Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  Byers spoke again. “Hey, Stanley, she didn’t know your name. She said you told her your name was Bill. That so? And why the deception if everything’s on the up ’n’ up?”

  “You know I’m married, so there’s no sense me saying my real name. Just thought I wanted something a little different that night. Conversationwise, you know. Besides, you’re getting the wrong idea here. I told you I got a wife, I got a mistress, and girlfriends all over. I don’t need to rape a girl.”

  After another half hour of grilling, Hoss remained relaxed and seemingly cooperative, reminding those present, “If I was guilty of doing anything to that girl, don’t ya think I’d ’uv taken off like Zurka did?” This made sense to some of his interrogators. The whole matter was boiling down to “he said—she said.” More than one cop in the room was tending to believe Hoss’s claim of innocence. Most did not see or talk with Kathy Defino but those that had—Chief Usiadek and Officers Orris and Curti— saw firsthand the teenager’s palpable fear of the one she said assaulted her. Yet Chief Detective Jennings of Allegheny County still had his doubts about Kathy’s story, and follow-up reports only added to his concerns, yet Kathy Defino had made a damning statement and pointed an incriminating finger at Stanley Hoss.

  Still unconcerned, even acting a bit put out at this inconvenience, Hoss may have thought he could talk himself right out of the station house. Then something happened that made his situation considerably grimmer. Like his colleagues, Detective Dick Byers had shot off a few questions to Hoss. One concerned the robbery of young, pregnant Nancy Falconer at her home only the week before. Hoss answered, “Can’t help you there. Don’t know anything about it. That’s not what I do, you know that.”

  Byers let it rest for the moment, but, eyeing him, Byers noticed that the coat Hoss was wearing didn’t fit right and was too heavy for the warm evening. Then Byers thought back to the list of the many items stolen in the Falconer robbery. Was a man’s coat on the list? He couldn’t be sure, but with Hoss and his coat right in front of him, Byers wouldn’t squander the moment. He whispered to his boss, Bill Jennings, then excused himself. Byers went to the next room and placed a call to Nancy Falconer. Byers asked Nancy if her husband’s coat had been stolen in the robbery. Yes, it had. Nancy then gave Detective Byers a fine detail. “It’s tan in color, wide lapels, size 42, but when I brought it home for Dennis, the sleeves were a tad long, so I hemmed them up with green thread. Why, did you find the coat somewhere?”

  “Just maybe, Nancy,” Byers replied. “Can you hold the line a sec?” Byers walked into the next room and interrupted Hoss, who was giving a response to Red Orris. “Stanley, hold out your hands, I want to see something.” Byers came close to Hoss and looked at his coat cuff—sewn with green thread. Byers returned to the phone, saying, “Nancy, we found the coat and we got someone wearing it. Can you come down to the East Deer Station?”

  The investigators working on the Falconer case, primarily Radage, Simonetti, Jennings, and Byers, knew that the perpetrators had worn masks, but Nancy had said that the one with the heavier build—Mr. Husky—had a distinctive voice that she’d recognize if she heard it again. So when Nancy and Dennis Falconer arrived at the station, the police arranged a “voice lineup.” Three policemen, a fireman, and Hoss stood out of sight while Nancy listened to each one say, “Shut up and sit on the couch.” Nancy said straightaway, “I know who it is, but let them do it again.” The process was repeated. She told Chief Usiadek, “It’s the second voice, second of the five. That’s him, I know it.” Mr. Husky was Mr. Hoss.

  After the Falconers left the station, Stanley Hoss was again put in a chair. Referring to the robbery and mimicking Hoss’s earlier statement, it was an angry Detective Dick Byers who spoke first. “That’s not what I do, you know that … really, Hoss? And not to mention the Defino girl. Gee, punk-ass car thief turned robber-rapist. I think this time your wife—oh yeah, and all your girlfriends—will be missin’ your charms for a long time. And in case you think it slipped by us, you didn’t flee this place with your buddy Zurka ’cause once you’d got rid of the gun, you thought all you faced was one more stolen car rap, and that’s chicken shit to you, Stanley, right? You didn’t know a rape was going to hit you between the eyes.”

