The Innocent and the Guilty: John Bartlow Martin and a Case in Pittsburgh

The letter arrived at the home of John Bartlow Martin in Highland Park, Illinois, without fanfare in 1957. As a nationally respected freelance reporter whose prize-winning work about crime often appeared in the pages of one of the country’s top magazines, the Saturday Evening Post, Martin received “a fair number of letters from convicts, most of whose complaints are without merit.” 

This letter was different. It came from Mary Simon whose son, John, had been convicted for a series of robberies and assaults from April 30 to May 28, 1942, in Pittsburgh’s Brookline neighborhood. The case became notorious in the local press, which dubbed the suspect the “Blue-Hooded Bandit” for the disguise he donned to hide his identity from his female victims.

Mary begged Martin to help free her son; she believed him to be innocent. John, who had learned to read while incarcerated at the Western State Penitentiary, had read one of Martin’s stories in the Post and asked his mother to write him about his case. While Martin noted that every prisoner who wrote him asking for help claimed to be innocent, one thing in Mary’s correspondence caught his attention. “Her letter said her son had been convicted without a lawyer,” Martin recalled. “I thought if true this was worth looking into.” Over the years in his work about crime, he had seen “innocent men convicted, guilty men convicted but convicted wrongfully, guilty men set free.” Martin decided to investigate. From his research, he produced a four-part series for the Post about how the criminal justice system sometimes went wrong. Of the cases he researched for the series, the Simon one meant the most to him because “I myself became involved.”

The Indiana-raised Martin, a graduate of DePauw University, had honed his observational skills as a police, city hall, and rewrite reporter on the Indianapolis Times in the late 1930s. He escaped the endless grind of newspaper work and left Indianapolis for Chicago and a career as a freelancer, first earning his living writing stories for such sensationalistic true-crime magazines as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime. During its heyday from 1935 to 1945, the true-crime genre attracted millions of readers across the country, with consumers having their pick of as many as seventy-five different periodicals on the average corner newsstand. A host of notable names in American literature wrote for these magazines, including Dashiell Hammett, Earle Stanley Gardner, Jim Thompson, Harlan Ellison, Ellery Queen, and Nunnally Johnson.

Martin said that while writing in the true-crime genre he learned the uses of such techniques as “description, dialogue, characterization, and perhaps above all narrative pull—that mysterious invisible force that pulls the reader onward.” He eventually found success by writing for such respected national magazines as Harper’s and especially the Post, which touted him on its cover as “America’s No. 1 Prize-Winning Reporter.” The magazine pointed out that in the five years the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Awards were given, Martin had been cited four times for book-length stories on crime, prisons, mental health, and segregation. He had also won two Sigma Delta Chi honors (today the Society of Professional Journalists) and a prestigious Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Crimes, Martin had learned through long experience, did not happen by blind chance—something caused them. “Sometimes the matrix is social, sometimes psychological, most often both,” he said. “Writing about an individual criminal case, then, offers also an opportunity to write about a whole society. Crime in context.” Stories Martin tackled for the Post including the senseless slaying of a nurse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by three juveniles; the revenge killing of a crooked landlord by a distraught father who lost his children in a Chicago tenement fire; the strange and dangerous life of an informant; and what life was like in prison for a notorious murderer, Nathan Leopold.  “I am basically a serious person,” Martin told a reporter. “I don’t like to do frivolous stories.”

For a time in the 1950s, Martin’s name became synonymous with the subject of penology. On one occasion Martin’s wife, Fran, who served on the Illinois board of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote to Washington, D.C., for research material on prison management and criminal rehabilitation. She received back a letter suggesting a book on prison reform, Break Down the Walls—the book by her husband based on the series he had done in the Post on Jackson Prison.

As he ranged over the country from San Antonio, Texas, to Gainesville, Georgia, researching the half-dozen cases he used for his Post series, titled “The Innocent and the Guilty,” Martin discovered that injustice “knew no geography.” Matters could go awry in myriad ways, including overzealous prosecutors, incompetent defense attorneys, and misidentifications by supposed eyewitnesses, which he described as one of the most common reasons for wrongful convictions. Martin experienced this phenomenon while attending a coroner’s inquest during a Chicago murder trial. A druggist testified that he had seen the defendant, Duncan Hansen, on the day of the murder. The coroner asked the druggist to point to the man he had seen. “Hansen was sitting almost directly in front of the witness and I was sitting about twenty feet directly behind Hansen,” Martin remembered. “The druggist made an indefinite gesture toward Hansen and me, when Hansen’s lawyer, Charley Bellows, said in effect, ‘Let’s see who he’s pointing out.” The witness left the stand, walked past Hansen, and pointed straight at the reporter, who stood about a foot shorter and twenty years older than the defendant. “A funny feeling,” Martin reported.

