Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

The Torturers by Charles Somerville

“Go ahead,” said the aged wife. “But if you kill us I know that God will see that you never get out of this county alive”.

Not even, I am told, the wanton killing of the little Frank boy by the young human monstrosities, Loeb and Leopold, caused a greater wave of revulsion and resentment to sweep the country than did a crime committed in a small Pennsylvania town a good many years previous.

It was a robbery attended by such hideous cruelty toward the victim that there was nation-wide expression of satisfaction and relief when good detective work effected the capture of the dastardly gang and all its members were dealt heavy prison sentences — sentences ranging from twenty-three years to fifteen.

And in connection with this review of the case, it contains a highly dramatic episode, suppressed in the press reports of the day and told now for the first time in print to the readers of FLYNN’S WEEKLY DETECTIVE FICTION.

About five miles below Pittsburgh, and on the Ohio River, is situated the little town of Coraopolis. It was comprised of a short main street of shops, a post office and a one story brick village lockup, and that was about all.

Of course, I am writing of the place as it was. As to how much it may since have developed I do not know. Beyond the limits of the tiny town spread a vast area of excellent farm land all under vigorous cultivation.

The dean of the farmers of the locality and the best liked man in all the country round was Ambrose Green. His wife shared his popularity. Green was approaching his eightieth year, and his wife was nearly his age.

In his young manhood and prime he had been a farmer on an extensive scale, and had also turned many profitable land investments. It was estimated that old Ambrose Green was worth fully a hundred thousand dollars, a big fortune for the times in a rural community. Moreover, he was known far and wide as a man who lived up to his professions of Christianity in love for his neighbors.

Any farmer in financial trouble applied to Green for relief. The old man could always be depended upon to lend the money. He would ask interest for it, but more to take the curse of charity off the loan than for profit, because he would charge only a third or fourth the interest a bank would have demanded on the same notes. Also he accepted some notes with which a bank would have had nothing whatsoever to do.

Coraopolis had no such institution of its own and Green was a depositor in the Pittsburgh banks, but he always kept a fairly large supply of cash on hand with which to come to the swift aid of troubled farmers.

His wife was equally kind in her manner and actions toward her neighbors. She visited and comforted the sick and aided the needy. Many of the wretched squatter families along the muddy river banks had from time to time their hunger appeased from the abundance of her larders and the produce of the Green farm.

The reputation of old Green for keeping a large sum of money in his home for the relief of his fellow farmers when they fell into financial travel traveled far beyond his community, due to those who came to know of it and felt that such generosity and kindliness should be praised. And articles had been written regarding him in the Pittsburgh newspapers.

Unintentionally, however, the spread of his philanthropic reputation did aged Ambrose Green a very bad turn, for it came to evil ears.

The aged couple held to the custom of the hard-working days of their younger years and regularly retired at nine o’clock each night. This they had done, as usual, on a certain night in December, 1896, and were both just sinking off to slumber when there came a loud and what sounded like a very excited rapping on the door of their home.

Old Green got up, shoved his feet into his slippers and, going into the hallway, shouted:

“Who’s there?”

“Oh, Mr. Green!” a voice high-pitched and apparently breathless replied. “There’s been a bad accident over to Len Purdy’s farm and—”

Len Purdy was a tiller of the soil who lived about a mile away and was one of Ambrose Green’s best friends. Anything happening to Purdy demanded his instant and active help.

He unbolted and swung open the door.

Five masked men pushed in upon him. The leader, a small, lithe man, pressed the muzzle of a pistol against the old man’s heart.

“Stick ’em up!” said this desperado to the aged farmer, clad only in his nightshirt, and with no possibility of being armed, since he had no weapon in his hand. “Stick ’em up or you’re a dead man!”

Instead of “sticking ’em up” and in spite of the pistol prodding against his chest, old Green smashed the leader down flat on his back with a ponderous blow between the eyes. But the four others leaped upon him, and, of course, there could be only one outcome to so uneven a battle.

