Word: sheeler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...protest. But it was also difficult to prove. When the cops discovered that Howard's girl friend, a Mrs. Mary Morgan, was in a hospital, they hopefully put a watch outside her room. Her brother-a 23-year-old, $8-a-week hamburger-stand counterman named Rudolph Sheeler-went to Philadelphia from New York City on his day off to visit her. They grabbed him there...
...Proof. Sheeler vanished into the recesses of City Hall. A week later, he signed a confession: Gunman Howard had shot the policeman and he, Sheeler, had been a witness and accessory to the crime. He was sent to the penitentiary for life by the late Philadelphia Judge Harry S. McDevitt, who neatly disposed of the feebleminded Bilger by getting him transferred to a mental institution from which he conveniently escaped...
...Sheeler was a philosophical sort. He had grown up in an orphan asylum, had become a depression road-kid, and-before he found a job-a petty criminal. He served his time quietly, although his wife had obtained records which proved he had been at work in New York on the night the policeman was shot in Philadelphia. But after seven years, when the cops failed to keep what he regarded as a solemn promise-to get him out after a short term-he began to fight...
...brutally. "Somebody in back of me kept hitting me in the back of the head so that my head would nod forward and somebody else would say, 'Well, he admits that.'" The chaplain went to Judge McDevitt, who wasn't interested. Said the judge: "He confessed." Sheeler stayed in prison. But finally a University of Pennsylvania criminal-law professor named Louis B. Schwartz entered the case. Last week, largely because of his intervention, Sheeler got a new trial. This time the state asked-and instantly got-a directed verdict of not guilty...
...Judge James Gay Gordon Jr.: "This is a black and shameful page in the history of the Philadelphia police department . . . and ... an ominous counterpart of what occurs daily behind the Iron Curtain. The police had not one scintilla of evidence . . ." Less than an hour later, six Philadelphia policemen, whom Sheeler accused, were suspended from the force, among them an assistant superintendent of police and the head of the homicide squad...