Fish described his method for seducing and bribing children, often going naked under his painter’s overalls so he could quickly remove his clothing, ready for sexual abuse. He selected victims from the poorest classes, especially “colored children,” because he knew they were the least likely type of victim to raise a community fuss.
Fish entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. His trial commenced in March 1935. Detective King testified that Fish had admitted that he knew that what he had done to Grace was wrong. Still, Fish had also said, “God still has work for me to do.”
Wertham said that Fish had practiced “every known sexual abnormality,” although his prepared list was not admitted. Giving a diagnosis of paranoid psychosis, he described Fish’s extensive family history of abnormal and psychotic personalities. Fish, Wertham said, had no rational control. He was dangerous but insane and should be institutionalized. In support, Fish’s children testified about having witnessed his self-torture and exhibitionism.
For the prosecution, Dr. Charles Lambert and Dr. James Vavasour, who had seen Fish for about three hours, refuted Wertham and another psychiatrist for the defense, finding that Fish was legally sane. He’d used false names, carefully planned his crimes, and took pains to hide evidence. Every step of the way, he was aware that his acts were immoral and illegal.
The jury took it all in and convicted Fish of first-degree murder. As Fish awaited his sentencing, he confessed to killing the Gaffney boy. He said he’d cut the boy into pieces and roasted his buttocks with onions and carrots. He also admitted to the murder of the McDonnell boy on Staten Island.
On June 17, 1935, Fish, now 65, went to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, his hands clasped together as if in prayer.
The Vanishing Judge
AN ENDURING MYSTERY is that of Judge Joseph Force Crater, who simply vanished one day after stepping into a cab in Manhattan. Born in 1889 in Easton, PA, he attended Lafayette College before going to Columbia University Law School in Manhattan. He took up the practice of law in New York and became president of the Democratic Party Club. President Roosevelt appointed him as Associate Judge of the New York Supreme Court, and just days before the appointment was to be announced, Crater withdrew $20,000 from his bank account, probably for the standard bribe for Tammany Hall officials who’d put his name forward for this honor. That’s how things worked.
During July of 1930, Crater was with his wife at their vacation home at Belgrade Lakes, Maine, when he received a phone call. He said he had business in the city, but did not identify the caller or the nature of his business. He just said that he had to “straighten those fellows out.” Circumstances suggest the caller was a showgirl with whom he was having an affair, as he subsequently accompanied her to Atlantic City. Afterward he returned to Maine for a brief period before going back to Manhattan. This was the last that his wife ever saw of him.
The last known sighting happened on August 6, 1930. Judge Crater had just been with friends at a restaurant, but said he had tickets to the theater and had to leave. They recalled that he’d been in a good mood. They’d seen him hail a cab and get in. Then Judge Crater was gone.
At first, no one missed him. A week later, his wife began to wonder she hadn’t heard from him. Generally he checked in every few days. She called friends and acquaintances, but no one had seen him recently. Then Crater failed to show up for the opening of the courts.
Now people were concerned. An investigation turned up information that on the day he disappeared, he’d asked his assistant, Joseph Mara, to cash two large checks for him, to the tune of over five thousand dollars. He’d also taken $20,000 from campaign funds, but had not said what it was for. Around noon on the day he’d disappeared, Crater and Mara carried two briefcases to his Manhattan apartment. He’d then purchased a single ticket to a Broadway play that evening, Dancing Partners. Prior to the show, he went out to dinner where he ran into friends. They described how he’d gone out to get a cab to make it to the show.
There were no more leads, but the story grabbed headlines: a prominent New York judge had virtually disappeared. His safe deposit box was empty and the two briefcases that Mara described were missing as well. Leads began to pour in from all over the world, but most were false. There was even a grand jury hearing, but despite the testimony of nearly 100 people, the police had nothing to go on.
In the New York apartment, Mrs. Crater found uncashed checks, record for stocks and bonds, and a note to the effect that Crater had been wary of someone. He did not offer a name. Mrs. Crater believed he’d been the victim of foul play. She couldn’t assist police with any names, however, and they never tracked down the woman with whom he was alleged to be having an affair.
