Born to Lose (58 page)

Hoss continued into the Midwest, taking good care of Lori Mae until he killed the little girl by suffocation and gunshot. Hoss said this occurred in a state park in Kansas where he placed the body beneath a soda pop case and covered it with debris. Hoss said specifically the incident was carried out near a stream, “But this state park is so big,” said the agent, “with so many streams we were unable to locate Lori. It's sad but I don't think we will learn any more than we know now.”

The article seemed to impart the final word in the mystery of the Peugeots—except that refuse is never used as landfill by any highway department. Said those in the know, “Mrs. Peugeot is not beneath any Ohio road.”
Further, the FBI remained unaware of the highly believable version told by Hoss to inmate Whitman Shute that Lori Mae was buried in a cemetery near the Kansas-Missouri border, all contained in a forgotten report by Detective Joe Start.

L'oblie
. “To forget.”

Letters were drying up. So were visits. There'd still be an occasional misguided woman who would read about Hoss, get “fascinated with me,” and make contact, but family and friends were becoming more like strangers. Yet if there was one loving constant, one beam of light in Stanley's dark world, it was his sister Betty. Calling him by nickname, her October letter left him weak, his mind numb.

My dearest Sonny,

I have struggled with whether to tell you this, but we have shared everything since we were kids. For some time I have had leukemia. Transfusions can no longer help me. The doctors say I don't have much time. I am telling only you this. Please tell no one. I will write to you as much as I can. Please don't worry about me.

All my love,

Betty

. . .

On a date chosen to commemorate those killed in the line of duty, Asaline and other Peterson relatives attended the memorial—but they never came to the penitentiary again. Maybe it could be chalked up to too many bad feelings, not just about Peterson's murder but about the penitentiary as well. Peterson's relatives did not know who to trust, who to believe. It was understood that Hoss and his crew pulled the trigger, as it were, but did they load the gun? Asaline remained appreciative of the efforts to bring the killers to justice but others in the black community weren't so sure. Didn't Delker say he was put up to it by prison officials? And what of the unsuitable Hoss verdict and the puny sentence? Was the fix in? Conspiracy hearings had gone on for a time, but nothing came of them. “That was because,” said veteran Gus Mastros, “there
was
nothing to come of it. The idea of collusion was an absurdity and we at Western remained hurt and dismayed over this kind of thinking.”

On a smaller scale, another relationship was poisoned within the Hoss constellation. Betty had always been friendly with Diane. Even when Diane began divorce proceedings against Stanley, Betty understood and wrote to
Diane, “We're all for you.” But now, after letters from her brother citing Diane's selfishness in keeping their kids from him, Betty wrote, “You were never any good for Sonny. You're just someone I used to know.”

Diane's pattern, after enough coercion, was to periodically respond to Stanley. His replies were always prompt.

2/24/75

Thank you for sending the kids birth dates. I just can't remember anyone's birthday except mine and LeAnn's. When I come to Pittsburgh to be sentenced, I'll let you know, but I still might get a new trial. I don't give a good shit because I'm going to kill again and again. Crazy, huh? Here at Graterford I'm surrounded by niggers. Of the 1500 inmates, there's only 200 or 300 white guys. I'm one honkey devil they don't want any trouble with. They know how much I hate them because I tell them every day. I'd like to throw all their black asses in an oven.

They still want to send me to a mental hospital. Just because everyone thinks I am their god, that's no reason to send me to a funny farm. I can't help it I am a god.

The end was approaching fast for Betty, but it came sooner than need be. On August 15, 1975, Betty visited her daughter Laura. When Betty left, Laura stayed on the front porch, watching her mother drive away. As she watched, Betty speeded up, then smashed her car into a cement retaining wall. Betty died instantly. Soon after, Hoss wrote to Diane.

I've been really fucked up since Betty got killed. She told me and only me last year she had leukemia. She didn't want people to have to take care of her. I don't have to tell you the accident was no accident. The last time she visited me she took a ring off her finger and, believe me, it's killing me but I'll never take that ring off as long as I'm alive. I don't know what I will do without her. I have a few things I must take care of then I think I will join her because my life has no meaning anymore.

