The French have a good term for those who dwell in their bastilles: oublier, “to forget.”
This was now the citizens’ wish in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who’d had a steady diet, forkful after insipid forkful, of Stanley Hoss. Though it would take longer for him to fully understand, Hoss now had to think his life was over. There were reasons.
Pandemonium had broken out when the jury foreman proclaimed “not guilty,” and Judge Lewis had hammered away for order. When quiet returned, the foreman answered Lewis as to second degree: “Guilty.”
In a befuddling decision, the jury concluded that Hoss had killed Peterson—but without a thought in his head about doing it. Further, a verdict of second-degree murder capped the penalty at ten to twenty years. Judge Lewis was furious and rebuked the jury for a collapse of common sense. If the Peterson family felt insulted by a sentence so incommensurate to the crime, Asaline, surrounded by newsmen, said only, “My husband gave his life so I could live in comfort, even though he lived in constant fear. I had to stay by his side even in death.”
Hickton tried to put on a good face: “I don’t consider this a defeat.” But, of course, it was. Then, right there, Zimmerman declared he’d appeal, to try to further diminish the verdict to voluntary manslaughter or to get his client off altogether. Because of a law favoring the criminal, the public defender knew Hoss could receive only an equal or lesser punishment in any second trial—an open invitation to appeal away.
As it stood, Hoss’s governing sentence remained that of Life for the murder of Officer Zanella. Even if that conviction was overturned on appeal or the sentence commuted by a liberal governor (Shapp was granting “Time Served” to many murderers after a mere ten or twelve years), Hoss still faced a consecutive sentence of ten to twenty years for rape. Formal sentencing for the Peterson conviction would come later but, given the judge’s frame of mind, Hoss could expect the max.
Hoss’s only hope was to get out from under the life sentence, then to whittle away at the lesser sentences. This was not necessarily a forlorn hope. After all, Hoss had succeeded in having a death penalty overturned; he calculated that his multitude of crimes while on the run would not be prosecuted; and that he would never receive a day in prison for his kidnapping and murder of the Peugeots, unless maybe the bodies turned up—little worry for Hoss. He was confident he would win his appeal in the Defino rape case, and he was hopeful, since Zimmerman claimed his rights had been violated all over the place in the Peterson trial, that maybe he could beat that case on appeal.
But over time, the flame of hope dimmed and began to flicker. First, Hoss learned his conviction for Zanella’s murder had been upheld. Then his rape appeal was denied. Finally, the points of contention raised by Zimmerman in his appeal of the Peterson case were, for once, given short shrift at the appellate level. Hoss should not have been surprised at his predicament; it is the way of criminals, to go sooner or later from ordinary freedom to life in a box. Maybe the psychiatrists were on the mark about Hoss, about his long-held sense of doom, even as a child … his belief in a personal, irresistible Armageddon. Hadn’t Hoss written to Diane days after his capture in Iowa, “I always knew I’d end up like this”? Hoss remained an object of interest in the psychiatric community, but it was far, far too late for other than the practical to prevail, the basics of crime and punishment.
Over the years, various interpretations by the courts—or by misguided jurors, meddling politicians, or liberal legislatures—had resulted in a failure to fully bring down the hammer on Stanley Hoss and major criminals like him. Now, for Hoss at least, the prison system would bring that hammer down, punishing Hoss with his worst nightmare. He’d be locked in a five-by-seven cell. Forever. The official position did not term this state of affairs as punishment but as protection, for Hoss and for those around him. Hoss was exceedingly dangerous to others. He was also a target for retaliation, particularly by the black prison population. The “forever” part was unofficial but understood by the Keepers of the Violent—a simple rule: If you kill one of us—especially in such a barbaric manner—and we cannot kill you legally, we will see you a dead man with a beating heart, drifting into oblivion with scant human contact, kept company only by what thoughts you may have.
Of course the enormity of such a punishment cannot be comprehended all at once.
. . .
A matter of weeks after the end of Hoss’s trial, it was Delker’s turn. His attorney, John Dean, claimed Delker was insane at the time of Peterson’s murder. A week before the trial’s start, Dean argued that Delker’s confession in the Hoss trial should be inadmissible in his own, since his client had been under the influence of drugs and psychological coercion. He further asked Judge Lewis to disqualify himself. Lewis would have none of it. Again, District Attorney Hickton would personally lead the prosecution.
In a turnabout from his attempt to have his client’s confession suppressed, Dean now highlighted the confession by having Delker read on the witness stand his statement that he alone had committed the atrocity on Peterson. Dean told the jury, “We want to get the whole story in front of you.” This was a canard, of course: as part of his insanity defense, Dean could only pray the jury would think Delker nuts for making such a confession in the first place.
“I’ll tell the man to tell the nigger that someone put something in the socket.” This was the text of a note found in Delker’s cell and dated two weeks before the murder. Hickton explained that the note had not been introduced at the Hoss trial as it was found among Delker’s belongings, and was thought at the time inadmissible against Hoss. But to this jury, the note showed premeditation.
