From Syracuse, New York, Charles Clark was employed as a design engineer for Reliance Electric & Engineering Company. He was the manager of the technical service division of the company’s federal marine section. He had worked for the firm for fifteen years. “He was as highly moral an individual as I’ve ever known,” said his boss.
Although the dead man never graduated from high school, he was on his way up. As the liaison between his company and the Navy Department, he traveled widely and was well known and highly regarded in his field.
Charles Clark was killed by a bullet through the kitchen window. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.
The oldest of ten children, Chuck was born in Ogdensburg, New York, to Carl E. and Ethel Clark. They later moved to Rochester, New York.
One week after the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, he joined the navy a semester short of high school graduation. He spent four years with the navy in Puerto Rico assigned to blimp service.
While on leave in Miami, Florida, he met a beautiful, dark-haired, sixteen-year-old model. Her name was Lois Mae Bravaldo. They fell in love and were married in June 1945. After Chuck’s discharge, he and Lois moved back to Rochester, where he went to work for Reliance. Six years later, he was transferred to Ohio.
Charles and Lois Clark’s home in Mentor. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.
At the time of Chuck’s death, the family had lived in Mentor in a white-frame house on Arcadia Drive for two years. The outside of their house was decorated with colored lights for the holidays. A Christmas tree stood in the dining room surrounded by presents for each of the four children, who ranged in ages from seven to thirteen. “It was an ideal family,” said a neighbor.
At least, it looked that way on the outside. The real story was quite different, however.
Lois Clark may have been teaching Sunday school alongside her husband at the Mentor Methodist Church, but she was having an affair with an attractive man named Floyd E. “Gene” Hargrove. The two began their trysts in the spring of 1959. Hargrove, who had been a buyer at Reliance in the past, had known Chuck for several years.
Lois revealed the affair to Sheriff William B. Evans during initial questioning. Evans had been called in to the investigation by Lake County prosecutor Edward R. Ostrander. The widow told Evans she and Hargrove had broken it off six weeks before the shooting. She insisted she never contemplated divorce, adding that she admired and respected Chuck.
“My husband and I got along well,” she told a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter.
Lois told the sheriff that she had received anonymous calls in the weeks leading up to her husband’s death. The man on the other end of the phone demanded she date him. When she refused, he threatened to tell her husband she was entertaining men at their home while he was at work.
It was true. Hargrove had been a frequent visitor to the Clark home. What she had to tell about her conduct was embarrassing, but she remained calm throughout the questioning, and Evans thought she was being truthful.
Why was she unfaithful, Prosecutor Ostrander asked. She said she was an orphan and, therefore, had no role model for love and marriage. She admitted to affairs with six other men in the past. But they were meaningless, and her husband knew nothing about them. She was in love with “Gene,” she said, and could not believe he was a murderer.
According to one of Clark’s sisters, Chuck had ordered Hargrove out of the house and told him not to come back when he was not home. Chuck was afraid the neighbors would gossip if they saw a man at their house when he was not there.
Investigators questioned three of Lois’s past lovers but concentrated on Hargrove, picking him up only hours after the shooting. He lived in an apartment in Painesville and was employed at Moss Point Cleaners in Willoughby as a delivery truck driver. He was affiliated with the Willo Gospel Chapel.
“I knew what I did was wrong,” Hargrove told a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter. He talked of “wrestling with the devil” and having a “big spiritual argument” with himself over the affair.
During his interview with the newspaper, he admitted that right after he and Lois broke it off, he thought about killing Clark and was ashamed of himself for that. While in jail, he said he dreamed of killing Clark. In one dream, Sheriff Evans helped do away with Clark with a bow and arrow.
On Christmas Eve, Hargrove claimed he had dinner with John Ozinga Jr. in Painesville, as he did on many evenings. Ozinga was his boss at the cleaners. He left Ozinga’s at 6:30 p.m. and went looking for another friend who worked with him. The cleaners was closed and his friend was not there, so Hargrove drove to the house of another friend, Robert Diday, stopping for gas along the way. Later, he drove to Euclid to see his ex-wife, Beverly, and to give his five children presents.
