REEL-LIFE MURDER
Cinema worker busted in slay of Staten Island mom
HARRY HOFFMAN, short and plump as a Billiken, lived an unremarkable life until he was accused of murder. He worked as a projectionist at the Palace Theater in Port Richmond, Staten Island. He lived nearby, at 92 Cottage Place, with his wife and two young daughters. He moonlighted as a trombonist with a jazz band. He loved to cruise the rutted roads of Staten Island in his Model T Flivver, his prize possession.
On the afternoon of March 25, 1924, a housewife named Maude Bauer, 31, set out in her own auto from Port Richmond to visit relatives in the Staten Island section then known as Linoleumville. (It became Travis after national ridicule.)
Along for the ride were her mother, Catherine Pero, and Bauer’s two daughters, ages 7 and 5.
Bauer was forced to yield to an oncoming truck on South Ave. in Chelsea. Her car bogged down in sandy soil, and she set out on foot to find a kindly motorist with a rope to pull her out.
Waiting in the car with the kids, Pero watched from a distance as her daughter got in a sedan. A schoolgirl also saw the woman enter the stranger’s car. She said the driver was a fatfaced, shaggy-haired man with a dark complexion and full lips. He was wearing tortoise-shell eyeglasses, a brown coat and a matching fedora.
Ten minutes later, boys on bicycles spotted the prone figure of a woman just off South Ave. They flagged down a cop, who found the body of Maude Bauer, shot dead barely a half-mile from where her car got stuck.
Newspapers squawked the description of the motorist seen by the schoolgirl, Barbara Fahs, 13. Cops said the murder weapon was a .25-caliber Colt.
Harry Hoffman, the film projectionist, happened to own a Colt .25, and Fahs’ description fit him perfectly.
He began telling co-workers and friends that he was bound to become a suspect. And he did his darnedest to act guilty.
He flat-topped his hair and switched pince-nez glasses. He mailed his Colt to his brother in Manhattan and burned its holster. He disposed of his brown outerwear and began wearing blue. And he reupholstered the front seat of his Flivver.
Someone whispered Hoffman’s name to cops, and they put him in handcuffs on April 17 after a woman stepped forward to say that Hoffman had pulled a gun and made sexual advances the previous fall after he offered her a ride during a rainstorm.
His defense attorney said the projectionist simply was terrified of being framed.
“He’s seen too many motion pictures,” said the lawyer. But a police commander said, “If the man is not guilty, we have witnessed amazing activity on the part of an innocent person to divert suspicion.”
Richmond County DA Albert Fach took the case to trial that May. An alibi witness — the defendant’s pal and union brother Raymond Parker, a projectionist at Liberty Theater in Stapleton — swore that Hoffman spent the hour of Bauer’s murder in his projection booth.
But Fach prevailed after a professor said the deadly shots were fired by Hoffman’s pistol and Fahs, the young witness, pointed a quivering finger at Hoffman as the man in the car.
The jury spared Hoffman but sent him to Sing Sing for life — but his legal odyssey was just beginning.
Three years later, the Court of Appeals voided his conviction on a technicality over the judge’s instructions to the jury. Fach mounted a second trial in 1927, but it ended when defense attorney Leonard Snitkin collapsed in court of a heart attack. A third trial in 1928 concluded with a hung jury, so the prosecutor pressed a fourth, held in Brooklyn in 1929.
AFTER FIVE years in custody, Hoffman was broke. His weight had gone from 190 to 120. His wife had divorced him and remarried.
In desperation, Hoffman sent a postcard begging Sam Leibowitz, one of the city’s best defense attorneys, to take his case — without pay. Leibowitz couldn’t resist a murder saga that had occupied the front pages for half of the Roaring ’20s.
The lawyer gambled by calling Hoffman as a witness for the first time, and DA Fach assailed him with insinuations. One exchange went like this:
“Did you ever horsewhip your wife in Lover’s Lane because of a quarrel over a tenant?” “That is absolutely untrue.” “Did you ever, on any occasion, tie her to a tree and beat her?”
“I did not.”
One newspaper headlined its story “Hoffman Denies Beating Wife.”
But Leibowitz outsmarted Fach with one of his most famous courtroom ploys.
He seized on an overlooked detail. Cops said the gunman fired with his right hand. And Hoffman was a lefty.
Leibowitz set up a demonstration. He handed Hoffman a hammer, which he used to expertly drive a nail into a post — with his left hand. With more props from Leibowitz, the defendant then nimbly threaded a needle, leftystyle.
The show-and-tell may have been little more than a diversion, but it worked. Hoffman was acquitted.
The Moving Picture Operators Union set him up with a job at a busy Times Square cinema. The murder of Maude Bauer was never officially solved, though detectives believed they had the right man all along.