Born to Lose (6 page)

Hoss was seated at the far end of a long, battered oak table. He was surrounded by cops, for by this time two Indiana Township officers, Charles “Spitzy” Pizzuto and Auggie Celo, and their chief, Wilbur Bliss, had dropped in, along with East Deer Township's Kenneth McKenna and John Novosak. In past years, most of these cops had had some dealings with Stanley Hoss. Zurka was younger and relatively unknown, but Hoss
had long enjoyed a cat-and-mouse game with the police. Even so, they had never pegged him as a rapist.

At the start of questioning, Hoss cleverly deflected minor grilling about his suspected involvement with other unsolved crimes. He even affably asked Officer Novasak, who lived near his own home in Tarentum, “So, John, how's the wife and your boy? Hell, betcha he's startin' school soon, huh?” He then got several in the room to break out laughing when, to no one in particular, he asked, “Ever find that missin' police cruiser?” It was well known that Hoss had stolen the police car in question from right in front of the East Deer Station, and then had literally buried it in the ground for a month, before digging it up, dismantling it, and selling all the parts. The small talk and joking was all show, though. Stanley Hoss detested the police, all of them.

With the laughter in the room and the accused acting smug and easy, Chief Usiadek recognized the interview had been sidetracked. He slapped his hand down on the table and said, necessarily loudly, “Hold up, here!” All smiles vanished. At the same time, Stanley Hoss's relaxed demeanor switched to a stony stare. He was not intimidated; he merely understood that the cops were now getting down to business.

Before the Defino family arrived, Chief Usiadek had Mirandized Stanley Hoss. The Miranda ruling was relatively fresh from the Supreme Court and was widely resented by the police, who viewed the warning as pandering to miscreants. Nevertheless, Chief Usiadek had read perfunctorily from a card he'd withdrawn from his wallet: “You have the right to remain silent …”

Now, sitting at the oak table, Usiadek began the questioning. “Stanley, this girl's made some serious charges against you. Want to talk about it?”

“Sure. I got nothing to hide. She's a liar … didn't do a damn thing to her.” Hoss hunched forward and opened his hands plaintively on the table. “Look, I was at the Eat 'n' Park on Route 8 having coffee. She, Kathy—I didn't know her, though—was talking to some of the waitresses. After a while we left the place.”

“Who, you and Kathy?” Usiadek asked.

“No, me and my buddy.”

“Zurka?”

“Since you already know his name, yeah, Zurka.”

Detective Dick Byers, who'd been appraising Hoss very closely, interjected, “Okay, so you and Zurka leave. Where's the girl come in?” Hoss made casual eye contact with Byers.

“Well, we walked out but we're still in the parking lot when she comes
out by herself. She's a good-looking chick and she's standing right by us. I started talking to her and after a few minutes asked if she'd like to take a ride. I pointed to the Corvette, which she went nuts over, saying she was never in a 'vette before. So we all get in and go for a ride and ended up near a coal mine, I think the Harwick mine, where the car started actin' up. I drove it to Cheswick, where I adjusted the carburetor, then we later walked up to a gas station for some pop. After this we took the girl home, but I can tell you that me or Rich [Zurka] never touched the broad.”

Byers spoke again. “Hey, Stanley, she didn't know your name. She said you told her your name was Bill. That so? And why the deception if everything's on the up 'n' up?”

“You know I'm married, so there's no sense me saying my real name. Just thought I wanted something a little different that night. Conversationwise, you know. Besides, you're getting the wrong idea here. I told you I got a wife, I got a mistress, and girlfriends all over. I don't need to rape a girl.”

After another half hour of grilling, Hoss remained relaxed and seemingly cooperative, reminding those present, “If I was guilty of doing anything to that girl, don't ya think I'd 'uv taken off like Zurka did?” This made sense to some of his interrogators. The whole matter was boiling down to “he said—she said.” More than one cop in the room was tending to believe Hoss's claim of innocence. Most did not see or talk with Kathy Defino but those that had—Chief Usiadek and Officers Orris and Curti— saw firsthand the teenager's palpable fear of the one she said assaulted her. Yet Chief Detective Jennings of Allegheny County still had his doubts about Kathy's story, and follow-up reports only added to his concerns, yet Kathy Defino had made a damning statement and pointed an incriminating finger at Stanley Hoss.

