Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  The trial started with Vincler’s opening statement to the jury. Vincler made it crystal clear that he would seek a first-degree murder conviction against Grady Stiles, Jr., on the grounds that the shooting was a premeditated act. To bolster his case, Vincler pointed out the following:

  “There are a number of key points on which Anthony DeCello, Mr. Stiles’s attorney, and I agree on, including the fact that Mr. Stiles did, in reality, shoot Jack Layne once in the chest and once in the back with a thirty-two-caliber revolver he purchased from an East Ohio Street pawnshop sixteen days before Mr. Layne was murdered.”

  For his part, Tony DeCello emphatically stated that Grady Stiles had no choice but to kill Jack Layne. Layne had taunted and threatened him to the point where he felt he was in grave danger. Layne had lured his daughter away. To save her, and him, Grady had no choice but to take matters into his own hands.

  Vincler then called his star witness: Donna Stiles.

  Once again, Donna testified that she was with Grady when he bought the gun and that he told her he was going to “use it on Jack.”

  After explaining how she ran away for nearly six days, she related how she called her father from the home of Jack’s sister.

  “If you don’t get home in five minutes, I’m going to beat the hell out of you. Then I’m going to kill Jack,” Donna quoted Grady.

  At the defense table, dressed in the same shabby clothes, and despite DeCello’s pleas to wear a tie, all Grady could do was mumble and shake his head in disbelief. Throughout the trial, he continued to drink heavily.

  On the stand, Donna told about the shopping trip to buy her dress on the day before the wedding, and what her father’s condition was.

  “And was your father drunk on the day of the murder?” Vincler questioned.

  “My father was fairly drunk,” Donna testified. “And he tried to talk me out of the marriage by telling me about the unhappy experiences he’d had with his previous wives.”

  Donna turned and looked at Grady, her face twisted in hatred.

  “She’s no good, I can’t believe she’d turn on me,” Grady mumbled.

  Donna claimed her father opposed the marriage because she was underage and that she planned to quit school. As for her living conditions, Donna hated living with her father because, among other things, he “made me baby-sit constantly and didn’t let me out enough.”

  “Damn her, damn her,” Grady mumbled.

  DeCello had been watching Donna very closely. Like Vincler, he, too, had not had a chance to depose her. This was the first opportunity he had to talk to her. It would be difficult to impeach her testimony. It was obvious that the jury believed the story this attractive girl told.

  Donna did concede under DeCello’s cross-examination that Grady had purchased the weapon before she and Jack had decided to marry. In the jury’s mind, DeCello had just planted a seed that maybe the crime wasn’t premeditated after all.

  Next on the witness stand was Frank DeSalvo, one of Jack’s friends.

  “I was watching through the front window of the Stileses’ home on the day before the shooting. I saw Mr. Stiles pull a gun from the left side of his wheelchair, point it at Jack, and say, ‘I will kill you before you marry my daughter.’”

  “He admitted shooting Mr. Layne because he said he had ‘no alternative,’” homicide detective Joseph Stottlemyre next testified.

  Forensic evidence was offered that inextricably linked the murder weapon to Grady’s possession. The autopsy results were entered into evidence.

  After a brief few hours of damning testimony, Robert Vincler was satisfied that he had proven his case and the defense rested.

  Now, it was DeCello’s turn to persuade the jury.

  DeCello’s tactic was to show that there were real reasons why Grady had opposed the marriage.

  Barbara Sanaer, Grady’s niece, testified that she had been engaged to Jack Layne and had broken up with him before he’d started dating Donna, and that Jack was prone to violence. “He frequently punched me and pushed me against the wall.”

  Sanaer and her mother, Sarah, Grady’s sister, both testified that they had warned Grady that Jack carried a knife.

  Perhaps the most interesting defense testimony came from Barbara Stiles.

