Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

With only so many plots to go around, the difference between a top-notch crime writer and a pedestrian crime writer is often subtle. What distinguishes Day Keene’s sauciest novels is his sense of humor — ruthlessly dark and foreboding — his sentences — crisp and abstemious — and his eccentric and often harrowing story lines. Keene published more than 50 novels from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. Since all of them currently await reissue in this country, may I suggest three to any publishers who may be reading? There’s Dead Dolls Don't Talk (Crest, 1959) with its outrageous cover blurb, “He figured her for just another one-night stand... until he found her still there in the morning — murdered.” There’s Too Hot to Hold (1959 Gold Medal). This time the cover copy cried out, “She was a female Judas leading men to torture... and death.” But Keene’s foremost treasure is Sleep with the Devil (Lion Books, 1954), featuring Les Ferron. An enforcer for a loan shark who moonlights as a model for a true crime magazine, Ferron tries to make a new start in life, in upstate New York and $150,000 the richer. But when he meets comely and virginal Amy Stanton, he discovers country life isn’t what he bargained for. One suspects much of Keene’s knowledge about true crime magazines came from writing for pulps like Lionel White’s Underworld Detective. Underworld published this grim tale about a killer criminology student, under Keene’s William Richards pen name in 1951.

Strangled

It was a glum day in the Federal Housing Administration offices in Fresno, California.

For though the sun shone outside and flowers bloomed and the glad sounds of spring were all about, on this Monday, April 2nd of 1951, something was amiss.

What was amiss was that Benny was not at work and there’d been no explanation of her absence. Benny was Hazel Benson Werner, 30-year-old former WAC, whose ebullient personality and irrepressible vitality had kept the office morale on an upward arc for three years.

Married to a GI student at Fresno State College, a handsome girl, tall and lush bodied, with an unfailing smile and a gay retort for all sallies, Benny was the bellwether of the office. As Benny went, so went the work, and since Benny always went the sunny route, good will and ambition prevailed in her orbit.

First Emily Bonne, who worked at the desk next to Benny and was one of her closest friends, telephoned her apartment and got no answer. Then Irene Elliott tried and finally Evelyn Hersey, and still no reply to the call. It wasn’t like Benny to go away without letting her office and her friends know of her plans.

Someone thought of calling the college. Someone called and learned that Edgar A. Werner, Benny’s 31-year-old husband, had not attended his classes during the day. This offered a possible solution: the two had decided on a sudden holiday and had driven somewhere for just a brief rest. The girl friends, however, were not satisfied. It simply wasn’t like Benny to leave her office in the lurch.

Work done for the day, Emily, Irene and Evelyn went to Benny’s apartment on College Avenue. They found a note tacked to the door. It said, “Darlings, whoever you are, I’ve gone to visit Lee and Lorna. Won’t be at the office, so don’t bother them there.”

The girls knew Lorna and Lee to be friends Benny had met through the WAC’s. Benny had not mentioned visiting them, or expecting to see them, but the note was calm and normal enough and the girls were satisfied... for the moment.

Even the fact that the signature had been typewritten, as was the remainder of the note, didn’t upset them.

It also was quite likely that Benny and Ted, her husband, had gone to visit Lorna and Lee together. It wasn’t unlikely that they should drive to Auburn, near Sacramento, for the visit and certainly they wouldn’t be expected to make the two hundred mile trip and return in a day.

In the office the following day, Benny’s friends explained her absence and all was well... that is, temporarily. A few minutes after eleven o’clock, C. S. Wooton, Mrs. Werner’s direct chief, appeared at Emily Boone’s desk to show her a telegram. It had come from Los Angeles and it said:

The telegram was signed “Hazel Werner.”

“But that can’t be,” Miss Boone protested. “The note on her door said she was going to Auburn and that’s 600 miles from Los Angeles.”

“Well, the telegram’s from Los Angeles,” Wooten said. “Maybe she didn’t want to tell you everything.”

“But,” interposed Irene Elliott, “I just remembered something. Benny doesn’t have a typewriter in her apartment. That note was written somewhere else.”

“That’s right, she doesn’t,” Miss Boone said. “It is strange, isn’t it?”

