Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  No contact with Diane was apparently too much for Stanley. After five weeks, he wrote again. “Did you see on TV about your famous husband? One day about my trial in Maryland and the next day about a retrial here. How about Rich Zurka? Now he knows what it is like to be in jail.”

  For Hoss’s partner in rape to draw a jail term, Kathy Defino had gathered her remaining strength to go to court again, and again Judge Strauss was on the bench. Zurka was tried as an accessory before and after the rape. It came out that the date of the rape was also Zurka’s birthday and that Hoss had joked that Kathy was his present. Kathy said on the stand that while Hoss assaulted her, Zurka hid the auto. When Zurka returned he’d made advances but had refrained from assaulting her after she told him she was sick. Zurka was convicted and in April was sentenced to a term of 11½ to 23 months. Kathy hoped her ordeal was now over.

  On the exact day Zurka learned his fate, Hoss’s defense counsel in Maryland, not to be outdone by the Pittsburgh attorneys’ fervor to save Stanley from perceived injustices, fought Judge Getty’s refusal to dismiss all charges in the Peugeot case. Their motion to the Court of Special Appeals necessitated that Hoss’s May trial date be cancelled pending outcome of the appeal.

  Hoss’s prison day was busy, but he still carved out time to hate. Referring to a man Hoss felt had slighted him in some way, he wrote Diane, “I’ll tell you, Diane, if I ever get out again the first thing I’m going to do is kill that punk and all his kids. I dream about how they look when I shoot them in the face.”

  Aside from concerns about Stanley on the psych front—visits with a psychiatrist were routine for inmates in long-term isolation—prison authorities were making other efforts on his behalf. The dental department made him a three-tooth upper plate. Further, since Stanley had always felt his ears were too large, by midsummer he found himself in the prison hospital, getting his ears reduced in size at taxpayer expense. “You should see me now,” he wrote Diane. “My face and head is all wrapped up like a mummy. I will say they bring in some of the best plastic surgeons there is in Pittsburgh.” He was thrilled with the results once the bandages were removed, writing to Diane, “Everything turned out beautiful. I’m going to get my whole face done.”

  If Diane was not visiting him, Jodine was, at least sporadically. Stanley had always told Diane that he’d broken it off with Jodine, saying some callous things along the way: “The only reason I stuck with Jodine is because of the boys. I owe her nothing.” Stanley was lying, of course. He wrote Jodine and she wrote him. That’s how it would be for a while.

  Hoss’s relations with his family were becoming more strained, however. Although Hoss’s mother may have missed her son terribly, regular visits by the Hoss parents began to wane, maybe because of the mother’s delicate health or because of the father’s “six pack a night.” In any case, it is a tall order to routinely visit a prison, given time and expense constraints alone. Stanley understood this not at all. If he wanted visits, why shouldn’t his family spend their days providing them? Meanwhile, Hoss worked his job, hit the weights, and hung out with a white clique.

  Like most other white prisoners, Hoss was overwhelmed, but personally unintimidated, by the large black prison population. Nevertheless, testing of the new inmate to establish his place in the inmate hierarchy was inevitable. One day in August, Hoss was confronted by a well-muscled black ruffian with an established rep, and his sidekicks. The encounter was probably intended as a typical prison yard gambit, usually not going beyond the taunt for status and bragging rights, but the prize was bigger this time because of the target, the biggest name in the Big House.

  Sitting on a crate outside the tag shop, Hoss saw them coming: five blacks with an insolent approach. The leader, whose street name was JoJo, got close enough that his shadow touched Hoss, and stood there shirtless, hair in a large “afro,” with his rangy arms folded in front—an insulting stance, as if Hoss could be cowed by his mere presence. Making to talk to his friends, who spread out behind him, JoJo drawled, “I guess they’re lettin’ baby-killers out in the yard these days.”

  Hoss raised himself from the crate with exaggerated slowness, which gave JoJo his first pinprick of nervousness. Facing the taller man with a few feet still between them, Hoss stared with his cold green eyes. “You talkin’ to me, Sambo?”

