EPILOGUE

You better make your payments on time or you may end up out on 81.”

But it was with a wink of the eye that Joseph R. Leone made this comment as he sealed the deal in selling a car to a sixteen-year-old girl, Yvonne Parker-Hook. He was joking, according to her mother, Sharon Prosser Hook-Pfuntner.

Seven years had passed since Leone had beat a murder rap in Jefferson County Court. He was working for Granger Paving, with one of his bosses being Sharon’s husband, John Granger.

“Joe worked at Granger Paving because he was a good worker and a friend of John’s,” Sharon said. “He worked for my ex-husband [John] for several years.”

Beth Johnson and Leone occasionally stopped in at the John Granger home for dinner, and “John and I went there [to Leone’s house] a few times, also,” she said.

“He was always nice to my kids and myself. He was quiet and kept to himself. After he came home from jail, I guess the questions never stopped, and he felt like he was still being singled out.” She added, “He never said if he was guilty or not. He never seemed violent to me, but after all that mess, he was different.”

Beth had remained a tenant in the Amedeo house on Central Street during Leone’s incarceration, and while she continued to be friendly, she did not discuss the case, Joe Amedeo said. Following the acquittal, the couple continued residing there for a while, he said.

They eventually moved to 309 Logan Street, their apparent last Watertown address. By 1981, Leone had taken a bartending job at the Hitchin Post Tavern on Court Street, familiar digs from the days prior to the murders.

Meanwhile, there were occasional reminders about the murders, assurances to the couple that as long as they lived in Jefferson County, they would be living under that cloud. For instance, there was the evening in about 1972 or 1973 when two city cops took their break in the Red Moon Diner. The senior officer, about sixteen years older than his rookie partner, saw Joe Leone.

“Hey, Joe!” the senior man shouted. “Have you shot anybody today?”

“Nope, not today,” a smiling Leone responded.

The now-retired “rookie” who recalls that encounter said, “I almost fell out of my seat” when his partner posed the question.

The couple left Watertown about 1982, relocating to Hannah, South Carolina. Leone obtained employment as a truck driver with a food distribution business and Rocket Express, a national trucking company.

By the time he died from complications of cancer on November 7, 2003, at the age of seventy-two, Leone and Beth had married. His obituary in the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier indicated that he was an army veteran and an American Legion member and enjoyed bowling and playing pool and pinochle. At this writing, Beth Johnson Leone is said to still be alive.

Before Joe Leone went to trial, the Watertown Daily Times calculated what his incarceration from the day of his arrest had cost the taxpayers of Jefferson County. Brought up to the day of his acquittal, the cost of $5 per day placed his jailing tab at approximately $3,335.

“ALL IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD ” might be an appropriate description for many of the individuals involved in the Egan story. When immigrants from Italy settled in Watertown, a majority made their homes in an area called “the flats” along Arsenal Street and adjoining roads. Today, Arsenal Street is a main artery in Watertown.

Among the intersecting streets are Duffy and Dorsey, both dead ends, separated by one block of Arsenal. The longtime home for the Egan brothers and Leona Fober Egan was on Duffy, while two doors away lived the Anthony Leone family. That dwelling, at this writing, remains a Leone residence.

Also still in the Leone family is a house on Dorsey Street, once the home of Joseph and Anita Leone.

Seven blocks to the east on Arsenal Street, Sherman Street is situated. There, newlyweds James and Dolores Pickett resided briefly after he concluded his military career. They moved in about 1959 across the Black River to Bradley Street on the north side of Watertown. That made James Pickett an across-the-street neighbor of Richard Woods, fellow prosecution witness.

Not long before the Leone trial, Woods moved onto High Street, becoming the across-the-street neighbor of Willard and Bertha Belcher. High Street is south of the Black River, approximately at the center of the city, intersecting with State Street, another major artery. Joe Leone, at the time of the murders, was living on Central Street, another offshoot from State Street, two streets away from the Belcher house.

Bertha Montondo Belcher had no fear and was not afraid to express herself, even after being accused of being an accessory to three murders. If she felt the public needed to hear her opinion, she let it out in the same newspaper that had reported about her alleged misdeeds for decades, the Watertown Daily Times . Her first offering, as far as can be determined, occupied the letters column in February 1974, when, complaining about city snow removal ordinances, she challenged Mayor Ted Rand to shovel “around the fire hydrants.”

She was inspired in May 1975 to complain about the United States spending millions of dollars by bringing refugees to this country. “Keep the money home, where we need it,” she asserted.

