The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

^Nine The Prosecutor

Sally Horner disappeared a few months after Mitchell Cohen was appointed as prosecutor for Camden County, a ten-year term that would last until 1958. He was already on the way to becoming the pivotal law enforcement figure in the city, a status that saw his name emblazoned, decades later, on the downtown federal courthouse. Taking on the prosecutor gig only bolstered his reputation. In the late 1940s, Camden County did not have enough major crime to justify a full-time prosecutor. So Cohen worked in spurts, spending the rest of his time on Republican party politics. He was so successful at it that he became the state party’s de facto leader, allied closely with the New Jersey governor of the day, Alfred Driscoll.

Cohen’s term as prosecutor was one of many jobs he held in law enforcement over a long legal career that stretched from early private practice with local law firms all the way to chief judge for the federal district court of New Jersey. He moved smoothly between prosecuting criminals and delivering judgments. Cohen wasn’t one to bask in career glories, though. He was far too busy working to spend much time reflecting on the past.

Cohen did, however, take the time to dress the part of a big-shot lawyer. In his bespoke suits, he cut a figure that landed somewhere between David Niven and Fred Astaire. One lawyer told Cohen’s son, Fred, “Whenever I appeared in front of your father, I felt I wanted to wear a white tie and tails and be at the top of my game because he was a classy guy.”

Any resemblance Cohen bore to famous actors was, perhaps, intentional. He caught the bug for theater early in life, making trips up to New York to see Broadway shows a priority. In his younger years, Cohen spent his Saturday nights in line for concerts and stage performances at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, angling for a twenty-five-cent seat in the gallery. Once established in his legal career, he could afford to split a box seat with a friend.

He’d met Herman Levin at South Philadelphia High; they remained pals even after Cohen’s family moved to Camden just before his senior year. The boys made a point of seeing every play in Philadelphia—long a city where Broadway-bound shows worked out problems and test-ran productions on audiences—on opening night. Levin ended up producing musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Destry Rides Again, and My Fair Lady. Before the latter show opened in 1956, Levin told Cohen to “hock everything he had in the world” to invest in the production. Cohen did, and reaped the benefits as My Fair Lady smashed box-office records. Cohen also became a theatrical producer himself, cochairing the short-lived Camden County Music Circus during the summers of 1956 and 1957.

But Cohen’s fashion sense, his theatrical interests, and even his political machinations did not overshadow his commitment to jurisprudence. Cohen cared about the law and about being fair. He believed it was as important to know when not to prosecute a case as when to prosecute. In 1938, early in his tenure as acting judge for the city of Camden, a husband and wife appeared together in his courtroom after she had attempted suicide by poison—back then a punishable crime.

“We had a quarrel, and I thought he didn’t love me anymore,” the twenty-eight-year-old woman told Cohen.

“Do you?” Cohen asked her husband, who was twenty-nine.

“I sure do.”

“Then go home and forget about it.”

Cohen didn’t seek out notorious cases. They found him. When he won a trial, he didn’t dwell upon the details. Those cases, and how Cohen approached them, are an important window into 1940s Camden, as well as the forces that set the city up for great societal changes.

WHEN MITCHELL COHEN set out to prosecute the men responsible for the murder of Wanda Dworecki in the fall of 1939, he had never worked on a capital case before, even though he’d been appointed city prosecutor for Camden three years earlier. Murders were rare then, a far cry from the statistics that designated the city as America’s murder capital as recently as 2012. The strangulation of a girl a month shy of her eighteenth birthday stood out in its singular brutality.

Wanda’s body was discovered on the morning of August 8, 1939, in an area near Camden High School frequently used as a lovers’ lane. A corsage of red and white roses adorned her neck. The killer strangled her so forcefully that he broke her collarbone and breastbone. Then he dropped a rock onto her head, fracturing her skull.

Police working on the case weren’t all that surprised Wanda had died so violently. Four months before her murder, in April 1939, two men had accosted Wanda on the street and thrown her into their car. They beat her up—a near-fatal assault—and tossed her out into a field in a desolate part of Salem County, just south of Camden. She spent weeks recovering in the hospital.

