Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  . . .

  Over his long career, Baker had investigated about forty murders, but Hoss was only his second experience with a cop killer. The first had been Mark McCauley.

  Baker had first encountered McCauley in 1946, when he was a newly minted state trooper and McCauley was a strip miner from Emoryville, West Virginia. McCauley already had a record for such minor crimes as possessing illegal deer meat and beaver pelts, but had recently been arrested by Trooper Sgt. Joe Horn, a friend of Baker’s, for stealing a pickup truck. At that point, McCauley was heard to threaten, “If ever Horn arrests me again, I will pump him full of lead.” In early autumn, Horn did arrest McCauley again, and then allowed the suspect to get some clothes from home before going to jail. Once inside his house, McCauley grabbed a shotgun and, sure enough, killed Horn. Waiting outside, Tucker County Sheriff Orsa Hovatter heard blasts and rushed inside, only to be shot dead likewise. Once captured, McCauley “got the noose.” Trooper Baker witnessed McCauley’s execution in February 1948 at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville—the eighty-second hanging since that prison had been designated for executions fifty-five years earlier.

  Baker and others watched the warden call out, “Mark McCauley, do you have anything to say?” When McCauley only shook his head, a hood was pulled over his head and the noose pulled snug. When the trap was sprung, McCauley shot down seven feet. A physician rushed under the scaffold, listening to the convict’s weakening heartbeat with a stethoscope. Twelve minutes later, Mark McCauley, cop killer, was pronounced dead. An old prison guard said McCauley’s execution was “Quick ’n’ Just.” The short phrase stuck with Baker.

  Baker and Hart gathered their papers while prison officers led Hoss from the interview room. Before the door closed behind him, Baker called out, “Stanley … Quick and Just.”

  Hoss looked back at Baker. “What?”

  Baker put his pen in his shirt pocket and said, “Never mind, Stanley, never mind for now.”

  . . .

  Feelings ran high among the populace in the Cumberland area. Restaurateur Fred Warner, Linda Peugeot’s employer at the time she was kidnapped, had a life-sized dummy made and labeled “Hoss” and hanged it in an empty plot across the road from his business. The effigy, representation of a despised person, hung outside for months, such was Warner’s bitterness. Then there was the letter from Linda’s dentist, Dr. Donald Kiser. “I have known Mrs. Peugeot since she was a young girl and I recall seeing her weekly at church,” he wrote the FBI. “Because of my respect for her, I am willing to travel to view dental work and assist in an identification of her, if it is found necessary.”

  The phone call lasted less than a minute. Pittsburgh’s agent in charge, Ian MacLennan, offered a cordial greeting (but no more) to his listener, a businesslike, largely humorless man. MacLennan considered the sole question posed to him: “Do you believe he knows where the females are?” MacLennan answered, “I believe him enough.” MacLennan got his marching orders. “Okay, take him out—and this is with us, our affair.” MacLennan said only, “Yes, sir,” before Director Hoover hung up.

  After Hoover’s go-ahead, MacLennan called Dick Thornburgh for, FBI or no, one just doesn’t bang on a penitentiary gate to take a prisoner out for a look around the country. There are procedures. However, it was the mission itself that again brought the state and feds into conflict, setting off another fiasco in the winding Hoss saga while the public wondered why their officials could not cooperate more effectively.

  Despite the inconsistencies, deliberate or accidental, in his mendaciloquent storytelling, Hoss was firm and convincing in his assertion that he knew where he had left the bodies of the Peugeots and could lead the law to the mournful spots. Since all else had failed, why not take him up on his offer? The need to find the Peugeots’ bodies was too great to leave any avenue unexplored. Thus the U.S. Attorney’s Office petitioned Allegheny County Judge Robert Van der Voort to release Hoss from the penitentiary for a trip through Ohio and Kansas in an effort to locate the slain mother and child. While no one could argue with this last-ditch, noble pursuit, District Attorney Duggan demanded that any search party include two or three county detectives. The FBI refused, banning participation by anyone but its own agents. At this news, Van der Voort bristled and backed away from Thornburgh’s petition.

