Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  Sirens were now wailing all over, but many cop cars were having great trouble maneuvering in and around rush-hour traffic, which was clogging main thoroughfares and many of the secondary roads. Some cruisers were forced to a virtual standstill, blaring sirens notwithstanding, while others crept as fast as they dared along berms.

  Police to Control: Do you want us to go down with the officer or up over the hill to look?

  Police to Control: Mike and I got the roadblocks at Hunter and the Water Tower.

  To all Cars, this is 101: This guy drove past, he’s on the upper end of Hunter Road somewhere. A lady saw him come flying up there. We’re in front of … ah, I’ll give you a number in a second, but he’s up on top of that hill somewhere!

  But he wasn’t. Stanley Hoss was speeding in another direction. After Hoss had shot off two rounds and watched the officer fall, he tore away straight up Plum Street. The easiest route of escape would be to continue on Plum which turns into Hunter Road within half a mile. Hoss would then be on more open roadway, which would deliver him into the borough of Penn Hills. Once there, he’d have better options to elude pursuit and disappear. That would be his most likely escape route. Yet, tearing away from the scene, Hoss went only a few hundred yards before turning left onto Sixth Street. The car turned so recklessly that William Walcroft, waiting to turn onto Plum, was nearly struck by the yellow Chevy. A few blocks down on Sixth, Josephine Brocato was backing from her driveway when she was almost hit by the speeding car. Any number of bystanders at the crime scene witnessed Hoss’s left turn, but, through their excitability or the responding officers’ urgency in the chase, Hoss’s immediate direction of flight was lost in the rush and pandemonium.

  Gloria Bradburn was at her desk at the Advance-Leader newspaper office in Oakmont when “wailing sirens announced the approach of two all black Oakmont police cars, so close together it could only mean one thing … something important had happened.” Bradburn ran out of the building with a colleague and took off in pursuit.

  Sprung to action after finally getting the call for backup from Speed Buttergeit, the Oakmont cops were about halfway to Plum when they heard Herm Trozzi’s broadcast of a Verona officer shot. As it was common practice to “trade days,” no one on the Oakmont force knew for sure exactly who on Verona’s force was on duty just then. In fact, Friday, September 19, was to have been Zanella’s day off, but he was filling in for a sick colleague. However, Oakmont’s dash to the crime scene came too late. Ironically, as Oakmont’s cruisers sped south, Stanley Hoss was speeding north. They passed each other unseen, only a few blocks between them.

  As the Oakmont cruisers, and a few personal cars with policemen inside, slid into Plum Street, they had to slow considerably to avoid the clusters of people standing all over the place. Officers Springer and Fescemyer were the first to arrive. Fescemyer observed “an officer laying down on the ground. I could see his pant leg up around his knee. It was strange, his position, and the color of his leg was a pale white. I’ve dealt with death on the job and before when I worked at a funeral home. I said to Bob [Springer], ‘I don’t think we should stop here. I think he’s dead, and we should go after the car, and we’ll direct another car to stop at the scene.’ So that’s what we did. I didn’t initially think it was Joe. I thought maybe it was Mickey Maroney.”

  Dick Zoller’s moment at Plum Street mirrored Fescemyer’s.

  We get there and I remember seeing some people I knew, but everything was a blur. The last thing we’re thinking about is a dead cop, not in our small town, not on this quiet corner with Squire Garove’s place right there, with the sun shining and the day so pretty … but there, just in front of the Verona cruiser, is a policeman laying on the roadway. There was no movement but, still, it is not registering that this kid’s dead. When I first saw him I thought it was Mickey Maroney. In our car we never came to a complete stop but drove by slowly. We were wondering what would be best to do. There were people there to help and everyone was yelling and pointing, “He went that way! He went that way!” We didn’t know precisely, but we felt he had only a minute on us so—following the pointing fingers and pleas to hurry, get him—we took off with a vengeance, straight up Plum toward Hunter Road. The other cars followed us.

  No one heard any bystander say the yellow Chevy turned off onto Sixth.

