Born to Lose (32 page)

Q. Which time?

A. If not the first time, then the last time. You have the truth now.

Hoss said most of the discrepancies were the result of selective deception—and that he'd since come clean. Others, perhaps, reflected his fatigue, poor nighttime visibility, or memory lapses from time gone by.

Q. We can't find the bodies. Can you?

A. Yes, I don't get it why—

Q. Maybe it's because you're making things up as you go along, with fabulous descriptions of everything but what is key.

A. No, I buried them and I can find them. Keep looking where I said, but I can find the graves if you want. All I need is to see the lay of the land to refresh my memory.

“Getting the truth from Stanley,” Agent Dunn ventured, “is like grabbing smoke.”

On October 14, Bill Baker, along with Sgt. Milt Hart of the Maryland State Police, drove from Cumberland to interview Hoss. They would also serve him with indictments, returned the week before by an Allegany County (Md.) grand jury, charging Hoss with the kidnapping (but not the murder) of Mrs. Peugeot and her daughter.

Baker and Hart “knew what everyone else knew,” but they were not privy to the FBI's closest dealings with Hoss. Indeed, when asked for a closer account of where he had smothered the baby, Hoss said, “No, I don't want to do that. I promised the FBI I wouldn't tell anybody else where I left the baby.” That aside, Hoss spoke freely of his travels, murders, and numerous stickups. Asked the location of Linda's body, Hoss said it was “either on Route 50 or 224.” This introduction of Route 50, which could not be found in or around Akron, was a new twist. As for Lori Mae, when Baker asked, “Can you tell me when this occurred with the baby?” Hoss answered confidently, “Yes, I remember it was either on September 29 or 30, in the afternoon.” At the time, Baker did not know that Hoss's location on September 29 had already been verified as Fremont, Nebraska, where he'd stayed at the Mid-Western Motel and robbed a service station, while on September 30 put him in Mitchell, South Dakota, at the Stevens Motel. Both Fremont and Mitchell are a long way from Kansas, where Hoss claimed to the FBI to have killed Lori on the 26th. At the time, Baker— with the normal reservations—accepted this account, just as the FBI, despite their own qualms, had accepted his earlier accounts to them. No one shared notebooks. At the end of the long interview, Baker and Hart asked Hoss to sign his statement. “No,” was the reply, “I won't sign anything. I haven't signed for the FBI or anybody else.”

. . .

Over his long career, Baker had investigated about forty murders, but Hoss was only his second experience with a cop killer. The first had been Mark McCauley.

Baker had first encountered McCauley in 1946, when he was a newly minted state trooper and McCauley was a strip miner from Emoryville, West Virginia. McCauley already had a record for such minor crimes as possessing illegal deer meat and beaver pelts, but had recently been arrested by Trooper Sgt. Joe Horn, a friend of Baker's, for stealing a pickup truck. At that point, McCauley was heard to threaten, “If ever Horn arrests me again, I will pump him full of lead.” In early autumn, Horn did arrest McCauley again, and then allowed the suspect to get some clothes from home before going to jail. Once inside his house, McCauley grabbed a shotgun and, sure enough, killed Horn. Waiting outside, Tucker County Sheriff Orsa Hovatter heard blasts and rushed inside, only to be shot dead likewise. Once captured, McCauley “got the noose.” Trooper Baker witnessed McCauley's execution in February 1948 at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville—the eighty-second hanging since that prison had been designated for executions fifty-five years earlier.

Baker and others watched the warden call out, “Mark McCauley, do you have anything to say?” When McCauley only shook his head, a hood was pulled over his head and the noose pulled snug. When the trap was sprung, McCauley shot down seven feet. A physician rushed under the scaffold, listening to the convict's weakening heartbeat with a stethoscope. Twelve minutes later, Mark McCauley, cop killer, was pronounced dead. An old prison guard said McCauley's execution was “Quick 'n' Just.” The short phrase stuck with Baker.

Baker and Hart gathered their papers while prison officers led Hoss from the interview room. Before the door closed behind him, Baker called out, “Stanley … Quick and Just.”

Hoss looked back at Baker. “What?”

Baker put his pen in his shirt pocket and said, “Never mind, Stanley, never mind for now.”

. . .