  JoJo, rep on the line, had just been insulted in front of his friends. Hoss’s posture and eyes showed no fear. Locked in a stare-down, JoJo blinked.

  A fist, with all the barbell lifts and pushups behind it, crashed into JoJo’s cheekbone. He went down in the same square foot he’d been standing in. Then Hoss kicked him in the face. JoJo’s friends stood still but a glance their way was a challenge: Anyone else? Leaving their leader unconscious and bleeding, they walked away.

  Word spread. The whites thought Hoss, baby killer or no, had done an excellent job; the blacks took the incident as a warning: beware of Stanley Hoss. JoJo could not humiliate himself further by snitching. At the prison hospital, getting stitched up, he told officers he’d fallen on a curb. Called to the major’s office, Hoss said he didn’t know what anyone was talking about. Nothing was done. JoJo was being his usual piece of shit … but Hoss bore watching.

  This incident was but one of many. Even when Hoss was isolated on death row, the tension in the prison had increased. Blacks were cautioned, “Unless that guy talks to you, it’s best to leave him alone.” Even on the row, locked in his cell essentially round the clock, Hoss on three occasions received misconducts for disobeying orders, intimidation, and threats. The little he had—a newspaper, mail privileges—was taken in punishment for a set period of time. On death row the smallest things are important, yet Hoss would risk all by acting out. It was this type of man who was a “custody problem,” one who’d accept any privation to get his point across. Hoss simply didn’t care.

  On September 19, exactly two years after Hoss’s bullet pierced Officer Zanella’s heart, Hoss picked his spot carefully and “bloodied another nigger.” Everyone knew but no one was talking.

  . . .

  The UPI headline was a thunderclap: “Court Spares Hoss’s Life.” The murder of a police officer, with no question as to who did it … how could this be?

  All along, Snyder and Baxter had harped about infringements of their client’s right to a fair trial. In a “spaghetti on the wall” approach, they hurled all sorts of objections at the courts to see what would stick. Eventually their motions worked their way as high as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which studied the litany of complaints one by one. The seven-man court viewed the facts and circumstances in “a light most favorable to the commonwealth”—until the very end, that is. The court dismissed defense objections about pretrial publicity, voir dire, and Miranda concerns. A defense challenge that Hoss’s statement, “If I could have gotten into my car, there would have been some dead Waterloo cops,” was irrelevant also failed to convince the court, which ruled that it revealed Hoss’s belligerent frame of mind when arrested and might have existed when Officer Zanella had tried to apprehend him and died in the attempt. To anyone reading the court arguments, it looked as though the defense was “reaching” as the state’s supreme court rejected each motion in turn.

  Yet the heart of the defense’s appeal concerned the sentencing phase of the trial, when the prosecution had put on the stand six witnesses testifying about Hoss’s alleged abduction of the Peugeots. The defense cried foul, and it was here the supreme court paid the most attention. Still, it noted again that under the Split Verdict Act, the jury had the right to hear of Hoss’s prior convictions, confessions, or admissions to aid them in fixing penalty. For the prosecution, then, so far so good.

  Then the supreme court qualified its view. Not all such evidence could be presented, only the most reliable. “The testimony of Agent Dunn of the FBI,” it ruled,

  mentioned the federal kidnapping indictments against the appellant, Stanley Hoss. Appellant contends this evidence is inadmissible. The jury heard test
imony of six witnesses which related aspects of the alleged kidnapping, and one witness who informed of pending federal indictments. The admission of this evidence violated our rule.

  In a capital case where a man’s life is at stake, it is imperative that the death penalty be imposed only on the most reliable evidence. Prior convictions of record, and constitutionally valid admissions and confessions meet this standard of reliability; piecemeal testimony about other crimes for which the appellant has not yet been tried or convicted can never satisfy this standard.

  Accordingly, the conviction of murder in the first degree is affirmed, but sentence of death is vacated.

