Small Town Noir -mugshots

(Weer) mugshots, deze keer vanuit het archief van het stadje New Castle , Pennsylvania ,USA.
Genomen tussen 1930 tot 1960 en gered van de vuilbak nadat de politie ze had weg gesmeten.
Via archieven van de lokale krant werden de verhalen van de gearresteerden gereconstrueerd.

http://smalltownnoir.com/

Preston H Litz Jr, "Larceny", 2 October 1948

 

The attendant at the William Watters service station on North Jefferson street returned to the office after dealing with a customer and found that the till had been robbed of $55. He told the police that the only person around when the cash had gone missing had been Preston Litz, a nineteen-year-old ex-army airman who lived in an apartment behind the station. Preston was arrested and held in jail for a week in default of bail before the case was dropped due to lack of evidence.

Preston moved back to his home town of Annville, near Lebanon, where he got work as a presser in Swimmer’s dry cleaners—“We Clean Most Anything”—and married a girl from his old high school, Ruth Carpenter, who was working as a waitress. Two years later, Ruth took him to court for desertion and non-support of their child, and he was ordered to pay her $17 every two weeks.

In the 1960s, Preston got himself elected part-time dog law enforcement officer for Lebanon and the surrounding townships. Many complaints were lodged about his methods, but none were upheld. A typical one, from 1967, concerns a family pet that Preston killed: “On Friday, June 2, our dog slipped its collar and ran into West Lebanon township. Preston Litz and his friend trapped our dog and then these two big men took this little 30-pound dog and tied his legs, mouth, and neck, dragged him down the alley and then Litz shot the dog through the head. All of this was done during Litz’s half hour lunch period from his other place of employment. He uses the city dog truck for all his own personal needs. He then threw our dead dog in his truck, drove up to our home, told my husband that our dog bit him, but refused to tell him where our dog was. Later that day he threw our dog away, uncovered, and in the hot sun at the Lebanon City disposal plant, which I am sure, was against our health laws.”

In 1975, more than a quarter of a century after Preston had beaten the service station robbery charge, he was arrested again and charged with stealing four thousand feet of steel tubing from the Cleaver-Brooks boiler plant, where he worked. As before, Preston was the only suspect but, once more, the evidence against him proved to be insufficient and he left court a free man.
Preston lived the next two decades of his life free from the attentions of the police, and died in September 1997, at the age of sixty-eight.

Samuel Webber, “Burglary”, 21 January 1949

 The Bowens, an old couple who lived next door to the Clover Farm store on East Washington street, were awoken at almost two in the morning by the sound of someone prowling around outside. Mr Bowen went out with a flashlight to see what was going on while his wife called the police.

Samuel Webber and Frank Vanasco—two boys in the middle of their last year of high school—had broken into the store using a key that Samuel had stolen two weeks before. They had filled a sack with $40-worth of candy, cigarettes, gum and canned chicken when Mr Bowen’s flashlight shone in the front window. Frank ran out of the back door and drove off in his car. Samuel hid behind the candy counter before following Frank out the back and running to his house two blocks away.

Frank was caught when he circled back to try to find Samuel. Samuel was arrested in his home an hour later, after Frank gave the police his address. They pled guilty and were rewarded with a fine instead of jail. The following year, they both attended their graduation ceremony, where a local pastor delivered a commencement address entitled, “The Choices We Make”, in which he advised the boys—and the rest of the school—that certain choices in life have irrevocable consequences and that they should give thought to God before making them.

Frank joined the army and was sent to Korea. Samuel went to teachers college in Slippery Rock, joined the army when he graduated and spent a few years in an anti-aircraft unit outside Pittsburgh.

After the Korean war, Frank opened a nursing home in Mount Vernon and Samuel became a teacher in Butler County. There is no further record of their lives.

Paul Conner, “Rec Money FP”, 17 Jan 1956

On Saturday, the fourteenth of January, 1956, many people throughout New Castle stopped to admire an unusual circular rainbow that hung around the sun above Lawrence County, a creation of the cold and frosty air. Fewer noticed Paul Conner as he drove south from Sharon through New Castle and onward, stopping at every department store and supermarket on the way to cash hundreds of dollars-worth of bad checks in the name of Joe Garrett.

Paul was heading for his home in Bellevue, in Allegheny County, but his trip was cut short when the manager of the Montgomery Ward store in Beaver Falls recognised him from a previous visit and called the police. He ran out of the shop but was chased and caught.

