Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  He had battered a twenty-two-month-old playmate to death, police said, pounded his head on the floor, then slammed a heavy glass vase over his skull.

  “He’s not mean,” his mother said. “He’s a little rough.”

  Her thirty-eight-pound son pushed the smaller boy down several times, she said, so she separated them, then left the room. She later found her son straddling the victim, brandishing a large glass flower vase over the baby’s battered head, saying: “Bad boy, bad boy…”

  Police bought it. So did her best friend, the mother of the dead toddler. A working mother, she had left her only child in this woman’s care. “I’m not angry,” the bereaved mother said. “They were good babies, both of them. Sometimes they were buddy-buddy, kissy-kissy, and the next minute they were fighting or fussing over a toy. He is two and a half years old—I don’t think he did it deliberately. He’s a good boy. I love him.”

  The child had too limited a vocabulary to dispute the case against him. “He doesn’t realize what happened,” said a homicide detective, father of a small boy himself. “How can you expect a two-and-a-half-year-old to know he wasted another kid? He’s a pleasant little boy—a little tornado, but he’s pleasant. It’s a very sad, sad case.”

  Prosecutors refused to charge the tot with a crime but did instruct the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to “determine if the child is delinquent.”

  Psychiatrists called the tot the youngest perpetrator of murderous violence they had yet encountered. One urged that he be evaluated in terms of impulse control and tested by a pediatric neurologist.

  “Most two-and-a-half-year-olds do not murder other children or hit them over the head with flower pots with such force or violence,” a doctor said. “I’m sure something is going on with this kid. His level of aggression is excessive, with poor controls.”

  Right the first time: Most two-and-a-half-year-olds do not murder other children. This one didn’t either.

  He was framed.

  Police acknowledged eighteen days later that the tot was innocent and announced they had a new suspect.

  It was not hard to figure out who that was.

  “They think I did it,” his mother told me. “You have to ask the police why.”

  I did. They had become aware of the similar death of another child, an eighteen-month-old boy, left in the same woman’s care five years earlier. She claimed that the child’s fatal injuries were caused by a fall. No one else could take the blame. Her son had not been born yet

  Miami Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez studied both cases and found it likely that the same person was responsible for both deaths.

  There was not enough evidence to arrest the mother. She did submit to a lie-detector test administered by internationally known polygraph expert Warren Holmes. His conclusion: “This woman has got no business baby-sitting.”

  The news clearing the toddler was a relief. That left a five-year-old as Dade County’s most dangerous child.

  The smiling youngster deliberately pushed a three-year-old playmate five floors to his death off a Miami Beach bayfront condominium.

  Police thought the fatal plunge was a tragic accident, but when they talked to the five-year-old he readily confessed. His six-year-old cousin corroborated his story, saying that the boy had returned to the family apartment and confided that he had just shoved the other child off an outside stairwell.

  The boy shocked detectives. “He doesn’t think he did anything wrong,” Detective Robert Davis told me.

  “He said he pushed him. He watched him fall. He heard him scream when he hit the ground and then he went for help. It’s horrendous. He doesn’t show any remorse. He was smiling when he was telling the story.”

  The husky seventy-pound preschooler wolfed two slices of pizza, a garlic roll and a banana after his confession.

  Children without conscience can be frightening and deadly creatures. A seven-year-old with a fatal fascination for fire touched off a blaze in which a young woman and her baby perished. He put a match to alcohol because he liked the blue color of the flames.

  Or take the curly-haired seventh grader, caught behind the wheel of a stolen Miami Beach Water Department car. The boy lived across the street from police headquarters and had stolen enough equipment to outfit a small law-enforcement agency of his own. “I wish he’d leave us alone,” whined a detective. “We have so little equipment as it is.”

  The boy took three guns, all expensive Magnums, 398 rounds of ammunition, hollow-point bullets, several boxes of .38-caliber cartridges, a hand computer, half a dozen walkie-talkies worth one thousand dollars each, five electronic beepers with battery chargers, cylinders of Mace, sets of handcuffs, nightsticks and other gear.

