man's
name was George Bruffy and that he and Lawrence Pettitt
were still hell bent on committing the robbery of the
main office. Pettit and Bruffy bought Bill's change of hard
hook line and sinker. Voulton and Brass coached informant Bill
(22:30):
and told him to bring up the Carborn case during
a point in the conversation where it wouldn't be obvious.
On the third day, a lunch meeting was planned at
a sandwich shop downtown at thirteen o six North Capitol
Street to work out the particulars. Bill, Pettit, and Bruffy
sat at a table by the window. Bill listened to
(22:50):
their plans about timing, where to park the car, entry
and exit points, and other logistics, taking mental notes to
give to Volton and Brass. When there was a pause
in the conversation, Bill asked the others if it would
be ok to bring a friend of his from Baltimore
to help out. Pettit and Bruffy told him that would
be great since it would make the heist four on three.
(23:14):
Bill interrupted and made his play about the Carbarn case.
I'm willing to go along with you fellows on the
thirty sixth and M Street job, but I won't be
a party to any damned fools who blast a guy
for no reason like that Chevy Chase affair. At that point,
Pettit and Bruffy stopped chewing, went silent and stared at Bill.
(23:36):
After a brief moment, Laurence Pettit spoke up and said
that was all a mistake. Forget it. George Bruffy kicked
Petted under the table and growled, shut up, you talk
too much. If you have information about the car Barn murders,
(23:58):
go to the Shattered Soul's Facebook page age and leave
me a message. Opening music by Sam Johnson at Sam
Johnson live dot com. Shattered Souls as produced by Karen
Smith and Angel Hart Productions
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