They soon had him down, a rope was produced, they dragged him to his big, old rocking chair in the living room and bound him in it hand and foot. He made no outcry, knowing it to be useless, for the nearest neighbor was far beyond the reach of his voice.

But while they were finishing the brutal business, one of them raised a sudden cry of alarm and pointed to the bedroom doorway. In it stood Ma Green in her nightdress. Her silver hair held to its tightly drawn and knotted bedroom arrangement, but her face was distorted and her blue eyes snapping. Steadying one hand with the other she was aiming a big, old-fashioned pistol at them.

“If you hurt my husband I’ll kill you!” she cried. With no quaver in her voice either. “You take those ropes off him this instant!”

And when they didn’t do so instantly she opened fire.

But she was an old woman and was using a pistol for the first time in her life, a pistol, moreover, gone stiff and difficult of trigger from years of disuse.

Her shots went wild and the robbers closed in upon her, bore her over to the bed and there bound her hand and foot as they had her husband. She screamed with rage as much as fear and fought them as hard as she could till they had stretched her prone on her back, tied helplessly.

Then they began to ransack the premises looking for the big roll of money Ambrose Green was reputed to keep always on hand in his home. Bureaus, chests and closets they rifled and an old desk they ripped apart. But none of the gang could find the money.

They cursed and grew enraged as the luck of the search went against them. Eyes glaring and glowering through their masks, they surrounded the old man.

“Where the hell do you keep that money?” the leader, a small, lithe figure of a man, demanded.

“I ain’t keeping no money here,” said Green.

“That’s a lie, you old skinflint. Come through and tell us or things will go a damn site worse with you than they have.”

“I ain’t got no money here.”

“Don’t lie to me!” snarled the leader, and repaid old Green for the blow between the eyes he had dealt him by punching the helpless man in the face.

“Tell us where that money is! Do you hear?”

Green was silent.

“There’s no use of you denying you got money here. Hell — everybody knows you keep a bunch of it in the house — that you’ve always got it on tap to lend out.”

When Green still remained tight-lipped, the youthful-appearing chief of the gang said:

“I’m going to count three, and if by the time I do you still hold out the information from us, by God I’ll shoot you dead. One... two—”

“You go to hell,” said old Green. “I don’t think you’ve got the guts to shoot.”

“You—” and the leader lifted his weapon.

But one of the other masked men gripped his arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Come over here a minute. Let’s talk this over.”

There was a consultation, in which it was decided that it would be useless to kill Green, for he evidently had some very secret place where he kept the money stored and that even if they murdered the old couple and had the whole premises to themselves they might never find the “swag.”

They had already searched every likely place they could think of and been unsuccessful. There was unquestionably some secret and very cleverly thought out place of concealment.

“That old bird would rather die than give us the satisfaction of getting away with it — you can see that,” said one of the gang to the leader.

“Let’s try the old woman then,” he suggested.

“That’s better,” agreed another.

“I don’t know,” said a third. “Gosh, how she fought back at us. She’s as much of a tiger cat as the old guy.”

“Let’s see how good her nerve is,” said the leader.

They left aged Green bound to his old-fashioned rocking chair and went into the bedroom.

“Now, mom,” the chieftain of the bandits said, “you tell us this minute where your husband keeps that money hid or we’ll kill the two of you and tear the house down to get it.”

“I heerd you askin’ my husband, Ambrose, to tell you,” she said. “And threatenin’ his life. And he spurned you. And so do I spurn you! I guess we’d both rather die than let our honest money get into the hands of such scoundrels — such cowardly scoundrels as you men.

“You go ahead and shoot. But if you kill us I know that God will see that you never get out of this county alive. You’ll be hunted and caught and shot down like mad dogs.”

Against the fearlessness of the old couple the robbers stood enraged but nonplused.