  “I’ve been to court three times, and I always get out,” the thirteen-year-old bragged.

  “He’s nervous,” the boy’s mother told me tearfully. He did not look or sound nervous to me. “Take me to Youth Hall,” he razzed a detective. “I’ll get out I always do.”

  His favorite pastime was hurling big rocks through the front door at headquarters, trying to hit the desk sergeant.

  The boy broke into the city water department on a Saturday night, snipped a chain with cable cutters, pried a gate and a padlock hasp, removed five jalousies, broke into the office, and stole four walkie-talkies and the keys to a Plymouth. Before driving away, he rewired the gate so the crime would go unnoticed until Monday. A city employee, however, discovered the thefts at one A.M. on Sunday. A policeman spotted the deftly camouflaged car parked on a South Beach street at ten A.M. The thief had spray-painted over the city seals on the doors and replaced the city tag with a stolen license plate.

  Cops staking out the vehicle saw a small figure with a walkie-talkie climb into the front seat and drive off. The youngster had to push the seat all the way forward in order to peer over the steering wheel. He swore someone had sent him for the car. Police assumed an adult was involved and asked him to hand up the guilty man. He led the cops to a park and pointed out a startled stranger.

  The boy, who carried a pilfered police badge in his pocket, had actually stolen the car to escape the city and an upcoming date in Juvenile Court.

  So many stories involving the very young and very old are unutterably sad. How do you forget the shabbily dressed gray-haired grandmother who tried to rob a Miami Beach bank by threatening to explode a “bomb” in her handbag? The tattered purse held no bomb—or money—just a pair of spectacles and some crumpled tissues. She said she was starving.

  Domestic violence or love gone wrong is sad at any age, but for some seniors it is a tragic conclusion to otherwise unblemished lives. A Miami man’s first marriage endured for sixty-two years. His second ended after six days when he beat his petite bride to death with a claw hammer. She was seventy-six. He was ninety.

  The bridegroom, a great-grandfather of ten, was charged with murder. The arrest was his first. The fatal argument erupted over the honeymoon cruise. Suitcases stood by the door. She wanted to go; he had second thoughts.

  When a sixty-nine-year-old woman savagely beat her eighty-nine-year-old husband to death, the murder weapon was a urine bottle. They had been married for forty-eight years.

  One couple was married in Brooklyn in 1920. Sixty-three years later, in Miami Beach, he beat her to death after a vicious argument. “I wouldn’t wish her on my worst enemy,” he told police.

  One is never too old to be among America’s most wanted. Old people are rugged and resourceful, the toughest desperados, especially when they feel they have nothing to lose. In gunfights, Miami police have killed an eighty-three-year-old great-grandfather with a pacemaker, and a seventy-nine-year-old man in bib overalls. Both fired at police first.

  Joseph Thomas still eludes police. He is eighty-five and wanted for murder.

  He accused Sadie Sheffield of being unfaithful and ended their twenty-eight-year relationship with a bullet. Sadie was seventy-three. The romance
was always stormy. “They feuded most of the time,” Miami Homicide Detective Louise Vasquez said. “They never got along.”

  After a bitter argument over his suspicion that she was seeing another man, Thomas went to his apartment, came back with a gun and shot Sheffield in the face. “He just walked out, got in his car and took off with the tires spinning,” Louise said.

  The case did not seem like a tough one. In such homicides, the shooter usually shows up shortly, conscience-stricken and full of remorse. Not this one.

  When Joseph Thomas raced away in his old and faded green car, it was July 1978. He was seventy-two. The search for Joseph Thomas has stretched into one of Miami’s longest man-hunts.

  Norman David Mayer, sixty-six, did not die like a typical Miami Beach senior citizen. He did not die like anyone you and I ever knew.

  He worked as a handyman at a beach hotel and wore a pig-tail held by a rubber band, a baseball cap over his balding pate and flowered Hawaiian shirts with yellow trousers.

