The Wrong Car
The death of Lillie Belle Allen
William Keisling
yardbird
The Wrong Car
Copyright © 2002-2011 William Keisling
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-882611-32-4
FIRST EDITION, Kindle edition
Digital versions of our books are available. E-mail orders can also be sent to: info@yardbird.com. Visit our web page at yardbird.com. For document downloads, videos and other materials associated with this book, visit www.yardbird.com/thewrongcar.htm
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keisling, William.
The wrong car : the death of Lillie Belle Allen:
a police murder mystery / William Keisling.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-882611-16-0
1. Murder--Pennsylvania--York--Case studies. 2. Murder
victims--Pennsylvania--York--Case studies. 3. Criminal
investigation--Pennsylvania--York--Case studies. I. Title.
HV6534.Y587 K457 2002
364.15’23’0974841--dc21 2002033853
This book is dedicated
to the memory of Abraham
Acknowledgments
My brother Craig Keisling provided invaluable assistance in the preparation of this book. Rick Kearns, old friend and collaborator, offered his usual great insights. Lynn Hamrick helped with the graphics. Lisa Westmoreland was our intern.
For research on the second part of this book, I’m indebted to the reporters working in 1968 and 1969 for the York Gazette and Daily and, to a lesser extent, the York Dispatch. If you want to learn about the York riots, these papers, particularly the now-defunct Gazette and Daily, are indispensable sources of information. Court records, in this case, are all but useless. A vibrant and free press, I’ve come to see, is not only a gift for today, but for future generations.
Warm regards to the family of the late Fred Speaker. Fred was a family friend and my confirmation sponsor in church. He was Pennsylvania attorney general at the time of the York riots. Always there for his family and community, Fred Speaker is fondly remembered and sorely missed.
Lastly, I’d like to thank the readers of my books, whose support and patience made The Wrong Car possible.
-- bk
Part One:
“What have we gotten ourselves into?”
“The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even the past.”
-- William Faulkner
1
Waiting for the Spells brothers
The Spells brothers got out of their Cadillac. They climbed the steps to the Messersmiths’ porch and knocked on the door. Bobby Messersmith came out with his shotgun. He took in the two black brothers. He didn’t like blacks, much less on his father’s front porch. And he certainly didn’t like the Spells brothers.
He saw James and Sherman Spells were angry, but resolved. He saw they weren’t much impressed by his shotgun. They certainly weren’t impressed with Bobby. They looked at Bobby Messersmith like he was a coward, the kind of coward who hid behind a hood, or shot kids in the back, or molested little girls, or threw firebombs at defenseless old ladies under cover of night. Which was what brought them here, in broad daylight.
The Spells brothers told Bobby someone had been tossing Molotov cocktails onto the porch of their mother’s house. They knew Bobby and his gang were behind the firebombings. They wanted to put a stop to it.
The Spells brothers told Bobby to leave their mother alone. If anything happened to their mother, they told Bobby, they were going to come back and personally take care of his cowardly ass.
Was that simple enough for him to understand?
With that the Spells brothers turned and walked back to their car. Straight-backed, unafraid.
Cocky niggers, Bobby thought. Somebody ought to teach them a lesson. He stood on his porch, clutching his shotgun, watching them pull away in their off-white Cadillac. He’d get around to teaching them that lesson, once his gang was with him.
It was about four-thirty in the afternoon, Monday, July 21, 1969.
As soon as the Spells brothers drove off, Bobby Messersmith began planning to firebomb their mother’s house again that night. Down in Bobby’s basement they busied themselves making more Molotov cocktails. Pouring gasoline into empty bottles, stuffing the bottles with rags. They laid the bottles out back on the fence. Should the Spells brothers attack them from behind, someone would fire a shot at the bottles and ignite them.
While these plans were laid, Bobby and his family put out an alert. They needed help on Newberry Street. The message went out all over town, across the county. The niggers were coming back that night in their Cadillac. Boys with their guns were needed on Newberry Street. This time they’d be ready for the Spells brothers.
Hearing the call for help, white boys began arriving with their guns. Bobby’s father, John Messersmith, assigned the boys to battle stations.
Then they told the police about the impending ambush.
Soon it was almost 9pm. The Cadillac full of coloreds would be coming before long. All was ready. Now they had only to wait for Sherman Spells.
2
“What have we gotten ourselves into?”
All eyes fix on the Cadillac as it glides down Philadelphia Street. Neighbors sitting on their porches and stoops along Philadelphia Street watch expectantly. They know what’s about to happen. Everyone in the neighborhood knows. They’ve been talking about it for hours.
First the car must turn the corner on to Newberry Street. On Newberry Street, many more expectant eyes watch.
The city and state policemen standing at the corner of Philadelphia and Newberry streets watch the car approach too. The police stand at a barricade in front of the Otterbein United Methodist Church, a gothic, dark structure brooding over the corner.
The car stops at the light behind a few other cars, its turn signal blinking. The light changes.
The policemen let the car pass their barricade. The cops watch the car round the corner and head down Newberry Street, toward the waiting, armed mob.
The car drives past Wentz’s TV shop, at the corner opposite the church, cattycorner from the YMCA.
The car moves past the neighbors’ homes. Neighbors with names like Strine, Koch, Slick. It rolls past the Haverstocks’ house, past the Rupperts’ house. All along the block, neighbors sit on their porches this warm summer evening, watching the car come down Newberry Street. It eases past the used furniture store, where a man sits watching out front. Until it reaches the railroad tracks.
At the railroad tracks twenty or more gun-toting kids wait. They’re mostly teenagers. They’re waiting for the car. The kids have been waiting all evening. With each hour their numbers grow. Many have brought guns. Guns normally used by the country boys to go hunting for deer or groundhog. Tonight they full well expect to kill men. For hours they’ve been running around the street with guns, under the eyes of police. More kids are stationed on the roofs of houses, and in windows, and elsewhere, their rifles and shotguns ready. In expectation, they’ve been drinking and drugging all night. The gun-toting teenagers suddenly are alerted that the car is coming.
What happens next is murder. Vicious, premeditated murder, committed in plain sight of at least a hundred eyes, some say hundreds of eyes. A murder committed in cold blood, in the shadow of a church, before the watching eyes of police. Down the street from the Young Men’s Christian Association and the neighborhood store where kids are sent to fetch milk and bread, a murder committed in plain sight of the watching, expectant eyes of small town America.
The policemen, like the neighbors, watch the car drive into the ambush. The cops duck behind their cruisers and watch the murder they know to expect. That all their senses tell them to expect. That they have been told to expect. Then they turn their backs and run, not helping the people in the ambushed car. They have been running ever since, to this day.
Later, to explain why the murderers were never brought to justice, the police will lie and say no one saw the murder.
The simple yet painful reality is that at least one hundred eyes will see the murder. These eyes all watch expectantly as the car rounds the corner and rides into ambush at the railroad tracks.
This is the story of some of those watching eyes, and what they saw.
It’s a very long story about a very short, ten or fifteen second car ride.
It helps to view the ten or fifteen second car ride cinematically, like a piece of film, or video tape, which can be stopped, fast forwarded, or reversed. Before the car reaches the murderous ambush at the railroad tracks, let’s hit rewind, and back it up. The car glides to a stop short of the gun-toting mob of teens at the railroad tracks, and smoothly reverses. Our film runs backward now, backward past neighbors on their porches, past the Rupperts’ house, past the used furniture store where a man sits out front, past the Slicks’ house, past the TV shop, past the watching cops at the barricade, rounding the corner backwards, stopping at the light, turn signal blinking. Then heading off backwards into the summer evening down Philadelphia Street.
Now let’s hit play again. The car resumes it forward cruise, toward the cops at the barricade.
Among the first eyes that see the car coming are those of Helen Diaczun. She’s sitting on her front steps on 249 W. Philadelphia Street, half a block away from Newberry. When the car passes her porch she sees “several colored people” inside. She watches the car stop at the light. She watches it pass the police barricade. She watches it turn right up Newberry Street.
The car approaches the stoplight at the corner of Philadelphia and Newberry streets, watched by the police stationed at the barricade. The barricade is made of yellow sawhorses. One city policeman and four Pennsylvania state police troopers stand by the sawhorses. Police have been stationed at the barricade for the past several days. More police officers are in the immediate area, walking the neighborhood of Newberry Street in roving patrols. There’s been trouble in the neighborhood. There have been riots in the city.
The previous summer, police learned they could successfully head-off violence by sealing troubled neighborhoods. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? The cops have become good at setting up and manning their barricades. That’s why they’ve manned the barricade at Newberry and Philadelphia streets. The job of these officers is to stop cars from going down Newberry Street, where a large gang of troubled white teenagers for days has been fomenting a race riot.
In the last few days, this neighborhood of Newberry and Philadelphia streets has seen several shootings of blacks and repeated mob attacks. It is a white neighborhood, whose residents feel they are at war with the city’s blacks. The police too are at war with the city’s blacks.
The policemen themselves are being shot at, and they are being hit. Several nights before, their fellow officer, Henry Schaad, was shot while riding through a black neighborhood in a poorly armored car. Schaad was a young rookie. He’s the twenty-two year old son of a York city police detective. Shot through the lungs, young Schaad lies dying in the hospital, on a respirator. Already the police have received the names of five young black men who they suspect of shooting Officer Schaad. They call these blacks the “militants.” Sherman Spells is suspected of being at the scene of Schaad’s shooting. Now here was Sherman and his brother, maybe more of the militants, riding into a trap. To say that the cops are mad is an understatement. They are out for blood.
Tonight the cops standing at the barricade wear bulletproof vests and riot helmets. Since the mortal shooting of the rookie cop, they have even been instructed to carry high-powered rifles.
Later, the police officers stationed at the corner will say they had no idea they were supposed to stop traffic at the barricade. They’d have us believe that they were there perhaps to collect dry cleaning, or perhaps to file their nails. They’d say they can’t remember any instructions from supervisors about what to do at the barricade.
They have certainly received instructions from the white gang.
Manning the police barricade this evening are Pennsylvania State Trooper Gerald Roberts, Trooper Steve Rendish, Trooper Bill Linker, and rookie Trooper Michael Marchowski. With them is York city policeman Ronald Zeager. Trooper Roberts remembers a few more city and state cops coming in and out of the intersection from time to time, on roving patrol.
Suppertime on Newberry Street bleeds into evening. The smells of summer suppers and burning charcoal run into the smell of expectant death.
The cops watch as trouble foments before their eyes. They watch the growing mob of white teenagers running in the street with guns. It’s pandemonium down there, and they do nothing. They’ve even received a phone call from a concerned neighbor who complains about the young snipers waiting in ambush on the roofs. Still the police do nothing. A few of the neighbors can’t understand why the police don’t seem to care that someone is about to get killed.
Before supper, Annabel Mae Kline, living on adjacent North Street, witnessed the Spells brothers confront Bobby Messersmith.
“At about 4:30pm I went out to get the garbage can in the alley to the rear of my house,” she remembers later. “I saw a white boy, a teenager, standing in the doorway at 229 N. Newberry St. He was talking to two young Negro men. The white boy had a rifle in his hand. They seemed to be arguing about something. I went back into the house.”
The hours pass and her concern grows. Annabel Kline sees the police turn a blind eye to another night of rioting on her block.
