1924: Cop killer attempts prison escape, caught and executed

Philip Hartman knew he needed to pay for his crime and that he would have to pay the ultimate price.

“Fight the case? No, I am guilty of the charges. I made my mistake. I am sorry,” the 24-year-old Hartman told reporters after he was arrested for murder and bank robbery.

After robbing the Abbottstown State Bank on October 14, 1924, Hartman had shot Private Francis Haley of the Pennsylvania State Police shortly thereafter. Haley had died almost instantly on the highway where he had fallen from his motorcycle, becoming the 11^th state trooper to die in the line of duty. Following an intensive two-day manhunt, Hartman surrendered to police in Reading and was returned to the Adams County Jail to await his trial.

Hartman spoke to reporters, “In broken phrases, like a man repenting a wrong deed, struggling in vain with a cigarette that refused to remain lighted,” the Gettysburg Times reported. He was unshaven, agitated and weary looking.

The following day state police escorted him as he retraced his route from the time of the bank robbery until he boarded a train to Harrisburg.

At the Abbottstown State Bank, Hartman was taken into the bank and the cashier, H. F. Stambaugh, was asked if Hartman was the bank robber. When Stambaugh reminded the police that the robber had worn a mask, Hartman said, “I’m the man.”

Hartman’s parents still lived in Annville, but his mother had had a stroke two weeks earlier and was still ill.  She hadn’t been told of her son’s arrest or trial. However, his father and wife did visit Hartman while he was in jail.

Hartman’s preliminary hearing was held at the end of October and only Stambaugh and George Johnson, the golf pro at the Graeffenburg Inn where Haley was killed, were called as witnesses to testify.

Hartman had no lawyer to represent him and did not want one. The judge told him that murder defendants needed a lawyer so the court appointed George J. Benner for him. The trial was held in January 1925 and went as quickly as the preliminary hearing. Hartman was found guilty of first-degree murder on January 31.

Following his conviction, Hartman was returned to the Adams County Jail to await his execution. Benner appealed for a new trial, but the appeal was denied.

“Several months’ incarceration in the Adams County jail, with freedom of the corridor granted him by Sheriff Shealer, instilled in Hartman desire to escape and he planned with and inveigled Roy Diamond, Annville, boyhood companion of his, to assist him,” the Gettysburg Times reported.

Diamond had tried to smuggle steel hacksaws to Hartman that he would have used to saw through the bars that covered the cells and windows. Diamond was caught, though, and was soon residing in the same prison as his friend.

As the date for the execution approached, Governor  Gifford Pinchot granted Hartman a 30-day respite. This came about due to the efforts of Clyde G. Gleason, a professor of psychology at Gettysburg College, who was seeking a way to stop the execution.

Gleason’s last-ditch effort failed. On the morning of November 28, Sheriff Shealer read Hartman his death warrant at the county prison. Hartman and an armed guard then left the prison for Bellefonte and Rockview Penitentiary. On the morning of November 30, 1925, Edgar L. Hildebrand, a Gettysburg College student who had been helping Gleason, and a prison guard escorted Hartman to the electric chair.

Hartman’s step did not falter as he walked. “The smile remained while attendants were adjusting the apparatus before the current was applied. Not a word was uttered by Hartman as he was placed in the chair,” the Gettysburg Times reported.

He was declared dead at 7:09 a.m. He was the 155^th person in Pennsylvania to die in the electric chair, which had replaced hanging as a form of execution in 1915.

 

History's Mysteries

Reblogged from Amy's Scrap Bag: A Blog About Libraries, Archives, and History:

• 
• 
• 

Yes, I'm borrowing the title of a History Channel show. It fits with my plans for this post. There are several historical mysteries that have baffled me. None are worth a full post, but I thought several posted together might make for interesting food for thought. Let us begin.

Why a Prime Minister, but not a President?

Women in the United States…

Read more… 835 more words

1924: Pennsylvania State Police mount largest manhunt in history of Pennsylvania for cop killer

Private Francis Haley

“Today, a bank-bandit and murderer, believed to be one and the same man, sulks in the shadows of whatever he may find to shield him; a criminal hunted like a beast, while more than 100 Troopers seek to avenge the death of one of their comrades,” the Gettysburg Times reported on October 16, 1924.

Two days earlier, Pennsylvania State Trooper Francis Haley had been murdered when he tried to stop a car that he suspected might have been involved in a bank robbery. He had died on Lincoln Highway just inside the Adams County near Michaux State Forest.