  Duggan, still smarting from the FBI’s conduct at the airport, was likewise upset at this new exclusion. In Duggan’s view, Hoss’s contentious but legal state confinement had ended the feds’ authority over the prisoner. Now that Duggan had Hoss under his control in Pittsburgh’s Western Penitentiary, he would not tolerate federal meddling, particularly since the “fibbies” hadn’t had the decency to broach any of their clever ideas with him. Furthermore, the feds still were refusing to fully share the information from their interviews with Hoss, responding to all the recent stories of death and graveyards with a curt “no comment.”

  On October 15, the day after Van der Voort rejected Thornburgh’s request for Hoss’s temporary release to aid in the search for the Peugeots’ bodies, a federal spokesman said the FBI had dropped the plan “for the present.” This about-face, however, was followed by another: the feds stated their intention to regain legal custody of Hoss.

  Before this, the courts and law enforcement had finally agreed that Hoss should first be tried for Zanella’s murder. Now, however, the FBI announced that “if it is established Mrs. Peugeot and her daughter were slain and the bodies found, then this case might take precedence over the others.” One can imagine Duggan’s reaction to this reversal.

  In the meantime, the search for the bodies continued without Hoss. Based on a recent shift in Hoss’s account, the new target zone this time was a dump in northern Ohio, near the Indiana border and at least 150 miles from the location he had given in earlier versions. Once more, it produced an empty bag.

  Then, within hours, the situation changed again. When Van der Voort’s refusal to sign Thornburgh’s initiative put Hoss out of the FBI’s reach, Thornburgh sought a friendlier ear, that of U.S. District Court Judge Wallace Gourley. Now, near midnight on the evening of Thursday, October 16, Gourley signed an order requiring penitentiary officials to release Hoss to the FBI. On October 17, in a clancular affair under predawn cover, the prized prisoner was hustled out of Western Pen.

  Hoss and his federal escort had barely crossed Ohio’s eastern border, forty-five minutes away, before Duggan was alerted to the sub-rosa scheme. Furious, he roused Judge Van der Voort from sleep and they soon met downtown. The feds’ action may or may not have been legal, but it was certainly unanticipated. Someone had gone behind their backs. Both men felt taken in, sucker punched.

  Judge Gourley’s order had decreed Hoss’s release to Pittsburgh’s FBI chief, Ian MacLennan, for searches “in and around Ohio and Kansas until the investigation is completed, but no later than 6:00 P.M. Monday, October 20.” The petition for removal also stated that Hoss had voluntarily confessed to the abduction of the Peugeots and to having caused their deaths. This statement was, in fact, the first official confirmation of the Peugeots’ fate. All previous reports, including the Pittsburgh Press’s “exclusive” of two days before, had been made anonymously, from a “prominent police official,” or a “source high in the investigation.” Never was a name attached until now. Now Thornburgh confirmed that federal authorities had removed Hoss under court order “and we hope to use his cooperation to secure these bodies.” The few words, perfectly genuine, were also good public relations. Who wouldn’t support the FBI’s cardinal undertaking?

  Duggan, for one. Abandoning reason in favor of principle, he immediately appealed Judge Gourley’s order, claiming that state authority had been violated. In harness with Duggan, Van der Voort signed an order demanding that the FBI return Stanley Hoss by 8:00 P.M. that very day. At 8:05, with Hoss nowhere in sight, an indignant Van der Voort ordered FBI chief MacLennan to appear at a hearing to show cause why he should not be held in contempt. But when members of Dugg
an’s staff walked over to the FBI office at 9:00 P.M. to serve the court order, they were foiled when federal agents refused to open the door. Duggan’s men then tried slipping the order under the door only to have the feds shove it back three times.

  On Saturday, a two-judge U.S. Court of Appeals heard Duggan’s motion that the FBI had overstepped its bounds. The court agreed and ruled Hoss should be back in prison “as soon as may be conveniently possible, but no later than 6:00 P.M. Sunday.”

  Thornburgh told reporters the latest court order would “not be taken lightly,” but defended the FBI’s actions. County detectives had been prevented from joining the search, he explained, on direct orders from J. Edgar Hoover, who had also ordered the secrecy to prevent undue publicity.