  Gloria Bradburn from the newspaper office got to the chaotic scene only a short time behind the police. “Oakmont Police Chief John Miceli was alternately standing by his radio for information and trying to keep the curious away from possible danger,” reported Bradburm. “Mayor Edward Cooke paced back and forth with walkie-talkie in hand. The chief and mayor sought to bring about order at Plum Street, but a new fright swept through the crowd. Word was received that the shooter was headed back toward Plum Street.”

  Chief Miceli ordered several cars to block Plum Street and direct traffic away from the area. The growing crowd was ordered back. Miceli’s eyes constantly scanned Plum and the boulevard, ready to pull his weapon at the sight of any yellow car.

  Gloria Bradburn stayed close to Miceli, figuring him the best source of news, but she also spoke to those who had been around the scene when the shooting happened. Bradburn followed this story closely and in the days ahead wrote many engrossing and poignant articles for her newspaper.

  By phone and radio contact, word spread among all area police forces of the shooting and of the suspect Stanley Hoss. Chief Blackie DeLellis got notice from Penn Hills dispatch “about three or four minutes after they knew an officer was down.” When Blackie arrived at the scene, he became the officer in command. “All I thought of was finding that car,” Blackie recalled.

  It was yellow, so it would stand out. And we had no means of communicating with Oakmont, but we got Pittsburgh police notified, and on the spot they dispatched a hundred officers. Pittsburgh knew, as we did, that if the shooter somehow eluded a quick capture, he could soon make it to countryside, lots of hills and woods, so we’d really need a lot of manpower to cover large areas. It was a tremendous response from Pittsburgh but it would still be twenty minutes or more, even with sirens going, till they’d make it into the area. And Pittsburgh had that special team that would work these emergency details. They came out full strength, all geared up. This whole area was converged upon from the Pittsburgh side. I was worried sick about Joe, wondering if he was all right but at the same time felt confident about all the men coming on the double to help out and wrap this thing up.

  Gunfire! Blackie heard the reports from Penn Hills and Pittsburgh radios. There was shooting going on at the top of Hunter Road. This surely meant Hoss had been stopped, perhaps flushed from his car, but that he’d decided to fight it out. Officers Fescemyer, Springer, Zoller, and others were near the top of Hunter, about three miles from the crime scene, when the gunshots were heard. All the officers got out of their vehicles, weapons at the ready, but used their cars as shields because, as Fescemyer said, “We all thought we were getting shot at. We thought Hoss had run into a cruiser, or even a civilian, and was trying to grab another car. Anyhow, we bailed out of our cars and took cover.”

  At Plum Street, Gloria Bradburn was still sticking close to Chief Miceli and could hear the radio transmissions. “I heard shots,” Bradburn reported, “I know I did. We thought Hoss for sure was cornered and was shooting it out.”

  “In the end,” Fescemyer said, “we found nothing. There has never been an explanation as to who was firing at what. Maybe it was firecrackers, but we sure lost a lot of time, ’cause we learned later Hoss was nowhere near Hunter Hill.” These two factors—police ignorance that Hoss had turned onto Sixth Street and the mysterious “gunshots” from the area police thought Hoss fled to—enabled Hoss to make it out of the immediate area unfollowed in the first critical minutes.

  Hoss continued pell-mell along Sixth which, layed in Belgian block, was quite bumpy, particularly if taken at high speed, and made more difficult by hills and turns. Hoss could hear the sirens of cop car
s traveling in the opposite direction on Allegheny River Boulevard. He had a minute on them but he knew the cops would be on his tail in no time. If he crashed he was done for, and he had to watch for any cops coming toward him, but his only chance was to go hell-for-leather. He didn’t know what had happened to the cop he’d shot, only that he had to get of out Oakmont.

  The noise atop Hunter Hill—bullets or firecrackers—faded away, leaving the police baffled, then angry at getting caught up in a wild goose chase. Still, only about twenty minutes had gone by since the shooting, so the police on Hunter Hill made radio calls explaining their situation, inquiring about new leads, and requesting direction for a fresh start.

