Born to Lose (42 page)

I remember when she didn't come back, we called the police. They said it was too early to put out an alert. Then the FBI came to say she'd been kidnapped.

They kept telling me there was no hope, but sometimes I thought maybe she could be alive. About three months ago I got a phone call. In the background I heard a girl's voice say the name Lori Mae—and it sounded like my Linda. I was panicked, excited, everything. I called the FBI right then. They said Linda couldn't be alive, that there was just too much blood in the trunk of the car.

On the wall behind Edna hung a number of framed photographs: Linda with husband Gerald in his navy blues; Linda seated in an MG making a funny face; Lori Mae nose to nose with Duke, the family's pet poodle …

“The year has been a hard one,” said Edna. “My son-in-law Gerald is a steel worker now in Pittsburgh. He doesn't say much but he's the kind that takes it out inside. My husband and I get upset and say things to him we shouldn't, and he doesn't say anything.”

“And you, Edna?” asked Morrow gently. “How are you?”

“Some nights I sleep well, and some nights I just sit in my room till morning. The other night I jumped out of bed as I dreamed I felt the bullets
going through me. Sometimes in the daytime I go down into the basement and scream and scream. I don't think I'll ever be through it.”

. . .

In the tedium of death row, one month is like three. Yet, like any shut-in, the inmate becomes reconciled to a routine. Breakfast and lunch at 6:30 and 10:30, supper at 3:30, or 4:00 at the latest. At first exposure to early mealtimes, prisoners would complain, only to get the unvarying response, “Get used to it.” From the prison kitchen, the food would come over on wheeled carts called trucks, their arrival signaled by the rattle of their wheels, and the traditional, loud-voiced Truuh-Kupp! The food was tepid. Hoss never griped about the meals, except to say he sometimes ate too much and had to watch his weight.

After months of a self-imposed Spartan regimen, Hoss began to loosen up. For the first time he bought from the commissary a bag of potato chips. He also found a chum. “I have been talking to my friend all day,” he wrote Diane at the end of June 1970. “He's in the cell above me and they just put him in there today. It's the first I've talked to anyone. I feel so much better now.”

Still, Stanley's mind churned about his future. Two things dominated his attention: his appeal for a new trial on Zanella's shooting and his meeting with his lawyers from Maryland.

Triggered by Hoss's demand for an immediate trial in Maryland, two lawyers drove from Cumberland to the penitentiary for a first meeting. Their names were Louis Fatkin and John Robb.

Cumberland did not have a Public Defenders Office, but as Hoss had filed
en pauperus
, the court was mandated to appoint counsel. From a pool of local lawyers on record as willing to take such cases, Fatkin and Robb were plucked.

The Maryland attorneys had read about Hoss and heard all the rumors, so they were relieved when their new client appeared in the interview room shackled, with a giant guard posted just outside.

Today I had a visit from the two attorneys who will represent me in Cumberland on those kidnapping charges. They said if I'm found guilty Maryland will give me death for each kidnapping. They said people down there want my blood real bad and are even mad at them for taking my case. I thought I could beat one death sentence but I'll never beat three. Oh well.

There was only one thing to do: escape. To that end Hoss plotted. Knowing it was impossible to escape from death row and almost as impossible to escape from the general confines of Western Penitentiary, Hoss determined that he'd have to connive to be taken out, to come up with some legitimate purpose for travel. This opportunity—to be in transport—was the same one he'd engineered by telling the feds he'd lead them to the Peugeot graves, and maybe he could have pulled off an escape then had not the trip been aborted after it had hardly begun. Hoss now figured correctly that if he had to appear at a trial or proceeding far away from Pittsburgh, he'd be held at a local jail, often a place lacking the security of a major prison. He'd skip from there. He'd done it before.

With this calculation, Hoss became hell-bent on facing the disagreeable charges in Maryland, the sooner the better—but his new attorneys disagreed. Fatkin and Robb not only saw no advantage in rushing matters, they actively counseled delay. They also explained that Maryland might be unable to proceed to trial until the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled on Hoss's appeal in the policeman's killing. Hoss left his meeting with Fatkin and Robb frustrated and angry. He wrote Diane,

I'm firing those attorneys in Maryland and be my own attorney. You will hear about it in the news. The name change for the kids is smart. It won't get better. You know what a big thing they make out of the Hoss name.

