The smell of burning leather and rubber was acrid in his nostrils as he carried the smoldering shoes upstairs on a shovel. The three others were still in the kitchen.
Engleberry had dropped down on a chair beside the porcelain-topped kitchen table, and his face was in his hands. Dully he looked up when Herrick entered with what was left of the shoes.
“I didn’t want to hurt her!” Engleberry moaned. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t mean it!”
Later that night, he made a complete confession to Herrick and District Attorney Simms.
He said that all along it had been Vivian Lahey whom he had loved. Years ago he had asked her to marry him, and when she would not have him, he had married her sister Rose. But through the five years of his married life Vivian lived in the same house, and her constant presence kept his passion for her alive. He insisted that he had never made an indecent proposal to her or approached her in any way, but he admitted that he had been jealous of the other men she had gone with.
Her affair with Shanken had affected him most. Because Shanken was a married man with children, it had seemed to Engleberry that she was degrading herself. Once or twice he had spoken to her about it. Her retort had been that her personal life was none of his business.
The night of the murder, he had remained up reading after his wife had gone to bed. He had heard a car pull up, and through the living-room window he had seen Vivian get out. He had recognized the car as Shanken’s. At that, the twisting, brooding jealousy that had tormented him for five years had caused something to break inside him. He had gone to the back door, and there, standing outside the stoop without hat or coat, he had abused her.
Again Vivian had told him that it was none of his business what she did. He lost his head completely. In the grip of insane rage, he had snatched up a milk bottle and struck her.
When he had seen her lying dead in the snow, some measure of self-control had returned to him. He had stepped to the corner of the house and glanced down the driveway to make sure that nobody had heard or seen anything. Then he had returned into the house and undressed in the bathroom. Because he and his wife slept in twin beds, she had not heard him slip into his bed.
Next day his nerves steadily deteriorated, especially when he had observed Sergeant Sperling making a cast of a footprint in the snow. He hadn’t been sure what that had meant, but he had been afraid it was evidence against him. He had hidden the shoes he had worn the night before in the cellar.
When he had returned from work, his wife had told him that the police had been there to look at his shoes. Panic seized him. He had rushed down to the cellar to burn the shoes. And when Herrick had retrieved them from the furnace, it had not occurred to Engleberry that that smoldering mass of leather and rubber was probably worthless as evidence. He had been too far gone, at the end of his rope. His nerves hadn’t been able to take more.
Six weeks later, on January 29th, 1945, George Engleberry was tried for murder in the second degree. His defense attorney tried to prove temporary insanity, but the jury thought otherwise. He was found guilty and given a sentence of twenty years.
Leslie Ford
Leslie Ford was really Mrs. Zenith Jones Brown, who also wrote under the pen name David Frome. Beginning in the early 1930s, Brown simultaneously juggled two impressive detective series. The first, using her Frome pseudonym, was set in London and the provincial United Kingdom, and it featured the little Welshman Mr. Pinkerton and his trusty friend Inspector Bull. Mystery historian Howard Haycraft named the first Mr. Pinkerton Book, The Hammersmith Murders (1930), to his list of “cornerstones” of the detective story, a major honor. Zenith Brown’s second series appeared under her Ford byline, and in this one her hero shuttled across the United States cracking cases. Here, it was Colonel John Primrose, “a straight-backed, courtly, bronze-skinned” amateur detective who took center stage. Despite their differences in setting, what the two series share in common is excellent research. Mrs. Brown loved to travel, and her books faithfully and painstakingly captured any given locale. Unfortunately, what they also have in common, to my ear at least, is heavy-handed, unwieldly prose which sometimes obscures her ingenious, well-thought-out narratives. One cannot register this complaint about this lively “lost” story as told to Ford by James L. Carrol, Former Assistant Detective Chief, Buffalo, N.Y.
The Scar-Faced Fugitive and the Murdered Maid
Eyes wide in growing horror, the young housewife approached the bed on which sprawled the limp form of her pretty maid, Pauline Sokolowska.
Even by the waning light of the March afternoon, she could see deadly, crimson stains that crept from beneath the girl’s dark, disheveled hair. One arm dangled loosely over the side of the bed. The fixed eyes stared in a look of astonishment. Her mouth was half-open as if death had stopped a scream.
Slowly, the woman pulled back a bloodstained quilt with trembling fingers. She saw that the girl’s dress was pulled up, exposing silk-stockinged thighs. But what her gaze fastened on was a scarlet ring darkening the garment over the right breast.
Scant seconds later, a telephone operator at Buffalo, N.Y., police headquarters heard the frightened plea:
“There’s been a murder! Please come quickly...”
It was 5:45 o’clock. Before 6 o’clock, a score of detectives and uniformed men led by Austin J. Roche, chief of detectives, had arrived at the two-family home on Sterling Avenue, Buffalo.
Hardly had we launched our search for clues when the first newspaper extras were shouting the news. A sex fiend had bludgeoned, then shot the attractive young girl, the headlines screamed.
Quickly, the girl’s employer told us what she could about her maid and the events of that afternoon. She had hired the East Side school girl just a week before, she said, to help with the housework and in caring for her four-year-old son.
When she arrived home that day from a downtown shopping trip, she found the youngster playing in the kitchen. He usually came home from kindergarten about 4 o’clock. There was no sign of the maid or any indication that dinner had been started.
A glance into the bedroom told her why.
The home was subjected to a minute examination. Flecks of blood were on the kitchen floor. A cabinet edge bore a few hairs and a bloodstain. The wash bowl in the bathroom was damp with crimsoned water globules. Someone with bloody hands had washed there, we decided. Probably the killer. Discarded in the tub was a blood-soaked wash cloth.
Medical examiner Earl G. Danser hurried in while detectives were examining the home. Sizing up the situation, he grunted as he observed the disarray of the victim’s dress.
“Sex case?” he asked.
“Looks like it,” admitted Chief Roche.
Dr. Danser pulled aside the garment, revealing a small dark wound an inch to the left and below the center of her right breast. He examined the head wound.
“Nasty rap. Offhand I’d say her skull was fractured,” he said. “But the bullet probably killed her. Find the gun?”
Roche shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Know who did it?” queried the doctor, looking up from the body.
Roche shook his head again.
“I’ll post the body immediately then. Call me in a couple of hours and I’ll let you know what I find.”
“Thanks,” Roche replied briefly.
Presently an undertaker’s hearse was bearing the body to the county morgue. Detectives resumed their examination of the house. Even the yard was subjected to close scrutiny but no weapon was found. Then the neighbors were questioned.