  Byers turned his back on Hoss and strode outside. Lighting a smoke, he thought, “What a piece of shit.”

  Inside, Stanley Hoss spat out to everyone in the room, “Fuck you cops!”

  2

  Stanley Hoss went to jail. Around the time of his arrest and for some years before, the Hoss name, among others, would come up at police functions, socializing, or over dinner tables. When Chief Steve Radage came home the day of the Falconer robbery, it was his wife, Betty, who ventured, “You don’t think Stanley Hoss is involved with this, do you?” Radage didn’t think so, as he’d not known Hoss or his brother, Harry, to engage in something so brutal. Still, Betty wondered. She not only knew Stanley Hoss’s name through her husband’s work but had actually met him on occasion, because for a time Hoss had lived not far from the Radage residence. She remembered Hoss as cordial, even courteous. When she’d seen him with one or two of his kids, he was attentive and seemed to enjoy the fatherly role, yet Betty’s instincts told her he wasn’t fatherly, at least in the truest sense of the word. The attention to his kids was overplayed, like that of a visiting uncle. And how could she forget the night when loud noises brought her and Steve to their bedroom window? “Steve grabbed his service revolver and ran out,” Betty recalled. “I stayed on the porch until Steve called for me. Steve knelt down beside the body and turned it over. Why, it was Stanley Hoss and he was badly hurt. He was not unconscious but awfully dazed. I ran back in and got a pitcher of water and the biggest towel I could find. We washed off the blood and found a gash right on the top of his head. By this time he was talking some. We said we were going to take him to the hospital. We learned later that Stanley had been in a fight with another young man who had picked up a cinder block and hit Stanley smack on the head.” These fights were a part of Stanley’s lifestyle.

  “It was a good half year after we’d taken Stanley Hoss to the hospital,” Betty remembered, “when I saw him sitting atop a retaining wall, legs dangling down, in a parking lot in Natrona Heights, by himself, just sitting there. He hopped down, walked over, and thanked me for helping him out that night. He seemed sincere but, call it intuition, I was always uneasy about him.”

  Wilbur Bliss, police chief of Indiana Township, was another who’d arrested Hoss on several occasions, a couple of times with his brother Harry. Born in 1913, Bliss lived the traditional rural life of the times. His education took place in a one-room schoolhouse until 1926, when five or six one-roomers were closed for a common school. He hunted, trapped, and, of course, farmed. In 1929, Bliss began work as an apprentice automobile mechanic. After nine years, he came down with tuberculosis; in fact, Bliss would lose three siblings, all to tuberculosis. As his own health deteriorated, he lost his job. By 1940, Bliss had recovered but was virtually penniless. Around this time, the sole policeman in the township retired and Bliss was asked by the local politicos if he would take over the police job. The job paid a paltry $175 a month and Bliss would have to furnish his own car and pay his own expenses. “How could I turn it down?” Bliss would joke. Given no training, only sentiments of Godspeed, Bliss was handed a badge and a Colt .38 Special.

  It was twenty-five years later that Chief Bliss, with four officers under him, began to run into Stanley Hoss. Hoss seemed to travel about the northern parts of Allegheny County and commit his misdeeds in the five or six townships comprising that area. Whether by Hoss’s design or not, no single police department had a complete picture of his criminal escapades, except for his predilection to swipe cars. Then, too, Hoss would often engage in this pastime further north, in Butler County, stealing cars there but driving them back to his home turf for hiding, chopping, and selling.

  “When we’d arrest Stanley and Harry Hoss,” Chief Bliss recalle
d,

  we’d mostly have them in our township office. This was usually about their shenanigans with cars but when you’d interview them about anything Harry was always a grizzly bear; he’d stand up, shout, roar, protest, and get hot-headed. He was the kind of guy that would scare somebody who didn’t know him. Now Stanley, well, he’d be sitting there real quiet, almost enjoying the show. Stanley was always cool as a cucumber—getting questioned was part of the deal, part of the lifestyle. This is why, when things broke big with Stanley, I had a hard time putting him together with the crimes. I didn’t figure him to be that kind of guy. Now if it was Harry, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all, but Stanley seemed to be different.