For his Post series about criminal justice gone wrong, Martin unearthed several procedural problems with the justice system: suspects who were illegally detained, whose confessions were coerced by the police, who were denied the right to counsel, and underwent illegal searches and seizures. While laymen saw these errors as “mere technicalities,” Martin believed they lay at the “heart of the Bill of Rights and so at the heart of freedom in our democratic systems,” as even guilty people had the right to due process. “How we convict matters more than whether we convict,” he argued. “Due process is society’s truly fundamental protection because it is the individual’s only protection. Due process is more important than the incarceration of men, however dangerous.”

The case that meant the most to Martin involved Simon, who had a rocky childhood growing up in Pittsburgh’s slums. Suffering from a learning disability (his IQ tested between 55 and 61), Simon had left school after only about five years, unable to read and only able to write his name. “Johnny couldn’t learn very good,” said his mother, who had only three years of education and could barely read herself. The young Simon had endured an abusive father who used to chase him while armed with an axe. Martin learned that Simon had appeared in juvenile court several times as a suspected bicycle thief and had been committed at the age of twelve to the Polk State School, established by the State of Pennsylvania to house what were then considered “feeble-minded children.” The school, however, proved to be overcrowded; Simon remained at home.

Although he had worked on a Works Progress Administration sewer construction project for a time, Simon had been fired after being absent from worth due to an illness. Afraid to let his mother know, he had left home each morning and faked going to work, instead wandering around the city looking for a new job. This was the during the same time, Martin noted, that a series of assaults by a man in a blue hood occurred in the woods on the city’s West End. Despite promises from police that they would soon capture the perpetrator, concerned mothers banded together to escort their children to and from West Liberty School.

On June 2, 1942, police arrested the teenaged Simon, whose age was cited by newspapers as either eighteen or nineteen. Patrolmen John Onderko and John Peyton had spotted him walking on the Shaler Street Bridge spanning Saw Mill Run from their patrol car. The officers noticed that Simon wore a blue sweater and light-colored dirty overalls—clothing victims had told authorities the bandit wore. “I’m just walking around,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Simon telling the police. Officers told reporters that when they tool Simon to Police Station Number 9, they had found a blue-denim hood with slits ripped in it to see through in his pocket, and later found more incriminating evidence in his room at his home. The Post-Gazette included in its report on the bandit being captured photographs of Simon with the hood on and off.

Simon disputed the police’s account, telling Martin that the hood had not been in his pocket when he walked into the police station. “The fat one [officer] stood back and the one in the straw hat punched me in the stomach,” Simon recalled. The authorities refused his request to speak to his mother, telling him, “When you sign a confession then we’ll let you see your mother.” Simon also alleged that the police took him down to the station’s cellar, beating him, knocking him to the ground, and continually telling him, “Make it easy on yourself—confess.” Simon broke down and signed the confession. “The police held him [for] four days. Nobody told him he had a right to have a lawyer,” Martin reported, “to telephone his mother, to be arraigned before a magistrate. He asked for none of his rights, being ignorant of them. He says he did not read the confessions and that no one read them to him.” In addition, police failed to follow standard procedure in the lineup, with Simon in a room by himself and the women brought in for the identification. Martin pointed out that usually police put a suspect in a lineup with other men, not in a room alone.

At his June 18 trial, which lasted, at most, a half hour, Simon, who pled guilty, stood alone, with no attorney or family member present. Simon’s mother had done all she could to ensure that her son had a lawyer. She decided to cash in an insurance policy to pay John J. McGrath to represent her son in court. McGrath, however, denied being Simon’s attorney. While he was present in court the day Simon was sentenced, McGrath claimed to be there “only as a spectator. I went there out of curiosity.” While the lawyer maintained he had not talked to John or Mary Simon, or anyone else, about the case, Martin discovered that McGrath had endorsed a check from the Monumental Life Insurance Company of Baltimore for $108.76, the cash-surrender value for Mary Simon’s policy.

While stuck in jail before his trial, John Simon had been visited by a psychiatrist from the Behavior Clinic of the Allegheny County Criminal Court. The confidential report given to the judge at Simon’s trial, William H. McNaugher, concluded that the defendant was “a potentially dangerous individual and will repeat similar offences in the future,” further recommending that he receive “prolonged or indefinite institutionalization such as the School for Defective Delinquents at Huntingdon.” McNaugher later told Martin he gave Simon such a severe sentence—twenty to forty years at the Western State Penitentiary in Pittsburgh instead of the School for Defective Delinquents—based on the Behavior Clinic report: “I was left with nothing else but to give him a life sentence for the protection of society—of course, subject to change, as all sentences are. And I’d do the same today.”