“After supper, I went out to North and Newberry streets,” Annabel Kline remembers. “The gang of kids were congregating. They usually got together every evening at this time. I went back to my yard and sat down. I saw three fellows with guns on the roof at 231 N. Newberry. One of them was hanging on the chimney. This was about 8 to 8:30pm. I went into the house and called the city police. I told them there were snipers on the roof.” In a short while, sitting in her back yard, Kline will hear the shooting start.
About the same time, seventy-year-old plumber Bill Boyer stands in the doorway of his shop, watching the mounting trouble and confusion.
“There were about seventy-five kids over there on the corner, kids seventeen or eighteen years old, running around with guns in broad daylight,” Boyer remembers. “I don’t know why the police didn’t chase them kids off the street.”
While the kids down the street prepare to kill the Spells brothers in ambush, police horse around at the corner barricade.
The officers notice someone’s left a package at the corner of Newberry and Philadelphia streets. A little too close for comfort. City policeman Zeager cautiously goes to the package, looking it over. State Trooper Bill Linker playfully slams the door to his cruiser. Zeager thought he jumped two feet in the air. It turns out not to be a bomb.
It’s almost 9pm, and the mob and the confusion grow by the moment. State troopers Gerald Roberts and Steve Rendish stand together on the corner, ensconced in riot gear. One of the young men waiting in ambush walks up from the railroad tracks, approaching the two troopers. He’s white, in his early twenties, Roberts recollects.
“Turn your backs and everything will be okay,” the young man winks at the state troopers. Turn your backs, he reassures the policemen, and the boys won’t shoot you, just the Spells brothers. The young man hurries back to the railroad tracks.
Troopers Roberts and Rendish turn to each other.
“What have we gotten ourselves into?” Roberts remembers them both saying at once.
The policemen on duty this night at the corner are slow to pick up several crucial facts. They are slow to pick up on the fact that they are policemen, and the fact that the public expects to be protected in their presence. They are slow to pick up on the fact that the boys running around with guns in front of their faces mean to kill someone. They are slow to pick on the fact that when they are told about a planned shooting, they should do something to stop it. They are not so slow to pick up on something else. They will notice the color of the skin of the people in the approaching Cadillac.
Not long after the young man came up and told the officers to turn their backs, Trooper Roberts sees the light-colored Cadillac approaching the barricade at the intersection. A couple of other cars sit in front of it at the intersection, waiting for the light to change. City officer Ron Zeager notices the Cadillac too. Zeager looks at the driver. He thinks he sees that the driver is a black man. He also notices passengers in the car. Later, he would curiously say he only saw they were black from behind.
The police, like the neighbors, expectantly watch the Cadillac waiting at the light. The light changes to green. The cars in front of the Cadillac go straight. The Cadillac reaches the corner and begins to turn at the barricade. The police make no effort to stop the Cadillac. Some would later remember that the cops actually move the barricade and wave the car through. One thing is certain: the officers make no effort to warn the blacks in the car of the ambush awaiting them. The ambush the police know to expect.
Years later, an occupant in the car would remember that one of the cops was smiling as he waved the car through the barricade.
At that moment, another York city police officer, Patrolman Charles Robertson, is listening to his radio several blocks away at Farquar Park. Robertson recalls receiving a police radio transmission from an unknown officer at the corner, advising that the Cadillac has passed the barricade. One of the boys waiting in ambush would later say that Bobby Messersmith’s father, directing the mob of boys from his house on Newberry Street, is also listening to police transmissions, over a police scanner. Not only are the police at the barricade aiding in the ambush, turning their backs to the expected murder, witnesses say they broadcast a heads-up to the waiting mob that the Spells brothers are on their way down the street in the Cadillac.
All is set. In less than ten seconds, the car is halfway down the block to the waiting mob. In less time than it takes you to read this paragraph, the car ride is over. At the railroad tracks, trying to avoid the gun-toting mob, the car makes a sudden left turn. The police, and the neighbors look on as the shooting starts. The police take cover behind their cruisers, waiting for the shooting to stop.
Gunsmoke still lingers in the air while they learn the Spells brothers aren’t killed. The Spells brothers aren’t even in that Cadillac. The damn cops let the wrong car through the barricade. The fucking morons at the tracks opened fire on a preacher’s family, on their way to the store to buy groceries.
They have all participated in murder. They have shot to death a young mother of two. A preacher’s daughter. Later still they will learn her name. It is a name none of them will ever forget.
3
The people in the wrong car
Who are the people in the wrong car?
Reverse the car ride as if it’s a movie, this time in fast reverse, yanking it from the tracks, speeding it up the street backwards past the barricade, round the corner. Let the story of the people in the car rewind hours backward, and we learn this:
The day before the ambush at the railroad tracks, the people in the car had started out on their summer vacation. They are out-of-towners, unaware that York is in the throes of a race riot.
The family seems oblivious to another important event. The same day they start out on their vacation, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land and walk on the moon. The Mosleys are on the highway on a day when most Americans are glued to televisions.
On Sunday, July 20, 1969, Reverend Jim Mosley and his family set out on their vacation by car from their home in Aiken, South Carolina. Jim Mosley is minister of the Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Aiken. He’s held the pulpit there since 1965.
Aiken is a small southern town of mostly unpaved streets and deep-set segregation. Mosley and his wife Beatrice live in a small white house on Horry Street, where they raised their eight children and two grandchildren. On Horry Street blacks live on one side of the street, whites on the other. Children are forbidden to cross over to play on the other side of the street. The schools are segregated too, of course.
Rev. Mosley and his family planned a road trip. They’d drive to Brooklyn, New York, to see their son Benjamin. They’d stop in York, Pennsylvania, to visit their daughter Hattie and her family.
They bring with them two of their daughters, Lillie Belle, 27, and Gladys, age thirteen. Lillie Belle brought along her own two children, Michael, nine, and Debra, eleven. Lillie Belle and her kids look forward to staying in Brooklyn, where they once had lived when her children were younger. She wants to get her kids out of South Carolina.