Stung by the Hoss verdict, Hickton was prepared but still fretted. As a further spur, he knew that if he failed to get a conviction in this case, Delker could be out of prison in a mere few years. This predicament was the result of one of the most baffling verdicts Hickton could remember. It was recalled that in the previous autumn, Delker had stabbed to death black inmate Melvin “Whiskey” Sermons while Sermons was sitting handcuffed in a room awaiting a prison hearing. In an April trial, the jury had decided Delker was Not Guilty by Reason of Self-Defense. Self-defense? While the victim was handcuffed? It was verdicts such as this—not to mention the recent Hoss fiasco—that forced Hickton to sympathize with oft-heard public complaints of a lack of faith in the courts. With this in mind, Hickton was careful and thorough throughout, taking five days before the prosecution rested.
John Dean had the hard sell of convincing a jury that on that fateful day in December 1973, Delker “could not have known what he was doing.” This was essentially Dean’s whole thrust and he doggedly banged away at it. Unfortunately for his strategy, the jury too often heard Delker say, “I can’t remember,” or other statements that sounded like he was fudging his testimony. This wasn’t helped when Hickton suggested Delker’s blackouts occurred at convenient moments.
Jurors and spectators gawked when Stanley Hoss was led through the court room doors. As Delker had for him, Hoss had agreed to testify for his comrade-in-crime. Plus, it got him out of his cell for a while.
“After Danny’s brother was killed,” said Hoss, “he went through a big emotional change. He went into a withdrawal, and even stopped talking to me, and he was pissed over the prison not allowing him to attend his brother’s funeral and not sending him to a mental institution.” After Hoss stated, “I never saw any problem arise between Danny and Peterson,” Dean ended his questioning without asking Hoss about the slaying itself, a legal maneuver that prevented Hickton from grilling Hoss about the murder either.
The following morning, Dean wrapped it up. Back on the stand, Delker insisted that on the day of the attack he “didn’t know right from wrong … but I do now.” He said he couldn’t recall hitting Peterson with a chair, adding, “but I must have.” On cross-examination, Hickton asked Delker how he was able to remember that Hoss and Butler had no part in the murder while drawing a blank about hitting Peterson with a chair.
Dean’s final witness was psychiatrist Sherman Pochapin. It was Pochapin who had testified for the defense in the 1970 Zanella murder trial of Hoss. Now Pochapin took the stand to say Delker’s attack on Peterson was a “Niagra Falls of rage breaking forth from years of resentment toward his father.” Pochapin theorized Delker had no real problem with Captain Peterson but instead had transferred his anger to the victim: “Delker’s own father was often in jail and neglected his son as a boy, failing, for instance, to take him to Little League baseball games.” Pochapin postulated that Delker’s hostility “exploded with the murder of the captain.”
In his closing argument, Dean implored the jurors to understand that the unprovoked killing was the end product of offspring rage, and that Peterson’s reputation as a praiseworthy man was viewed by Delker as a “reproach to his own father.” After more minutes of what Hickton later termed “psychobabble,” Dean asked the jury to hold his client guiltless, “as no sane man could commit what Danny Delker did.”
Hickton rued the timing of Peterson’s murder, which had occurred when the death penalty was off the books in Pennsylvania. Although death had since been reinstated as a penalty for a narrow range of crimes, thanks in part to the oft-referenced Stanley Hoss escape from that penalty, but, as it stood then, Delker’s top punishment was limited to a life sentence. Hickton wanted no less.
Speaking substantially longer than Dean, the district attorney again laid bare the harrowing details of Peterson’s death; “ … pounded the victim’s head to a pulp as they struck him with chairs, like woodchoppers,” was a representative phrase. It was a distasteful task, particularly with Asaline present, but Hickton felt nothing could be left to chance. Hickton also dismissed the testimony of the psychiatrist Pochapin, noting that he was the only one of the eight psychiatrists who’d seen Delker “who would come in here with that story.”
Hickton paced slowly back and forth while talking, but now, standing still in front of the jury, he repeated the words used by Assistant District Attorney Fagan against Hoss in 1970: “The time has come for society to protect ourselves.”
The jury returned four hours later. “Guilty of first-degree murder,” the foreman said. It was as if Kozak was whispering in Delker’s ear, “We’re going to weld your door shut. Forever.”
For his foolish quest to establish a reputation like those of Hoss and Delker, George Butler likewise earned a first-degree murder conviction. As he was led away, he screamed over and over again, “Kangaroo Court!”
. . .
Several months later, key witness Bob McGrogan sat in Judge Lewis’s courtroom. After a twenty-five-minute nonjury trial, Lewis acquitted Mc-Grogan in Peterson’s murder. However, he was compelled to add, “You are a fortunate man today, yet with your long criminal record you missed an opportunity to redeem yourself by failing to intervene in saving that good man’s life.”
To split up the killers, Hoss was shipped to Graterford, a maximum-security prison near Philadelphia. This was a severe blow. It was so far away from home, who would visit him now?
