Sunday News from Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 17

1950-17 ent Robbery Motive Death Verdict -i i v. '4 SEVEN MEN HAVE DIED in Rockview Penitentiarys electric chair for murders committed in Lancaster County. Last one was in 1922. Death house is just in front of main building. Harry Way Case Was Probably Shortest; Countys First Sanity Commission Used 35 Years Ago; One Condemned Slayer Beat Death Rap Beating the rap of a first-degree murder conviction happens so rarely that, like a death verdict, its an almost-never occurrence in Lancaster County.

Tracing the murder saga, in which the Gibbs jury in directing the extreme penalty is truly unique, many another facet of unusual fact develops in Lancaster County cases. For instance: w- A- i'y is nk tf '-hsd 1 SHORTEST AND CHEAPEST killing case in Lancaster County was the 12-cent murder of Zach Keller by Harry Way in ML Joy. The case went to the jury after only four hours testimony. in the first degree. Way.

last man to be sent to the electric chair from the Lancaster jail, walked to the chair in the same nonchalant manner which featured his conduct during hearings and court trials. it was reported. If there was any sorrow in Ways heart for the crime, he never showed it. Two shocks of 2,000 volts each were applied, and six minutes after the first jolt he was pronounced dead All the people who took the hot-seat rap from this county have been executed in the grim death house at Rockview. Way was preceded down the lonesome corridor in 1919: Greg-gory Sandoe and William got the chair and Samuel honor of being Lancaster to Rocco Tas-sone, 1915 for murder year.

The Lancaster In 25 years. MASS EXECUTION of four men in the old prison yard, with all swung from the gallows at the same momenL was result of robbery-murder In a railroad construction shack at Gap. The Book Review chair, so the sentence was hanging. Watsons attorney appealed On reviewing the evidence, the State Supreme Court ordered a retrial. Ten months after he had been primed for the noose, Watson was again before a Lancaster jury.

Though the district attorney used the same tack that Watson had killed Makle in a fit of jealousy over a girl the defense put up a better argument, and proved to the jurymen's satisfaction that Makle had first tried to smash Watsona skull with a heavy sea-shell The verdict: second-degree murder. with imprisonment of 19 to 20 years. The judge told Watson he was "fortunate to escape a first-degree conviction. Greatest mass execution In local history occurred in the Lancaster prison yard on Oct. 3, 1907, when the grim gallows claimed the lives of four men.

Theirs was a bloody story. Thej were convicted of killing Plato Al-banese while robbing a group of fellow-workers, ail living in a shack along the railroad near Gap. There was much knife and razor-wielding in the battle, which began, evidence showed, when Albanese told the quartet that he had only 50 cents. The four, Anthony Delero, Stephen Carlui, Sivereo Rodelli and Joseph Celione, were reportedly members of the Black Hand organization. and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Tone Changed Since 1912, the electric chair has been substituted for the rope, and this Is the usual sentence: It remains for me to pass upon you the vigorous sentence of the has thus been seven, which is that you be taken by three local men Psaros, John filter. Two had in 1918: William McMillcr Garner. Dubious the first from die in the chair was electrocuted in the previous County total. law JAMES JOYCE: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World, by W. Y.

Tindall (Scribner, $2). CHARLES DARWIN: The Na. turalxt as a Cultural Force, by Paul B. Sears (Scribner, $2). ALBERT EINSTEIN: His Work and Its Influence on Our World, by Leopold Infield (Scribner, $2).

for the last time through the door of the death cell at Rockview penitentiary. The Gibbs case unique principally in the fact that a Lancaster County jury delivered the death verdict, rather than only the first degree decision, also was outstanding for its clear climaxes, unusual murder trials. Moved On Schedule With the discovery of the body of Marian Baker the available clues seemed to fall into continuous pattern of disclosures ending in the startlingly sudden confession of Gibbs. The trial was equally uncomplicated with clear, unconfused presentation of essential points by both sides and with speedy decision by the jury. Next to the Harry Way verdict which made a record of an afternoon's trial, the Gibbs case is perhaps the most rapidly handled.

It hung, apparently, on Gibbs emotional or mental responsibility which Gibbs had been building up, but which failed to convince the- Lancasters shortest and "cheapest murder case (it involved 12 cents and took four hours to try) was probably that of the last man to die in the electric chair from Lancaster County. That was 28 years ago. The first sanity commission called into a local slaying trial saved a man convicted of second-degree murder from prison but took him out of the fire into the frying pan by confining him to a mental hospital instead. That was 35 years ago. Only once, according to available records, has a first-degree murderer, convicted in Lancaster County, escaped the penalty to which he was sentenced.