That was not good enough for Evans. He calculated a twenty-minute span that Hargrove did not account for.
Beverly Hargrove, an attractive thirty-two-year-old blonde, had nothing good to say about her ex-husband, but she confirmed that he had visited her and their children on Christmas Eve. She told a Plain Dealer reporter that she left him three years ago because he had put her in the hospital a couple of times. They were married for nine years and divorced in September 1958.
When first asked, Hargrove consented to a lie detector test. Before the polygraph was administered, he was subjected to ten hours of relentless questioning with no sleep. At one point, he asked for a cigarette and a chance to think. After a few minutes, he said he would confess, but first he wanted assurance that Lois’s children would not be taken away from her. Then, in a flat voice, he confessed to slaying Charles Clark. Evans, Hathy and Lake County assistant prosecutor John F. Clair were in the room to hear him.
Hargrove said he found a .22-caliber rifle in the basement of his apartment building. Sometime later, he bought a box of shells at a Willoughby hardware store, but he was not planning on shooting anyone at that point. Then, on the day of the murder, he suddenly decided what he was going to do.
Hargrove told police he drove to a street a block away from the Clarks’ house and parked his car. By that time, it was dark. He walked through backyards until he got to the Clarks’ house. He took up a position where he could see the kitchen window. He stood and waited for several minutes until Clark came into sight. He took aim and fired the rifle. Then he ran for his car.
From there, Hargrove claimed he drove to a deserted dead-end road in Mentor-on-the-Lake and threw the rifle into Lake Erie. Divers from Mentor-on-the-Lake and Cleveland police searched for the weapon, but after an entire day of hunting, they came up empty-handed. If the gun had been thrown into the water at that point, drivers would have found it within an hour, the captain of the dive team said. He added that the lake had been calm for several days, so it was unlikely the gun could have washed up on shore somewhere else or been taken out to deeper water.
While police sought to tie up loose ends with Hargrove’s confession, Ostrander was uncomfortable with it. There were three points that did not jibe with the evidence. First, Hargrove described standing on Clark’s patio forty feet from the house. The patio was only fifteen feet deep. Secondly, Clark’s daughter was standing in the window beside her father, but Hargrove said she was not there. Ostrander’s third point was that Hargrove was not sure whether the gun he used was an automatic or bolt-action. He finally claimed it was bolt-action. The prosecutor again asked Hargrove about a polygraph. This time the suspect declined, saying he had already confessed.
The bullet retrieved from Charles Clark’s head was in two pieces, flattened to the point that ballistics experts had only two markings to make a match, even if they found the gun. Police were further stumped when they went door to door looking for someone who had seen Hargrove’s car in the area on Christmas Eve. No one had.
Floyd Hargrove was in love with Lois Clark. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.
Police turned to the scheduled polygraph tests for three of Lois’s past lovers. The tests were administered by a Shaker
Heights expert, Sergeant Ralph Schaar. The men were all cleared. Finally, Hargrove agreed to a polygraph. It cleared him as well. The police had to let him go.
At that point, Hargrove recanted his confession, saying to the sheriff and the Plain Dealer that he loved Lois Clark deeply and had confessed “to spare her and her family any further investigation and suffering.” He told reporter Jerry Snook that Lois was such a wonderful, beautiful person. He knew no one would understand why he went so far to protect and spare the woman he loved.
Hargrove said he was afraid Lois’s life would be ruined if she were questioned in depth about their affair. “I figured I’d get about seven years in jail.” He thought she would move to Columbus with the children so she could visit him. “Then when I got out we’d marry and begin a new life together.”
Services for Charles Clark were held on Monday, December 28, at the Mentor Methodist Church, where he had been a congregant and Boy Scout troop leader. More than two hundred people attended. He was buried in the Mentor Cemetery.
