Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio

by Jane Ann Turzillo

  Martin was asked to come to meet with police near the Passavant Hospital in Pittsburgh. He complied because he thought they wanted to talk to him about some stolen jewelry. Instead, he was there to face Cleveland detective James Hogan and Cuyahoga County detective John Toner and to answer questions about Potter’s murder.

  Although some of the witnesses had said the man they saw was a small, dark man, Martin was tall. He also had a space between his front teeth, which none of the witnesses mentioned.

  Martin insisted he did not know Potter. He denied renting the apartment where Potter was murdered and said he did not even know where it was.

  While in police custody, he tried to hand his keys to a friend. Police grabbed the keys, and Cleveland detective Wolf later tried them in the Parkwood apartment’s lock, but none fit. Investigators found Martin’s car, a dark blue Nash, which was believed to have been sitting outside the apartment where Potter was murdered. They went over it with a fine-toothed comb and found nothing.

  They searched his and his parents’ homes and a building where police thought Martin and his racketeer friends met. They came up empty-handed for evidence of Potter’s murder but found freshly printed whiskey labels.

  “Pittsburgh Hymie” was not about to go to Cleveland quietly. This was a death penalty case and he knew it, so he hired attorney Samuel S. Rosenberg to fight extradition and file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. It charged that Martin had been illegally arrested and was illegally held.

  Cleveland police were getting tired of the legal delays. They were afraid if they waited any longer, they could lose Martin in more legal maneuvers. Wolf and Hogan decided to act. They snatched Martin, shoved him into a waiting car and drove nonstop to the Cleveland Justice Center.

  This angered Pittsburgh judge Joseph Stadtfeld, who had yet to sign the journal entry for the habeas corpus. He called it a “kidnapping of the prisoner as the most indecent haste indicative of extreme disrespect for this court.” He said he would not sign the paperwork until the Cleveland officers appeared before him. He ordered the state police to stop the detectives on the road, but the Cleveland detectives had gotten away. The judge never signed the journal entry.

  Miller and Wolf were interested in talking to Martin’s girlfriend, Mary Outland Woodfield, also known as “Akron Mary.” They figured she was the blond woman seen in the kitchen window of the “death apartment.” But she went on the lam.

  Left to right: Cleveland police detectives Joseph Koelliken, Bernard Wolf and James Hogan with a hatless Pittsburgh Hymie Martin. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  Miller said he would guarantee Mary’s safety and treat her courteously if she would come out of hiding and tell what she knew about the murder. Police put on a two-state dragnet looking for her—to no avail. She was so well hidden that the authorities began to think someone had “taken her for a ride.”

  Miller subpoenaed thirty-one witnesses to testify in front of the grand jury. They included detectives, patrolman, family members, members of city hall, tenants of Parkwood Apartments, known friends and past enemies. The tenants identified Martin as the man who rented the death apartment. The supposed weapon was introduced through the man who found it in the street. One particularly interesting testimony was given by common pleas court judge George B. Harris, who told jurors that Potter had been in his office shortly before his death and threatened to take others to the penitentiary with him if he was convicted of perjury.

  Miller secured an indictment against Martin, but he had yet to find a clear motive. Cody talked with Beatrice again but got no new information. She was at a loss for any motive. According to the Plain Dealer, Cody said, “I am convinced that the deal that led to Potter’s murder was one that he kept secret from his family.”

  Pittsburgh Hymie Martin playing cards in his jail cell. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  After a month of searching, and just as Martin was about to go on trial, police found Akron Mary in a Pittsburgh apartment under the care of two of Hymie’s friends. Mary was not blond; she had dark hair. They brought her to Cleveland and held her as a material witness in a hospital cell in the Central Police Station.

  When questioned, she came up with different stories. She said, “My Hymie wouldn’t hurt a fly” and claimed that he never owned a gun. After speaking with her attorney, she gave her story.

  The trial commenced on March 24 with seven men and five women in the jury box. Rosenberg and William E. Minshall defended Martin.

