Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were killed in 1934. Two years later, the story of the outlaw lovers was as powerful as it had ever been, and was undoubtedly on Janet Borland’s mind one winter’s night when she met a beguiling young rogue named Clarence Campbell, a small-time car thief from Missouri who had left a trail of stolen autos and forfeited bail bonds from Oklahoma to Ohio. She was impressed enough to agree to […]
The Liberty Hotel was a solid, 19th-century building at the southern end of the New Castle streetcar line, by the Mahoningtown railroad station. Its upper floors accommodated a selection of permanent and short-stay residents, and its ground floor housed a restaurant, a bar and commercial rooms that were rented, over the years, to various businesses. On May 23, 1932, during the period when the Mahoning Trust Company operated a bank on the premises, it became […]
It came as a surprise to everyone when John Assid killed Ethel Brown and Assunta Monsey on Highland Avenue one February evening in 1945. He’d been sent off to war a couple of years before – very much against his will and only after he’d been captured by police when he tried to skip town rather than go to the army induction center – and he should on that day have been in Europe, fighting alongside […]
On the last Sunday night in 1940, Frank Bullano and his friend, James Perrone, both seventeen years old, were stopped and searched after being seen loitering around the parking meters on North Mercer street. Between them, they were carrying $3.25 in nickels – roughly the daily wage of a factory worker. They were arrested and held for further investigation, but were eventually released, having consistently denied any wrongdoing. A few days before Christmas, five years later, Frank […]
Charles was a good boy, but he had done a bad thing. A well turned out, plump young man, with the intellect of a child, who lived with his mother and her husband in a decent house on Randolph street, he had no idea what had come over him to make him raise the false fire alarm. “I don’t know why I did it!” he told the police. He had seen the fire alarm […]
The Government bought 450 million bushels of grain from the 1947 harvest to send abroad as part of its $400 million Greek-Turkish aid programme, aimed at stopping both countries going Communist. The policy prompted the John S Brown feed company of New Castle to insert the following notice in the small ads section every week for a year: “TURKEY and GREASE get the GRAVY—$400,000,000 worth. What do we get? We get the highest grain prices […]
When he was eight years old, William Fabian nearly burned to death. “The boy’s clothes had been soaked in gasoline by playmates, who then set them afire”, the newspaper said. A passer-by heard him screaming for help and beat the flames out, saving him from “almost certain death as a ‘human torch’”. William was taken to hospital with severe burns, and the two boys who had been with him—Benjamin Byro and Walter Krausm, both six […]
By half past four in the morning, William Janiel was too blind drunk to drive his car, so he gave the keys to Josephine Stewart and told her to take him home, regardless of the fact that Josephine was blind drunk too. As they progressed at some speed down South Mill street, she somehow struck a parked car and crashed straight into another. William Janiel was quite badly hurt—pain in his head; blood on his […]
The January, 1939, basketball game between New Castle high and Butler high dominated the sports pages of the New Castle News for three days, causing even news of Joe Louis’s defence of his world champion title to be squeezed into a few column inches. The winning team stood a good chance of taking the section three title, which New Castle had taken from Butler the year before. The honour of the town was at stake. […]
William Mattingly’s car exploded outside his house at 4 o’clock in the morning. His housekeeper, the first to leave the house and see the car in flames, noticed a man standing in the trees nearby. She shone a torch on him and he ran away. A stick of dynamite or a heavy charge of powder had been placed on the car’s gas tank and ignited. Mattingly couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to blow up […]
Small Town Noir 