Prescription: Murder! Volume 1: Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  The Case of the South Philly Slaughterers

  The Case of the Philandering Family Doctor

  The Case of The Traveling Doctor and the Farmer’s Wife

  The Case of The Jekyll-Hyde Sawbones

  THE CASE OF ARSENIC, OLD LACE AND SISTER AMY ARCHER

  Prescription: Murder!

  Volume 1 of 3

  By Alan Hynd with Noel Hynd

  With illustrations

  “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”

  —Stephen King, Under the Dome

  © 1962, 1990 by Diane and Noel Hynd

  Cover art © 1962 Stanley Borack

  © 2014 by Red Cat Tales, LLC

  Published by:

  Red Cat Tales, LLC

  PO Box 34313

  Los Angeles, California 90034

  www.RedCatTales.com

  Introduction

  My father, Alan Hynd (1903 – 1974) was one of the foremost true crime writers of his day. Over a career that spanned almost fifty years, he wrote close to two dozen published books, probably more than a thousand magazine articles, several radio and TV shows and a couple of films. It was not a bad life’s work - it was just mostly about bad people.

  He had a style, which was more anecdotal than scholarly, more entertaining than academic. A keen sense of humor, sometimes very dark, was never lost on the events, and was almost always conveyed in his reporting. Prescription: Murder! is a small sampling of some of his more memorable articles, classics in the annals of true crime. This collection is about doctors who killed, for example. There are four episodes about doctors and then a bonus track about a nursing home. This is stuff that just couldn’t be invented. Where possible, I’ve included illustrations from the eras of the story. They are all in the public domain.

  I have gone through all of these stories and re-edited them for modern audiences. In some cases, I made small additions, adding information that may have come to light on these cases in the forty years since my father died. I’ve retained his jaundiced outlook on the cases he wrote about, and kept his style. I like to think I have done it in a manner that would have pleased him. Hence I added my name as a writer here more than an editor. In the final years of his life, I ghosted several articles for him. So I can think of no one more qualified than myself to tinker.

  A final note: The dialogue in several of these articles is closer to the truth than one might think. All of it was taken from court proceedings of the era, credible newspaper accounts and actual confessions, then “cleaned up” a bit.

  Alan Hynd’s stories, which appeared in publications from, The Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post to True Detective, had thousands of fans in their day. Thanks to the accessibility of electronic publishing, it is never too late to become one.

  If you like true crime, or just a crazy jaw-dropping story, this is probably for you. Enjoy.

  Noel Hynd

  September 2014

  Los Angeles, California

  The Case of the South Philly Slaughterers

  …in which a homicidal threesome made accidents pay.

  The trouble with Doctor Morris Bolber, who functioned as a faith healer in the Italian section of South Philadelphia back in the Terrible Thirties, was that he could never quite bring himself to have much faith in the theory that murder will out. This attitude of the discerning doctor sprang in part from conditions right in his own neighborhood. Bolber, whose ear was never very far from the ground, was aware of three instances wherein ladies, for various reasons, had poisoned their spouses.

  The Philadelphia Police Department, without realizing it, or in fact caring much, was lending an assist to this shocking state of affairs. The Department in the Thirties was honey-combed by grafters from City Hall down to the flatfeet on the beat with the result that many honest cops were usually so preoccupied by worry over getting the rug pulled from under them that they didn’t notice what was going on among the citizens. Thus a murderer who was sly enough not to throw his victim out with the garbage or appear in the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade with somebody’s head stuck to a broomstick, stood in a fair way to go unmolested indefinitely. And, for a man who was really clever, the field of pre-meditated homicide offered opportunity practically beyond limit.

  All of that raises the curtain on one of the strangest episodes ever in the history of American homicide. Let’s consider the three main players, a pair of cousins named Herman and Paul Petrillo and their associate, one Dr. Morris Bolber.

