Monk’s body was taken to the morgue and docketed as that of an unidentified man. Bodies in the holding rooms lay on a zinc table, and in hot weather a spray of cold water fell constantly from a shower-head and was carried away by a drain beneath the table; in the depths of winter, the biting cold was enough to delay decomposition until the coroners and undertakers had done their work. A postmortem examination revealed a good deal of grain alcohol in Monk’s stomach.1 The body of the man whose face was once familiar to every detective lay unrecognized for two hours before it was identified by two old-timers—policemen who had known Monk in his heyday.2
A label on the inside coat pocket of the good suit of clothes he had been wearing when shot was marked E. EASTMAN. OCT. 22 1910. NO 17434. W.B.3 That identified the suit’s makers as Witty Brothers of 50 Eldridge Street, and Henry Witty confirmed that he had made the suit for Monk. “We have made clothes for him for nineteen years. The last suit we made for him was delivered October 21 this year.” Still not completely satisfied with that identification, detectives took fingerprints from the body and compared them with those held at police headquarters, definitively establishing his identity.
Contrary to a lurid and entirely fictional newspaper report of Monk shooting back in his last moments, he had been unarmed when he was killed. “That fact, even more than the mystery of his murder, was the talk of the Lower East Side last night.4 The Monk was killed while unarmed.” John A. Ayres, a printer, was the only witness to come forward, even though he said that Monk had been killed in the sight of ten or more people, several of them within fifteen or twenty feet. Ayres was in a restaurant on the other side of the street, and when he heard the first shot he rushed outside and saw a man lying on the sidewalk across the street with his arms over his face. “A man was standing over him,” Ayres said, “and as we reached the window, we saw him fire four more shots into the man on the sidewalk.”5 The murderer “bent over his victim a moment, presumably to make sure he was dead,” then ran to a taxicab moving slowly up Fourth Avenue. “He ran out as if he expected it,” Ayres said. The taxi slowed and the killer jumped onto the running board. Ayres saw the man throw something out of the window as he got into the taxi. Someone shouted, “Stop him!” but the taxi drove off. Ayres said that he was warned by one of the men who had been in the restaurant, “If you try to mix in this, you’ll get killed,” so he had stayed where he was for fifteen minutes and then caught a cab home.
A cheap, nickeled .32-caliber revolver with five empty chambers in the cylinder was later found on the steps of the B.R.T. subway entrance at Union Square, by the same policemen who had been first on the scene after the shooting.6 Suggestions that the gun might have been Monk’s were laughed off by police. “The Monk wouldn’t carry a cheap gat,” one plainclothes officer said.7 “The man who planted that ‘Young America’ beside the body of the Monk didn’t know him. If he was packing a gun, it would be one of the best … As far as we can learn, the Monk hadn’t packed a gun in months.”
Perhaps forgetting past shootouts like the Battle of Rivington Street, Police Commissioner Enright cited Monk’s killing as proof that
there is a new kind of crime abroad in the land … it is the “Wild West” sort of crime.8 We used to read about it in dime novels … but it is only since the close of the war, where many young men learned to use firearms for the first time, that we began to have this form of spectacular crime … We had assaults and robberies in the old days, but the implement was the slug iron, the sandbag or brass knuckles. The gun … was not so much in evidence.
