Armed with Shewchuk’s confession, Camden police brought in the preacher. It turned out Dworecki had taken out a life insurance policy on Wanda around the same time as he had taken one out on her mother. He had hired three men, including Shewchuk, to kidnap and kill Wanda back in April. When she survived the failed attempt, Dworecki upped the policy on his daughter to nearly $2,700, with a double indemnity clause should she die in an accident, and got ready to try again.
Dworecki eventually confessed in a statement that ran to nearly thirty pages. The preacher admitted to being aggrieved by Wanda’s behavior, but he claimed the idea to kill Wanda originated with two men, Joe Rock and John Popolo, whom he’d met in Philadelphia. Dworecki said they urged him to kill his daughter to collect the insurance money and pressed him again as time went on. He roped Shewchuk into the murder plot after learning the younger man had bragged about sleeping with Wanda. Shewchuk denied it, but Dworecki sensed an opportunity to manipulate the boy into carrying out his murderous scheme.
Both men entered guilty pleas in Camden County Court on August 29, 1939. Dworecki refused to look at anyone. Shewchuk chose the opposite tack, smiling whenever someone caught his eye. Then Mitchell Cohen, the city prosecutor, explained to the assembled crowd, including the surprised defendants and their lawyers, why the guilty pleas had to be thrown out. New Jersey state law at the time stipulated that one was not allowed to be sentenced to death if he pleaded guilty. Capital cases, and murder certainly counted, required that the defendants face a full trial, verdict, and sentencing.
Cohen voided the pleas, then bound the cases over to the county court, where Samuel Orlando (whom Cohen would succeed a few years later) would prosecute them. Cohen’s work was done, but he paid attention to what happened in the county courtroom. Orlando cross-examined both Shewchuk and Dworecki with extra vigor. Shewchuk received a life sentence in exchange for being the primary witness against Dworecki. The preacher’s confession was admitted into evidence, despite his lawyer protesting it should be kept out. The jury found him guilty after swift deliberations.
Shewchuk was paroled in 1959 after surviving his own near-fatal beating in prison; he died in the late 1980s. Dworecki was put to death by electric chair on March 28, 1940. Before his execution, he implored his surviving children, Mildred and Alfred, to lead pious lives and asked that “God have mercy on their souls.” Dworecki’s grave lies next to that of the daughter he murdered.
UNLIKE THE DWORECKI CASE, where Cohen did not have to work to establish the defendants’ guilt, he played a larger role in a subsequent murder trial that garnered a great deal of media attention. This case concerned the death of twenty-three-year-old Margaret McDade (Rita to her friends) on August 14, 1945, as Philadelphia, Camden, and the entire country celebrated V-J Day. That night, Rita’s best friend and fellow waitress Ann Rust saw her in the arms of a stranger, dancing to a Johnny Mercer tune. Five days later, Rita was found naked and dead at the bottom of a cistern near a sewage disposal plant. An autopsy determined that she had been raped, beaten bloody, and tossed into the cistern alive. She died of suffocation.
Not long after, police arrested the stranger Rita had danced with on the last night she was seen alive. Howard Auld was a former army paratrooper, recently discharged. When police found him, Auld gave them a fake name (“George Jackson”) and claimed to be innocent. Discharge papers he carried caught him out on the first lie. Careful interrogation spurred Auld to confess to McDade’s murder.
Auld recounted an all-too-familiar, all-too-horrible story: after the dance, he had made a move on Rita that she turned down. He got angry, punched her in the face, and choked her until she passed out. Auld claimed he felt for a pulse and, when he found none, dumped her into the cistern. (Never mind that she was still alive and he omitted mention of the rape.) Auld’s time in the army also included repeated stints in a mental hospital and various bouts of violent behavior, which his lawyer, a court-appointed defense attorney named Rocco Palese, would use as a mitigating circumstance in the trial.
Auld was sentenced to death for Rita McDade’s murder in 1946, but the conviction was tossed out on appeal several months later. The presiding judge, Bartholomew Sheehan, had failed to tell the jury that they could recommend mercy—meaning, a verdict other than death—in finding Auld guilty of first-degree murder. The Camden County prosecutor’s office moved quickly to try Auld again, but proceedings did not begin until 1948, after Mitchell Cohen’s appointment as top prosecutor.
Sheehan was also the judge for the second trial. Cohen asked for the death penalty, in accordance with New Jersey state law. Auld’s new court-appointed attorney, John Morrissey— Palese had since been appointed as a judge—implored the jury to be lenient toward his client, “a feeble-minded boy,” and deliver a not-guilty verdict by reason of insanity. But Cohen prevailed with the jury. Morrissey indicated he would appeal, and did, several times over, delaying the execution date a half dozen times. Howard Auld did not die in New Jersey’s “Old Smokey” until March 27, 1951. His final words were “Jesus, have mercy on me.”
BY THE END OF 1949, Mitchell Cohen had established his bona fides as Camden County prosecutor. He had tried one capital case directly and worked on another, even though he was deeply conflicted about the death penalty. Decades later his son, Fred, recalled Cohen becoming “very emotional” when the subject came up, so much so that they did not discuss it again. Cohen did his duty, whether asking for the harshest sentence as a prosecutor or delivering the sentence as a judge. But he did not have to like it and, with that single exception, took care not to bring his feelings home to the Rittenhouse Square town house he shared with his family.
He would also vault onto the national stage with his handling of a case that would shake the city to its foundation, and foreshadow similar massacres in the decades to come. But he did not close the books on Sally Horner’s abduction. To his knowledge, the new kidnapping charge had not flushed out Frank La Salle. Sally was still missing. And the more time passed, the less likely the outcome would be a good one.
Ten
Baltimore
Here’s the point in the narrative where I would like to tell you everything that happened to Sally Horner after Frank La Salle spirited her away from Atlantic City to Baltimore, and the eight months they lived in the city, from August 1948 through April 1949. The trouble is, I didn’t find out all that much. A scattershot list of addresses and court documents can’t bring to life what a little girl thought or felt. Visiting the neighborhood where Sally lived, and walking by the school she attended, can’t adequately bridge the decades. The neighborhood has changed, demographically and socioeconomically. Sally, were she still alive today, would barely recognize it.
The meager paper trail frustrated me. My patience frayed as I ran up against dead end after dead end, record search after fruitless record search, to try to build up a picture of the months Sally lived in Baltimore. If she made friends, or had someone she felt she could trust, I couldn’t find them. If there are people still living who knew her at the time, I could not track them down. If she kept a journal during her captivity, it did not survive. She did go to school in Baltimore—a Catholic school—but if any of its records remain, they are buried under decades of detritus no one has the inclination to sift through.