Hoss never carried through with sacking Fatkin and Robb, but he worried they would not abide by his wishes, and thus redoubled his personal efforts. For the first time in his life, he employed the written word to get his way, rather than gun or fist. As he wrote Diane, “My main thing now is law. Day and night I'm busy studying. My cell is filled with nothing but law books.”

Compared with his earlier letter to the Maryland courts, Hoss's motion of August 27 was based on legal principle, and polished. He railed against Fatkin and Robb as likely to seek a continuance—to delay a trial beyond the 180 days a speedy trial requires—but Hoss would have none of it: “Because I am innocent I seek an immediate trial before Maryland's malicious delay irreparably damages my defense.” Not above theatrics, Hoss wrote, “Maryland knows she falsely accuses, has no good case against me, and strives to murder me,” ending his three-page letter with, “I in NO WAY seek, desire or accept a continuance of these indictments.”

Once the motion was notarized and mailed, Hoss began to fret. He wondered if Maryland required reasons why he demanded a speedy trial other than he was innocent as a lamb.

Dog-earing more pages, Hoss again petitioned Maryland on September 15. Again, his demand was ably written—and bolstered with lies. In this four-page thrust, Hoss branded Fatkin and Robb as vipers. “If Fatkin and Robb defy my demand, they will be colluding criminally with Maryland's prosecutor, whose tactics have already caused a loss forever [of the] testimony of four witnesses who would have established beyond all doubt my innocence.” Without a speedy trial, Hoss argued, “I'll never be able to defend myself because of my remaining witnesses, one will soon be in Viet Nam, and two are elderly in poor health. If trial is further delayed I will lose contact with my witnesses, their memories will dim and they might die or be killed, and with them their words establishing my complete innocence.” Then Hoss once more slurred the Maryland courts for conspiring to murder him.

Not forgetting his goal to escape, Hoss got word of his plan to two carefully chosen convicts. Would they join him? He got word back: They were in.

. . .

Since Hoss's conviction for her rape, Kathy Defino had graduated high school but had forgone an academic scholarship to college. She couldn't concentrate. Maybe later. Something was wrong but she did not know what. She kept up a front, particularly for her family—hadn't she caused them enough trouble?—but her soul was hollow, vitality and interests gone. She'd go places but not as much as before. It was a chore to laugh with friends. Happier in isolation, contact dwindled.

After high school, the Defino kids were expected to pay their own way, and full-time work forced Kathy from the refuge of her bedroom. She found a job as a secretary in a Pittsburgh law firm, but its location near the courthouse was always a reminder of her ordeal. Six months into the job, Kathy remained withdrawn, although her reserve was mistaken for shyness. Still, she felt obliged to attend a few company social events. The men told her what a good job she was doing, offered her wine, and told her how pretty she was. Kathy, her self-esteem shot, could not imagine how they could think so. As Kathy would say many years later, “Once you are raped with a gun to your head, you can get in your mind a fear of confrontation, of resistance, not just with men but in all areas of life. Maybe this reluctance to say no, to fight, can be seen in the eyes of victims of violent rape? I don't know.”

Kathy had difficulties with unwanted relationships at work and eventually left her job, telling her parents there'd been cutbacks. Her depression deepened. Two weeks later she was hospitalized, diagnosed with a nervous breakdown. She was medicated, and her flat affect became flatter. Since she divulged nothing, no one knew what was wrong. There was Stanley Hoss, true, but, as Kathy's father asked her mother, “Isn't she over that yet?”

Feelings of self-blame and worthlessness took hold. Kathy's “aloneness” was searing. Hoss's continued presence in news accounts made it even harder for Kathy to keep Hoss from reinvading. Wasn't he just now saying he was innocent of killing that young mother and her child? Who is he kidding? Kathy thought. He was sentenced to die, so why can't he be dead already?

When Kathy finally rose from her sick bed—“There, sweetie, just a little of the doldrums,” her mother said, “you're fine now”—she got another job. Trying to regain her sense of self, she forced herself to try to reconnect socially, but her efforts led her into promiscuity, and she cried herself to sleep every night. What is wrong with me? she wondered.