That was 38 years ago. Capital punishment was handed out in only 28 county cases since horse-thief Jockey Jones was strung up in 1770 but four of the slayers died in a single day in the old Lancaster prison yard. That was 43 years ago. Angles on the Gibbs case make many of these old-timers topical again. Theyll remain newsworthy until the day Gibbs either hears a new sentence on a retrial, or steps handed down by the jury itself.

There is an appeal from the verdict, not yet cleared of, ultimate legal processes. So the curtain has not rung down. All these points find echoes, some of them by contradiction, in the court annals of the past. Tradition Altered The Gibbs verdict included the fateful word to the formal phrase which had become almost a stereotyped expression for past local juries bringing in a murder-guilt verdict. Traditionally it went like this: We find the defendant guilty of murder as indicated the first degree.

Then the judge was left with the task of passing sentence. The old form used by the court in passing sentence ran like this: The sentence of this court is that you be taken from hence to the Lancaster County prison from whence you came, and-from thence First Sanity Commission Those who beat the rap have been the rarest of exceptions. But on the records are the names of two. Twenty-five years ago, a second-degree verdict was overturned by the first sanity commission ever called into a local case. That was when counsel for Albert Woolhafe, who had been sentenced to solitary confinement at labor in they vigorously denied it, the Eastern Pentientiary in 1912 forj and the prosecution had trouble 18 to 20 years, had a petition filed keeping its witnesses from sneak- to the place of execution within the walls or yard of said prison, jury and brought on another startling climax the death sentence many, but by no means all, of the pursling aspects of Joyces writing.

He does not pretend to know everything that was in Joyces labyrinthine mind. Thus he laces his book with such qualifications as Joyce probably did this or that, or there is reason to conclude that, or "Although God's place in Finnegans Wake is more puzzling, it is probable that et cetera. So far as Iknow, this ia the first and only brief and concise interpretation of Joyce suitable for the layman. (Recommended longer works: Frank Budgens James Joyce and the Making of Ulys-ses Campbell and Robinsons A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and Herbert Gormans able James Joyce: A Biography, reissued in 1949.) n-Charles Darwin, Paul Sears, a botany professor at Oberhn, attempts to relate the theories and discoveries of the great English naturalist to the whole field of contemporary science. Darwins evolutionary thesis, he tells us, unleashed theories of change and development that altered the thinking of man concerning the entire universe.

Dr. Leopold Infield, a Polish mathematician now teaching at has attempted a difficult job in trying to make Albert Einstein understandable to the layman. He comes off quite well, although Lincoln Barnetts The Universe and Einstein remains, so far as I am concerned, the best book of this kind. To his credit, Dr. Infield has abandoned the mysteries of higher mathematics and used analogies and familiar illustrations to translate special relativity, general relativity, and the quantum theory into everyday language.

I am not prepared to sa much I understand of all this, but then, happily, neither does Dr. to the Western Penitentiary in Centre County and that you there suffer death by means of the application of a current of electricity of sufficient intensity through your body until you are' dead. The last man to hear those words was Harry Way, who shot Zachary W. Keller in Mt. Joy on June 22, 1922.

If it had happened in 1950, thq slaying might well have written blacker headlines across the nation than did the Gibbs case. For the victim, a colorful old-time evangelist and horse-dealer, was the father of a man who is now one of the automobile industrys outstanding executives K. T. Keller, president of Chrysler Corporation. Stole Pistol, Borrowed Shells But 28 years ago it was just another slaying, with a few bizarre angles.

For example, Harry Way, a young Negro who had formerly worked for Keller, told the State Police in his confession that he had held up the old man and got from him exactly 12 cents. Was said hed taken a stolen pistol, and five borrowed shells, into the barn where Keller was currying a horse, and used the time-worn phrase: Money or your life! In the week between the discovery of Keller's body and the surrender of Harry Way, there was a gleam of color in the story of the Mt. Joy clairvoyant who lived with her 12 cats near the barn where the crime was committed. Sadie Dice, the Intell reported, had been gazing into her crystal ball and had managed to evoke a picture of the murderer still pretty misty, but sharpening up. three years later seeking a commission to inquire into the mans sanity.

In June of 1915 the report of the commission was filed with the Lancaster courts, declaring Woolhafe insane. He had beat the rap, all right, but it meant merely a change of scene he was taken from the pen and confined to the State Hospital for Insane. Verdict Changed Only once, however, has a death penalty been appealed to higher courts from Lancaster County and the verdict altered. That case went into the books when George Watson, sixty-year old junkman, stuck a knife between a couple of the ribs of Isaac Makle, twenty-three, in Watsons shack at Columbia on Nov. 14, 1910.