As they turned their attention to the search for Monk’s killer, New York police were forced to confess that the Penn Street address they had for him was false. They had no idea where he had been living and were ignorant of most other aspects of his life, as was demonstrated by their insistence that Monk and his father were both really called William Delaney, and that his parents were still alive—his father had died in 1888, his mother in 1903. They then released details of Monk’s rap sheet—his criminal career as far as they knew it—listing some of the aliases he had adopted:
John Eastman, December 1902: New York City, assault, discharged9
Joseph Morris, August 1903: Freehold, NJ, felonious assault, discharged
William Delaney, December 1903: New York City, suspicion of homicide, discharged
William Delaney, December 1903: twice arrested as a suspicious person and twice discharged
William Delaney, April 1904: felonious assault, ten years in Sing Sing, by Recorder Goff
John Marvin, Buffalo, burglary, discharged
William Delaney, July 1915: Albany, burglary, two years and eleven months in Dannemora
Even that was a far from complete account of Monk’s criminal career. The police claim that Monk had first been arrested in 1902 was ten years wide of the mark; in fact, he’d been arrested in 1892, and he was convicted and sent to Blackwell’s Island for three months in 1898. Police were so much in the dark about the killing that it was first alleged that Monk might have been shot somewhere else and then thrown from a taxicab outside the subway. Although police now embarked on a belated roundup of gangsters and former associates, they admitted that no immediate arrests were expected, for the leads they were following were “as vague and shadowy as the life of Eastman since he forsook his old haunts and ways of crime.”10
Robbery was ruled out as a motive for Monk’s killing when his pockets were found to contain $144, a heavy watch and chain, two pairs of gold spectacles, a bunch of keys, and a Christmas card addressed to “E. Eastman.”11 It was signed with the name “Lottie” and postmarked Brooklyn, but that was all the police knew about the woman. Yet again they displayed their ignorance about him when claiming that Monk “was understood to have had a wife who died several years ago, but his closest friends did not believe he ever married again, nor did they know of any woman with whom he had been closely associated.” The fact that he had been living alone in a single room was enough to persuade police to state that Monk had “tired of women … Once, years ago, he was ‘turned in’ by a ‘moll’ and since then he often had been heard to voice rather positive opinions about the opposite sex.” How this belief chimed with their disclosure that they were seeking the woman, Lottie, who had signed Monk’s Christmas card, in the hope of learning something of importance, was not explained.
Police kept watch on the morgue, seeking to detain someone who might aid them in their search for the murderer, but the only person who went to the morgue to view Monk’s body was Charley Jones, who said he would take charge of his old friend’s body and arrange his funeral if no one else came forward. “He was a good guy,” Jones said.12 “I’m trying to find some of his folks. If I can’t, I’ll take care of the body. He was regular, he’d do as much for a pal. I’ll come through for him as I know he’d come through for me.”
Jones volunteered his interpretation of his old friend’s death, suggesting that some “young squirt gunmen” eager to make a name for themselves in Monk’s former kingdom might have shot him out of sheer bravado. Jones then somewhat diminished the impact of his previous statements about Monk’s reformed life by adding that if he was “over in Manhattan after all this time on any business, you can bet it was big business and no piker affair.”
With little or no hard evidence, other theories about Monk’s death were soon being circulated, and almost the only thing on which all concurred was that Monk had not merely been shot in a drunken argument. One theory, probably originating with the police since it insisted that Monk’s real name had been William Delaney, claimed that the killing was the result of a gunman’s vendetta and that Monk had been “associating with professional gamblers.13 He had no known means of support but had plenty of money,” an assertion at least partly borne out by the $144 found on his body. Another newspaper report, based on yet more anonymous police sources, suggested that the killing was premeditated and the real reason for Monk’s death was a dispute about the profits from drug peddling and bootlegging.
The narcotics squad added their weight to that theory, stating that Monk was the head of an organized band of drug sellers, employing twenty agents.14 In an attempt to substantiate those claims, New York police then fed newspapers with reports supposedly emanating from the Brooklyn police that Monk had taken up with a criminal gang there that had been planning an old-style shootout in the streets with a rival gang. Brooklyn police immediately refuted those claims. Captain Daniel J. Carey, head of detectives in the section of Williamsburg where Monk had been living, said he had led a quiet and apparently respectable life since he moved across the river. Far from knowing that Monk had joined a new gang or rejoined his old one, and that the rival gangs were arming for battle, Carey said the Brooklyn police did not even have Monk under surveillance, and he had last been seen a few months before by a detective who had known him during his criminal career. “I am not Monk Eastman anymore,” he had told the detective. “Tell the world that I am going straight.”
Corroboration of that appeared to be offered by his furnished room on Driggs Avenue, a dismal, unheated little bedroom for which he paid $2.50 a week. Even when that address had been passed on to the New York police by their counterparts in Brooklyn, a search of the property and an examination of Monk’s belongings failed to yield any useful clues. The police were later forced to admit that they had found no evidence that Monk had been involved in any sort of large-scale crime; if he was making big profits from drug running and bootlegging, there was little sign of it in his dingy furnished room in Williamsburg.15 Monk had claimed to be a bartender at the Court Cafe at Broadway and Driggs Avenue, not far from the house, though in reality, police said, he was employed as a bouncer—bringing his life full circle from his early days at the New Irving Dance Hall in the 1890s.