A distraught Mary remembered visiting her son after his incarceration:

He said, “Mommy, look what I got, from twenty to forty years. No lawyer, nobody helped me. I was an orphan boy and I was punished like an orphan boy. Nobody helped me. Nobody.” I said, “Son, I didn’t know. They didn’t let me know.” He said, “I know, mommy.” He just went like that.

Seeing her crying, the police had laughed at Mary’s distress and threatened to put her in jail after she complained about their behavior. “Go ahead—I’ve had a miserable life anyway,” she told the officers. “God will punish you.”

The pleas for aid from Simon’s mother convinced Martin to not only to investigate the case, but also to seek assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union. Although the Pittsburgh ACLU declined to help, a young attorney connected with the organization, Martin Lubow, agreed to represent Simon at a token fee of $200 (the Post later agreed to pay Lubow for his time and expenses). Talking with his new client, Lubow found him “so embittered” that the only people in the world he trusted were his mother and Martin. “I was surprised to find that when I broke through John’s defense and hostility, that he seemed not only a reasonable person but a fairly shrewd and intelligent one,” Lubow wrote Martin. “This suggests a possibility to me, in the light of his home background . . . that perhaps his difficulty vis a vis, his alleged deficient mentality, may have been an emotional block.”

Martin and Lubow hired a private detective agency to help track down the eyewitnesses used by the police in the Simon investigation. Questioning the witnesses, the reporter discovered that several of them had been unsure about identifying Simon as the perpetrator, with one woman saying the man who had attacked her had been older, taller, and sharp-featured. The detective agency also found a man who reported he had wrestled with an unmasked bandit in the area Simon supposedly committed his crimes. Martin interviewed him and he told him “he had not been taken to the lineup—a fact that had always puzzled him.”

Lubow’s initial efforts at commuting Simon’s sentence failed, with McNaugher denying the attorney’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that his client had not been represented by a lawyer. The U.S. Supreme Court had not, at that time, established the constitutional right to counsel in state prosecutions for felony offenses. The Court did so in 1963 in its Gideon v. Wainwright decision. Although Martin’s August 13, 1960, article about the Simon case concluded that he had probably committed some of the crimes, the method in which he had been convicted raised, the journalist argued, “serious questions about the administration of criminal justice. For even a guilty American is not to be imprisoned except by the just processes of the law.” In Martin’s view, Simon’s case came down to this: “Society got the right man (probably) by the wrong methods and then had no proper place to put him—and now is determined to keep him forever in the wrong place.”

With the Gideon v. Wainwright decision establishing the right to counsel, Lubow tried again, using the federal courts to try to free Simon. Although a federal judge granted Lubow’s habeas corpus petition, Simon remained in prison, awaiting a retrial by the Pittsburgh district attorney on four of the five counts for which he had been originally indicted. “In my opinion, the motivation for various judges’ and district attorneys’ consistent opposition to my efforts has been the fear that John, after release, might commit some other crime and thus embarrass them,” Lubow wrote Martin in May 1964. The attorney pointed out that Simon had been a “model prisoner for twenty-two years; has taught himself to read and write; and to be a tailor.” Simon, however, had not helped himself. Martin noted that state officials had hinted the prisoner might win parole. Simon refused; he did not just want to be released, he wanted “vindication,” as did his mother, Martin wrote. “People, all people, know when they have been wronged,” he noted.

On June 12, 1964, Lubow informed Martin that after meeting with officials from the Pittsburgh district attorney office, an agreement had been reached whereby Simon would agree to plead guilty and then would be put on ten years’ probation on one of his sentences, with the others suspended. “John Simon is accepting this, although not without some reservation,” wrote Lubow. “All of this agreed that this was best for John and society and to play Russian roulette with John’s future life, whatever John’s own inclinations might be, would not be well advised in my opinion.” Finally, on June 22, Simon was free.

Reflecting on his criminal justice series, Martin found it astonishing that his articles were published, not in a liberal publication like The New Republic, but in the conservative Post, a periodical “not noted for liberal crusading,” and during a time when Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “poison still infecting the body politic.” Writing his memoirs in the 1980s, during a time when “cries of ‘law and order’” were dominant, and with the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government “climbing aboard,” Martin believed it would have been “inconceivable that such a series of articles could be published anywhere.”