  In command at Plum Street, Chief DeLellis was overwhelmed from the start, surrounded by lights and sirens and contending with growing bands of citizens and rubberneckers, a constant stream of radio calls, and police arriving in droves. “Reinforcements came in heavy from the Pittsburgh side,” DeLellis recalled, “and, once word spread to the departments on the other side of the river, their cars were comin’ in, too. After Pittsburgh police were present in force, their Inspector Mayer DeRoy took over command for the simple reason Pittsburgh had the only effective means of communication with all their people and a lot of the other departments. We [Verona] could only talk to Penn Hills by radio and Oakmont by walkie-talkie, when we finally got them distributed.”

  Now that he knew Hoss’s capture wasn’t imminent, Chief DeLellis had time to get better organized, give direction, distribute forces, and tend to all the other details that came up. Most important was to get roadblocks in place. This was no easy task, since early communication was limited or impossible and large numbers of converging police were terribly slowed by traffic.

  Many cops showed instant initiative, however. Red Orris of East Deer, who’d arrested Hoss on Easter for the rape of Kathy Defino, was at home when he learned of the shooting. “I didn’t wait for nobody to tell me nothin’. I grabbed my gunbelt, called for my boy, then we jumped in my car to pick up Chief Usiadek. We got there real quick and in a hurry. In fifteen minutes we had a roadblock set up on the north end of the New Kensington Bridge.”

  West Deer’s Radage and Simonetti drove to the scene and later took up sentry along the Route 8 corridor. Chief Wilbur Bliss of Indiana Township sent his officers but he, himself, “decided to stick around the township and watch things, see what might happen. With the wisdom of hindsight, maybe more of us should have done the same.”

  After the ambulance got under way to the hospital, after the Hunter Hill episode had come up dry, and after it became painfully evident that the culprit had disappeared, the chase-turned-hunt for the man who shot Joe Zanella began in earnest.

  Base: Where you at now, Mike?

  Verona: I’m in the car with Chief DeLellis. I want you to notify all Verona police to report to the station immediately.

  Base: Call them all out, right?

  Verona: That’s a 10–4, and can you have a Verona officer come down here [Plum St.] and get the car? There’s only one officer here.

  115: We’re requesting you bring some carbines up here around Ryan’s Lane.

  101: Okay, I got four carbines, two shotguns with me, and I’m on my way.

  105: We’re comin’ by the station. Do ya want us to pick up anything?

  Response: Yeah, pick up more rifles.

  501 to 506: We got the lower end of Posey Lane blocked off and we’re sending five or six pieces up there, too.

  16 to Sgt. Schrott: How many’s in the car? Do we know?

  Sgt. Schrott: Don’t know. We only got a report of one man.

  Officers from all over were calling, saying they’ll be right in. They were asked to go to the Verona Station. One of Joe Zanella’s sisters, Barbara Sizemore, received a call from another sister, saying she’d heard a policeman was shot and she worried it might be Sonny, calling Joe by family nickname. “At the time,” Barbara said,

  I was living in Penn Hills and we left the house immediately to go to Verona. It wasn’t far away but it took a great deal of time because it was rush hour and at that point police were coming to Verona from every direction. All we heard were sirens. It was nerve-racking. We just prayed it wasn’t him. He wasn’t supposed to be working this shift but someone called off and Sonny filled in. Dad got there and went with the ambulance. Maybe another cop brought him to the scene, because Dad didn’t have a car. For I don’t know how long after the shooting, you couldn’t even get phone lines. Everything was mayhem.

  Up to this point, hardly anyone had the description of Stanley Hoss. “We had no idea what he looked like,” said Lt. Milt Remmick, “no picture, nothing. Finally, the workhouse was called and they gave us info from their records.”

  Herm Trozzi put it on the air: “Okay, radio all cars. Here’s a description of the guy. He’s white, five foot nine, 179 pounds. Age 26. Has light brown hair and green eyes.”

  Radio to Chief: County Detectives want to know if you want dogs?

  Chief: That’s a 10–4.

  Radio: Oakmont wants to inform that the city dogs are on their way, also.

  Chief: I want that spare ambulance that pulled in behind me to come down here and stake out 9th Street.

  118: Come on up top of Verona Hill and go down with the men along Barger and 7th.

  Anon: Okay, Chief, I’m at 4th and North and were goin’ down over the hill here.