After attending church, the five drove out of Aiken, heading north for York. The family arrived at Hattie’s by Sunday evening, and straightaway made plans to fish the next day. Lillie Belle likes to fish. Hattie’s husband, Murray “Bubba” Dickson, had a favorite fishing hole a short way outside town at the York reservoir.
Bubba, himself from Bamberg, South Carolina, had several years earlier traveled north and found a labor union job in York. He sent for his family in 1966. They rented a small house on Pershing Avenue, near Penn Park. Enough money was coming in that Murray bought a light gray 1961 Fleetwood Cadillac.
The next morning, Monday, July 21, they packed fishing rods, some gear, and a picnic lunch into the trunk of that nice gray Cadillac. Thirteen-year-old Gladys was left in charge of her younger nieces and nephews. By 11am the Mosleys, Lillie Belle, Hattie and Bubba get into Bubba’s Cadillac. They drive into the Pennsylvania countryside to fish. It was a pleasant, hot summer day.
Lillie Belle Allen is remembered as a quiet, good mother. She made her own clothes, and was a good cook. She wanted more for her kids than life in the South could provide. At times she’s a little dreamy.
That afternoon, when Lillie Belle wasn’t fishing, she dreamily walked among the rounded stones at the York reservoir.
She took to holding them up into the midday sun, rolling them over, watching the water curl around their smooth edges. Sun and earth and water. A warm summer breeze. On this pretty day on earth it crosses Lillie’s mind to collect stones.
I can’t help thinking Lillie was picking up the stones only a few hours after Neil Armstrong, on the moon, lifted his last lunar rock, and examined it with equal wonderment. She must have turned the rounded stones in her hands, her fingers dripping water.
The stones of each day are for the young to collect. I’d find that out, writing this book. The old no longer have an interest, and they’ll tell you.
Lillie particularly fancied several larger stones. She brought them over to her mother, dreamily saying they looked pretty. Lillie wanted to take them home, and make bookends out of them. Beatrice had to laugh. Just what Lillie needs. More knickknacks to clutter things up. Rocks yet. Still Lillie Belle fancied them. She put the rocks into the trunk of Murray’s Cadillac.
They prattled the pleasant day away like this, casting into the water, talking, looking around, eating. One of them would by and by feel a sharp tug on the rod, and they’d reel in a sunny. It was so pleasant, everyone being together, they began to talk about maybe coming back tomorrow.
The day slipped away so fast they hardly knew where it went. The fishing was good. At last the sun was going down and the moon was rising. Somebody must’ve said they better be getting back to the kids. Somebody must’ve said Gladys and Debra probably were doing fine with the kids.
At last Reverend Mosley sung out it was twenty-five minutes of nine, and they best be going. Driving home, they saw a little fruit stand off the side of the road. They stopped and bought some treats for the kids. Milk, ice cream, cookies.
Rev. Mosley had his eye on the prices at the fruit stand. He always had his eye on the prices. Had to.
“Is food high here?” he asked his daughter about York.
“Yes,” Hattie told him. “But we shop at the J. M. Fields store.” It was a big shiny new store on Route 30. The store had just unveiled a new fountain. When they got back to town, Hattie thought it might be nice to take her folks to the store and show off the fountain. They talked of spending another day fishing. They could get some supplies at Fields.
When they got home Hattie took the things she’d bought into the house. Rev. Mosley went upstairs to the bathroom. When he came back out of the house with Hattie, the others were waiting to go to the store.
There was a small problem. Hattie couldn’t get Bubba’s light grey Cadillac to start. She ground the engine but it wouldn’t start.
Reverend Mosley suggested they take his car. Suddenly the Cadillac started, and Hattie bid them all to get in.
4
What awaited the people in the wrong car?
They made these plans happily oblivious to the world spinning around them. They were oblivious to the televised spectacle of the first moon landing, oblivious to the sudden war raging around them in York, Pennsylvania.
In Europe, the joke goes, you never knew when to expect the Spanish Inquisition. In York, in the late 1960s, you never knew when to expect a race riot. And over the third weekend of July 1969, a bad one flared.
It wasn’t just York seeing these troubles, though York’s troubles certainly had been brewing. Race riots spread like wildfire across the country. Watts had already burned, and that very weekend Detroit and other, smaller towns were burning. At Easter time, in a strange premonition of things to come, the son of the 1930s actor Stepin Fetchit drove down the Pennsylvania Turnpike shooting at cars. Nobody was taking it anymore, not even Stepin Fetchit’s kid.
For decades the white town fathers of York prided themselves in keeping blacks down. That’s saying it charitably. The York city police force provided the primary muscle used to humiliate and subjugate blacks, though the police were by no means the only tool in the shed.
The rioting had started the Thursday before the Mosleys had rolled into town. An all-out race riot now was raging.
The city that night burned in all quarters, lit up by countless arsons and firebombings. Police cruisers and armored cars were shot. Black snipers aimed from windows all over town. They stuck potatoes on the ends of their gun barrels to hide the flash. The York police force — staffed by under a hundred men — quickly found itself outgunned and overwhelmed. Thirty-five state police troopers already had been called in. Before the end of the night, another thirty-two state troopers would be added to bolster the glaringly poor local force.
On the previous Friday night, July 18, 1969 a young city cop had been shot and mortally wounded. While on patrol in a black neighborhood, twenty-two-year-old rookie Henry Schaad was hit by a high-powered sniper bullet. The armor-piercing round ripped through the armored car in which Schaad was riding. His father, city police detective Sgt. Russell Schaad, knew the identity of his son’s shooters the next morning. For some reason, he never pressed for any arrests. Like many in the York police force, young Henry had followed his father into police work. Now young Henry lay dying in a hospital bed, hooked to a respirator, slowly dying from a bullet fired through both lungs. To the police, blacks were the enemy.