  Barbara said that Grady purchased the gun at her request after she began receiving obscene and threatening phone calls. Then, “Barbara testified as to their home life. She didn’t testify [as to the alleged] threats [Grady made against Jack] because I think even though she feared Grady, she didn’t want to get herself in a position where she would have problems herself.

  “I think she was relieved, thinking Grady would go to jail and get out of her life. She was in fear of him. You could tell that by the way he treated her,” DeCello recalls.

  For her part, Donna hated Barbara. She was just glad that she was out of her life.

  Things were not looking up for Grady, and he knew it. It was time to bring in the cavalry.

  Paul Fishbaugh, The Fat Man, entered the courtroom. Too heavy to fit his six hundred pounds into the witness chair, he was forced to sit in a lotus position on the floor of the courtroom in front of the witness docket.

  Fishbaugh, under DeCello’s brief questioning, asserted the forthrightness of Grady’s character.

  The next character witness for Grady was The Bearded Lady, whom Teresa would later identify as Priscilla Bagorno. Bagorno, with her full, dark beard, related what a wonderful human being and credit to the human race Grady was. And by the time the third character witness, a carnival midget—not Glenn—had finished his testimony, spectators of the trial were presented with a portrait of Grady Stiles, Jr., as a caring parent and model citizen.

  For his part, Vincler was limited by law in the questions he could ask the character witnesses, just as they were limited in what they could testify to. How do you challenge someone’s opinion of another human being? The answer is, you don’t. You just assume the jury understands that these are Grady’s friends, and their testimony, inherently, is going to be tainted. Hopefully, the weight of evidence will prove to them that Grady Stiles, Jr., is not the paragon of virtue his friends made him out to be.

  Grady was a showman, first and foremost. He had cut his teeth performing in front of crowds. Now, he would get to perform for a crowd of twelve, with his life hanging in the balance.

  “I call Grady Stiles, Jr., to the witness stand,” Tony DeCello announced to the court on the morning of February 21, 1978.

  The bailiff wheeled Grady up to the witness stand and turned the wheelchair around. He was sworn in and then, under DeCello’s patient questioning, began his testimony.

  “Tell us first what your daughter’s relationship was with Jack Layne,” DeCello began.

  “Well, Donna started to change shortly after she began dating Layne last July. She would sneak out of the house late at night and come home sometimes with beer on her breath.”

  “Why did you oppose their marriage?”

  “Because Donna was too young. She’s only fifteen. And she was going to leave school to marry him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Donna threatened to live with him without being married.”

  “A common-law marriage?”

  “Right. Rather than see them live together, I’d rather see them get married.”

  DeCello then asked Grady to describe what had happened the day of the murder.

  First Grady contradicted Donna. “I never called Jack into the living room,” Grady testified. “He was already in there playing with my daughter [Cathy] when he said, ‘Well, I guess I got Donna now.’”

  “Then what happened?”

  Holding back tears, Grady replied that it would be up to a judge the next day to decide whether or not Donna could marry.

  “He [Jack] said it didn’t matter what a judge said and that he would live together with her. Then he started coming toward me. I don’t know what came over him, but I was scared—I guess of him killing m
e. He lunged toward me when I fired my gun.

  “I didn’t even see him when I pulled the trigger,” Grady added. “Because of my birth deformity, my shooting is pretty poor.”

  “Do you recall shooting Mr. Layne a second time as he turned to leave?”

  “No. I don’t. For four or five days after, I didn’t know what was happening.”

  Grady said he did not recall telling the police that he kept the gun he’d purchased at the East Ohio Street pawnshop by his side for protection when he was alone in the house.

  “I bought the gun because my wife Barbara had been receiving threatening phone calls.”

  Having the gun in the house was just Grady acting in a husband’s role, as his wife’s protector.

  As for Frank DeSalvo’s testimony that Grady had pointed the gun with his left hand at Jack the day before the shooting, Grady said DeSalvo was mistaken.

  “I cannot support a gun in my left hand,” he said, and all attention in the court went to his left claw. It was his weak claw. “It’s impossible,” he asserted.