It took only one paragraph for her to say thanks, for undisclosed reasons, to “our faithful friend” Jim Brett in September 1977. Unknown is whether she was speaking about the former Times reporter James C. Brett or local politician James E. Brett, who at the time was a member of the Watertown City Council. “God bless you, Jim,” she wrote.

Bertha penned two letters in July 1978. First came her criticism for the City of Watertown’s decision to place a traffic light at Factory Square, where four streets come together at peculiar angles. She had lived there for thirty-four years, she said, and the new lights “tie up traffic more than before they were installed.”

Later in the month, she was provoked by a letter writer who had complained about people who have children living near a hostel. She asked, “Who are you to say where the children can live?” And then she put the other writer on notice, claiming that he or she was “sick…in the head.”

She liked Dr. Chris Ronson of Watertown, letting it be known in two letters. She commended him in January 1980 for being dedicated and caring and labeled as “junkies” those people who “are trying to ruin our good doctor’s name.” She followed in April 1981 by praising him for the medical care he had given her.

And Bertha was politically motivated. She advocated the election of Watertown’s Wesley Eisenhauer to the county board of supervisors in November 1979 and twice wrote letters in 1984 expressing her disdain for President Ronald Reagan in his reelection bid.

“I am an old lady living alone. My Social Security helps, but I have to go without to make ends meet,” she wrote in a letter appearing in February 1984. “Reagan has plenty of money to send overseas and keep all the people who come here where they don’t belong. Charity begins at home.”

Even for being an innocent victim, she couldn’t keep her name out of newsprint. Such was the case in December 1969, when she slipped on ice and fell on Public Square, bruising her hand and knee. In September 1974, she was rendered unconscious in a two-vehicle collision on Coffeen Street in Watertown. Her car was struck in the rear after a bee flew into the face of the driver of the second auto.

There often seemed to be confusion about Bertha’s age when police agencies filed charges against her. The confusion was finalized at age ninety-three, when she died on January 11, 1989, in McAuley Hall of the then Mercy Hospital. There was no funeral.

ALTHOUGH WILLARD BELCHER was placed in a state correctional facility for the criminally insane back in 1968, he was free from state custody sometime after Joe Leone won his acquittal. Records have not been retained by the New York State Department of Correctional Services and Community Supervision to reveal when and why he was discharged. He was not out of the sight of law enforcement, however. After being injured in December 1972 in an auto accident on Route 37 in Jefferson County’s town of LeRay, he was charged with driving while intoxicated. He was placed in the county jail on November 18, 1973, after he was alleged to have threatened the life of McClusky, who by then had left the post of district attorney to be appointed Jefferson County judge. Police were informed about the threat by Bertha Belcher. Willard was returned to state custody and was reported to have died at age sixty-one “in an Ogdensburg hospital,” likely the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center at Ogdensburg, New York, on March 7, 1976.

Willard died in prison “because he was involved with the mob, Irish and Italian,” said a granddaughter, who added that she loved her grandparents no matter what they did, “and that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.”

WHATEVER ARRANGEMENTS ROBERT PRAY may have gained for his assistance to the prosecution against Joe Leone did not get him out of prison. He died of a heart attack in 1974 while still serving his sentence at Adirondack Correctional Treatment and Evaluation Center in Dannemora.

There is no public record of Joseph Gonoski ever being linked to the Egan deaths, only the suggestive testimony, which in itself sounded more like thirdhand hearsay. An army veteran who served in the European theater of World War II with the Tenth Armored Division, he died in May 1989 at the age of seventy-one. Anthony Leone, the father of Joe Leone, was a construction flagman when he was struck and killed by a vehicle on September 17, 1973. The accident occurred at the northbound on-ramp of Interstate 81 at Bradley Street, the same exit taken by the killers en route to the Egan executions a mile up the highway. He was sixty-four years old.

The authors and publisher have agreed not to use the names of the three Egan children. One of Barbara Egan’s high school classmates said that prior to the murders, the children “were always running wild, and they were always dirty looking. And they constantly used horrible, filthy language. It’s a shame nobody wanted those kids.” Another classmate said the children were placed in a rehabilitation facility shortly after the murders to help them forget everything about their past.

Watertown Daily Times files show no stories about the trio in their adult years. It has been suggested that their names were changed, and they were moved out of state.