The two girls looked at each other. It was Emily Boone who said slowly, “I’ve got a terrible premonition. This whole thing just isn’t like Benny. She simply wouldn’t tell some people one thing and someone else another. I’m going over to her apartment as soon as I get off here.”

The day wore slowly on. Promptly at five o’clock, the Misses Boone, Elliott and Hersey hurried from the office and drove to Benny’s College Avenue apartment. They tried the door and got no answer. They tried the windows, found them locked, with the shades tightly drawn... also unlike Benny.

They drove to the telephone office and put a call in to Auburn for Lorna. When she answered, they asked about Benny. Lorna seemed surprised. She hadn’t heard from Benny for more than two weeks. No of course she hadn’t been to Auburn, she knew nothing about the note saying Benny would visit her.

The three ordinarily circumspect girls with no more than the normal young woman’s interest in mysteries and crime suddenly became Pinkertons in petticoats. They sped off to the Western Union office, persuaded the manager there to contact Los Angeles and learn, if he could, whether the wire sent to Wooton on that morning had been filed by a man or woman.

The reply came back in an hour. The wire had been sent by a man, but the clerk remembered little of his appearance. Could the original message be sent, air mail, special delivery, to the Fresno office of the Western Union? No reason why it couldn’t be, said the manager, and the girls asked that it be done.

Fast as air mail might be, it would not arrive in Fresno until the following morning, so the three left the telegraph office and returned to the building in which Benny had her apartment.

En route, they began to ponder the state of Benny’s affairs. The notation in the telegram about settling problems for her husband seemed ambiguous. The girls knew that the pair, once so happy and seemingly ideally mated, had not been seeing eye-to-eye in all things recently. In fact, Ted had taken a room of his own, near the college, so that he could have quiet for his studies. He was making a desperate effort to finish his schooling and land his degree within the year and, since Benny often had friends in, he had sought solitude.

They were together much of the time, nonetheless. He took most of his meals with her and their weekends they spent together. But what affairs Ted could have, especially in Los Angeles, that would require help from Benny, puzzled the three friends. They pondered it apprehensively as they drove back to the apartment house and rang the bell at the landlady’s flat.

The landlady responded. The girls asked her if she’d had any word from Mrs. Werner. The landlady hadn’t, had not seen Benny leave the flat. Miss Boone then suggested that she open the door to Benny’s flat. The landlady demurred, but when the girls told her they had reason to believe Benny might be ill in her quarters, she finally opened the door.

Emily Boone was the first to step inside. She found a scene of violent confusion. Rugs had been kicked out of place, a chair was overturned, a drape had been pulled down from one of the windows. The bedclothes were disheveled and a pillow lay on the floor.

Beyond the bed, huddled in a pool of blood, her head a mass of gashes and contusions, lay the body of Benny Werner. Loose now about her neck, but showing signs of having been closely knotted there was a brown shoe lace and near her, the handle broken away from the bloodsmeared head was a carpenter’s type of claw hammer.

A few minutes after the landlady had called Fresno headquarters, Lieutenant S. G. Vind and Chief of Detectives Dan Lung arrived.

They found the room covered with the unmistakable dark brown spots left by drying blood. The dead girl’s skull had been fractured in at least four places. Yet her staring eyes and the purplish gray pallor of her face indicated, to the trained officers, that the blows, obviously from the broken hammer, had not been the real cause of death. Instead, they concluded, she had been strangled to death, presumably by the shoe lace.

Immediately Lung inquired about Benny’s marital status. He learned that, although she had been temporarily estranged from her strapping, six foot, two hundred pound student husband, they had been reconciled only recently and appeared to be on the best of terms. At Fresno State College, he discovered that Werner had made plans to be away from school for at least two, possibly three weeks, hence his absence had aroused little interest.

Learning that he still lived, part of the time, at the quarters he had taken when he and Benny had separated, they went there. There was no sign of him. Two of his bags were missing and some of his clothing. So, too, was his small automobile, purchased on a GI loan plan. His landlady said that he had told her he expected to be away for two weeks, explaining that he had been ill and needed a rest from his studies.

They found a series of fingerprints, including Benny Werner’s and those of two other persons, obviously, from the broad impressions, male. All three series seemed to be of approximately equal age, as if three persons had been in the apartment within the last forty-eight hours, two of them male.