One evening, Lois went in front of the WJW TV cameras asking for anyone who had any knowledge or information about the murder of her husband to come forward. She asked, “For my sake, for my children’s sake and the neighbors’ sake…” She broke down in the middle of it, and her mother-in-law had to finish for her.
“Instead of throwing dirt, why don’t people think of the good she did?” Edith Clark asked.
Authorities thought they had the case wrapped up with their suspect’s confession, but when the polygraph cleared him, it sent them in a new direction. Investigators decided to look deeper at Chuck’s life and background. Ostrander said their picture of the slain man was of an upstanding citizen, a pillar of his church, a Boy Scout leader and a successful, up-and-coming businessman.
Chuck traveled a good deal for his company, and little was known about his business trips. Police wanted to know where he went and what hotels and motels he used. They wondered what he did in his spare time while on the road. Ostrander said they would widen their search for anyone who might benefit from Chuck’s death or seek revenge for some reason.
In the meantime, the Shaker Heights polygraph examiner hooked up Lois Clark to the machine at the Painesville Courthouse. Investigators quizzed her for two and a half hours. When it was over, Ostrander said, “We are convinced that she knows nothing of the murder, nor did she perpetrate or collaborate in any way in arranging her husband’s death.”
After enduring the grueling questions, the widow, clad in a dark brown coat, walked out of the Lake County Jail, eyes straight ahead, head held high. She was accompanied by her father-in-law. “I’m mentally exhausted and extremely tired,” she said.
The elder Clark told reporters that he and his wife were going to stand by Lois and hoped she and the children would go to Rochester to live with them. “We all make mistakes in our life and now she’s paying for hers,” he said. “We’re going to help her all we can. She’s the same as a daughter to us.”
Lois repeatedly told investigators she thought her husband’s death was a freak accident. Emery E. Galloway at the Ohio State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in London, Ohio, said an accidental shooting was not possible. By examining the inside kitchen window and storm window and making tests at Clark’s house and backyard, he determined the shot was fired on purpose. He thought the sniper steadied the rifle barrel in the crotch of a sycamore tree forty-two feet from the kitchen window.
Then Chief Hathy got a phone call from Hargrove’s boss, Ozinga, at 8:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day. He told the police chief that Hargrove had confided in him that he had purchased a gun in Chardon on December 23 and that he planned to kill Charles Clark the next day.
Police had already checked with twenty stores that sold guns in Lake County but got nowhere. Three stores sold guns in Chardon. With the help of the Geauga County sheriff, Hathy narrowed it down to the Carlson Hardware Store and called the owner at home. The storekeeper opened up for the police so they could go through his file on gun purchases. They found the purchase of a used Springfield, .22-caliber, single-shot, bolt-action rifle. The name printed on the file card was Robert G. MacClaren.
The gun cost eleven dollars, and the shells cost seventy-eight cents. The storekeeper said he did not connect the sale of the rifle with the murder or the photos of Hargrove in the papers.
Cleveland handwriting expert Joseph Tholl compared the printing on the gun file card with samples of Hargrove’s on the cleaner’s claim slips, as well as samples police collected while their man was in custody. Tholl determined they all had allegedly been printed by the same person.
“The phone call was the real break,” Hathy said. He immediately got a warrant to arrest Hargrove for first-degree murder. Hathy figured Hargrove murdered Clark because he wanted to marry Lois. Bolstering his theory, Hathy found out his suspect had been an expert marksman in the Army Air Force during World War II.
Late on New Year’s Day, police located and arrested Hargrove at his mother’s in Toledo. That evening, he was flown by private plane back to Lake County, where, after several hours of questioning, he confessed for the second time. The next morning, he led police to a spot a few miles north of Chardon and showed them a utility pole with a slug dead center of a metal marker. Police pried the lead from the pole and sent it to the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in London, Ohio. Galloway determined it was a match to the one taken from Clark’s right temple.