  Norman David Mayer had a cause. He was the founder—and total membership—of an organization called “Number One Priority.” He had been arrested twice for handing out leaflets on college campuses. He sold death’s-head emblems urging “As an Act of Sanity Ban Nuclear Weapons … Or Have a Nice Doomsday.” A tireless antinuclear activist, he waged a one-man ten-year crusade to ban the bomb.

  Nobody listened.

  Mayer bought a used Ford step-van and converted it into a rolling bomb shelter, reinforced by steel and stocked with dried food and an anti-radiation suit. When the world blew up he wanted to be the one to see how it looked afterward.

  Before leaving Miami Beach for the last time, Norman David Mayer told his only close friend, an auto repair shop owner who had known him for thirty-three years, that he would not be back. “It’s over now. There’s nothing more to be said. I’ve had enough.”

  The aging activist called later, bragging that he had distributed five thousand leaflets in Washington, some on the steps of the Capitol. For thirty-five days, he protested in front of the White House from eleven A.M. to six P.M. He told people that he had been arrested twelve times for his cause.

  Still, no one listened. “You have to do something,” he declared.

  So he did. On his last day he donned a dark blue jumpsuit and a black Darth Vader-style helmet with a visor. He raced his van up to the east face of the Washington Monument at 9:15 A.M. and threatened to blow it up with one thousand pounds of dynamite unless his demands were met.

  Everybody listened now.

  He insisted that every governmental agency and private organization join a national dialogue on the dangers of nuclear war. He refused to negotiate with a team of FBI agents and police.

  We heard about the threat at The Miami Herald, and I got a local tip that the man holding the Washington Monument hostage might be Norman David Mayer. The FBI was dubious, doubting that the terrorist in the taut standoff could be a senior citizen. The cool, quick militant in the dark helmet appeared to be about thirty years old, but an FBI spokesman conceded, “We don’t know who he is.” He suggested that more than one person might be inside the van.

  The owner of the Miami Beach hotel where Mayer had worked flew to Washington at FBI request, to help negotiate. He was too late. At about 8:30 P.M., after a tense ten-hour siege, Norman David Mayer decided to drive away.

  The barrage of police gunfire that killed him overturned the van at the foot of the Washington Monument

  There was no one else inside—and no dynamite. Only Norman David Mayer, age sixty-six, and his leaflets.

  He had a cause.

  If Wayman Neal had a cause, nobody knew what it was. He did, however, have a nasty habit.

  Wayman Neal did not look like one of Miami’s most dangerous men. He looked like a nice, sweet, docile old gent—somebody’s grandfather—until you put a knife in his hand. The last time Miami police arrested Wayman Neal he was attending a prayer meeting. They charged him with murder—again.

  The bloody knife was in his pocket

  He did not run or resist. He could not run or resist. He walked slowly—with a cane. He was either seventy or seventy-four years old, depending on which records are correct. In court he was humble, sober and soft-spoken. He wore a blue baseball cap, a Grateful Dead T-shirt and bib overalls.

  The saga of Wayman Neal is a story about our criminal justice system: how it works, how it malfunctions and what happens when a criminal is poor and black and his victims are the same. It is a story of half-hearted prosecutions, frightened witnesses and forgiving victims.

  The criminal record of Wayman Neal begins with murder in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1938. Forty-two years later, in Miami, in 1980, it was murder again. This time there was a difference: The victim was white. All the others had been black, like Wayman Neal.

  No one is sure how many victims there are. In just four years in Miami he was charged ten times.

  “He has stabbed strangers he never met before in his life,” Miami Homicide Detective Bruce Roberson told me in awe.

  Wayman Neal failed to finish grade school. As a young man, he left his father’s farm in Quitman, Georgia, to seek work. Unemployed laborer or bricklayer was the occupation he listed on arrest reports. His family heard nothing from him until his 1938 “trouble” in St. Pete.

