8

One of the most puzzling, complex, baffling problems that faces an investigator who is trying to check up on a murder case is to uncover what actually did happen.

Time after time the investigator is forced to rely on speculation when he knows that there should be some definite proof which would furnish a measure of guidance.

Take the Vance Hardy case, for instance.

On May 3, 1924, Louis Lambert was running a soft drink business in Detroit, Michigan. This was during the days of prohibition, and prohibition was not popular, particularly in Detroit. There seems to be reason to believe Lambert’s soft drink business was a front for a “speak-easy.”

This was the heyday of the organized gang. At that time Detroit’s ten-man homicide squad was hopelessly overworked. Homicides were running at the rate of one a day. It was a physical impossibility for the police force to keep up with such a deluge of crime. Murders were taking place faster than they could be investigated and other crimes were running them a close race. It was an era during which law and law enforcement were at an all-time low.

On this third day of May, 1924, which was a Saturday, Louis Lambert went to the branch bank as was his custom. It was located within a short distance of his business, and down the street a few hundred yards was a branch of the Hupmobile factory.

By the time the factory closed on Saturday the bank would be closed, so many of the employees made it a practice to drop in at Lambert’s place for a sociable drink and to have their pay checks cashed. Lambert needed a large amount of money on hand to cash all of these checks, and every Saturday his procedure was the same. He’d go to the bank in the morning and secure an ample supply of cash.

On this Saturday morning death was waiting for Louis Lambert.

Down the street a short distance, a woman who was running a bakery shop saw a Studebaker car, with the side curtains in place, pull up to the curb and park. Three men got out and sat around waiting and watching.

Lambert went to the bank. The men got in the car and started the motor, whipped the car into a U-turn and started along the street toward the bank.

Louis Lambert left the bank. The car, fully enclosed with the side curtains drawn, pulled up alongside Lambert. Someone opened a door, a shot was fired, Lambert staggered, would have fallen but eager hands reached out from the automobile and grabbed his coat, pulled him half into the car, and the car sped away, Lambert’s legs sticking out over the running board.

One of the bank employees, who had been watching Lambert cross the sidewalk, grabbed a gun which was kept for protection against holdups, ran out to the sidewalk and started to shoot.

The persons in the Studebaker returned this fire. Lambert, his legs still dangling, was whisked away.

Several minutes later the Studebaker was driven into an alley in a residential section of Detroit, where it was abandoned. Three men jumped out of the car and started away at a jog trot.

Bruno Marcelt was in the kitchen of his house. The kitchen windows opened on the alley. His wife was away, and he was at the moment engaged in changing diapers on his baby. He looked out of the window, saw the three men running away, and then a moment later saw the dying Lambert get out of the car, stagger for a few feet down the alley and fall.

Marcelt rushed out to see what he could do.

Lambert said in a half whisper, “The River Gang got me,” or it may have been “The River Front Gang got me,” or it may have been “I believe the River Gang got me.”

It is difficult to remember exactly what was said at that time, but the gist of it was that Lambert knew who had been responsible for his death and designated the murderers as either the River Gang or the River Front Gang. (This is a highly important point in the case, although it was overlooked at the time.)

Marcelt and a neighbor saw the three men running away. That is, they were proceeding at what Marcelt repeatedly refers to as “double-time.”

Marcelt and the neighbor started to follow. They never got close enough to have a good look at the men whose backs were turned toward them. They probably were never closer than a hundred and twenty feet.

One of the men half-turned, brandished a gun and said, “Get back or you’ll get some of the same.”

That discouraged pursuit. Marcelt and the neighbor turned back; the three murderers went away. An ambulance came for Louis Lambert, and that night he died in a hospital.

At that time Vance Hardy was apparently a rather likeable, fast-thinking, fast-working young chap who was following carnivals, hanging around race tracks, and looking for suitable opportunities to make a fast dollar. He was undoubtedly on the way to becoming a first-class candidate for state prison. However, he was jolly, full of fun, made friends without any effort, and saw no reason to settle down.

One of these friends was a man whom we’ll refer to now only as Benny.

Benny was in many ways one of the most interesting men we investigators for the Court of Last Resort have ever met. Benny was a holdup man, a professional stick-up artist who had been making a living for years by the simple process of holding up people who had money and taking it away from them.

He had an unusually keen mind and he profited by the experience he had. By the time he became a veteran stick-up artist he knew just about all of the angles. He had even gone so far as to classify prospective victims by age, race, nationality, etc., so as to know just how to go about engineering an effective stick-up.

Twenty-six years later Benny was to sit down in a room and unburden himself to us, and his conversation was taken down on a tape recorder. It is a most fascinating and interesting story of crime as seen through the eyes of a criminal.

Benny particularly emphasized the necessity of a good job of casing rather than “going on a blind.” In casing a place, Benny and his confederates learned the background and habits of every man and woman in the place that was to be held up. They knew just how to approach each individual person, and when the going was tough and there was police pursuit they knew how to discourage this pursuit.

Benny was an expert, daring automobile driver. He knew every alley in Detroit, and his favorite getaway was to take to the alleys, roaring through them at high speed, taking the corners on two wheels, throwing his car so adroitly into a skid that he could make a complete about-face and be going in the opposite direction almost within the winking of an eye.

It was Benny who bewailed in his conversation with us the unfortunate tendency of certain citizens to become heroes.

The hero, Benny explained, was one of the greatest menaces to the holdup profession. A hero was usually a youngster, over the age of fifteen, but usually under the age of twenty-two. He hadn’t as yet learned that the place of an innocent bystander in a holdup was to stand with his hands elevated. The young, hot-blooded, impulsive individual wanted to become a hero. He would, Benny explained sadly, at times even “go so far as to grab for the gun.”