Yet another theory about the crime, believed by many in the underworld, was that Monk had been shot because he was suspected of being an informer. “Whipped by drink and drugs … a victim of cocaine and opium for years …‘Monk’ had squealed and for that had made himself a marked man, doomed to die.”16 Despite his claims that Monk had not been seen for months and his denials of having him under surveillance, Captain Carey was said to have paid a second visit in ten days to Monk’s room on Driggs Avenue on December 23, just three days before the killing.17 That fact alone might have been enough to mark Monk out for a gangland execution, but in addition, two officers from the narcotics squad had also called on Monk in the same month. Still loyal to the code by which he had lived all his adult life, Monk had refused to give them information, but rumors about his involvement with the police persisted, and one officer conceded that it would be no surprise if Monk had been shot because someone thought he had “squealed.”18 Others claimed that Monk’s boasting had become tiresome to his associates, though that alone scarcely seemed enough to merit a death sentence.
Police sources then backtracked, further muddying the waters. In a curiously worded statement they “would not deny” that they had secured information leading to the exposure of an opium ring, but they then went out of their way to deny that Monk had been killed for informing.19 Instead, they stressed their belief that Monk, “drunk and quarrelsome, had brawled once too often,” claiming that he had been particularly aggressive since retuning from the war. Whatever the truth of that, it was widely believed that the police, whether eager to avoid deterring other potential informers or for some other, more opaque reason, had invented the story of Monk’s involvement in bootlegging.
Newspapers also interviewed Morris Pockett, who claimed to be Monk’s best friend and insisted that Monk made an “honest” living selling pigeons he had coaxed to the roof of his building back to their rightful owners for twenty-five cents each.20 Pockett denied that Monk was involved in any crime and said that his only excursions to Manhattan were weekly trips to a Turkish bath. He and some of Monk’s other friends cited his kindness to children and animals as proof that “he really wasn’t a ‘bad guy.’ ”
Like Pockett, Monk’s comrades from the 106th Infantry dismissed all the calumnies against him, and two comrades, John J. Boland and Monk’s former platoon sergeant, “Hank” Miller, whom Monk had rescued from the battlefield at Vierstraat Ridge, put up funds for a burial with full military honors. “Mr. Edward Eastman did more for America than presidents and generals,” Boland said with some hyperbole.21 “The public does not reward its heroes. Now they are calling Mr. Eastman a gangster instead of praising him as one of those who saved America. But we’ll do the right thing by this soldier and give him the funeral he deserves.”
After a death certificate, number 33332, Manhattan County, was issued, listing Monk’s occupation as a machinist in the auto trade, his body was taken from the dead house—the morgue at First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street—to be prepared for the funeral. Monk’s wife did not put in an appearance. If Worthy—last heard of living in the Big Bend area of Texas—was aware of his death, or even alive herself, there was no trace of her at the morgue, or at the funeral parlor of A. C. Yannaco on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, where his body was taken. When his two married sisters, Lizzie Reynolds and Francine Wouters, perhaps shocked by the killing and fearing unwelcome publicity, also failed to claim the body, the medical examiner surrendered it to Monk’s army comrades. Soon afterward a man wearing the uniform of a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy arrived at the dead house and asked to see Monk’s body. Told it had already been removed, the man, who refused to give his name, said, “I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to see him again.22 It was Monk Eastman who set me going straight. I met him twenty years ago on the Bowery. I was a sailor then and what he had to say to me made a big difference.”
In the funeral parlor’s cold, marbled back room, Monk’s body was prepared and dressed for burial, surrounded by stacked coffins and the ritual satin shrouds in which women were buried: “white ones for dead virgins, lavender for the young married, purple for the middle-aged and black for the old.”23 Monk then lay in state in the funeral parlor, dressed in his army uniform. The American Legion wounded men’s button with a silver crest in the center was pinned on his left breast, with the insignia of the 27th Division on the left shoulder, three service stripes on the left sleeve, and two wound stripes on the right. Monk’s name, the dates of his birth and death, and the simple legend our lost pal.24 gone but not forgotten were inscribed on a silver plate on the lid of the oak coffin. Mrs. Yannaco told reporters that, though several men and women had visited the funeral parlor to see the body, they showed no signs of grief and appeared to her to be “mere curiosity-seekers rather than old partners of the Cherry Hill battles in the days before ‘the Monk’ thought of regeneration and restored citizenship.”