  The accused of this country are due fair trials but not necessarily perfect ones. Agent Dunn’s testimony regarding pending indictments for kidnapping was a natural outgrowth of Hoss’s admissions and confessions of those very kidnappings, which was perfectly allowable testimony. But the Supreme Court fixed on Dunn’s dozen-word sentence—“Mr. Hoss faces two kidnapping indictments, one in Pennsylvania, one in Maryland”—as judicial error, an error grave enough to overturn Hoss’s death sentence.

  It was over. The death sentence was converted to life in prison for the murder of Officer Joe Zanella, and the dumbfounded public was treated to interviews with tweed-coated legal scholars arguing that unless legal principles protect us all, we are all in peril.

  Wrote Hoss, “Diane, I live another day.”

  21

  Though Hoss had evaded the death penalty, his smile was short-lived. Six days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling, the penitentiary took action. Hoss and family called it pure retaliation. Prison officials called it prudent management.Wrote Hoss to Diane,

  I’m locked up again in solitary. I was sitting in my cell one night and the next thing I knew there were a lot of guards in front of my cell telling me to come out. They put chains on me and put me in this dungeon. They just tell me it’s a security reason.

  Hoss’s removal from general population was not without justification. As usual, Hoss was at minimum a source of discord, and was suspected of more. When previously on death row, Hoss had adorned his cell wall with graffiti done in penciled block letters about a foot square, with roses at each corner. It read: “Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil—Because I’m the badest mother fucker in the Valley.” That was how Hoss saw himself. That was his identity.

  When Hoss entered the general prison population, he set out to ensure that was how others would see him, too. No one was openly ratting out Hoss, but a prison yard abounds with snitches, some credible, some not. These confidential sources of information are assigned numbers in secret files—CSI 489, CSI 612—their identities known only by a select handful in the security department. In this way, enough information made its way back to prison authorities to justify removing Hoss from general circulation, at least for a while. The snitches exposed his assaults, but security regarded them as small potatoes compared with the information that Hoss’s arrogance and bullying was seriously riling the majority black inmate population. Black inmates resented Hoss throwing his weight around, in their view with impunity, and took it as another example of the white administration’s favoritism to a white inmate.

  . . .

  Just a month after the news hit the papers that Hoss’s Pennsylvania death sentence had been overturned, public ire was tempered by another ruling in Maryland. Hoss’s defense team had argued that because Judge Getty had failed to rule on the prosecution’s request for a continuance within the 180-day period mandated under the Interstate Detainer Act, Hoss’s right to a speedy trial had been violated and all charges in the Peugeot kidnappings should be dropped. After hearing arguments, however, Maryland’s court of special appeals determined that the defense had offered no evidence that Hoss’s chances had been prejudiced by the delay. Accordingly, the court refused to dismiss the charges. A new trial date would be set for Hoss to finally answer for the Peugeots.

  In the days that followed, Hoss never mentioned the development in Maryland, but he railed to Diane about how he was being victimized.

  Unless you’ve experienced prison, you’ll never know what it’s like. The ones who run this place enjoy braking [sic] a man and they use every method they can. And if they brake [sic] apart two people in love they have the pleasure of knowing they’ve made another man’s life miserable. They have me caged like an animal and the only thing that keeps me going is you. Without your love, I am nothing! I have nothing! I cease to exist!

  I’m still in the dungeon and don’t know why. I may die in this cell but not before I raise some hell. You know me. I never give.

  The “dungeon” Hoss spoke of was an ordinary cell located in the Home Block, the same place Hoss had spent his time on death row, but this time his status was administrative segregation, for the safe and orderly running of the institution. By January 1972, Hoss had been in lockup for three months, with no end in sight. As with other long-term segregation cases, Hoss was eventually given a small job in the Home Block, so he got out of his cell for a little while each day. This also gave officials a chance to watch his conduct.