“That makes for trouble,” Benny said. “It makes for bloodshed and that gives the business a bad name.… I just don’t believe in this too much heroism, Mr. Gardner. I don’t believe in this hero business. When crazy men go to stick up a place, a man who has any intention of becoming a hero should think twice. It’s sometimes nice to be a hero and have your pictures in the paper, but if you have to pay for it with your life it’s too great a price—and it’s bad for business.”

On the other hand, when some other gang had engaged in a holdup which hadn’t gone off as smoothly as anticipated and guns had blazed, and the newspapers were filled with pictures of the victim and angry editorials against the bold criminals, Benny and his cohorts rubbed their hands in glee.

To the uninitiated it would seem that during a period of such publicity, the gang should lie low, but actually the exact opposite was the case.

As Benny explained it to us, during such times prospective victims in a holdup were cowed into submission by the horrible example which had been made of a fellow citizen who had been so foolhardy as to resist.

At some length Benny went on to explain the simple tenets of the holdup profession. The stick-up men really didn’t want to kill. They wanted to work out a smooth plan by which they could get the money and make an escape. If they could do that without firing a shot the holdup was perfect. If they had to fire a shot that was potentially bad business.

And there was, of course, a special technique to be used in holding up women. According to Benny, if you terrified a woman she promptly proceeded to faint or to have hysterics. If she fainted, when she came to she started to scream, and if she had hysterics there was absolutely nothing you could do with her. In the holdup business there is nothing worse than a screaming woman (unless it’s a “hero”). It was, therefore, necessary to verse oneself carefully in the little acts of gallantry by which a woman could be made to understand that it was only her employer’s money that was being taken, and, after all, the holdup men were rather considerate young chaps.

Benny’s pet taboo was Chinese. You simply couldn’t stick up a Chinese, he explained. They just wouldn’t hold up. That was all there was to it. You tried to stick up a Chinaman and he wouldn’t hold up.

A book could be written about Benny and what he told us about the inside of the holdup racket, Benny insisting vehemently that it took a lot more brains to stick up a bank than it did to run one.

The point is that Benny and Vance Hardy became acquainted in a casual sort of way, and Benny took a liking to young Hardy.

At that time, however, both of them insist that Benny had no intention of cutting Vance Hardy in on his racket, and that Hardy knew nothing about the manner in which Benny was making his livelihood. It was simply a casual contact which was fast ripening into a friendship, a friendship which it seems certain could have brought no good to Vance Hardy as matters existed at the time.

Benny had some friends who had been unfortunate enough to be apprehended by the police and convicted. They had been sent to Marquette prison, and had managed to evade prison censorship of correspondence so as to let Benny know that if guns could be left at a specified place they felt certain a prison break could be engineered.

Benny was always ready to oblige a friend.

He secured the guns and, by means of wires, fastened them to the underside of an automobile. Then he planned the trip up to Marquette. To work in with his plans it was necessary that this trip seem utterly and completely innocuous. Therefore Benny decided to take a couple of people along with him who had no police records, people in whom the law could not possibly have any interest.

Benny found two men who answered his purpose. One of them was Vance Hardy. He suggested to Vance that he was going to have to make a trip up to the northern part of the state, and inquired if Vance wanted to go along “just for the ride.” Vance did.

There is considerable mystery about what happened immediately after that. It is one thing on which Benny refuses to take us into his confidence. He won’t even discuss it. However, the best guess is that the inmates of Marquette prison hadn’t been quite as successful in evading censorship as they had thought. Apparently the prison officials knew that guns were to be brought up by Benny, and they weren’t playing it quite as wide open as Benny thought. After he arrived in the vicinity of the prison he must have received a tip-off that all was not well. Perhaps there was some signal which was to have been given indicating that it would be all right to proceed. When this signal was not forthcoming Benny became suspicious.

In any event, it seems certain that when the car started out there were guns wired to the undercarriage where they were out of sight. By the time the police sprang their trap and triumphantly pounced on Benny, the guns had mysteriously disappeared.

The police were baffled. They were also angry. They had detected the conspiracy to bring in the guns. They had nabbed the man whom they felt certain was the gunrunner but they didn’t have any evidence. They were in no mood to exchange pleasantries or to discuss constitutional rights. So far as Benny’s two companions were concerned the police didn’t waste any time or any sympathy listening to stories about having merely gone along on a sociable trip for the ride.

The police arrested all of these men and took them back to Detroit.

As to what happened after that we have only the story of Vance Hardy and of Benny.

As Benny expressed it to us, “The police were sore because they thought they had a cinch case. When they picked us up they found they didn’t have any evidence. They took us back to Detroit and threw us in the can and charged us with murder. Not any particular murder—just murder. Then they brought in a whole procession of people who had been in a position to identify suspects of different murder cases and had them try to identify us. Every ten or fifteen minutes we were dragged out and put on display in the hope that some witness would identify us in connection with some murder. The police didn’t care what murder. It went on hour after hour.”

Finally, according to Benny, Bruno Marcelt pointed to Vance Hardy and said in effect, “That looks something like one of the men I saw running away. One of them was about his build and complexion.”

That connected Vance Hardy with the Louis Lambert murder.

Bruno Marcelt, according to his own subsequent admission, didn’t feel that he could make an identification. He had only said that Vance Hardy was about the same build, and had a “ruddy complexion” similar to that of one of the men he had seen a hundred and twenty feet away on that day when Louis Lambert was murdered. He kept insisting to the police that all he could say was that Hardy was “something like” the fellow, and that he couldn’t positively identify him. He hadn’t seen the man plainly enough.