As young Patrolman Schaad lay dying, the largely incompetent and under-trained York police force stepped up to what can only be called a war footing in their rioting town.
The police began to ally themselves with young white street gangs, encouraging the youths to defend their homes from what they saw as black insurgency in their neighborhoods. With the blessing of police, several gangs of armed, white teenagers converged on N. Newberry Street, home turf of a gang calling itself the Newberry Street Boys.
Newberry Street in York for years enjoyed the reputation as the town’s red light district. It’s a working class, seedy area of town. Men came from all over to pick up working girls.
Open prostitution in this working class town went on for years. It’s still going on, I’d learn. How is this possible? The girls worked under the noses of the police force, prosecutor’s office and county court system. For years, policemen themselves received sexual favors above a bicycle shop on nearby South Duke Street. At the courthouse, a running story involved a pimp making regular visits to the county DA’s office, where protection money was paid to the prosecutor. The judges in York County demand their share. Policemen as late as the 1980s warned each other to stay away from the parking garage at a downtown hotel. Informants told police they regularly stuffed money and narcotics into the trunk of a judge’s car, parked in the garage.
York is a small industrial town, very set in class. You are what your daddy was, and you keep in place. There’s also lots of old money hiding under the rocks in York County. The wealthy of York, like the robber barons of old, do little, and care less for their town. They languidly mate at places like the York Country Club. The York Country Club remains restricted to this day. No blacks or Jews allowed. It’s one of the places the civic leaders, lawyers, and judges hang out. Oh, blacks are allowed in to cook, or to wash dishes. They, and Jews, are always useful as the subject of jokes.
Reverend Mosley could not have known what he and his family were riding into on their summer vacation. Did they imagine the American dream? They got the American nightmare.
In the 1960s, South Newberry Street was predominantly a black part of town. Philadelphia Street divided black from white. North Newberry Street, just across Philadelphia Street from the Y, remained a white enclave. Residents saw themselves as making a last stand against a rising black tide.
In July 1969, activity on Newberry Street buzzed around the home of John Messersmith, his wife and sons, Robert, Arthur, Michael and James. The Messersmiths rented a small row house at 229 N. Newberry, a few doors past the tracks of the Western Maryland Railroad. The Messersmith brothers formed a club of like-minded delinquents known as the Newberry Street Boys.
By all accounts father John Messersmith was a consummate York county urban cracker. Picture someone who sees himself as a beleaguered, racist Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Picture John Messersmith as a hairy, backwoods, foul-talking Fagin or Artful Dodger, barking orders to a brigade of stupid white street thugs. Toss in a fair dollop of your garden variety white-trash bigot, add a smidgeon of the wildness of the eye of Charles Manson, and the dull-witted temper of Huck Finn’s pappy, and you’ve got a fair idea about self-proclaimed neighborhood guardian John Messersmith.
He was a drunk. He was often abusive. Neighbors, on occasion, complained to police that John Messersmith took pot shots from his front porch at passing black motorists. If he had accomplished nothing else memorable in life, he instilled a seething anger and hatred in his sons, particularly in the oldest, Bobbie. The two were bookends.
Bobby Messersmith was a true neighborhood menace. He’s walked off the pages of A Clockwork Orange, without the inventive language. Several days before, on Thursday, July 17, Bobby Messersmith, in the company of his brother Artie, almost single-handedly touched off the riots of ’69 by sniper-shooting two young black men, wounding one seriously. This wasn’t Bobby’s first brush with trouble. Police knew he was trouble. When he was fourteen, Bobby had done time for sexually assaulting a six-year-old girl. Some neighborhood hero. No capes, just hoods.
Throughout these balmy days of July the Messersmith boys and their gang shot and firebombed their way into the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. They planned commando raids into black neighborhoods. They schemed to draw unsuspecting blacks down to the singularly featureless Codorus Creek, a polluted drainage ditch running through the center of town, where they would ambush and shoot their hapless victims.
John Messersmith made the basement of their home the command center. The basement of the Alamo. From the bowels of chez Messersmith they initiated the firebombing of many black targets, including the home the of the Spells brothers’ mother.
Late in the afternoon of July 21, 1969, in their bunker command center, their dank basement, Bob and Artie Messersmith and their father John busied themselves drawing up another half-baked plan for firebombing the Spells’ mother’s house. They put word out across town, and beyond, to youth and police alike, that the Spells and their militant black friends were expected back at any time with guns, looking to terrorize the neighborhood.
For once in their lives, the Messersmiths had a role, a raison d’étre. A self-appointed mission in life.
They were the neighborhood protectors.
Around suppertime on July 21, under the approving eyes of police, white teenagers from across town and beyond began converging on Newberry Street with guns to help defend the neighborhood from the expected attack.
Some of the boys who heard the call for help had military training, like twenty-year-old airman Mark Barr, or army men Dick Wales and John Duke. John Messersmith saw boys with military training as particularly useful. When Mark Barr arrives late that afternoon with a .22 rifle, AWOL from the Air Force, he goes to the cellar of the Messersmith house.
“I seen Bob in the cellar and he said that the colored people were coming up Newberry Street and burn it out,” Barr remembered a few weeks later. Burn it out. Light it up. Good words for a young man when he’s clearing the breach of his rifle.
John Messersmith proceeded to craftily draw up what he considered a fool-proof plan to defend their castle. He allowed that there had previously been serious security flaws in fortress Newberry. In the early days of the riot, boys had been stationed at the corner of Newberry and Philadelphia to signal when blacks neared. Approaching blacks then would be stoned, or beaten.
The arrival of the cops at the barricade over the weekend was supposed to dampen this behavior, but in reality the cops had taken over the job of gatekeepers and signalmen. John Messersmith kept a police scanner and sat listening for alerts broadcast by friendly cops.
