On a cool Saturday evening on September 15, 1951, a young medical student, Christian Helmus, was driving with his wife and another couple to their home near the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Helmus saw something in the street and, after dropping off the women, returned to the scene with his male friend after midnight. They were confronted by the body of a woman laying almost in the middle of the street beside the rear fender of a parked car. Checking her pulse, Helmus discovered she was still alive, but only barely; he called the police.
Residents were stunned, however, when, a few days after the murder, police were tipped off that three teenagers from the nearby town of Ypsilanti—Bill Morey III, Max Pell, and Dave Royal—had committed the crime, with Morey striking the fatal blows. As a reporter noted, the boys “had no felony records. They came from good families. They were nice-looking boys, well-spoken, neat, mannerly.” A jury eventually found Morey and Pell guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced them to life in prison (Michigan did not have the death penalty at that time) without the chance for parole, while Royal was convicted of second-degree murder and received a twenty-two-year-to-life jail sentence. Morey’s father’s reaction to the news, “I can’t believe it—I just can’t believe it,” reflected what many parents thought at the time.
The shocking case drew the attention of a freelance writer uniquely qualified to probe what had happened—John Bartlow Martin. Although he never consciously set out to specialize in crime, Martin had developed a fascination with the subject during his early days as a freelancer producing articles for such sensationalist true-crime magazines as Official Detective Stories and Actual Detective Stories for Women in Crime. As his career advanced to writing for such prestigious publications as Harper’s magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, he continued to write about crime, criminals, and prison.
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For some time Martin had wanted to do a careful study about a murder involving a teenage suspect. He checked into several of these apparently senseless cases of slayings over a period of years and in each one it did not take him long to discover “that the thing wasn’t really senseless at all, that there was some clear reason assignable if one took the trouble to look—but the reason was so unusual, so special, that it deprived the story of what it ought to have above all else: Wide applicability.” For example, he noted that sometimes a newspaper reported that the youth came from an average, respectable home, but in digging further the mother turned out to be an alcoholic, the father a criminal, or the home was in a slum neighborhood. It was the not the fault of the newspapers, said Martin, as they had to work fast and print what information they could find. “It is for this very reason that I think a magazine or book writer in the fact field can perform a useful service: by coming along after the event has occurred, he gains perspective and can see the event whole,” he said.
Martin investigated and dropped several cases, looking for one that involved young men “in whom any one of us might recognize our own children; parents in whom we could recognize ourselves.” Only then could a single case have a wider application, he added, getting at some of the “fundamental problems and weaknesses of our world as a whole, and more especially of the way our world rears its children.”
When he learned about the Morey case, Martin traveled to Ann Arbor, as it “seemed to be what I was looking for—a crime readily explained by none of the standard ‘causes’ of ‘juvenile delinquency,’ a crime that by all the rules should not have happened but did happen.” (This was a few years before actor James Dean put the issue of teenage angst on the nation’s consciousness with his performance as troubled youth Jim Stark in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause.) It turned out to be one of the most difficult stories Martin ever covered, not in a technical sense, but personally. “I have children of my own,” noted Martin. “I know a lot of other kids not very different from Bill Morey. I know a lot of parents not very different from his parents.”
Martin and his friends, when young, had also done some of the stupid and dangerous things Morey had done—drink alcohol before they legally could, drive around recklessly in cars looking for excitement, and base their actions on the opinions of others in their age group. “The story rather frightened me,” Martin said. Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti were by no means unique towns, and the teenagers who lived in those communities were not different from thousands of others in cities across the country. “We all think it can’t happen here, not in my town; but it sure can, it happened in Ann Arbor,” he noted.
Ordinarily, in conducting his legwork for such a story, Martin would have chosen to interview the boys’ parents last, but he realized if they, especially Bill Morey’s parents, refused to talk to him freely, he had no story. He decided to approach the Moreys first, traveling to Ypsilanti by bus and from there on foot to the Moreys’ home on a quiet and shady street. Both parents were reluctant to talk to Martin. By this time the trial had concluded, their son was in prison, and they did not want to relive what they had endured. However, as Martin noted, they were reliving what had happened every day, as they “dated everything in their lives as ‘before this happened’ or ‘after this happened,’ this terrible event, the murder.” He explained to them that he was not trying to write a sensational story, but instead “a thoroughgoing study for a serious magazine [the Post] that would try to discover why it had happened.”
As Martin noted in his four-part series in the Post, although no final answer might be found for the question, “Why did they kill?” perhaps an understanding could be reached by getting at the facts of the case. “All is not,” he added, “cannot be, darkness and mystification.”
Martin shared his own experiences as a sometimes wayward youth and his and his wife Fran’s lives as parents of a young daughter. After a time, the Moreys began to respond to Martin’s gentle nudging, with Mrs. Morey nodding her head to what he was saying and volunteering information about her son. For an hour and a half they talked about Bill, as they still called him, and Martin decided not to press them on anything. Upon leaving, he asked if he could return the next day; they agreed and the three of them talked for two hours, “and the day after that for four hours, and the following week for more,” Martin recalled.