. . .
It was September 1974.
Diane,
Why don’t you write? Surely you can find the time. Do I have to send my friends to find out how the kids are? The kids [should] hear the whole story about their dad, not just the shit they hear from you. You got One Week!!
It was a month before Diane wrote back with her own complaints of feeling threatened all the time. Always one to bristle when his women resisted his wishes, Stanley escalated the debate.
Go ahead and call the warden. You don’t think I send these letters through the mail room do you? The war between us has just started up. Whatever happens or whoever gets hurt is all on you because I’ve tried the right way. I think the best thing for you to do is kill yourself and that little toilet case to save me the trouble. Once more, I only want to see my kids and there won’t be any trouble. Think about it!
On the last day of September, an article appeared in the Pittsburgh Press entitled “The Peugeots and Hoss.”
Five years ago next week Stanley Hoss was captured in Waterloo, Iowa, ending a nationwide manhunt. He still makes headlines, notorious as they may be, and every time his name is discussed somebody wants to know what happened to the ‘mother and baby.’ Now, five years later, authorities are willing to talk of their fate.
An FBI spokesman said after Hoss killed Mrs. Peugeot near Johns-town, and placed her in the trunk of the auto, he drove to Ravenna, Ohio, where he put the body in a dump. “We had no reason to doubt him,” said the agent, “because he gave an exact description of the area including a wooden fence and a water tower in the vicinity. Hoss was taken to the dump in an effort to help us find the woman.”
The FBI even paid a contractor $10,000 to remove debris and assist in scouring the dump. The dump’s fires burned continuously which may have destroyed remains. In addition, refuse was taken to a nearby highway project to be used for landfill during construction. The agent said, “In all probability the remains are beneath a highway because we went through that dump with a fine-tooth comb.”
Hoss continued into the Midwest, taking good care of Lori Mae until he killed the little girl by suffocation and gunshot. Hoss said this occurred in a state park in Kansas where he placed the body beneath a soda pop case and covered it with debris. Hoss said specifically the incident was carried out near a stream, “But this state park is so big,” said the agent, “with so many streams we were unable to locate Lori. It’s sad but I don’t think we will learn any more than we know now.”
The article seemed to impart the final word in the mystery of the Peugeots—except that refuse is never used as landfill by any highway department. Said those in the know, “Mrs. Peugeot is not beneath any Ohio road.” Further, the FBI remained unaware of the highly believable version told by Hoss to inmate Whitman Shute that Lori Mae was buried in a cemetery near the Kansas-Missouri border, all contained in a forgotten report by Detective Joe Start.
L’oblie. “To forget.”
Letters were drying up. So were visits. There’d still be an occasional misguided woman who would read about Hoss, get “fascinated with me,” and make contact, but family and friends were becoming more like strangers. Yet if there was one loving constant, one beam of light in Stanley’s dark world, it was his sister Betty. Calling him by nickname, her October letter left him weak, his mind numb.
My dearest Sonny,
I have struggled with whether to tell you this, but we have shared everything since we were kids. For some time I have had leukemia. Transfusions can no longer help me. The doctors say I don’t have much time. I am telling only you this. Please tell no one. I will write to you as much as I can. Please don’t worry about me.
All my love,
Betty
. . .
On a date chosen to commemorate those killed in the line of duty, Asaline and other Peterson relatives attended the memorial—but they never came to the penitentiary again. Maybe it could be chalked up to too many bad feelings, not just about Peterson’s murder but about the penitentiary as well. Peterson’s relatives did not know who to trust, who to believe. It was understood that Hoss and his crew pulled the trigger, as it were, but did they load the gun? Asaline remained appreciative of the efforts to bring the killers to justice but others in the black community weren’t so sure. Didn’t Delker say he was put up to it by prison officials? And what of the unsuitable Hoss verdict and the puny sentence? Was the fix in? Conspiracy hearings had gone on for a time, but nothing came of them. “That was because,” said veteran Gus Mastros, “there was nothing to come of it. The idea of collusion was an absurdity and we at Western remained hurt and dismayed over this kind of thinking.”
On a smaller scale, another relationship was poisoned within the Hoss constellation. Betty had always been friendly with Diane. Even when Diane began divorce proceedings against Stanley, Betty understood and wrote to Diane, “We’re all for you.” But now, after letters from her brother citing Diane’s selfishness in keeping their kids from him, Betty wrote, “You were never any good for Sonny. You’re just someone I used to know.”
Diane’s pattern, after enough coercion, was to periodically respond to Stanley. His replies were always prompt.
2/24/75
Thank you for sending the kids birth dates. I just can’t remember anyone’s birthday except mine and LeAnn’s. When I come to Pittsburgh to be sentenced, I’ll let you know, but I still might get a new trial. I don’t give a good shit because I’m going to kill again and again. Crazy, huh? Here at Graterford I’m surrounded by niggers. Of the 1500 inmates, there’s only 200 or 300 white guys. I’m one honkey devil they don’t want any trouble with. They know how much I hate them because I tell them every day. I’d like to throw all their black asses in an oven.