Five months later, a Lancaster jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree. This was just before the state invested in the electric ing away before the trial. It was only 12 days after the crime that the trial began. It last-ed four days, and the lury took three hours to come to a verdict of first-degree murder for all four defendants. Lawyers appealed the conviction up to the Supreme Court, and also asked the governor to grant a stay of execution.

However, on the appointed day, a stout hickory gallows borrowed from Berks County was set up in the jail Compound, and all four men were swung from it at the same moment. Among the 29 cases which have ended in the death penalty Lancaster in the past 130 years, there have been many dramatic moments, many precedents set. Certainly no moment was more dramatic, no verdict more electrifying than the conclusion of the Gibbs when the jury became the I first in Lancaster County history to jhand down a veidict of guilty w'ith I the death Reviewed by VAN ALLEN BRADLEY The experienced reader Is Inclined to cast a jaundiced eye on most kooks written for the layman. Re has learned that all too often auch endeavors turn out to be superficial, Ok pompous or dull, If not inaccurate or downright illiterate. Happily such Is not the case with three slim, attractively produced, authoriative, well-written and en-3 loyable volumes.

rhey inaugurate Scribners Twen- leth Century Li' brary, a series, dited by Hiram Iaydn, which urns to give the L3 ntelhgent layman i basic under- standing of those A ib hinkers of the last hundred -Bradley years who have most influenced the intellectual currents of our time. They are a handsome beginning. While written for the common reader, they respect him. They have not been written down," for which we must thank both publisher and editor: Piof. Tindall's valuable and discerning little book examines the Irish novelist who year after year, since the appearance of Ulysses in 1922, has exerted an increasingly profound influence upon our terature, especially the novel.

The effect of Joyces magnificent and peculiarly complex Ulysses was that of a literary cyclotron, for it smashed th novel into a variety of new entities. Joyces techniques of parallel, symbol, and allusion and of multi-leveled explorations of the human consciousness are discernible in the works of almost every major literary artist of today. Despite this responsibility of the modern reader to Joyce, only a thin minority of Americans Is thoroughly familiar with the original blue-paper Ulysses or with the editions, smuggled or which since have been available. Few even of that minority have given Ulysses or the later Finnegans Wake the careful attention, even rereading, that is required if one is to extract their gold. Prof.

Tindall, a Joycean scholar now teaching at Columbia, has provided a useful tool for either the atudent or the casual reader. His study brilliantly clarifies Qur-pJace wasioo small, so wo ussd the Groff Funeral Home Sadie told a reporter: The murderer is flirting with the electric chair. All Over In 5 Hours When Way came to trial Sept. 11, 1922, he was trie chief actor in one of the shortest murder deliberations in the history of the local courts. The proceedings started at noon.

Shortly after 4 pm. the jury went out. and within an hour it was back with a verdict of guilty, A'' 1 I GIBBET just outside the dreaded little green door of Lancaster County Prison was the end of the trail for killers in days before first local man went to the chair at Rockview in 1915. Did The Irish Discover America? believing that the Black Death of 1350 may have been responsible for their extinction. The Black Death, a virulent form of bubonic plague, after sweeping through first English colonists.

At first believed to be Norse, those scholars conducting research into it now declare that it Is almost certainly Celtic. Harvard University is in Stamped Money May Be Clue To Indiana Murder Chicago, March 18 ()P) A window washers habit of rubber stamping his paper money gave police a clue today that may lead to his fiendish slayers. The severed parts of a body of a man tentatively identified as George Willis Baldwin, 54, of Terre Taute, were found yesterday in a ditch in suburban Flossmoor. Police said he had been shot six times in the head and chest, beaten and tortured before his body was cut in two. The torso was severed above the waist.

Baldwin operated a one man window washing service in Terre Haute. He had been missing since Monday. His landlady in Terre Haute said he usually carried large sums of money. Police said no money was found on the body. Police said they had been informed that Baldwin stamped the name of his window cleaning service on paper money as an advertisement.

