Born to Lose (31 page)

When Hoss told of murdering Lori Mae, he cried a little.

. . .

“I will tell you that Linda and Lori are buried in separate graves, not in cemeteries or in water.” So began Stanley Hoss's all-absorbing account of his disposal of the Peugeots.

The FBI could hardly have had better agents in place to conduct this pivotal interview. Fred Fehl and Danny Dunn were experienced and bright, Dunn a Harvard grad. Both listened carefully and allowed Hoss ample latitude.

The confessions of murder were over—but would Hoss divulge where Linda and Lori lay? The talks went on for three days, October 9 through October 11. Considering the fuss Hoss had made about explaining himself to his parents and Jodine because “the newspapers will mishandle the facts,” he had done little to dispute their accounts, and he made no claims that anything printed was untrue.

To prepare for the crucial interviews with Hoss, Fehl, Dunn, and others thoroughly read and reread the transcripts from the Waterloo interviews. Hoss had confessed to killing three people and provided many details of his activities and travels, yet there was much he had left out or refused to discuss. The agents would now listen for discrepancies but, above all, would seek to get the information promised.

“After I killed Linda,” Hoss began, “I put the body in the trunk. It was in there when I robbed the gas station in Rathmel and at the motel and restaurant in Franklin.That's why I told you we were all together in Franklin when I got hamburgers and coffee because, well, we were all together.” Only Hoss smiled at this black humor.

“Where's the baby?” Dunn asked.

The baby's in the car seat and Linda's in the trunk, but I wanted to get rid of her, and I did soon. I made my way into Ohio. Now I'll tell you the best I can where I put the body. Some place on Route 224, maybe below Akron, I passed a motel on my left. I went by this place a quarter mile when I turned off on a dirt road on the right. I drove maybe a mile and a half on this road. Along here I saw a cabin and it looked like someone lived there. I crossed over a ridge and came to a dump that had a triangular shape gate made of steel pipe with a chain and lock which would be used to tie open the gate to a tree. I got out of the car and found the gate wasn't locked, so I pulled it open, then drove into the dump.

Q. What time was this?

A. Late. One, two, three in the morning.

Q. What was this place named?

A. Don't know. Didn't see any sign. Inside the dump were two bulldozers and it was fairly light because of fires still burning. I got the woman from the trunk and put her down at the foot of a filled area where I figured the next loads of trash would be dumped. I covered her up with a flattened out broken barrel.

Q. What then?

A. I went back to 224 and registered at the motel I saw before I found the dump. I used the name William Young.

Q. You took the little girl with you to the motel?

A. Yeah.

Q. Okay, Stanley, where is she now?

A. I already told you guys I drove west. Eventually got to Kansas City, Kansas. I was looking for a guy named Slim, who was a dealer in registered cutter horses. [Here the agents wondered just what the hell Hoss was talking about but did not interrupt.] I got lost trying to find Slim's, so I finally asked directions from a farmer and his wife. When I finally got there, I told this Slim I was interested in buying a palomino. Slim said he didn't own the horse but to come back Saturday when I could talk to the owner.

Q. Where is Slim's?

A. On a dirt road named Kansas Road but that's about all I can tell you.

Q. Is Lori Mae with you?

A. Yeah, she was on the car seat when I talked to Slim. When I left, I went three or four miles when I came to a one-lane bridge where a sheriff was sitting in his car on the bridge. The sheriff had to move his car to let me by, so I felt I should ask him directions. The sheriff leaned in the car and said Lori Mae—he thought she was my daughter—was a real sweetheart.

Q. When was this anyway and can you describe the sheriff?

A. I'm thinking this was September 26. The sheriff was driving a green Chevrolet, new '69 model with a gold emblem on the door. He was tall with light brown hair that was graying and was crew cut. He reminded me of a younger Andy Griffith.

Because of the sheriff's directions, I turned around and went back on the same road, then wandered around on different roads because I thought the sheriff might come after me. After a while, I stopped along a creek that ran parallel to the road, about three feet down from the edge of the road. There was a lot of beer cans dumped but the place was not a dump. I didn't see any other trash other than the cans. The creek was small and didn't have much water running in it.

