Born to Lose (33 page)

A. Fuck them.

Q. Stanley, would you consider seeing them for just a few moments to answer one or two questions?

A. No.

Q. The Thompsons have come 150 miles from Cumberland. Won't you please reconsider?

A. No, fuck them. I don't care if they came a thousand miles, and you can tell the god-damned newspapers anything you want.

But what of Linda's husband, Gerald? Edna had earlier informed Baker that Gerald was to receive a hardship discharge from the navy, adding, “I don't know if Jerry is looking for Linda and Lori. He left our house last Sunday, saying he might be back in a week or two. He didn't say where he was going. He is terribly broken up.”

Throughout the autumn, hardly a week went by without some news of the Hoss case or related stories. Nancy Falconer, the pregnant victim of the Hoss and Zurka home robbery in March 1969, gave birth to a baby in August, and reported that she and the baby were fine.

Hoss's wife Diane, like Hoss's own parents, legally sought a name change
for herself and her children, who were constantly harangued at school. Diane had found it impossible to live with the Hoss name, but in her straitened circumstances she could not relocate. Finding she couldn't even afford the fees required for a legal name change, Diane went to her kids' school with her worries. Out of desperation, she asked the school district to pay for a name change. School officials balked, but Diane pressed hard. The school sympathized but feared setting a precedent in such a matter. Nonetheless, after more than one peculiar meeting, the school board acquiesced. They'd foot the bill. Maybe it would help.

It was because of Kathy Defino's survival and her courage in standing up to Hoss at trial that he was at this moment locked away. It was, everyone told her, a service to society. Yet Kathy's family and friends could see her nerves were shot. If she had been a typical free-spirited teen before, she wasn't anymore.

Karen Maxwell likewise had only a tenuous grip on herself. Like Defino, her sister in distress, Karen had believed Hoss would kill her before he let her go. She returned to work but shied from social situations and shunned the press. However, she couldn't avoid the investigators stressing her importance in the upcoming trial. Since that day in the cemetery when Hoss had nabbed her, Karen had kept secret the pain and humiliation she'd suffered. Initially, only Karen's mother and doctor knew of her rape and abuse by Hoss, but although it was never made public, certain officials eventually came to know, too. Karen understood her civic duty as a witness but she was mortified at the thought of others learning the details of her ordeal. Only after officials assured her that all mention of sexual aggression and improprieties would be excluded from testimony did Karen agree to cooperate.

In mid-December, Captain Joe Start got a call from his boss, Bob Duggan. The penitentiary had called Duggan about an inmate who might have knowledge about Lori Mae Peugeot. Duggan sent Start to see what the story was.

At the prison, Start was taken to a second-floor office area, then led to an obscure room little larger than a closet. Waiting for him inside was a gaunt, fair-haired man named Whitman Shute, who with shaking hand lit his next cigarette from the end of his last one.

“If Stan learns I'm talking to you, I'm a dead man,” said Shute. “But the stuff is too heavy, I can't have it in my chest no more.”

Start lit up himself, further clouding the room. Acting casual to calm Shute, sitting there with sweaty palms, he told the inmate that a prison CO had brought him up unseen, “so no one knows you're talking to anyone,
and it'll stay that way.” Soothed for the moment, the con with a secret began to speak.

“I have known Stanley Hoss since our youth. It was while we lived in Bairdford, we played together. Lately, I got busted for narcotics. I was strung out pretty good, using nine bags of heroin a day. It was during this time I was in the infirmary here that they brought Stan in from Iowa. He said he didn't give a damn about anything anymore and told me about the baby he killed. He also told me about shooting the lady. He didn't tell me where he put her but said it wasn't in a dump ‘like them dumb bastards think.' That's how he put it.”

Start was impressed at this catharsis. He nodded at Whitman to continue.

About the baby, Stan said what he did to her, and I said, “Man, don't be rapping on me with that kind of shit. I mean, it's too much.” I don't want to hear 'cause, man, it was too much.

I remember most of what Stan said so I can tell you where he put the kid. He said Fort Leavenworth, Kansas … well, about twenty miles east of there. Said he saw this cemetery that had a big gate and a fence around it. Said he drove in around like to the back and then he saw a new grave, so he scooped back some flowers and dug down deep enough and put the little girl in there, then he covered her up again and put the flowers back so you can't tell anything was wrong. Said she'd have seven holes in her.