By this time the police were desperate. They slapped charges of murder against Benny and against Vance Hardy. Benny was able to convince the jury that on the particular day in question he had been in the company of some reputable citizens at a party, and introduced enough evidence to beat the case. Vance Hardy had only one alibi witness, his sister, who insisted that Vance Hardy had been having dinner with her in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time of the Lambert holdup. She said he attended the Kentucky Derby on that day.

Vance Hardy was convicted.

Vance Hardy had insisted and he continued to insist that he was innocent. He went to prison filled with bitterness and was far from being a model prisoner. He engaged in a jail break and made an escape. Upon being recaptured he was thrown into solitary confinement and kept there.

Solitary confinement is a punishment intended to be meted out to desperate criminals over a period of a few days at a time. A few weeks represents the extreme limit that a man is supposed to be able to endure this form of punishment.

Vance Hardy was placed in solitary confinement for ten years.

There seems to be but little question that Hardy would have died in solitary confinement if it hadn’t been for the fact that a new warden took over the administration of the prison. Vance Hardy, at that time near death, was released from solitary.

There are certain other forms of punishment amounting to torture which can be meted out to prisoners when they are in solitary confinement. These punishments leave no visible mark upon the prisoner, and it is always easy to deny that they were inflicted. One of the better known of these punishments is to force the prisoner to stand up in front of a barred cell door. His arms are pushed through the door at about the height of his shoulders and just over a crossbar. Then a pair of handcuffs are snapped on the prisoner’s wrists on the outside of the door.

The prisoner stands there hour after hour. He has no alternative but to stand there. His feet ache. His muscles become a network of screaming torture. The bite of the handcuffs on the bones of his wrists makes excruciating pain. There is nothing a man can do about it. If he tries to take the weight off his feet, the pressure of the steel manacles becomes unbearable. He can’t even shift his position. He simply stands there, and stands there, and stands there.

Apparently Vance Hardy endured this form of torture day after day, day after day.

Prisoners can cite many instances of men who went completely mad, and of others who died under this form of torture. Vance Hardy endured it.

Once a week he was permitted to walk down the corridor to take a shower bath. That was his only form of recreation, his only form of exercise. The cell was not quite dark, but a minimum of light was admitted through a small window near the top of the cell, and, because there was nothing on which he could use his eyes, he found himself going blind. In fact, from all we can gather, Vance Hardy would have lasted only a few more weeks when there was a change in prison administration and he was returned to a more normal confinement.

Gladys Barrett, Vance Hardy’s devoted sister, felt positive that Hardy was innocent. There may have been some doubt in her own mind as to the accuracy of the alibi she gave him. Hardy had been visiting at her house in Louisville, but whether it had been on the day of the crime or at about the same time, is a question. She always insisted that it was on the day of the crime, but when Alex Gregory ran her on a lie detector, there were indications on her graph which made Gregory feel that she might be mistaken as to the exact date.

Later on, further doubt was thrown on her statement by investigations of the Michigan Corrections Department, Division of Pardons, Paroles and Probation. Gladys Barrett had insisted that the day of the murder was the day when the Kentucky Derby was being run, and investigations indicated that such was not the case.

However, Gladys Barrett maintained that her brother was innocent, and her reactions on the lie detector showed that she had a genuine and complete confidence in his innocence. If he had been implicated in any way in the crime his sister certainly didn’t know about it, and, on the other hand, had every reason to believe that he could not have been implicated.

Gladys Barrett devoted her entire life to seeing that the injustice against her brother was rectified.

It was a long, uphill fight. All of her earnings went into that fight, and she accomplished nothing.

She secured counsel, and Vance Hardy went into court asking for a new trial on certain technical grounds as well as on the claim that Bruno Marcelt had been forced by the police to make the identification which had resulted in his conviction.

This brings us back to Bruno Marcelt.

Years after Hardy was convicted, Gladys Barrett found herself working in a munitions plant. One of the men whom she saw from time to time had a familiar face. It was Bruno. Marcelt, also employed in the same place.

Gladys Barrett made his acquaintance. She interrogated him concerning his identification, and to her Marcelt confided that he hadn’t been able to make a real identification of anyone; that the police had brought pressure to bear by calling for him in the small hours of the morning, placing him in the “tank,” treating him just as they would treat a criminal, and giving him to understand he’d get the works if he didn’t cooperate. This had been on the day of the trial.

Marcelt had felt that if he didn’t identify Vance Hardy things would go pretty bad with him. The other witness who had been with Marcelt at the time stated flatly that he couldn’t identify Hardy and was promptly sent to jail for contempt of court.

Now obviously there was some other sequence in here that didn’t appear in Marcelt’s story. The witness must have been defiant, or must have disobeyed some order or process of the court, but the fact remains that as far as Bruno Marcelt was concerned, he felt that this neighbor had been sent to jail for contempt of court because he had failed to identify Vance Hardy.

Bruno Marcelt identified Vance Hardy.

In telling Gladys Barrett about this, he admitted that he certainly couldn’t be positive Vance Hardy was the man. He doubted that he was the man. He wanted to rectify the wrong he had done. Gladys Barrett said she’d get a lawyer and Marcelt could sign an affidavit.

So Marcelt signed an affidavit and Gladys Barrett proceeded to try and get a new trial for Vance Hardy.

Thereupon certain things happened.

According to Marcelt’s story, a deputy prosecutor sent for him and said, in effect, “What’s this about your affidavit? Did you tell the truth at the time of trial, or are you telling it now? Both of these statements can’t be correct. If you are telling the truth now then you committed perjury at the time of the trial and can be punished. If you told the truth at the time of trial then this affidavit of yours is perjury, and if you don’t repudiate it you can be prosecuted.”