It was then that a horrible, savage, fiendish idea entered the mind of the leader. It must have occurred to him as his baffled eyes chanced to look at the reddened metal of the old, round-bellied stove alight in the living room.

“You fellows hold off,” he said curtly to the others. “I’ve got the notion that’ll make ’em come through — make ’em tell.”

Old Ambrose Green’s eyes were on the man as he came into the apartment where the farmer sat bound to the chair. But the leader of the robbers ignored his stare. Green saw the man go to the stove, fling open the door; then stoop, take up the poker that was at hand and push it deeply into the red coals.

While he waited for it to become hot, he turned a malicious grin on the aged farmer.

“I guess there’s going to be some talking done pretty soon, you old fool,” he said.

“Ain’t been any done yet.”

“Well, I’m going to toast the bare soles of your wife’s feet till there is.”

Streams of cold sweat started down Green’s cheeks.

“Good God!” he said. “You wouldn’t — couldn’t do that!”

“Couldn’t hey? You just wait a minute more till this poker gets good and red-hot and you’ll find out whether I mean business or not.”

The old man gulped.

“Well, then—” he began, but the voice of his wife came from the next room:

“Don’t you tell ’em a word, Ambrose! I forbid you! They won’t dare do that to me. And if they do, I’d rather have my feet burned off than to give in to the filthy cowards. Ambrose, keep your mouth shut.”

The small, masked man drew the poker out of the fire. It glowed as red as the coals. He stepped on into the bedroom.

“Wait!” cried old Green. “I’ll—”

“They ain’t touched me yet, Ambrose, they won’t dare!”

But in his avariciousness to possess himself of the aged farmer’s money the leader fiendishly laid the red-hot iron against the bare flesh of the prostrate woman’s feet.

Yet such was her fortitude she did not cry out. She knew that the sounds of her suffering would be the one thing that would make her husband yield, and two of the robbers were afterward to confess that four times the red-hot poker was applied to the woman’s flesh before, tortured beyond all endurance, she screamed.

At the sound of that single outcry of agony old Ambrose Green yelled to the robbers that he was ready to yield the secret of the hiding place of his money.

To the chagrin of the gang, who had toiled so hard in ransacking the place and gone to such horrible lengths to extort the knowledge, the old man said with a curling lip of scorn:

“It’s in my pocketbook in my coat pocket — that coat there you dumped on the floor when you was searching around back of the closet.”

The leader pounced upon the coat, brushing the others back, and found there a wallet containing one thousand dollars in cash and four bonds of five hundred dollars each. These were negotiable bonds which could be realized on as easily as the cash itself.

“Well, now that you got the money untie my wife and me — you’ll do that much in decency, won’t you, so I can ’tend to her, put some salve on her burned feet?”

The defeated, agonized old woman said in added plea:

“Do that, you men, won’t you? I’m suffering awful.”

The merciless crew paid no slightest attention to the appeal, had no pity.

They hurried out of the house and the old couple heard sounds of triumphant laughter as the gang made their get-away down to the dark and deserted highway.

It was virtually murder, for it might easily have been days before any neighbor came to the Green farm.

As it happened, however, Len Purdy, the farmer, whose name the robbers had used in gaining entrance to the domicile, had need of a farm implement he didn’t possess and arrived at the Green home early the next morning for the purpose of borrowing the implement.

Both Green and his wife were unconscious, but the sturdy old man soon revived. The coma into which the wife had fallen had been a mercy to the aged woman with the seared feet, and a doctor was at her bedside and oil and bandages applied to her wounds before she revived.

But the shock of her experience, coupled with the physical agony she endured, added to the symptoms of blood poisoning resulting, kept her for weeks on what appeared to be inescapably her death bed.

The press of the country rang with denunciations of the fiendish cruelty of her torturers coupled with demands on the authorities to make extraordinary efforts to discover the whereabouts of the inhuman gang of robbers.