  As for the testimony of the prosecution witnesses that Grady had previously threatened to kill Layne because he did not want him to marry his daughter, under cross-examination by Vincler, he told the court, “All of them lied on the stand.”

  Once again, Grady created a public sensation. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported, “Some of the jurors were visibly affected by Stiles’s account of the fatal shooting of his fifteen-year-old daughter’s fiancé.…”

  “He got up there and traded on his condition,” DeCello recalls. “He made a helluva witness for himself.”

  It was a bravura performance, better than anyone realized. “He had no feelings. Had no love for anyone. He had no fears. He was a very sick man,” says DeCello.

  Vincler had not been able to shake Grady on cross-examination. He attempted to rebut the character witnesses’ testimony by recalling Donna to the stand.

  “Did you ever see Mr. Stiles beat his wife?” Vincler asked.

  “Yes,” Donna replied. “I saw him beat my stepmother on several occasions.”

  During closing arguments, District Attorney Robert Vincler emphasized that the murder of Jack Layne was a cold, premeditated act of a violent man.

  “He asks you to believe that all those people,” and the dynamic young attorney waved to the prosecution witnesses in the courtroom, “and the police, got together and fabricated their stories.

  “Donna Stiles has been out of town since the incident. How could she have known what anyone else was going to testify to, let alone fabricated her testimony?

  “Besides Miss Stiles, several prosecution witnesses indicated that Mr. Stiles frequently promised to kill Mr. Layne rather than allow him to marry his daughter. This was a deliberate act of premeditated murder.

  “I would also cite the autopsy report. It clearly contradicts Mr. Stiles’s version of the shooting. Mr. Stiles said he was talking to Mr. Layne when the victim came at him and appeared ready to attack him. The defendant also said he could not remember firing a second shot, which struck the victim in the back as he was leaving the living room.

  “Well, the autopsy showed that the first bullet, which struck the victim in the chest, traveled in a downward path, after making initial contact with Mr. Layne’s body. That shows irrefutably that the victim was seated rather than standing and walking toward him, as Mr. Stiles claimed.”

  Defense attorney Anthony DeCello countered that “love and compassion” led Grady to defend his daughter and himself, and that the killing of Jack Layne was a pure act of self-defense.

  “The greatest hurt and the greatest shame for Mr. Stiles came when his daughter [Donna] told him she’d see him to his grave,” DeCello said. “Try and visualize the love and compassion this poor soul has for his children. My client loved his children so much that he obtained a court order in Florida to assume custody of his two children from his previous wife.

  “All Grady has is his family,” DeCello concluded with obvious emotion. “He has no real friends because people don’t want to have someone as him for a friend.”

  Judge Harper charged the jury and sent them out to deliberate Grady Stiles’s fate. While he had been charged with first-degree murder, the jury also had the option of convicting him of second-degree murder, an intentional killing without premeditation, or third degree murder, commonly known as voluntary manslaughter. With the exception of the last charge, all were punishable by mandatory prison sentences. First-degree murder was also punishable by death.

  Three hours later, the jury of six women and six men came out of the jury room. Somber-faced, they took their assigned places in the jury box.

  “Mr. Foreman, I understand you’ve reached a verdict.”

  “Yes, Your Honor, we have. We find the defendant, Grady Stiles, Jr., guilty of third degree murder.”

  Grady wept crocodile tears. He sat at the defense table in his wheelchair, the same one he had told Barbara and Donna was stolen the day of the murder, the same one he made them search for while he shot Jack Layne.

  “I think the jury felt sorry for him. The bottom line is the jury gave him a break. I felt it was first-degree murder then and I still feel it’s first-degree murder now,” says Vincler, who’s now in private practice.

  “One of the things that we tried to bring out on defense was he [Grady] may have had the gun for protection and he saw the kid coming at him and his reflexes were so poor … but that’s just not true. He was sitting in the house facing the door when they got home. Grady had that gun pointed exactly where he wanted to hit that kid dead-on.

