Regarding Getty’s assertion that a continuance was indeed granted, and that any delay was inconsequential, the court of appeals disagreed, saying bluntly, “Judge Getty did not grant a continuance.” As to Judge Murphy’s support of Getty, and Murphy’s contention that Hoss’s Pennsylvania death sentence made the purpose of the 180-day rule “manifestly inapplicable” to Hoss, the high court inclined to agree but still found Murphy’s justification irrelevant, saying, “Hoss’s death penalty was not final, and in today’s world it is folly to suppose it ever would be”—somehow implying that judges should not consider what is actually current law but instead base their rulings on what might become new law.
As for the argument that petitions for a continuance are well within the discretion of the trial judge and will not be disturbed absent an abuse of that discretion, Judge McWilliams became severe: “To what we have said about ‘good cause,’ we say the State did not show a continuance of whatever duration was either necessary or reasonable. And while it might be argued that a person already in prison would be less likely than others to be affected by anxiety accompanying public accusation, there is reason to believe that an untried charge can have fully as depressive an effect upon a prisoner as upon a person at large. But for a speedy trial, rehabilitation is corroded. A man’s anxiety and depression may leave him with little inclination toward self-improvement.”
It was not the high court’s role to concern itself with the discomfiture of anyone other than the accused, Stanley Hoss, so the ruling left unmentioned Hoss’s victims, Linda and Lori Mae, and the anxiety and depression of their family and friends, who needed the justice and closure that a trial might provide. Instead, McWilliams’s closing words removed nearly all hope of justice for Hoss’s victims: “We draw some comfort that our decision today is not likely to expedite Hoss’s release from the bastilles of Pennsylvania. Indeed, if the identifiable remains of the kidnapped mother and child are ever discovered, a further indictment is possible. But even if Hoss were to be set free tomorrow, we could not do otherwise. The indictments must be dismissed with prejudice.”
Despite the monstrous nature of the kidnapping and murders of the Peugeots, Stanley Hoss walked away. And, kindly warned of his danger by Maryland’s high court, why would he ever risk future prosecution by talking about their hidden bodies?
Several months after the decision, Judge Getty was in the garage of a waterfront hotel in Annapolis when, by chance, he met the chief judge of the court of appeals, Paul Hammond. Hammond explained that he’d been absent the day the Hoss case was heard, and another judge had filled in. Then he said to Getty, “I want you to know something. Had I been present that day, the result that came out would never have seen the light of day.” This meant a good deal coming from the chief judge, and Getty thanked Hammond for his words.
It was decades after this encounter that Judge Getty spoke further of the legalities of Hoss’s case. “I wouldn’t contend I didn’t make any mistakes in my rulings with Hoss, but none, no material error, warranted the overturning done by the high court. It seems to me when I ruled not to dismiss charges and to proceed within a reasonable time but did not include a specific order for a continuance was, if deemed wrong at all, only harmless error. Because of my vehement disagreement with the final decision, I wrote a rather curt letter to the author of that decision.” Getty laughed when thinking of this all these years later. “It was a real piece of temerity to chide a judge sitting on a higher court. I understand there was some discussion over this brashness of mine whether I should be summoned before the court, but cooler heads prevailed. Good, too, because I had no intention of backing down. My God, this was the most outrageous crime around here in the eighty-five summers I’ve been alive.” Sitting at his desk, piled with books, papers, and readings, Getty, a distinguished man of Lincolnesque proportions, lamented, “In my four decades as a judge, and add twelve to that as a state’s attorney, this Hoss affair by the court of appeals is the worst decision in any matter I was ever involved with in my entire career.”
For citizens who believed Hoss should be tried for his crimes, there was hope. The Maryland high court decision pertained only to state charges. Hoss still faced federal indictments for the Peugeot kidnappings. It was now up to the feds to proceed with prosecution.
They never did.
The case also had another peculiar twist. When Maryland state attorney Don Mason had prepared for trial, the kidnapping charge against Hoss mentioned only Linda Peugeot; Lori Mae Peugeot’s name was never placed on the indictment. So what was to stop Mason from now bringing charges against Hoss for Lori Mae? The statue of limitations hadn’t run out. But nothing was done.
22
It is hard to imagine an atmosphere more stifling than that of an upper-tier prison cell in August. Stanley Hoss wore only underwear, his hard, muscled body covered with sweat. On his bunk lay two pieces of steel, each with a wide blade fully nine inches long and honed sharp enough to cut bone. Hoss tied thin rope around the handles, then practiced tying the other ends around his wrists. He had to get them just right; the three-time killer could ill-afford to have a weapon knocked from his hand.
A tier below, Frank Phelan made identical preparations, but this was to be Stanley’s fight. Frank’s role was merely to cover his friend’s back. It was 4:00 A.M.
. . .
The previous evening, Gil Walters had sat in his third-floor office at an ancient, but still-beautiful cherry wood desk. He’d greeted the fifteen men he’d invited to this meeting, who sat before him in chairs posed for the occasion. Half those present were suspicious of Walters; the other half didn’t trust him a whit.
It had been only weeks since August 1, 1972, when Walters had been named to replace Western Penitentiary’s superintendent, Joseph Brierly. Walters, at age thirty-six, did not fit the mold of a tough prison administrator. He looked more like a high school math teacher and was viewed by the veterans as a college boy, a largely new commodity to the prison system. Further, he’d shot from counselor at Eastern State Prison to head of the Western Penitentiary in a mere four years—unheard of—which rankled not a few contenders who’d put in their time.
Already hailed by the press as the “New Image of Western Pen,” Walters had stated that his first objective was to humanize conditions for prisoners—a stance implying that inmates currently were treated other than humanely. With rehabilitation as his centerpiece, Walters sought to change Western Penitentiary’s “troubled can” image and to give hope to those confined, but already Walters knew he faced a clash of philosophies: Custody vs. Treatment. Walters worried if he could succeed at both.
The group in the super’s office represented old hands and new, corrections officers to high-level administrators. There was even one outsider, Monsignor Owen Rice, a firebrand “labor priest” who also sat on the county’s prison board. As the staffers settled in, the first minutes were taken up with sports talk, how the Steelers were a flop of a team, had been for decades.
. . .
Meanwhile, as Hoss and Phelan lay waiting for morning, neither would go back to sleep. They’d wait, knives ready, until the guards “kicked the doors” to begin a new day. By 5:00 A.M., Stanley still lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling he couldn’t see in the darkness. The heavy blades rested on his stomach.
For Hoss to engage in a dangerous vendetta at this stage of his incarceration was lunacy. He’d escaped the death penalty for his first-degree conviction of Zanella’s murder and had beaten the Peugeot kidnapping charge, a gallows case if ever there was one. Now was the time to lay low, let the appeal on his life sentence run its course. But a gauntlet had been thrown, not by some shitty midlevel malefactor like JoJo, but by Geno Spruill, black leader and kick-ass enforcer.
Events had begun building the day before, in the prison yard, when a white prisoner of small stature was cornered by a black booty bandit. Hoss intervened, threatening the predator and telling him to take it somewhere else. From nearby, Geno Spruill ha
d watched this exchange, fed up with Hoss “stickin’ hiz nose in anuthah bruhthuh’s bizzniss.”
. . .
Walters had called his meeting to show himself as a reasonable administrator, to clear up possible misperceptions, and to gather ideas of what was right and what needed fixing at Western.
“What do you see going on, Al?” asked Walters. This was to Al Eroline, who’d first passed through the prison gate during the Great Depression, in Roosevelt’s first term.
“Seems to me,” answered Eroline, “we’re at the tail end of how the place was run in the thirties and forties. Custody, security was always foremost. Now that’s not so. You can see how loose it is.”
“Before, sir,” said CO Jimmy Weaver, “each institution was like a little monarchy, with the warden as king. The state commissioner had minimal influence, didn’t intervene much. Things worked. Actually, nowadays,” the corrections officer continued, “I blame the courts. We’re given orders we don’t understand or believe in. I mean, we’re taking cutthroats out to the community to recite their damn poetry.”
Walters recognized Weaver’s view concerning outside influence. As recently as the late sixties, the U.S. Supreme Court made decisions that changed forever how prisons would be run. For the first time, really, prisons were having to confront the issue of prisoner rights.