They still want to send me to a mental hospital. Just because everyone thinks I am their god, that’s no reason to send me to a funny farm. I can’t help it I am a god.
The end was approaching fast for Betty, but it came sooner than need be. On August 15, 1975, Betty visited her daughter Laura. When Betty left, Laura stayed on the front porch, watching her mother drive away. As she watched, Betty speeded up, then smashed her car into a cement retaining wall. Betty died instantly. Soon after, Hoss wrote to Diane.
I’ve been really fucked up since Betty got killed. She told me and only me last year she had leukemia. She didn’t want people to have to take care of her. I don’t have to tell you the accident was no accident. The last time she visited me she took a ring off her finger and, believe me, it’s killing me but I’ll never take that ring off as long as I’m alive. I don’t know what I will do without her. I have a few things I must take care of then I think I will join her because my life has no meaning anymore.
Several weeks later, Stanley sent Diane a picture of himself taken in Graterford’s visiting room. For one whose existence was in a barred cubicle, he looked remarkably well. Standing in front of a large piece of cardboard painted in wild psychedic colors, he wore prison-issue cocoa-colored pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. His pose showed long, wellgroomed hair, resting on broad shoulders. His waist was trim. He sported sunglasses and a happy smile. In the accompanying letter he wrote:
I’m sorry about the handcuffs. I must keep them on at all times, even when on a visit. Well, I just got word I’m going to Pittsburgh to be sentenced for killing that nigger.
The sentencing hearings for the three killers, held in September 1975, confirmed assumptions that the convicts would get the max. Danny Delker got Life. As the sentence was read, Delker turned his back on Judge Lewis. George Butler got Life. As sentence was delivered, Butler, too, turned his back on the judge and said loudly, “You’re a senile old fucker.” In the course of these hearings, held several days apart, Judge Lewis said only what was required for the formality of the occasion. This reserve was dropped, however, when it came to Stanley Hoss.
Commenting on the jury’s verdict, Judge Lewis said directly to Hoss, “Why they were so charitable is hard to imagine. If ever there was a first-degree murder, it was that of Captain Peterson, a decent and honorable man. It was cold-blooded murder by you and fellow thugs who have killed before and will kill again if given half a chance.”
Hoss, seated before the judge, laughed out loud.
Ignoring the insolence, Lewis went on. “Men like you are a menace to society outside of prisons and a danger within. I am sorry I cannot impose the death penalty. It is what you deserve. The sooner the death penalty is restored in full to this country, the sooner society will be protected against the likes of you.”
In imposing a sentence of ten to twenty years, Lewis ordered the term to run consecutively, adding, “I hope this sentence, along with your others, will forever foreclose the possibility of you ever being released.”
Hoss’s parents had long since discontinued use of their own last name, but shortly after their son’s most recent sentencing, Stan Sr. and Mary asked the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court to legally change their surname to Meyers, the name they’d been using. The couple said the Hoss name had subjected them to vilification and harassment.
Nearly three years after the Peterson murder, in June 1976, a Western Pen inmate named Terry Fishel wrote to correction’s headquarters, claiming that prison personnel were involved in “offing the guard,” but within ninety days it was Fishel who was charged with making false statements. Of the two staff members he had named, one had not even been working at the prison at the time and the other had been on a pass day when Peterson was killed. Fishel’s motivation became clear when prison officers intercepted a letter he wrote to another inmate. The contents revealed a plan to implicate guards so Fishel (after heroically coming forward) would be transferred to a county jail to serve his lengthy sentence, a transfer that would improve his chance to escape.
Peterson’s killers all appealed their convictions. George Butler’s appeal came to naught. As for Hoss’s appeal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed it in a ruling on October 8, 1976. Hoss had made several objections—voir dire, venue, excessive publicity—but they were knocked down one by one. Then came Hoss’s claim that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. Justice Robert Nix reacted with scorn. “This argument is preposterous. This was one of the most pernicious killings within the Commonwealth in many years. The evidence was overwhelming. The de-fendant’s motion is denied.”
Having dismissed the Hoss and Butler appeals, the state wanted to get the same result for Delker, the “hat trick,” but it was not to be. When Judge Lewis instructed the jury in the Delker trial, he followed case law when explaining an insanity plea: “It is the defense’s role to prove the accused is insane.” Unknown to Lewis, or to Delker’s attorney, John Dean, the state supreme court had, only two weeks earlier, written a new ruling that switched responsibility on this issue: it was now the prosecution’s obligation to prove the accused sane. It was only when Dean was researching an appeal that this came to light. Fearing “reversible error,” Lewis wrote a twenty-eight-page persuasive opinion, but the high court was unswayed. Delker was awarded a new trial, and he again pled not guilty.
