CRUSHING NEWS CAME FOR WALTER on December 7, 1994, when the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled two to one that he could be retried for Barbara Jean’s murder. Once more, he had come within one vote of going home; once more, he would go on trial for his life.
The ruling was a great relief for DA Abraham. Now she had a chance to bring this case, a six year, front-page embarrassment—four years without an arrest followed by the near-acquittal and mistrial—to a positive conclusion: Walter Ogrod on death row.
In mid-December, a week after the superior court ruling that Walter could be tried again, John Hall was moved into his cell block. Another coincidence, according to the DA’s office, that led Hall to an inmate accused of an old, high-profile murder case that prosecutors were worried about losing. Hall would, as usual, deny he’d been moved to target anyone in particular, but in this instance he did tell an investigator later that Joseph Casey, in a phone call, originally brought up the idea of him talking to Walter. At first, Hall claimed, he didn’t want to go near the Ogrod case.1 This sounds like an extension of the standard Hall story, that he didn’t like snitching and only did it out of a sense of duty. On the other hand, it’s hard to figure out how lying about Casey suggesting a case to him could help him; he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that.
Casey denies ever mentioning Walter to Hall, and Hall certainly could’ve come up with the idea himself. Maybe no one had to suggest it directly; maybe Hall was transferred into Walter’s orbit and just spotted the opportunity: Walter struck him as a “big, goofy guy; some kind of mental deficient.”2 And a mental deficient facing a murder charge in an old, high-profile case was a godsend for Hall. He wouldn’t have had to ask the DAs what to do.
Hall approached Walter.
“Are you Walter Ogrod?” he asked. “I’m John Hall. Marc Frumer sent me to check up on you.”
Hall was presenting himself to Walter as a kind of family acquaintance. Frumer had been Walter’s brother’s lawyer on a case, and his father, Marshall Frumer, had helped the Ogrod boys with some inheritance issues after their father died.
Isolated and depressed in the wake the denial of his appeal, Walter fell into the classic snitch trap, which Professor Barry Tarlow described this way: a defendant charged with murder, worried about his future and needing a friend to confide in, gets a cellmate who has appeared at the key moment purely by happenstance. The cellmate offers a shoulder to lean on, earns the defendant’s trust, gets him to talk, and manufactures a “confession.” It turns out the new cellmate is a jailhouse snitch, who offers the manufactured confession to authorities in exchange for leniency.3
Walter’s version of what happened with Hall matches this prototypical jailhouse snitch scenario exactly. Walter took Hall for a friend, a good friend with obvious clout—the accordion file of legal papers, the flip-up TV in his cell, the regular visits from important officials.4 Lacking the good sense to not talk to anyone in jail about his case, Walter talked to Hall about his late father, jobs he’d had, his apartment in Glenside, his mother’s death, the mistrial, his plans to sue the detectives and prosecutors who had put him away. He discussed his case and his legal strategies in great detail.
Hall, despite his close ties to Joseph Casey, including visits, phone calls, a signed cooperation agreement on the mob case, and possibly Casey’s suggestion that he talk to Walter, never read Walter his Miranda rights. He talked to Walter about his truck-driving route, the superior court ruling, the other suspects, the case in general.
Hall tried to put together a story of Barbara Jean’s murder but was dissatisfied with Walter’s level of knowledge about the case.
“There were gaps in Ogrod’s story,” Hall explained later. “I had enough to proceed against him but I needed more. Ogrod didn’t know about particulars, and [I am] a stickler for details.”5
The “gaps” in Walter’s story, the particulars he didn’t know, were details of the murder itself. Hall spoke to Phyllis and she sent him newspaper clippings about the murder, but they were too general, lacking the specific detail that he wanted.6 With his research failing, Hall obscured the lack of specifics about the murder in his story with overwhelming detail about Walter’s life.
“I got mostly everything I needed from [Ogrod],” he explained. “Then I kept notes. Eventually I assembled those notes into a composite summary and then an elongated account and history of the events leading up to the incident, the incident itself, and the aftermath.”7
Hall sent his “composite summary” and “elongated account” to Marc Frumer. Both letters, headlined ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION, JOHN HALL TO MARC FRUMER, are full of Walter’s background, his complaints about the police setting him up, and his determination to sue the DA’s office when he got out, but lack any specific information about the murder. Out of the several thousand words crammed into five pages, two written lines to a ruled line, that make up the “composite summary,” the murder itself gets thirteen words: “Walt said he fucked her and beat her and smashed her skull in.”8 This is no more than a poor summary of the state’s case, complete with the inaccuracy about Barbara Jean being raped. Neither of the descriptions of the murder that Hall sent to Frumer has any details about the murder that hadn’t been in the papers or discussed at Walter’s trial.