  The prosecution’s star witness was Betty Gray. On the stand, she told of seeing Hymie from Pittsburgh in the hallway of the apartment complex. On at least one occasion, he had locked himself out and she helped him gain entrance.

  Mary was called to the stand by the defense. Stylishly dressed in a black velvet dress, black coat and hat, she took an oath to tell the truth and nervously related how in the beginning of February, Martin had been in Cleveland when he sent her money to come by train to meet him. She arrived on February 2, and after registering at the Auditorium Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. H. Chambers (Mary’s maiden name), she and Martin went to dinner with his friends. The next day, February 3, Mary and the friend’s wife went shopping while Martin did “business.” The two lovers met up at four o’clock that afternoon at the Hotel Winton and drove to Akron, where they registered at the Anthony Wayne Hotel. Miller introduced a hotel receipt that showed they checked in much later.

  On April 3, the jury came back with a verdict. They recommended mercy. Five guards brought Martin into court to hear his fate.

  Martin had remained poker-faced throughout the proceedings, but when the jury brought in a guilty plea, the veneer cracked and his face twisted into a grimace. Back in his cell, he admitted that he was glad it was over. He asked Sheriff John Siltzmann if a rabbi would come in for holiday services.

  Miller was high on victory. “This conviction only marks the beginning of the investigation of the murder,” he told the Plain Dealer. He was certain Martin had an accomplice. He pointed to evidence that in the days leading up to the murder, Martin had been associated with a “shadowy figure” named Louis Klein—aliases Louis Reddy, Charles Marks and Harry Collins—at the Hotel Winton.

  Police uncovered the man’s real name to be Louis Rothkopf, but they did not begin looking for him until after Martin’s conviction. By that time, Rothkopf had disappeared, and police thought he might even be dead.

  In a February 1932 affidavit, Betty Gray repudiated her testimony that she had seen Martin in the apartment building. The judge in the case refused to take her new statement seriously and called her a perjurer. Then she disappeared.

  Martin’s attorneys, Minshall, Elmer E. McNulty and Harold Mosier, carried his case to the Lima Court of Appeals, which granted a new trial. The State Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

  Miller was now Cleveland’s mayor, so Frank T. Cullitan prosecuted Martin this time. The state had no new evidence, and its hands were tied when the appellate court held that during the second trial, the state was not allowed to introduce Potter’s land deals as an explanation for his murder. The defense successfully showed that prosecution witnesses, especially Laub, had been paid for their testimony. Detective Cody defended cash changing hands from authorities to some witnesses as a means to keep them in town. He pointed to the fact that Betty Gray had skipped.

  Ray T. Miller prosecuted all the land scandal figures, as well as Pittsburgh Hymie Martin. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.

  It took the jury exactly one hour and ten minutes to acquit Martin this time. He smiled and stuffed a stick of gum in his mouth.

  In the end, so many questions remained. No one was ever held accountable for Rarin’ Bill Potter’s murder.

  But eighty years later, a member of Akron Mary’s family related that Mary always knew “her Hymie” was innocent.

  6

  GUNNED DOWN IN COLD BLOOD

  Patrolman Harry C. Beasley holstered
his Colt .45 revolver and strapped on his cross-draw gun belt for the last time on Tuesday, June 30, 1931. It was shortly after 5:00 p.m. when he walked out of the police station on West Main Street in Newark, Ohio, to begin his shift that should have lasted until 1:00 a.m.

  The night started out like any other on his regular downtown beat. The air was sweltering, but other than that, nothing seemed out of place around the south side of Courthouse Square. Everything was quiet until right around 9:15 p.m.

  Beasley turned off South Third Street and headed toward the Rutledge alley running east and west behind the 25–27 South Park Place stores that faced the courthouse. It is possible that he saw the glow of lights where there should have been darkness coming from a narrow alley by the Miller warehouse behind the Newark Bargain Shoe Store and Cornell’s retail store.