That beating wasn’t Wanda’s first brush with violence. In late 1938, she and a friend had been out walking in the neighborhood when several men tried to kidnap them. Police were convinced—or at least, this is what they said—that Wanda was “destined to be murdered.” What they would soon learn is how much one man manipulated things so that destiny would become reality.

Wanda’s father, Walter Dworecki, who had emigrated from Poland in 1913, appeared to be an upstanding figure. He preached at the First Polish Baptist Church, a congregation he’d founded when the family moved to Camden from rural Pennsylvania. His teenage daughter troubled him, especially after her mother, Theresa, collapsed at the breakfast table and died in 1938. He brooded over Wanda’s fondness for the opposite sex, lecturing her about preserving her virtue, verbally abusing her in such a way to make an example of her to her younger siblings, Mildred and Alfred.

Respectable appearances can hide awful secrets, and Dworecki had plenty. Like being out on bail for setting fire to a house in Chester, Pennsylvania, in a scheme to collect insurance. Or having been sentenced to five years’ probation for passing counterfeit money. Like getting so angry at a neighborhood boy that he allegedly fractured the teen’s jaw with a broomstick. Or taking out a $2,500 life insurance policy (nearly $45,000 in 2018 dollars) on his wife, Theresa, whose cause of death was officially “lobar pneumonia”—the same cause of death listed for a number of victims of a murder-for-insurance scheme in Philadelphia whose culprits had some connections to the preacher.

The secret Walter Dworecki should have tried harder to keep was his fondness for hanging around Philadelphia dives, looking for men who might be willing and able to kill his daughter.

Immediately after Wanda’s murder, Dworecki slipped into the role of grieving father. He cried, “My poor Wanda!” when he saw his daughter’s body at the morgue, and then fainted. He had an alibi for the time of her death, but his grief-stricken act cracked quickly once police started to investigate.

A witness had seen Wanda with a “large blond gentleman” the night before she was murdered, who turned out to be twenty-year-old Peter Shewchuk, who boarded at the Dworeckis’ and romanced Wanda every now and then. When Shewchuk learned he was wanted for questioning, he fled Camden for his boyhood home in rural Pennsylvania. Police caught up to him on August 27, after his father turned him in.

In the interview room, all it took was the offer of a single cigarette for Shewchuk to open up. He told the detectives that he and Dworecki had met up in Philadelphia earlier in the evening of August 7. “He gave me 50 cents to cover my expenses and then went to conduct his religious services. I met Wanda and we strolled down the street.” Walking past the lovers’ lane, Shewchuk said he “suddenly felt the urge to kill” Wanda the way her father had told him to: “Choke her, hit her with a rock, twist her neck.” Dworecki was supposed to pay Shewchuk a hundred dollars for the murder, but after Wanda was dead, he reneged on the deal.

Armed with Shewchuk’s confession, Camden police brought in the preacher. It turned out Dworecki had taken out a life insurance policy on Wanda around the same time as he had taken one out on her mother. He had hired three men, including Shewchuk, to kidnap and kill Wanda back in April. When she survived the failed attempt, Dworecki upped the policy on his daughter to nearly $2,700, with a double indemnity clause should she die in an accident, and got ready to try again.

Dworecki eventually confessed in a statement that ran to nearly thirty pages. The preacher admitted to being aggrieved by Wanda’s behavior, but he claimed the idea to kill Wanda originated with two men, Joe Rock and John Popolo, whom he’d met in Philadelphia. Dworecki said they urged him to kill his daughter to collect the insurance money and pressed him again as time went on. He roped Shewchuk into the murder plot after learning the younger man had bragged about sleeping with Wanda. Shewchuk denied it, but Dworecki sensed an opportunity to manipulate the boy into carrying out his murderous scheme.

Both men entered guilty pleas in Camden County Court on August 29, 1939. Dworecki refused to look at anyone. Shewchuk chose the opposite tack, smiling whenever someone caught his eye. Then Mitchell Cohen, the city prosecutor, explained to the assembled crowd, including the surprised defendants and their lawyers, why the guilty pleas had to be thrown out. New Jersey state law at the time stipulated that one was not allowed to be sentenced to death if he pleaded guilty. Capital cases, and murder certainly counted, required that the defendants face a full trial, verdict, and sentencing.