F. Lee Bailey continued to be involved in nationally prominent cases, including being lead defense attorney for Patty Hearst, daughter of San Francisco Examiner managing editor Randolph Hearst. After being kidnapped by the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army, she was a visible participant in robberies and was eventually charged for her role in the crimes. Brought to trial in 1976, she was convicted of armed robbery and use of a firearm during the commission of a felony and served a prison sentence.

Bailey also assisted in the successful defense of O.J. Simpson in 1994. The former professional football star was acquitted of charges that he murdered his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her boyfriend, Ronald Goldman.

Bailey was disbarred in 2001 in Florida after being found guilty on seven counts of attorney misconduct by the Florida Supreme Court. Two years later, similar action was taken in Massachusetts, and in April 2014, Maine’s Supreme Court denied his application to practice law in that state.

In August 1969, Bradley Realty Corporation, which was located at 489 Newell Street, filed a $100,000 lawsuit against Jefferson County and New York State for alleged damage to three of the company’s warehouses on the Black River. The company claimed that the use of underwater explosives during the search for the Egan murder weapons, ordered in the spring of 1968 by McClusky, caused a portion of an old wooden dam at the south end of Newell Street to be removed. With half of the dam swept away, river water was diverted, creating a major flow of the river against the Bradley buildings, resulting in structural damage.

After Jefferson County settled out of court for $3,000, the claim against the state went to a trial in the state’s court of claims in November 1974 before Judge Henry Lengyel.

The judge’s review of testimony and evidence, contained in his written decision, included the following: The dam ran in a north–south line, from the Bradley property, formerly the property of Taggart Paper Company, which had owned the dam, to the opposite shore abutting the property of Abe Cooper Watertown Corporation.

Charles Donoghue.

The reasons for the dam’s original construction no longer existed; it did not serve a useful purpose.

Bradley had signed a “general release” prior to partial removal of the dam. Damage was not contemplated by the New York State Police, who had sought the demolition; army personnel, who were carrying out the mission; or Bradley.

On August 21, 1968, the army blasted a thirty- to forty-five-foot-wide breach in the dam, with the southerly edge of the breach about five to ten feet north of a concrete wall abutting the dam.

State police officers in charge of the detail had no expertise in the use of explosives, and the army personnel had never performed a mission of this nature. Investigator Charles Donoghue testified that he “never heard one of them say they had removed a dam like we were trying to do.”

“It was crystal clear that neither the state police nor any other state representatives had discussed the removal of the dam and its possible effects with any hydraulic or marine expert,” the judge observed.

In May 1969, the spring runoff of snow water plus heavy rains caused the river to flood. By May 22, downriver flow had peaked at 33,600 cubic feet per second. That flow was “rather exceptional,” said Kenneth H. Mayhew, an engineer for the Hudson River–Black River Regulating District. A Bradley official observed that the “water was very high and that it was rough, wild water swirling in and out against the wall, which eventually gave way.”

“I noted that when the dam was intact between 1945 and 1969, the property now owned by Bradley was not damaged by the Black River even though on three occasions the peak discharge was over 32,000 cubic feet per second,” the judge wrote. “There was no viable proof that this wall was not functional or in a suitable state of repair.”

A hydraulic engineer opined that the breach in the dam caused by explosives “deepened the water on the south side of the river and increased the pressure of the water against the wall, causing it to collapse.”

Judge Lengyel concurred:

It is my opinion…the failure of the wall was a direct result of the breach in the dam which was created at the request of and under the supervision of the New York State Police. I further find that the state police representatives were not versed in what the effect of such a breach might be, and there was no proof that the Army demolition engineers were versed in anything other than demolishing barriers .

He continued, “The state police desire and zeal to solve the Egan murders (the guns were never found) outweighed good judgment and caused unqualified personnel to attempt to accomplish a highly technical operation. I find the State negligent.”

Bradley was seeking $58,275 in damages, a sum that Judge Lengyel said, “I totally reject.” He reasoned that “when the state damages an ordinary structure it does not have to replace it with the Taj Mahal.”

He set the award at $9,060 plus interest dating back to May 24, 1969, calculated at $2,890.28, but he also subtracted the $3,000 received in the settlement with Jefferson County, leaving the state’s responsibility at $8,950.28.

That court case was the final action stemming from the New Year’s Eve 1964 triple execution just outside Watertown. And the criminal investigation is closed. Responding to a crime story on December 29, 1984, in the Watertown Daily Times , an investigator with the New York State Police told the newspaper on January 16, 1985, that the murders were solved and the case was closed with the arrest of Joseph Leone, despite his acquittal.