  As Beasley rounded the corner, he saw a car facing west, engine running. The headlights blinded him and made him a perfect target. Two shots punched through the thick night air. One bullet pierced Beasley’s chest. The other hit him in the ankle. As he went down, he saw two dark figures hauling a safe out of the back door of the shoe store. He ripped his gun from its holster and returned fire in the direction of the muzzle flashes. The thugs dropped the safe, scrambled into their car and made their getaway, turning onto Third Street. There was no way to tell whether Beasley, an expert marksman, hit either of the gunmen.

  Patrolman Harry C. Beasley was shot down when he interrupted thieves stealing a safe. Courtesy of the Newark Division of Police. Sergeant Al Shaffer, photographer.

  According to the Newark Advocate, a few people were still outside, sitting on the park benches at the Courthouse Square. When they first heard the loud pop pop sound, they thought it was backfire from a car or firecrackers set off before July 4. Evidently, some people saw the car but failed to get a make or model.

  Someone ran to the police station for help. Within a short period of time, both on-duty and off-duty police swarmed the scene. Beasley was taken to Newark City Hospital in the Criss ambulance.

  Drs. Carl J. Evans, L.A. Mitchell and Victor Turner took numerous X-rays to determine the path of the bullet that entered the right side of Beasley’s chest. The X-rays showed the slug had passed through his lung, splintered the twelfth vertebrae and finally lodged against his spine, producing paralysis from the waist down. The doctors did not want to take the chance of operating to remove it.

  “I was trying the rear store doors when I saw the two men emerge from the shoe store with the safe. When they saw me, one fired two shots,” the forty-year-old Beasley told a hospital attaché, who relayed his statement to the Columbus Dispatch.

  “I fell to the ground and was unable to rise, but I fired five shots at them as they fled down the alley,” he said. He was not able to give a description of the shooters.

  Officer John M. Jones said Beasley and the thieves were approximately thirty feet apart when the gun battle started. He said one of the burglars shot first. He was of the opinion that Beasley recognized the bandits. He told the papers that Beasley did not talk much because he thought he was going to recover and “go get the men himself.”

  Harry Beasley served as a “Bluejacket” aboard the USS Florida during the occupation of Veracruz in 1914. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Beasley was no stranger to peril when he joined the Newark Police Department on March 23, 1926. As 1 of the 285 armed navy seamen known as “Bluejackets” from the USS Florida, he had distinguished himself during a firefight when he took part in the United States occupation of Veracruz on April 21, 1914.

  Led by Ensign George M. Lowry, Beasley’s company went ashore on a mission to capture the customhouse, where weaponry was stored. Shortly after landing, the company was pinned down by enemy fire. Lowry did not want to risk his landing party, so he asked for a few men to volunteer to advance to the customhouse through a narrow side alley.

  Beasley volunteered, along with four of his shipmates: coxswain J.F. Schumaker; boatswain’s mate, second class, Joseph G. Harner; Stark County (Louisville) resident seaman Lawrence C. Sinnett; and boatswain’s mate, second class, George Cregan. Lowry led the men into a confined alleyway where they were peppered with rifle fire from the custom building and blasted with machine gun fire from a nearby hotel.

  One bullet snapped off a button from Lowry’s hat. A second grazed one of his legs. Beasley received a slight wound, but Schumaker was shot through the head.

  Once the remaining four men had picked off the snipers, a medic made his way down the alley to aid and evacuate Schumaker, who later died. Lowry, Beasley, Harner, Sinnett and Cregan continued down the alley and scaled the wall around the customhouse. They crashed through a window of the building itself, causing the enemies inside to give up.

  Beasley was commended for his “conspicuous courage, coolness and skill, which were in accord with and added to the best tradition of the naval service.” In additional to being decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, he was given $100. Fifty-five other men were also given the award for their part in the capture of Veracruz.

  Shortly after Veracruz, Beasley left the navy, only to reenlist during World War I. He served until 1921. Besides the Medal of Honor, he was awarded the Good Conduct Medal, the World War I Victory Medal and the Navy Expedition Medal. After the war, he left the navy with the rank of chief petty officer. His medals are on display at the Newark Police Department.

