Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  Start was convinced he could bulldoze through any difficulties at the cemetery if he was on the scene, but when he suggested this, Duggan blocked the trip. At a dead nonplus, Start toyed with the temptation to slip his written report to the FBI, but he knew he’d be fired on the spot the moment Duggan found out. Eventually, Start’s report was filed away, not to be seen again for thirty-five years.

  In the cold of winter, after receiving a tip, scuba divers searched unsuccessfully for the Peugeots in Deep Creek Lake. Searches also continued in dumps scattered between Maryland and Iowa. Meanwhile, the uncertainty was taking a serious toll on Linda’s family. By Christmastime, William Thompson was doing little more than shuffling to work and back. As for Edna, she ate little and lost weight, becoming nearly bedridden.

  As the fascinating, albeit turbulent sixties drew to a close, everyone, from dinner table to workplace, beer hall to beauty parlor, talked about the case, waited for the trial … and wondered about the young man who’d aroused such passion and calls for revenge.

  . . .

  “Pretty young, maybe five or six years old, Stanie fell out of a tree. Hit his head good but his dad wouldn’t take him to a hospital because we couldn’t afford it. In my thinking, this is when Stanie’s troubles began.” This is what Hoss’s mother, Mary, always said.

  Mary, née Atkinson, married Stan B. Hoss Sr. in 1937. She may have considered herself lucky to catch another man, for at age twenty-seven she’d already walked down the aisle twice before and had three daughters to care for: Mary Jane and twins Jenny and Jean. She began her third marriage deep in the Great Depression, and everyone seemed to be just scraping by. Certainly this was so for Stan and Mary.

  Stan Hoss Sr. of Polish decent, stood 5 feet, 7 inches, with a body made stout by years of manual labor. Only in his late forties did Stan Sr. grow thicker in the waist. Mary was diminutive, barely 4 feet, 10 inches tall, a welcoming woman given to easy smiles. Her husband, a year younger than she, wanted more children. Mary agreed, though neither knew where the money would come from to feed more mouths. Still, in the late summer of 1939, Mary bore her fourth daughter, Betty. It was several more years before Mary again became pregnant. Stan hoped for a first son as a namesake, and got his wish on March 1, 1943. Stanley Barton Hoss Jr. was born with the aid of a midwife on a farm near the village of Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. Two years later, rounding out the Hoss brood, another son, Harry, was born.

  Although World War II was raging, Stan Sr. was not required to serve, both because of his age—thirty-one—and because of his responsibilities. By the date of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Stan Sr. already had a wife and four daughters, with two sons to follow. During these years Stan Sr. mined coal, collecting scrap metal for resale on the side. Some people, too, suspected him of stealing from the mining company.

  The Hoss family, never prosperous, moved from one modest rental home to another. In the winters, it was often cold enough that the children could scrape their names in the frost on the inside of the windows. When the children were young, a local Methodist church regularly witnessed a quiet, almost taciturn, Stan Sr. with his cheerful wife and scrubbed children, take up half a pew, always toward the back.

  By the 1950s, Stan had somehow lost his job in the mines, so the Hoss family was relieved when Stan Sr. became the caretaker at Lakewood Cemetery in Dorseyville. The job came with a house on the property. With a roof over their heads and food on the table, the Hosses felt blessed.

  The Hoss girls performed well enough in school but Stanley, considered a bright boy by his parents and older sisters, did not fare as well. His parents saw to it that Stanley did not miss school, but his grades hardly ever rose above D’s and F’s. He was made to repeat first grade, then fourth.

  Stan also suffered from poor health. In addition to the head injury he received in a fall from a tree, Stanley was hospitalized at age nine with a serious kidney infection. A year later, he came down with rheumatic fever. This later resulted in a heart murmur that slowly corrected itself over the years. At age twelve, Stanley was again hospitalized for a condition called “spongy liver.” Then, at age seventeen, he fractured his skull and injured a cervical vertebrae in a car crash. As a physical specimen one might think Stanley would be weak and wanting, but the opposite was true.