In 1939, Judge Crater was officially declared deceased. His case was closed 40 years later. Then in 2005, an announcement was made that the case might have been cracked.
The NYPD Cold Case Squad investigated a letter left behind by Stella Ferrucci-Good, who died April 2, 2005. Her granddaughter discovered the letter in a metal box full of clippings that covered Crater’s disappearance. Stella Ferrucci-Good claimed she knew what had become of the judge. He’d been abducted and murdered.
Her husband, Parks Department Supervisor Robert Good (now deceased), had been part of the plan, she said. With the assistance of a NYPD cop named Charles Burns and the cop’s brother, cabby Frank Burns, Good had allegedly killed the judge and buried his body beneath the boardwalk at West Eighth Street in Coney Island.
In 2005, this area was the site of an aquarium, and in fact when the ground had been excavated for this building, the skeletal remains of five bodies had been unearthed. No one knew who these decedents could be. Sources confirmed that a police officer named Robert Burns had served during the right period of time at the precinct at Coney Island. However, the sets of exhumed bones had been reburied in a potter’s field on Hart Island. They’d mingled with other unclaimed remains, so it’s unlikely there will ever be a definitive answer as to whether the “missingest man in New York,” as the media dubbed him, was killed and buried in this manner. Stella didn’t provide a motive.
The Mystery of Frank Olson
I MET JAMES STARRS IN York, Pennsylvania, just after he’d wrapped up his part in this case. He was a law professor at the George Washington University who undertook exhumations and re-autopsies to help families or set history straight. Although I missed the big event in this case, I attended the reburial. I also did plenty of research to assist with determining the manner of death, since the CIA had admitted to lies and the manner remained a mystery. We included this case in A Voice for the Dead.
It was just after midnight on November 28, 1953, when Dr. Frank Olson reportedly jumped from a thirteenth-floor window in the Hotel Statler to his death on the sidewalk below. He was still alive for a few moments before he finally expired. The night watchman, Armand Pastore, looked up and saw a shade flapping through the broken glass. This man, he realized, had jumped through a closed window with the shade drawn. He’d never seen that before, and he’d seen a lot of suicides. Olson was just 43.
The night operator also placed a call from 1018A, the room that the decedent had occupied with another man. It was placed to a Dr. Abramson on Long Island. The caller said, “Well, he’s gone.” The reply was brief: “That’s too bad.” They’d both hung up without another word.
Hotel officials went to 1018A and found the other man, CIA Agent Robert Lashbook, calmly sitting in the room. Oddly, he asked no questions about the fate of the person who’d shared the room with him. He said he’d been awakened by the noise of shattering glass. He’d realized that Olson had committed suicide. There was nothing Lashbrook could have done, he insisted. Yet Lashbrook hadn’t called the front desk to alert anyone or ask about the decedent, and Olson’s bed had the look of someone being forcibly removed. It was all quite suspicious.
An assistant medical examiner, Dr. Dominick De Maio, examined the body and stated that he’d found multiple laceratio
ns on the face and neck. Olson’s family was notified and the body was shipped back to their home in Frederick, Maryland, in a sealed casket. Due to the lacerations, Olson’s wife, Alice, was advised to leave it sealed. She and her three children held a quiet funeral service. Olson had been a biochemist at Fort Detrick, the Army’s bacteriological warfare research facility, part of top-secret Cold War defense programs. His supervisor, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, arrived to assist with the family’s needs Alice failed to understand. She’s spoken to her husband the day before he died and he hadn’t been suicidal. On the contrary, he’d been feeling quite well and had expected to be home for Thanksgiving. And if he’d been that unstable, why had they taken a room on such a high floor? Why hadn’t they kept a close eye on him? But she could get no answers.
