The Charlotte News

Friday, December 18, 1953

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President and Republican leaders of Congress, in their second round of White House conferences to establish a new legislative program for 1954, discussed taxes, the national debt limit, atomic energy and foreign affairs this date. Social Security and aid to the physically handicapped, as well as a continuing discussion of national health problems, also were on the agenda, with Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Oveta Culp Hobby presenting her views at the morning session. The talks would continue for another day. The President was keeping the press informed on the topics being discussed, but provided no details.

Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, after attending the morning meeting, said that no conclusions had been reached on any of the subjects discussed, including whether to amend restrictive laws on atomic information sharing, to permit the sharing suggested by the President earlier in the month, amendments which Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson had informed the NATO nations earlier in the week in Paris that the Administration would seek from Congress. Senator Alexander Wiley said that he had listened, but had no other comment. Representative Robert Chiperfield said that the discussion of foreign aid had been completed, but refused to say whether the 1954-55 fiscal year appropriation would be less than the current outlay.

In Versailles, France's badly divided National Assembly failed again this date to elect a president, in an unprecedented third round of voting, with none of the three candidates left in the contest obtaining enough votes. Premier Joseph Laniel wound up with 358, while Socialist candidate Marcel-Edmond Naegelen received 313, and Radical Socialist Yvon Delbos received 225. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault had withdrawn just before the third-round voting began. The number of votes needed for election was 462, and the fourth ballot to try to break the deadlock was scheduled for this afternoon.

In London, the wreckage of a missing U.S. Navy patrol bomber was reported by the U.S. Air Force to have been sighted this date on a bleak Iceland glacier, with first reports indicating that there were survivors among the nine-man crew. Air Force headquarters in London said that an Icelandic ground rescue party would be dispatched by plane to a small airfield at the foot of the glacier. The weather in the area was extremely bad, with heavy rain and snow cutting visibility to nearly zero during the early part of the day.

In Jefferson City, Mo., the two confessed kidnappers and murderers of six-year old Bobby Greenlease, who had been kidnapped on September 28 and killed within a short time thereafter, were executed this date after they had pleaded guilty in Federal District Court and a jury had then been impaneled only to hear the sentencing phase of the case, having recommended the death penalty. The kidnapping had been effected by the woman of the couple, who convinced nuns at the boy's Catholic school that she was his aunt and that his mother had suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. The fact that lime had been purchased prior to the kidnaping, which had then been used to accelerate decomposition of the boy's body, buried in a shallow grave behind the house where the couple lived, signified to investigators that the couple always intended to kill the boy. They had collected a $600,000 ransom, only half of which had been recovered. The man of the couple confessed early to the crimes, and sought to alleviate the guilt of the woman by indicating that she was a heavy drinker, consuming two fifths of liquor per day. He admitted to being a drug addict. The woman had initially claimed that she knew nothing of the plan to kidnap and murder the boy, that she believed the boy was the man's son, but later admitted her role in the planning of the matter. The man had first sought to implicate a third party in the actual killing of the boy, but later recanted that story and admitted shooting the boy, himself. In their last minutes, the two had a brief conversation and engaged in a farewell embrace, shared a final cigarette, bade the Missouri prison guards goodbye and died side by side amid a deadly cyanide gas. The man had indicated early that he was prepared for the death penalty. They had been caught after a tip had come from a cabbie who had picked up the man, and was impressed by his free spending, believed that he might be a bank robber, and so called the police. The woman was the first female to be executed in Missouri. Neither told investigators at the last anything about what may have happened to the missing $300,000. The ransom money paid on behalf of the wealthy family, had been hastily arranged within a few days after the kidnaping, by the brother of the President, Arthur Eisenhower, a Kansas City banker and a friend of the Greenlease family. When the ransom had been paid, the boy had already been killed. Federal jurisdiction over the matter had been acquired by the fact that the kidnaping had occurred in Missouri, while the killing had taken place a few miles away in Kansas, with the Lindbergh kidnaping law passed in the wake of the kidnaping of the Lindbergh child in 1932 allowing for Federal jurisdiction when the kidnap victim was transported over state lines, either alive or dead. Both the Federal law and the state law of Missouri allowed for the death penalty for kidnaping, the difference being that harm had to come to the victim under Federal law to invoke the death penalty, but not under Missouri law.

An anonymous piece indicates that the man of the couple had "died a tremendous witness for Christ", saying at the last that his being caught had saved the lives of five others, that if he had 12 more hours of freedom, he would have killed five more people, that God had saved him from that act. He said that the five people were those he had hated all of his life. He said that he had murder in his heart, that God knew it and had saved the five others. He then lit a cigarette, and continued telling the priest that only God was important, as he now understood, and that if it had not been for whiskey, penitentiaries would have been closed. "Tell the world, Father. Look—if Christ could do this for me, a mean, drunken, miserable so-and-so, Christ could do it for anybody. I know." He said that his conversion was not out of fear of death as he had never been afraid of death. He said that his girlfriend was also repentant, and repeated that she had been drunk daily for months prior to the kidnaping, that after awhile, anything seemed all right, that he was the guilty one, that she could not say no to him and that her only sin had been loving him. He said that he was looking forward to meeting his judge. Three hours later, both were executed.