Left to right: Lake County sheriff William Evans, Floyd Hargrove and Mentor police chief Frank Hathy. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.
While being questioned, Hargrove was sketchy on details of the shooting, but authorities figured if they could get their hands on the gun, they could neatly wrap up their case. Hargrove finally agreed to take them to the spot where he thought he disposed of the weapon. Instead, he led them in circles, and they were no closer to locating the gun.
In trying to explain why the lie detector had cleared Hargrove the first time he was in custody, Sheriff Evans said Hargrove was emotionally upset when he took it. In fact, their suspected murderer had consulted a psychiatrist in the past because he had “personality problems.” The polygraph works by showing changes in heart rate, breathing rate and perspiration, all indications of lying. Sergeant Schaar, an operator with ten years of experience, said it could not detect psychopathic liars.
Beverly Hargrove said her ex-husband had visited her and their children after his release from jail. It was a short visit, with him patting the five children on the head and then leaving. “He’s what you’d call a street angel and a house devil,” she told the papers. He seemed to always be searching for something, she said. He looked into different religions. One time, he espoused the medieval practice of Rosicrucianism, burning candles and incense behind locked doors. At a later date, he became a Jehovah’s Witness. Most recently, he turned to the Willo Gospel Church, believing it was the true religion.
Floyd “Gene” Hargrove kept a picture of Lois and a Bible in his jail cell. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library.
Psychiatrist Dr. Stanley F. Wallace, a friend and fellow congregant at the Willo Gospel Church, visited Hargrove in jail. The doctor suggested using sodium amytal to “help” the prisoner remember where he disposed of the gun. Hargrove took Wallace’s suggestion and submitted to an injection of “truth serum.”
Under the influence of the drug, Hargrove gave police a location in Kirkland Hills in the east branch of the Chagrin River. Mentor firemen searched for the .22-caliber rifle and came across it within twelve minutes. It was in two feet of water. The stock had broken off and washed downstream. A shell casing was still in the ejection chamber. The rifle was sent to the ballistics laboratory.
Prior to the sodium amytal, Hargrove said that he could not remember what he did with the gun. He said being under the influence of the “truth serum” caused him to accept the fact that he had murdered Chuck Clark. He said at the time he
took the lie detector test, he had believed himself innocent.
“In my mind I had rejected reality that I had killed Clark,” Hargrove told the Plain Dealer. “I just couldn’t make myself believe that I had done such a thing.” He said he was relieved that he had taken responsibility for the killing.
The after effects of the drug were still evident when Hargrove was taken before the judge for arraignment because he needed help to walk. He pleaded guilty. The guilty plea only served to waive the preliminary hearing, as Ohio law does not allow a formal guilty plea in a capital case. No bond was permitted.
In a 1963 case, Townsend v. Sain, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that confessions obtained using one of the truth drugs were inadmissible in court. Like alcohol, sodium amytal or any of the truth serums diminish inhibitions, but they do not necessarily produce the “truth.” It is possible to lie while under the influence of a truth serum.
A week after the arraignment, Hargrove hired intense thirty-seven-year-old Louis A. Turi Jr. of Wickliffe to defend him. Turi’s first act was to get the preliminary hearing and Hargrove’s guilty plea stricken from the court record. Turi said the plea and waiver of the preliminary hearing should have been given in writing instead of orally. He wanted the hearing and the plea wiped from the record so they could not be introduced against his client later on. Turi further criticized the prosecutor for taking Hargrove before the court for an arraignment before the sodium amytal had completely worn off.
The trial began on May 16, 1960, in Judge Winfield E. Slocum’s court. From the start, prosecutors John F. Clair Jr. and Edward R. Ostrander said they would seek the death penalty. Turi was assisted by thirty-two-year-old Painesville attorney Robert L. Simmons, who was mild in appearance but hard-hitting in court. Turi said he was confident of his client’s innocence. “Don’t be surprised at developments that come out at the trial,” he told the papers.
Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio Page 10