She’d known that Frank had recently been disturbed by something after returning from a business retreat. He’d even decided to resign, but had been persuaded by Ruwet to stay. To her, he’d seemed relieved. That’s when the CIA had taken Frank to get “help” for emerging behavioral issues. They’d wanted him to see a psychiatrist. He’d agreed. In retrospect, it seems that he actually had no choice.
THEN ON JUNE 11, 1975, a front-page article in the Washington Post caught the eye of Eric Olson, Frank’s eldest son, now a grown man. The article covered the Rockefeller Commission’s findings about illegal C.I.A. activities. The reporter noted that a civilian employee of the Department of the Army had jumped from a New York hotel after he was surreptitiously given the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. It was part of a C.I.A. project in which individuals had been given psychoactive drugs, without knowing it, to learn LSD’s efficacy for making someone talk.
This description matched Frank Olson’s death. The Olson family pressured to learn more and Ruwet admitted that the unnamed man was Frank. He’d been a guinea pig in a CIA sponsored testing of LSD at a retreat at Deep Creek Lodge. Afterward, when he seemed to be suffering from side effects, the C.I.A. had decided to take him to New York for treatment. In the midst of this, he’d jumped. The Olsons sued the government and President Gerald Ford offered a financial settlement. C.I.A. Director William Colby was directed to show them the files. He provided 150 pages of heavily redacted documents.
These documents raised more questions than they answered. Eric began to suspect that his father had murdered outright. He dug deeper and learned that Frank Olson had helped to set up the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. He’d been tasked with developing secret biological means for effective interrogation and warfare. Among its projects were LSD research and the development of assassination materials.
Oddly, the first assassination manual, written the same year that Olson died, offered a suggestion for “accidental” death that could have been a blueprint for Olson’s death. It advised preparing a subject with drugs and dropping him from a window or roof. If the subject had to be controlled, blows to the temple or behind the ear were effective.
In fact, C.I.A. official Sidney Gottlieb had been involved in C.I.A. assassination plots on national leaders. He also ran mind control experiments in the name of national security. “Project Artichoke” had involved extreme interrogations and experiments with hypnosis and amnesia in subjects who knew too much. Subjects like Olson, who’d seen a lot and who’d apparently been disturbed enough by what he knew to consider resigning.
So, Frank Olson had been a C.I.A’s guinea pig. On November 19, 1953, someone at Deep Creek Lodge had slipped the drug into his glass of Cointreau. Olson developed hallucinations. Directly thereafter, he’d tried to resign. Ruwet and Lashbrook took him to an allergist in New York who used LSD with patients as therapy. He apparently gave Olson bourbon and Nembutal. By some accounts, Olson might also have met a magician, John Mulholland, who may have tried to use hypnosis.
Ruwet told investigators that Olson had spent one evening wandering the Manhattan streets. He’d discarded his wallet and wanted to “disappear.” For some reason, this supposedly suicidal man had been booked into a high floor in the hotel and assigned a bed near a window, rather than taken to a CIA safe house that was just a few blocks away.
Following Olson’s death, the C.I.A. had sent several investigators to New York. An internal memo shortly thereafter referred to Olson’s “suicide” in quotation marks.
In 1984, Eric Olson went to the Hotel Statler (now the Hotel Pennsylvania) to see the room. He could not imagine how anyone could have gotten a running start in a room this small without awakening the person in the next bed. The sill was high and a radiator blocked the window. He wondered if it was even possible to break through the window with so little space for momentum. (Experts would later tell him that a man would need a pace of thirty miles per hour to crash through such a window, and there was not nearly enough space for this exertion in that room.)
Eric decided from piecing together several reports that his father had witnessed something quite disturbing in CIA tactics, possibly involving extreme torture to extract information. Another person who also took an interest in Olson’s death believed Olson had witnessed experiments with hallucinogenic drugs on residents of isolated European villages. In any event, Olson’s death was beginning to look more like a murder staged as a suicide.