Feelings ran high among the populace in the Cumberland area. Restaurateur Fred Warner, Linda Peugeot's employer at the time she was kidnapped, had a life-sized dummy made and labeled “Hoss” and hanged it in an empty plot across the road from his business. The effigy, representation of a despised person, hung outside for months, such was Warner's bitterness. Then there was the letter from Linda's dentist, Dr. Donald Kiser. “I have known Mrs. Peugeot since she was a young girl and I recall seeing her weekly at church,” he wrote the FBI. “Because of my respect for her, I am
willing to travel to view dental work and assist in an identification of her, if it is found necessary.”

The phone call lasted less than a minute. Pittsburgh's agent in charge, Ian MacLennan, offered a cordial greeting (but no more) to his listener, a businesslike, largely humorless man. MacLennan considered the sole question posed to him: “Do you believe he knows where the females are?” MacLennan answered, “I believe him enough.” MacLennan got his marching orders. “Okay, take him out—and this is with us, our affair.” MacLennan said only, “Yes, sir,” before Director Hoover hung up.

After Hoover's go-ahead, MacLennan called Dick Thornburgh for, FBI or no, one just doesn't bang on a penitentiary gate to take a prisoner out for a look around the country. There are procedures. However, it was the mission itself that again brought the state and feds into conflict, setting off another fiasco in the winding Hoss saga while the public wondered why their officials could not cooperate more effectively.

Despite the inconsistencies, deliberate or accidental, in his mendaciloquent storytelling, Hoss was firm and convincing in his assertion that he knew where he had left the bodies of the Peugeots and could lead the law to the mournful spots. Since all else had failed, why not take him up on his offer? The need to find the Peugeots' bodies was too great to leave any avenue unexplored. Thus the U.S. Attorney's Office petitioned Allegheny County Judge Robert Van der Voort to release Hoss from the penitentiary for a trip through Ohio and Kansas in an effort to locate the slain mother and child. While no one could argue with this last-ditch, noble pursuit, District Attorney Duggan demanded that any search party include two or three county detectives. The FBI refused, banning participation by anyone but its own agents. At this news, Van der Voort bristled and backed away from Thornburgh's petition.

Duggan, still smarting from the FBI's conduct at the airport, was likewise upset at this new exclusion. In Duggan's view, Hoss's contentious but legal state confinement had ended the feds' authority over the prisoner. Now that Duggan had Hoss under his control in Pittsburgh's Western Penitentiary, he would not tolerate federal meddling, particularly since the “fibbies” hadn't had the decency to broach any of their clever ideas with him. Furthermore, the feds still were refusing to fully share the information from their interviews with Hoss, responding to all the recent stories of death and graveyards with a curt “no comment.”

On October 15, the day after Van der Voort rejected Thornburgh's request
for Hoss's temporary release to aid in the search for the Peugeots' bodies, a federal spokesman said the FBI had dropped the plan “for the present.” This about-face, however, was followed by another: the feds stated their intention to regain legal custody of Hoss.

Before this, the courts and law enforcement had finally agreed that Hoss should first be tried for Zanella's murder. Now, however, the FBI announced that “if it is established Mrs. Peugeot and her daughter were slain and the bodies found, then this case might take precedence over the others.” One can imagine Duggan's reaction to this reversal.

In the meantime, the search for the bodies continued without Hoss. Based on a recent shift in Hoss's account, the new target zone this time was a dump in northern Ohio, near the Indiana border and at least 150 miles from the location he had given in earlier versions. Once more, it produced an empty bag.

Then, within hours, the situation changed again. When Van der Voort's refusal to sign Thornburgh's initiative put Hoss out of the FBI's reach, Thornburgh sought a friendlier ear, that of U.S. District Court Judge Wallace Gourley. Now, near midnight on the evening of Thursday, October 16, Gourley signed an order requiring penitentiary officials to release Hoss to the FBI. On October 17, in a clancular affair under predawn cover, the prized prisoner was hustled out of Western Pen.

Hoss and his federal escort had barely crossed Ohio's eastern border, forty-five minutes away, before Duggan was alerted to the sub-rosa scheme. Furious, he roused Judge Van der Voort from sleep and they soon met downtown. The feds' action may or may not have been legal, but it was certainly unanticipated. Someone had gone behind their backs. Both men felt taken in, sucker punched.