. . .

In a public statement made in November 1970, Don Mason, state's attorney for Maryland, said the death penalty would be sought against Stanley Hoss. Mason knew he had sufficient, even ample, evidence to ensure a guilty verdict. The trial was scheduled to begin January 11, 1971, a date that met by one week the requirement to provide a speedy trial by bringing Hoss to trial within 180 days of his request. Hoss was charged with kidnapping Linda Mae Peugeot and stealing her Pontiac GTO. Oddly, no mention was made in the indictment of Lori Mae.

By this time, fourteen months after the kidnappings, not a soul believed the Peugeots to be alive, yet, legally speaking, “a crime's jurisdiction cannot be waived.” This meant that the authority to prosecute murder rests with the state where the murder occurred. Since there was no evidence that either Peugeot had been slain in Maryland, that state seemingly had to defer to Pennsylvania or Kansas. Hoss's multistate travels had further muddied the waters. What if Linda's body was eventually found in Ohio, and Lori's in a state bordering Kansas? Was it necessary to find their bodies to bring Hoss to account for their murders? The various agencies involved were trying to sort out these issues, but in the meantime, trying Hoss for murder in Maryland was not in the cards. Still, a conviction for kidnapping could result in a death sentence; Mason and his constituents were still planning on building a scaffold for Hoss.

The hype leading up to the trial promised to be something never seen before in Maryland. Mason wondered more than once why Hoss wanted to face the charges without delay, but so be it. Mason wrote to the Attorney General's Office for clarification of the Interstate Detainer Act, employed by Hoss to force a speedy trial. Because Hoss was under the death penalty in Pennsylvania, Mason questioned whether the act was applicable to Hoss. Mason was advised to file a continuance, to allow further time before trial to address any issues and to guard against a mistake.

On December 4, 1970, Fatkin and Robb petitioned for their client's transfer to Cumberland several days before the start of trial. In addition, Hoss had requested the presence of two witnesses (secret partners in his escape plan), Richard Mayberry and Frank Phelan. Contrary to Hoss's earlier claims, neither witness was was elderly, fatally ill, plagued by dimming memory, or scheduled to return to Viet Nam. Both men were criminals, and no ordinary ones at that.

Mayberry was considered extremely dangerous. Initially sent to a juvenile facility for armed robbery in 1957, Mayberry had within a few years accumulated a substantial record of inciting riots and attempting jail breaks. He'd also shot another inmate with a zip gun. Maryland authorities learned that it was Mayberry, along with two others, who had been charged in 1965 with holding a hostage within the walls of Western Penitentiary and exchanging gunfire with three guards. Then, when all three were housed for trial at Allegheny County Jail in late 1966, it was ringleader Mayberry who had made an incredible escape. Any corrections official who'd ever known the daring Mayberry categorized his intelligence as being within the top 1% of all criminals.

Frank “Hatchetman” Phelan was likewise no dimwit. With an IQ of 117, he was considered bright-normal by the psychologists. Whereas Mayberry had a spare frame, Phelan was a menacing 6 feet, 3 inches, and 220 pounds. A former boxer and extremely brutal, he had been called before the Athletic Commission after his one pro fight for the terrific beating he gave his opponent. At age thirty-one, Phelan had accumulated a record of assaults, gun possession, and a prison break, but he reached the big time as a hit man.

Philadelphia restaurateur Jack Lopinson preferred his mistress, a model and part-time actress, to his wife. Wife Judy, a winsome brunette and former art teacher, was in the way. So Lopinson hired Phelan to do away with her for ten thousand dollars. Phelan did so—with a couple shots to Judy's head. However, both Phelan and Lopinson (who never did pay up) were caught, convicted, and sentenced to death. To separate the two in prison,
Lopinson was incarcerated at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary while Phelan was sent to Western Penitentiary (a cell over from Stanley Hoss), although not before he had caused brain damage in another inmate by clubbing him with a pipe.

Given their histories and prospects, Mayberry, doing twenty to forty years and with more charges hanging over him, and Phelan, facing execution—the King of Terrors—readily threw in with the ever-ominous Stanley Hoss and his scheme to escape.