In Downtown Baltimore, a 1922 Madison Street murder gets a retelling

Yahoo

4 hours ago

Park Avenue and West Madison Street seem an unlikely setting for the grim events of August 18, 1922. The landmark Gothic brownstone spire of First Presbyterian Church (the tallest church tower in Baltimore) threw a shadow toward Howard Street, where the Commonwealth Bank had just opened its bronze doors.
Within minutes, William Norris and Fred Kuethe left the bank carrying a cash payroll of $6,750 for employees at their flourishing construction firm.
A five-member bandit gang descended upon Norris and Kuethe. Within seconds, a stickup became a botched, bloody crime scene. Witnesses heard the gunshots. Passengers saw the incident from their seats as streetcars passed. The attackers jumped into a large, stolen Hudson Cruiser touring car and sped off toward East Baltimore.
Many bystanders noted the license: 85:065. A city police officer saw the oversized Hudson and recognized one of the gang members. Within 24 hours, paper currency bands with 'Commonwealth Bank' on them appeared in Back River, where some of the loot was distributed.
Bystanders picked up Norris' wounded body and carried the contractor two short city blocks to Maryland General Hospital, where he died on an operating table.
A new book, 'Murder on Madison Street,' by author John Voneiff II, retells this Baltimore story based upon previously unpublished notes taken by the prosecuting attorney, Herbert R. O'Conor, who later became Maryland's governor and a U.S senator.
By chance, Voneiff heard O'Conor's son, James Patrick 'Jim' O'Conor, retell this tale while both men were in the Baltimore County Club's exercise room in Roland Park. The men, who enjoyed a rich friendship, rehashed the particulars of the Norris murder case. Voneiff, supplied with the lawyer Herbert O'Conor's copious notes, then wrote the book over three years during the pandemic. James O'Conor died in 2023. His father, the governor-senator, died in 1960.
The result is a Baltimore true crime classic.
Things like this were not supposed to happen in Baltimore, steps away from the Washington Monument and the Peabody Institute. Within a little more than a year, the Alcazar, today's Baltimore School for the Arts, would open a few feet from the murder scene. Most of the best physicians and dentists in Baltimore practiced nearby.
The victim, William Norris, was 44 years old, a City College and Maryland Institute graduate, married with young sons. He was a co-owner of Hicks, Tate & Norris, a construction firm located across the street from the murder site. He lived in Govans on Beaumont Avenue. Civic outrage burned bright when a business executive, just doing his job, was gunned down on an otherwise quiet Friday, a payday morning.
The Baltimore Sun and Evening Sun immediately posted a $5,000 reward for the capture of the killer. Then Gov. Albert Ritchie added to the reward pot, as did members of Maryland's Masonic orders.
Voneiff's book, drawn from the prosecuting attorney Herbert O'Conor's extensive private papers, indicates that Baltimore had more of a pervasive underworld crime scene than people commonly understood. National prohibition brought a trade in illegal liquor production and sales. Baltimore had plenty of thirsty customers who patronized what became an expanding army of haphazard crooks.
Political corruption flourished, if not always acknowledged. City State's Attorney Robert F. Leach Jr. became so disenchanted that he left his office without seeking reelection.
The Norris case involved a set of interesting players. The gang's ringleader and brain was a cool customer named Jack Hart, a crook with all the right credentials. He was smart, liked the illegal liquor racket and managed to escape the State Penitentiary at least twice. His wife, an East Baltimore lass named Kitty Kavanaugh, who by all accounts truly loved her man, added spice to the Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow scenario.
The crime was conceived quickly in a house in the 900 block of North Broadway in Upper Fells Point. Some of the loot was divided up in Essex and Back River.
The crime was so controversial that the trial of the shooter, a man named Walter Socolow, had to be moved to Towson's Baltimore County Courthouse.
Socolow opened fire when Norris and Kuethe refused to surrender the payroll, worth about $150,000 in today's money. He was spared the hangman's noose and spent years incarcerated before being paroled and trained as a printer. He ended his days in 1970 living in a rooming house and making a living in the old News American's composing room.
The sensational case unfolded quickly. Baltimore police detectives captured Hart in a Pennsylvania Avenue apartment near the White House in Washington, D.C., after being ratted out by the wife of one of his liquor-dealing criminal accomplices.
Socolow fled to Long Island and initially hid at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. New York. New York City police detectives arrested him after he bought a copy of The Baltimore Sun at a Bryant Park newsstand near the New York Public Library.
The story took a hit of criminal/legal adrenaline when prosecutor O'Conor, with Baltimore detectives and assisted by New York cops, kidnapped Socolow from an extradition hearing that could have delayed his speedy passage back to Baltimore. O'Conor and his captive Socolow, with detectives in tow, found backstairs out of the courthouse. An unmarked New York cop car took them to a steam ferry, the Elizabeth, to traverse the Hudson River. They disembarked at Jersey City and caught a series of trains to Baltimore.
Justice moved very quickly. Socolow was convicted on October 20, 1922, less than two months after the heist.
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