The officers took the fingerprints to headquarters for study and classification. A few hours later a check with the records of GI students at Fresno state college revealed that one of the two male series belonged to Ted Werner. The other, however, remained unexplained.

The identification of Werner’s fingerprints occasioned no unusual interest. There was no reason why Werner should not have been in the house. In fact, it was appropriate that he should have been. Not only had he told his school of planning a vacation, but his wife had indicated that she expected to be away. What more likely than that he had gone to her apartment to pick her up in his car as they started their vacation?

By this line of reasoning, suspicion led naturally to the owner of the third set of fingerprints. Who was he and what had he been doing in the apartment? Prints had been found on an ash tray, on a chair arm, on a tumbler out of which he apparently sipped beer, the doors leading to the bathroom, the bedroom and the kitchen, in addition to the prints on the entrance door. He had gotten around, but there was an even more significant showing of his fingerprints.

They were on the broken handle of the claw hammer with which the victim had been beaten.

Couldn’t it mean that an intruder had entered the Werner home, strangled and bludgeoned Benny Werner and been interrupted at this grisly task by the arrival of Werner?

Couldn’t it have meant that the thug and Werner had struggled for the hammer — hence the discovery of fingerprints of both on the broken handle — broken the weapon in their struggle and resorted to some other tactics, such as a gun drawn by the intruder to intimidate and even kidnap Werner? Not only was it possible, it was highly probable. It would have been difficult for the intruder to beat Werner into unconsciousness, or even kill him, and then drag his body from the house, dump it into a car and escape without attracting some notice.

On the other hand, two men walking out of an apartment, even though they walked close together, would not be too noticeable. The bandit might very easily have forced Werner into his car, ordered him to drive and made his escape, leaving the murdered Benny Werner lying in her life blood.

What motive could the thug have had for kidnapping Werner? He’d already committed one murder; certainly he could not suffer more, if caught, for the commission of a second.

But what reason could he possibly have for kidnapping Werner, who had no money? Could they have wanted his car, and his ability to drive it? Could it have been that the killer did not drive and that, in this emergency, he saw a chance to make a well covered get-away by forcing Werner to drive him beyond the city, possibly northward toward San Francisco and Oakland, where he could dispose of Ted at his leisure?

Certainly this sounded the most logical of all the possibilities, but what of the note left on the door? Did the bandit write it before arriving... there was no typewriter in the apartment... and if so, how did he know Lee and Lorna? Or had Benny had Werner write it on his typewriter. Bring it to the apartment, tack it to the door and leave it before he entered the house? If this were so, there was every reason why it should have been left, as it was, by the bandit. It would provide an extra time killer for him, giving him further opportunity to put distance between himself and the scene of his heinous deed.

But how about the telegram from Los Angeles? That had been sent by someone who knew the Werners. And it had been sent by the killer to further obfuscate the Werner friends and keep them away from the charnel house as long as possible. It indicated, unquestionably, that the slayer had picked the Los Angeles area for a hideaway instead of the San Francisco Bay district. Furthermore, it also showed that the slayer, if he had sent it and had been the one who left the strange fingerprints, had known a very great deal about the Werners, consequently must have been a reasonably close friend.

Detective Sergeant L.M. Morris of the Fresno police and Assistant District Attorney Richard Shepard now took over the case. One of their first moves was to forward the unidentified fingerprints to the FBI in Washington.

Before nightfall of the following day, Shepard and Morris had their identification of the mysterious fingerprints. They corresponded to those of a sailor named Roland Berger stationed at the Port of Los Angeles in Wilmington. Immediately Shepard asked for a check on Berger, and received the information that he was on his ship. He had, however, the report said, spent the preceding week-end visiting relatives in Fresno.

Shepard and Morris started at once for Los Angeles. Before leaving, they asked Western Union to hold the copy of the Wooton telegram — already requested by the girls, but not yet received — in the southern city. They could check it there against a specimen of the writing of both Benny and Ted Werner taken from the dead girl.

Arriving in Los Angeles, the two went first to the Western Union office from which the telegram had been dispatched. The manager nervously handed it to them. It had been written on a sheet of plain, white paper... and with a typewriter.

“Keep it,” Morris advised as Shepard disappointedly moved to throw it away. “Maybe we can check it against a typewriter somewhere.”