Q. You stopped the car here?

A. Yeah.

Q. What for?

A. I got out of the car and watched the creek water. After a few minutes, I got the girl from the backseat. We're by the car at the side of the road. I put her standing beside me and held her hand, then I picked her up and smothered her with a blanket. I put her on a side of the creek with the
beer cans. I covered her up with an empty beer carton then fired about seven shots into her.

Agent Danny Dunn considered the overaverage criminal across the table and remembered the interview in Waterloo when Hoss had asked that a gun be left on the table and he be given a minute alone. Well, why not? Dunn now thought. The creature doesn't deserve to draw another breath.

Q. Do you know where you are exactly?

A. No, but I'll tell you where I went, what's nearby, so that will help you. I got back in the car and went straight ahead for a couple miles to where the dirt road crossed a cement bridge, which connected to an interstate highway right where the highway took a big, almost 90-degree bend. I saw a big new building, maybe a police barracks or highway administration building. It had a flag pole out front and a nice lawn. I got on the interstate, four-lane asphalt with a steel divider, and went about seven miles and got off the first exit after seeing an overhead sign that said, “Downtown Kansas City, Next Three Exits.” I kept bearing right and was almost right away in an area where there were a lot of homes. I went a little bit more, then followed arrows to a bridge back into Missouri.

Hoss had started this day awakened at 4:00 A.M. In Iowa for return to Pennsylvania. He'd been spirited away from two airports, grilled at the Greensburg prison, cavalcaded to Pittsburgh's courthouse, got hammered with a sentence of ten to twenty years, deposited at Western Penitentiary, met with his love Jodine for the ticklish task of explaining bloody murder, confronted a meal of cold, limp noodles with congealed gravy, and then faced hours more of insistent inquiry. It was exhausting work for an infamous felon still holding secrets. Hoss said as much. He was tired. Everyone else's opinion: Screw him. The interview continued till midnight.

The searchers had to wait out the night, but dawn brought activity to specified areas of Ohio and Kansas. By noon, Hoss was brought forth for a talk. Neither Linda nor Lori had been found; indeed, the searchers had trouble finding the key landmarks Hoss had described. When told of this, Hoss said he would help locate the bodies and again insisted that Linda's body was in Ohio near a motel on Route 224. The agents furnished him with the names of all towns on or near 224, but Hoss said the only name that sounded familiar was Atwater, a town on 224 but almost twenty miles east of the southern outskirts of Akron. As to the motel, Hoss said he
could not, try as he might, remember its name but was certain it was not a chain, such as Howard Johnson or Holiday Inn. He explained that the motel had a tall slender sign with the word “Motel” spelled vertically rather than horizontally. Hoss said that he and Lori had left the motel after some sleep, and had crossed the Cuyahoga River on his way west to Wellington, the town made newsworthy by Hoss's gift of roses from there to Jodine.

One of the map checkers informed agents Fehl and Dunn that for Hoss to have crossed the Cuyahoga, he must have been north or northeast of Akron, not south or southwest as he had stated. Informed of this, Hoss looked confused. “I don't understand. Maybe it was just some creek, not the Cuyahoga. I'm telling you the best I can, but you have to understand I've been on the move, hardly ever stopping since I broke out of the workhouse. I've covered a lot of road.”

On Saturday, October 11, Hoss was again interviewed and shown photographs and sketches of a dump and motels provided by the FBI's Cleveland office. Hoss said the gate shown in the picture and the entrance road were like those he remembered but that the rest of the area, including the dump, the buildings around it, and the motels, definitely were not the right ones. He was adamant that he'd left Linda's body in Ohio and believed it was just off Route 224. When the agents showed Hoss a photo of another dump near Franklin, Pennsylvania, he shook his head, saying the gate was different and that he was familiar with the area and could not mistake it for Ohio.

Getting back to Lori Mae, Hoss said that although he'd mentioned visiting Bonner Springs, Kansas, when talking about Slim, he actually did not know anyone there and had not been there, but went on to say positively that he had seen the Andy Griffith–like sheriff, probably between noon and 3:00 P.M. of September 26. Hoss described the landscape where he'd met the sheriff as nothing but cornfields broken by occasional dirt roads.

Now that he'd admitted that his meeting with Slim was a lie and that his description of Linda's location as “just off 224” was dubious, the rest of Hoss's story likewise fell into doubt. Hoss also proceeded to topple more of his previous statements. Instead of “wandering around” for several miles in his car after leaving the sheriff and before coming to the spot where he killed Lori Mae, Hoss changed his account to say that he'd fled the vicinity of the sheriff at a high rate of speed, expecting the sheriff to chase him, and might have gone as far as twenty-five miles from the bridge before stopping to kill the child and dispose of her body. He also now asserted that upon leaving the murder scene, he'd traveled thirty miles, rather than
two, as he'd claimed earlier, before reaching the interstate highway. These changes typified the conundrum presented to the agents. Was it two miles or thirty miles? Or was it one thousand miles?

A sinking feeling took hold—nothing new to any cop who ever put faith in a criminal. “Yet, and yet,” Dunn remembered thinking at the time, “if one wanted to hang on to any thread of hope, it was provided only by the one who made everything hopeless in the first place. Stanley Hoss would sit there like any worried parent. He expressed surprise that the bodies had not been found and indicated he could find their exact locations if we needed him to. Can you see our plight of knowing better but wanting desperately to believe the sympathetic words—‘I will help you find them'—of someone we all agreed was the worst human being we'd ever known?”

Bingo. After much legwork, the elusive motel had been found. It was the Lake Motel, situated not the mile or so north of Route 224, as Hoss had said, but fully fifteen miles further north in the town of Richfield, which was barely ten miles west of Boston Heights, where Hoss had stolen Carol Meredith's yellow Chevy on September 18 before shooting Officer Zanella the following day. Did Hoss know someone in this area? Had someone aided and abetted him in his ghoulish tasks? Given how precisely Hoss had described Linda's burial spot, how, investigators wondered, could he be so far off? As for the dump he'd claimed was near the motel, the dump where he'd left Linda's body, it was nowhere to be found.

A team of agents again studied Hoss's statements—not only what Hoss said but its context and the manner in which he'd said it. It was tempting to dismiss Hoss as a flat-out liar—except for his astonishing memory and attention to detail, and except that much of his story had been confirmed. Yet in all this authenticity
something
was disproportionate. Maybe it was too good.

Fred Fehl spoke to the group of agents. “Do you remember when Hoss described Linda at Kings parking lot? He said she was wearing a ‘short-sleeve blouse, maybe it was red.' Linda's mother, Edna Thompson, described her daughter leaving the house that morning wearing a light blue sweater, and also described Lori Mae's clothing to a T. Who would you believe?” Fehl had drawn his conclusion: “We've been had.”

Back at the penitentiary, Hoss was angrily confronted. Was Linda shot near Johnstown in mid-afternoon or at dusk close to Rathmel? Was she raped, like Defino? Were the bodies really hidden “two states apart, not in a cemetery or in water?” when Ohio and Kansas are
four
states apart? Was Hoss “not alone” in Fairbury, Illinois, and then, as he'd stated, “alone” in Hannibal,
Missouri, indicating Lori Mae had been killed by then? Why make a big deal about Kansas City and the sheriff who looked like Andy Griffith (who, by the way, could not be found) and about burying Lori Mae in the midst of those Kansas cornfields? How about Hoss's intriguing statement that “one body is in a state where I was known to have traveled, the other in a state I was not known to have traveled”? Just how much was he leaving out? Was Lori smothered by hand or with a blanket? He'd claimed each at different times, and the method would not be something he'd forget. Were Lori Mae's and Linda's bodies both “in dumps,” as Hoss had originally claimed, or was Lori “spared” this indignity, instead being merely buried beside beer cans with “no other refuse around, not a dump”? And, if Hoss had barely buried the child, instead merely covering her with a beer carton, as he'd perfectly described, why hadn't she been found? After all, every Kansas farmer had been alerted to look for circling buzzards.

After confronting Hoss with all these discrepancies, the agents got back to business.

Q. Anything to say, Stanley?

A. I'm telling you the truth.