Judge Gourley's order had decreed Hoss's release to Pittsburgh's FBI chief, Ian MacLennan, for searches “in and around Ohio and Kansas until the investigation is completed, but no later than 6:00 P.M. Monday, October 20.” The petition for removal also stated that Hoss had voluntarily confessed to the abduction of the Peugeots and to having caused their deaths. This statement was, in fact, the first
official
confirmation of the Peugeots' fate. All previous reports, including the
Pittsburgh Press
's “exclusive” of two days before, had been made anonymously, from a “prominent police official,” or a “source high in the investigation.” Never was a name attached until now. Now Thornburgh confirmed that federal authorities had removed Hoss under court order “and we hope to use his cooperation
to secure these bodies.” The few words, perfectly genuine, were also good public relations. Who wouldn't support the FBI's cardinal undertaking?

Duggan, for one. Abandoning reason in favor of principle, he immediately appealed Judge Gourley's order, claiming that state authority had been violated. In harness with Duggan, Van der Voort signed an order demanding that the FBI return Stanley Hoss by 8:00 P.M. that very day. At 8:05, with Hoss nowhere in sight, an indignant Van der Voort ordered FBI chief MacLennan to appear at a hearing to show cause why he should not be held in contempt. But when members of Duggan's staff walked over to the FBI office at 9:00 P.M. to serve the court order, they were foiled when federal agents refused to open the door. Duggan's men then tried slipping the order under the door only to have the feds shove it back three times.

On Saturday, a two-judge U.S. Court of Appeals heard Duggan's motion that the FBI had overstepped its bounds. The court agreed and ruled Hoss should be back in prison “as soon as may be conveniently possible, but no later than 6:00 P.M. Sunday.”

Thornburgh told reporters the latest court order would “not be taken lightly,” but defended the FBI's actions. County detectives had been prevented from joining the search, he explained, on direct orders from J. Edgar Hoover, who had also ordered the secrecy to prevent undue publicity.

Turning up the heat, Duggan, solemn and dutiful, responded with a show of concern. “We don't know where Hoss slept Friday night, whether it was in a motel or roadside tent. We have security concerns.” Such concern was spurious; the FBI search party, knowing their friend Hoss the way they did, had their parlous prisoner “shackled and chained enough to give Houdini the sweats.”

Given all that had transpired—the stridency, the finger-pointing, the hearings, and the contempt charges—the FBI decided to quit. Hoss was returned by armed caravan to Western Pen at 9:00 P.M. on Saturday night.

The prerogative of the state court had been vindicated and the FBI put in its place—bitch-slapped—but at what cost? Both sides, really, had been disingenuous. Duggan might have been slighted by the FBI's refusal to allow his detectives to join the search, but his outraged public response served to hinder a thorough search for the bodies. Surely his fuss and denouncements could have waited a few days. Had he forgotten what this was about? As for the FBI, what was so taxing about taking along a couple of county detectives? Couldn't they have suspended their clannish mentality just for this special mission, this imperative?

Days later, Ian MacLennan declined to specify how far they'd taken Hoss but added that they had not reached Kansas. In fact, they hadn't gone beyond Akron, Ohio. The standoff continued. In subsequent days and months, there was nary a move among the FBI, the Allegheny County Courts, or DA Duggan's office to seek a new effort to take Hoss out again on a mutually agreeable search for the Peugeots' bodies.

Meanwhile, Linda's husband and parents remained in limbo. Bearing the unbearable, that her babies remained alone somewhere under the stars, Edna Thompson resolved to speak with Stanley Hoss himself. If need be, she would beg him to reveal the locations of the bodies. On midmorning of Halloween day, therefore, Edna and her husband sat with Bill Baker at Western Pen waiting for Stanley Hoss to be brought out. When Baker saw Hoss in the hallway, he asked to speak with him first, without the parents. Hoss had not been warned of their visit, and Baker worried over a reaction. He knew Hoss could be vile. Once in an office alone with Hoss, Baker greeted him. Hoss said, “Yeah, I remember. You talked with me a couple weeks ago.”

Q. That's right, Stanley, but I am not here to interrogate you today but simply ask if you'd be willing to talk with Mr. and Mrs. William H. Thompson, the parents of Linda Peugeot?