They went to Berger’s ship. His commanding officer summoned the sailor. He came into the presence of Shepard and Morris, almost eagerly, it seemed. He was a pleasant faced, blond youth, somewhere in his early twenties, but his young face was drawn and lined and there was a certain shocked terror in his blue eyes. Introduced to his visitors, he spoke before either could fire any questions.

“What happened to her?” he said. “What happened to my aunt?”

“Your aunt?” It would have been impossible to determine whether Shepard or Morris spoke first, so spontaneous was their reaction. Finally Shepard said, incredulously, “What do you mean, your aunt?”

“My Aunt Hazel... Mrs. Werner,” the youth said. “The papers say she’s dead.”

“She’s your aunt?” Shepard repeated dazedly.

“She’s my aunt... yes, she was my aunt,” Berger said, doggedly, “and I want to know who killed her.”

“Seaman Berger visited with his aunt last week-end,” the commanding officer said. “He came to me as soon as he read of her death in the papers and told me the story.”

Shepard and Morris obviously were stunned. They looked at each other, then at Berger. Finally Morris withdrew the broken hammer from a package he had carried to the interview.

“Did you ever see this before?” he demanded. Berger studied the bloody fragments, then nodded slowly.

“She had a hammer like that in her apartment,” he said. “I used it just before I came away to fix some shelves.”

He stopped and looked anxiously at his commanding officer for reassurance.

Morris said, quickly: “Go on. You haven’t told us the whole story about this hammer.”

Berger stood silent for a long time. There was terror in his eyes, a terror heightened to near panic by his indecision. His commanding officer said:

“I’d advise you to tell everything you know, Berger,” he said. “I have every confidence in your innocence, and I’m sure these men want only the truth, that they don’t want to persecute anybody.”

Berger gulped. Then he turned to Shepard and Morris. “I spent the week-end with my aunt... that is, Mrs. Werner,” he began. “I stayed with Ted, her husband, over Saturday night and we went back to her apartment on Sunday. They got into a quarrel and once I took the hammer from Ted and hid it, or thought I did. The quarrel passed once, but they started fighting again later.

“I went out for a while and when I came back, Ted was threatening her and had hit her once or twice when she refused to allow him to move back into the apartment.

“It got so bad that my entire week-end was being loused up, so I decided to pull out for good. I went back to Ted’s place, got my luggage and came back here. As soon as the papers reached camp telling about my aunt’s body being found, I came to my commanding officer to ask for another leave to go to Fresno... that was only a couple of hours ago.”

Once more the C.O. bore out Berger’s story. There was nothing for Shepard and Morris to do but accept his story, especially when the commanding officer guaranteed that he would be available at all times if wanted. They returned to Los Angeles and located the clerk who’d taken the Wooton message on Monday morning. She recalled, dimly, the man who had sent it.

“He was a big guy,” she said, “and sorta good looking in a long-hair kind of way. He wore big horn rim glasses. He acted pretty nervous and looked like he hadn’t had much sleep. I’d say he was an inch or two over six feet and weighed two hundred pounds or more.”

Back in Fresno the officers returned to Werner’s apartment. They seized his typewriter and turned it over to the police laboratory for the purpose of comparing its type with the telegram. When the results appeared identical, the officers were ready for a thorough casing of the Werner rooms.

With three uniformed officers, Shepard and Morris returned to Werner’s rooms. It was apparent that he had taken some clothing with him in a suit roll and a hand grip. But there was considerable clothing left in the apartment, along with two items which aroused more than passing interest: a shirt and a pair of slacks, obviously belonging to Werner, dug from the bottom of the clothes hamper in a closet, both bearing unmistakable blood spots.

Came now another report from the police laboratory. The note found on Benny’s door ostensibly had been written on Werner’s typewriter. The conclusion was that he had prepared it before going to his wife’s apartment for the last time, an obvious indication of premeditation. When Werner’s fingerprints were taken from the door upon which the note had been tacked, the authorities were then entirely certain that they had now identified their quarry.

Shepard now asked for a murder indictment against Werner. When it had been granted, he sent out an all-points bulletin, with a description of Werner and the car he was driving, asking for his arrest. Then, with Morris, he began checking Werner’s movements and his past.