“Did you ask Stan questions, and did he say when this happened with the baby?” Start prompted.

“No man, nothing. Like I said, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, but Stan said this happened around October one, or like maybe the last week of September. This is a big cemetery near the Missouri line, Route 200 something. The body in a box could be in Missouri because Stan said he told them Kansas but he thinks it's Missouri. He said he was just riding around and didn't know what to do with the girl … big cemetery off a four-lane highway, twenty miles east of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

Start's gut told him Shute's story could be the breakthrough everyone was waiting for. It made sense. Shute was scared to talk, but he did, showing moral courage perhaps for the first time. Further, it made perfect sense that Hoss would retreat to the comfort zone of a cemetery to execute an illicit burial. Maybe he did the same with the young mother.

Back in his office, Start scoured maps of Missouri and Kansas. From Shute's “route 200 something,” Start found Route 210, which went through
Independence, Missouri, a place searchers had confirmed Hoss had stayed on September 26. Also, Route 210 intersected Route 435, a four-lane road. After reciting routes and descriptions of interest to countless officials in the area, Start—remarkably—had found one that matched up well with Shute's statement. Wanting to fly out right away, Start called Duggan with the exciting news. To Start's great shock and greater disappointment, Duggan hemmed and hawed, telling Start to try to handle everything by phone. Moreover, once Start had found a matching cemetery and made contact with its representative, the cemetery administrator was less than helpful. Did Start have any idea how many souls were laid to rest on any given day in their spacious grounds? the administrator asked. Also, he cautioned, no grave could be touched without the permission of kin.

Start was convinced he could bulldoze through any difficulties at the cemetery if he was on the scene, but when he suggested this, Duggan blocked the trip. At a dead nonplus, Start toyed with the temptation to slip his written report to the FBI, but he knew he'd be fired on the spot the moment Duggan found out. Eventually, Start's report was filed away, not to be seen again for thirty-five years.

In the cold of winter, after receiving a tip, scuba divers searched unsuccessfully for the Peugeots in Deep Creek Lake. Searches also continued in dumps scattered between Maryland and Iowa. Meanwhile, the uncertainty was taking a serious toll on Linda's family. By Christmastime, William Thompson was doing little more than shuffling to work and back. As for Edna, she ate little and lost weight, becoming nearly bedridden.

As the fascinating, albeit turbulent sixties drew to a close, everyone, from dinner table to workplace, beer hall to beauty parlor, talked about the case, waited for the trial … and wondered about the young man who'd aroused such passion and calls for revenge.

. . .

“Pretty young, maybe five or six years old, Stanie fell out of a tree. Hit his head good but his dad wouldn't take him to a hospital because we couldn't afford it. In my thinking, this is when Stanie's troubles began.” This is what Hoss's mother, Mary, always said.

Mary, née Atkinson, married Stan B. Hoss Sr. in 1937. She may have considered herself lucky to catch another man, for at age twenty-seven she'd already walked down the aisle twice before and had three daughters to care for: Mary Jane and twins Jenny and Jean. She began her third marriage deep in the Great Depression, and everyone seemed to be just scraping by. Certainly this was so for Stan and Mary.

Stan Hoss Sr. of Polish decent, stood 5 feet, 7 inches, with a body made stout by years of manual labor. Only in his late forties did Stan Sr. grow thicker in the waist. Mary was diminutive, barely 4 feet, 10 inches tall, a welcoming woman given to easy smiles. Her husband, a year younger than she, wanted more children. Mary agreed, though neither knew where the money would come from to feed more mouths. Still, in the late summer of 1939, Mary bore her fourth daughter, Betty. It was several more years before Mary again became pregnant. Stan hoped for a first son as a namesake, and got his wish on March 1, 1943. Stanley Barton Hoss Jr. was born with the aid of a midwife on a farm near the village of Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. Two years later, rounding out the Hoss brood, another son, Harry, was born.

Although World War II was raging, Stan Sr. was not required to serve, both because of his age—thirty-one—and because of his responsibilities. By the date of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Stan Sr. already had a wife and four daughters, with two sons to follow. During these years Stan Sr. mined coal, collecting scrap metal for resale on the side. Some people, too, suspected him of stealing from the mining company.