She became and remains only the second woman ever executed by the Federal Government, the first having been Ethel Rosenberg, executed six months earlier along with husband Julius for conspiring to provide atomic secrets to the Russians in 1944-45. In 2020, the Trump Administration is going for a bloodbath, executing ten persons since July, 2020, twice the maximum number of executions for non-sabotage related crimes in any single prior year, the next most having been the six executions at one time of Nazi saboteurs caught in the U.S. in 1942, and prior to that, five, in 1938, also under FDR. The ten executions in 2020 equal the prior number of executions in the Federal system going back to one of the pair of executions this date in 1953, there having been no Federal executions between 1963 and that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in 2001, and none between 2003 and July, 2020. Trump is making up for lost time, the only thing in four years he has done with dispatch and consistency. Too bad he could not have used such resolve to keep more than 315,000 people in the country alive during the pandemic of the past nine months by acting in an honest and assertive manner from its inception, telling the nation the bad news it needed to hear rather than treating the deadly disease as a "hoax", no worse than the flu, and saying instead to hell with the deniers of science among his most rabid, cultist fans, cultivated out of his reality-tv days as the fake "boss", who, in reality, is an incompetent, lying slob who could not run a dog pound efficiently if any community were so collectively insane to place him in charge of same. Trumpies, do not ever do this again.

In Nashville, Tenn., a series of dynamite explosions had ripped through a construction office, two widely separated barbershops and a cleaning plant this date, and police were working on the theory that it had some connection to a series of previous blasts with uncertain motives. No one had been injured and the buildings were unoccupied at the time of the explosions. Two homemade bombs made from sticks of dynamite had not detonated and were found by police on the roof of the construction company. The same company had suffered heavy damage the previous September 7, when a series of dynamite explosions had ripped through its road-building machines at Gallatin. A company spokesman said that it was involved in some labor trouble prior to that latter series of explosions, but that it had been the last trouble they had.

Ann Sawyer of The News indicates that the Mecklenburg grand jury, which had completed for the present its investigation of Charlotte Police Department corruption, was scheduled to render its final report during the afternoon, as its term would expire the following day. A new grand jury would be appointed on January 4, and the present grand jury could request that it continue the investigation. Thus far, the grand jury had heard from 57 witnesses on the matter, including columnist Drew Pearson, whose accusations had been the original reason for the investigation, after he published a column and said on his Sunday television program a few months earlier that gambling operations in the city had been permitted to exist by the police through the taking of bribes.

Also in Charlotte, Keith Beaty was found guilty by a jury of three counts of Federal income tax evasion in the U.S. District Court this date. He had been charged with attempted evasion of payment of about $200,000 in income taxes during the years 1945-47, one count for each year. The jury, which deliberated for nearly three hours, recommended mercy for Mr. Beaty based on his ill health.

Emery Wister of The News tells of temperatures having dropped to 11 degrees the previous day, as recorded at the Charlotte Municipal Airport, the lowest temperature in the area since the same temperature was recorded November 26, 1950, setting a new low record for the date, the previous low of 19.2 degrees having been established in 1901. He reports that the Charlotte area had not experienced colder weather generally since 1940, when a week-long cold spell in January of that year had caused the temperature to drop to 6 degrees, where it remained for several days. It was colder in Charlotte during the morning than in New York and Boston, with the temperature having fallen only to 17 at New York's LaGuardia Airport and to 13 in Boston, though the previous day, when Charlotte reached a high of 33, Manhattan's high had been 27. The Weather Bureau predicted another cold day this date and indicated that the night would be almost as bitter as the previous night, with a high this date of 31 and a low during the night of 16. The cold air stretched from New England to Florida, though the low in Key West during the morning was 57. Warm air was expected to raise temperatures by Sunday afternoon, when light rain was expected. It provides cold temperatures for South Carolina and other areas of North Carolina as well.

At least one death had occurred, in Rock Hill, S.C., attributed to the cold, as a woman was found lying in her yard early this date and died later in the hospital, with authorities believing that she had suffered an attack while in the yard, but attributed death to exposure.

In Rochedale, England, somebody had sawn off the top six feet of the community Christmas tree the previous night, while the town's trained police dogs slept soundly a few yards away.

Hang those good-for-nothin's.

On the editorial page, "Presentments Are Not Verdicts" indicates that the four presentments handed down the previous day by the Mecklenburg County grand jury should not be interpreted as necessarily indicating guilt of Police Chief Frank Littlejohn, who, it says, had fought undesirable elements in the city for many years. The presentments did not provide the supporting facts upon which they had been based, and one of them rested on the credibility of Lamar Caudle, former head of the tax and criminal divisions of the Justice Department at different times during the Truman Administration, and whose credibility was in question because of allegations of acceptance of gifts to fix tax cases by referring them for only civil penalties. Chief Littlejohn had not been given an opportunity yet to provide his side of the story and presentments were not formal charges, but merely instructions to the local Solicitor to prepare bills of indictment which would then go before a new grand jury in January, who would determine whether the facts warranted returns of bills, after which, if returned, the resulting charges would go before a regular petit jury.