It may or may not have been a threat. It may have been merely a statement of law, but Bruno Marcelt felt it was a threat.

Marcelt repudiated the affidavit.

He was able to do this because the affidavit had been written in longhand by the attorney Gladys Barrett had brought to call on Marcelt, and he had signed the statement the attorney had prepared. Marcelt was able to repudiate this affidavit by saying that he hadn’t read it, and that it wasn’t in his language. The attorney insisted that he had written it out just as Marcelt had told it to him and had carefully read it back to him before he signed it.

The question became academic because Marcelt repudiated the affidavit.

Vance Hardy went back to prison. The motion for a new trial was denied.

Gladys Barrett kept on fighting—if you could call it fighting. It would perhaps be better to say that she kept on beating her head against the stone wall of official hostility and indifference.

The liberation of Louis Gross had caused quite a commotion in the Michigan state prison, and, as usual, after a case in one prison has been brought to a successful termination, we were deluged with applications on behalf of other prisoners who were confined in the same institution.

Gladys Barrett submitted an application on behalf of her brother. She did more. She called on Dr. LeMoyne Snyder in Lansing. She wrote letters individually to the various members of Argosy’s committee. And, in addition to that, she sought and obtained personal interviews.

There could be no question of Gladys Barrett’s sincerity. She believed that her brother was completely innocent of the crime charged. She had devoted the last twenty-five years of her life to waging a singlehanded crusade against injustice.

There is something compelling about a situation where a woman has used all of her meager earnings to right a wrong. Gladys Barrett didn’t know very much about law. She knew nothing about legal procedure. She didn’t know how to spend her money most effectively to get the best results for her brother. She accepted advice from various people, and whenever she could get money together she would spend it ineffectively, making applications to officials who considered Vance Hardy a number and Gladys Barrett a nuisance.

The point is that she spent all of the money she could save up for expenses. She went without new clothes. She made her old clothes last, repairing them over and over. She went without proper food. She worked, and worked hard, at whatever wages she could get, denying herself all of the luxuries and many of the necessities so that she could save a few pennies here and there until they had grown into a sufficient reserve to enable her to sally forth once more and again vainly strive to get a new appraisal of her brother’s case.

So when Gladys Barrett appealed to us, the picture she presented was so filled with human heartache that we were sympathetically inclined.

There was, moreover, the feeling of Dr. Russell L. Finch, the prison physician, that something should be done for Hardy. Dr. Finch was a close personal friend of Dr. LeMoyne Snyder; and Vance Hardy, who by this time had been assigned as a nurse’s assistant to Dr. Finch, had interested the doctor in his case.

So, at Dr. Snyder’s insistence, we decided to investigate the Vance Hardy case, at least to the extent of talking with Bruno Marcelt.

There could be no mistaking Marcelt’s sincerity. We felt certain that Marcelt had either been forced to make an identification of Vance Hardy, or that he thought he had been forced. At times, Marcelt, searching his memory, would feel positive that Vance Hardy was not the man he had seen running away from the scene of the crime. At other times he would feel that there was a certain superficial resemblance, and that was as far as he could conscientiously go, either one way or the other.

In the city of Detroit there probably were two hundred thousand men who fitted those same specifications of description, so, of course, from a legal standpoint it would make but little difference whether there was this resemblance.

Marcelt was a conscientious individual. He had grown in intellectual stature with the years, and held a position of responsibility. He had learned to exercise his best judgment in matters calling for thoughtful consideration, and, above all, he had learned the importance of knowing he was right in his facts before making up his mind.

As a result of all this, the testimony he had given in the Vance Hardy case had been preying on his mind. Opposed to the twinges of his conscience, however, was the feeling that in the event he tried to change his testimony he would promptly be arrested and sent to prison for having perjured himself at the time he gave his testimony at the trial.

Dr. Snyder was able to point out to Marcelt that the statute of limitations granted him immunity from any prosecution for perjury because of testimony he had given at the former trial; that now he was not only free to tell the truth but that it was his duty to do so.

Marcelt, however, was still mindful of what he had felt was a very distinct threat made by the deputy prosecutor should he make any sworn statement which departed in any way from the testimony he had given at the time of trial.

So Tom Smith and Dr. Snyder went to the office of Gerald K. O’Brien and put the matter before the prosecutor himself.

O’Brien acted with characteristic, straight-from-the-shoulder vigor. He sent word to Marcelt that he wanted him to tell the truth regardless of what it might be; that if he told the whole truth now and was certain about it there would be no prosecution on the part of his office because of the former testimony.

So Marcelt told the truth.

I was present at the time Marcelt was interviewed. In fact, the whole committee, Raymond Schindler, Alex Gregory, Dr. LeMoyne Snyder, Tom Smith, Harry Steeger and I sat around the table. There was a microphone on that table connected with a tape recorder. We didn’t want any misunderstandings this time as to what Marcelt said, or as to whether someone had put words in his mouth.

He sat in front of the microphone and started to tell his story, at first somewhat self-consciously, using rather stilted language. Then, as he began to think of the mental torture he had endured over the years, the words came pouring forth, one word following another with such rapidity that it would have been impossible for any stenographic reporter to have taken down what he said. But it was all recorded on tape.

It was the anguished cry of a man whose conscience had given him no rest for years because he had let the exigencies of the situation force him into making what amounted to a positive identification at a time when it actually shouldn’t have been positive, in fact when he shouldn’t have made any identification at all. All he had seen was a group of three men running away from the scene of the crime. One of the men had briefly turned toward him—at no time had Marcelt been closer to these men than a hundred and twenty feet. He had never had a close look at any of the men.

