Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been a long week, a long day. You’ve listened intently and understand the gravity of the matter before us. Via witnesses and expert testimony you already have what you need to know, so I shall be brief.” And Hickton was, closing in a mere fourteen minutes, compared with Zimmerman’s closing statement of one hour and forty minutes.

  Hickton glided through the spine-tingling steps to the homicide, then challenged the defense’s version of events.

  “Mr. Zimmerman had told you that Hoss’s clothes bore only specks of blood.” In a move that caused one female juror to recoil, Hickton held high Hoss’s trousers and said,

  I submit to you these pants were bathed in blood. You’ve been told by Delker, and surely he, too, has blood up to his elbows, that Captain Peterson was somehow unfair, but know that his last act was one of kindness, that of going into that basement to personally relieve Stanley Hoss of any anxiety he may have had over a relative’s hospital stay. And how many fellow officers called the captain one of the finest and fairest men they’d ever known?

  Finally, let me speak of intent. Could it be imaginable that those men in that basement—their lair—armed, each to execute separate chores, could have sprung as one without contemplation, no maneuver, cunning, or prior scheme? To suggest such is undiluted bamboozle. No! This is a case of singular prison treachery. It is a case of premeditated murder!

  Hickton then gave his final plea to reason and justice. “Please, render a verdict of first-degree murder upon Stanley Hoss. I beg of you.”

  The following morning, of those waiting to enter the courtroom, many had stood in line ever since the jury went out, refusing to leave for fear of missing the verdict.

  After five hours and twenty-seven minutes of deliberation, the jury sent a message to Judge Lewis that they had reached a verdict. Everyone scrambled to their places in the crowded courtroom, and the court was brought to order.

  Judge Lewis: To the charge of murder in the first degree, how do you find?”

  Jury Foreman: “We find the defendant, Stanley Hoss, not guilty.”

  27

  The French have a good term for those who dwell in their bastilles: oublier, “to forget.”

  This was now the citizens’ wish in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who’d had a steady diet, forkful after insipid forkful, of Stanley Hoss. Though it would take longer for him to fully understand, Hoss now had to think his life was over. There were reasons.

  Pandemonium had broken out when the jury foreman proclaimed “not guilty,” and Judge Lewis had hammered away for order. When quiet returned, the foreman answered Lewis as to second degree: “Guilty.”

  In a befuddling decision, the jury concluded that Hoss had killed Peterson—but without a thought in his head about doing it. Further, a verdict of second-degree murder capped the penalty at ten to twenty years. Judge Lewis was furious and rebuked the jury for a collapse of common sense. If the Peterson family felt insulted by a sentence so incommensurate to the crime, Asaline, surrounded by newsmen, said only, “My husband gave his life so I could live in comfort, even though he lived in constant fear. I had to stay by his side even in death.”

  Hickton tried to put on a good face: “I don’t consider this a defeat.” But, of course, it was. Then, right there, Zimmerman declared he’d appeal, to try to further diminish the verdict to voluntary manslaughter or to get his client off altogether. Because of a law favoring the criminal, the public defender knew Hoss could receive only an equal or lesser punishment in any second trial—an open invitation to appeal away.

  As it stood, Hoss’s governing sentence remained that of Life for the murder of Officer Zanella. Even if that conviction was overturned on appeal or the sentence commuted by a liberal governor (Shapp was granting “Time Served” to many murderers after a mere ten or twelve years), Hoss still faced a consecutive sentence of ten to twenty years for rape. Formal sentencing for the Peterson conviction would come later but, given the judge’s frame of mind, Hoss could expect the max.

  Hoss’s only hope was to get out from under the life sentence, then to whittle away at the lesser sentences. This was not necessarily a forlorn hope. After all, Hoss had succeeded in having a death penalty overturned; he calculated that his multitude of crimes while on the run would not be prosecuted; and that he would never receive a day in prison for his kidnapping and murder of the Peugeots, unless maybe the bodies turned up—little worry for Hoss. He was confident he would win his appeal in the Defino rape case, and he was hopeful, since Zimmerman claimed his rights had been violated all over the place in the Peterson trial, that maybe he could beat that case on appeal.

