Remarks Before the Atlantic County Historical Society

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 - allposts/src=sidebar                                          

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.