As trial began in May 1977, the jury studied Delker carefully. Few would recognize the man—full head of hair, twenty pounds lighter, wearing rimless glasses—as the same “skinhead” who had yukked it up with Hoss at the coroner’s hearing days after the murder, shouting racial slurs, giving people the finger, and punching his attorney, all the while sucking on a broomstraw.
Prosecuting the case was Assistant DA Pete Dixon, who left nothing to chance. He called the same witnesses as in the original trial and used four full days re-proving guilt.
The battleground, though, was the issue of sanity versus insanity. Dixon had the jury listen to four psychiatrists say Delker was not then or now insane, and rested his case with a slow reading of Delker’s confession of the crime.
Undaunted, Dean Foote opened the defense. “Yes, my client took part, but he was incapable of understanding the nature of his act. We are interested in his state of mind.”
And who better to weigh in on that state of mind than Delker’s friend Stanley Hoss? Hoss had arrived at the county jail the afternoon before. Foolishly placed in adjacent cells that night, the two killers had plenty of time to get their stories down pat.
On the morning of the sixth day of trial, Hoss took the stand dressed in plum-colored jail fatigues and oval sunglasses. In leading Hoss, Foote’s strategy would attempt to suggest that it was the Pennsylvania prison system that created people like Hoss and Delker.
“Maximum security units are all the same, no good,” said Hoss. “Shrinks, counselors, any of the screws, nobody did nothing for me all these years I’ve been in prison.”
Q. Is there a possibility you’d kill again?
A. Yes, I would kill again.
Q. Why would you kill again, Mr. Hoss?
A. I’d kill again because I’ve always been willing to rehabilitate myself but prison officials did not, will not, help me.
Nodding toward Delker, Hoss explained, “Danny probably feels the same way because the lousy jail treatment was a common rap with us guys in the Home Block, the hole. But Danny never told me he would kill anyone, because we don’t get into emotions.”
Q. Do you hate blacks?
A. Yes.
Q. Guards?
A. I’d kill them all. I’d do anything to get the point across I want to better myself through counseling.
Q. So what you want is treatment, someone to be caring. What you really want is a caring Bureau of Corrections, and, if so, you will change your ways?
A. Right.
For the next three days Foote continued to argue that Delker should be absolved of the crime as a “by-product of a harsh and discriminatory penal system.”
Earlier on, Delker, as polite as he could be, enlightened the jury. “I remember grabbing Mr. Peterson, but when I saw the cross he wore around his neck, I had an epiphany … asked myself what I was doing? I don’t remember anything after that.”
“Did you want to kill him?” asked Foote. “Yes,” answered Delker, “but everyone wants to kill everyone else down there. That’s the way it is.”
At every opportunity, the prosecutor, Dixon, did an exceptional job tripping up Delker, even getting him to admit he knew right from wrong during the many other crimes of his life. Dixon also thrashed the defense’s theory that Delker suffered from psychomotor epilepsy—a malfunction of the brain. Still, the thirteen-day trial was a slugfest. It would come down to who the jury believed.
In the end the jury decided Delker was not the product of an inhumane prison system, that he’d never been insane, and that he had planned and carried out a butchery.
For the second time, Delker was sentenced to serve “Natural Life.” Prison authority would dictate the terms of that incarceration, and, like those of Hoss and Butler, those terms were summed up by the phrase “your door welded shut.”
. . .
After testifying against Peterson’s killers Bob McGrogan did need protection, but the homosexual couldn’t very well be kept indefinitely at a house for wayward boys. He was eventually transferred to Greensburg Prison, a place where most inmates were nonviolent and many had work-release privileges. McGrogan stayed clean and bided his time, until he thought the moment was right to seek an early release from prison.
Jack Hickton, no longer the district attorney since he had failed to win reelection and had entered private practice, appeared before the State Board of Pardons on McGrogan’s behalf. Asked by a reporter if his involvement was to repay a debt, Hickton replied, “I told the guy in the beginning I couldn’t do anything for him but if something came up in the future, I’d express my feelings.”
To the board, Hickton elicited what compassion he could by pointing out that, at age eight, McGrogan had witnessed his mother’s murder, that his father had been poisoned to death when the boy was twelve, and that since the age of fourteen, McGrogan had been out of prison only twice, never for more than six months. Hickton knew, though, that he was not playing to a sympathetic audience. Broaching the meat of the matter, Hickton stated that it was McGrogan’s eyewitness testimony that had led to the important convictions in the Peterson case. “He did a hell of a job under frightening circumstances, and I was sure his testimony would lead to his death in the prison system. Since that testimony, it is my belief Mr. McGrogan has had a reawakening of consciousness.”
Not everyone felt the same. Hickton’s successor, Robert Colville, opposed any cut in McGrogan’s sentence, and although he didn’t testify before the board, Officer Bus Reilly—the other eyewitness—said privately, “McGrogan’s as guilty as the rest of them.”
. . .
“Locked up so tight, I don’t know how Hoss could still cause so much trouble. He needed executed. It’s the only thing that would stop him.” These words came not from prosecutor, cop, or guard, but from a murderer.
