Alan Hynd - Authentic Cases From the Files of Alan Hynd

But McDevitt’s office now had the problem of proving Petrillo’s allegations. The only way they could get solid proof would be to exhume every victim. McDevitt already had Ferdinando Alfonsi’s medical records and decided to proceed with that case. He knew that he could always file other charges later.

The Petrillo cousins, knowing the law finally had them, began to sing in unison. Stories about Doctor Bolber, the faith healer, and the Witch emerged from the vocalizing. The Witch was arrested at her home before she could grab her broomstick and beat it. She began to talk, too. But when the cops went around to the brick house on the corner of Moyamensing Avenue and Ninth Street. Doctor Bolber had vanished. It was months before the law caught up with the doctor in Brooklyn, New York running a delicatessen.

Then Bolber, too, decided to sing. Everybody was singing his own tune, to save the flesh around his vocal chords. A whole raft of faithless wives were caught in a dragnet as a result of the confessions of the master plotter and his associates.

Herman Petrillo’s trial began on March 13, 1939 in Philadelphia’s City Hall. The presiding judge, Harry McDevitt, no relation to the D.A. Vincent McDevitt, was a defense attorney’s worst nightmare. The judge was known in legal circles as “Hanging Harry.” Petrillo’s lawyer, Milton Leidner, was a close friend of the judge, but the defense attorney did not expect any leniency.

During the trial, Herman Petrillo didn’t offer much of a defense, other than to claim that Bolber, the faith healer, had mesmerized him with “the evil eye” and forced him to do all that bad stuff. The jury wasn’t buying it and neither was Hanging Harry.

On March 21, 1939, the jury foreman, 42-year-old Margaret Skeen, read the verdict to the court. Guilty, with a recommendation for death, she announced.

“You lousy bitch,” Petrillo snarled as he lunged toward the jury foreman. However, guards quickly restrained him and the judge banged his gavel in an attempt to bring order back to the courtroom. When the courtroom settled down, Judge McDevitt congratulated the jurors.

“You can see how mean and vicious this man is,” he told the jurors. “You now realize that was the only verdict you could have returned.” He then sentenced Herman Petrillo to die in Pennsylvania’s electric chair. Following the verdict, defense attorney Leidner stood up and apologized to the court.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t have defended this man had I known he was such scum.”

Further inquiry would follow. Upon the conclusion of the trial, investigators announced that 70 bodies would be exhumed and examined for signs of arsenic.

But Little Herman wasn’t finished. In an effort to escape the electric chair, he agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. By May 21, 1939, 21 more arrests were made in connection with the poison ring. As the investigation continued, detectives discovered that Herman Petrillo and Bolber also had a matrimonial agency, which was apparently created in order to find new husbands for widows of their victims. Upon finding a new mate, the recent widows would marry and then take out life insurance policies on their new spouses. Afterwards, it was up to the members of the ring to do away with the insured and collect the money.

On May 25, 1939, Morris Bolber pled guilty to murder, possibly hoping that his plea would earn him a lesser sentence. His plan worked and he was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment. A few months later, in September 1939, Paul Petrillo also pled guilty.

Nevertheless, Paul was not quite as nimble as Bolber and was sentenced to die in the electric chair. But the last major player in the poison ring, the Witch, Maria Favato, also drew a life sentence. In the end, 13 men and women besides Bolber and the Petrillos were either convicted of or pled guilty to first-degree murder. All of these convicted killers served long sentences, the shortest being not less than 14 years in prison.

Paul Petrillo died in the electric chair in April 1941.

Seven months later, Herman Petrillo, who was involved in maybe a hundred murders, died like a coward. When his rubbery legs failed him, guards dragged the weeping man to the death chamber, forced him into the chair and forcibly bent his arms in order to strap him in. He made several attempts to stand up and had to be held in place while other guards fastened the straps.

“Gentlemen, you don’t want to see an innocent man die!” he cried. “Give me a chance to prove my innocence. I want to see the governor.”

They didn’t and turned on the juice.

Thirteen years later, on February 15, 1954, Morris Bolber died of natural causes while awaiting his third parole petition. The Witch got off with life in prison, but also died within prison walls. Some of the wives went to prison; others got off for testifying for the state against Bolber, the Petrillo cousins and the Witch. The last of these lovely ladies passed away in the 1960’s, bringing to an end the episode that is still known in South Philadelphia as “Arsenic Incorporated.”

…in which a Romeo loves ’em and leaves ’em… dead.

Doctor Henry Meyer practiced medicine in a comfortable, middle-class German neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side in the dying years of the nineteenth century. A better than average general practitioner, Doctor Meyer might have rounded out his life cycle in a fairly normal manner but for one thing. He was an incurable woman chaser.

The doctor’s wife, Lena, like himself a native of Germany, was a docile, self-effacing hausfrau who had been his childhood sweetheart but who had for some years now been a sort of unnecessary appendage to her husband’s amatory progress. Mrs. Meyer never complained about even the more brazen infidelities of the doctor, though if she wasn’t aware of what was going on, she had one of the worst cases of undiagnosed astigmatism in medical history.

The doctor was about forty. He was a frail-looking undersized man with a wizened face and thinning cinnamon-colored hair. It was his eyes and his clothes that got the women. His eyes were blue, with just a tinge of violet, and when, from behind silver-rimmed glasses, they focused on a current object of the chase, the lady’s better instincts, if she had any, usually went out the window.

Women, at a loss to explain the physician’s hold over them, used to sigh and say that they guessed Dr. Meyer had hypnotized them. Without knowing it, they had discerned a considerable portion of the truth.

Meyer had, after his graduation from medical college in Leipzig, studied hypnotism in Chicago under Professor Herbert Flint, one of the celebrated hypnotists of the era. So far as is known, he never utilized hypnotism as a therapeutic agent, but reserved it for his personal use. It must have been a potent force in combination with the persistent single-mindedness of a self-centered person in gaining what he wanted, for Dr. Meyer, far from ministering to the ailments of humanity in an unselfish spirit, was a vain and mercenary practitioner. He had one of the most spectacular wardrobes in the Middle West. He owned enough haberdashery to open a shop, and his collection of walking sticks anticipated every, possible whim.

It was the Inverness cape, however, that really set the little man apart. Meyer had a dozen Inverness capes, the only difference in them being the color of the lining. Some were lined in white silk, some in black, some in deep blue and still others in various shades of red. It would have been possible for an alert observer to have guessed the physician’s mood from the color of the lining of a given Inverness as Meyer minced through the streets of the North Side on a winter night, his last patient out of the way and some woman waiting for him.