  One day, Hoss spied in the newspaper a photo of a miniskirted high school student in woodshop, standing by a lathe. The paper identified her as Mary Ann Symkiewicz and gave her address in Natrona, close to where Hoss had once lived. Hoss’s next action showed just how far removed he had become from his previous life as a ladies’ man; he wrote to the ninth-grader. The letter was outwardly polite, even complimentary. Hoss wrote that Mary Ann was cute and suggested they become pen pals—a common enough ploy among the incarcerated. He concluded the one-pager with the hope that she was not offended by his writing her and that she remembered him. Mary Ann showed the letter to her parents, who were furious that such contact could be made by a locked-up criminal, let alone the worst of them all. The prison superintendent was notified, and Hoss was read the riot act. Hoss smugly wondered aloud if he’d broken any laws. What was wrong with fighting prison’s loneliness by seeking a friend? Still, Hoss knew he’d lost this one. There were no more letters to the girl.

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, Hoss began to come around. Gone were the cold eye and the threats. He’d learned his lesson, he said, and was ready to go back into the general prison population. Weeks passed before the administration finally agreed. Forewarned of the consequences for any misstep, Hoss rejoined the other inmates after six and a half months of isolation. Within days, he had secured a job, reconnected with his prison buddies, and hit the weights with a passion. He also got a TV for his cell, a new offering at the pen. He wrote to Diane that the first programs he saw were her favorite soap operas, The Guiding Light and The Secret Storm.

  Stanley received a “Dear John” letter from Jodine. He wrote to Diane, “You don’t think I really loved her do you? I only stuck with her because of the boys.” But if he was saddened at all by Jodine’s departure, his mood brightened when his attorneys gave him their latest news.

  When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated Hoss’s death sentence for killing Officer Zanella, it was assumed the new sentence would be life in prison. This was standard procedure, but would take a rehearing of the penalty phase of the trial to make it formal. Now, however, Hoss learned that the rehearing would be postponed until the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on the constitutionality of capital punishment. That the U.S. Supreme Court was even considering taking the death sentence off the books nationwide boded well for Hoss and his upcoming trial in Maryland, where surely nothing but death would do. If Hoss had worried, he soon found he needn’t have, for even before the federal Supreme Court could act, Maryland’s highest court, the Maryland Court of Appeals, came to his rescue.

  It was ruling on only one issue: Had Maryland’s lower courts violated Hoss’s right to a speedy trial? It was true that Judge Jim Getty had failed to rule on Hoss’s request for such until 64 days beyond the 180-day period had elapsed. When Getty did rule, in March 1971, he refused the defense re
quest to dismiss the charges against Hoss while maintaining Hoss’s right to a speedy—but not, in this particular case, an “immediate”—trial. Noting that the prime purposes of the speedy trial rule are to guard against crippling delays affecting witnesses or other testimony and to dispose of pending charges in a timely way, so a defendant’s rehabilitation is not hindered, Getty concluded that they could hardly apply to Hoss, since the death sentence he was then under in Pennsylvania made rehabilitation moot. Getty added, “The delay, if any, has not resulted in oppressive incarceration, has not caused Mr. Hoss undue anxiety, nor impaired his ability to defend himself.” With this justification, Getty had ruled that the State of Maryland must arrange a trial on the matters of kidnapping and abduction “within a reasonable period of time.”

  When Hoss’s defense team appealed this ruling to the next level, the court of special appeals, speaking through Chief Judge Murphy, agreed with Getty’s assessment but not before recognizing that Getty’s ruling had indeed been made after the 180-day speedy trial period. Ticklish, too, was the fact that Maryland had initially lodged its charges against Hoss when he was serving ten to twenty years for rape. This made his sentence a “term of imprisonment,” governed by rehabilitative concerns. Still, Judge Murphy concluded that the later imposition of the Pennsylvania death sentence added a new dimension to the circumstances surrounding Hoss’s demand for a speedy trial, importantly adding that the state’s petition, which Getty ruled on, did show good cause. Noting that the actual postponement of the Hoss trial previously set for January 11, 1971, was tantamount to Getty’s timely granting of the state’s motion for a continuance, the court of special appeals upheld Getty’s ruling, once again mandating trial for the Peugeots’ disappearance.

  At Hoss’s desire, Robb and Fatkin appealed yet again, sending the issue to Maryland’s highest arbiter, the court of appeals. By June 14, 1972, it was ready with its decision. Early in its eleven-page ruling, the high court, through Judge William J. McWilliams, ripped into both Getty and Murphy.