Still unconcerned, even acting a bit put out at this inconvenience, Hoss may have thought he could talk himself right out of the station house. Then something happened that made his situation considerably grimmer. Like his colleagues, Detective Dick Byers had shot off a few questions to Hoss. One concerned the robbery of young, pregnant Nancy Falconer at her home only the week before. Hoss answered, “Can't help you there. Don't know anything about it. That's not what I do, you know that.”

Byers let it rest for the moment, but, eyeing him, Byers noticed that the coat Hoss was wearing didn't fit right and was too heavy for the warm evening. Then Byers thought back to the list of the many items stolen in the Falconer robbery. Was a man's coat on the list? He couldn't be sure, but with Hoss and his coat right in front of him, Byers wouldn't squander the
moment. He whispered to his boss, Bill Jennings, then excused himself. Byers went to the next room and placed a call to Nancy Falconer. Byers asked Nancy if her husband's coat had been stolen in the robbery. Yes, it had. Nancy then gave Detective Byers a fine detail. “It's tan in color, wide lapels, size 42, but when I brought it home for Dennis, the sleeves were a tad long, so I hemmed them up with green thread. Why, did you find the coat somewhere?”

“Just maybe, Nancy,” Byers replied. “Can you hold the line a sec?” Byers walked into the next room and interrupted Hoss, who was giving a response to Red Orris. “Stanley, hold out your hands, I want to see something.” Byers came close to Hoss and looked at his coat cuff—sewn with green thread. Byers returned to the phone, saying, “Nancy, we found the coat and we got someone wearing it. Can you come down to the East Deer Station?”

The investigators working on the Falconer case, primarily Radage, Simonetti, Jennings, and Byers, knew that the perpetrators had worn masks, but Nancy had said that the one with the heavier build—Mr. Husky—had a distinctive voice that she'd recognize if she heard it again. So when Nancy and Dennis Falconer arrived at the station, the police arranged a “voice lineup.” Three policemen, a fireman, and Hoss stood out of sight while Nancy listened to each one say, “Shut up and sit on the couch.” Nancy said straightaway, “I know who it is, but let them do it again.” The process was repeated. She told Chief Usiadek, “It's the second voice, second of the five. That's him, I know it.” Mr. Husky was Mr. Hoss.

After the Falconers left the station, Stanley Hoss was again put in a chair. Referring to the robbery and mimicking Hoss's earlier statement, it was an angry Detective Dick Byers who spoke first. “That's not what I do, you know that … really, Hoss? And not to mention the Defino girl. Gee, punk-ass car thief turned robber-rapist. I think this time your wife—oh yeah, and all your girlfriends—will be missin' your charms for a long time. And in case you think it slipped by us, you didn't flee this place with your buddy Zurka 'cause once you'd got rid of the gun, you thought all you faced was one more stolen car rap, and that's chicken shit to you, Stanley, right? You didn't know a rape was going to hit you between the eyes.”

Byers turned his back on Hoss and strode outside. Lighting a smoke, he thought, “What a piece of shit.”

Inside, Stanley Hoss spat out to everyone in the room, “Fuck you cops!”

Stanley Hoss went to jail. Around the time of his arrest and for some years before, the Hoss name, among others, would come up at police functions, socializing, or over dinner tables. When Chief Steve Radage came home the day of the Falconer robbery, it was his wife, Betty, who ventured, “You don't think Stanley Hoss is involved with this, do you?” Radage didn't think so, as he'd not known Hoss or his brother, Harry, to engage in something so brutal. Still, Betty wondered. She not only knew Stanley Hoss's name through her husband's work but had actually met him on occasion, because for a time Hoss had lived not far from the Radage residence. She remembered Hoss as cordial, even courteous. When she'd seen him with one or two of his kids, he was attentive and seemed to enjoy the fatherly role, yet Betty's instincts told her he wasn't fatherly, at least in the truest sense of the word. The attention to his kids was overplayed, like that of a visiting uncle. And how could she forget the night when loud noises brought her and Steve to their bedroom window? “Steve grabbed his service revolver and ran out,” Betty recalled. “I stayed on the porch until Steve called for me. Steve knelt down beside the body and turned it over. Why, it was Stanley Hoss and he was badly hurt. He was not unconscious but awfully dazed. I ran back in and got a pitcher of water and the biggest towel I could find. We washed off the blood and found a gash right on the top of his head. By this time he was talking some. We said we were going to take him to the hospital. We learned later that Stanley had been in a fight with another young man who had picked up a cinder block and hit Stanley smack on the head.” These fights were a part of Stanley's lifestyle.