All trace of the hunted man ended in Los Angeles. That he had gone directly there, was admitted. There were vague clues placing him at the Mexican border, at Tijuana, but no reason to believe that he had remained in Mexico. Shepard now checked his background at Fresno State College.

The records showed that he had spent a year at Oklahoma A. and M. at Stillwater, Oklahoma. From there he had gone into the service. He had been born near Kinderhook, up the Hudson River from New York City, a small town chiefly distinguished as the birthplace of President Martin Van Buren.

When a search of Stillwater and surrounding country failed to reveal any trace of the fugitive, the FBI was brought into the case by means of a fugitive warrant. The federal agency at once instituted a search of New York City, at the same time setting up a check on Kinderhook, where Werner still had relatives. The mails to and from Kinderhook were placed under particular observation. So, too, were the telephone lines and the telegraph wires.

Meantime, Morris developed a new angle. At Fresno State, Werner ostensibly had prepared himself for a life of dubious emergencies by specializing in Criminology and the Psychology of Crime. In his examination of Werner’s school records, Morris came upon a thesis in which the fugitive had written that the homing pigeon instinct in first-time criminals, while almost unconquerable, was not completely uncircumventible. It was natural for a man in trouble, he wrote, to want to be in friendly, or at least, familiar environs, but he could achieve this, not by such hazardous maneuvering as returning to his regional beginnings, but to a similar environment reasonably near (or as near as would be prudent) to his home.

When Morris communicated this information to the FBI, Federal Agent Edward Scheidt in New York set up a check of the Hudson River littoral, but carefully avoided Kinderhook. Newburg, Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, Hudson, Kingston, et al, fell under his scrutiny.

Then, one day, his peregrinations took him to Garrison, the little town that clings to the east bluff of the broad river just across from West Point. Here was a town somewhat smaller than Kinderhook, but in much the same pattern and atmosphere. Here was a hideout where communications were readily accessible, but in which strangers attracted little notice, since it was the United States Military Academy on the other side of the stream.

With one agent working beside him, Scheidt began to comb the little river community. At the end of 36 hours the two had checked every male resident of the town between the ages of 28 and 35, and were ready to strike.

Together, they waited at a restaurant a few yards off the main street. Dinner time came and the usual flow of men in working clothes arrived for their evening meal. One or two women ate alone, a family appeared, more men in working clothes, and finally a tall, burly man, his myopic eyes blinking, edged up to the lunch counter and Scheidt gave the signal.

With his partner, he waited for the man to finish his dinner. As he quit the counter, the two preceded him to the door and waited just outside on the sidewalk. The big man stepped through the door and Scheidt and his aide fell in on either side.

“Take it easy, Werner,” Scheidt said evenly. “We’re FBI. We want you for the murder of your wife.”

For the moment it seemed that Werner would sink to the sidewalk in complete collapse. Scheidt and his partner supported him by the arms.

“Let’s walk on over to your lodgings,” Scheidt said. “Act like nothing unusual was happening and we’ll all do better.”

Werner obeyed. The three reached the fugitive’s cheap rooming house. Werner volunteered the information that he had been living in similar places since leaving California. Asked why, he replied that he felt it was better to escape detection.

“I heard that Benny was dead,” he said, “and since I’d fought with her, I knew they’d be after me and that I’d never be able to prove I didn’t do it. That’s why I hid out.”

“But you did do it, Ted,” Scheidt said. “They’ve got all the proof they’ll ever need out there in California.”

“No,” Werner said, quietly, “I didn’t do it. I loved her too much to harm her.”

“But you slugged her a couple of times,” Scheidt said. “I wouldn’t call that love.”

“Maybe not, but I didn’t kill her,” Werner insisted.

“Who did, then?”

“I don’t know. There was a fella visiting her... her cousin, she said. Why don’t you ask him?”

“They did,” Scheidt said. “He knew plenty.”

Werner steadfastly refused to admit the slaying. He also refused to return to California without due process of law. Back in New York, working with Fresno authorities, they took up the task of obtaining extradition papers.

The Fresno authorities were in no mood to temporize. Even as Werner fought extradition, Shepard and Morris were building their case against him, convinced that no conceivable alibi available to Werner could save him.