FAMOUS LAST WOODS

Sure is peaceful out here in nature all by myself. Yep, really glad I decided to do this.

Above is a June 1955 issue of True Detective, with a woman proving yet again that—on pulp covers at least—it’s always a bad idea to wander in the woods alone. But at least she has a chance to run away, unlike these women who got fully naked and leaped into the nearest pond before being surprised by intruders. Inside this True Detective is a story on the Ann Yarrow murder of February 1955. Little known now, at the time it was a major story, mixing those favorite pulp elements of sex, race, and brutality into a stew that had all New York City gripped during the winter of that year.

Ann Yarrow was a twenty-three-year old NYU honors graduate who was found raped, strangled, and stabbed thirty-seven times in a cheap apartment in an area of Manhattan known today as the East Village. Yarrow was an unusual woman for the times in that she judged people by neither social standing nor skin color. Thus she had friends from all walks

of life and at the time of her murder had just split with her African-American boyfriend Ernest Jackson. Once police learned of Jackson’s existence he became the prime suspect, though his exemplary background made him an unlikely candidate.

The New York tabloids published tales of tawdry interracial sex, but it soon became so obvious that Jackson was not the killer that even while he was in custody Ann Yarrow’s father tried to contact him to offer sympathy and reassurance. When the police finally decided they couldn’t make the case, they moved on to Yarrow’s last known acquaintance, Angelo “Mike” Morelli. They knew Morelli had called Yarrow’s apartment at least once, and one of the last letters written by Yarrow mentioned a person named Mike. When arrested, Morelli still bore a woman’s scratches on his back and a little legwork revealed that he had sent his suit to the cleaner the day after Yarrow’s murder.

Morelli’s alibi was thin. He claimed that he had spoken to Yarrow but had never actually met her. He said the scratches came from a prostitute he had scuffled with the night of the murder. And he said he had sent his suit to the cleaner as a matter of course rather than to cover up a crime. A few days after his arrest, Morelli was able to pass a note to an acquaintance,

who took it to the New York News. The note, gleefully published by the paper, claimed cops had beaten Morelli while in custody to coerce a confession. But beaten or not, he never confessed, and soon he made $10,000 bail and was freed (above left, with his lawyer) pending further investigation.

Weeks later, less than a month after Yarrow’s death, police arrested a former psychiatric patient named William Patrick Farrell on the charge of raping his sister-in-law Irene Miller. While in custody, police asked him if he had committed similar crimes before, and he allegedly said he had, and confessed to the Yarrow killing, even adding that he had disposed of the knife in a sewer. Days later he recanted, saying, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I don’t know why I made a confession.” Nevertheless, he was a deeply disturbed man who had raped Irene Miller in front of her three-year-old son, and about this there was no doubt—Miller’s stepfather had called the police after Farrell chased him at knifepoint from the apartment. That apartment was only blocks from where Yarrow had been living.

The case against Farrell was entirely circumstantial, but he had confessed and police expressed no doubts he had spoken the truth. From his confession: “I just caught sight of her on the street. I took a fancy to her and followed her home. I rang the doorbell and when she opened it I put my foot in it.” If DNA testing had existed at the time, perhaps Mike Morelli would have been the one facing a judge, but he walked, and Farrell was tried and convicted of murder and sent to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Beacon, New York.

Ann Yarrow’s slaying had fueled the tabloids for weeks, and most of those stories questioned the wisdom of her associations and stirred up racial animus, but ultimately it may have been a random encounter that led to her ugly demise. The murder was all anyone wanted to talk about during the winter of 1955, but in the end, other crimes filled the tabloids and New Yorkers went on as if William Patrick Farrell, Mike Morelli, Ernest Jackson, and Ann Yarrow had never existed.

New York City, East Village, New York News, Ann Yarrow, William Patrick Farrell, True Detective, true crime magazine

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

July 10

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

July 9

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

July 8

1965—Biggs Escapes the Big House

Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.

July 7

1949—Dragnet Premiers

NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.

July 7

1973—Lake Dies Destitute

Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.

Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE