Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  We got Stanley to and from court without incident. A couple weeks later I was at Graterford and went to Hoss’s cell. I told the officers to kick his door. They said, “You sure?” I said yeah, he won’t bother me. So I went in, sat down on his bunk with him. I called him as I did since he was a kid, “Well, Stasiu, you’ve been out for the very last time.” I rapped my knuckles on the cell wall and said, “This is where you’re going to spend the rest of your life.” He responded, “Let me tell you something. One of us is gonna die before all this is over.” I told Hoss he was right but it wasn’t going to be me. He said, “We’ll see about that.” Yeah, more spit and fire, but there was a distance in his eyes I’d never seen before. I think he knew.

  Maybe less so, but Hoss kept writing his letters.

  I am surprised you moved, Diane. Do you like your new place? I had a wonderful Christmas. Did you cut down a tree like we used to and decorate it with strings of popcorn? Two young guys locked near me killed themselves. One received a bad letter from his wife so he wrote her a note, left it on his bed then hung himself with a bed sheet. I don’t know why the other guy hung up. Did you get my card? Will you send me some pictures for my cell wall?

  . . .

  On a snowy day in early January, 1978, Steve Coble was hunting near Wisterman, Ohio. Approaching a small thicket, something caught his eye. Kneeling down, he saw what appeared to be a human skull frozen into the ground. He went home to call the Putnam County Sheriff ’s Department. As it had grown dark, Coble met the following morning with Sheriff Bob Beutler and several deputies. More snow had fallen, and a broom was used to clear the area. Beside the skull was the bottom jaw with most of the teeth still intact. Small trees around the skull were cut down and a canvas was placed over the slender trunks. Two heaters were installed to blow hot air under the canvas to thaw the ground, but it was not until 1:00 A.M. that the men were able to carefully dig around the skull and, eventually, an entire skeleton. Bones were put in one box, cloth and other debris in another. Later, another piece of the skull, two white buttons, and three teeth were added to the find. All the evidence was sent for analysis to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.

  Sheriff Beutler had to search for the name but soon gave his assessment. “I’ll betcha this is Linda Peugeot, kidnapped and murdered back in ’69. The guy, Hoss, came through these parts. Said he buried her around here.” This led to a call to Investigator Bill Baker in Cumberland, Maryland, who mailed official reports and dental records.

  The following day, the coroner’s office estimated the skeleton’s age at death at twenty years. The skeleton was missing both hands, the left foot, and a long bone from the right leg. Only bits of fabric remained. The entire area was searched again with small hand rakes, which yielded bones believed to be part of a foot and a long bone thought to be from the right leg. It would be days more before the final report, but Sheriff Beutler wasn’t waiting. He and Detective Dave Roney left Ottawa, Ohio, on the long drive to Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison.

  “After having spent the night nearby,” said Beutler, “we arrived at the prison Monday morning of January 9.” Deputy Superintendent Robert Mauer escorted the officers across part of the sixty-two acres inside the walls to the maximum-security ward, which stood alone in a courtyard. Beutler was struck that the only windows in the building were those of the kitchen.

  “Hoss came out a few minutes later with four guards around him,” recalled Beutler. “Just going by what pictures I’d seen, I was surprised at his appearance, 230 pounds or more, brawny, and very rough cast. He had longer than shoulder-length hair, a long mustache, and a goatee about a half-inch wide in the middle of his chin. We told him who we were and what our purpose was. Hoss said—with an attitude—that he knew nothing of the girl. ‘I haven’t been charged with anything in connection with that girl,’ he said, and that finding the girl was our job, not his. The bastard added, ‘Everything I know is going to Hell with me.’”

  Days later the coroner’s office called Beutler. The skeleton was not that of Linda Peugeot.

  Three weeks after the skeleton’s discovery in Ohio, Senator Edward Early spoke before the Pennsylvania State Judiciary Committee: “We here in Pennsylvania cannot escape thinking about Stanley Hoss when we consider the death penalty.”

  Pennsylvania had abolished its death penalty in 1972. Two years later the law was resurrected but in December 1977, it was again declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court. Now Senator Early led the legislature to draft a new version, one that reflected the will of the people, and one that would stick. Among other facts and examples, Early brought up Hoss’s criminal biography. “It’s been nine years since Hoss has become known as something more than a small-town hoodlum. Look what he did! There can be no redemption here. He’s in prison now, probably waiting to kill again.”

  Early’s strong appeal—“Are we so ineffectual we cannot protect our citizens?”—helped usher the bill to its passage (over Governor Shapp’s veto) in September 1978. It has remained the law of Pennsylvania ever since.

  In Maryland that same September, Edna Thompson may have read of Pennsylvania’s resolve, but any emotions the loving woman had were long since gone. Her sole interest these days was to bury her daughter and granddaughter in the local cemetery. Then she’d be able to visit them all the time. Maybe that would relieve the nightmares, lift the crushing depression, lighten the blackness. Her husband, William, had helped her get through the years since Linda’s and Lori Mae’s disappearance, but he’d died in the summer. There had been moments of hope—the discovery of the skeleton in Ohio had buoyed her temporarily—but she knew Hoss would take his secrets to hell with him …

  It was September 19, 1978. In three days, Edna would face another anniversary of Linda’s kidnapping. Maybe a neighbor would bring over a pie, sit awhile. Toward evening, Edna ran a bath. Sitting in the warm water she slit her left wrist, then her right, and closed her eyes.

  . . .

  For Stanley, one month dripped into the next. In the grey of another cold autumn, he wrote to Diane the longest letter he’d ever written from prison. In part, he told Diane:

  You have tremendous cause to feel I’ve wronged you. You can despise me, desire to torture me or crave to see me dead. But I demand that you do not mock me. Skin me alive, tear my body to shreds, shackle me naked to the ground and turn loose upon me a thousand starving King rats. But don’t mock me. Yearn to see me dead, to see my obituary, “Mad Dog Hoss Dead.” But don’t deny that we ever existed.

  When you saw my picture you said I was looking old. Why did you say that? Because it’s true. I look haggard and drawn. When you see my picture you are looking at a man who had been dead for years. I am dead.

  Strange though, isn’t it, how just a few years have destroyed my youth, killed my happiness, buried my spirit and converted me into a hatchet-eyed, world-hating, walking dead man.

  But what is this thing that time cannot kill but only your mocking can kill? I’ll tell you but it reveals how weak I really am and always have been. I’m not ashamed of this for my weakness is you, Diane. I love you. You no longer love me? But what if you did? You can’t murder memories. Live life in the present, Diane, but don’t deny we once loved greatly and equally.

  The evil within me drives me to act like a devil, a madman, a beast. I admit these things. I have wronged you but I love you. What difference how many girls I have fascinated? You are the only girl I have ever loved. I’ll love you past death.

  Leave me my memories. Let me love you and the kids. I’m not so insane as to expect you visit me or let the kids visit, but you know our kids represent the joys of our love. Why deny that our kids are our kids? We have our happy memories. We have our kids.

  I have lost you and lost sight of our kids. My heart bleeds, my blood screams, but Diane, can’t we declare a truce? I started the war between us. You ended it. You have conquered me. Can’t you tolerate me to the extent that you occasionally write and let me know about yo
u and the kids?

  Diane, they keep me caged around the clock. They won’t even let me out of my cell for exercise. I pace this cage. I stalk it. I hate it and hate all these people, all these pigs, all these cowards. Every day, every hour, every minute that my hate is not burning my mind, I think of you and our kids.

  Diane, nourish my memories or kill me outright. Please write.

  . . .

  It was early, 4:00 A.M. on Wednesday, December 6, 1978, when Hoss re-inforced blue shoestring with a strip of denim, then fashioned the length into a noose.

  Some prisoners would lose track of time, but Stanley always knew what day it was. He was also aware that ever since the morning he’d stabbed Geno Spruill he’d been held in isolation: 2,311 days. Door Welded Shut. Of that incident he’d written to reporter Tony Klimko, “I could have killed Geno then but decided to let him live just to show him God is white.” This was one thing he might miss—the intermittent correspondence he’d taken up with Klimko, or KDKA’s Bill Burns, and a select few other media personalities. Burns once wrote that the quickest way for someone to make a rep in prison is to “become the man who kills Stanley Hoss.” Stanley liked that. “You know,” he’d told inmate Gergel, “like, the king is dead, long live the king.”

  As a marked man, why then, Hoss reasoned, couldn’t he be released to population? He knew the administration wanted him dead, so this was a way to do it. But no one would play along, nor would the prison system forgive him for Peterson, even a little. He’d never get out of isolation, not until he was found some time in the next century sitting on his bunk as a skeleton.

  His pleading letter to Diane had brought no reply. Even if one arrived that day or the next, its very delay showed him what small importance he had, how little he’d become.

  Never an untidy cell-keeper, Hoss gathered the few items he had—a book or two, a pile of yellowing newspaper clippings, prison garb—and put all neatly in a corner with a note in his careful penmanship requesting that his “last effects” be sent to a woman who’d been a recent visitor, one who, like the others, had read about him and wanted to meet him. It was to her, just the day before, that Hoss had spoken of suicide. By the end of the visit, she thought she’d talked him out of it.

  At 7:50 A.M., a guard came by on his rounds. When he peered into the cell, Hoss nodded but said nothing. Once the guard continued along Hoss knew he’d have enough time unobserved, uninterrupted. He dipped his finger in a small container of red paint he’d hidden away and wrote a message on the wall.

  “I cannot deny this urge to die, to put an end to what has been this agony called life.”

  Once done, he tied the makeshift rope to his cell bars, slipped his head in the noose, then—unrepentant, secrets held within—prisoner #P-0310 dropped to his knees and fell forward.

  Epilogue

  Over his long run of crimes, spanning more than a decade, Stanley Hoss’s very name became synonymous with a danger, something very bad. In western Pennsylvania, boys played “Cops and Hoss” rather than “Cops and Robbers.” When darkness descended over yards, fields, and woods, mothers called out back doors for their children, warning them not of the boogeyman but “Time to come in or Stanley Hoss will get you!” His transformation from killer to dark legend had begun.

  How did Hoss die? The coroner’s report said, “asphyxiation by strangulation.” His death was listed as a suicide, but that didn’t stop wide speculation, theories. His longtime mistress, Jodine Fawkes, believed he was “officially murdered,” while his ex-wife Diane does “not for a minute believe he took his own life”—if only because “he loved himself too much.” General barroom talk, along with conspiracy theorists, wishful thinkers, and lovers of a good mystery all pegged the death as an “administrative hit”—a theory unfounded, of course. One thing was for sure, though: no sympathy was expressed for the inimical Hoss.

  Asaline Peterson has always believed divine intervention ultimately rights all wrongs. When visited by the press the day Hoss died, Asaline told of her trust in God, “but these past five years have been terrible. I remember Hoss in those horrible courtroom scenes, not man but animal, with no insides. I have never been in prison but I think I know what life is like there. My life now is just like being in prison.”

  Life was as hard for her son, Walter Jr. In the years following his dad’s death, Walter Jr. lost boyhood joy and his grades slipped. “Mom,” he would say, “the man only got ten years … maybe someday he’ll come back and get me.” No child should bear such worry, but Walter Jr. eventually improved. Same for Asaline, but her improvements were marginal, her happiness never to approach what she’d had with her husband by her side. An unremitting anguish forced her from her job in 1976. Her sparkling personality had disappeared, replaced by skittishness and paranoia, her person beset with dramatic weight loss, then gain, and back again. There were periods when the melancholy would lift, but Asaline was never again whole. Despite her relative youth, Asaline did not remarry but stuck close to Mt. Olive Baptist Church—and the church stuck by her. Except for spells of exceptional debilitation, Asaline was the church organist for sixty years. It was as close to peace as she got. She is now eighty years old and loves her Lord and her church.

  There was, though, that prideful moment when “Pete’s” son, Walter Jr. became a Pennsylvania state trooper. He serves today.

  As of October 3, 2010, Reverend William Callaway had reached the notable milestone of serving Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Clairton, Pennsylvania, for forty-eight years.

  . . .

  A clandestine funeral? No one had heard of such a thing, but that was the arrangement made for Stanley Hoss.

  J. R. Sewicki of Sewicki Funeral Home accepted Hoss’s body for “the mother’s sake.” He, along with local police and the Stocklein family (owners of Lakewood Cemetery, where Hoss was to be buried), worried over the likelihood of disruption, an unseemly following, or the carnival atmosphere publicity might bring, with Hoss’s body being honored by all the wrong people. In the supreme irony, therefore, it was in the strictest secrecy that the region’s most famous criminal was quickly mourned and buried. After being transported to Sewicki’s for a predawn viewing—attended only by Hoss’s mother (his father having died the previous March)—the coffin arrived at Lakewood by 7:00 A.M., and by 7:30 A.M., Stanley was laid in the ground beside his sister Betty—“Together Forever.” None of his women and none of his children attended.

  In 1982, Steven, Stanley and Diane’s second child, was nineteen years old. On probation for stealing, Steven met a certain James “The Indian” Harkins, nearly thirty years his senior. It was Harkins who told the teenager about the “toughest criminal of ’em all—your ol’ man.” Steven rel-ished hearing all the stories about the father he’d barely known.

  The two became friends and teamed up for a four-month crime spree, Harkins as driver with Steven wielding the gun for numerous armed robberies. The pair threatened store clerks with death and beat and bound at least one homeowner. Caught and convicted, Steven was sent to Western Penitentiary to serve ten to twenty years. Counselor Tom Conner completed a classification summary on Steven. Conner remembered Hoss’s boy as “cocky, full of himself, and he made the statement, ‘Do you know who my ol’ man is?’” Yet, of course, Steven’s crimes, including escape, have taken an enormous toll; it has taken him twenty-eight years to be released from prison. Free for a year, he violated parole: back in the slammer.

  Stanley and Diane’s first-born son, Stanley the third, never turned to crime and was never incarcerated—except in his own mind. Taunted mercilessly as a boy, ridiculed as “the killer’s kid,” this Stanley turned inward, withdrew. Diane said he could never distance himself enough from what his father had done. Stanley has seen psychiatrists over many years; counseling has been a regular part of his life. According to his mother,

  He’s had a hard time coming around, like he wears the mark of Cain. In some ways I think Stan damaged Stanley even more than Steven. I always felt
Steven had a choice, but with Stanley it was as if a wave overwhelmed him, nearly drowned him. Keep in mind, of my children, Stanley was nearly eight when his father killed the policeman, and all that followed. Stanley knew his father, loved him as boys will love their dads. So yes, Stanley’s world was turned inside out.

  Steven was six when the big crimes happened. He remembered his father less than Stanley but still was affected.

  Diane pulled out an old prison letter filed in a shoebox to read a passage about Steven. “Stan wrote this,” Diane explained, “after I’d complained how rambunctious and troublesome Steven could be: ‘We both always could see that Steven is just like me but don’t beat him, Diane. The cops beat me all my life and it just made me worse.’”

  Diane sighed. “Maybe it’s true that it’s just in your makeup to go bad. I remember when Steven was arrested for the robberies there was a big story with the headline: Like Stanley Hoss, Son Was ‘Born to Lose.’” Diane gave a resigned laugh. “Yeah, just like Stan’s tattoo said. Could that be it then? Just a roll of the dice, that despite a mother’s efforts her son will grow up to be a criminal?”

  In 1993, Diane married her long-time boyfriend, Ron, who was a good man to her and her children. “My three girls have no memory of Stan. All they ever knew was Ron. We had our little place out in the country and we were happy for a long time.” But not forever.

  At the unlikely age of fifty-eight, Ron began “drugging.” It was not long before addiction ruled his waking hours. “I begged him to stop,” said Diane, “held his hand, encouraged rehab. He cried, said he was helpless and afraid but wouldn’t or couldn’t quit.” It got so bad Diane eventually had to move out to live with her daughter, LeAnn. Diane persisted in trying to help, but in January 2008 Ron put a bullet in his head.

  Stanley Hoss’s fifteen-year-old bride, now sixty-seven, has had her share of sorrow and hardship. With her name change and the passing years, few know who she is or her story. Diane still resides in the Pittsburgh area.