Chester Tomski ran away from home at the age of thirteen. He hitchhiked around the Franklin and Oil City area, stealing what he could to get by—like the $2 in the pocketbook he took from ten-year-old Bernice Hazlett—and selling stolen bikes for $1.50 or so. He was caught after a week and sent home.
Four years later, when he was seventeen, Chester was arrested behind the wheel of a car he’d stolen from the parking lot of the Mathews conveyor company. He’d been practicing his driving all day, going up and down the back roads between New Castle and Ellwood City, and the car was in a bad way. He was given six months in Huntingdon reformatory. He went there the same day his father, Frank, started his own six-month sentence in the Alleghenny workhouse, for selling liquor without a license.
Chester started stealing cars again within weeks of his release. The police went to his parents’ house, where he’d been living since he got out, but he wasn’t there. He had left home as soon as he heard the police were looking for him, taking with him his father’s only suit, which he stole while Frank was out.
On the fourth of May, an off-duty policeman called Thomas Boyle was taking his wife for a drive in the country when he noticed a stolen Plymouth at a sandbank on the road beyond the Moffatt school. Chester was sitting behind the wheel. Chester saw officer Boyle recognise him and started his engine, taking off across Hickory Heights to the Harlansburg road.
Boyle went after Chester along the dirt roads towards East Brook. Chester ditched the Plymouth and ran into a swamp. Boyle found him hiding under some bushes. The next day, Chester pled guilty to larceny of an auto, hoping for a light sentence. Once all the auto thefts and parole violations were taken into account (as well as a bungled escape attempt while he was awaiting trial), he ended up with ten to twenty years.
Chester spent all of the forties and fifties in jail—he was given extra time when he was caught trying to saw his way out of the Western penitentiary in 1955. By 1966, he was out on parole, but he was sent back to jail when he was caught driving a stolen car in Shenango township, just outside New Castle. By the time he got out of jail again he was over fifty and he had seen about as much of life outside of an institution as most of the boys he was at school with had seen by their early twenties. From the day in 1937 when, at the age of seventeen, he had been sentenced for stealing the car from outside Mathews conveyor, he had been either in custody or on parole.
Chester went back inside for the last time in 1973, after he burgled a furniture store in Rimersburg. He died at the age of fifty-nine, not long after he was finally released.
Sources: Franklin News-Herald (2 March 1933, “Two Boys Arrested After Several Petty Thefts”; 20 March 1933, “Oil City Happenings In Brief”); New Castle News (17 July 1937,”Youth Held On Car Theft Charge”; 17 January 1939, “Pleads Guilty; Sent To Jail”; 24 January 1939, “Confesses To Having Stolen Several Cars”; 6 May 1940, “Tomski Caught”; 21 May 1940, “Youth Returns To County Jail”; 21 May 1940, “Four Prisoners Are Blamed For Trying General Jail Break”; 3 Jan 1966, “Man Jailed After Police Chase, Crash”); Oil City Derrick, 27 March 1973, “2 Held For Burglary In Rimersburg”.
Small Town Noir 
Another good story, Diarmid
And, once again, I’m grateful to you for sending the mug shot to me!
seems like such a waste.poor guy must of had little loving guidance.Thank you for your stories and all the time researching.It certainly makes me think how easily a whole lifetime can turn around and then slip away by making bad choices
Thanks for writing. And yes, this poor guy’s story really shows how bad things can get when bad choices and bad luck accumulate.
A very sad story.
Such a waste…
Yes, for him, his family and community. 😔
I enjoy reading the stories that you write to accompany these photos!
Thank you for doing this for us!
Thanks, Marty — glad to!
*wonders what Chester’s niece Cathy, still of New Castle, would make of her uncle’s naughty antics*
It’s all water under the bridge…
Hi Diarmid,
Quite unrelated to this posting but possibly relevant to your website, I was wondering if you were familiar with a book I’ve just finished reading, “Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence” by Bill James. (James is best known as a baseball statistician.)
Chapter XIV (“The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run”) concerns a serial murderer whose modus operandi was to decapitate his victims. James lists a number of incidents in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where headless bodies were found, most in proximity to the railroad line that runs between New Castle and Cleveland:
New Castle, Pennsylvania: 1923-1924 (6 victims); July 1, 1936; October 13, 1939; 1941
Cleveland, Ohio: September 1934-August 1938 (13 victims); July 22, 1950
Youngstown, Ohio: June 30, 1939
McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania: May 3, 1940 (3 victims)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: 1941
I may have missed a few.
Based on his analysis, James came up with a hypothetical biography of the killer:
1895-1898: born in Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh, or New Castle and spent childhood in New Castle
1917: went into the US Army
1918 or early 1919: left army
1919: possibly married a New Castle woman
1922: suffered a major stress, possibly a marriage breakup
1924 or 1925: convicted of a major crime and went to prison
1933 or 1934: released from prison and moved to Cleveland
1938: interviewed by police and fled to Youngstown
1942-1954: died, without ever being caught
When reading this chapter of the book, I immediately thought of your website, due to all the references to New Castle.
Thanks for writing. I hadn’t come across Bill James’s psychological profile, but that’s fascinating – thanks for taking the time to set it all out.
All the time I’ve been doing this site, I’ve been looking for a mugshot that would let me tell the story of New Castle’s murdet swamp, where lots of headless corpses turned up in the 20s, the result of crimes possibly committed by the guy who later became known as the mad butcher of Kingsbury run, but I haven’t found one… so far. I’ll keep looking, of course.
I’m thinking of using this site to do a concept album inspired by this blog if you are ok with that – a song about/inspired by an individual post. the imagery is fascinating and i feel i could weave something amazing from this. my friend is from newcastle and i just happened upon this site. thank you for the amazing work!
I hope you do exactly that — I’d be very excited to hear it. I’m listening to your album on Spotify as I write this (https://open.spotify.com/album/5Ql7N8SSOgwXUJ45pgsFDg — for the benefit of anyone reading this comment) and I like it a whole lot. Let me know how you get on if you start the project. It would be amazing.
wow, thank you!
I wonder how the officer’s wife took that little detour from their pleasure drive.
Thanks for the stories! I know what it takes to find this information — I write blog about orphan train riders. You don’t find the story for every name!
Yes, I bet she was just thrilled.
Thanks for writing. I just had a quick search and found your blog, Orphan Trains of Illinois. It looks fascinating! As you say, you don’t always find stories, but when you do it’s great, isn’t it?