Theorizing that he was toitured by thieves seeking his money, police are on the lookout for such marked bills. Meanwhile, Cook County police were checking an anonymous tip were cnecking an anonymous tip charge of the investigation and will Europe, all but wiped out Iceland release the full report on its find-1 and Greenland. Parish records of ings with regard to Newport Tow- old Icelandic churches indicate that 75 per cent of the population died, and few were left to carry on Wiped Out By Plague The bubonic plague could have had a similar disastrous effect upon er sometime next year. Not Remarkable If the Celts did visit America, according to Everett, it is not too remarkable in view of their known (SUNDAY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU) Washington, March 18 Were the Irish really the first discoverers of America? And did they establish settlements here long before Christopher Columbus? Glenn D. Everett, of the Sunday News Washington staff, believes that it may be true.

In a copyrighted story which appeared this week in the Irish Independent, a leading newspaper of Dublin, Eire, Everett has described archeological evidence found at several points in the United States that increasingly points to the fact that the ancient Celts, antecedents of the modern Irish, may have been in America even before the year 1000. Sees Traces of Celts i Everett, not an Irishman but an mounds are beautiful and exten-amateur paleonto.ogist who writes slve an(j arc presumed to be In- IP YOU CANT GAIN WEIGHT If you are skinny, thin, underweight, due to no organic cause, read these tacts abilities as navigators. Neither is, the Celtic and Norse stockades in it too remarkable that evidence of North America. Indians when epi-Irish settlement should be so long 'demies struck immediately pulled up their tepees and made off into the woods, which in the case of a plague carried by fleas on rodents was the best possible preventative, To help you gam weight-nature lually requires two things One a good hearty appetite. Second better digestion in being discovered.

The sites of their settlements were on high, in- accessible hills which even today c.Ho8 hi Lion dlan in origln- although the people remain heavily wooded and which saurs on the side, has been close- wh0 built them had vanished from never have been farmed. After the face of the earth at least 500,1,000 years the fragments of these years before the first white men 'early settlements are so deeply came to Ohio. buried under the topsoil that they Scholars at first declared the are not apparent at first glance. ierv while lookine for remains of1 vnuidrs ai nisi ucodiea me nu aypaicm. What happened to the decimated white garrisons when the Indians return can only be conjectured In any event, there were no white men in North America when Columbus executed his bold voyage to change food into flesh.

Thousands who recogpize these medical tacts have tried a great medicine developed by a doctor often with amazing results. Its Dr. Pierce Golden Medical Dis eovery. Instantly, it starts its wonderful tonic action. First, makes you really want to eat.

Second, helps you get more ouid out of food helps turn it into nds of added flesh. So it you are un this wav. get Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery at your drug store today. Tablets only 509, liquid Jl.oo Ad y.ika- that a free-spending stranger was the settlements of Leif Erirsons furnaces Mallery found the Only the vaguest outlines of the seen in the slaying area reeentlv band has come across evidence rnounds to be lime kilns, but grow-1 walls of the old forts remain until a cross the unJcnown Atlantic paying with bills of $50 and $100 which suggests that the Celts may lng evldenc has been amassed to excavation is begun.

Then the rnhmnhn mav have denomination. have been in America prove that they could not have pieces of stone and rusted iron One very promising site according to Everett, is on the upper However, Columbus may missed by only 100 years finding been. which are turned up can only be a number of settlements founded A third site is that surrounding identified by scientists. by wandering bands of Celts, which If the Celts visited America and but for a stroke of ill fortune might THE spacious, comfortable Groff Funeral Home is always available for the use of patrons and friends at no extra charge. Perhaps you wonder why it costs no more to use the Groff Funeral Home.

By having services there, important savings are effected in time and transportation costs savings that enable patrons to have the facilities of the beautiful Groff Service Pioom and slumber rooms without paying a penny extra. the Newport Tower at Newport,) R.I a mysterious stone to werlbuilt forts here, what happened given America an Irish back-c'on'KVo'i MaUery the Staunton and Roanoke Rivers is the remains of a great fortification inhabited in prehistoric times by a race of people who knew how to work iron very skillfully. Iron Significant The American Indians whom Columbus and later explorers found in North America did not know the use of iron. Captain Mallery, who is a metallurgist, and J. V.

Howe, a retired small arms manufacturer on whose property near Clarksville, Va the first Iron fragments were found, have identified the sites of several primitive iron furnaces. Excavation on Howes farm in the past six months has revealed more than 600 iron fragments, urns, vases, and other arti-, Tacts, some of which appear to be Norse in origin, others of which scholars pronuonced to be Celtic in design. A second siti which is being explored is in Ross County. Ohio.1 Chillicothe, on the heights above the Scioto River, a tributary of the Ohio. Not Indian Mounds Here Mallery has found iron fragments in the ancient Indian mounds" which were left by a race of aborigines known only as the i mound builders.

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