I have the tape recording of that interview. Sometimes when I want to illustrate a point about identification evidence, I play back that tape. It is easy to understand the weight that had been on Marcelt’s conscience all of those years—twenty-six years—when one listens to this tape.

It so happened that at about this time a radio company wanted to put one of our cases “on the air.” It was felt that in view of Marcelt’s attitude and his tape-recorded statement there couldn’t possibly be any better case with which to start than that of Vance Hardy. So we decided to make a complete tape recording of the factual background of the Hardy case.

It was a good thing we did.

We went out to the scene of the crime, taking along a sound technician, a microphone and spools of tape. We arranged a “setup” so that only the microphone need be out on the sidewalk, while the tape-recording machine was concealed in a nearby storeroom.

During the intervening twenty-six years the scene of the crime had changed to the extent that the streets had now become main thoroughfares for automobile traffic. A traffic signal had been installed and the intersection where Louis Lambert had met his death was indeed a busy one.

It was planned that Tom Smith would carry the microphone and show me the location of the crime, pointing out to me where Lambert had entered the bank, where he had stepped off the curb, where the automobile had spun into a U-turn, etc. In this way the invisible radio audience would get a good picture of the locale.

We had just started our recording, and, naturally, had collected something of a crowd, when a man, walking up, asked one of the radio technicians, “What’s all the excitement about?”

“Nothing in particular,” the radio man said, trying to get rid of as much of the crowd as possible. “Just some people investigating an old murder case which occurred here some twenty-six years ago.”

The man became visibly excited. “What murder case?” he asked. “Who was killed?”

“Louis Lambert,” the technician said. “Why? Why are you interested?”

“Because I saw it,” the man said. “I saw the whole thing.”

So, as Tom Smith and I were going through the act, just as Tom was saying, “Now Louis Lambert had come down this street and stepped up on the curb about where you are now standing, Erle. The bank is right behind us, and that door …” the radio technician said in a hoarse whisper, “There’s a man here who says he saw the crime committed. Do you want to talk with him?”

“Gosh, yes,” we said. “Bring him over.”

And so the witness, whose name we didn’t even have at the moment, was brought up in front of the microphone and proceeded to tell his story.

It was a peculiar interview. I was asking questions, feeling my way, trying to size the man up, not at all certain but what he might have been “planted” by someone who wanted to see that Vance Hardy was going to remain in prison for the rest of his life, and that this man, telling a story in front of a crowd and directly into a microphone would make an identification which wouldn’t be any better than Bruno Marcelt’s had been, but which, under the circumstances, would be infinitely more damaging to Hardy’s case. The dramatic background, the fact that the interview was being recorded, that there was no opportunity to cross-examine the witness properly, all made it necessary to move cautiously. Trying to size up the type of person with whom I was dealing, I was watching for that first indication of overeagerness which would indicate someone had “planted” him with a story to tell.

During all of this time the traffic signal was changing from red to amber, amber to green, then back to red once more. Cars were speeding along, sliding to a stop, waiting, then, as the signal changed to green, the sound of fifteen or twenty motors being revved up all registered in the microphone.

It was a momentous interview.

The witness had been a newsboy selling papers on the corner at the time of the murder. During evenings he worked for Louis Lambert as a pin boy in Lambert’s bowling alley. As Lambert had emerged from the bank he had said good morning to him, and those had probably been the last words Lambert had spoken to anyone before he fell mortally wounded and was dragged into the automobile. Moreover, the witness had seen the three murderers while they had been loitering around, waiting for Lambert to show up.

Of course, the witness hadn’t known that these men were planning to commit a murder. There was, therefore, no reason for him to notice them particularly, but nevertheless he had noticed the man who seemed to be the dominant, outstanding figure, the one who Marcelt had felt had the same general physical make-up as Vance Hardy.

And, later on, when Hardy had been arrested and tried, just to satisfy his own mind the witness had gone up to court to get a good look at the accused to see if he was the man whom he had seen in the group waiting for Louis Lambert to emerge from the bank.

He was convinced that Vance Hardy was not that man, but he had said nothing to anyone.

This witness said he had never been interviewed by the police and that he had never volunteered to tell his story. This statement that he was making in front of a breathless crowd of a hundred or a hundred and fifty people was the first time he had ever told the story to investigators.

The witness then went on and told us something which we had generally understood was the case but which we hadn’t been able to prove.

Louis Lambert had received a shipment of whisky which had been twice watered. During those days of bootleg activities and gang wars, a person was naïve indeed to expect a shipment of the “pure quill.” Good whisky was watered, diluted, flavored, spiked and adulterated. But this particular shipment had been so adulterated that the customers for whom Lambert was supposed to have ordered it refused to accept it. Therefore Lambert maintained that he wasn’t going to pay for it. This had caused hard feelings, and a day or two before the murder a grim committee had entered Lambert’s place of business to tell him that he was either going to pay “or else.”

The theory of the prosecution had been that Vance Hardy, who concededly didn’t know Louis Lambert at all, had held up Lambert and killed him simply in order to obtain possession of the large sum of money which Lambert had just drawn out of the bank, that the motive for the crime was robbery and nothing else.

If it could be shown that Lambert’s death was the result of a bootleg war, and that the motivation had been revenge, it not only tied in with rumors we had heard, but it would account for Louis Lambert’s statement when Marcelt had gone over to pick him up: “The River Gang got me.”

Therefore the testimony which this witness gave us, standing there on a busy street intersection, became of the greatest value, and the fact that all of the dramatic highlights of that interview were permanently engraved upon recording tape was in every way a break for Vance Hardy.