Cohen voided the pleas, then bound the cases over to the county court, where Samuel Orlando (whom Cohen would succeed a few years later) would prosecute them. Cohen’s work was done, but he paid attention to what happened in the county courtroom. Orlando cross-examined both Shewchuk and Dworecki with extra vigor. Shewchuk received a life sentence in exchange for being the primary witness against Dworecki. The preacher’s confession was admitted into evidence, despite his lawyer protesting it should be kept out. The jury found him guilty after swift deliberations.

Shewchuk was paroled in 1959 after surviving his own near-fatal beating in prison; he died in the late 1980s. Dworecki was put to death by electric chair on March 28, 1940. Before his execution, he implored his surviving children, Mildred and Alfred, to lead pious lives and asked that “God have mercy on their souls.” Dworecki’s grave lies next to that of the daughter he murdered.

UNLIKE THE DWORECKI CASE, where Cohen did not have to work to establish the defendants’ guilt, he played a larger role in a subsequent murder trial that garnered a great deal of media attention. This case concerned the death of twenty-three-year-old Margaret McDade (Rita to her friends) on August 14, 1945, as Philadelphia, Camden, and the entire country celebrated V-J Day. That night, Rita’s best friend and fellow waitress Ann Rust saw her in the arms of a stranger, dancing to a Johnny Mercer tune. Five days later, Rita was found naked and dead at the bottom of a cistern near a sewage disposal plant. An autopsy determined that she had been raped, beaten bloody, and tossed into the cistern alive. She died of suffocation.

Not long after, police arrested the stranger Rita had danced with on the last night she was seen alive. Howard Auld was a former army paratrooper, recently discharged. When police found him, Auld gave them a fake name (“George Jackson”) and claimed to be innocent. Discharge papers he carried caught him out on the first lie. Careful interrogation spurred Auld to confess to McDade’s murder.

Auld recounted an all-too-familiar, all-too-horrible story: after the dance, he had made a move on Rita that she turned down. He got angry, punched her in the face, and choked her until she passed out. Auld claimed he felt for a pulse and, when he found none, dumped her into the cistern. (Never mind that she was still alive and he omitted mention of the rape.) Auld’s time in the army also included repeated stints in a mental hospital and various bouts of violent behavior, which his lawyer, a court-appointed defense attorney named Rocco Palese, would use as a mitigating circumstance in the trial.

Auld was sentenced to death for Rita McDade’s murder in 1946, but the conviction was tossed out on appeal several months later. The presiding judge, Bartholomew Sheehan, had failed to tell the jury that they could recommend mercy—meaning, a verdict other than death—in finding Auld guilty of first-degree murder. The Camden County prosecutor’s office moved quickly to try Auld again, but proceedings did not begin until 1948, after Mitchell Cohen’s appointment as top prosecutor.

Sheehan was also the judge for the second trial. Cohen asked for the death penalty, in accordance with New Jersey state law. Auld’s new court-appointed attorney, John Morrissey— Palese had since been appointed as a judge—implored the jury to be lenient toward his client, “a feeble-minded boy,” and deliver a not-guilty verdict by reason of insanity. But Cohen prevailed with the jury. Morrissey indicated he would appeal, and did, several times over, delaying the execution date a half dozen times. Howard Auld did not die in New Jersey’s “Old Smokey” until March 27, 1951. His final words were “Jesus, have mercy on me.”

BY THE END OF 1949, Mitchell Cohen had established his bona fides as Camden County prosecutor. He had tried one capital case directly and worked on another, even though he was deeply conflicted about the death penalty. Decades later his son, Fred, recalled Cohen becoming “very emotional” when the subject came up, so much so that they did not discuss it again. Cohen did his duty, whether asking for the harshest sentence as a prosecutor or delivering the sentence as a judge. But he did not have to like it and, with that single exception, took care not to bring his feelings home to the Rittenhouse Square town house he shared with his family.

He would also vault onto the national stage with his handling of a case that would shake the city to its foundation, and foreshadow similar massacres in the decades to come. But he did not close the books on Sally Horner’s abduction. To his knowledge, the new kidnapping charge had not flushed out Frank La Salle. Sally was still missing. And the more time passed, the less likely the outcome would be a good one.