  Whether it was skill, or luck, that delivered Beasley from harm in Veracruz and during World War I, neither skill nor luck was enough to protect him in that back alley on that sizzling hot night in Newark.

  Dr. Evans had stayed with the fallen officer for several hours. Around 11:00 a.m. on July 2, Beasley slipped into unconsciousness, and Evans determined he was not going to live. At 12:30 p.m., with his family around him, Officer Harry Beasley succumbed to his wounds. “Death dramatically ended the life of one of the most brilliant officers on the Newark police force,” Chief A.E. McMaster told the Advocate.

  Esther, Beasley’s wife, was inconsolable. They had married in 1917, just before he reenlisted for duty in World War I. They had no children. He had two sisters, Marguerite Baker and Bernace Stouch of Newark, and two brothers, Samuel of Canton and Arthur, a prison guard at Columbus. His parents, Charles and Alice of Massillon, were still living.

  A post-mortem revealed that the bullet that shattered the bones in his ankle was a .32 caliber. The piece of lead that lodged against his spine and led to his death was a .38 caliber. The different calibers confirmed two shooters.

  The shoe store’s safe was heavy, so it would have taken at least two men to drag it the sixty-five feet out of the store, then along seventy-two feet into the alley where police found it. Detectives wondered if a third person may have been waiting in the car as a lookout and driver. The safe was not opened and still contained $500.

  The thieves had used a crowbar to force open the door of the shoe store. They emptied the cash register of all its money, except for one penny.

  Beasley was found lying ten feet from the safe. His shots took an upward trajectory. Two slugs were lodged in the outer walls of the shoe store and Cornell’s. The best evidence came when Officer Harry Bragg lifted four fingerprints off the safe.

  Safecrackers were sometimes called yeggs at the time, and there had been a rash of yeggs crimes in central Ohio. Clues were few in the Newark case, but authorities hoped the offer of a $1,000 reward would help bring the culprits to justice.

  Newark police spread their investigation out over the whole state. They sought help from other jurisdictions and took the slimmest of tips and leads into consideration.

  Chillicothe authorities pulled over William Murphy and John Dean for a minor infringement and found two empty shells in their car, along with a gun. Officers thought it had recently been fired. The two men said they had nothing to do with Beasley’s shooting and claimed to have spent the night of June 30 in Columbus. They were released from police custody after Newark ch
ief of detectives Curt Berry and officers Charles Connor and Clyde Hupp could not match their fingerprints to those found on the safe.

  Columbus police nabbed two other men for attempting to steal a safe from the Columbus Nash Company. Jack Gates and Byrd Daniels were caught red-handed in the alley outside the motor company building. Gates, out on parole from another safe job, and his partner were unable to open the safe and take its $500, so they were putting it in their car. This sounded like a solid lead to Newark investigators, who went to interrogate the two prisoners, but it turned into another dead end.

  Police in Columbus shot a suspected car thief, thinking he might have information on the murder. Newark police questioned him at length, but they came away with nothing. Two other Columbus suspects were picked up and subjected to fierce questioning. Their alibis checked out, so they were cleared of the murder; however, during questioning, they admitted to a long string of burglaries.

  One evening, as three Newark officers patrolled downtown, they saw a car parked on the square with a hole in its body that looked like it came from a bullet. Knowing Beasley had shot five bullets and detectives had recovered only two, the officers wondered if this car might contain one of Beasley’s bullets. They rounded up the owner, who was a young Buckeye Lake man. After considerable questioning, they released him, confident he had nothing to do with Beasley’s murder.

  In Zanesville, prisoners cleaning up the canal bed behind the police department came across a small iron safe that had been broken open. It was identified as belonging to the Boston Store, a business not far from the Newark Bargain Shoes. Missing for five weeks, the now empty safe had once contained $350. Unfortunately, it provided no tangible new clues.