  “We got the news that he cut a man, and the man died,” said younger brother, Peter Neal, sixty-two. “He’s quiet when he’s not drinking. But when he drinks…”

  Few records remain of the 1938 murder. A jury in St. Petersburg agreed that “on the 16th day of April, 1938, Wayman Neal did inflict mortal wounds in an assault on Willie Williams with a knife.” Willie Williams was black, unmarried, about thirty. On his death certificate both birthplace and relatives are listed as unknown.

  A judge sentenced Wayman Neal to twenty years. Richard Patrick Moore, the 1980 victim, was three years old at the time.

  Neal was paroled in 1943. Parole revoked, he was sent back to prison in 1947. He was released in 1955, then arrested for larceny in 1958. He served sixty days for assault in 1960, was acquitted of robbery in 1961 and then arrested again for shooting a thirty-year-old woman in the foot. “Just horseplay,” he explained.

  A St. Pete policeman wrote in a file: “He has been known to claim that he has killed before and wouldn’t mind doing it again.”

  Wayman Neal never married, but there was a woman. Her name was Gladys Harris. They lived together in St. Petersburg until a day in 1966 when Gladys and her friend Beatrice Scott, fifty-four, locked him out of the house. Enraged, he sliced open the screen with a knife and stepped inside. Gladys got away.

  Police found broken furniture, blood on the walls and Beatrice Scott—stabbed nine times in the back.

  She survived. Neal did three years in prison.

  On January 19, 1970, Neal walked up to Willis Harvey, sixty-seven, on a St. Petersburg street, according to police, and carved a wicked six-inch gash through his upper lip. They found a Kutmaster hollow super-edged knife stashed in Wayman Neal’s right shoe. Harvey failed to appear in court, and prosecution was dropped.

  That summer of 1970, Wayman Neal walked into St. Petersburg police headquarters and asked to be jailed for his own protection. He said a woman named Mary wanted to shoot him.

  An agreeable police officer locked him up for vagrancy, noting that Neal was “just somebody with no money and no place to stay—or a mental case.”

  Despite forty-two years of violence, no judge ever ordered a psychiatric examination for Wayman Neal. He walked into a police station asking to be arrested again in 1971. Police obliged.

  Wayman Neal was first noticed in Dade County at 4:35 P.M. on October 18, 1975.

  Peter Roy Rivers, fifty, sat with Neal, quaffing cool ones on a wooden bench at the Store Porch, an aged row of peeling bars and shops. Claiming the man snatched his drink, Wayman Neal rose and pulled two knives.

  “He was stabbing, with a knif
e in each hand,” a witness said.

  Police found Rivers bleeding in the gutter. Bystanders said the attacker, wearing a blue cap, had strolled into a bar across the street. Inside, wearing a blue cap and holding two blood-stained knives, stood Wayman Neal.

  An ambulance rushed Rivers to a hospital in critical condition, his scalp nearly severed. Four stab wounds had pierced his back and two his chest. A long slice to the side penetrated his intestines, liver, spleen and pancreas.

  He survived.

  Wayman Neal was charged with assault with intent to commit murder. Rivers failed to appear at a preliminary hearing. The prosecutor said the man was out of the hospital and had been notified. A judge dismissed the charges for lack of prosecution.

  Less than a month later, Wayman Neal angrily confronted two policemen, demanding to go to jail. They said they had no reason to arrest him, so he gave them one by shouting and threatening to hurt people.

  On May 18, 1977, Neal sent a pal on an errand. J. B. Williams returned with a bottle of wine and change from a five-dollar bill. Neal insisted he had given the man two five-dollar bills. They fought. Williams was stabbed. Neal was arrested a block away. That case was dropped after Williams signed a paper stating he had no wish to press charges.

  On April 3, 1979, Neal snatched a table knife in a Miami rooming house, witnesses said, and plunged it into the neck of fellow boarder William Fry, fifty-six. Another boarder, Curtis Driggers, fifty-three, stood up to protest. Neal stabbed him, too, and slammed him over the head with a chair.

  The injured men went to the hospital. Wayman Neal went to jail—but not for long. When I asked the prosecutor why, he could not recall the case, even after reviewing the file.