Especially came the cry from every side for the capture of the barbarously merciless leader who had conceived and enacted the atrocity of putting red-hot iron to the feet of the bound and helpless old woman as a means of loosening the lips of Ambrose Green regarding the whereabouts of his money. It was a cry from the press expressing the feeling of the population of the entire country.

But little Coraopolis itself had no police force — a single constable befuddled at the facing of the task. In the circumstances the Governor of the State appealed to the Pittsburgh police for aid, and Roger O’Mara, then chief of the force of that city, announced that he would take personal charge of the pursuit.

A week, two weeks passed, however, and no arrest had been made. Not a clew discovered. The five men had worn masks which completely concealed their countenances and Green and his wife could only offer descriptions of the sizes and apparent ages of the men.

Both were certain — very — that they would recognize the voice of the little, lithe leader of the gang. It was curiously mild and soft, they said, for the voice of such a fiend.

The train crews of every passenger and freight which had passed through the territory that night were energetically sought, seen and interviewed, but none had recollection of seeing such a group of men on the night of the crime.

O’Mara hardly expected any result from this step. He was certain the gang was in Pittsburgh, that they had walked the five miles into the city from the Green farm under cover of the night.

Deep disappointment had public expression in the newspapers, when two weeks had gone by and the monstrously cruel robbers were not apprehended or, even, apparently, a clew turned up to guide the police toward their capture.

And now I am to tell of the strange dramatic episode that didn’t get into the newspapers, that is for the first time here told in print.

Police Chief Roger O’Mara was persona non grata in that office or any other post to Euge O’Neal, editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch.

O’Neal was pacing his sanctum dictating to his young secretary a fierce philippic against the Pittsburgh police department and O’Mara especially, because of the failure to run down the barbarous plunderers of the Green farmhouse.

He was accusing the department and its chief of stupidity, laxity, carelessness, slovenliness of method, misdirection and all around incompetence.

“Lord, Mr. O’Neal,” commented the secretary, “you are fairly taking the hide off O’Mara!”

“Well, by heavens,” replied the editor to the young man, “they should have the hide taken off them. Those damn fiends — especially that little devil who thought of putting a red-hot poker to the bare flesh of that old woman — are at large in this town. There’s no doubt of it. And this dumb department can’t lay their hands on them! It’s absurd. An intelligent roundup would be bound to do it.”

“I guess they are a bunch of flatheads all right,” said the secretary in smiling agreement.

“Worse than that,” commented O’Neal. “Well, now let’s see... er... what was that last sentence?”

“Why,” answered the secretary, “it was—”

He got no further.

Two stalwart men, entirely unannounced, made their appearance in the doorway of the editor’s office. As they entered, one in a calm, casual way drew a pistol. As he did so he said:

“We are detectives from headquarters, Mr. O’Neal.”

The editor stared at man and pistol, and his face flushed.

“If that big, stuff shirt O’Mara has sent you up here to intimidate me, to keep me from giving him another blast, you can go back and—”

“We’re not here for anything like that,” protested the officer, but as he spoke he and his colleague advanced further into the room.

“Going to arrest me for criminal libel at pistol point?” sneered O’Neal. “You’d best be about your business of grabbing those crooks who tortured old Mrs. Green.”

“That,” said the second man, “is exactly what we’ve come here to do.”

And he suddenly plunged forward and gripped the little secretary by the throat while he called to his comrade:

“Frisk the dirty little rat, Jim, and see if he’s got a gun on him!”

“What the devil has young Morris done to make you handle him like that?” demanded O’Neal.

“Young Morris,” said the first man, “Jim,” after he thoroughly rifled the pinioned secretary’s pockets and found no weapon, “is the heartless young devil who burned Mrs. Green’s feet!”

At first O’Neal roared that he didn’t believe it. He saw in the episode a put up job by O’Mara to annoy him and make him look ridiculous. And he threatened to bring down every law of reprisal in the land on the head of the police chief of Pittsburgh.