  But over time, the flame of hope dimmed and began to flicker. First, Hoss learned his conviction for Zanella’s murder had been upheld. Then his rape appeal was denied. Finally, the points of contention raised by Zimmerman in his appeal of the Peterson case were, for once, given short shrift at the appellate level. Hoss should not have been surprised at his predicament; it is the way of criminals, to go sooner or later from ordinary freedom to life in a box. Maybe the psychiatrists were on the mark about Hoss, about his long-held sense of doom, even as a child … his belief in a personal, irresistible Armageddon. Hadn’t Hoss written to Diane days after his capture in Iowa, “I always knew I’d end up like this”? Hoss remained an object of interest in the psychiatric community, but it was far, far too late for other than the practical to prevail, the basics of crime and punishment.

  Over the years, various interpretations by the courts—or by misguided jurors, meddling politicians, or liberal legislatures—had resulted in a failure to fully bring down the hammer on Stanley Hoss and major criminals like him. Now, for Hoss at least, the prison system would bring that hammer down, punishing Hoss with his worst nightmare. He’d be locked in a five-by-seven cell. Forever. The official position did not term this state of affairs as punishment but as protection, for Hoss and for those around him. Hoss was exceedingly dangerous to others. He was also a target for retaliation, particularly by the black prison population. The “forever” part was unofficial but understood by the Keepers of the Violent—a simple rule: If you kill one of us—especially in such a barbaric manner—and we cannot kill you legally, we will see you a dead man with a beating heart, drifting into oblivion with scant human contact, kept company only by what thoughts you may have.

  Of course the enormity of such a punishment cannot be comprehended all at once.

  . . .

  A matter of weeks after the end of Hoss’s trial, it was Delker’s turn. His attorney, John Dean, claimed Delker was insane at the time of Peterson’s murder. A week before the trial’s start, Dean argued that Delker’s confession in the Hoss trial should be inadmissible in his own, since his client had been under the influence of drugs and psychological coercion. He further asked Judge Lewis to disqualify himself. Lewis would have none of it. Again, District Attorney Hickton would personally lead the prosecution.

  In a turnabout from his attempt to have his client’s confession suppressed, Dean now highlighted the confession by having Delker read on the witness stand his statement that he alone had committed the atrocity on Peterson. Dean told the jury, “We want to get the whole story in front of you.” This was a canard, of course: as part of his insanity defense, Dean could only pray the jury would think Delker nuts for making such a confession in the first place.

  “I’ll tell the man to tell the nigger that someone put something in the socket.” This was the text of a note found in Delker’s cell and dated two weeks before the murder. Hickton explained that the note had not been introduced at the Hoss trial as it was found among Delker’s belongings, and was thought at the time inadmissible against Hoss. But to this jury, the note showed premeditation.

  Stung by the Hoss verdict, Hickton was prepared but still fretted. As a further spur, he knew that if he failed to get a conviction in this case, Delker could be out of prison in a mere few years. This predicament was the result of one of th
e most baffling verdicts Hickton could remember. It was recalled that in the previous autumn, Delker had stabbed to death black inmate Melvin “Whiskey” Sermons while Sermons was sitting handcuffed in a room awaiting a prison hearing. In an April trial, the jury had decided Delker was Not Guilty by Reason of Self-Defense. Self-defense? While the victim was handcuffed? It was verdicts such as this—not to mention the recent Hoss fiasco—that forced Hickton to sympathize with oft-heard public complaints of a lack of faith in the courts. With this in mind, Hickton was careful and thorough throughout, taking five days before the prosecution rested.

  John Dean had the hard sell of convincing a jury that on that fateful day in December 1973, Delker “could not have known what he was doing.” This was essentially Dean’s whole thrust and he doggedly banged away at it. Unfortunately for his strategy, the jury too often heard Delker say, “I can’t remember,” or other statements that sounded like he was fudging his testimony. This wasn’t helped when Hickton suggested Delker’s blackouts occurred at convenient moments.

