Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  “Have you ever been robbed or broken into?” Stottlemyre asked.

  “No.”

  “Where do you keep the gun?”

  “In a drawer in my upstairs bedroom.”

  “So, since you haven’t been robbed or broken into, you really wouldn’t have any reason to bring the weapon downstairs?”

  “Right.”

  “Then why’d you bring the gun downstairs today?”

  Grady thought for a second.

  “Now that’s a good question,” Grady smiled. He wouldn’t answer any more questions. The interview ended.

  At approximately 11:55 P.M., the detectives notified the coroner’s office that they had the accused in custody and they wanted him arraigned as soon as possible. Could a deputy coroner come to their office for the arraignment because the accused was in a wheelchair?

  At approximately 1:10 A.M. on September 28, 1978, Deputy Coroner Phillips came to the homicide office and began the arraignment at 1:18 A.M. Grady Stiles, Jr., was officially charged with the murder of Jack Layne. Phillips then set a hearing for October 6 at 11 A.M., and Grady was taken back to a cell to wait for justice to unfold.

  Later that day, September 28, cops again searched the murder scene for the missing bullet. Finding none, they called the coroner’s office to verify that the victim was shot twice. They also discovered that one of the bullets was still in the victim. Since the gun had been fired twice, and the investigating officers had found one spent bullet on the porch the previous night, and the second pellet was still in the victim, the numbers added up and the search was terminated.

  At 10:30 that morning, the coroner came in with his preliminary findings.

  The first wound was the one everyone had seen, in the chest. The bullet had lodged in the body. The second was located near the back of the neck in the area of the scapula. Jack was shot in the back of the neck as he was fleeing. The bullet had passed through his body, hit the wood above the door, and then fell to the porch beneath.

  Later in the day, detectives interviewed Jack Layne’s other sister, Eveline Rivera.

  “Grady Stiles was opposed to Jack marrying Donna,” she told the detectives. “He had threatened Jack before with a gun on a number of occasions.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Jack told me.”

  “So, you never actually saw Grady threatening him?”

  “No. And Jack never really thought that Grady would follow through on the threats. You know, Jack only knew her for three months. Grady was against the marriage but he finally gave the okay. The wedding had been postponed, though, a couple of times because Grady told them that he was sick.”

  In the days after the murder, Barbara Stiles received a series of threatening phone calls that she reported to the police on September 30.

  She claimed that it was Jack’s family that they were threatening to kill her and the girls. And every time she looked out the window, there was this same blue Ford sedan cruising past. She was very worried.

  She called again on October 3. This time, somebody broke the left rear window of their car.

  The next day, Barbara was relaxing in the house when two bricks came crashing through the front window. The phone rang.

  “You’re all dead,” said the caller, and hung up.

  Barbara told the police it was all happening as retaliation for the murder.

  On October 6, a hearing was held before Coroner’s Solicitor Stanley Stein. A special van with a hydraulic lift transported Grady to the hearing. It made for a heartrending photograph in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette to see the crippled man when he was lowered to the ground.

  Donna testified that Grady had not been happy about her impending nuptials to Jack.

  “He [Grady] said Jack could come for supper but for him not to smile or snicker at me,” Donna testified.

  Donna then said that she was with Grady when he purchased the murder weapon. “He told me the gun was for Jack and me,” Donna said.

  Dressed in a shabby pair of blue trousers, white shirt, and white sweater, Grady could only shake his head in astonishment at Donna’s testimony. He still had no conception of the tragedy he’d caused.

  She then recounted her shopping trips on the day of the shooting, and what happened when they returned to Foreland Street.

  Stottlemyre then took the stand and told Stein how he had taken Grady’s statement after he was taken into custody, and the content of it.

  It didn’t take long for Stein to remand Grady to the County Jail without bail pending trial.

  All alone in his jail cell, Grady had time to think. Despite what the police had told him, he was smart enough to know he was in hot water. They had charged him with first-degree murder.

  In the State of Pennsylvania, first-degree murder is punishable by death in the electric chair. Grady knew that unless he found a good attorney, he would be convicted.

  Eight

  The taxicab left Grady and Barbara off on Grant Street, in downtown Pittsburgh. They paid for the cab with the little funds they had left. The state had moderated their initial demands and had let Grady out on $10,000 bond.

  Barbara helped Grady into his chair, then wheeled him up the sidewalk and into the Grant Building.

  When they got off the elevator, they found themselves in a reception area, off which were the offices of five different criminal defense lawyers.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist asked.

  “We’re here to see Anthony DeCello. We have an appointment,” Barbara answered.

  They were ushered into DeCello’s office. It was very plush and expensive-looking. There was a big, dark mahogany desk, arranged neatly with a phone/intercom, a dictating machine, yellow foolscap pad, pen and pencil set in holders, pictures of DeCello’s family, and a statue of St. Anthony. The saint of lost things, St. Anthony was DeCello’s patron saint.

  In front of the desk were chairs made out of a lighter colored wood than the desk, upholstered in a soft, cushiony fabric. To complete the look of elegance, all the walls were paneled in dark wood.