On the evening of December 30, a whiskey-sodden wake that lasted all night took place in one of the Lower East Side bars on Monk’s old turf, and at two o’clock the following afternoon, New Year’s Eve 1920, he began his final journey. Well before the scheduled time for the funeral, a corps of detectives had spread themselves throughout the neighborhood.26 Two men who had been among the party in the Blue Bird Cafe on the night of the shooting were arrested, though police later admitted that neither was the killer, who was still at large.
While police patrolled outside, the Reverend James H. Lockwood, pastor of the South Third Street Methodist Church, gave a brief address at the funeral parlor. “It is not my province to judge this man’s life,” he said.27
His Creator will pass judgment; He possesses all the particulars and is competent to judge any soul. It may startle you to hear me say I wish I had known this man in life. We may have been reciprocally helpful. It has been said there is so much bad in the best of us, so much good in the worst of us, that it does not become any of us to think harshly of the rest of us. That is one way of saying “let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”
The pastor said he had been told of many incidents in Monk’s life that showed he was made of “the right kind of stuff.”
After the address, two dozen of Monk’s former comrades from the 106th Infantry, under Lieutenants Michael J. Davidson and Edward McNeeley, formed an honor guard, and the coffin, draped with the American flag, was borne out of the funeral parlor on the shoulders of eight uniformed veterans. Despite the thin fall of gray, gritty snow cloaking the ground, a crowd of several thousand men, women, and children had gathered outside the funeral parlor long before the procession departed; one estimate put the crowd at ten thousand.28
The pallbearers led the funeral procession along South Fifth Street to the Williamsburg Bridge Plaza, and then on to Keap Street, where they halted while the coffin was transferred to a hearse for the long climb to Cypress Hills Cemetery. The windows of the tenements along the route were filled with faces staring down, silent, as the cortege of six black limousines and twenty horse-drawn carriages moved slowly past. Thousands lined the sidewalks, and thousands more fell into line behind the column of mourners, their breath hanging like mist in the still, frosty air, as the cortege made the five-mile journey through the snow. Although it was rumored that Monk’s sisters were among the crowds thronging the sidewalks, friends failed to spot them, and Mrs.29 Yannaco subsequently revealed that Lizzie and Francine had paid their last respects to their brother at the funeral parlor late the previous night.
Despite the bitter cold, the first groups of mourners, the majority of them women, had begun to arrive at Cypress Hills as early as two o’clock that afternoon. “Mothers with lines of hardship on their faces trudged along the soggy roads behind carriages bearing crying infants to the farthest end of the grounds,” where Monk’s body was to be laid to rest. Each train arriving at the cemetery gates brought further mourners until by 4:15, when the procession appeared, there were six hundred people from all walks of life waiting beside the freshly dug grave in the cannon grounds of the cemetery, the site of the long-demolished Cannon Street Baptist Church.
Mere curiosity alone was not enough to explain the presence of so many on such a harsh winter’s day. Like his army comrades, the majority of Lower East Siders must have been there because in some way Monk had touched their lives. For them at least, memories of past kindnesses—a handout of money or food when they were destitute, a dose of rough justice enacted on their oppressors—must have outweighed the wrongs he had inflicted. The people of the Lower East Side, an often despised and ignored underclass, had turned out to pay their last tribute to one of their own.
Several thousand more mourners arrived behind the cortege as it turned in through the gates of Cypress Hills and the oak coffin was carried into the chapel of rest. There Monk lay in state as a line of serving officers and men filed past, paying their last respects. They included Monk’s former divisional commander, General O’Ryan, several officers from his old regiment, and many former doughboys with campaign medals pinned to their jackets. There were others there, too: police; sharp-suited mobsters and their bodyguards; a few scarred and aging street toughs, uncomfortable in their unaccustomed, ill-fitting suits; and more throngs of poor Lower East Siders, all paying homage to New York’s most celebrated gangster and most unlikely war hero.
When the coffin was carried to the gravesite, the mourners spilled over the pathways and climbed onto the other graves for a better view, trampling the fresh-fallen snow into gray and grimy slush. After Pastor Lockwood had read the committal, Sergeant Miller of Company G walked slowly forward and spoke.