Alex Gregory gave polygraph, or lie detector, tests both to Vance Hardy and Gladys Barrett, and was able to reach very definite conclusions. Vance Hardy had no guilty knowledge of the murder of Louis Lambert. Gladys Barrett was sincerely convinced that Hardy was innocent, and she had no knowledge whatever of any circumstance which would indicate his guilt, although Gregory felt that Gladys Barrett was being more positive in her statement about Vance Hardy having been at her house on the exact date of the crime than the circumstances would justify. She was, perhaps, doing a little wishful thinking on this point. Hardy had probably been with her at about that time, but when she stated she was sure of the exact date she was rationalizing. That was Gregory’s best opinion from reading the charts made by the polygraph.

Bruno Marcelt was under the distinct impression that he had been the only one at the trial who had made any sort of an identification of Vance Hardy.

There may be some question as to this. There was perhaps an identification made by a man who had seen only the hands of one of the murderers when they had reached out and dragged the dying Lambert into the car. This man, according to Vance Hardy, had identified him by saying that his hands looked to be the same.

However, no one will know exactly what happened at the time of the trial because here again the records had all disappeared.

In the present case, however, there was probably a different motivation than that which took place in the Louis Gross case.

There had been a custom in Detroit which had existed for some years of permitting verdicts to be received in the absence of the trial judge when the verdicts were returned late at night. The verdicts would be received by the clerk and held until court convened the next day, when they would be entered in the court record. The Supreme Court eventually declared that this practice was unconstitutional and granted a new trial to one of the prisoners who had been so convicted. Of course, there were hundreds of other prisoners who would be entitled to a release under similar circumstances.

It is, perhaps, no mere coincidence that in some of these cases where the judge had not been on the bench when the verdict was received, the records disappeared, so that there was no way of establishing officially the fact that the defendant was entitled to a new trial.

There was considerable evidence that the Vance Hardy case was one of these in which the verdict had been received sometime in the evening after the judge had left the bench and gone home, and the procedure in connection with the verdict had been substantially the same as that which had been held by the Supreme Court to entitle the defendant to set aside the conviction and have a new trial.

Human recollection being what it is, establishing what had happened twenty-six years earlier was rather difficult. Some members of the jury who convicted Vance Hardy had felt positive that the judge had been on the bench when the verdict was received. Others were equally positive that the verdict had been received in the absence of the judge. In any event, someone had deliberately torn the pages out of the shorthand reporter’s notebook so that it was impossible to determine what the official records had to say on the subject.

In view of Marcelt’s positive statement that no one else had identified Vance Hardy; in view of Hardy’s own statement of what had taken place at the trial; in view of Marcelt’s repudiation of his so-called identification; in view of the records shown by Gregory’s exhaustive polygraph tests, plus the fact that we learned another police polygraph expert had previously given Vance Hardy similar tests and had come to the conclusion that Hardy was innocent; in view of the testimony of the witness who had been interviewed at the scene of the crime and who had given us such pertinent information to the effect that Lambert had been killed as the result of a bootleg war, we felt entirely justified in asking the Governor for a pardon for Vance Hardy.

In Michigan there is a peculiar procedure in regard to pardon. The governor has the sole right of pardon, but before he can issue a pardon it is necessary that an application be referred by him to a board which makes a preliminary investigation. If the board feels the prisoner is not entitled to a pardon, that is all there is to it. If the board feels there is some doubt in the matter, a public hearing is given and any person who may wish to interpose an objection is privileged to attend that hearing. At the conclusion of the hearing the matter is referred back to the governor. The board is the same body which grants paroles, fixes sentences, etc.

It would seem that the object of this statute was to prevent the surreptitious granting of pardons, and to give any person who wanted to appear and be heard the opportunity to do so. However, the legislation is relatively new and no one knows exactly what it does mean.

One thing that as a practicing lawyer I would say it did not mean was that the board should act as a reviewing tribunal and retry the case as a court would.

However, the Michigan board acted on the theory that they were to hold a hearing similar to a court’s, and the results were ludicrous to say the least. Judges sometimes permit themselves to become bogged down in a welter of red tape, but when laymen start assuming judicial prerogatives and masquerading as they feel judges would act or should act under similar circumstances, they are all too prone to invest themselves with a ponderous misconception of the laws of evidence. Not knowing what the law of evidence is, they strain at absurd technicalities on the one hand, and entirely overlook fundamental safeguards on the other.

Because evidence of the so-called polygraph examination is not admissible in the courts, the board refused to consider Gregory’s conclusions in connection with the polygraph as evidence, and the same was true of the police polygraph expert. And, incredible as it may seem, the board even went so far as to intimate that because the prosecutor had not considered the possibility that Lambert had been killed as a result of a bootleg war when the case was originally tried, it would be inequitable to allow Vance Hardy at this late date to demonstrate that such was the case.

On the other hand, a police officer who had kept notes on the case as to what he thought the witnesses had testified to, or were going to testify to, was permitted to testify in great detail as to the contents of his notes, the notes virtually taking the place of an authenticated court record of the transcript of testimony.

The board did demonstrate pretty conclusively that Gladys Barrett was mistaken in fixing the date when Vance Hardy had been with her by referring back to the Kentucky Derby. The records showed that the Kentucky Derby was not run on the date of the murder. It was quite probable that Hardy could have been with his sister for the purpose of attending the Derby, but he certainly couldn’t have gone to it on the exact date of the murder.

Investigators for the board also uncovered one witness who came as a distinct surprise to all concerned. It was a witness who stated positively that he had seen the men in the murder car and Vance Hardy was not one of those men.

