by Fred Rosen
In the corridor outside, the camera crews were all ready to shoot the family, but Judge Alvarez, the administrative court judge, would have none of it. He ordered all the camera crews to leave their taping for outside the building.
Outside, Cathy, ever the family’s spokes-person, was about to make a tearful speech.
“It’s bad to say because I am a Christian. I hope that Fred Rosen, Mr. Hanes, and Sandra whatever her name is get the beatings and the threats my family has,” she shouted.
When asked about the verdict, Arnie said, “Who wants a compromise when you’re right? She killed this man because he deserved to be killed.”
Epilogue
Before Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., came to trial in late August of 1994, Ron Hanes offered him a deal. Plead to the same charges his mother had been convicted of and he would receive the same sentence.
The deal was carefully explained to Glenn’s attorney Peter Catania, to Glenn, and to Teresa. Catania advised Glenn to take it. Teresa disagreed, and Glenn went to trial.
On August 9, after one hour and five minutes of deliberation, Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. It turned out that it was Peter Catania’s first time trying a murder case.
On August 29, 1994, Teresa Stiles was sentenced to twelve years behind bars, followed by five years probation.
On October 14, 1994, Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., was sentenced to life in prison.
When Arnie Levine subsequently filed his appeal, the state cross-appealed with a brief asking that in Teresa’s case, the defense of battered wife syndrome be disallowed. They wanted an opportunity to go back into court and convict Teresa on first-degree murder.
In the same brief, the state named Cathy Berry Stiles as an unindicted coconspirator.
As for Teresa, Judge Fuente subsequently relented and allowed her to remain free on bond, pending appeal.
“She posted a twenty-thousand dollar bond,” Hanes confirmed. “She put the home up for collateral. Basically, she’d signed off on it back in January of 1993, with the proceeds going to her children, who then put it up for collateral.
“In Florida, manslaughter with a firearm is not included in the intestate statutes as specifically prohibiting a person from collecting on an estate.”
Interviews in Gibtown
I first started working on this case on October 31, 1994, when I flew to Florida. Having forgotten that it was Halloween, I was surprised when I stopped at a light driving out of Tampa’s airport and Count Dracula looked over at me. He was in the next car. Perhaps it was an omen of things to come.
The next day, my first stop in Gibsonton was at the Giant’s camp, the nerve center of the community and the home of Jeanie Tomaini, “The World’s Only Living Half Girl.” I found Jeanie outside, with her grandson. Soon, we moved indoors to talk, to her daughter Judy Rock’s office, at the far end of their trailer court.
Jeanie sat on the floor, two-and-a-half feet tall, on her torso. It did indeed look like only half of her was there.
“There’s so much crime here now. Kids are just born different. Tampa being a seaport, it’s so easy to get drugs and stuff in. There are more street people now. Little jungles of street people in Gibtown,” said Jeanie.
While Grady’s death was a shock to the community, it was by no means the first time a major crime had occurred thereabouts.
Jeanie recalled that back in the day, “It was just a swamp here. We came here every year, cleared a little more and then, we stayed here. I could adapt myself to whatever. Seems to me I was just a country girl who’s been traveling and working with shows since I was three.”
Her mother had met up with someone who thought Jeanie’d be a great addition to the carnival. How was a girl like her supposed to make a living anyway, let alone attract a husband? And so Jeanie began her life as what would become a legendary sideshow attraction, “The World’s Only Living Half Girl.”
“I enjoyed the show, the traveling. I made friends. I been in every state. The carnivals were family shows. Now it’s dog-eat-dog. People then were more reliable and stable.”
A train rumbled by and the office vibrated. Jeanie held her balance on her hips with ease.
“I never actually knew Grady Stiles,” she continued. “We were on separate shows, but most people in this area thought mighty well of him. The people at Showtown speak highly of him,” Jeanie continued in her soft voice.
Looking up at me, I could see that there was an ineffable tranquility in her eyes that I had never seen in a human being.
“Considering what happened, why not walk away?” she questioned with a flash of anger. “Considering his condition and all,” she believed it would have been easy for Teresa to just leave. “It still boils down to that he was a human being, a live human being, and they took the life away from him.”
Judy, who handled the day-to-day management of the Giant’s Camp and also has a business making gravestones, also had an opinion. She, too, thought that Teresa should have left Grady instead of killing him. We talked a little bit more, then I thanked them for their time and hit the street.
If the Giant’s Camp is the nerve center of Gibtown, then Showtown, USA, with its brightly painted façade of carnival scenes, is the place where jangled nerves are assuaged with booze and conviviality. Chuck Osak runs the place. Fortyish and slim with bifocals, he has a brushy mustache the same color as his sandy blond hair. He was dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and dark shades.
“Grady was known in this town. He was a good man. He had his own little sideshow, something you could look at. Grady exhibited himself all his life. I’d sit down with him when he came in off the road and ask him ‘How was the season, Grady?’”
And they would chat about what kind of season it had been.