  Herman Petrillo was born in 1899 in the province of Campania, near Naples. He came to the United States in 1910 and first worked as a barber. Then he found more profitable ways to make money: his schemes first consisted of arson and insurance fraud. Eventually, however, he came across a small Philadelphia gang selling counterfeit five-dollar bills for half the face value. Petrillo bought in, learned the business, so to speak, and was printing his own.

  Herman Petrillo’s cousin, Paul Petrillo, also landed in Philadelphia in 1910. He married shortly after his arrival in the States and opened a tailor shop, Paul Petrillo, Custom Tailor to the Classy Dressers, on East Passyunk Avenue. The business was successful for many years. Then along came the Depression and no one was buying new threads. So Paul the Tailor was on the rocks financially. Soon thereafter, he got into the life insurance racket. He sold cheap policies: weekly premiums were 50 cents or a dollar. The insurance company he worked with was a fly by night outfit that never had any intention of making a big payout. It also did not require a medical examination of the insured. So Paul Petrillo would sell policies mostly to sick and injured middle-aged men. A good deed, you think? Think again. Petrillo had his own game plan. He was working with immigrants, don’t forget, people who were often illiterate in English. So Petrillo would list himself on the policy without the policyholder’s knowledge, often making himself the sole beneficiary. At first, Petrillo was playing a numbers game and hoping for a hit in the form of a death of someone that he had insured. Later on, things would take a darker turn.

  Paul Petrillo also had a side interest, stemming from legends he had heard as a boy in Italy: faith healers. A superstitious man, he was also fascinated by magic; particularly as it was practiced by men who claimed the power to take away a person’s pain. Through this interest, and prowling through the nether regions of South Philadelphia, Petrillo came across a middle-aged man known in the neighborhood as Louie the Rabbi.

  Louis was actually a Russian Jewish immigrant named Morris Bolber. Bolber had been raised by his grandparents in a small village near Moscow. He was a child prodigy, entering Grodno State University at age nine and graduating at twelve. He then became interested in the Kabbalah as well as other ancient books of magic and mysticism. His fascination morphed into a fixation. In 1905 he traveled to China and sought out a legendary sorceress. Bolber lived with the old woman for five years, then immigrated to New York City in 1911, calling himself “Dr.” now, following his education in China. He married and settled on the lower East side. He worked as a teacher, saved his money earnestly, and ran a grocery store. For many years, he led a normal life.

  Then came the Depression. His business failed. Bolber packed up his wife and family and moved to Philadelphia. But now he had an inspiration: He sent out handbills announcing his new practice as a faith healer.

  So by the mid-1930’s, Paul Petrillo had met the man known as Dr. Morris Bolber. Through Paul, Bolber
met Cousin Herman. And so there they were, the counterfeiter, the insurance guy and the fake doctor. Things were reader to roll.

  By the year 1932, Doctor Bolber was in nasty financial straits once again. The pickings in the faith healing field had been slim since the Great Depression of 1929. The faith healer’s patients had either lost faith in him or couldn’t afford to be healed.

  So the doctor, as he was called, with a wife and a houseful of off-spring to support, had gone into a side business: selling bottles of stale ginger ale spiked with saltpeter to women whose husbands had strayed from the connubial couch. The saltpeter had slowed down the husbands but it hadn’t slowed down a parade of creditors to the doctor’s domicile and office, in a faded-red brick house on the corner of Ninth Street and Moyamensing Avenue, in the heart of the Quaker City’s Italian district. One morning in February 1932, Bolber was in a state of acute depression as he sat in a gloomy front room that he used for professional purposes, against a background of scuffed leather volumes on abracadabra, while a howling wind rattled the windowpanes. The faith healer looked somewhat in-congruous in such a setting, for he was an affluent-looking little man of 42, neatly barbered, alert of eye and sharply turned out. As he sat there in his office, railing at the fates, somebody pulled the bell at the front door.