Having given the matter mature consideration, the board filed its opinion, holding that it was incumbent on Vance Hardy to prove himself innocent by evidence, stating that he had failed to do this, and then, treating all of the conclusions, all of the arguments, all of the self-serving declarations of the police as being entitled to the weight of evidence, elevating the notes of a police officer to the dignity of official evidence; and finally commenting by implication that it wasn’t cricket for Vance Hardy to try and establish a different motivation for the murder than that which the prosecutor had felt must be the case at the time the matter was originally tried.

Vance Hardy’s application was denied.

Once more Gladys Barrett had been rebuffed. Once more her brother, his hopes raised high, had been sent back to prison.

We had talked with Governor G. Mennen Williams and with his legal advisor. We felt pretty certain that Governor Williams, under the circumstances, would have pardoned Hardy if he had had an opportunity to give the matter his personal consideration, but he certainly wasn’t in a position to go against the direct recommendation of the board, particularly in view of the new legislation in connection with pardons which had been so recently enacted in Michigan.

Members of the Court of Last Resort felt that the decision was so flagrantly against the dictates of justice that the Michigan courts of law, even though bound by the strict letter of the law in regard to evidence, would give the relief which the board had denied.

So our committee went to two Detroit lawyers, Sidney Sherman and David Martin, men who are considered leaders of the bar in their field; able, conscientious men who had long been familiar with the work that was being done by the Court of Last Resort, and who had expressed a willingness to co-operate at any time they could do so.

We presented the facts to them.

They agreed to serve without compensation, to institute formal proceedings, asking for a new trial before Judge Joseph A. Gillis, the same judge who had previously heard and denied Hardy’s motion for a new trial.

These lawyers were inclined to think the case had been a close one, that Judge Gillis had been somewhat on the fence, and that the motion for new trial had been denied largely because the affidavits of the jurors seemed to be about equally divided as to whether the judge had or had not been on the bench. If new evidence could be presented, the lawyers felt that Judge Gillis would grant Vance Hardy a new trial.

Tom Smith and I had previously interviewed Judge Gillis in connection with the Hardy case, trying to find out exactly what had been in his mind when he had denied Hardy’s motion for a new trial.

That visit had been highly interesting. We had dropped into Judge Gillis’ court about eleven o’clock. He had agreed to go to lunch with us as soon as he had finished his calendar. He was trying some contested criminal cases.

I thought that we had probably misunderstood the jurist; and that what he had meant was that he was trying a contested criminal case. I hadn’t felt that it was possible for a man to dispose of more than one of them in the course of an hour.

When we entered court we learned our mistake.

The calendar had been partially disposed of. There remained some twenty cases to be cleaned up before the judge was able to go to lunch.

Some of these cases were mere routine, the court accepting a plea and meting out sentence, but at least a dozen of them were contested cases.

It seems absolutely incredible that a judge could dispose of that many before lunch. (As it turned out, lunch was delayed an hour or so, waiting for the judge to get through with his calendar.)

However, Judge Gillis did just that, and I think he made a remarkably good job of it.

A case would be called. Judge Gillis would summon the attorneys, the defendant, the prosecuting attorney, and all of the witnesses to stand up before him. The witnesses would raise their right hands and be sworn all at once. There were no technicalities, no particular attention paid to the framing of questions. Usually the judge framed them all.

He would look at the complaint in the matter. He’d point his finger at the prosecuting witness. He’d say, “All right, now just what was it that happened on the second of June? Just tell me the story.”

The witness would tell him in his own language. The judge would break in from time to time with questions, hurrying him along, getting rid of side comments and extraneous matters, looking for the real meat in the case.

Then he’d turn to the defendant. “All right, what have you got to say about this?”

He’d listen to the defendant’s story, say, “You got anyone who can back up your story?… All right, let’s hear from him.”

The judge would then listen to whatever corroboration there was for the defendant’s story. Then he’d turn to the prosecuting witness. “Anybody else see this thing besides you?” he’d ask, and that would pave the way for a brief recital from any of the other witnesses on behalf of the prosecution.

It’s surprising how quickly a story can be told when the judge encourages a witness to speak right up and tell it in ordinary language, without having any formalized courtroom procedure in which an attorney asks a question, another attorney objects to the question, there is considerable argument on the merit of the objection, the judge makes a ruling, the witness answers the question yes or no, then the attorney asks him to elaborate his answer, and so forth on down the line.

Judge Gillis is, in many ways, a controversial figure. He is an individualist. He reminds one very much of an umpire in a ball game calling out a close decision at home plate. He isn’t going to please everyone and he just doesn’t give a damn whether he does or whether he doesn’t. He calls the shot the way he sees it and lets it go at that.

Listening to those cases in court I was remarkably impressed with Judge Gillis’ knowledge of human nature, his quick perception, his ability to ferret out the weak spot in a case, his ability to get the facts out of a witness, confine a garrulous witness to the pertinent facts in a case, encourage a tongue-tied witness to tell his story.

And as an attorney I was very deeply impressed with the decisions themselves. As nearly as I could tell the judge was deciding every one of the cases right.

Defendants find it’s hard to lie to Judge Gillis. He looks them in the eye, grins sardonically, and the best rehearsed lies become stumbling recitals. Moreover it’s a lot easier to get at the truth when you hurry a man along so that he doesn’t have a chance to depend on a carefully rehearsed story.

Personally I don’t like to see such a congestion of cases that a judge has to rush them through in this manner. On the other hand, when attorneys are given all the time they want, they haggle and quibble endlessly. I will say this, if I had to participate in a case on such a crowded calendar I would as soon have it heard by Judge Gillis as by any jurist I know anywhere in the country.