“He was never an excessive drinker. Maybe an hour here at most. The only wife I knew was Barbara. She drank a little bit. Whatever Grady wanted to do, she did. If he said, ‘Let’s go to New York,’ she’d go. She’d roll with the punches.”
If Tony DeCello had been present, he would have added, “No pun intended.” As for Teresa, if things were so bad, “She could have left him,” Osak said forcefully. The same perspective as Jeanie Tomaini. And like Tomaini, Osa, bemoaned the decline of the family shows.
“You knew the kids; they helped you set up. I’d see them the following year and they’re a year older. But the family shows are a thing of the past. How the hell can you compete against Disney World?!”
If I wanted to know more about Grady, Osak recommended I speak to William Roberts. Then he left me with this piece of advice.
“Any carny won’t tell you the truth because they don’t want you to know the truth.”
So I drove over to Kracker Avenue, a Gibtown store called the Pirates Treasure Cove. William Roberts, a former aerialist, runs it. The place makes costumes for circus and carnival people, a truly distinct specialty operation.
“I was on a cruise with him [Grady] and I knew the family,” Roberts told me. But he would provide me with no further information. Osak’s advice rang in my ears.
The Stiles family live in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. After a number of lefts and rights and lefts, past a bunch of apparently empty fields and a tropical-fish farm, I found myself on Inglewood Drive. It is a grand name for a narrow, block-long street, bordered by a bunch of run-down trailers. Walking across the parched grass, I stopped before a chest-high cyclone fence.
The door of number 11117 was open. The wooden sign above it said:
The Stiles
Grady & Teresa
Four dogs came out barking and smelled me.
“Anybody home?” I yelled above the din.
Again, the dogs barked.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, just a second,” a young voice answered from inside the trailer.
The door was opened and I peered into the dark interior. On the floor in the shadows was a crawling figur
e, who suddenly turned and popped up into a wheelchair. In one motion, he expertly leaned back, turned it, and wheeled himself out of the gloom, into the sunlight.
“Hey, boys, sit,” he said, calling off the four dogs on his side of the wire fence. He introduced himself as Grady Stiles, III. His family called him “Little Grady.” Little Grady wore a dark T-shirt over his barrel chest. My eyes drifted down to his claws. They are different from his father’s, with two fingers on each hand instead of one.
“I’m writing a book about your dad,” I explained.
“It’s not a good time. Come back at 5:30 when my sister will be here,” he answered politely. I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 P.M.
I rode around awhile, visiting the park in Riverview where Glenn Newman met with Chris Wyant to discuss the murder of his stepfather, and where the money for the hit allegedly changed hands. Then I went to the cemetery where Grady was buried. By 5:30, I was back at the Stiles place, but Cathy, the family spokesperson while her mother was in jail, had not shown up yet.
“Hey, I’m a showman,” he said proudly, telling me all about how he traveled with and worked the carnival. He particularly loved the gorilla show illusion that Donna and Joe operated.
“I love to watch people’s reaction to it,” he smiled.
He brushed hair from across his eyes.
“Do you miss your father?”
“Nah, I don’t miss him. He was abusive.”
“He beat you?”
“Oh yeah, multiple times. I just miss my mom and Harry. I want ’em back.”
His bright blue eyes seem soft rather than hard.
“Harry’s father is inside.”
Midget Man.
“Mr. Newman?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well, I’ll try again later.”
I left to the sounds of the dogs barking. That bothered me.
Why hadn’t the dogs barked when Chris Wyant entered the trailer to kill Grady?
I went back to my hotel room to await Cathy’s call. A few hours later, the phone rang.
“Mr. Rosen. This is Peter Catania.”
It was Glenn’s lawyer. He told me that Cathy Berry had called him and said that I had requested an interview. As her brother’s attorney, he represented Cathy’s interests as well. After I told him that all I wanted was to speak to Cathy to get some background on family matters, he asked me if the family, who was very poor, could, in some way, be financially compensated for their assistance.
“Mr. Catania, I am certainly sympathetic, but I’m a journalist. I don’t pay for information. All I can promise is that I’ll get the best obtainable version of the truth. So can I talk to her?”
Catania paused for a long time before answering.
“All right,” he said affably. “I’ll advise Cathy it’s okay to talk with you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” and the line went dead.
I called Cathy and we made an appointment for 7 P.M. that night. I got there on time. Walking through the front door as Det. Willette had done, I found myself at the crime scene. The body of course was long gone, but you could still feel the vibes, the tension of that night when Grady Stiles, Jr. had three bullets pumped into the back of his head in a nice, neat row.
Everyone acted normal. We just happened to be sitting in your average American living room, in your average American home. Only in this home, the father just happened to have been murdered. His armchair was vacant now, but it was easy to imagine him sitting there, watching Danny Aiello playing Ruby, as Wyant came in to kill him.
I couldn’t help but notice the picture to the left, of Grady and Cathy; he looked like a proud smiling father. And yet Cathy was an unindicted co-conspirator in his murder.