The Hoss family, never prosperous, moved from one modest rental home to another. In the winters, it was often cold enough that the children could scrape their names in the frost on the inside of the windows. When the children were young, a local Methodist church regularly witnessed a quiet, almost taciturn, Stan Sr. with his cheerful wife and scrubbed children, take up half a pew, always toward the back.

By the 1950s, Stan had somehow lost his job in the mines, so the Hoss family was relieved when Stan Sr. became the caretaker at Lakewood Cemetery in Dorseyville. The job came with a house on the property. With a roof over their heads and food on the table, the Hosses felt blessed.

The Hoss girls performed well enough in school but Stanley, considered a bright boy by his parents and older sisters, did not fare as well. His parents saw to it that Stanley did not miss school, but his grades hardly ever rose above D's and F's. He was made to repeat first grade, then fourth.

Stan also suffered from poor health. In addition to the head injury he received in a fall from a tree, Stanley was hospitalized at age nine with a serious kidney infection. A year later, he came down with rheumatic fever. This later resulted in a heart murmur that slowly corrected itself over the years. At age twelve, Stanley was again hospitalized for a condition called “spongy liver.” Then, at age seventeen, he fractured his skull and injured a cervical vertebrae in a car crash. As a physical specimen one might think Stanley would be weak and wanting, but the opposite was true.

…

Playing along a creek in the woods, Stanley and several other boys came upon a fair-sized rock with interesting coloration. Each wanted to take it home. A couple of the boys tried to move it but the rock was partially buried and would not budge. Then Stanley tried. Though no bigger than his pals, Stanley gripped the prize and yanked it free from the earth. Stanley the strong.

Though remembered by school officials as quiet, unobtrusive—some-one unlikely to be noticed in a small group—Stanley's classmates saw a different boy. One day, a new kid was brought to Stanley's third-grade class. Since the new boy arrived during recess, the teacher asked him to take a seat and wait for the other students to return. When the kids trickled back in in twos and threes, they surrounded the new boy, not to welcome him but, with something like dread on their faces, to warn him, “You're in Stanley's seat!” Stanley the intimidator.

Of course from time to time Stanley would enrich himself with a classmate's milk money. There might be protest, but not too much. A victim might shout, “I'm gonna tell on you!” but something in Stanley's eyes forced an acceptance of the loss. You didn't tell on Stanley. Stanley the thief … Stanley the robber.

And these traits were being noticed while Stanley was still a child.

Age fourteen—the age Stanley himself said he became a criminal— marked a jump to bigger things for the boy, bigger certainly than filching bicycles and wagons. Now Stanley graduated to stealing property of all kinds, to keep or to sell. Garages, sheds, and homes: Stanley raided them all. By the age of sixteen, Stanley had held a gun in his hand. Stanley the threat.

Age sixteen also marked the end of Stanley's schooling—something he regarded as little more than a grind and a waste anyway. While his peers were in tenth grade, Stanley, at sixteen, sat in eighth. School administrators, discouraged by years of effort to encourage Stanley to apply himself, now encouraged him to leave instead. After all, he was already sixteen and still on the verge of failing. Perhaps he could find his way in one of the trades? Stanley accepted the school's suggestion, at least about leaving. If his parents were disappointed, that was just too bad. Besides, he was getting married.

During the great manhunt of 1969, and directly after Hoss's capture, Agent Tom Marsh, assigned to Stanley's wife, learned more about his marriage. Diane told stories while making coffee and minding her kids.

Diane Burnham had been four years old when her father killed himself by driving off a bridge in a drunken stupor. Her family had other troubles
too. Diane, her brother and her sister were all raised for the most part by their grandmother, a disciplinarian whose words were as sharp as a scythe to grass. It was nothing for Diane to hear her grandmother scream, “You'll never amount to nothing!” And the whuppings. “My brother and me got hit a lot,” Diane remembered, “but my sister was viewed as an angel. We weren't allowed to have friends over. In school I didn't feel I was as good as everyone else. We always wore hand-me-downs and got teased. I stayed quiet in school, never got involved. I wanted to get away from home.” She was fourteen.