Hall even created a new and twisted motive for the crime: according to Hall, Walter said Sharon was nice to him, he fell in love with her, and he killed Barbara Jean so he could pin the crime on John Fahy and, with him out of the way, marry Sharon.9 According to Hall, Walter thought John was related to Henry Fahy, a man on death row for strangling a young girl with an extension cord years before, so if he killed Barbara Jean the same way, John would be arrested for it.10 (According to John Fahy, he and Henry are probably not related and did not know each other, though it’s possible they are distant cousins. In the papers at the time of Barbara Jean’s murder they were variously described as brothers or distant cousins.)11
Once John was arrested, according to Hall’s version of what Walter had told him:
Sharon’s love for John would turn to hate for raping and killing her daughter, the police would put him away for life or give him a death sentence so he could be with his brother [Henry Fahy]. Sharon would then be grieving for the loss of her daughter and the betrayal and loss of her creep husband, and because she’d be in that house alone and upset, and because she already knew and liked him, Walt said [she] could turn to him for comfort and support and then love him.”12
Walter, Hall wrote, was excited to move in with Sharon without even leaving the street he’d grown up on, and planned to tell her Barbara Jean would want them to have another baby.
This story is pure Hall—dramatic, outlandish, featuring a villain who is a master of evil and disgusts him. It would make the murder clearly premeditated, which would help prosecutors get a death sentence.
It also has no basis in fact. Hall claimed Walter told him he fell in love with Sharon because she was nice to him; in reality, Sharon and Walter agree they never met and didn’t know who each other were until after the murder. According to Hall, Walter said he befriended Barbara Jean over the course of the spring of 1988, getting her used to being around him; in reality, no one ever saw Walter speak to or interact with her.
According to Hall, to prepare for the murder Walter stashed gloves, an extension cord, garbage bags, and rubber bands in his basement. The extension cord was the key, the link to the Henry Fahy murder that would get police to arrest John Fahy.
Hall said Walter tried twice that spring to abduct Barbara Jean but was thwarted once by a car driving by and once by a passerby on foot.13 On the afternoon of the murder, according to Hall, Walter said he saw Barbara Jean outside, playing by herself, and lured her across the street to his door by blowing her kisses. She came happily and Walter took her to the basement, but the extension cord was missing so he raped her and then killed her with the pull-down bar from his weight set. (In later versions, having learned that there was no evidence of a sexual assault, Hall would write that Walter had tried to penetrate the little girl but couldn’t. There was no evidence of that, either.)
Hall’s story fundamentally changed the nature of the murder from a spur-of-the-moment sexual assault that turned into a panicked homicide with the nearest weapon at hand when Barbara Jean screamed to a calculated murder carried out by a manipulative psychopath who beat a little girl to death and then sat in the living room talking with the Greens and, later, a detective who came by, without betraying any nerves, and who got away with it for years. Walter only cracked, Hall explained, when he thought his mother had told the police he did it.
Hall’s writings to Frumer about Barbara Jean’s murder offer scant information about the actual killing, and his descriptions of Walter’s motive and plan and cool demeanor in the aftermath of the murder are fantastical. But his description of how Walter got rid of the body is merely impossible. According to Hall, Walter originally wrapped the body in a garbage bag and carried it around the neighborhood looking for a place to ditch it before getting nervous and leaving it in some bushes. He went home but started feeling nervous that there were fingerprints on the bag, so he went back out, found the TV box, and carried it, empty, to St. Vincent Street.
“Walt said . . . he didn’t go past [the car dealership window] carrying the box in his arms,” Hall wrote. “Walt said he had the box in his hand and at his side because there was nothing in it and he didn’t use his arms or [walk down] St. Vincent Street.”14
After leaving the empty box on St. Vincent, Hall wrote, Walter retrieved the body and carried it, wrapped in the garbage bag, to the box by a back route—not down St. Vincent Street from Castor Avenue, where the man with the box had actually walked. Walter dumped the body in the box, took the garbage bag with him (though Barbara Jean had actually been found wrapped in it), and walked down to Castor and Magee, a fifteen-minute walk each way,15 to toss the garbage bag in a Dumpster. This trip would’ve meant Walter was gone from his house from at least 5:00 PM until at least 6:00 PM, though all of the Greens and Walter’s friend Hal Vahey say he was home during that time.