And that’s quite a concession from me because I don’t believe that judges as a rule should take over the trial of cases. I think that a defendant is entitled to his counsel and to his day in court, and that he is entitled to the technical advantages which the law gives him in connection with evidence. If he’s to be convicted for a technical violation of the law he should have the advantage of the technicalities of the law in his favor.

When I first saw what Judge Gillis was doing I was prepared to resent that procedure. By the end of an hour I was nodding my head approvingly.

Talking with him afterward I learned that he feels the process of justice is altogether too complicated, and a lot too expensive. He likes to see that the poor man gets justice; that he gets it swiftly, expeditiously and inexpensively.

In a magazine article someone referred to Judge Gillis as the poor man’s judge, and I think he’s more proud of that appellation than of any of his judicial honors.

Judge Gillis talked frankly with us about the Vance Hardy case. It had been a close decision. He felt that the question of whether the judge was or was not on the bench when the verdict had been returned was something that Hardy had to establish by a preponderance of the evidence. As far as Judge Gillis was concerned the evidence was as near equally balanced as it could possibly be in such a case.

Conferring with Sidney Sherman and David Martin, LeMoyne Snyder, who is an attorney as well as an M.D., put all of our information at the disposal of these attorneys. It was agreed that if some bit of new evidence could be discovered, particularly on the question of whether the judge was on the bench when the verdict was returned, Judge Gillis would ride along with us.

Tom Smith started work.

It was a pretty hopeless task. He was following a trail that was twenty-six years old. Most of the jurors in the case, like most of the witnesses, had either disappeared into oblivion or had passed away.

Then Tom learned of a relative of a surviving juror. The juror was traced to the northern part of Maine, where, as winter was setting in, he would probably be isolated until early summer. And because of the passing of time in the case there was always the possibility that early summer would be too late.

Bob Rhay, who has charge of the records and correspondence of the Court of Last Resort, who sifts through the original cases, condenses them into brief notes, tabulates and answers the dozens of letters which are received every day, is an aviator of considerable skill. He thought that by chartering an amphibious plane it would be possible to make a landing on a lake which was near where the juror lived, yet which because of certain thermal conditions in the springs which fed the streams that flowed into the lake remained ice-free after most of the surrounding lakes and streams had frozen.

It was a race against time. He flew to Maine and there picked up a local pilot and a local notary public, and flew over miles of wild, snowbound woods, until they located just about the one lake anywhere in the country which was free of ice. Then they managed to get to the juror, who remembered the case perfectly, who was absolutely positive that the judge was not on the bench when the verdict was returned. They secured an affidavit from this juror, got back to their plane, and took off with fingers of ice already beginning to clutch at the edges of the shore line.

Attorneys Sidney Sherman and David Martin prepared an application for a new trial on behalf of Vance Hardy, and went into Judge Gillis’ court.

Everyone who listened to these attorneys was impressed with the thoroughness of their preparation. They had studied the case forward, backward and sideways. They were acting without fee, purely because of their interest in the cause of justice, and because they sincerely felt that Vance Hardy had been wrongfully imprisoned. They made a masterful presentation of the evidence.

Judge Gillis heard all the arguments, read the affidavits, and decided that Vance Hardy was entitled to a new trial upon technical grounds. Then he went out of his way to state that he had become interested in this case after we had talked with him; that from confidential sources of his own he had learned definitely that Louis Lambert was killed not for purposes of robbery but as a means of revenge in a bootleg war; that he seriously doubted whether Vance Hardy knew anything whatever about the murder, and that, in his opinion, Vance Hardy was entitled to a new trial.

There was, of course, no possibility of securing a conviction in a new trial in view of the fact that Bruno Marcelt, the state’s star witness, not only would not identify Vance Hardy but would have stated if he’d been questioned that his previous identification had been made under duress, and that his present best judgment was that Hardy was not the man he had seen leaving the scene of the crime.

So the prosecution dismissed the case and Vance Hardy walked out of the courtroom a free man.

Circumstances had prevented my leaving my California ranch on the date set for the final hearing on the motion for a new trial in Judge Gillis’ court, but I knew that the matter was in able hands, that lawyers Sherman and Martin had left no stone unturned, and that they felt satisfied Judge Gillis’ decision would be favorable. LeMoyne Snyder, who had been working with the case for many months, was on hand, as were Tom Smith and Alex Gregory, and I had been in close touch with all of these people in their conferences immediately prior to the court hearing. We felt that under the circumstances we could almost guarantee that at long last Vance Hardy was “going to get a break.”

However, for various and obvious reasons we didn’t communicate our hopes in the matter to Gladys Barrett. After all, she had had her hopes raised so many times only to see them dashed to pieces, that this time we simply told her we were going to do the best we could.

However, the morning of the hearing someone brought her an orchid and told her to pin it on for luck.

Immediately at the close of the hearing, as soon as Vance Hardy walked out of court a free man, Gladys Barrett telephoned me in California. Her voice was broken and quavering with tears and excitement. She tried to stammer out the story but she was incoherent with happiness.

However, she didn’t need to tell me in words. Just the tone of her voice and her happy sobbing was all that was required. I passed on my congratulations over the telephone and told her I was certain her luck had turned, that at last she had won her long fight for her brother’s freedom, and from now on she could occasionally buy herself some new clothes.

That was when she broke down completely. “Mr. Gardner,” she sobbed, “I’m wearing an orchid.… Think of it!… Me, wearing an orchid!… It’s the first time I’ve ever had an orchid in all my life.”

She certainly was entitled to it.