Paul waited in Beaver Falls jail while the various jurisdictions discussed where he should be dealt with first. New Castle won the argument, and he was taken there on the seventeenth of January. There is no further record of his case or of Paul himself.

 

Ross Paswell, “High W Robbery”, 2 February 1945

 

On 25th January 1945, when Ross Paswell’s former comrades in the American navy were firing thousands of shells into the hillsides of Iwo Jima, destroying Japanese installations that were blocking the advance of the marine corps in the early days of a battle that would end the lives of twenty-five thousand men, Ross, who had been found unsuitable for naval service the year before and sent home with a dishonourable discharge, was robbing a café in Ellwood City, along with a man named Harold Geary, who was 4F on account of a broken ear drum.

Ross and Harold forced the café owner at gunpoint to hand over the contents of the till—$50—and drove off in a stolen car. They picked up their girlfriends—one of whom, Maria White, was married to an overseas marine—and drove south through heavy snow, stealing other cars in Washington and Uniontown on their way to Connellsville where, the police later said, “they lived as men and wives” for four days.

They were arrested when they returned the women to their homes in Beaver Falls. All four were taken back to New Castle, where they pled guilty to the charges against them. The men received six to twelve years in the state penitentiary for armed robbery and auto theft; the women got one to two years in the workhouse for being accessories after the fact.

Ross had difficulties in jail. He protested about the lack of educational opportunities, recreational facilities and an adequate diet. In return, he spent a great deal of time in the hole—a concrete cell with a concave floor beneath the administration building, with no furniture, toilet or light, where, after being stripped naked, he would have to sit, squat or lie in his own urine and excrement for up to seven days at a time.

After six years, Ross was paroled. He found that he was unable to buy a car, due to his criminal record, so he used a false name to sign the papers. His deception was uncovered, and he was returned to jail to serve the rest of his ten-year sentence.

Ross was released in February 1955. Four months later, he married a woman named Marjorie Dougal and moved into a house in Ellwood City, where he became a self-employed landscaper. Marjorie was pregnant for most of the next decade, producing two sons and six daughters before 1969, when she had Ross arrested for an assault in which he cracked two of her ribs. Ross and Marjorie were divorced as soon as the court would allow.

The following year, living alone in New Castle, Ross began to write long letters to the New Castle News in which he discussed the social upheaval that he saw going on around him. He said that the disillusionment of the young was entirely justified, that they had been betrayed by the capitalists and the communists, the liberals and the conservatives. He urged understanding of the Weathermen and other leftist bombers, whom he described as keeping America’s conscience awake. He spoke of the outright revolution that was to come and called for the United Nations to declare the ghettos, the Indian reservations and the migrant worker camps disaster zones and send in observers to determine if the under-privileged, the poverty-stricken and the down-trodden were being treated humanely. He said that the only way America could save itself and the rest of the world was to take all that was salvageable from the Judeo-Christian traditions and combine that with Zen Buddhism. He contemplated his time in jail and what he had done to Marjorie, and wrote that he considered that the dehumanising punishments to which he had been subjected had left him with a slow-burning animal rage that could burst into flame at any moment.

In October of that year, Ross was jailed for one to two years for passing bad checks at his local supermarket. He immediately began to campaign for prison reform, writing letters to congressmen, senators and the state attorney general to draw attention to the paucity of fruit in the jail diet, the lack of adequate light for reading and the fact that there were no laundry facilities. He also made “a silent commitment to the teachings of Christ” when he was given a few packs of tobacco and candy by a visiting preacher following an Easter service.

On his release in 1971, when he was fifty-one years old, Ross founded an organisation called IOU, Inc, which was made up of local business and professional people and ex-convicts who volunteered to help convicts reintegrate into the community when they got out of jail by providing them with employment, loans and fellowship. It became known throughout the state correctional system as an example of how to rehabilitate offenders. Ross was invited to speak at state anti-crime hearings. He was described as an inspirational figure by leaders of the community. His views on the political issues of the day—for example, that Richard Nixon had allowed “an arrogant clique of power mad political appointees to manipulate governmental agencies by adopting Nazi philosophies that are contrary to the morals and ethics on which our democracy was founded”—continued to find an outlet in the pages of the New Castle News.

Ross kept on working with ex-convicts until old age prevented him from doing any more. In one of his last published letters, he wrote, “Looking back over the life I have been compelled to live as a convict and ex-convict, considering the psychological scars imprinted on my mind, knowing that I could have been reduced to an animal, it has to be the continuing grace of God that I am alive, free and still a human being.” He died in a nursing home in 2008, at the age of eighty-eight.