  Bolber rushed to a window to see whether it was friend or foe: patient or creditor. The caller was a new patient, a moderately attractive woman of about 30, the wife of a man named Anthony Giacobbe, who ran a dry-goods store. She had come to get a bottle of that stuff she had been hearing about, the stuff that slowed men down. Mrs. Giacobbe told Bolber that her husband was spending so much time and money on drink and other women that he was letting his business go to pot.

  “We’re even having a hard time keeping up his insurance,” said Mrs. Giacobbe. “Insurance?” said Bolber, all ears. “How much insurance does your husband carry?”

  “Ten thousand dollars’ worth.”

  Doctor Bolber was visited by an inspiration. He gave Mrs. Giacobbe a bottle of stale ginger ale spiked not with saltpeter but with an aphrodisiac strong enough to transform a broken-down wreck into a howling wolf.

  “Come back in a couple of weeks,” said the doctor, “and let me know if this has any effect on your husband.” As soon as Mrs. Giacobbe left, Bolber, according to an admission he was one day to make to the cops, had an inspiration. He hustled around the corner to the hole-in-the-wall tailor shop run by his friend, Paul Petrillo.

  Petrillo, a chubby man in his thirties, with heavily greased black hair and the smell of Sen Sen on his breath, had for some time been collaborating in a unique arrangement with the faith healer. Petrillo made free suits for Doctor Bolber in return for the names of women married to men who were neglecting their homework.

  Petrillo was one day to be revealed in a courtroom as a gentleman with phenomenal amorous powers. This particular day, when the fraudulent faith healer slipped the wolfish tailor the name of Mrs. Millie Giacobbe, something new had been added. Petrillo was not only to seduce the lady; he was to pretend to fall in love with her and propose mar-riage.

  “But what about the husband?” Petrillo asked.

  “Never mind about him,” said Bolber.

  “Just get the wife nuts about you and I’ll take care of the husband.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll kill him.”

  “But why knock the guy off, Doc?” asked Petrillo. “What’s the angle?”

  “Insurance. He’s got $10,000 worth of insurance. We can get half of it from the wife. That’ll give us $2,500 apiece.”

  Petrillo was all for it. In 1932, $2,500 was a bundle.

  “How you gain’ to knock the guy off, Doc?”

  “Poison,” said Bolber. “I got a poison that’ll fool any doctor.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  The substance Bolber had in mind was conium, a lethal herb known to the layman as hemlock, the stuff that was in the mickey that did in Socrates, the Greek philosopher, in

  500 B.C. The attractive feature of conium, which was easily disguised in food and drink, was that when it was adminis-tered to a patient suffering from any one of a wide variety of diseases it caused the ailment to worsen materially. Making things even more convenient in the Giacobbe household, the man of the house was a chronic drunk. It would be easy to slip something into his beverage.

  Next morning Petrillo sprayed himself with cologne and, posing as an encyclopedia salesman, called on Mrs. Giacobbe after her philandering husband had left for his place of business. In a couple of weeks, Mrs. Giacobbe called on the faith healer again. The stuff that he had given her to slow down her husband had had no effect.

  “But I don’t care,” said Mrs. Giacobbe. “I’ve met somebody else.”

  “And you’re in love with him?”

  “Yes.”

  Bolber sat in his office half the night writing a dramatic act, complete with instructions for gestures, by which Petrillo was to propose marriage to Mrs. Giacobbe. Next day, after Giacobbe, the marked man, was away at business, Petrillo called on the wife. On bended knee, he professed his undying love for the lady.

  “Let’s get married and run away some-wheres,” he said, beating his chest.

  “But what about my husband?” asked Mrs. Giacobbe.

  “Something could happen to him.”

  Mrs. Giacobbe had never thought of such a happy eventu-ality.

  “What could happen?” She asked.

  “We could take all his clothes off when he comes home drunk some night and he could get pneumonia from layin’ there naked with the cold wind blowin’ right on him.”