  “The first time Grady came into my office with Barbara, he was in a wheelchair,” DeCello recalled. “She did everything for him as far as pushing it. He wanted me to know immediately about his physical condition, which was quite obvious.”

  During introductions, Grady shook DeCello’s hand. The attorney would later find out that this was Grady’s favorite thing to do when meeting someone for the first time. He always wanted a formal introduction. That’s when he could establish his strength by literally crushing the other person’s outstretched hand in his iron grip.

  Throughout the morning, Grady had been drinking. DeCello smelled the booze on his breath. When he tried to tell DeCello what had happened and why he was there to seek his help, the words came out in a drunken slur.

  DeCello knew how difficult it was defending any defendant accused of murder, but one who was a drunk, whose behavior was unpredictable, was just too problematic. He told Grady to go home and the next time he showed up for an appointment, he better be sober. Otherwise, he would have nothing else to do with his case.

  Few people talked to Grady like that and got away with it, but Grady was fresh out of options and staring the electric chair in the face. When he and Barbara showed up for his next appointment a few days later, he was sober.

  Barbara, still thin to the point of emaciation, was dressed in ill-kept jeans and a raggedy shirt. “She looked like she fought Sonny Liston and lost. She was bad. She always was bruised. Every time I saw her she had bruises. She was ugly and she was very stupid,” DeCello recalls. “And she smelled.”

  As for Grady, despite the fact that he was in a place of business, he, too, was dressed shabbily. His pants, cut off at the knee, and button-down shirt were wrinkled and faded.

  But if Grady was not flashy in appearance, he was still a showman.

  He had Barbara position his wheelchair next to one of the overstuffed armchairs in front of DeCello’s desk. A
s DeCello watched openmouthed, Grady used his claws to flip himself from one chair to the other in a single, neat motion. It showed the dexterity he had with his claws, all right, but DeCello wondered why he was trying to impress him so. Coupled with his antagonistic way of shaking hands, DeCello figured he was trying to show off his immense physical strength.

  At the time, Tony DeCello was one of Pittsburgh’s more prominent defense attorneys. Of medium height and dark good looks, the forty-one-year-old DeCello moved with the grace and fluidity of an athlete.

  His hometown was Farrell, a little place eighty miles north of Pittsburgh. If it is known for anything at all, it is the quality of its high-school basketball team.

  In 1952, Farrell’s basketball team won the state championship. Years later, playwright and actor Jason Miller became fascinated by the little town that could. He interviewed many of the team members, including one of the starting guards, Tony DeCello. Eventually, he wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the 1952 team. He entitled it, That Championship Season.

  Opening night on Broadway, Miller flew in the captains of the championship team, including Anthony DeCello. With the actual pictures of the team on stage as backdrop, they watched the action unfold. Afterward, they were ushered to the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, where they were treated to an elaborate meal.

  Now in his office, DeCello asked Grady to tell him the truth in his own words of exactly what had taken place because he didn’t want to be surprised in court.

  Instead, Grady began to discuss the fact of his physical disability. His tone was sarcastic, and DeCello soon realized that the disability was his armor plate against everything, that because he was physically disabled, everyone should take pity on him.

  Finally, after Grady finished trying to garner the lawyer’s sympathy, DeCello was able to turn the conversation around to the crime Stiles had been charged with.

  “Jack had taunted me and made fun of me and ridiculed me,” Grady said in his whiskey-soaked voice. “He told me that he’d had sex with Donna and there was nothin’ I could do about it. And then he made fun of me. He said, ‘I’m gonna dump you out of the wheelchair anytime I feel like it.’”

  To DeCello, though, Grady’s fears did not seem real. He could tell from talking to Grady and from the man’s physicality that he was not the defenseless cripple he tried to make himself out to be. He was a very strong man who was able to do almost everything a normal man could, including firing a gun.

  Despite the fact that Grady was hardly defenseless, he insisted that Jack Layne continued to taunt him with all kinds of names until finally, he just couldn’t take the verbal abuse anymore. He thought that in the best interests of Donna, and for his own sake, he had to do something about Jack.

  “Donna, she deserved better than this bum,” Grady said.

  After that second meeting, Anthony DeCello remembers feeling sorry for Grady Stiles. “Hell, any normal person would have feelings of remorse that someone would have to live a life with those claws. He was poor, he was downtrodden and his own family, he claimed, made fun of him,” said DeCello.

  Regardless of what Stiles had done, he deserved help. And DeCello was going to give it to him. He would plead “not guilty” by reason of self-defense. Whether he believed Grady or not was not relevant. The man was entitled to the best defense possible. He would do what the law allowed—present his defense as the facts allowed.

  In court, DeCello would try to minimize the seemingly cold-blooded nature of the crime with the mitigating factors of Jack’s alleged threats, Grady’s fear, and, of course, his client’s pitiable physical condition.

  While Anthony DeCello was trying to figure out a way to rescue Grady from the electric chair, Robert Vincler was doing the exact opposite. As sure as the sun would come up in the morning, Vincler was certain that Grady Stiles had committed first-degree murder. As assistant district attorney, and supervisor of general trials for the district attorney’s office of Allegheny County, Vincler’s job was to make sure that Grady Stiles, Jr., was convicted.

