Vintage Crime: Independence Day Issue

Happy Birthday, America!

To mark 250 years of misbehavior, Vintage Crime Gazette combed the archives for the noir-est July 4th stories. We found a thrill killer with a loyal wife, a double-murderer who surrendered to a reporter, and two more.

Enjoy, and have a non-lethal Independence Day!

Hiding in Plain Sight

LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK, July 4, 1925 – It took no time to figure out who murdered cabbie Louis Panella. Finding the killer took six years.

Friends of Panella discovered the body covered by boards in the ruins of an abandoned Army hospital near Mitchel Field on Long Island.

He had been shot in the head from behind with a .45-caliber Army pistol.

Police inquiries at Mitchel Field revealed a .45 was missing – along with a 25-year-old air cadet, Philip Knapp.

Knapp left behind notes complaining his life wasn’t exciting enough, prompting tabloids to call the Panella murder a “thrill” killing.

A large search turned up nothing, and the story fell from the headlines.

Then in 1931, Police Inspector Harold King sent 300 letters with Knapp’s fingerprints to government agencies and police departments across the country – and he got a hit.

The U.S. Coast Guard wrote to say the fingerprints belonged to a mechanic going by the name Allen Phillips who had been discharged in 1930 after a three-year stint on Staten Island.

King traced “Phillips” to a cottage in West Orange, New Jersey, that he shared with his unsuspecting wife Eleanor.

Knapp pleaded guilty and drew a sentence of 20 years to life at Sing Sing.

He became eligible for parole in 1948. By 1950, he was living in Yonkers, New York, working for a bus company, and still married to Eleanor.

‘No Fair! No Fair!’

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, July 4, 1927 – When 70-year-old Sara Brownell disappeared on Independence Day, nobody seemed to notice.

Neighbors finally raised the alarm five days later when Brownell’s friend Selma Bennett, 56 and owner of the boarding house Brownell ran, also went missing.

A woman told police she last saw Bennett walking around to the rear of the boarding house with Ludwig Lee, 38, a Norwegian ship’s carpenter who lived there and did odd jobs for Bennett.

A door at the back led down to a cellar. Officers entered and found two bloody saws, an axe, and a hatchet.

Two ash bins contained most of Brownell – her legs were missing.

Parts of Bennett were strewn on the floor, which was covered with water because chunks of flesh had clogged a drain.

It was this flooding that brought Bennett to the house.

Packages containing limbs and organs wrapped in brown paper turned up at three sites in Brooklyn. Brownell’s legs were found in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan.

Evidence against Lee mounted. Bennett’s wedding ring was found in Lee’s toolbox; he bought 16 cans of lye in the days before the murders; he asked Brownell for $1,000 so he could return home to Norway, but she refused.

Jurors ignored his claims of innocence and sentenced him to the electric chair.

According to The Brooklyn Daily Times, Lee went to his death screaming “No fair! No fair!”

Murder in Mississippi

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI, July 4, 1946 – Catherine Rossie’s friends, the Gaddys, were driving her home from Independence Day festivities in Jackson around midnight when the couple started fighting.

The car ran off Highway 51 into a ditch, and a hysterical Catherine climbed out and started running down the road.

As the Gaddys watched, a black pickup truck passed their car and gave Catherine, 22, a ride.

Thirteen days later, her body was found near a deserted cabin on a dirt road off the highway.

The killer had struck Catherine in the head with such force that bits of wood were embedded in the bone.

The investigation floundered for nearly two years until A. E. Crawford, a private investigator hired by the victim’s family, tracked down Edward Sant.

The 25-year-old was working as a gravedigger in Clovis, New Mexico, 800 miles away.

While on the run, he had married and sired two children.

Sant (above, center) signed a confession saying he beat Catherine over the head with a blackjack when she refused to have sex with him. She jumped out of the pickup and ran to the cabin, but he caught up with her and hit her again.

At his trial, the defense tried to show Sant was feeble-minded – he could only read and write his name, and his mother said he was “peculiar” growing up.

Jurors took 32 minutes to find him guilty but split on his punishment. The district attorney wanted the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to life instead.

Sant was paroled 11 years later and settled in California, where he remarried. It’s not clear if his new wife knew about his past. He died in 1986 at age 63.

The Cub Reporter and the Killer

VALLEY OF THE MOON, California, July 4, 1949 – Henry Guldbrandsen attacked the two men as they slept in the remote cabin in Sonoma County. All it took was one blow to each head with a heavy stone pestle.

Then the 34-year-old merchant mariner went to the nearest town and lured a woman he hardly knew to the cabin where he raped her, beat her with the pestle, and tied her to a tree.

Next, Guldbrandsen drove 200 miles north to Eureka, called the Humboldt Times, and surrendered to Ed Neumeier, who was three months into his first newspaper job.

Above: Humboldt Times reporter Ed Neumeier types as Henry Guldbrandsen dictates his confession.

Guldbrandsen told Neumeier he killed the two men, Peter Flint, 31, a maritime academy roommate of Guldbrandsen’s, and Peter Jensen, 55, who owned the cabin.

He denied raping the woman, saying she “gave herself to me” to calm him down. The district attorney would label this “a lot of malarkey.”

Guldbrandsen wouldn’t say why he killed the men. “To discuss it would be repulsive.”

Then, the day before his execution in October 1950, he opened up in another interview with Neumeier.

Guldbrandsen spoke of a "sordid incident" involving three men when he was a 15-year-old runaway in New York. Neumeier didn't explain further, but his coded language suggests Guldbrandsen was referring to a sexual encounter with other men that he viewed as traumatic.

Guldbrandsen said a "similar sordid incident" at the cabin triggered the July 4 killings.

The only other time he had lost control in a similar way, Guldbrandsen said, was in 1947, when he stabbed a friend with an ice pick and tried to rape the man's girlfriend, earning a two-year prison term. He said he should have been sent to a psychiatric institution instead of prison.

On October 6, 1950, Guldbrandsen was strapped into San Quentin’s two-seated gas chamber* along with double-murderer Herman Avery.

The men nodded goodbye to each other before the cyanide pellets dropped.

As the gas filled the chamber, Guldbrandsen took a deep breath – on the advice of guards and a chaplain – looked around in disbelief that he was still alive, and took another.

* I was surprised to learn California’s gas chamber could accommodate two condemned prisoners. If you would like me to take a closer look in a future Vintage Crime Gazette, hit Reply and let me know.

Dan Williams and M. J. Van Deventer are the authors of the historical true crime book Madeline Gets Life, to be released by Level Best Books in May 2027.

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