John Gergel had been a “marine, four years,” but after his discharge somehow things went south, and Gergel ended up in jail on suspicion of burglary. “It was a forty-eight-hour hold, that’s what they told me,” said Gergel, “but I decided to escape.” During the attempt, Gergel was confronted by Officer Sam VanAucker. “We fought, and I got his night stick,” said Gergel. “When I hit him over the head, it killed him. I didn’t mean to do that.” Gergel got a life sentence and wound up in Graterford’s Behavior Adjustment Unit (BAU).
“One day this guy is by my cell,” remembered Gergel, “and he stared in at me. Not knowing Hoss, I said, ‘What the hell you lookin’ at?’ Hoss liked someone like that, from a white guy that is. I later learned he asked that I be permitted to yard with him, but this was in the months to come. At the time Hoss got yard by himself. This was a couple years after he killed that guard at Western, but Hoss had it worse than any of us. His restrictions approached that of Hannibal Lecter. These procedures were put in place for Hoss alone. I could see why.”
So could Graterford’s first black superintendent, Julius Kyler. “There was that time Hoss climbed up top of the BAU roof so now we have a kind of standoff. I’m on the phone with Commissioner Robinson, who knew Hoss from a teen. ‘Tell Hoss he got five minutes to get down—or shoot the bastard.’” Kyler laughed in the retelling. “Yeah, that’s what Robby said. Hearing this, and who gave the order, Hoss yelled back, ‘Robby said that? Well, I know that sunnuvabitch wants me dead.’ Hoss climbed down. But, yeah, Hoss was always a risk.”
“Hoss was not allowed in pop for any reason,” said inmate Gergel.
He had to be exercised—that’s the law, I think—but he was put out in a dog run by himself. If someone was given yard with Hoss, he’d complain and the guy was removed. There was a special setup when Hoss had a visit. He went out cuffed and shackled at count time or after hours with no other visitors present. That’s the way it was for him.
In this time, ’75 and ’76, I knew Hoss as well as anyone. He didn’t speak to many and few talked to him. No black officer dealt with Hoss. They weren’t allowed. But after a while Hoss and me would yard together. It was okay at first. We’d swap home stories and he’d go on about girls, cars, or crime, and he told me about Betty. He’d get amped up for these visits. He never said anything about sexual matters with her but he was very close. I’d see pictures he got taken in the visiting room. You’d think Betty was a girlfriend, the way they posed and hugged together. Stanley told me he believed the state police drugged Betty, causing the crash that killed her. He was inconsolable. That was the end of any lucidity he may have had. He became even more dangerous after Betty’s death. Exercising constantly, he was a beast. He made a brine out of beet and pickle juice, and this would toughen his skin to a hide, on his hands. He’d punch the walls. He requested free weights. Denied. So he went off, broke his sink and toilet. They put him all by himself for a couple weeks. He calmed down after that but he was always so dangerous.
But Hoss was charismatic when he wanted to be. You could see at these times how he could influence men and how women could be drawn to him. But usually I was extremely uncomfortable around Stanley. He was forever coming up with plans to kill—which included me as a partner. One plan was to escape from the BAU then, “kill five or six blacks before we’re stopped.” Jesus! You can see how I was always walking on eggshells. Another plan was to get into court by filing lawsuits, but his purpose was to kill a judge. I know Stanley wanted to kill this Judge Strauss he talked about. He said he’d leap over a railing or table then snap the guy’s neck with his bare hands. Stanley lived to kill again.
But here’s what happened to me … once staff thought you were too close to Hoss, you were transferred out. I got sent to Pittsburgh, too, and there, considered a “friend of Hoss,” I was given the rough treatment, put in the hole an’ all for about eight months.
“Hoss put in more than one lawsuit on us,” said Bill Robinson, who over the years had gone from an assistant at the Allegheny County Workhouse to a jail warden and now to Pennsylvania commissioner of corrections.
Hoss said he wanted things like education and work therapy. Then Judge Ray Broderick got a Hoss lawsuit in his office. Hoss made his case for this or that, plus he wanted to learn Spanish. I’d decided to let Hoss learn Spanish on his own in his cell, and I considered allowing dry ceramics but Judge Broderick said he needed to have a hearing to get everything on record. I made tight arrangements for this court trip, even with helicopter security because this was Hoss’s last time out. I’d also heard Hoss wouldn’t mind killing another official so when in front of Broderick, Hoss was virtually strapped around, and I borrowed a trick from the Peterson trial when a detective, a marksman, was pointed out to Hoss along with a quiet message, “You try anything at all in court, Stanley, that man has orders to shoot you through the head.” I had my own man in Broderick’s courtroom and Stanley was given the same cheerful warning. You might think this was going too far but let me tell you something interesting. In the months preceding this hearing, Graterford staff noticed a certain woman who’d gotten on Stanley’s visiting list. She was one of those volunteers coming into the prison with a religious group to save souls. We checked her out. She was in her late twenties, married. She’d fallen for Stanley and left her home but not before cleaning out her husband’s bank account. The plan was to meet Stanley when he went to federal court. He would escape. I don’t know how, but she was ready with her part. She’d chartered a private plane for the two of them to fly to Mexico. Spanish!
