William
Kelly- Remarks before the Atlantic County Historical Society Luncheon – October
12, 2019
It is an
honor to be invited to address this distinguished group of historians and
people interested in our local regional history, and I don’t want to lecture
you about things you are already well acquainted with. So I will briefly address
a number of interesting issues that are not included in 300 Years at the Point,
and hope to inspire you to research them further.
A
history buff may read a lot of history, but a researcher takes what is known
and takes it further, and there are plenty of areas that are in need of more
research.
I will
be talking about two murders, two mayors and two brothers. The murders of Harry
Anglemeyer and the Parkway Coeds are considered cold case homicides, but they
can and should be solved to a legal and moral certainty, though justice will
never be served.
Harry
Anglemyer was the Boardwalk Fudge King who owned a chain of Copper Kettle Fudge
Shops in Sea Isle City, Ocean City and Atlantic City. He lived above his shop on
the Ocean City boardwalk, was an active civic association member and was an advocate
of doing away with the city’s blue laws that forbade him from selling fudge on
Sunday. He was also somewhat flagrantly gay, and an embarrassment to other
civic leaders who didn’t appreciate his lifestyle, that included a nightly
swirl through Somers Point bars, until Labor Day, 1964. That’s the night that
he said he was supposed to reluctantly meet someone at the Dunes after hours
nightclub on the Longport Blvd. There he met his death when a man in a black
suit punched him and he hit his head on a concrete bunker. Three men then
lifted him into his car, took his diamond ring, and left him to bleed to death.
I write about Anglemeyer’s murder in my Roman a Cleff novela – Waiting on the
Angels – the Long, Cool, Summer of ’65 Revisited, which you can read on line – https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2582362646983539002
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The
Anglemeyer murder can be solved, but the Ocean City police have obstructed the
investigation because some of their relatives are involved.
Then
there’s the Memorial Day 1969 Parkway Co-ed Murders of two young college girls
whose car was towed off the Parkway and they were found dead in the woods a few
days later, a cold trail that today, leads directly to mass murderer Ted Bundy.
Bundy was here at the time, and his MO – Modus Operandi was used and he
actually confessed to the crime to his prison psychologist – saying it was the
first time he “did it.” And because the State Police failed to call in the car
they towed, the murders went undetected for a few days, long enough for the
killer to get away. And the fact that the police made mistakes in their
investigation, they refuse to consider Bundy a suspect because if he did do it,
then they could be responsible for the thirty some murders he committed
afterwards.
Now my
father was a policeman for 47 years, and I understand that, but Bundy’s
fingerprints should be compared to those found on the car, and his DNA should
be checked against those found at the scene.
And both
of these cold case homicides can be taken off the books.
The two
mayors of Somers Point I want to mention are John McCann, Jr. and George
Roberts. John McCann, Jr. was the son of the John McCann, prohibition
bootlegger who specialized in beer – and was considered a Beer Barron who owned
Bay Shores and built the Dunes nightclub.
When he
was elected Mayor, McCann actually lived in Pittsburgh and traveled to Somers
Point council meetings by helicopter. Then one day he picked up his teenage
daughters in school and with his wife disappeared. It turns out that, like his
father before him, McCann got heavily involved in smuggling drugs – cocaine,
bringing it in by the ton by plane, until one of his planes crashed in Mexico.
That’s when he disappeared.
McCann
was then spotted in Canada, stocking shelves in a convenience store, recognized
by a Somers Point local on vacation. McCann was then arrested reentering the
United States from Canada, and he pleads a bargain to make sure his wife and family
was protected. His wife then married his lawyer and McCann was called to
testify before the Kerry Congressional Committee where he told of his
experience with Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama. McCann visited Noriega and gave him a suitcase full of cash in exchange for his planes to be allowed
to refuel in Panama. Noriega showed McCann the file the CIA kept on Somers Point
mayor, clearly indicating his own ties to the agency. After corresponding with
me a number of times by mail, McCann died of cancer in prison. His Senate
testimony however, should be obtained and archived for those who want to
advance the research in these areas.
Then
there was Mayor George Roberts, whose real estate office was across the street
from City Hall and Charlies bar. Roberts had the listing for the Anchorage
Tavern, and while on vacation in Florida, accepted a down payment for the
Anchorage from Bill Morris. When Morris came to Somers Point to inspect the
property, Andrew Corneglia the owner was surprised as Roberts never told him
about the sale or the down payment, a six figure sum that Roberts kept. While
Andrew fought the sale in court, he lost and had to sell the property, but the
news reports of Roberts’ treachery brought a number of other local people out to
reval how Roberts had also done some unsavory things to them involving mortgage fraud and false sales. And while there have been periodic news reports, someone
should put this story together in one place.
Now as
for the two brothers, I’m quite confident you never heard of them, because I am
still learning about them. This story stems from the little yellow booklet of
photos of homes from the 1920s. Back in the late 1970s when I first came across
the booklet, I traveled around town taking photos of the homes that appeared in
the book to compare and contrast them after fifty years. One of them is the
house on the north east corner of Fifth Street and New York Avenue, which the
booklet shows was once a very large mansion that took up the entire block.
While the Carriage House in the back on the alley is a good example of the type
of original architecture, much of the mansion apparently burned down in a fire,
but what remains has been restored and divided into a number of apartments,
where a friend of mine now lives.
Spending
time there, I took an interest in the original owner and found that Willard
Huntington Wright was a distinguished New York literary editor who wrote early
detective novels under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, popularizing fictional
detective Philo Vance, and setting the style for Sam Spade, Columbo and other similar
detective novels that were made into radio shows and movies, which is where
Wright made his money. Apparenly he spent some of it on his Somers Point
mansion, where he was known to throw lavish parties. Willard Wright’s brother
Stanton Wright was an artist – a modern artist in the Picaso tradition, and
they wrote an important book together – From Manet to Cubism, and Stanton
painted a realistic portrait of his brother Willard that hands in the National
Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