  Jurors and spectators gawked when Stanley Hoss was led through the court room doors. As Delker had for him, Hoss had agreed to testify for his comrade-in-crime. Plus, it got him out of his cell for a while.

  “After Danny’s brother was killed,” said Hoss, “he went through a big emotional change. He went into a withdrawal, and even stopped talking to me, and he was pissed over the prison not allowing him to attend his brother’s funeral and not sending him to a mental institution.” After Hoss stated, “I never saw any problem arise between Danny and Peterson,” Dean ended his questioning without asking Hoss about the slaying itself, a legal maneuver that prevented Hickton from grilling Hoss about the murder either.

  The following morning, Dean wrapped it up. Back on the stand, Delker insisted that on the day of the attack he “didn’t know right from wrong … but I do now.” He said he couldn’t recall hitting Peterson with a chair, adding, “but I must have.” On cross-examination, Hickton asked Delker how he was able to remember that Hoss and Butler had no part in the murder while drawing a blank about hitting Peterson with a chair.

  Dean’s final witness was psychiatrist Sherman Pochapin. It was Pochapin who had testified for the defense in the 1970 Zanella murder trial of Hoss. Now Pochapin took the stand to say Delker’s attack on Peterson was a “Niagra Falls of rage breaking forth from years of resentment toward his father.” Pochapin theorized Delker had no real problem with Captain Peterson but instead had transferred his anger to the victim: “Delker’s own father was often in jail and neglected his son as a boy, failing, for instance, to take him to Little League baseball games.” Pochapin postulated that Delker’s hostility “exploded with the murder of the captain.”

  In his closing argument, Dean implored the jurors to understand that the unprovoked killing was the end product of offspring rage, and that Peterson’s reputation as a praiseworthy man was viewed by Delker as a “reproach to his own father.” After more minutes of what Hickton later termed “psychobabble,” Dean asked the jury to hold his client guiltless, “as no sane man could commit what Danny Delker did.”

  Hickton rued the timing of Peterson’s murder, which had occurred when the death penalty was off the books in Pennsylvania. Although death had since been reinstated as a penalty for a narrow range of crimes, thanks in part to the oft-referenced Stanley Hoss escape from that penalty, but, as it stood then, Delker’s top punishment was limited to a life sentence. Hickton wanted no less.

  Speaking substantially longer than Dean, the district attorney again laid bare the harrowing details of Peterson’s death; “ … pounded the victim’s head to a pulp as they struck him with chairs, like woodchoppers,” was a representative phrase. It was a distasteful task, particularly with Asaline present, but Hickton felt nothing could be left to chance. Hickton also dismissed the testimony of the psychiatrist Pochapin, noting that he was the only one of the eight psychiatrists who’d seen Delker “who would come in here with that story.”

  Hickton paced slowly back and forth while talking, but now, standing still in front of the jury, he repeated the words used by Assistant District Attorney Fagan against Hoss in 1970: “The time has come for society to protect ourselves.”

  The jury returned four hours later. “Guilty of first-degree murder,” the foreman said. It was as if Kozak was whispering in Delker’s ear, “We’re going to weld your door shut. Forever.”

  For his foolish quest to establish a reputation like those of Hoss and Delker, George Butler likewise earned a first-degree murder conviction. As he was led away, he screamed over and over again, “Kangaroo Court!”

  . . .

  Several months later, key witness Bob McGrogan sat in Judge Lewis’s courtroom. After a twenty-five-minute nonjury trial, Lewis acquitted Mc-Grogan in Peterson’s murder. However, he was compelled to add, “You are a fortunate man today, yet with your long criminal record you missed an opportunity to redeem yourself by failing to intervene in saving that good man’s life.”

  To split up the killers, Hoss was shipped to Graterford, a maximum-security prison near Philadelphia. This was a severe blow. It was so far away from home, who would visit him now?

  . . .

  It was September 1974.