  It would grow on Chief Bliss that Stanley’s interests spread wider than auto theft. “Two young women worked in the office of Lakewood Cemetery, which is the adjoining property to our police department building,” Bliss explained.

  One of the women lived with her husband, who had quite a few guns. I knew them well. She came up and told me someone had broken into her house and had stolen the guns. She said the man she worked with, Stanley Hoss, a gravedigger at Lakewood, told her who stole the guns. The guy Hoss blamed lived in West Deer, so I went to see Steve [Steve Radage of West Deer] who said, “Well, you’re not looking for that fellow; you’re looking for Stanley Hoss.” He proceeded to tell me he knew Hoss and he’s had a slew of trouble out of him. Anyhow, we went to see the guy accused of stealing the guns. He knew nothing about it, and we believed him. So we did a little undercover work and we found out what happened. These two women that worked at Lakewood had invited Stanley and his brother to one of their houses for a sex party. Word was some of these parties had gone on at Lakewood Cemetery as well. Presumably after the festivities, Stanley said that he’s taking the guns, and he did. So the girl, somehow wanting to protect Stanley, had to cover this up some way and concocted the story of the guy in West Deer. In the end we knew damn well Stanley Hoss was the culprit but we just didn’t have a case against him or his brother. It was sort of dumb of Hoss to tell that girl to say some guy in West Deer stole the guns, but I figured Hoss was mad at the fellow and wanted to put him in a fix.

  Maybe a year later, the state police came down from Butler. They were after a car stolen that they traced to Indiana Township, and they found it in Lakewood Cemetery. They asked if they could put the stolen car in our police garage till the matter was straightened out. Well, the same thing happened a half dozen times over the next few months; these cars kept appearing in the cemetery. We knew Stanley Hoss worked there, so you’ll know of our suspicions. We went to see the man who owned Lakewood but got no cooperation from him; in fact, he was belligerent to us all the time. I didn’t know then why he was like that but he was either afraid of those boys or had some other tie-in. The state police arrested Stanley and Harry more than once over these cars, but they never really served any time for it.

  Now, these two Hoss boys were working at Lakewood, and their job was to take a body out and bury it. I’ve often wondered … can you imagine guys like that not opening the casket to see if there were jewels to be had? The Hosses were always committing crimes but, of course, you had to catch them. Still, any time I talked to Stanley he was nice and polite.

  For nightlife, Hoss was no stranger to nearby New Kensington. Of course he found trouble or vice versa, and New Kensington was undoubtedly where Hoss came to know mob figures. These mobsters and Hoss found they could use each other. For the several years their crooked handshake lasted, everyone profited. Hoss provided stolen cars, both randomly and by special order. Even cigar-chomping Detective Bill Jennings called Hoss an accomplished car thief: “He had a gift. He could steal an auto at the bat of an eyelash.”

  Here again, Hoss’s rep as a car thief prevailed in law enforcement minds, and Hoss never pretended to be other than the criminal he was. Between the law and Hoss, the game was “Catch me if you can.” The general police mind-set was that Hoss would steal your wheels and throw in an occasional good ol’ boy tussle, but was unlikely to do serious harm beyond that. This mind-set was reinforced by ignorance. Not all the area’s police departments knew of the voice ID by Nancy Falconer, and if word spread about the rape of young Kathy Defino, it was followed by doubting whispers.

  Wherein lay the truth? In a 1970 letter to his wife, Hoss wrote,

  As far as my criminal life goes, that was just born in me. I was so good at it that I could never stop. I must have stole hundreds of cars. You know how good I was with cars. Then I went to burglarys. I was an expert in that line of business. I remember one time I had pulled so many burglarys that all the police and detectives in the county joined together to break the ring up. As you know they never did. I seen they would never catch me so I went into armed robberys. I set up and pulled so many of them, and, there again, I was an expert. I could go on for hours about all the things I did. I would tell you all the crimes I have done just to show the cops how dum they are but there was so many guys that was in with me.

  Braggadocio, to be sure, but the words nevertheless rang true.