Haley was the 11^th state trooper to be killed in the line of duty and Pennsylvania State Police had turned out in force to hunt down the killer.

The killer’s car had been found the day after Haley had been killed. The car was found about 5 miles from Fayetteville, burned and abandoned. Though the license plate had been removed, it was still identifiable as the car that Haley had tried to stop and the state police had been searching for as dozens of troopers had combed South Mountain for clues.

Police were also searching for a potential suspect named Gerald Chapman. He had escaped from a federal prison in Atlanta, Ga., and was wanted for murdering a policeman during a robbery attempt in New Britain, Conn.

Meanwhile, the police in Baltimore, Md., had detained a suspect for questioning. He said that his car had broken down near Monterey Pass and he had to take the train to Baltimore.

The Gettysburg Times called it the largest manhunt in Pennsylvania history to that point. The Pennsylvania State Police were utilizing just about all of their resources to find the killer.

Amid this turmoil, Haley was buried in the Pottsville Cemetery. It was a reminder to the state police that all of the previous murderers of state troopers had been caught and Haley’s killer was still at large.

However, locating the car was a break in the case. The owner of the vehicle was identified as Philip Hartman of Rochester, N.Y. Hartman had also been a former resident of Adams County, working as a farm hand and lineman. The search shifted to locating Hartman. By that evening, the Reading Police reported that Hartman had surrendered to them and confessed to the murder.

He told the police that he had been forced to abandon his car in the mountains when it became stuck in mud. He had tried to hide it by burning it and then set off on foot to Mount Holly Springs. He traveled through the night to reach the town where he caught the train to Harrisburg. He then took a train to Reading.

Hartman talked freely while he was in the prison at Reading. He was born in Gettysburg and had later moved to Annville when he had gotten married and then became a father. Earlier in the year, he had traveled to Ohio in search of work. The job lasted only two weeks before he was laid off.

This was the last straw for Hartman and he decided to turn to crime. He stole a car in Columbus, Ohio, and made his way back to Adams County robbing gas stations along the way. Eventually, he found himself in Abbottstown where he decided to rob the bank there.

“My intention was not to kill the state trooper. I noticed him following me in the vicinity of Graeffenburg Inn. I aimed for his shoulder and as I did, he turned. The murder was not deliberate. I just wanted to put him out of the running, so I could make a getaway. After shooting the policeman, I abandoned the car and struck over the mountains,” Hartman told reporters.

When he arrived in Reading, he phoned his wife who told him that police had already questioned her and they were searching for him. He had planned to hide out in Reading until things blew over. He would then return home and lead a honest life, but his wife had urged him to turn himself in. Things wouldn’t blow over with him having killed a state trooper. Hartman reluctantly agreed and turned himself in.

He would have to throw himself on the mercy of the court.

1924: Pennsylvania state trooper murdered in Adams County

The Graeffenburg Inn on the border between Franklin and Adams counties in Pennsylvania and near where state trooper Francis Haley was shot and killed in 1924.

This is the first in a series of articles I wrote for the Gettysburg Times about the murder of Pennsylvania State Trooper Francis Haley and the hunt for his killer.

With just five months with the Pennsylvania State Police and only two days at the substation in Chambersburg, Private Francis Haley could still feel a sense of newness and wonder with the job. It was a feeling he would lose all too soon.

Around 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 14, 1924, the report came in to be on the lookout for a lone man in a touring car with New York plates who was wanted as a suspect in the robbery of the Abbottstown State Bank. Upon fleeing the scene, the bank robber had last been seen heading in the direction of Gettysburg along Lincoln Highway.

Around 2 p.m. that day, H. F. Stambaugh, the cashier at the Abbottstown State Bank had found himself alone in the bank enjoying a lull in the busy day. A man had entered the bank wearing a grayish suit and slouch hat, but what alarmed Stambaugh was that he had a red bandanna pulled up over his nose and a pistol.

The robber demanded all of the money in the cash drawer, which amounted to $1,000 (around $13,500 today). He then told Stambaugh to get in the vault. As the cashier walked into the bank vault, he heard something that made him turn around. He saw that the robber had run off.

Stambaugh ran to the bank door. He didn’t see anyone on the town square, but he did see a touring car head off down Lincoln Highway driven by a lone man.

The cashier had quickly reported the robbery and the alert had been sent out shortly thereafter.