  Diane,

  Why don’t you write? Surely you can find the time. Do I have to send my friends to find out how the kids are? The kids [should] hear the whole story about their dad, not just the shit they hear from you. You got One Week!!

  It was a month before Diane wrote back with her own complaints of feeling threatened all the time. Always one to bristle when his women resisted his wishes, Stanley escalated the debate.

  Go ahead and call the warden. You don’t think I send these letters through the mail room do you? The war between us has just started up. Whatever happens or whoever gets hurt is all on you because I’ve tried the right way. I think the best thing for you to do is kill yourself and that little toilet case to save me the trouble. Once more, I only want to see my kids and there won’t be any trouble. Think about it!

  On the last day of September, an article appeared in the Pittsburgh Press entitled “The Peugeots and Hoss.”

  Five years ago next week Stanley Hoss was captured in Waterloo, Iowa, ending a nationwide manhunt. He still makes headlines, notorious as they may be, and every time his name is discussed somebody wants to know what happened to the ‘mother and baby.’ Now, five years later, authorities are willing to talk of their fate.

  An FBI spokesman said after Hoss killed Mrs. Peugeot near Johns-town, and placed her in the trunk of the auto, he drove to Ravenna, Ohio, where he put the body in a dump. “We had no reason to doubt him,” said the agent, “because he gave an exact description of the area including a wooden fence and a water tower in the vicinity. Hoss was taken to the dump in an effort to help us find the woman.”

  The FBI even paid a contractor $10,000 to remove debris and assist in scouring the dump. The dump’s fires burned continuously which may have destroyed remains. In addition, refuse was taken to a nearby highway project to be used for landfill during construction. The agent said, “In all probability the remains are beneath a highway because we went through that dump with a fine-tooth comb.”

  Hoss continued into the Midwest, taking good care of Lori Mae until he killed the little girl by suffocation and gunshot. Hoss said this occurred in a state park in Kansas where he placed the body beneath a soda pop case and covered it with debris. Hoss said specifically the incident was carried out near a stream, “But this state park is so big,” said the agent, “with so many streams we were unable to locate Lori. It’s sad but I don’t think we will learn any more than we know now.”

  The article seemed to impart the final word in the mystery of the Peugeots—except that refuse is never used as landfill by any highway department. Said those in the know, “Mrs. Peugeot is not beneath any Ohio road.” Further, the FBI remained unaware of the highly believable version told by Hoss to inmate Whitman Shute t
hat Lori Mae was buried in a cemetery near the Kansas-Missouri border, all contained in a forgotten report by Detective Joe Start.

  L’oblie. “To forget.”

  Letters were drying up. So were visits. There’d still be an occasional misguided woman who would read about Hoss, get “fascinated with me,” and make contact, but family and friends were becoming more like strangers. Yet if there was one loving constant, one beam of light in Stanley’s dark world, it was his sister Betty. Calling him by nickname, her October letter left him weak, his mind numb.

  My dearest Sonny,

  I have struggled with whether to tell you this, but we have shared everything since we were kids. For some time I have had leukemia. Transfusions can no longer help me. The doctors say I don’t have much time. I am telling only you this. Please tell no one. I will write to you as much as I can. Please don’t worry about me.

  All my love,

  Betty

  . . .

  On a date chosen to commemorate those killed in the line of duty, Asaline and other Peterson relatives attended the memorial—but they never came to the penitentiary again. Maybe it could be chalked up to too many bad feelings, not just about Peterson’s murder but about the penitentiary as well. Peterson’s relatives did not know who to trust, who to believe. It was understood that Hoss and his crew pulled the trigger, as it were, but did they load the gun? Asaline remained appreciative of the efforts to bring the killers to justice but others in the black community weren’t so sure. Didn’t Delker say he was put up to it by prison officials? And what of the unsuitable Hoss verdict and the puny sentence? Was the fix in? Conspiracy hearings had gone on for a time, but nothing came of them. “That was because,” said veteran Gus Mastros, “there was nothing to come of it. The idea of collusion was an absurdity and we at Western remained hurt and dismayed over this kind of thinking.”