  …

  Playing along a creek in the woods, Stanley and several other boys came upon a fair-sized rock with interesting coloration. Each wanted to take it home. A couple of the boys tried to move it but the rock was partially buried and would not budge. Then Stanley tried. Though no bigger than his pals, Stanley gripped the prize and yanked it free from the earth. Stanley the strong.

  Though remembered by school officials as quiet, unobtrusive—some-one unlikely to be noticed in a small group—Stanley’s classmates saw a different boy. One day, a new kid was brought to Stanley’s third-grade class. Since the new boy arrived during recess, the teacher asked him to take a seat and wait for the other students to return. When the kids trickled back in in twos and threes, they surrounded the new boy, not to welcome him but, with something like dread on their faces, to warn him, “You’re in Stanley’s seat!” Stanley the intimidator.

  Of course from time to time Stanley would enrich himself with a classmate’s milk money. There might be protest, but not too much. A victim might shout, “I’m gonna tell on you!” but something in Stanley’s eyes forced an acceptance of the loss. You didn’t tell on Stanley. Stanley the thief … Stanley the robber.

  And these traits were being noticed while Stanley was still a child.

  Age fourteen—the age Stanley himself said he became a criminal— marked a jump to bigger things for the boy, bigger certainly than filching bicycles and wagons. Now Stanley graduated to stealing property of all kinds, to keep or to sell. Garages, sheds, and homes: Stanley raided them all. By the age of sixteen, Stanley had held a gun in his hand. Stanley the threat.

  Age sixteen also marked the end of Stanley’s schooling—something he regarded as little more than a grind and a waste anyway. While his peers were in tenth grade, Stanley, at sixteen, sat in eighth. School administrators, discouraged by years of effort to encourage Stanley to apply himself, now encouraged him to leave instead. After all, he was already sixteen and still on the verge of failing. Perhaps he could find his way in one of the trades? Stanley accepted the school’s suggestion, at least about leaving. If his parents were disappointed, that was just too bad. Besides, he was getting married.

  During the great manhunt of 1969, and directly after Hoss’s capture, Agent Tom Marsh, assigned to Stanley’s wife, learned more about his marriage. Diane told stories while making coffee and minding her kids.

  Diane Burnham had been four years old when her father killed himself by driving off a bridge in a drunken stupor. Her family had other troubles too. Diane, her brother and her sister were all raised for the most part by their grandmother, a disciplinarian whose words were as sharp as a scythe to grass. It was nothing for Diane to hear her grandmother scream, “You’ll never amount to nothing!” And the whuppings. “My brother and me got hit a lot,” Diane remembered, “but my sister was viewed as an angel. We weren’t allowed to have friends over. In school I didn’t feel I was as good as everyone else. We always wore hand-me-downs and got teased. I stayed quiet in school, never got involved. I wanted to get away from home.” She was fourteen.

  One afternoon in the summer of 1958, Diane was walking along a dusty road near Tarentum. “There were a couple of boys behind us but we didn’t pay them attention. After they caught up, we walked along and talked. I liked the one. He told me his name was Stan Hoss. He seemed older than me a little. Once we got to Main Street, we sat at a counter in a drug store. He bought me a hot dog and a cherry coke. By the time we left the store, I was in love with him.” Stanley the lady-killer.

  In rural Cherry Valley near Saxonburg on rainy October 3, 1959, Magistrate Walter E. Flick presided over the wedding vows of Stanley and his fifteen-year-o
ld bride. The Hoss family welcomed Diane with open arms. Diane’s family thought Stanley was no good.

  Just up the road from the magistrate’s office was the one-story stone Hoss house. The newlyweds moved in there with Stan’s family after the ceremony. The water was from a well; the bathwater was shared. By the next autumn, Stanley and Diane, Stanley’s brother, Harry, and his parents had all taken up residence in the old Carson farm, in its day a wonderful place. However, Officer Dick Curti, who’d been involved in the Defino rape investigation, remembered when the Hosses lived on the Carson farm. “There might as well have been a Keep Away sign in the front yard. Even from a distance, the old house looked forbidding, spooky. The yard around it was untended. It just wasn’t the place you’d walk up to to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  By this time, Stanley’s three half-sisters and one full sister, Betty, had married and moved away, so at least there was plenty of room at the farm for those who remained—and for a new generation. On the last day of November, 1961, Diane gave birth to their first child, a boy, named Stanley Hoss III after his grandfather and father. Over the next decade Diane gave birth to another child every couple of years.

