H. J. Rogers
Harvard Law School '66
"And the L-rd set a mark upon Cain . . . . " Gen. 4-15.
It's been well over 50 years but I can remember the haunted look in Tom Cronk's eyes. To borrow from Audie Murphy, another WW II vet, they were the eyes of a man who had been "to hell and back". For Cronk it had been the South Pacific, Iwo Jima and all that. The only physical scar that was visible was the absence of four fingers and half of his throwing hand. At his trial they said that he had held onto a hand grenade a little to long. So instead of a fist he had a thumb and a piece of hard bone at the end of his forearm. Rather than being handicapped, according to Dr. Chuck Kelly, late of the Benwood Clinic (and at last report stretched out insentient on his back at Peterson Place), Cronk was able to deliver a near lethal blow with the "hand".
"Some guy was hassling Tom at this dive bar on the Island. They say Tom just sat there on the stool with his back to him. The guy was running his mouth, challenging Tom to fight him. Suddenly Tom spun around and hit the guy across the face with that bony hand and absolutely cold-cocked him. Then he spun back around, finished his drink, and and got up and left. The guy still laying there on the floor. They say he didn't move 'til the E-Squad showed up and carried him out on a stretcher."
Late one afternoon in the middle 50s, Cronk killed three people with a .45 in center Wheeling. A fellow named Dennis who used to hang around AA and drive the old vets to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh told me how he was playing in the courtyard with some other kids that day. Cronk just showed up with the gun in his good hand and then BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! "It just sucked up all the air. We sat there for the longest time. Then I could hear the sirens a long way off. It seemed like it too them forever to get there."
When Cronk woke up in the Ohio County jail the next morning he thought the cops had arrested him for drunk driving again. He asked the Deputy when he came by with the breakfast wagon "Hey, when am I going to get out to post bail?" He would tell me this years later one night in the guard's dining hall at the old West Virginia prison in Moundsville. He said that the guard stared at him for a long minute before he said "Tom, you ain't gonna get to post no bail. You killed three people last night."
As a high school sophomore at Shadyside [Ohio] high school, I had attended Cronk's trial. It was pretty much cut and dried with the only questions being whether he would get the death penalty or a life sentence. As I used to put it when I would tell this story to a fellow drunk, Cronk killed everyone except the personal he should have killed, his estranged wife. He killed her mother, father, and, as I recall, an aunt or a younger sister. The defense lawyer made much of Cronk's WW II record, his Purple Hearts and the rest of his medals, which is how the prosecutor spun it. Even to my untutored ear, this made him sound more like a cold-blooded killer than a man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Back then, of course, members of the Greatest Generation (my Father was an infantry lieutenant and spent 3 and 1/2 years in North Africa and Italy) were supposed to suck it up when they got back into mufti. Unless you were "shell-shocked" with that 1000 yard stare, no one was going to cut you any slack (and then not very much, especially if you self-medicated with alcohol.)
As I recall, after Cronk was convicted, there was no pre-sentence investigation, no witnesses for the defendant, nothing. With little or no argument from the attorneys, the judge sentence him to die in the electric chair. [The electric chair passed out of style years ago. Americans have long obsessed with a "humane" way to kill a human being. I think that the Chinese have attained the "state-of-the-art" in the death business, i.e. the offending wretch lies prone on the ground and the executioner---whose face may or may not be "well-hidden" in compliance with the words of the Nobel Prize winner for literature---fires a small caliber bullet into the base of the skull. I have read that a surgical team then "harvests" the saleable organs in the best tradition of hillbilly hog butchering. Nothing is wasted, my grandfather said, except the squeal.
When I showed up as prison guard in early 1963, I soon spotted Tom Cronk (along with 3 fellows from my hometown of Reader which had a population of c. 500. So it's a small world, right?) I was surprised that he wasn't on death row. When I asked the record clerk, he said that the Governor had granted a partial pardon of sorts, which somehow had cut the sentence to that of 2nd degree murder. Back then, that carried a 5-18. Cronk's father owned an IGA Grocery store in south Wheeling (within earshot of the murder scene, which means that he may have heard the gun go off.) The governor, W.W. Barron, who would later go to prison himself, probably sold the family a pardon. Unfortunately, for West Virginia, this was just "chump change" compared systemic looting of the State than occurred during that administration.
[As an item of full disclosure, I got my job at the prison by paying "social calls" on the Democratic chairman and the district committee man and woman. I then took the application to our State Delegate Herbert Schupbach and the next day the governor's office called and told me to report for work. TO THE VICTOR BELONGS THE SPOILS !!!]
The prison administration depended on Cronk for maintenance work and I had to get him out late one night to work on an electric problem. By the time he was done, it was two or three in the morning and I could see that he was wide awake and in no hurry to back to his cell. I took him over to the guard's dining hall and I fried up some eggs and bacon while he made a pot of coffee. Then he started talking about his drinking and what had happened to get him in prison. This is when he told me about asking the jail guard about when he could post bail. HE HAD BEEN IN AN ALCOHOLIC BLACKOUT WHEN HE KILLED THREE PEOPLE !
He wasn't trying to con men or excuse himself. The recitation was cold and factual. Later I would think about the trial. There had never been a hint about him even drinking before the murders, not a suggestion about him being literally unconscious while he killed his wife's mother and father and another relative. All that I remembered the defense trying to do at the trial was to generate some generalized sympathy because he was a veteran. Besides, most people, even if they believed a story about an alcoholic blackout, would not consider it exculpatory. Very few judges would give an instruction that voluntary intoxication could even be considered as a mitigating factor.
Still later I would think "Did he remember me being at his trial? Is he trying to send me a message?" I had started to drink on a nightly basis after I went to work at the prison. I soon had my first blast of alcoholic ecstasy---that one glorious drunk that alcoholics have and spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture. And I clearly remembered it. So I may have been feeling a little guilty. However, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that he would connect the face of the young guard with the high school boy at the trial.
What Tom Cronk did for me was to plant in my mind something like the tuning fork in 2001: A Space Odyssey, so that when the blackouts started coming fast and furious 20 years later, I knew that I was in big trouble. I loved to drink, I loved guns, and I had a short fuse. I remember thinking "If I do kill somebody, I want to know who it was and why I did it." I had my last drink on 25 May 1982 and by the grace and mercy of G-d and the fellowship of the men and women in the 12-step programs I have not found a reason to drink or use any mind-altering chemical over the intervening years.
Tom Cronk made parole and returned to Wheeling. I learned that he attended some 12-step meetings but we never met again. I would later read in the paper that he killed his son but was not charged, because it was deemed self-defense. The son had made some sort of home invasion. I owe Mr. Cronk a debt of gratitude. Thank you, Tom.