We got Stanley to and from court without incident. A couple weeks later I was at Graterford and went to Hoss’s cell. I told the officers to kick his door. They said, “You sure?” I said yeah, he won’t bother me. So I went in, sat down on his bunk with him. I called him as I did since he was a kid, “Well, Stasiu, you’ve been out for the very last time.” I rapped my knuckles on the cell wall and said, “This is where you’re going to spend the rest of your life.” He responded, “Let me tell you something. One of us is gonna die before all this is over.” I told Hoss he was right but it wasn’t going to be me. He said, “We’ll see about that.” Yeah, more spit and fire, but there was a distance in his eyes I’d never seen before. I think he knew.
Maybe less so, but Hoss kept writing his letters.
I am surprised you moved, Diane. Do you like your new place? I had a wonderful Christmas. Did you cut down a tree like we used to and decorate it with strings of popcorn? Two young guys locked near me killed themselves. One received a bad letter from his wife so he wrote her a note, left it on his bed then hung himself with a bed sheet. I don’t know why the other guy hung up. Did you get my card? Will you send me some pictures for my cell wall?
. . .
On a snowy day in early January, 1978, Steve Coble was hunting near Wisterman, Ohio. Approaching a small thicket, something caught his eye. Kneeling down, he saw what appeared to be a human skull frozen into the ground. He went home to call the Putnam County Sheriff ’s Department. As it had grown dark, Coble met the following morning with Sheriff Bob Beutler and several deputies. More snow had fallen, and a broom was used to clear the area. Beside the skull was the bottom jaw with most of the teeth still intact. Small trees around the skull were cut down and a canvas was placed over the slender trunks. Two heaters were installed to blow hot air under the canvas to thaw the ground, but it was not until 1:00 A.M. that the men were able to carefully dig around the skull and, eventually, an entire skeleton. Bones were put in one box, cloth and other debris in another. Later, another piece of the skull, two white buttons, and three teeth were added to the find. All the evidence was sent for analysis to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office.
Sheriff Beutler had to search for the name but soon gave his assessment. “I’ll betcha this is Linda Peugeot, kidnapped and murdered back in ’69. The guy, Hoss, came through these parts. Said he buried her around here.” This led to a call to Investigator Bill Baker in Cumberland, Maryland, who mailed official reports and dental records.
The following day, the coroner’s office estimated the skeleton’s age at death at twenty years. The skeleton was missing both hands, the left foot, and a long bone from the right leg. Only bits of fabric remained. The entire area was searched again with small hand rakes, which yielded bones believed to be part of a foot and a long bone thought to be from the right leg. It would be days more before the final report, but Sheriff Beutler wasn’t waiting. He and Detective Dave Roney left Ottawa, Ohio, on the long drive to Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison.
“After having spent the night nearby,” said Beutler, “we arrived at the prison Monday morning of January 9.” Deputy Superintendent Robert Mauer escorted the officers across part of the sixty-two acres inside the walls to the maximum-security ward, which stood alone in a courtyard. Beutler was struck that the only windows in the building were those of the kitchen.
“Hoss came out a few minutes later with four guards around him,” recalled Beutler. “Just going by what pictures I’d seen, I was surprised at his appearance, 230 pounds or more, brawny, and very rough cast. He had longer than shoulder-length hair, a long mustache, and a goatee about a half-inch wide in the middle of his chin. We told him who we were and what our purpose was. Hoss said—with an attitude—that he knew nothing of the girl. ‘I haven’t been charged with anything in connection with that girl,’ he said, and that finding the girl was our job, not his. The bastard added, ‘Everything I know is going to Hell with me.’”
Days later the coroner’s office called Beutler. The skeleton was not that of Linda Peugeot.
Three weeks after the skeleton’s discovery in Ohio, Senator Edward Early spoke before the Pennsylvania State Judiciary Committee: “We here in Pennsylvania cannot escape thinking about Stanley Hoss when we consider the death penalty.”
Pennsylvania had abolished its death penalty in 1972. Two years later the law was resurrected but in December 1977, it was again declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court. Now Senator Early led the legislature to draft a new version, one that reflected the will of the people, and one that would stick. Among other facts and examples, Early brought up Hoss’s criminal biography. “It’s been nine years since Hoss has become known as something more than a small-town hoodlum. Look what he did! There can be no redemption here. He’s in prison now, probably waiting to kill again.”
Early’s strong appeal—“Are we so ineffectual we cannot protect our citizens?”—helped usher the bill to its passage (over Governor Shapp’s veto) in September 1978. It has remained the law of Pennsylvania ever since.