  Turning up the heat, Duggan, solemn and dutiful, responded with a show of concern. “We don’t know where Hoss slept Friday night, whether it was in a motel or roadside tent. We have security concerns.” Such concern was spurious; the FBI search party, knowing their friend Hoss the way they did, had their parlous prisoner “shackled and chained enough to give Houdini the sweats.”

  Given all that had transpired—the stridency, the finger-pointing, the hearings, and the contempt charges—the FBI decided to quit. Hoss was returned by armed caravan to Western Pen at 9:00 P.M. on Saturday night.

  The prerogative of the state court had been vindicated and the FBI put in its place—bitch-slapped—but at what cost? Both sides, really, had been disingenuous. Duggan might have been slighted by the FBI’s refusal to allow his detectives to join the search, but his outraged public response served to hinder a thorough search for the bodies. Surely his fuss and denouncements could have waited a few days. Had he forgotten what this was about? As for the FBI, what was so taxing about taking along a couple of county detectives? Couldn’t they have suspended their clannish mentality just for this special mission, this imperative?

  Days later, Ian MacLennan declined to specify how far they’d taken Hoss but added that they had not reached Kansas. In fact, they hadn’t gone beyond Akron, Ohio. The standoff continued. In subsequent days and months, there was nary a move among the FBI, the Allegheny County Courts, or DA Duggan’s office to seek a new effort to take Hoss out again on a mutually agreeable search for the Peugeots’ bodies.

  Meanwhile, Linda’s husband and parents remained in limbo. Bearing the unbearable, that her babies remained alone somewhere under the stars, Edna Thompson resolved to speak with Stanley Hoss himself. If need be, she would beg him to reveal the locations of the bodies. On midmorning of Halloween day, therefore, Edna and her husband sat with Bill Baker at Western Pen waiting for Stanley Hoss to be brought out. When Baker saw Hoss in the hallway, he asked to speak with him first, without the parents. Hoss had not been warned of their visit, and Baker worried over a reaction. He knew Hoss could be vile. Once in an office alone with Hoss, Baker greeted him. Hoss said, “Yeah, I remember. You talked with me a couple weeks ago.”

  Q. That’s right, Stanley, but I am not here to interrogate you today but simply ask if you’d be willing to talk with Mr. and Mrs. William H. Thompson, the parents of Linda Peugeot?

  A. Fuck them.

  Q. Stanley, would you consider seeing them for just a few moments to answer one or two questions?

  A. No.

  Q. The Thompsons have come 150 miles from Cumberland. Won’t you please reconsider?

  A. No, fuck them. I don’t care if they came a thousand miles, and you can tell the god-damned newspapers anything you want.

  But what of Linda’s husband, Gerald? Edna had earlier informed Baker that Gerald was to receive a hardship discharge from the navy, adding, “I don’t know if Jerry is looking for Linda and Lori. He left our house last Sunday, saying he might be back in a week or two. He didn’t say where he was going. He is terribly broken up.”

  Throughout the autumn, hardly a week went by without some news of the Hoss case or related stories. Nancy Falconer, the pregnant victim of the Hoss and Zurka home robbery in March 1969, gave birth to a baby in August, and reported that she and the baby were fine.

  Hoss’s wife Diane, like Hoss’s own parents, legally sought a name change for herself and her children, who were constantly harangued at school. Diane had found it impossible to live with the Hoss name, but in her straitened circumstances she could not relocate. Finding she couldn’t even afford the fees required for a legal name change, Diane went to her kids’ school with her worries. Out of desperation, she asked the school district to pay for a name change. School officials balked, but Diane pressed hard. The school sympathized but feared setting a precedent in such a matter. Nonetheless, after more than one peculiar meeting, the school board acquiesced. They’d foot the bill. Maybe it would help.

  It was because of Kathy Defino’s survival and her courage in standing up to Hoss at trial that he was at this moment locked away. It was, everyone told her, a service to society. Yet Kathy’s family and friends could see her nerves were shot. If she had been a typical free-spirited teen before, she wasn’t anymore.