Harry Glenn Newman, Sr., “Midget Man,” lay sprawled in boxer shorts in front of the television set, that he gazed at intently. A clear plastic line stretched from his nose to a tank. He was on a respirator because of the lung condition he’d contracted back in Ohio when he was a welder. Near him lay a wooden cane he still used to help him stand and move around, because of the fall he had taken.
Cathy Stiles Berry sat in an armchair next to the one in which her father was murdered. A pretty woman, she had the broad shoulders and large arms of a person who has to rely on her upper body to get around. She had no legs and claws like her father’s.
Cathy sounded intensely protective of her mother.
“It’s too rough on her on the road. I just more or less traveled with her. I didn’t work out there. I just traveled mainly to look out for my mother.”
“Your brother seems like he likes the life on the road.”
“Little Grady? Well, he has no worries. He’s seventeen. All he knows how to do is go out there, ride, play the games and have fun. I have a lot more [responsibilities] than that.”
“It seems like, for everything that went on, you have it together.”
“I had to. Living with him [her father], I had to. There was no way that I was gonna let him mess me up.”
“It’s real interesting how some kids who grow up with the kind of abuse you did, respond by turning out the way you did.”
“I’m level-headed. He has scarred me emotionally a lot, but right now I just can’t let it get to me.”
“And your mother?”
“I think my mom is the most wonderful person. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for her.”
“Why didn’t your mother call the cops when your dad got drunk and abused her?”
“If my mother would have called the cops, you better believe things would have gotten ten times worse.”
Her husband, Tyrill, who had been in the other room taking care of four-year-old daughter Misty, came in carrying the child. Her young face, the spitting image of her father’s, looked ravaged, old beyond her scant years. She was born without legs.
Because the ectrodactyly gene comes out differently from generation to generation, Misty’s “legs” stop before the knee; she has a toe or claw up on her hip. She has only one arm with a claw at the end. The other is a stub. Tyrill went over to the cage where he was raising gerbils.
“You didn’t know anything about what your mom was planning?” I asked Cathy.
Cathy wouldn’t look at me. She looked away and shook her head no.
“When you finally found out what happened, how’d you feel?”
“I really didn’t feel anything,” she answered in a loud voice. “’Cause I knew what she lived with. I’d had it done to me. I feel sorry for her and my brother, not my father. He destroyed our love back in 1978 when he shot my sister’s fiancé. I didn’t see him do it, but I heard it because I was right in the backyard.
“When I came around the house, he [Jack Layne] was lying on the ground. At that time I was what you call ‘Daddy’s Little Girl.’ Daddy couldn’t do no wrong. But when the cops came and took him away, and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I did it and I’m glad of it, I’d do it again,’ that kind of destroys everything you have for a person. When I get real depressed, I can still see the abuse.”
Midget Man turned around, pulled the respirator off from under his nose, and lit up a Marlboro.
“Pardon me, but considering you’re on a respirator, is that a smart thing to do?” I asked.
Glenn smiled. His mustache framed a mouth lifted up in an impish grin. It was easy to see why everyone liked him.
“Not too bright, huh?” he answered in a gravelly voice.
Glenn turned around and resumed watching TV.
“What about Chris Wyant?”
“I didn’t like the kid when I met him,” Cathy said firmly. “He looked like the type that takes drugs.”
But her father felt differently.
“He was the only boy that my father would let my brother mess with. My father never let anybody have any friends.”
“What was it like living with your father?”
“With my father, the more he drank, the wor
se he got. He couldn’t stop at one or two [drinks]. He had to keep going. My dad had the gift to where he could act sober even when he was totally intoxicated. He could turn it right around and make it look like it was a woman’s fault.
“He’d done it with Little Grady’s mother. She called the cops several different times and they came down here to the house and he’d make her look like she was totally crazy [because he acted sober], and not one report was ever filed.”
“Your sister Donna said he drank up to a gallon of booze a day.”
“Yeah.”
“He’d get four drinks out of a half a pint,” said Glenn, suddenly turning around.
“Did he drink when he was working?”
“There was many a time he was totally intoxicated while working,” said Cathy, a teetotaler. “When I was around five my father used to get drunk and put me on the platform ’cause I was identical to him. He would put me out there to work, so he wouldn’t get in trouble because he was intoxicated.”
When she got old enough to say “no,” she refused to go up on the platform anymore.
“It was too boring to sit there.”
“Mr. Newman, you worked with him?” I turned around and asked Glenn.
Cathy laughed before he could respond.
“He knows who you are,” and laughed again.
“Harry Newman, Sr.,” I said and added, “What’s it like being on the road with the carnival?”
“It’s a very rough life. It separates the men from the boys. I’ll tell you that,” Glenn continued.
“What makes it so rough?”
“The hours, the work,” said Cathy.
“You never have time for yourself. On your day off, you’re washing clothes.” Glenn added.
“If you have a baby reptile, you have to heat on them,” Tyrill chimed in.
“We lived in trailers, but some of the help, they lived in trucks and tents,” Cathy recalled.
“I heard that some people would actually sleep in the joints at night.”
“Sometimes you have to for security,” Tyrill explained. “Some spots like New York City, you’d get people slash up the tent.”