In Maryland that same September, Edna Thompson may have read of Pennsylvania’s resolve, but any emotions the loving woman had were long since gone. Her sole interest these days was to bury her daughter and granddaughter in the local cemetery. Then she’d be able to visit them all the time. Maybe that would relieve the nightmares, lift the crushing depression, lighten the blackness. Her husband, William, had helped her get through the years since Linda’s and Lori Mae’s disappearance, but he’d died in the summer. There had been moments of hope—the discovery of the skeleton in Ohio had buoyed her temporarily—but she knew Hoss would take his secrets to hell with him …
It was September 19, 1978. In three days, Edna would face another anniversary of Linda’s kidnapping. Maybe a neighbor would bring over a pie, sit awhile. Toward evening, Edna ran a bath. Sitting in the warm water she slit her left wrist, then her right, and closed her eyes.
. . .
For Stanley, one month dripped into the next. In the grey of another cold autumn, he wrote to Diane the longest letter he’d ever written from prison. In part, he told Diane:
You have tremendous cause to feel I’ve wronged you. You can despise me, desire to torture me or crave to see me dead. But I demand that you do not mock me. Skin me alive, tear my body to shreds, shackle me naked to the ground and turn loose upon me a thousand starving King rats. But don’t mock me. Yearn to see me dead, to see my obituary, “Mad Dog Hoss Dead.” But don’t deny that we ever existed.
When you saw my picture you said I was looking old. Why did you say that? Because it’s true. I look haggard and drawn. When you see my picture you are looking at a man who had been dead for years. I am dead.
Strange though, isn’t it, how just a few years have destroyed my youth, killed my happiness, buried my spirit and converted me into a hatchet-eyed, world-hating, walking dead man.
But what is this thing that time cannot kill but only your mocking can kill? I’ll tell you but it reveals how weak I really am and always have been. I’m not ashamed of this for my weakness is you, Diane. I love you. You no longer love me? But what if you did? You can’t murder memories. Live life in the present, Diane, but don’t deny we once loved greatly and equally.
The evil within me drives me to act like a devil, a madman, a beast. I admit these things. I have wronged you but I love you. What difference how many girls I have fascinated? You are the only girl I have ever loved. I’ll love you past death.
Leave me my memories. Let me love you and the kids. I’m not so insane as to expect you visit me or let the kids visit, but you know our kids represent the joys of our love. Why deny that our kids are our kids? We have our happy memories. We have our kids.
I have lost you and lost sight of our kids. My heart bleeds, my blood screams, but Diane, can’t we declare a truce? I started the war between us. You ended it. You have conquered me. Can’t you tolerate me to the extent that you occasionally write and let me know about you and the kids?
Diane, they keep me caged around the clock. They won’t even let me out of my cell for exercise. I pace this cage. I stalk it. I hate it and hate all these people, all these pigs, all these cowards. Every day, every hour, every minute that my hate is not burning my mind, I think of you and our kids.
Diane, nourish my memories or kill me outright. Please write.
. . .
It was early, 4:00 A.M. on Wednesday, December 6, 1978, when Hoss re-inforced blue shoestring with a strip of denim, then fashioned the length into a noose.
Some prisoners would lose track of time, but Stanley always knew what day it was. He was also aware that ever since the morning he’d stabbed Geno Spruill he’d been held in isolation: 2,311 days. Door Welded Shut. Of that incident he’d written to reporter Tony Klimko, “I could have killed Geno then but decided to let him live just to show him God is white.” This was one thing he might miss—the intermittent correspondence he’d taken up with Klimko, or KDKA’s Bill Burns, and a select few other media personalities. Burns once wrote that the quickest way for someone to make a rep in prison is to “become the man who kills Stanley Hoss.” Stanley liked that. “You know,” he’d told inmate Gergel, “like, the king is dead, long live the king.”
As a marked man, why then, Hoss reasoned, couldn’t he be released to population? He knew the administration wanted him dead, so this was a way to do it. But no one would play along, nor would the prison system forgive him for Peterson, even a little. He’d never get out of isolation, not until he was found some time in the next century sitting on his bunk as a skeleton.
His pleading letter to Diane had brought no reply. Even if one arrived that day or the next, its very delay showed him what small importance he had, how little he’d become.
Never an untidy cell-keeper, Hoss gathered the few items he had—a book or two, a pile of yellowing newspaper clippings, prison garb—and put all neatly in a corner with a note in his careful penmanship requesting that his “last effects” be sent to a woman who’d been a recent visitor, one who, like the others, had read about him and wanted to meet him. It was to her, just the day before, that Hoss had spoken of suicide. By the end of the visit, she thought she’d talked him out of it.
At 7:50 A.M., a guard came by on his rounds. When he peered into the cell, Hoss nodded but said nothing. Once the guard continued along Hoss knew he’d have enough time unobserved, uninterrupted. He dipped his finger in a small container of red paint he’d hidden away and wrote a message on the wall.
“I cannot deny this urge to die, to put an end to what has been this agony called life.”
Once done, he tied the makeshift rope to his cell bars, slipped his head in the noose, then—unrepentant, secrets held within—prisoner #P-0310 dropped to his knees and fell forward.