Walters looked to Monsignor Rice, a man of unresting intellect, sympathetic, compassionate—but no fool. “With criminals, it’s fine to offer humane treatment,” said Rice, “even kindness, but they have to know you don’t fear them. Once they smell fear, all your generosities mean nothing, and you’ll get run over. The criminal is not like you and me. For the most part, they’ve stayed as children, impetuous, self-centered, with lamentable thought processes. Fulfilling their wants within prison may be charitable, some would argue, but in the end you can create a monster.”
“True,” said Walters, “but do the figures of assaults in here bear this out?”
“When I got here,” answered Gus Mastros, a twenty-year man, “the place just mesmerized me: beautiful lawns, lovely looking. Of course, there were incidents, prison being what it is. The ’53 riot burned the place down. You could smell it a mile away. Captain Maroney came in with the state police on horseback. So, sure, you’ll have problems, but it’s a matter of frequency. These days fights, stabbings, rapes, even killings are far above anything I’ve seen.
“I can tell you with certainty that all were treated fairly and humanely, but troublemakers saw the rough side,” Mastros continued. “Those in isolation got bread and water. Some years back, an inmate was brought before the deputy warden [of] the time. He said, ‘Why did you speak so harshly toward my officers?’ Then [he] got a Billy club from his desk and beat the man to the floor. This sounds brutish, I know, but even the inmate knew what was coming. Order was kept.”
. . .
While Hoss and Phelan lay awake, their plan set, Geno Spruill was sound asleep. He’d backpedaled the white devil Hoss, something no one had done before, and for such a coup his stock had risen. Many of his friends, anxious for the story, had come up to him, asking with smiles, “What did you say to Hoss? … What did he do then?” Spruill replied many times over in statesmanlike fashion, “If Hoss wants ta mouff off to white boys, well, let ’im, but he’z no more gonna intahfere in a black man’s bizzniss. Right, bruhthuhs?” Respectful listeners nodded. Talking through a contraband toothpick stuck in his mouth, Spruill revealed the message he’d given to Hoss. “Then I sez to the man, ‘If you be so bad, git your shit togethuh. It’ll be you an’ me tomorrah mornin’. An’ ya know, the coward didn’t have the balls to even look at me, jist turned away and walked off. Everyone saw this. Ha! He looked scared to me.”
. . .
One by one staffers spoke their minds. Walters gathered the prison’s condition was the worst of all—a house divided. In the blocks, there were white ranges and black ranges. In the mess hall, it was whites to the left, blacks to the right. The Black Muslims, with shirts buttoned to the neck and stern countenances, marched the yard every morning like soldiers. Most never opened a Koran. Others refused the label of killer or swindler, regarding themselves as political prisoners. Amerika the Oppressive.
When his turn came, Officer Ken Lechwar spoke up frankly. A graduate of Duquesne University, Lechwar was himself a college boy, a rarity among the prison officers. He had only a single year in on the job but it had been a hard one, mostly walking the ranges. “From what I’ve seen so far,” said Lechwar, “the new initiatives haven’t improved behavior. You can treat them like Prince Charles come-to-visit, or like your drunken, freeloading brother-in-law. Hardly matters.”
Walters laughed, then suggested that everyone pour coffee and light up.
. . .
Black heavens ever so slowly turned grey. Dawn, August 17, 1972. The 6:00 A.M. To 2:00 P.M. shift had just come on. Range officers turned the key locks of the cells. Once this was done, each officer went to the very end of his range to pull on a long bar that acted as a fulcrum for a 3-inch piece of flat rail running the length of the range. This clever device, in place since Western Pen opened in 1882, lowered the long rail just enough to unblock a triangular protrusion located atop each cell door, which rested against the inside of the rail and acted as a second lock. Unlocking the individual cells on a range consumed several minutes; pulling the bar, as it was called, only a moment.
Officer Ken Lechwar had been at the superintendent’s meeting the night before but had made it home in time to catch the news, have a sandwich, and hit the hay. Rising at 5:00 for work at 6:00, Lechwar was working up on P range. When he peered into cell 22, he saw a fully dressed Stanley Hoss sitting on his bunk, hunched forward with forearms resting on his thighs. Lechwar considered the two of them got along okay, occasionally talking cars and women. In his way, Hoss liked Lechwar, but he was still the law, “the man.” If an all-out prison war ever erupted, he’d kill Lechwar last, that’s all.