But when the detectives ripped from an inside pocket of Charley Morris one of the five hundred-dollar bonds stolen from the Green home and then and there in sight and hearing of O’Neal began shaking a complete confession out of the white, whimpering and trembling secretary, the editor did the only thing left for him to do — he flopped back into his big, revolving chair and watched and listened in dum-founded silence.

“We got the first of the gang three days ago, Mr. O’Neal,” volunteered one of the detectives as he and his colleagues were about to depart with the handcuffed, sobbing Morris between them.

“We had to keep it quiet till we made him come through with the names of the others. We’ve got all five bagged, counting this dog here now. There’s only a woman left to take up, and we know where she is and she can’t get away from us.”

O’Neal stared at the slightly built, curly-haired, pale-eyed young Morris.

“And you,” the astonished man said, “you little bowing and scraping, soft-voiced, mincing creature, you were the fiend that put the hot iron to that old woman’s bare flesh? I can’t — by God, I can’t make it out!”

“This fellow was the leader of the outfit,” said the detectives. “The woman and him schemed out the whole job.”

The first clew to the farmhouse torturers came out of a Pittsburgh saloon. A sharp-witted bartender passed it to a precinct detective and started the machinery that was to bag the entire outfit of crooks.

It may be said here that they were all amateurs. None had ever come into the hands of the police before. All the men in the execution of the plot, excepting young Morris, were perennially hard-up alcoholics, men who earned a dollar here and there, borrowed one elsewhere, somehow scraped up the prices for drinks.

One of these, for long known to the neighborhood as a professional down and outer, sauntered into this particular saloon on a morning about ten days after the Coraopolis crime, ordered a double whisky with an air of jauntiness and confidence unknown to the bartender, from whom he had so often begged a drink with humble words and watery eyes. And when the bartender said:

“Hey, Jimmy, who made you a millionaire overnight?” Jimmy replied:

“That’s just what’s happened, old kid.”

He tendered a one hundred dollar bill across the bar in payment.

“G’wan,” said the bartender, “pull back with that stage money and let me have some real change.”

“That bill’s as real as the nose on your face,” said Jimmy Kramer.

The man behind the bar took a closer look at it and was convinced.

“Where in God’s name did you get one hundred bucks all at once?” he demanded.

Jimmy Kramer winked.

“I’ll bet you’d give a lot to know,” he said. “But treat me nice now, because there’s more where that one came from. Give me another double hooker, and throw me a quart bottle of the best into a paper wrapper. I’m giving a little party to some friends this afternoon.”

When Jimmy had departed with his bottle and his pockets stuffed with the bills he got in change for the hundred, the bartender pondered. Jimmy Kramer he had known as a shiftless, jobless “bar fly” for nearly ten years.

Of course, somebody might have left him some money. But if so, Jimmy Kramer was the sort that would have been around with his chest out, bragging about it, because he was always boasting of having wealthy relatives.

It. came to the saloon man’s mind that he hadn’t seen Jimmy around for some days. A week — no, more than that — ten days. He wandered where Jimmy, the saloon’s “regular,” had been for ten days. But his conjectures ended only in perplexity.

There being no other customers at the time, he picked up his morning newspaper, not yet perused. It was the Dispatch. And in large type this headline stared him in the face:

Tenth day!

Could it be possible that Jimmy Kramer, the worthless rummy, was in that cowardly crime? Jimmy Kramer — with one hundred dollars to spend!

Well, if Jimmy Kramer was one of the gang who burned that plucky old woman, who was dying from the deal she got, he ought to be turned in. The bartender knew crooks who, with an easy conscience, he would protect. But not that kind of a crook.

So he spoke to the precinct detective. And the detective watched Jimmy all day as Jimmy got gloriously drunk with a group of sordid guzzlers like himself. The detective waited until four o’clock in the morning, when he knocked on the door of Jimmy’s squalid furnished room, and when Jimmy opened it and stood quaking and trembling from his debauch, the detective seized him.