Several weeks later, Stanley sent Diane a picture of himself taken in Graterford's visiting room. For one whose existence was in a barred cubicle, he looked remarkably well. Standing in front of a large piece of cardboard painted in wild psychedic colors, he wore prison-issue cocoa-colored pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. His pose showed long, wellgroomed
hair, resting on broad shoulders. His waist was trim. He sported sunglasses and a happy smile. In the accompanying letter he wrote:

I'm sorry about the handcuffs. I must keep them on at all times, even when on a visit. Well, I just got word I'm going to Pittsburgh to be sentenced for killing that nigger.

The sentencing hearings for the three killers, held in September 1975, confirmed assumptions that the convicts would get the max. Danny Delker got Life. As the sentence was read, Delker turned his back on Judge Lewis. George Butler got Life. As sentence was delivered, Butler, too, turned his back on the judge and said loudly, “You're a senile old fucker.” In the course of these hearings, held several days apart, Judge Lewis said only what was required for the formality of the occasion. This reserve was dropped, however, when it came to Stanley Hoss.

Commenting on the jury's verdict, Judge Lewis said directly to Hoss, “Why they were so charitable is hard to imagine. If ever there was a first-degree murder, it was that of Captain Peterson, a decent and honorable man. It was cold-blooded murder by you and fellow thugs who have killed before and will kill again if given half a chance.”

Hoss, seated before the judge, laughed out loud.

Ignoring the insolence, Lewis went on. “Men like you are a menace to society outside of prisons and a danger within. I am sorry I cannot impose the death penalty. It is what you deserve. The sooner the death penalty is restored in full to this country, the sooner society will be protected against the likes of you.”

In imposing a sentence of ten to twenty years, Lewis ordered the term to run consecutively, adding, “I hope this sentence, along with your others, will forever foreclose the possibility of you ever being released.”

Hoss's parents had long since discontinued use of their own last name, but shortly after their son's most recent sentencing, Stan Sr. and Mary asked the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court to legally change their surname to Meyers, the name they'd been using. The couple said the Hoss name had subjected them to vilification and harassment.

Nearly three years after the Peterson murder, in June 1976, a Western Pen inmate named Terry Fishel wrote to correction's headquarters, claiming that prison personnel were involved in “offing the guard,” but within ninety days it was Fishel who was charged with making false statements.
Of the two staff members he had named, one had not even been working at the prison at the time and the other had been on a pass day when Peterson was killed. Fishel's motivation became clear when prison officers intercepted a letter he wrote to another inmate. The contents revealed a plan to implicate guards so Fishel (after heroically coming forward) would be transferred to a county jail to serve his lengthy sentence, a transfer that would improve his chance to escape.

Peterson's killers all appealed their convictions. George Butler's appeal came to naught. As for Hoss's appeal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court addressed it in a ruling on October 8, 1976. Hoss had made several objections—voir dire, venue, excessive publicity—but they were knocked down one by one. Then came Hoss's claim that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. Justice Robert Nix reacted with scorn. “This argument is preposterous. This was one of the most pernicious killings within the Commonwealth in many years. The evidence was overwhelming. The de-fendant's motion is denied.”

Having dismissed the Hoss and Butler appeals, the state wanted to get the same result for Delker, the “hat trick,” but it was not to be. When Judge Lewis instructed the jury in the Delker trial, he followed case law when explaining an insanity plea: “It is the defense's role to prove the accused is insane.” Unknown to Lewis, or to Delker's attorney, John Dean, the state supreme court had, only two weeks earlier, written a new ruling that switched responsibility on this issue: it was now the prosecution's obligation to prove the accused sane. It was only when Dean was researching an appeal that this came to light. Fearing “reversible error,” Lewis wrote a twenty-eight-page persuasive opinion, but the high court was unswayed. Delker was awarded a new trial, and he again pled not guilty.