Trouble was, the blacks had proved to be smarter, more wily, and better fighters than the Messersmiths and the police. It made a white supremist like Messersmith look bad.
Just the evening before, on July 20, a carload of blacks had snuck into the neighborhood through one of several side alleyways. When the white gang members approached the car, its trunk swung open and out popped an angry black man with a gun, firing away. Many said it was Sherman Spells. This much is sure: a brief and wild gunfight ensued in the alleyway beside Newberry Street. The white gang members shot back. One boy shot wildly into the cigar store on the corner. A white boy was shot in the arm. The car sped away up Newberry Street, pursued by a police cruiser suddenly appearing from the corner. In a town where one still hears the phrase “nigger in the woodpile,” meaning the worst sort of unexpected treachery, the shooter popping out of the car trunk provided pure hair-straightening fright. The Messersmith gang wouldn’t forget that lesson anytime soon.
This time, John Messersmith vowed, they wouldn’t outsmart him.
As the boys arrived, old man Messersmith assigned ambush stations around the house and the neighborhood. On the roof. The windows, front and back. The back yard, the railroad tracks, a nearby bridge or two. Covering all the side alleyways. Even a railroad car down the tracks a piece. They were ready, and they fully expected someone to get killed.
They’d keep an ear to the police scanner for an alert that “a car” was rolling into their trap.
This time, he thought, no nigger was going to make monkeys out of the Messersmiths.
5
“Wait for this Cadillac, cause it’s on the way”
“I remember it was real crazy,” one of the boys present that night, Rick Knouse, recalls. “I remember being in (John) Messersmith’s house, you know, going down into the basement and him giving orders. Like, ‘Youse take these weapons and go there and this group take these weapons and go over there. And you man the window and you take the backdoor and you go across the street and all kinds of, you know, go here, go there.’ And you know out of his mouth was ‘Kill as many niggers as you can.’ And you know that would ring and ring in a person’s head. And you know that’s what would happen and people would scatter.”
Rick Knouse continues, “It was like an order. ‘You go here. You, you, and you go down here and look for, wait for this Cadillac, cause it’s on the way. And I think that (had) something to do with the police scanner….”
The police were active allies, Knouse says. The day before, on the street near the Messersmiths, Knouse says he encountered a group of supportive police. “I’m talking about fifty people around these cops and they were talking just a lot of shit you know like white power and keep it together and protect yourselves and we’re with you and we’re behind you.” It was, he recalls, a “rally type thing.”
And it wasn’t just a single policeman.
“It was a crew of police down there,” he says, “hollering what kind of gun do you got and this and that.” One of the cops, he says, asked him what he was shooting. Knouse says another boys gave him a 30-06 rifle. “I didn’t know much about it and I don’t know who it was said he’s got a 30-06 and he had shells for it. He threw a box of them down.”
Another boy on Newberry Street that night, Roger Kinard, agrees. Kinard remembered some thirty years later that the kids on the street had “the impression (the) police wanted (the white street gang) to back them up.”
Rick Knouse remembers his arrival on Newberry Street that night. He and fellow members of his gang received a plea for help from members of the Newberry Street Boys. Knouse had known some of the Boys Newberry since childhood. Knouse was a member of another, rival white gang, from Girard Park, called the Girarders. Since the rioting began, the white gangs had banded together to fight the blacks.
“Some of these guys I grew up with in the Parkway projects, before there was Newberry Street or Girard. We had childhood ties. Sonny Lutenge, Messersmith, and I think Teddy Halleran and maybe Jeff Flinchbaugh came over to Girard Park and asked us to come over there because you know they needed help. There were all these rumors that blacks were gonna run down there and just like terrorize this whole neighborhood and they were in fear. Four or five or six of us decided to go over there armed, except for me and except for maybe one other guy. Our thought process on that was let’s go over there and keep the blacks over there so they don’t make it over here. If there’s gonna be this war of people living and dying we don’t want it in our neighborhood. Let it happen on Newberry Street, and we’ll help you guys out. We were over there in the day time so that we would be there without having the risk of getting caught for being out after curfew.”
The day before, Rick Knouse proved to be an unreliable shot. Knouse was present when they’d all been surprised by the jumping-brother-in-the-trunk routine. Knouse was so shocked he’d fired the 30-06 into the cigar store. He later heard the bullet passed through some comic books and cup cakes, into the house beside the store, where it lodged in a woman’s couch. The neighbor had complained, and John Messersmith had taken the gun away, saying it was the “kind of gun that somebody should have who knew what they were doing.” In its place, John Messersmith gave him a shotgun loaded with buckshot.
Now, while waiting to hear the tip-off on the police scanner, Knouse and the other boys waited. And waited. And waited.
Where was that Sherman Spells?
Knouse goes on to describe this period of waiting: “And he gave me a shotgun I didn’t like everytime I leave the house have the shotgun you know (sic). There was a lot of idle time you know sitting on the porch, drinking, smoking cigarettes this and that I mean getting tired. There was drugs. There was speed, there was crank, there was acid. I mean everybody wasn’t like altogether upstairs mentally you know what I mean. There was a lot of getting high and craziness. I mean when I know myself I was under the influence.”
6
“It was insane”
At the barricade, meanwhile, a little after 9pm, Bubba Dickson’s light gray Cadillac, on its way to the grocery store, had by this time stopped at the traffic light. Approaching the light and seeing the policemen, Hattie Dickson made it a point to flip on her turn signal. She kept coming toward the intersection.
Her mother was a backseat driver.
“Don’t you see the red light?” Beatrice Mosley asked.
Hattie stopped the car. The policemen saw four or five blacks in the Cadillac, waiting at the light, behind a few other cars. The light changed.
The cops allowed the Cadillac to pass the barricade. Years later, Hattie would remember the cops talking and smiling as one waved her through.