  “Another thing. Grady had told me he had no experience with guns, that it was a lucky shot. I didn’t believe him. The reason I didn’t believe him because there was another time he was telling me when he was in Florida, there was a place down there that show people frequented, and at one time or another, he would fire a gun there with some of his friends. I knew he had some experience with firearms.”

  “Still,” adds DeCello, who no longer practices law, “he convinced the jury that he was defenseless.”

  Judge Harper postponed sentencing pending a presentencing report by the county’s Adult Probation Office, and Grady was allowed to remain free on the $10,000 bond he had already posted.

  The trial had been a draining process for all concerned. Not one person involved in the case, from the police who investigated to the prosecuting attorney, did not feel sorrow at the awful life Grady Stiles had led.

  In the presentencing report, the police stated that they had no feelings regarding sentencing. Vincler was even more vague.

  “Assistant District Attorney Robert Vincler stated that the present offense was most difficult in terms of sentencing. He stated that the offense was of a very serious nature, however, at the same period of time, he had no statement to make regarding sentencing.

  “The present offense is truly a sad case,” the report concludes. “It appears that there was some premeditation on the defendant’s part and shooting the victim was the only way that the defendant could stop the victim from marrying his daughter. To further complicate the situation, the defendant’s physical handicaps would present a problem if the defendant were incarcerated, yet at the same period of time, the present offense is serious enough that a prison sentence might be in order.”

  Shortly before sentencing, Judge Harper called Vincler.

  “Bob, I have gotten a letter from Western Penitentiary [one of the state’s penitentiaries] and they’ve indicated that they did not want him in the system because they’d end up having to put a guard with him all day to take care of him.”

  “What are we going to do with him, Judge? Realistically, he’s wheelchair-bound. And his health’s not good.”

  At Grady’s sentencing on April 30, 1979, Grady rose in Judge Harper’s courtroom to hear his fate.

  Everyone knew Judge Tom Harper, who is now deceased, to be a kind, wise man, and a truly nice guy. He was a man of compassion. />
  After first noting the difficulties long-term housing of Grady would present to the state prison facilities, Judge Harper got down to the nitty-gritty. He sentenced Grady to fifteen years’ probation.

  “I’m not so sure that a prison term would not be cruel and unusual punishment in this case. Unquestionably, though, the crime was a serious offense,” Harper told the hushed courtroom.

  “Society doesn’t require vengeance, and I felt a probationary term met the best interests for society and the defendant. In fact, even if the defendant could operate a wheelchair without assistance, prisons in the State of Pennsylvania do not have ramps to facilitate mobility.”

  Grady would not serve one day behind bars for Jack Layne’s cold-blooded murder.

  Tony DeCello was happy and thrilled by the verdict and the sentence.

  “Judge Harper felt that putting him on probation would accomplish the same effect as putting him in jail,” explains DeCello. “By putting him on probation, Grady would dictate his own destiny. If he did something [criminal], he’d go to jail. But he wasn’t gonna shoot anyone else. Grady was a [classic bully], to his family especially.”

  All Grady had to do was report to his probation officer on a regular basis and keep his nose clean, and he would remain free to do as he pleased. He would even be allowed to move to another area of the country as long as he reported to his probation officer in his new habitat.

  Immediately after the trial, Grady left Pittsburgh, and never paid DeCello his fourteen-thousand-dollar trial fee. “He never even said thank you. Never,” DeCello relates.

  The money he saved by not paying DeCello helped him organize his own sideshow. No longer would “Lobster Boy” be working for anyone else. Now, he would be the boss of ten acts, presented as one show, that travel together from carnival to carnival. It was the bizarre world Grady felt most in control of, the one place where he didn’t have to put his defenses up, where he could be himself.

  “You gotta remember all these people were in the same boat. It’s their own little protective world. You or I wouldn’t associate with them. You’d have nothing in common with them. And they realized that. They are very defensive people. Very defensive,” says DeCello.