Lock turned, Lechwar moved on. When the bar was eventually pulled, Hoss got up and walked onto the range—ready. He leaned over the rail to see comrade-in-arms Frank Phelan on the range below. Hoss winked at him.
Hoss and Phelan made their way out to the prison yard. They spotted Spruill walking with a friend, Oscar Robinson, toward the mess hall. At nearly the same time, Spruill spied Hoss, who began walking toward him. This surprised Spruill, who thought he had cowed Hoss. No matter. Spruill had been sure of himself when he’d dressed down the white punk. Though both were bulked up and powerful, Spruill had several inches and twenty-five pounds on Hoss. He didn’t see a weapon, so it would be with fists. Further, Spruill could use karate, which he’d studied for years. A kick to Hoss’s face could well seal the deal, promoting Spruill, by right of conquest, to “Most Feared” among blacks and whites. He drifted, only slightly wary, toward Hoss.
Then the shanks came out, pulled from waistbands. Spruill and Robinson stopped in their tracks. Unarmed, they looked around, anywhere, for a weapon. They ran a short distance to grab wooden tent pegs used to rope off a grassy area. No sooner had they done this than their attackers were upon them. By a tremendous swing at Robinson’s throat, Phelan forced him to retreat, which left Hoss and Spruill alone, squared off. Spruill got into his karate stance, which deterred Hoss not at all. He went right for the kill, his steel blade moving in a speeding arch for the heart. Spruill shot his arms up to protect his chest, and the blade speared through the web of his left hand, sending blood everywhere.
From a distance, CO Ron Horvat saw the commotion and ran toward the scene. On hand at more than one prison tussle, Horvat was nonetheless left with a lasting impression. “I’ve been in a lot of ghettos, even hung around some nasty barrios in Mexico, so I know the look of dangerous people who do ugly things. When I saw Hoss go after Spruill I never, I mean never, saw anything like that before. I literally saw foam coming out of Hoss’s mouth.”
With Hoss on his tail, Spruill was running and screaming. Horvat
and Sergeant Doug Cameron were blowing their whistles but, unarmed themselves, had to be very careful. Hoss looked positively rabid. In a blood frenzy, he could turn on anyone.
Running for his life and attempting to zigzag when Hoss got close, Spruill tripped and fell near the south block ramp. Hoss was right there, on him, and everyone within sight of this onslaught thought Spruill was done for. “Hoss raised that knife,” said inmate John Keen, “ready for the plunge, when a black dude called Cochise grabbed at Hoss’s arm enough to foul up his swing.”
With Hoss off-balance, Spruill sprang to his feet and bounded off like a jackrabbit, heading toward the nearest safe haven, the Third Gate, which is actually a massive set of steel doors. In clement weather, the doors are always left open, but floor-to-ceiling bars, or gates, manned by an officer inside, protect against unwanted intrusions.
Counselor Joe Hoffman had come into the Third Gate from the auditorium and was speaking with Gus Mastros about what might be happening outside when “Spruill’s panicked face appeared. He was yelling and pounding on the gate in the greatest trepidation. Blood was on his face, hands, and shirt, and twice in quick succession he looked to his left. It was the guard’s call what to do. He didn’t know the exact situation, whether shanked-up inmates would rush in, but he turned the lock and held the gate ajar, all the while yelling, ‘Get in, get in!’”
Spruill thrust himself through the opening only to barge in his panic into Gus Mastros, both collapsing in a tangled heap. “My lord,” said Mastros, “when I opened my eyes Spruill’s face wasn’t six inches from mine. Though black, he was white as a ghost.”
Hoffman recalled,
Even before Gus and Spruill began to extricate themselves, I said to Spruill, “Who stabbed you?” I guess even in these seconds he got some composure back, knowing his attacker couldn’t get at him, because he said, “Ain’t sayin’,” but he was still scared to death and cut pretty good. Right then I looked out in the passageway and saw Hoss—with Frankie Phelan behind him—and was just fascinated by what I saw. Hoss held his knives up to shoulder height. You could tell he had a complete dedication to destruction. He stood there as calm as the devil in dark shadow, peering through the gate at us, trying to see Spruill.
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