“People said they saw a man other than Walt, with lighter hair, carrying a box and he didn’t know what that was but it wasn’t him,” Hall wrote, brushing aside the four witnesses on St. Vincent Street who’d all seen the man with the box.
Unlike the detectives’ statement, which just ignored the existence of witnesses by saying that Walter didn’t talk to anyone while carrying the box down St. Vincent Street, Hall’s story at least tried to address why Walter didn’t talk to anyone or even resemble the man who’d carried the box: he said Walter’s guess was that around the time he was carrying his empty box through the neighborhood the man with the heavy TV box came up the street, too, and the witnesses mistook that box for the box Walter was carrying.
Another fantastic coincidence for Hall, but also not possible, as four witnesses saw one man carrying and dragging a heavy box west on St. Vincent Street from Castor Avenue, and the box was opened, revealing Barbara Jean’s body, within three minutes of being placed on the curb.
According to Hall’s story, Walter was happy when he got Detective Worrell’s card in April 1992, thinking John Fahy was finally going to be arrested for the murder, and rushed downtown to talk to the detectives. When the questioning started, “Walt said he was scared and [the detectives] told him he’d be in a lot less trouble if he told the truth,” Hall wrote. “Walt said that he was told that he could get help instead of rotting in prison or the death penalty, so he let them hand write . . . a confession that he signed. . . . He said he couldn’t think straight and he was scared and he just let them write it all out and he wanted to get out of there because he was embarrassed and scared.”16
This description of the interrogation sounds like it did come from Walter, since it’s the same story he’s been telling since his arrest.
Hall sent Frumer the “elongated account” of his Ogrod story, a smoother version created from his two earlier summaries and written in block letters for easy reading, on January 5, 1995. For this version he wrote that Walter “fucked [Barbara Jean] by sodomy”—his updated version of the assault, given that there was no evidence of even attempted vaginal rape. As in Hall’s earlier drafts, details about Walter’s life overwhelm nearly nonexistent details of Barbara Jean’s death, and the description of Walter’s walk through the neighborhood and his handling of Barbara Jean’s body is impossible. In this last draft Hall emphasized the powerful but false story that Walter had admitted the murder to his mother and confessed to Devlin and Worrell because he thought she’d turned him in. Or, as the jury would hear it from the prosecutor: even Walter’s mother thought he was a killer.
Hall met with detectives about Walter on January 6. Given his history as a snitch, that the DA knew he’d lied in other cases, and that much of what he said about Walter did not fit the evidence in Walter’s case, the detectives ought to have been skeptical. They weren’t. Hall said he’d come forward because he could not in good conscience remain silent and see the murderer of an innocent girl go free, and he told his impossible story as two experienced detectives, trained to break down every lie a suspect told, transcribed it without asking anything substantive and had him sign it.17
“The District Attorney was salivating at the account given to them,” Hall explained later. “They had previously proceeded on a simple statement by Ogrod of admission. . . . My account was replete with details and chronology. He would burn on my recounting of the facts.”18
That Hall was a liar was well documented by the time I heard of him. In 1997 the Philadelphia Daily News ran a front-page story by reporter Will Bunch laying out Hall’s snitching career, piecing together the repeated coincidences of Hall being moved near high-profile inmates as well as the several times when even prosecutors had decided Hall was lying—which is what happened eventually in the Martorano case. The question was, how to prove it.
After I’d been working on the case for a year or so a source claimed to have proof that Hall lied about Walter and agreed to send it to me. Nothing came. I followed up with the source few times over the course of a year, but when I never heard back, I decided the person probably didn’t want to be involved after all. Then a legal-size manila envelope, thickly taped shut, arrived in the mail. It was a lesson in investigating old murders: people tell you things when they’re ready. Police and DAs have legal means to pressure people to talk, and police can even lie to make it happen. Journalists just have to wait.
I cut the tape, opened the envelope, and spread the contents out on my desk: John Hall’s private notes and papers. His letters of support from law enforcement; fake IDs, one of them in the name of his wife’s ex-husband; letters to his lawyers and his wife; handwritten transcripts of court hearings; enigmatic postcards that seemed written in code. I could follow Hall’s snitching process from the quick notes he jotted on the back of an envelope to the fruits of Phyllis’s research for him—pictures of a murder victim’s house, newspaper articles printed out from library microfilm—to affidavits he’d sworn out against other inmates and warm letters of thanks from prosecutors.