“It was a good half year after we'd taken Stanley Hoss to the hospital,” Betty remembered, “when I saw him sitting atop a retaining wall, legs dangling down, in a parking lot in Natrona Heights, by himself, just sitting there. He hopped down, walked over, and thanked me for helping him out that night. He seemed sincere but, call it intuition, I was always uneasy about him.”

Wilbur Bliss, police chief of Indiana Township, was another who'd arrested
Hoss on several occasions, a couple of times with his brother Harry. Born in 1913, Bliss lived the traditional rural life of the times. His education took place in a one-room schoolhouse until 1926, when five or six one-roomers were closed for a common school. He hunted, trapped, and, of course, farmed. In 1929, Bliss began work as an apprentice automobile mechanic. After nine years, he came down with tuberculosis; in fact, Bliss would lose three siblings, all to tuberculosis. As his own health deteriorated, he lost his job. By 1940, Bliss had recovered but was virtually penniless. Around this time, the sole policeman in the township retired and Bliss was asked by the local politicos if he would take over the police job. The job paid a paltry $175 a month and Bliss would have to furnish his own car and pay his own expenses. “How could I turn it down?” Bliss would joke. Given no training, only sentiments of Godspeed, Bliss was handed a badge and a Colt .38 Special.

It was twenty-five years later that Chief Bliss, with four officers under him, began to run into Stanley Hoss. Hoss seemed to travel about the northern parts of Allegheny County and commit his misdeeds in the five or six townships comprising that area. Whether by Hoss's design or not, no single police department had a complete picture of his criminal escapades, except for his predilection to swipe cars. Then, too, Hoss would often engage in this pastime further north, in Butler County, stealing cars there but driving them back to his home turf for hiding, chopping, and selling.

“When we'd arrest Stanley and Harry Hoss,” Chief Bliss recalled,

we'd mostly have them in our township office. This was usually about their shenanigans with cars but when you'd interview them about anything Harry was always a grizzly bear; he'd stand up, shout, roar, protest, and get hot-headed. He was the kind of guy that would scare somebody who didn't know him. Now Stanley, well, he'd be sitting there real quiet, almost enjoying the show. Stanley was always cool as a cucumber—getting questioned was part of the deal, part of the lifestyle. This is why, when things broke big with Stanley, I had a hard time putting him together with the crimes. I didn't figure him to be that kind of guy. Now if it was Harry, it wouldn't have surprised me at all, but Stanley seemed to be different.

It would grow on Chief Bliss that Stanley's interests spread wider than auto theft. “Two young women worked in the office of Lakewood Cemetery, which is the adjoining property to our police department building,” Bliss explained.

One of the women lived with her husband, who had quite a few guns. I knew them well. She came up and told me someone had broken into her house and had stolen the guns. She said the man she worked with, Stanley Hoss, a gravedigger at Lakewood, told her who stole the guns. The guy Hoss blamed lived in West Deer, so I went to see Steve [Steve Radage of West Deer] who said, “Well, you're not looking for that fellow; you're looking for Stanley Hoss.” He proceeded to tell me he knew Hoss and he's had a slew of trouble out of him. Anyhow, we went to see the guy accused of stealing the guns. He knew nothing about it, and we believed him. So we did a little undercover work and we found out what happened. These two women that worked at Lakewood had invited Stanley and his brother to one of their houses for a sex party. Word was some of these parties had gone on at Lakewood Cemetery as well. Presumably after the festivities, Stanley said that he's taking the guns, and he did. So the girl, somehow wanting to protect Stanley, had to cover this up some way and concocted the story of the guy in West Deer. In the end we knew damn well Stanley Hoss was the culprit but we just didn't have a case against him or his brother. It was sort of dumb of Hoss to tell that girl to say some guy in West Deer stole the guns, but I figured Hoss was mad at the fellow and wanted to put him in a fix.