  Yet despite the facts of the case, Vincler was struck by the tragedy of the whole thing. Here was the sad case of a young girl who had gone out to buy a wedding dress and returned to her home, only to have her future husband shot by her father and die in her arms. It was also astonishing to Vincler that Grady had so much dexterity with his claw, he was able to pull the trigger on the gun.

  Donna was going to be the prosecution’s star witness; she was going to testify against Grady. Over the course of the next five months, Vincler spoke frequently with Donna over the phone. She was still pretty broken up about the crime.

  After Jack had been killed, his sister and his family blamed Donna for his death. For a time, she hid out at her girlfriend’s house. Cathy had been living with Barbara at the Salvation Army. Then, one day, Donna’s grandmother, Edna Stiles, called her up on the phone.

  “Donna, your mom’s been in touch with me. Your mom’s sending an airplane ticket to get you and Cathy,” Edna continued.

  “My … mom was only going to take me, because she didn’t know if she was allowed to have Cathy. And Grandma says [to Teresa], ‘You better take Cathy with you. You take both of these girls and get them out of here.’”

  Teresa sent her the plane tickets. Donna and Cathy left Barbara with her children, Little Grady and Tammy.

  “We left Pittsburgh and met her and Glenn [Sr.] in Dallas. They were helping a friend with a show. They were sort of taking a vacation and working at the same time.”

  Glenn was working the bally stage for Ward Hall, a famous carnival entrepreneur. Eventually, they moved back to Ohio.

  Donna stayed with her mother and Glenn in the Buckeye State, where Glenn supported the family from a tire business he had established. Because Teresa rarely spoke to Vincler, the task of explaining the family circumstances fell to Glenn, Sr. Vincler found himself liking the man, even though they had never met.

  From Glenn and others who were involved in the case, Vincler came away with the impression that Donna was the apple of her father’s eye. While Cathy and Little Grady were deformed, Donna was the attractive, normal one. Grady thought she could really make it and was very upset that she had been lured away and was going to marry a guy he thought was a bum.

  For his part, Grady had no knowledge that his family was conspiring with the prosecution to put him in jail. He was certain that once enough time had passed, Donna would forgive him. Eventually she would see that he’d done the right thing, the only thing. She would come back to him.

  In his conversations with DeCello, Grady made it clear that he was both proud and envious of Donna.

  Over and over, DeCello took Grady through the day of the murder to get his story straight so there’d be no inconsistencies when he testified. DeCello found it strange that when they talked about the murder, Grady showed no feelings.

  In his practice, DeCello had found that anybody you talk to involved in a murder has feelings about it, either remorse or hate. But Grady just went over the details like he was describing some routine task. Flat. Never once did he express any emotion over killing Jack.

  But when it came to discussing his sex life, his voice took on new vigor.

  “Everyone I have sex with wants to have sex with my claws. They love it when I use my claws.”

  He was proud of that fact. Barbara, who was sitting across the room, nodded in agreement.

  And as if to prove the point, Grady told DeCello this story.

  “One of my daughter’s [Donna’s] teachers came to the house to discuss her attendance at school.”

  In fact, Donna had failed to attend school on a regular basis during the fall of 1978 when she met and fell for Jack Layne.

  “This teacher, she really liked my claws. So we had sex right in the house and she just kept coming back and back and back because of this.”

  The lawyer came to realize that it was a source of personal pride for Grady that he was able to have a s
exual relationship with someone that was normal. “When he talked about having sex with the teacher, it was like he’d just won the Battle of Bataan. It was like a victory. He wanted you to know he had these accomplishments, no matter how totally insignificant they were,” DeCello said.

  As for what he did to make a living, carnival to him did not mean sideshow freak. It meant Carnegie Hall. Grady Stiles, Jr., was a famous, dominating figure in the carnival world.

  Robert Vincler woke up to a cold day, where snow matted the ground. Traveling to work, breath plumed from his mouth in a cold fog.

  By 8:30 A.M., on February 20, 1979, he was in the forty-by-fifty-foot space he shared with two other assistant district attorneys. Each had their own office. Because Vincler’s was located not twenty feet behind the reception area, he always had a clear view of who was visiting. He looked up from his work when he heard people in the corridor.

  “I knew right away who the people were coming through the door. This girl was rather attractive, young, sixteen years old; followed by her mother, who was also rather attractive, thin, well dressed, and manicured; followed by Mr. Newman who was a midget. It sort of floored me that here was this midget,” Vincler recalls.

  No one had ever given any indication over the phone that Glenn might not be of normal height.

  After recovering his composure, Vincler noted that Donna wore a nice conservative outfit. She’d make a good witness. As for Glenn, he was dressed in a pullover jersey and a pair of slacks. His hair was cut rather long.

  “Time to go downstairs,” Vincler said.

  As the women walked quickly down the corridor to the elevator, Glenn settled down in the young district attorney’s office.

  The trial was about to begin.

  Nine

  The courtroom of Common Pleas judge Thomas A. Harper was set up in an old-fashioned way, with the defense and prosecution seated at parallel tables on opposite sides of the courtroom.