ERIC ENGAGED JAMES STARRS AND HIS TEAM for an exhumation. Starrs gathered experts from various forensic disciplines. The exhumation at Linden Hills Cemetery took place on Thursday, June 2, 1994. The remains were well-preserved and there was no evidence at all of the supposedly terrible lacerations that had “forced” the CIA to seal the coffin. Nor were there any lacerations on the body.
The x-rays revealed that Olson’s right foot had hit the pavement first, fracturing the leg bone. He’d also hit some obstruction on the way down. In addition, over the left eye was a fist-sized hematoma. No skull fracture was evident and it was not mentioned in the original autopsy report. Starrs didn’t think that Olson would have been looking up at the window upon impact, so he wondered if Olson had been hit while in the room.
Using the room’s measurements, the injuries to the body, some physics calculations, and the various reports, the team created several possible reconstructions.
“We had a triad of possibilities to consider,” Starrs writes, “that someone in the room had hit Olson and pushed or dropped him out; that he had hit something on the way out or down; and that he had received his injury on the sidewalk.”
Engineering Animation, Inc. made a computer simulation, using all the known facts, and it contradicted the CIA’s version of the story. For Olson to have landed where he did, his exit velocity would have been no more than 1.5 miles per hour. However, moving at this rather slow speed would not have gained him the force he needed to jump through a closed window with the shade drawn. Eric had to wonder whether his father had been hit in the head while in the room and dropped down to the sidewalk, with the window broken afterward to make it look like he’d jumped? If so, had Lashbrook done it or had there been others involved?
In support of this, the measurements of the window revealed that the lower ledge, at thirty-one inches from the floor, required that a person intending to throw himself out would have to elevate himself to clear the ledge. Nothing in the room indicated that he’d used anything for this purpose.
Eric and Nils Olson retained attorney Harry Huge to reopen the case, despite the settlement that their mother had accepted (she was now deceased). Huge drafted a memorandum, which helped to persuade New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, to assign the case to Stephen Saracco and Daniel Bibb, from the NYPD cold cases unit.
They notified William Colby, Vincent Ruwet, Robert Lashbrook, and Sidney Gottlieb that they wished to speak with them. Within days, Colby turned up missing. He left a computer running in his home, dinner on the table, and a radio on. This mystery was solved a week later when searchers found his decomposing remains on a Chesapeake Bay island. His death was ruled an accidental drowning.
Saracco and Bibb did manage to meet with Ruwet and found him evasi
ve. They set up a second meeting, but Ruwet died from a heart attack.
Lashbrook would talk only in the presence of an attorney, saying nothing.
Gottlieb was being sued in civil court for the LSD drugging of aspiring artist. With this information in hand, Saracco and Bibb prepared a letter of introduction. On that day, Gottlieb died from a heart attack.
The DA’s office did discover a few facts about Olson’s treatment: at the Deep Creek meeting, Olson had been given LSD mixed with Meretran, a drug that loosened tongues. This confirmed a report from Abramson, written a few weeks after Olson’s death, that this drug had been used to set a trap. He’d told Army researchers that Olson’s death had occurred shortly after his security breaches following a trip overseas. People had been paid to stay silent.
Starrs surmised that a third person was involved, and could have entered through a door that opened between adjoining rooms, However, he could not learn the identity of the person who’d been in that other room that night. It’s likely that if there was a contract killer, he’d hardly have used his real name.
In the spring of 2001, Norman Cournoyer, who had been a close friend of Olson’s and a colleague at Detrick, contacted the Olson brothers. He told them that Olson had witnessed harsh interrogations of former Nazis and Soviet spies, and that sometimes these persons had died.
On September 12, 2001, directly after Osama bin Laden’s attack on America, Harry Huge resigned from the case, citing an overload. Eric was unable to acquire another attorney, so he conducted a final funeral, reburying his father.
It seems improbable that Olson committed suicide and impossible that he’d strolled across a room and crashed through a closed window with the shades drawn. Lashbrook’s phone makes it clear that no one who’d been handling him was disturbed over the death, and insiders had expected it. The medical examiner who’d made the first autopsy report admitted he’d written what the CIA had told him to write.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 11