The character of Eastman—I knew him as “Pop” when he was a buddy of mine—has been blackened in the press.30 But we knew him as an honest-to-God man. He was a real soldier. He saved my life on September 2, 1918, when our company was attacked and caught near Vierstraat Ridge. “The Monk” was wounded. He saw me fall with a bullet through my right shoulder. He crawled to me, picked me up and carried me to the rear. He saved my life. He was a real man. That’s why I cannot forget and why I am here.
After Miller’s eulogy, the curiosity-seekers were allowed to file past the casket to take a last look at the face of the dead gangster. A number of detectives stood by the casket and carefully scrutinized everyone who passed.
Then the coffin lid was closed and Monk was lowered into his last resting place, a grave near that of his mother. There was a dry rattle as General O’Ryan scattered a handful of dirt on the coffin, then a lone bugler sounded taps. As the last notes of the bugle hung in the air, the mourners remained motionless, perhaps remembering not just Monk Eastman, but all those old comrades lost in East Side gang wars or buried in Flanders mud.
A rifle squad of men from his old regiment stood ready to fire three volleys over Monk’s grave, but another figure, a man in clergyman’s robes—probably the divisional chaplain, Father Kelley—then stepped out of the crowd. “No matter how bad a man is, there’s always some good in him,” he said.31 “Eastman was a gunman, but not at heart. There were many heroic things he did during the war that never reached the ears of those over here.” Like Pastor Lockwood, Kelley told of Monk’s encounter with the fifteen-year-old German youth. “Monk’s companion was about to end the boy’s life with a bullet,” Kelley said. “ ‘Don’t shoot’ cried the ‘killer.’ ‘He’s only a kid.’ The boy was made a prisoner. That boy’s life was spared, and I am sure that, together with his mother, he prays for ‘The Monk.’ ” As he stepped back into the ranks of mourners, there was a moment’s silence and then, at a command from Lieutenant Davidson, rifle shots sounded a requiem. As the echoes faded, the crowds began to file away into the gathering dusk of that cold December afternoon.
Even as the funeral was taking place, police had produced yet another leak about the cause of Monk’s death. It was now grudgingly admitted that Monk had been acting as a police spy. Described on the morning after his death as “a reformed gangster who could not go right,” he was now being hailed by his former comrades in the 27th Division as “a hero who had paid the price of his recovered citizenship by losing his life to the swift, relentless vengeance of the underworld.”32 However, those claims were ridiculed by Monk’s former gang members. Throughout his life, no matter what threats were made or inducements offered, Monk had adhered to the underworld code, and those who knew him refused to believe, on no more solid evidence than yet another unattributable leak from police headquarters, that he had become an informer.
The search for his killer continued, but it appeared directionless, and police statements remained contradictory. Forty-eight hours after the shooting, they had still been insisting that the suspect, supposedly an old crony of Monk’s and a member of his gang, had not left New York, though, as one observer noted, it was obvious that their information did not extend to his present whereabouts. When it was pointed out that more than thirty-six hours had elapsed between the killing and the questioning of the first witnesses, and that the criminal—if there was only one—had had ample time to flee New York, the feeble response from the police was that they “did not believe their case had been weakened by the lapse of time, as they had to ‘work it out in our own way.’ ”33 Despite their claims that Monk had been killed for informing, the police were also forced to concede that they were still far from certain of the motive.
Two days later, the arrest and interrogation of two material witnesses—William J. Simermeyer, the chauffeur who drove Monk and five other men from Brooklyn to the Blue Bird Cafe on the fatal night, and Sylvester Hamilton, a member of the party—produced a breakthrough. Police announced that they were now confident that Monk had been shot and killed by a man who had entertained him and five friends at a dinner in the Blue Bird Cafe immediately before the killing. He was, they said, a Williamsburg man whose business was “both legitimate and illegitimate”—a prosperous businessman who was also on intimate terms with many criminals.34
Contradicting earlier claims of a furious argument between Monk and his killer, Hamilton insisted that “not an angry word had passed up to the time the slayer began to shoot at Eastman,” and police were now also forced to admit that, in complete contradiction of their earlier claims, the killer had left the city immediately after the murder.35 The killing was now said to be premeditated, and police claimed that Monk had been invited to the dinner to ensure that there would be no interference with the murderer’s plans.