By this time, amid all the mob confusion down the block at the railroad tracks and in the Messersmith home, witnesses report seeing several policemen mixed in with the kids running around with guns. Were these cops on roving patrol in the neighborhood, as mentioned by Trooper Roberts? Were they policemen responding to Annabel Kline’s complaints of snipers on the roofs? One of the boys present that night, Stephen Noonan, remembers seeing a police car at the Messersmiths’ about the time of the shooting. Noonan reports an officer told the boys to stay inside with their guns.
Newberry Street was also the family home of a policeman. York police officer Wayne Ruppert’s mother, Miriam, lived at 121 N. Newberry, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks. Officer Ruppert and his brother lived at the family home off and on over the years, and often hung out there. Shortly after the shooting that night, Officer Ruppert would be spotted on Newberry Street, talking to the murderers. Years later, Ruppert would become chief of police.
We have every reason to believe cops were all over the place on Newberry Street at the very instant the wrong car passed through the barricade and came down the block.
Several witnesses report the following: as the car rounded the corner at Philadelphia and Newberry streets, one of the cops stationed at the barricade opened the microphone of his two-way radio and broadcast an alert that the car was coming. He spoke through a police radio located either in his cruiser, or perhaps over a radio this officer was carrying. He broadcast an alert about the Cadillac. The identity of this officer is a mystery.
We know of this broadcast because, blocks away, in Farquar Park, Patrolman Charlie Robertson says he heard the transmission.
Robertson remembers an officer at the barricade radioed an alert that a Cadillac had just run the barricade at a high rate of speed. “Oh shit a car got through,” Robertson remembers hearing.
This is collaborated by Rick Knouse, who remembers John Messersmith listening to a police scanner for word of the arriving Cadillac.
Out on Newberry Street, a sudden relay of shouts alerted all that the awaited Cadillac full of blacks was coming, and everyone without guns get off the street. A hornet’s nest of doped-up kids, most of them toting guns, with, witnesses say, cops standing among them, looked down the street and saw a light Cadillac emerging from the dusk, its headlights beaming.
It looked all the world like the Spells brothers’ Cadillac. Some of the white boys began to run, taking off through the backyards and down the tracks to get away.
In the backseat the minister’s wife, Beatrice, noticed a group of people sitting on a porch, then, by a railroad track a short distance ahead, she saw a state trooper with a gun. The trooper suddenly pointed his gun at the car. Murray Dickson, in the front seat, noticed another policeman pushing his motorcycle out of the way, off the street and onto the sidewalk.
A block from the barricade they had just passed, as the Cadillac approached a dip in the road where a railroad track crosses Newberry Street, Hattie finally noticed the large, menacing group of white men at the side of the road, pointing guns at their approaching Cadillac.
“Oh Lord, they’re going to shoot!” Hattie yelled. Most of the young men with guns were off to the right, just on the other side of the tracks. One was a heavy-set looking cracker. They noticed an older man with a gun on the other side of the street. Other young men with guns hung out the second-floor window of the Messersmiths’ row house, while still more clung to the roof and chimney above. All had guns pointing at the car rolling out of the dusk.
Hattie said she’d turn around and go back. Lillie Belle urged her to keep going and drive past the gunmen, but Hattie panicked and yelled she wasn’t going that way and started to make a U-turn to the left on the railroad tracks. The big car made a wide turn, as the kids with the guns followed the car around. Now on the railroad tracks, Hattie encountered a cement barrier. Lillie yelled for her to be careful less she hit the pole. Hattie excitedly said she wouldn’t hit the pole and put the car in reverse and started to back up.
Outside, in the street, the stoned and scared boys saw the trunk of the reversing Cadillac backing toward them. They fully expected Sherman Spells or one of his soul brothers to pop from the trunk and start shooting, as had happened yesterday. Looking down their guns at the trunk of the approaching Cadillac, the car suddenly stalled.
Inside the stalled car, Lillie Belle announced she’d drive. Lillie opened the left rear door, jumped from the car, and waved her arms, about to holler. She reached for the driver’s door and began to pull it open.
What happened next would live forever in the memories of the many boys pointing guns at the car, at the many neighbors who looked on from their porches, and the many policemen who watched in plain sight from the barricade and the street beyond.
Lillie wore a blue and white-striped blouse. As she opened the driver’s door, Bobby Messersmith bore down on her and pulled the trigger of his long-barreled shotgun. He had earlier loaded his shotgun with a huge slug. He had prepared the slug by carving a notch in its top, all the better, he explained, for it to blow apart on impact.
Messersmith’s shotgun roared. Lillie Belle was thrown back and lifted by the blast, torn from her sneakers. She fell and leaned against the car, her face toward the front.
“Lillie Belle’s been shot!” her mother cried. Hattie swung open the door and climbed out. She saw her sister on the ground, bleeding. In shock, Hattie started to run down the railroad tracks. Noticing she had left the headlights on, she went back to turn them off.
As she got back into the car someone yelled, “Get ’em, Neff!” at Girarder Greg Neff. All hell broke loose as at least twenty-five boys in the street, in the windows of the row house, and on the roof, opened fire on the car. It was by all accounts a furious and loud barrage. Muzzles flashed all along the street, from windows and roofs, and other places. Flashes lit the street, witnesses said. Each volley rocked the car.
Inside the car Murray Dickson pulled Hattie into the car and held her down in the seat. In the backseat Reverend Mosley also put his head down, but Mrs. Mosley went to the door to try to pull Lillie Belle to safety. She looked out and saw that Lillie Belle by this time had slumped under the car. The minister told his wife to take cover and lay down; only God could help their daughter now.
The boys kept firing. One boy blew out the back window, shattering the glass. They kept firing into the back and side of the car, into the trunk.
The minister and his family cried and prayed in the car. The Caddy’s thick sheet metal (and everyone keeping their heads down) probably saved the lives of those inside.