As trial began in May 1977, the jury studied Delker carefully. Few would recognize the man—full head of hair, twenty pounds lighter, wearing rimless glasses—as the same “skinhead” who had yukked it up with Hoss at the coroner's hearing days after the murder, shouting racial slurs, giving people the finger, and punching his attorney, all the while sucking on a broomstraw.

Prosecuting the case was Assistant DA Pete Dixon, who left nothing to chance. He called the same witnesses as in the original trial and used four full days re-proving guilt.

The battleground, though, was the issue of sanity versus insanity. Dixon had the jury listen to four psychiatrists say Delker was not then or now insane, and rested his case with a slow reading of Delker's confession of the crime.

Undaunted, Dean Foote opened the defense. “Yes, my client took part, but he was incapable of understanding the nature of his act. We are interested in his state of mind.”

And who better to weigh in on that state of mind than Delker's friend Stanley Hoss? Hoss had arrived at the county jail the afternoon before. Foolishly placed in adjacent cells that night, the two killers had plenty of time to get their stories down pat.

On the morning of the sixth day of trial, Hoss took the stand dressed in plum-colored jail fatigues and oval sunglasses. In leading Hoss, Foote's strategy would attempt to suggest that it was the Pennsylvania prison system that created people like Hoss and Delker.

“Maximum security units are all the same, no good,” said Hoss. “Shrinks, counselors, any of the screws, nobody did nothing for me all these years I've been in prison.”

Q. Is there a possibility you'd kill again?

A. Yes, I would kill again.

Q. Why would you kill again, Mr. Hoss?

A. I'd kill again because I've always been willing to rehabilitate myself but prison officials did not, will not, help me.

Nodding toward Delker, Hoss explained, “Danny probably feels the same way because the lousy jail treatment was a common rap with us guys in the Home Block, the hole. But Danny never told me he would kill anyone, because we don't get into emotions.”

Q. Do you hate blacks?

A. Yes.

Q. Guards?

A. I'd kill them all. I'd do anything to get the point across I want to better myself through counseling.

Q. So what you want is treatment, someone to be caring. What you really want is a caring Bureau of Corrections, and, if so, you will change your ways?

A. Right.

For the next three days Foote continued to argue that Delker should be absolved of the crime as a “by-product of a harsh and discriminatory penal system.”

Earlier on, Delker, as polite as he could be, enlightened the jury. “I remember grabbing Mr. Peterson, but when I saw the cross he wore around his neck, I had an epiphany … asked myself what I was doing? I don't remember anything after that.”

“Did you want to kill him?” asked Foote. “Yes,” answered Delker, “but everyone wants to kill everyone else down there. That's the way it is.”

At every opportunity, the prosecutor, Dixon, did an exceptional job tripping up Delker, even getting him to admit he knew right from wrong during the many other crimes of his life. Dixon also thrashed the defense's theory that Delker suffered from psychomotor epilepsy—a malfunction of the brain. Still, the thirteen-day trial was a slugfest. It would come down to who the jury believed.

In the end the jury decided Delker was not the product of an inhumane prison system, that he'd never been insane, and that he had planned and carried out a butchery.

For the second time, Delker was sentenced to serve “Natural Life.” Prison authority would dictate the terms of that incarceration, and, like those of Hoss and Butler, those terms were summed up by the phrase “your door welded shut.”

. . .

After testifying against Peterson's killers Bob McGrogan did need protection, but the homosexual couldn't very well be kept indefinitely at a house for wayward boys. He was eventually transferred to Greensburg Prison, a place where most inmates were nonviolent and many had work-release privileges. McGrogan stayed clean and bided his time, until he thought the moment was right to seek an early release from prison.

Jack Hickton, no longer the district attorney since he had failed to win reelection and had entered private practice, appeared before the State Board of Pardons on McGrogan's behalf. Asked by a reporter if his involvement was to repay a debt, Hickton replied, “I told the guy in the beginning I couldn't do anything for him but if something came up in the future, I'd express my feelings.”