Subsequently, Martin spent weeks talking to the Moreys, to the families of the other two boys jailed for the crime, their schoolteachers, friends, the lawyers defending the boys, a psychiatrist (Doctor O. R. Yoder) who believed Bill had a “psychopathic personality,” and the boys themselves while they were in prison. Martin’s articles also examined the differences between Ann Arbor, the quiet college town, and where the boys had lived, Ypsilanti, which he described as “a blue-collar town turned upside down by the war.”
The war had drawn thousands of “hillbilly” workers from Kentucky and Tennessee to Ford Motor Company’s massive Willow Run bomber plant, and after the war they had gone on “relief and turned Willow Run into a slum,” wrote Martin, with their children running wild, smoking marijuana and drinking. “Ypsilanti and the automobile with its roaring exhaust became characters in the story,” he said. As prosecuting attorney Douglas K. Reading told Martin: “I don’t know why this murder happened, but I can see a part of the picture, I think. Night after night they’re out driving around, drinking beer, getting in a little trouble. They talk big. There aren’t many who will ever do a damn thing. But there is always one who will do it—and by looking at him, you can’t tell him from the others.”
In his concluding piece in the Post, Martin pointed out how hard the case had been to understand, especially given the grief and guilt felt by the boys’ parents and the difficulty in obtaining reliable information from the teenagers involved, as they seemed to inhabit “a world of their own” and were exceedingly loyal to one another. “I never really answered the question of why—why they had killed. Why?—to a reporter, it is the only question that matters and it is the only question he can never really answer,” said Martin.
Although bitter about the way their son had been treated by
local newspapers, by police, and by the prosecution during his trial, Mr. and
Mrs. Morey, too, had no final answers for what their son had done. When Martin
had asked him why his son had killed the nurse, Bill Morey Sr. had quietly
responded: “I couldn’t tell you. It is a mystery.” Civic leaders in Ypsilanti
and Ann Arbor agreed there existed no more juvenile delinquency in their towns
than in most communities, Martin reported. “If this is true, then adult
Americans have little notion of what their children are up to—and this is by no
means unlikely,” he noted.
The series about the case in the Post prompted numerous letters to Martin, and worried parents in suburban communities across America made stronger efforts, he reported, to cooperate with school officials, civic leaders, and police “in the hope they can find out what is wrong with their own towns and thus, possibly, prevent the same thing from happening again.” Martin expanded what he wrote into book-length form, published by Ballantine Books in 1953 as Why Did They Kill?
Martin’s book received strong reviews upon its release, with Croswell Bowen, a writer for TheNew Yorker specializing in crime, in his critique for the New York Times, describing Martin as “probably the ablest crime reporter in America” and saying the book was “as smooth and gripping as a first-rate novel.” Why Did They Kill? continued to receive praise from critics in the years to come, especially with the release in 1966 of Truman Capote’s best-selling book In Cold Blood, which examined the vicious murder of Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of their children in Holcomb, Kansas, by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, who were found guilty and hanged for the killings.
First serialized in The New Yorker, Capote’s book received strong support for its literary achievement. “It seemed to me,” Capote said in an interview with the New York Times, “that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘non-fiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He went on to say that very few “first-class creative writers” had ever bothered with journalism, except as a sideline, “something to be done when the creative spirit is lacking, or as a means of making money quickly,” and dismissed journalism as “unbecoming to the serious writer’s artistic dignity.”
Over the years questions have arisen about Capote’s veracity and his claims that the book was “immaculately factual.” Although The New Yorker ran Capote’s articles, its editor, William Shawn, had been concerned about how Capote could be so certain of what had been said in private conversations he had no part in. Shawn later expressed regrets at having published the articles in his magazine. At the time of In Cold Blood’s publication as a book, some writers, including Kenneth Tynan and Ned Rorem, criticized Capote for profiting off the death of two people and not doing enough to save Hickock and Smith from their fate.
Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic denigrated Capote’s work, saying it was “ridiculous in judgment and debasing of all of us to call this book literature,” and spoke for many of the anti-Capote critics by instead recommending Martin’s book as a cut above In Cold Blood. “His 131-page book,” Kauffman said of Martin’s Why Did They Kill? “is superior to Capote’s in almost every way, makes some attempt to answer the question in its title, and is devoid of any suspicion of conscious self-gratifying aggrandizement into Literature.”
Other critics, however, preferred Capote’s work, with Joseph Haas writing in the Chicago Daily News that he read Martin’s book “with respect and pleasure,” writing that it displayed all the virtues of the best modern news writing—accuracy, responsibility, thoroughness, and interpretation. However, Haas added, Why Did They Kill? suffered from a host of limitations. “It tends to pedestrian prose, pat pop-sociological conclusions, uninspired organization and a shortage of perceptive insight. It lacks the substance of art: rich in facts, it is poor in truth,” he wrote. Haas and other Capote supporters may have faulted Martin’s literary skills, but few people ever disputed his facts.
Postscript: In 1970, at the age of thirty-seven, Morey was granted parole and released from prison after Michigan governor William G. Milliken commuted his life sentence (Royal had been paroled in 1962 and Pell in 1967).