Private Haley mounted his motorcycle and headed out from the Chambersburg substation alongside Sgt. Merrifield. They headed east along Lincoln Highway watching the cars around them. As they passed through Fayetteville, Merrifield turned off to patrol along a different road.

Haley knew that the odds of finding the robber so far away from Abbottstown were slim. He had certainly had many opportunities to turn off the highway before reaching Chambersburg. Still, Haley was new enough on the job that the general acceleration of events still thrilled him.

He was driving by the Graeffenburg Inn near the border between Adams and Franklin counties around 3:30 p.m. when he noticed a touring car approaching him from the east. Then he noticed that the car had New York license plates.

The car passed him, but Haley turned his motorcycle around and hurried to catch up to the car. He drew abreast of the car and waved for the driver to stop.

“Pull up to the side of the road and stop,” Haley ordered the driver.

Instead, the driver drew a .32 automatic and shot Haley at point blank range. Haley hadn’t sensed any danger and hadn’t even had time to attempt to draw his pistol. The driver’s bullet passed through Haley’s right hand and then into his right breast where it also hit his heart before lodging in a rib.

“The momentum of the motorcycle carried the trooper along for a distance of about 25 feet. He then fell off onto the highway, face downward,” the Gettysburg Times reported.

People sitting on the porch of the Graeffenburg Inn had seen the entire shooting. They rushed to Haley’s aid as the car sped off towards Fayetteville.

As the witnesses tried to stop the blood flow, Haley said, “Get that man! I’m shot!”

And then he died; the 11th Pennsylvania State Trooper to be murdered in the line of duty. All of the previous murderers had been captured and the Pennsylvania State Police would make sure that Haley’s killer was also caught. His death set off the largest manhunt in Pennsylvania history to that point.

Starvation Cannibalism at Jamestown

Reblogged from Bones Don't Lie:

• 

If you've read any news in the past day, you've seen reports regarding cannibalism in colonial Jamestown. It was known prior that the colonists had undergone a number of starvation years where they were forced to eat foods that they wouldn't normally. The trash pits from the sites hold the remains of animals who aren't normally butchered, including horses, cats, dogs, rats and snakes.

Read more… 1,058 more words

Ewww! Not surprising, though, given the circumstances. Donner Party, anyone?

The Pennsylvanian Who Invented Bubble Gum

            When an idea blows up in an inventor’s face, the inventor usually isn’t too happy. Not so with Walter E. Diemer.  In 1928, Diemer was a 23-year-old accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia. But on his lunch hour and after work, he was an inventor.

            Diemer’s office in the Fleer Company was near the chewing gum production machines. When Gilbert Mustin, who ran the company at the time, tried to create a bubble gum, he put the small vat for mixing his recipes in a corner next to Diemer.

            “He said to me, ‘Watch that, will you?’” Diemer recalled in a 1992 interview. “After awhile, I was not only watching it, I was doing it.”

            Diemer experimented with recipes for a gum base and hit on success in September of 1928 when he including a natural form of latex in his recipe. It created bubbles and it also allowed the gum to be easily removed from skin and clothes. The characteristic pink color came about because that was the only type of food coloring that was available when he made the recipe.

            “It was an accident,”’ Diemer said in a 1996 interview with The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. ‘’I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles.’’

            With his new formula showing some promise, Diemer used a salt water taffy machine and wrapped 100 pieces of his new gum. He took the five-pound batch to a small Philadelphia grocery store where it sold out in one afternoon for a penny a piece.

            Diemer continued to refine his recipe through December. Then the Fleer Company took over production, wrapped the new gum in a yellow wrapper and named it Dubble Bubble.

            “I never thought it was anything that’d last,” Diemer told the Harrisburg Patriot News in a 1992 interview. “I thought it’d be here today, gone tomorrow.”

            Diemer helped market his creation by teaching salesmen how to blow bubbles so they could demonstrate the gum. Sales of Dubble Bubble were more than $1.5 million the first year. At a penny a piece, that means more than 150 million pieces of bubble gum were sold. Nowadays, the bubble gum business is nearly a $1.5-billion industry.

            Dubble Bubble wasn’t the first bubble gum made, but it was the first one that was actually successful. Fleer Company founder Frank Henry Fleer had made a batch of bubble gum in 1906. He called his gum Blibber Blubber, but it was too stick and broke too easily so it was never sold to the public.