John could be very creative when he needed to be, my source explained. He could make a great novel out of a few details.
The papers included a copy of Will Bunch’s 1997 Daily News article “The Snitch,” with its photos of seven of the men Hall had snitched out. The biggest picture was of Walter, handcuffed, being led from the courtroom.
Many of the documents related directly to the Ogrod case. There was a draft of the cooperation agreement Hall and Joseph Casey had made in the summer of 1994, and a library microfilm printout of a 1988 article about Barbara Jean’s murder. Then a few pages of blue-lined, college-ruled paper with ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED written in block letters across the top of the first page and, in handwriting small enough to fit two lines of print between each line on the page and fill the margins with notes, the first draft of Hall’s Walter Ogrod story. There was a second draft, also headlined ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED, with fewer additions and cross-outs, written a few days after the first draft.
There was a transcript of Hall’s interview with detectives about his Ogrod story, though it wasn’t much of an interview, because the detective didn’t ask any follow-up questions. The whole conversation took less than half an hour.
Once I’d read John Hall’s papers and understood the development of his story about Walter, I decided it was time to call Phyllis, his wife. I didn’t expect her to talk to me, a random stranger calling up and asking about her infamous husband.
She answered, her voice soft. I told her I was a writer, looking into an old John Hall case. She didn’t hang up, but she didn’t say anything. Did she know where John was now, I asked? Back in jail, she said. Yes, she said, she knew about some of his cases. She’d researched some of them for him by going to the scene of the crime or, in one instance, to a victim’s house to gather details that Hall then presented to authorities as things only the killer could have known.
She paused and said, “I’m not sure I should tell you any of this.”19
I didn’t say anything. I’d been told that it’s important sometimes to shut up and let awkward silences sit so that the person you’re interviewing is more likely to keep talking.
“I know John lied in twenty or thirty cases,” Phyllis said after another pause.
“Do you think he lied in the Ogrod case?” I asked.
The pause was long this time.
“Off the record, I know he did,” she said. (She later agreed to put all of this on the record.)
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I helped him do it,” she said.
Phyllis lived in a nice house in the country and worked as an accountant in an office. She was small and quiet, her eyes bright as we talked at her kitchen table. Her daughter and grandchildren lived with her, and occasionally one of the kids would run through. She seemed nervous and wondered out loud sometimes why she was talking to me. But she talked for a long time about herself and John and her involvement in his snitch work. She took me through the papers I already had, explaining what everything was. She pointed out one of John’s little jokes—the fake ID in the name of her second husband.
I didn’t know how much of what she was saying to believe, but she had various documents of Hall’s to back up her stories. She also had dozens of his letters going back to the early 1990s, some from around the time Hall was snitching on Walter, in which he bragged about making up stories and selling them to the DA’s office for leniency.
As we were talking, Phyllis said, “Oh, I remember one thing John had me do to get information from Walter. He had me pose as a stripper and write him letters.”
I hadn’t thought to ask her about Walter’s story about Autumn, the stripper who’d written to him in jail four years after they met. But now it made sense: there was no stripper. John Hall had been the “friend” of Walter’s who’d been on the jail phone, supposedly with a friend at the strip club, and he had called Walter over to tell him how excited Autumn was to hear from him. John Hall had told Walter she was too excited to speak to him but would write to him. John Hall had had Phyllis write the phony letters.
Later I found one of Walter’s letters to the stripper in John Hall’s papers, proof that Phyllis’s story was true. Walter was thirty and had been in prison for close to three years when he wrote it, but it still reads like a seventh grader’s:
“I must be dreaming about this letter from you,” he wrote. “But it’s real and I remember you weren’t just better than the others you were great. . . . If you were to asked [sic] if I would take you out for some coffee, I would have and maybe dinner if you wanted to go with me.”20
Walter exchanged a few letters with this person he thought was Autumn but never wrote anything about the murder other than that he was innocent, so Hall stopped the ruse.
Walter had told me he never understood why the stripper stopped writing to him.21 The next time I talked to him I told him the stripper letters really came from John Hall. There was silence on the line for a few seconds.
“Really?” he said. “Aw, come on. Really?”