  Karen Maxwell likewise had only a tenuous grip on herself. Like Defino, her sister in distress, Karen had believed Hoss would kill her before he let her go. She returned to work but shied from social situations and shunned the press. However, she couldn’t avoid the investigators stressing her importance in the upcoming trial. Since that day in the cemetery when Hoss had nabbed her, Karen had kept secret the pain and humiliation she’d suffered. Initially, only Karen’s mother and doctor knew of her rape and abuse by Hoss, but although it was never made public, certain officials eventually came to know, too. Karen understood her civic duty as a witness but she was mortified at the thought of others learning the details of her ordeal. Only after officials assured her that all mention of sexual aggression and improprieties would be excluded from testimony did Karen agree to cooperate.

  In mid-December, Captain Joe Start got a call from his boss, Bob Duggan. The penitentiary had called Duggan about an inmate who might have knowledge about Lori Mae Peugeot. Duggan sent Start to see what the story was.

  At the prison, Start was taken to a second-floor office area, then led to an obscure room little larger than a closet. Waiting for him inside was a gaunt, fair-haired man named Whitman Shute, who with shaking hand lit his next cigarette from the end of his last one.

  “If Stan learns I’m talking to you, I’m a dead man,” said Shute. “But the stuff is too heavy, I can’t have it in my chest no more.”

  Start lit up himself, further clouding the room. Acting casual to calm Shute, sitting there with sweaty palms, he told the inmate that a prison CO had brought him up unseen, “so no one knows you’re talking to anyone, and it’ll stay that way.” Soothed for the moment, the con with a secret began to speak.

  “I have known Stanley Hoss since our youth. It was while we lived in Bairdford, we played together. Lately, I got busted for narcotics. I was strung out pretty good, using nine bags of heroin a day. It was during this time I was in the infirmary here that they brought Stan in from Iowa. He said he didn’t give a damn about anything anymore and told me about the baby he killed. He also told me about shooting the lady. He didn’t tell me where he put her but said it wasn’t in a dump ‘like them dumb bastards think.’ That’s how he put it.”

  Start was impressed at this catharsis. He nodded at Whitman to continue.

  About the baby, Stan said what he did to her, and I said, “Man, don’t be rapping on me with that kind of shit. I mean, it’s too much.” I don’t want to hear ’cause, man, it was too much.

  I remember most of what Stan said so I can tell you where he put the kid. He said Fort Leavenworth, Kansas … well, about twenty miles east of there. Said he saw this cemetery that had a big gate and a fence around it. Said he drove in around like to the back and then he saw a new grave, so he scooped back some flowers and dug down deep enough and put the little girl in there, then he covered her up again and put the flowers back so you can’t tell anything was wrong. Said she’d ha
ve seven holes in her.

  “Did you ask Stan questions, and did he say when this happened with the baby?” Start prompted.

  “No man, nothing. Like I said, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, but Stan said this happened around October one, or like maybe the last week of September. This is a big cemetery near the Missouri line, Route 200 something. The body in a box could be in Missouri because Stan said he told them Kansas but he thinks it’s Missouri. He said he was just riding around and didn’t know what to do with the girl … big cemetery off a four-lane highway, twenty miles east of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

  Start’s gut told him Shute’s story could be the breakthrough everyone was waiting for. It made sense. Shute was scared to talk, but he did, showing moral courage perhaps for the first time. Further, it made perfect sense that Hoss would retreat to the comfort zone of a cemetery to execute an illicit burial. Maybe he did the same with the young mother.

  Back in his office, Start scoured maps of Missouri and Kansas. From Shute’s “route 200 something,” Start found Route 210, which went through Independence, Missouri, a place searchers had confirmed Hoss had stayed on September 26. Also, Route 210 intersected Route 435, a four-lane road. After reciting routes and descriptions of interest to countless officials in the area, Start—remarkably—had found one that matched up well with Shute’s statement. Wanting to fly out right away, Start called Duggan with the exciting news. To Start’s great shock and greater disappointment, Duggan hemmed and hawed, telling Start to try to handle everything by phone. Moreover, once Start had found a matching cemetery and made contact with its representative, the cemetery administrator was less than helpful. Did Start have any idea how many souls were laid to rest on any given day in their spacious grounds? the administrator asked. Also, he cautioned, no grave could be touched without the permission of kin.