On December 31, 1920, the district attorney’s office released the name of the suspect: Jeremiah “Jerry” Bohan, a “dry agent” (Prohibition Enforcement Agent). Although they stopped short of naming him as the killer, the statement that Bohan was not at his home, was known to carry a gun, and had been arrested in connection with a previous shooting in Williamsburg, and that of three customers of the Blue Bird Cafe on the night of the shooting who were still unaccounted for, “we want Jerry Bohan most of all,” was probably enough of a hint for even the most dim-witted bystander.36
On January 4, 1921, there was an astonishing development, as Jerry Bohan walked into the Lee Avenue police station in Brooklyn, voluntarily surrendered to police, and confessed to the killing, though he claimed he had shot in self-defense. Bohan said that Monk had “got mussy over nothing” in the Spatz Cafe in Brooklyn some months before and had threatened to shoot him, but the quarrel had then been patched up.37 On Christmas night they were in the Blue Bird Cafe with four other men when an argument broke out over tipping the staff and the piano player. Bohan claimed that when that had been settled, he was walking away from the Blue Bird alone when Monk grabbed him from behind, whirled him around, and told him that he had been “a rat” ever since he got the Prohibition job. At the same time, Bohan asserted, Monk, who was subsequently found not even to be armed with a penknife, “dropped his hand in his right coat pocket.” At that instant, Bohan said, remembering how Monk had threatened him before, he drew his own pistol and emptied it into Monk’s body. He also claimed that the arrival of the taxicab in which he escaped was merely a coincidence and not evidence of premeditation on his part.
Bohan’s story was contradicted by the testimony of the other witnesses in the case, and his bizarre claim that he and Monk had fallen out over the tip at the Blue Bird Cafe was denied by the waiters there. They insisted that Bohan had not been one of the six companions with whom Monk shared his last marathon drinking session. It was also revealed that Bohan had a long criminal record. He had been tried and acquitted for the killing of Joe “The Bear” Faulkner in Brooklyn in 1911, and had been arrested four times for disorderly conduct. During the war he had again been arrested under the “Work-or-Fight” law, and then got a job on the Brooklyn waterfront “representing” the stevedore’s union, which was having trouble with the employers. Monk was “representing” the employers at the same time, and it was “thus the two met and became friendly enemies.”38
Bohan had been fired from his job as a Prohibition agent as soon as it was known that the police were looking for him, but why he returned to New York, gave himself up, and voluntarily confessed to the killing was not revealed by him or the police. It is possible that he feared Jersey justice—a revenge shooting by one of Monk’s former gang members—more than the justice administered by the City of New York, or he may have struck a deal to plead guilty in return for money, or for other crimes being ignored.
Three months after Monk’s funeral, one of his old gang, Edward Herberger, traveled to New York from Philadelphia to avenge his old boss. It was said that one of the ties that bound them was that they had once been arrested together on the Williamsburg Bridge, charged with picking a pocket. Herberger arrived in Brooklyn and went to the Court Cafe, the favorite haunt of Monk and many of his old followers. When he walked in, Herberger announced that he was looking for an old enemy of his pal, Monk, and dropped many hints about what he would do if he found the men he was after, but Bohan was behind bars and none of the other men Herberger named were to be found. As he sat in the Court Cafe, “brooding, with his head in his hands, his disinterested motive for the visit to New York seemed to ebb away” and, according to the cafe owner, Joseph Germanhauser, Herberger suddenly jumped to his feet, drew a revolver, and said, “I guess I have got to work.”39 He then held up the cafe owner, robbed him of two thousand dollars, and fled. He was identified by Germanhauser from the portraits of Monk’s friends and criminal associates held in the Rogues’ Gallery at police headquarters, and Philadelphia police arrested him a week later. When they searched his lodgings, along with most of the two thousand dollars, they found some opium, a set of safecracking tools, and a photo of Monk draped in black cloth.
The man Herberger had been seeking, Jerry Bohan, was initially imprisoned in the Tombs without bail, and his trial did not take place until a year after the killing.40 After pleading guilty to manslaughter in the first degree, Bohan was sentenced to from three to ten years, three months in prison. Received at Sing Sing on January 5, 1922, he was paroled on June 23, 1923, after serving just seventeen months of his sentence, giving rise to further suspicions that there was more to Monk’s death and Bohan’s confession to the killing than had ever been revealed.