  101 to Control: You tell anyone who starts through this clump of woods, we got about 10 other men down here and we don’t want to shoot our own people, so if any men come down through, let us know.

  Base: 10–4. Hey, do we have any verification as to what type of weapon the shooter has?

  Chief: The only thing we have is it’s probably a pistol.

  Base: The city police helicopter is on the way.

  Plum Boro: The policeman … is he all right?

  Base: Don’t know. We hope … I’ll send out any news pronto.

  Herm Trozzi was as busy and concentrated as any juggler, fielding one call after another, offering assistance, receiving requests, and relaying directions. In addition to all the radio calls, his phone never quit ringing. The next time Trozzi picked up the receiver, he listened as a man identified himself by name adding, “I’m with county police. The morgue just called us.” Trozzi listened a few moments before hanging up. He hesitated over his broadcast, delaying a few more seconds his duty to say something so final. Not in possession of himself, his voice breaking, Trozzi flipped his transmit switch.

  Base: To all police officers on this call. Officer Zanella has expired. Joe’s dead.

  8

  When word came of Zanella’s death, his killer had long since sped over the breadth of Oakmont, until sliding to a stop at Virginia Avenue. Hoss turned left, traveled one block, and nearly ran smack into the Oakmont Police Station, now emptied out save for “Speed” Buttgereit manning the phones. A right turn brought Hoss to Hulton Road, and it was here that a decision had to be made.

  Hoss was most familiar with the towns and roads north of the Allegheny River; that’s where he lived and where he had grown up. North of the river, he knew the country lanes, the dirt roads, the location of garages or barns; he knew where to stash a car, where to run, and where to hide out. But to get there he’d have to turn left and cross the Hulton Bridge, only a quarter mile away, but getting over the bridge was too risky. It was rush hour, when a stream of slow-moving cars headed to the bridge every day; when the light at the bridge turned red, there could be as many as forty stationary automobiles waiting for the light to change. To get caught up in that traffic would surely be the end of his run. Nothing for it now but to turn right onto Hulton Road and hope for the best. Compared with the droves of commuters returning to Oakmont at rush hour, the traffic leaving Oakmont was sparse. On the broad road, Hoss was able to get up his speed.

  A few miles out of town Hoss veered east onto Route 909 toward New Kensington. He watched two police cars, lights flashing, pass him go
ing in the opposite direction. In his mirror he saw both cars slam on their brakes, one of them sliding on roadside gravel, kicking up a cloud of dust. Hoss realized the description of his car had already been broadcast: any cops coming in from Plum Boro or New Kensington knew what to look for. He’d known all along he’d have to ditch the yellow Chevy but now, spotted as he was, he’d have to get off this main road, for even if the cops didn’t catch up to him, they would be on their radios alerting everybody.

  Cresting a hill, Hoss was momentarily out of sight of the police behind him, no doubt turning around their vehicles to give chase. He looked for any kind of escape route, anywhere to get off the main road, and finally he saw what he wanted, the only slim chance he’d have. There was an old roadside fruit stand just off to the left. A sign read: Dom Defatta’s Gardens. The place appeared closed. Behind the fruit stand, though, dirt tracks could be seen indicating a farm lane. It was unpaved, but it was enough for Hoss. He drove onto the lane, which sloped down and was flanked by old-growth trees. The bucolic setting swallowed up the killer and his car.

  Up above, on Route 909, the two police cars were speeding ahead, the policemen thinking they would catch sight of the yellow car at any moment, at the top of the next hill or around the next bend. The fruit stand to their left was just a blur.

  101 to Base: Plum Boro has just chased a car up Route 909, it’s a yellow car. They don’t know what the story is but they did chase him.

  Perched atop a tower, Reed Kosmal, a lineman for Duquesne Light Company, always figured he had one of the best jobs in the world. Much of his work was out of doors, “high in the air with the best of mother nature all around.” Eleven years in with the company, Kosmal was skilled, knew his way around dangerous wires, and regularly partnered with his friend and fellow linesman, Garland McCune. On this Friday afternoon, it was past quitting time but “once up on these tall towers,” Kosmal explained, “with all your gear and tools, you just can’t drop things without first finishing up the odds and ends or even setting up for the next day.”