He gave him no opportunity to bring back his nerves through a deep drink from the bottle beside his bed. He wouldn’t let poor, whining Jimmy touch the bottle, but made him hustle into his clothing and called a patrol wagon and took him to headquarters.

And there huge-bodied, hard-jawed, steel-eyed O’Mara took Jimmy in hand and demanded an account of where he had come into possession of so much money.

And Jimmy, who hadn’t earned more than a half dollar or a dollar at anything in more than fifteen years, was totally unable to pull his scattered wits together to formulate any sort of a reasonable lie. Within half an hour O’Mara had made an abject pulp of him, and a complete confession was forthcoming.

He said that he and three other men like himself, social discards who yet had never been apprehended for serious crimes, were approached by a young woman named May Lang, with whom all had a sporadic acquaintance.

May Lang, he said, when she was flush with money, liked to appear in the back rooms of the resorts Kramer and his kind frequented and play the “good fellow.” She would stand them all three, four, sometimes five rounds of drinks.

Once or twice on these expeditions she had been accompanied by a young fellow to whom they were finally introduced by her under the name of Morris. On this last meeting May told the four men that her friend had a big scheme for picking up some easy money, and lots of it. Then she had let Morris do the rest of the talking.

“He told us about this old fellow that lived way off from anybody else and kept a potful of money in his house all the time,” Kramer went on to say.

“There was only this old geezer and his old wife living in this lonesome house, without even a dog to protect them. All we’d have to do was to put on masks, and if the old boy saw five men come in on him at once, why there’d be nothing to it. He’d give up all the money he had in the house in a hurry.

“When he told us he was sure this old boy was eighty years old, and said how he had studied out the lay of the land and how he would get the old man to open the door by telling him one of his friends was sick — well, it looked pretty good to the bunch of us.”

Then Jimmy Kramer went on to relate the stubborn opposition they had unexpectedly met from the old couple. And he whined and whimpered that if he had ever known to what revolting lengths Morris would go in order to extort the money from the old man he would never have joined the expedition.

Morris, the handler of the red-hot poker, collapsed as pusillanimously as his hirelings.

Like Judd Gray in the recent Snyder murder, he sought to cast the blame for it all on the woman — in this case, May Lang.

“She put it into my head,” he whined. “She could make me do anything. She has won me away from my wife, made me forget my home and two babies. I met her in a dance hall. She’s a wicked, wicked woman.

“She’s had me starving my wife and children, and I was on the verge of losing the little home I’ve paid installments on — all on account of her, of her demands for money to satisfy her silly and expensive whims. That’s how it all came to happen in the first place.

“She brought me the newspaper clippings that told about old Green running a sort of a bank in the little village for his neighbors. She said how easy it would be to go down there some night and get his money. She said she had heard he kept as much as ten thousand dollars in the house at a time.

“I kept telling her I wouldn’t dare do such a thing. And she kept taunting me with being a coward. And then she said she could round up four men who would go down there with me and would not expect much of the loot. She said if five of us showed up masked it would scare the old couple so hard they’d give up the money without a struggle.

“It was her that went down there and got the name of Len Purdy for me to use to get the old man to open the door. She threatened if I didn’t go down there and get the money she’d never see me, never speak to me again on earth, and I couldn’t do without her — I was so blind in love with her I felt I couldn’t live without her. But it was her put up the whole job — May Lang, she did it.”

“Was it May Lang,” demanded O’Mara, “who told you to burn old Mrs. Green’s feet?”

Twenty-three years at hard labor was the little fiend’s prison portion; May Lang got fifteen. And fifteen years each was meted to the others in the dastardly affair.

And Editor O’Neal manfully swallowed his pill. No higher praise was given O’Mara’s achievement than was contained in the editorial on the subject which appeared in the Pittsburgh Dispatch.