  “Though Stanley’s dad took to drink pretty heavy,” Diane told Agent Marsh,

  I’ll say his parents were good people. How they catered to Stanley, though! He was a spoiled brat, viewed himself as Mr. Wonderful. He never wanted to get his hands dirty and was fussy about his appearance. I must say, though, Stan is a good-looking man. Most called him Stanley or by his Polish nickname, Stasiu, but I called him Stan, same as did his sister, Betty, who fawned over him something sickening.

  As for my marriage, it was good in the beginning, meaning the first few months. I didn’t get hit around much, but that’s because Stan once beat me up early and that was enough. After that, I was careful when I saw a certain look in his eyes, but sometimes, too, he’d squeeze hard my wrist or forearm to make a point. Sex? He just used me when he wanted. I didn’t feel he really loved me, but still he’d say, “If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you.”

  It was the winter of ’62 to ’63 when I learned of other girls. I was pregnant then and didn’t know what to do. In the end, I didn’t do anything. There was no money and no place to go.

  Starting a year after we were married, Stan was in and out of jail. He was never in long, usually for a couple days or a week. But when he’d come home, I was expected to welcome him like nothing happened. Because Stan abandoned himself to leisure and crime, we were on welfare. It was embarrassing to me, but Stan didn’t care, and it went on. He never wanted to fit in society. He made money anyway he could with gangsters. I recall more than one mob guy, Mannarinos and all, playing cards in my living room. Stan wasn’t Italian, so I suppose he wasn’t a bona fide mob member, but they all schemed together.

  Agent Marsh didn’t know if this information would help in finding and prosecuting Stanley, but his job was to relay anything he got. Minutes before, when Diane had mentioned her husband’s sister, Betty, she became animated, a little angry. Marsh let it pass, but Diane’s emotions were too odd a reaction. He’d revisit the subject.

  “Diane, is Betty someone Stan relies on?”

  “She’s meaningful to him, yeah. They are to each other. Betty is one of those Nordic-looking beauties. She’s nice to me, can’t say she’s not, but her and Stan adore each other. Those two can sit together and talk like there’s no one else in the room. He loves her.”

  “Of course,” said Marsh, “but you’re not saying … ?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As a woman, I have suspicions. But I don’t want to speak more on this. I don’t know, and that’s it.” Marsh made his notes but changed the subject.

  “Diane, did Stan, or would he, ever torture animals or insects?”

  “No, never!” Diane said vehemently.

  “Was there anything in Stan, you know, a cruel streak which might have you believe he could rape or hurt women?”

  “Yes, he could,” Diane said simply.

  “How does he view authority figures?”

  “Stan doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do. He has a hate for the law.”

  “For anyone else?”

  “Yes, for negroes. He hates them, too, maybe more than the law.”

  “Do you love him now?”

  “No, I don’t.” Diane saw no reason to inform Agent Marsh she was three months’ pregnant. And it wasn’t Stan’s.

  “Before all this trouble, Diane, did you ever think that Stan could kill?”

  “Yes,” was the flat response.

  Yes. Stan the killer.

  During the hour that Marsh was interviewing Diane, Agent John Porter was doing the same with Jodine Fawkes in the next town over. Porter knew Jodine ran hot and cold, helpful and unobliging by turns. Their contact over time had brought them to a first name basis, and Jodine began,

  You’d think this strange, John, but I didn’t know Stanley’s personal business, but I sensed he did things against the law. He never talked to me about what he did, ’cept one time he told me a story about him and a buddy a few years back getting accused of breaking into Adam’s Meat Market in Gibsonia. You seen their sign, “Nobody Beats Adam’s Meats.” Well, his buddy’s backseat is filled with meat. They take it to his buddy’s house. The guy is married and his wife hits the roof. She’ll have nothing to do with this. She throws him out and is going to testify against her husband and Stanley, but before this gets too far she said it was all a mistake. Said she didn’t see anything, and the case was thrown out. When tellin’ me this, Stanley gives me one of his smirks and says, “See honey, I’m innocent after all.”