Neighbors watched the ambush from porches and windows. Some ducked behind walls and cars and looked on. Other watched through their curtains. One bystander was peppered with shotgun pellets. The gunfire roared. The whole side of the block seemed to flash and roar with gunfire, and burn with smoke.
“I heard a lot of high power rifle and small .22 fire,” one man, Harold Loss recalled. Loss sat on the porch of a second-hand store with its owner, John Nelson, just down the street, at 127 N. Newberry. During the shooting, Loss saw at least four policemen standing a short distance away, near the barricade on the corner of Philadelphia and Newberry Streets, by the church. The cops — state and local police — like the rest of the people up and down the block, looked on and watched the attack.
“It was insane,” Rick Knouse later remembered.
Up at the corner barricade, state trooper Gerald Roberts remembers watching the Cadillac round the corner and head up Newberry Street. They watched as it made a sudden turn at the tracks and stop. Then all he heard was gunfire. He and his partner, Trooper Steve Rendish, took cover behind their cruiser while the shooting continued. They did nothing to help the family in the car.
York policeman Ron Zeager likewise remembers watching the car cruise down Newberry Street. When the shooting started, they “took cover behind their cruiser,” he says. Zeager, like officers Roberts, Rendish, Linker and Marchowski, and whoever else may have been standing at the barricade, did nothing to come to the aid of the family that was being attacked in front of their eyes.
For some reason they would wait for another team of police, blocks away in Farquar Park, to answer the call for help.
While the cops hid behind their cruisers, the fusillade finally stopped, but not before one last blast blew out a rear tire. Tire air hissed through the night, mixing with the soft sounds of whimpers and murmured prayers of Rev. Mosley’s family hiding in the car. The stillness must’ve seemed uneasy. Gunsmoke wafted above the houses and hung over the block. The gunsmoke took on an eerie quality in the gathering moonlight. The shot-up car with the body lying in the road reminded the stoned boys of something out of the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde.
Lillie Belle Allen’s mother remembered a policeman at this point coming up and looking into the car. “A police officer finally came up and wanted to know if anyone else was hurt and we said no, and he said to keep down,” Beatrice Mosley would tell city police later that night at the hospital.
Who was this officer? He obviously was one the policemen who witnessed the mistaken ambush. Perhaps he was one of the cops Beatrice spotted standing among the gang. Maybe he came down from the barricade. I asked retired Trooper Gerald Roberts why they had not helped the family in the car. “We did!” Roberts told me. “There’s a lot that happened,” Roberts went on. “You don’t know. You weren’t there.”
In any event., this officer seen by Beatrice eyed the body of Lillie Belle lying in a pool of blood, and peered into the car. He was the first to understand the problem.
Sherman Spells wasn’t in the car. James Spells wasn’t in the car. These quivering people, their hair and faces sparkling with shattered glass, didn’t seem to be armed. No one in this car had anything to do with the shooting of Officer Henry Schaad. There was only the most superficial, the most tenuous and unfair connection to the shooting of Henry Schaad. Blacks had shot Schaad, a white cop. Lillie Belle Allen, a black, had been shot by whites. From that moment a thought began to take root in the minds of York police. They got one of us; we got one of them. The score had been made even. Blood vengeance, blood justice.
The cops, as promised, would just have to back up the boys. The cops at the barricade and the cops in the street who participated in this and who witnessed this would need protection too.
Otherwise, they were all in deep shit.
It looked like hell. A real problem, particularly with race riot raging in the background.
After the policeman asked those inside if anybody else was hurt, and told them to keep down, he got the hell out of there, like the other cops who witnessed or participated in the ambush.
The kids who had done the shooting meanwhile moved around the car, their guns at the ready, taking in the shot-up Cadillac and the body in the street.
Rick Knouse, years later, remembers the aftermath. “I recalled myself walking down, not the whole way down, looking just you know like damn. You know seeing the car and it looked like Bonnie and Clyde. Like riddled, (a) bullet-riddled car and this person lying there and shit and then I hauled ass back up to the house.”
Before long they heard the sounds of an approaching police armored car. Somebody yelled that the armored car was coming and the kids scattered into the alleyways. Some ran back into the Messersmith house. One boy ran into the home next door to the Messersmiths’ and chatted with the occupants. A man, two women, and several girls chatted as though nothing much of note had just happened.
The street was empty, save for the Cadillac and the bloody woman lying beside the car on the pavement.
7
York police to the rescue
The armored car meanwhile rumbled up one of the side alleyways and stopped some distance from the Cadillac. One of the young patrolmen inside, Charlie Robertson, got out of the car and yelled for everyone not to shoot.
Robertson remembers it this way: he and three other officers had been several blocks away, northeast of Newberry Street, in nearby Farquar Park. The police had an antenna in the park. Officers were stationed at the park to protect the antenna from rumored attack. Robertson and the others in the armored car were shooting the shit with the cops guarding the tower. They’d been chatting when, Robertson says, he heard the call over his police radio that a car had run the barricade at a high rate of speed.
Moments later, Robertson and the other cops heard a sudden barrage of gunfire. With that they started off toward Newberry Street. Robertson remembers driving the armored car down Jefferson Avenue with three other cops in the car. He turned south onto Pershing, turning onto College Hill heading west to Newberry. In route, they received a transmission from the dispatcher advising that shots were being fired on Newberry Street. They drove until they reached the area of the railroad tracks, parking some distance from the shot-up Cadillac.
Robertson remembers getting out of the armored car and yelling, “Don’t shoot!”
“Who is it?” Robertson says a voice in the darkness called back.
“It’s me, Charlie!”
“Come ahead!”
Neighbors looked on from their homes as Robertson and another patrolman, Dennis McMaster, approached the Cadillac with guns drawn. Neither of these two were the lone officer who had peered into the car and told the family to keep down.