MASS MURDER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3795, 14 August 1936, Page 8

MASS MURDER

GIRL’S CONFESSION. MAN WANTED TO “SHOW OF#’ Six people brutally murdered—all because an ex-prize fighter wanted to show off! That is the story behind one of the most amazing and sensational crimes of the last few years (writes Harley Ford in a London journal). For a time it baffled the police. But in the end the woman he had tried to impress, tortured by nightmare memories of the grim scene she had been forced to witness, told the police the truth. Had Leo Hall not compelled the girl, Peggy Paulos, to accompany him on that fateful night, the mystery of this bloodthirsty mass murder might have remained for ever unsolved! He wanted to impress the pretty, 28-year-old waitress—his audience—with his ability to stage a hold-up! And no doubt that was all he intended to do, at first—but somewhere during the events that followed he went betserk and hacked, stabbed, hammered, and shot to death the six occupants of the little white house at Erland's Point, Washington. At the time of the crime the whole world rang with the gruesome details of the horrible end of a party in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Flieder. An angry cry went up for the killer, or killers, who had turned the cottage into a shambles. The crime was discovered when three little fluffy French poodles, imprisoned in a limousine outside the house, were heard yelping for food by the Flieder’s neighbours. When these neighbours investigated and cautiously gazed through the ground floor window they were horrified to see the bodies of two men prone on the living room floor. At once they notified the police. Breaking into the house, the officers found the bodies of the host, hostesss, and their four guests scattered all over the house. Every possible police inquiry was made, but without result, and the mass murder was added to the long list of unsolved crimes. Then just recently, Leo Hall was arrested on suspicion of another murder. For 18 months Peggy Paulos had kept quiet in terror of Hall’s threats against her life. Here was her chance.

She went to a lawyer and told him her appalling story. She convinced him that she had been present on the night of the dreadful murders, and, against her will, had been forced to witness the hold-up and part of the massacre that followed. The lawyer took her to the police, and she repeated her gruesome tale. She told how she had met' Hall in 1933, when her fiance, Larry Paulos, introduced her to the ex-prizefighter. Shortly afterwards, Paulos was sent to the penitentiary, and Hall began

to pay attention to his pretty girl friend. Peggy said he often came and asked her for money. She worked in various taverns. The Flieders were patrons of such places and big spenders. One night they tipped Peggy a dollar. She gave it to Hall. He said: “It would be a good place to stick up.” The girl thought he was “showing off.” “The next afternoon,” said Peggy, “Leo came to my apartment again and showed me a pearl-handled pistol. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for the hold-up.’ I saw then that he meant what he said the day before. I refused to go. I told him to get out of it. Then he threatened me, and I was afraid of him and started out.

“When we got to Bremerton," her narrative continued, “a car picked us up and we rode away. Then we got out and walked to the Flieder place. I pleaded with him not to do it. As the time came for us to enter the house, he forced me to go with him. “We put on masks and gloves and entered through the kitchen door. We found two men and two women in the sun room. Three were playing cards, and Mrs. Flieder, who was ill, was lying on the couch.

“Stick ’em up!” Hall ordered. They lined up at the point of the gun, which covered me as well as them. I was ordered to tie up their hands and to bind their mouths and eyes with tape. After we tied the four people, the big man (Chenevert) and the small one (Balsom) came in, and we tied them the same way. “Mrs. Flieder complained of not feeling well, and Leo took her intQ the bedroom. He brought her a glass of water and some pills. Then he went to the basement, came back and entered the bedroom again, closing the door. When he came out again there was blood all over his collar. I asked him what he had done, and he said: ‘Nothing.’ “Then he said he would separate the people. He took one of the men across the hallway partly closed the the door, and then I saw him strike a blow with something he had taken off the table. I started to run toward the kitchen door and he fired a shot at me. I got out of the house and made my way to Bremerton, where I stayed with friends. “I wasn’t sure what happened until I read about it in the papers. A few days later Leo came and told me he would kill me if I mentioned it to anybody, and would say I had killed one of six.”

The jury found Hall guilty of murder in the first degree, and he was sentenced to be hanged. The girl was set free. She married Paulos on his release from prison.