  Had Patrolman Burt Parrett of Harmar Township read Hoss’s letter, he would have believed every line. He’d had his own encounters with Hoss and held a certain opinion. “A lot of people know Stanley Hoss as just a car thief, but he was violent, certainly sure could be. He was in a lot of fights. Bigger guys in bars would take him on, but he was very strong and good enough a street fighter to beat the hell out of most anybody. He was kinda like a loner. You could talk to him but not know what was going on in his mind. Stanley Hoss was one guy when you looked at him you knew anything was possible. Sooner or later he was gonna blow up.”

  3

  At his arraignment for the rape of Kathy Defino, bail was set at $10,000, which Hoss could not post. On the evening of April 7, 1969, Hoss was duly delivered to Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Jail, an architectural masterpiece that served as a “symbol of law and a warning to lawbreakers.” Naturally the jail’s human contents were blind to its beauty and had little appreciation for their housing arrangements.

  When Stanley Hoss was deposited at the jail, he was in a foul mood. He’d done time before, but only in small doses, little more than an occupational hazard. True, he got to lie around, rest up, eat well, and lounge with cronies, but he wouldn’t care to do too much time, certainly no long stretches.

  But behind bars this time, Hoss was less carefree. He was in much bigger trouble, which could see him tucked away for years. He tried to anticipate the extent of the evidence the police could have collected against him. As he told a fellow jailbird,

  The pregnant broad never saw my face. All that stuff that was stole, they didn’t find nothin’ except that damn coat, but see, I bought it from some nigger in Pittsburgh, right? And get this, the cops say they got me ’cause the broad recognized my voice. Isn’t that illegal or something? Now the rape crap … I’ll tell you what I shoulda’ done with her. Well, never mind, live and learn. Anyway, I’ll call her the lyin’ bitch she is. She wanted sex to get back at her boyfriend. Rich didn’t do nothin’ to her and I didn’t either, so she gets pissed and says I raped her. No one’s gonna believe her.

  Inmates usually side with other inmates. Only the quite stupid, of which there are many, actually believe the story, but most will commiserate for form’s sake. After all, since it’s the criminal against the whole state government, soon enough each listener will want his own incredible fibs taken as gospel.

  Hoss’s buddy took a last drag from his cigarette, then flicked it over the third-tier rail to the rotunda floor below. He looked Hoss square in the eye and lamented, “Man, if you get time for that shit, Stan, you’re right, they’re railroadin’ you.”

  As things stood, Hoss could only bide his time and wait for his shot at trial. He fell into the easy routine of chow time, exercise, and drinking loads of coffee, to which he was partial.

  After two months in the county jail, Hoss learned from his appointed defense attorney, Barney
Phillips, that a grand jury would be scheduled regarding the rape of Kathy Defino. Phillips explained to Hoss that the alleged victim would sit before twenty grand jurors, an assistant district attorney (DA), and other officials to answer questions about her alleged abduction and assault. It boiled down to whether the grand jury believed Miss Defino, whose testimony would be augmented by whatever evidence the prosecution wished to present. A confident Phillips told Hoss he felt the whole matter would die on the vine. Taking no chances, Hoss had already put out the word to a select friend or two.

  Thus began the terrorizing of the Defino family: a cherry bomb set off beside bedroom windows at 4:00 A.M.; frightening phone calls suggesting Kathy would be wise to keep her mouth shut; the front door of their home vandalized. The Shaler Police Department could not guard her house around the clock. No one was ever apprehended for the torment.

  For Kathy, the harassment compounded stress that was already nearly intolerable. How could Kathy forget the doctor’s visit right after the rape? In the waiting room, her father had said, “I guess now we’ll find out who’s telling the truth!” The words cut deep, but she’d hoped her father—Italian, patriarchal, conservative—would come to support her. Instead, his woeful attitude kept Kathy’s mother from fully supporting her either. At St. Francis Hospital during the doctor’s exam, she felt treated as a leper. The doctor removed a tampon and held it off to the side before dropping it with disdain into a wastebasket. He barely spoke to Kathy and at the end said he couldn’t tell much of anything and would not be making a report. Because of the stress of the rape and her treatment afterward, Kathy had been hospitalized for a week after the rape to stave off a complete nervous breakdown.