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Show BROADWAY AND MAIN STREET Patty MacVeigh, a Patient Cop, Worked Hard To Solve 'Hugger Mugger in Automat Mystery WkWBTV " tar V By BILLY ROSE siderine how few of them there are, gets plenty f result-SldeTTiveyou result-SldeTTiveyou an idea of what DeX P tag. let me tell you the classic story ol. .fHl, "gr-Mugger in the how he solved the case usually referred to as Hugger Mugger , AiiTrtmat " I and headed for the men's room. At the foot of the stairs he collapsed and died. So far, so clear. Next, MacVeigh Mac-Veigh went to work on Lillian Rosen f eld. She had been a harmless harm-less old bat who scavenged around junk heaps, and for 28 years had lived in a S7-a-month basement room which was filled with everything from old piano rolls to a rusty weather vane. From employees of the Automat, the detective learned that on several sev-eral occasions the old dame had parked herself in the mezzanine where she could watch the tables on the main floor, and when someone some-one left without finishing a meal, she would hurry down and eat the remains or scoop them into a paper bag. That finished the case. Obviously the scavenger had seen Jellinek leave part of his roll and had popped the half-eaten bun into her mouth. MacVeigh's investigation uncovered uncov-ered an additional irony. While sifting sift-ing through the hodge-podge in Lillian's Lil-lian's room, he found six bankbooks which showed she had $45,000 stashed in various banks in Manhattan Man-hattan and New Jersey. The annual interest on her nest egg was $1,200, or eight times the amount Jellinek needed to save his garage and life. One morning in August, 1933, two people died suddenly and withm a few minutes of im each other in the r-w 4 nickel - in - the- . . ' T slot restaurant at f ' 1 Broadway and. I J 104th street. One, pv f a dowdy old 1 p dame named Lil- f'J, . v lian . Rosenfeld, F keeled over in the I j 1 restaurant's mez- 1,.. A. - AaJ zanine, and the Biy Kose other, a middle-aged middle-aged garageman named Harry Jellinek, Jel-linek, was found outside the little boys' room in the basement. The coroner certified that both deaths were caused by a powerful dose of cyanide of- potassium. Was it a case of double murder? mur-der? Was it double suicide? Or was it murder and suicide? Detective Patty MacVeigh was handed this sizzling spud, and went about cooling it off not like a Sherlock Sher-lock Holmes but like an ordinary policeman. He started by question-where question-where the victims had lived, inching inch-ing everyone in the neighborhoods by-inched the tenement flats they had called their homes; jig-sawed together a lot of biographical bits and pieces, and came up with a solution so-lution so simple that no one connected con-nected with the case could imagine why it hadn't been thought of right away. Jellinek's past was reconstructed easily enough. Starting as a helper in a garage, he had managed to save enough to buy his own business, busi-ness, and his garage had prospered until the depression hit it. When things got tough, he borrowed $150 from a bank, and when he couldn't meet the note on July 1, he was threatened with foreclosure. Figuring he had nothing to live for, he purchased $3 worth of powdered pow-dered cyanide and then, with his last nickel, bought himself a poppy-seed poppy-seed roll at the Automat. He dug a hole in it, poured the powder in, bit off as much as he could chew |