            Dubble Bubble had no competition until after World War II, when the Topps Company of Brooklyn began wrapping bubble gum in comics and calling it Bazooka. Both brands became known internationally, and other companies later made bubble gum in sticks, flakes, nuggets, powders and even pastes, noted the New York Times in its obituary for Diemer.

            Though Diemer eventually became a vice-president in the Fleer Company, he never received any royalties for his invention. However, he did receive plenty of fan mail from children thanking him for inventing bubble gum, according to his wife Florence Diemer. “Although he rarely chewed gum, he would invite groups of children to his home and tell them about his invention, then preside over bubble-blowing contests, his wife said,” according to the New York Times.

            “He was terrifically proud of it,” Mrs. Diemer said. “He would say to me: ‘I’ve done something with my life. I’ve made kids happy around the world.’”

            Diemer died of congestive heart failure in 1998 at a hospital in Lancaster. He was 93.

Embarrassed wife has doctor killed in 1851

 

         It’s been said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Such fury cost Oakland, Md., its first doctor.

            When Dr. John Conn stepped off the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad train in 1851, he was a pioneer. Oakland hadn’t yet been incorporated as a town and the region was still frontier for Maryland. The town only had a few hundred citizens and they needed a doctor. The next-closest doctor was Dr. John H. Patterson in Grantsville, Md. To get there and back to Oakland would have taken a full day.

            Conn set up his office at Second and Oak streets where it quickly flourished.

            “In the days before the convenience of a well-stocked pharmacy, it was said that the ‘young doctor’ either had on hand the correct medication, or could prescribe a suitable home remedy for any attack of ague or vapors, vague ailments which were popular at in that period,” according to Garrett County Historical Society book, Strange and Unusual True Stories of Garrett County.

            Besides the fact that Conn had a monopoly on the medical needs of the community, part of the reason that his practice was successful was because he was young, attractive and people liked him.

            Sometimes too much.

            Ann Johnson was a woman who believed that she deserved more from life than to work in a general store owned by her older husband, Cornelius, and live in a backwoods town. The general store was on Railroad Street, just 300 feet away from where the Dr. Conn had set up his office. Ann could watch him leaving and entering the building from either the general store or her apartment. Sometimes the young doctor would even come into the store for items.

            Ann began to think that Conn might be her way out of Oakland. He was younger than her husband and he could take her to a city where she could live the life she wanted. She began to find reasons to visit the doctor for treatments for various ailments that either she or her infant daughter, Ida Lucy Florence Jeanette Genevieve Jenny Lind Johnson, supposedly had. She would engage the doctor in conversation to show her sophistication and smile at the single man.

            “As time passed, and the visits continued, Mrs. Johnson was convinced that her personality and charm were making an impression on Dr. Conn,” according to the Garrett County Historical Society.

            And she was making an impression. Conn thought she was being quite out of line. He told one person that he thought Ann was a “butterfly fool.” When word of this got back to Ann, her dreams collapsed around her. How could this man call her foolish? He could not find a better woman in this town!

            Ann stewed on the issue and her affection for the doctor turned to hate. She said something to Cornelius, most likely accusing Dr. Conn of doing something inappropriate to her during one of her visits.

            Then one evening in the spring of 1854, Cornelius left the general store shortly before 7 p.m. and climbed the stairs to his apartment. There he loaded his muzzleloader and took up position at his window. He watched the doctor approach his office and raised the muzzleloader to his shoulder.

            As Cornelius took aim at the doctor’s back, Marquis Perry approached the doctor to talk about something.

            Cornelius waited for his target.

            “One shot was fired and the doctor crumbled at the step. The bullet passed through his head and lodged in the office door,” according to the Garrett County Historical Society.

            Marquis was so frightened at being next to a murdered man that he ran off. He was found later hiding in his closet. Others, alerted by the shot, came outside and saw the doctor on the ground. They carried him to Thayer’s saloon on Railroad Street where Constable Thomas Arnold pronounced Conn dead.

            Suspicion quickly fell on Cornelius and Arnold arrested him. However, the only witnesses against him were Marquis and Ann. Marquis said he was too shaken to know what happened and Ann wouldn’t testify against her husband.

            The jury failed to convict Cornelius.

            He left Oakland and his wife shortly thereafter.

            Ann, surprisingly, stayed on longer taking care of her daughter. Then one day, she left the young girl in the care of a neighbor, saying that she needed to run some errands. Instead, she boarded a train and never returned to Oakland.