  A few nights later Bolber was sitting in his office listening to Petrillo relating the happy developments.

  “Giacobbe didn’t go to work today,” the tailor was telling the faith healer. “Me and his wife stripped him when he come home drunk last night. He woke up with an awful cold this morning.”

  Mrs. Giacobbe had gotten her husband thoroughly starched again that night.

  “So we stripped him again a little while ago,” Petrillo went on. “The weatherman says it’s gonna be down to ten above tonight. When Giacobbe wakes up tomorrow morning he ought to be practical blue.”

  The next night Petrillo reported to Bolber that Giacobbe had contracted pneumonia. The family doctor had been called and had prescribed two kinds of liquid medicine.

  “Good,” said the faith healer. “Tell Mrs. Giacobbe to come around with that medicine.”

  The patient quickly began to come apart at the seams. The bona fide doctor wasn’t surprised.

  “Your husband was a heavy drinker,” he explained sadly to Mrs. Giacobbe. “Heavy drinkers often fail to survive pneumonia.”

  “My poor Antonio,” said Mrs. Giacobbe, warming up to the idea of an early widowhood.

  After the funeral, Bolber sent for the widow. There would be a fee, he explained, for his doctoring up that medicine, a fee of half that insurance money. Mrs. Giacobbe, not too bright and happy to be rid of her faithless spouse so that she could marry the ardent tailor, willingly forked over the five grand in cash.

  It wasn’t long before Mrs. Giacobbe appeared in Bolber’s office greatly distraught. Petrillo had banked his romantic fires. The doctor made a ticking sound and shook his head sadly. The male animal was an unpredictable beast. There was nothing, he feared, he could do to help the lady.

  One night, after office hours, the faith healer suggested to Petrillo that they get busy on another husband. Where, Petrillo asked, would they find a man carrying enough in-surance to make the enterprise worthwhile?

  “We’ll insure somebody ourselves,” said Bolber. The doctor had already been thinking about his own patients. He went to his card file and selected one.

  “Now here’s a woman named Lorenzo whose husband is a roofer. We could insure the husband for say $10,000, with double indemnity in case of an accident, and then get him pushed off a roof.”

  How, Petrillo inquired, wo
uld they get Lorenzo insured without his knowing it? And who would push him off the roof? Bolber ignored the questions.

  “Your cousin,” he said to Petrillo. “The one that was pinched a couple of years ago for counterfeiting.”

  “Oh, you mean Little Herman. Herman Petrillo.”

  “That’s the fellow. He used to be an amateur actor, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, before the Secret Service pinched him for that bum money. He used to act in church plays.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s a spaghetti salesman.”

  “Get him here,” said the faith healer.

  Herman Petrillo, the once-and-future counterfeiter, was a foxy-looking toy man given to loud checked suits and overcoats with belts in the back. Doctor Bolber decided that Little Herman would blend perfectly into his scheme. Bolber explained to Little Herman that he was to pose as Lorenzo, the roofer, in taking out an insurance policy. Then, after the policy was issued, Herman would shove the real Lorenzo off a roof. Little Herman, a real stinker, was simply mad about the plot.

  Paul Petrillo, carefully coached by Bolber, assumed the role of a canvasser and called at Lorenzo’s home one day when Lorenzo was up on a roof in a distant part of the city. A few weeks after laying the groundwork, Paul asked Mrs. Lorenzo if she would marry him.

  The lady said she would be glad to except that she was already married.

  “But supposin’ something should happen to your husband,” said Petrillo.

  “Like what?” asked the seduced wife.

  “Like him fallin’ off a roof.” Mrs. Lorenzo, who caught on quickly, liked the idea. Now Doctor Bolber instructed Little Herman to telephone to the Philadelphia offices of the Prudential Insurance Com-pany, palm himself off as Lorenzo, and ask that a salesman come to the Lorenzo home the next day at noon, when the real Lorenzo would be up on a roof somewhere.