  Like Diane and Stan, Jodine Fawkes was born into poor circumstances. Her father was a coal miner who “had some drinkin’” that brought about his early demise. Years later, she’d lose a brother from the same cause. Jodine managed to get to eleventh grade before dropping out. She helped her mother around the house but was otherwise jobless.

  “I was fifteen when I met Stanley at the Torena Dancehall,” Jodine told Agent Porter. “For the longest time, he said his name was Bill Wallace. I didn’t know he was married for about a year.” [This may not be perfect truth as Hoss’s wife, Diane, had told Agent Marsh, “I knew all the Fawkes girls. Jo was wild.”]

  “What was he like?” Porter asked.

  “Stanley was a gentleman. We hung out and had fun. We didn’t have sex till six months, maybe. I was a virgin at the time. He drove a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria, licensed and inspected. It was a beautiful car. I never seen him with nothing new. My dad died in ’66 but my mom didn’t take to Stanley. She said she could see through him and for me to get away, but I was in love and we were happy together.”

  Porter encouraged Jodine to continue about her life with Hoss. Sometimes to know the woman is to know the man.

  “You know how styles change? I kept up with the hairdos and miniskirts but Stanley stayed the conservative dresser,” Jodine said. “Jeans and regular shirt or white T-shirt. No bell bottoms for Stanley. Hair was kept shorter, always clean-shaven and neat-looking. He never wore tennis shoes but usually a dress shoe, even with his jeans. He always exercised and lifted weights. He looked good, the type of guy who could capture a girl’s heart. He did mine. We just laughed and talked together like boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “Did you go places?”

  “Not really, I mean like other couples who went bowling or to the movies. We never had much money, so our entertainment was simple. We’d go to the Venus Diner on Route 8 and get pie à la mode and coffee. He loved that.”

  Jodine’s mother was in her chair in the small living room, watching television. She said little more than, “I told my daughter more than once about Stanley, but do young girls listen to their mothers?” She paid no further attention to the FBI man questioning her daughter in the kitchen.

  “So you and Stanley went merrily along?”

  “Yes and no,” replied Jo.

 
I loved him very much for a long time, but Stanley’s not an easy man. He’s demanding, you know, how to dress or wear my hair. Sometimes when I’d tire of him I’d tell him I didn’t want to see him no more. He’d get mean, scared me some. He’d never hit me like across the face but he’d squeeze my hand till he hurt me. It was a threat. Stanley always told me, “If I ever see you with anyone, I’ll strangle you.” He’d terrorize any guy who was interested in me. Once he threatened to blow up my house. If I would leave him he’d get me back. After a while I just accepted it. And look at me now … I’ve had three death threats already, people saying I turned in Stanley for blood money.

  “We’re checking all that out, Jo. It’s baloney, crank calls, but we’ll be around the house as long as needed.” Changing the subject, Porter asked, “Your kids, how are they?”

  “My kids are none of your business,” Jodine said defiantly, without reason.

  “I know, I was just wondering when they were born?”

  “I won’t tell you the day or month, but my first was born in 1967, my second this year.”

  “That’s Stanley and Michael, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Jo said, resigned to answer all these questions.

  Porter said carefully, “You know Stanley and Diane’s first son is also named Stanley.”

  “Yeah, I know. When I first got pregnant, and I think he did that to me on purpose, he decided on the name Stanley, then saying to me, ‘Now my name will go on forever.’”

  “He was proud, then?”

  “Hell, yeah. He was always playing with Stanley Jr. holding him. He’d like pictures taken of all us together.”