’45 ‘torso’ slay was tabloid gold
PHONES BUZZED in New York newspaper gossip hives in August 1945 when a renowned ballroom dancer named Burt Harger suddenly turned his back on a celebrated career. Harger and his hoofing partner, Charlotte Maye, had just begun a twice-nightly gig at the Biltmore, the palatial Grand Central hotel, when Harger took a powder.
Maye, who reported him missing, got a strange telegram from Harger the next day. He said he’d had it with New York and was moving to Hollywood.
Harger’s Midtown roommate, Walter Dahl, a railroad freight salesman from Philadelphia, insisted it was much ado about nothing.
“I’ve heard from Harger and everything’s all right,” Dahl told detectives. “You can stop hunting for him now.”
But anatomical chunks began bobbing up in New York waters — a muscled torso off Rockaway Beach, matching arms and legs in the Hudson. Police asked Dahl to have a look at the headless ensemble. “It’s horrible!” Dahl cried. “But it isn’t Burt.” He said the body was missing a telltale birthmark. Cops were skeptical. This Manhattan missing-person mystery in the final weeks of World War II became known as the Adonis torso case.
Harger, 39, hailed from southern California, where his father was the longtime postmaster in Riverside.
Born with happy feet, he won dozens of dance competitions as a boy and perfected his craft at Stanford University. He then toured Europe as an acrobatic adagio dancer billed as “the toast of the Continent,” performing for the kings of England, Sweden and Spain.
Chased home by the war, he was a lead dancer in a number of Broadway musicals, including “Early to Bed” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
In the early 1940s he teamed with Maye, an exotic beauty from Portland, Ore., and the two twirled across the country with engagements at the finest hotels — the Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, the Mark Hopkins atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill, the Edgewater Beach in Chicago, the Statler chain in St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo, and the Martinique, Pierre and Biltmore in New York.
In 1943, the dance team settled into New York, renting apartments at 43 W. 46th St. — Maye and her husband, Army Capt. William Tubesing, on the fourth floor, and Harger and his pal Dahl directly above them on the fifth.
Dahl, a handsome blond, was an odd bird — courtly but kind of creepy. He was “good-looking but overly polite,” the Daily News said. “He would bow from the waist and kiss your hand.”
Maye and Tubesing heard a frightening din from up above on the night of Aug. 19, 1945.
“They were throaty, gasping sort of noises,” Tubesing told a News scribe.
He hurried upstairs and pounded at Harger’s door but retreated when there was no answer. Later, the couple listened to water running for hours in Harger’s flat.
The next morning, Dahl knocked to say that Harger had impetuously left the city on a 3 a.m. train.
But cops were not convinced by Dahl’s explanations and applied a shadow of NYPD homicide detectives — John Smith, John Leonard and Tom Murphy.
“He just didn’t act right,” said gumshoe Murphy.
They trailed him as he sent phony telegrams in Harger’s name, tried to cash a $1,592 check made out to the missing man, and then visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for “shattered nerves.”
Cops were waiting with handcuffs when Dahl returned to Penn Station on Oct. 6.
He stuttered through a phony tale about a murderous lonely sailor visiting Harger, but soon gave a confession that “knocked into a cocked hat” his previous alibis, as Daily News rewriteman Art Smith put it.
Smith wrote that Dahl was “jittery almost to the point of hysteria.”
Dahl claimed he brained Harger with a hammer when the dancer made “improper advances,” then carved him up and dropped the pieces off the Weehawken and Staten Island ferries on the night that Maye and Tubesing heard the gasps and the deluge of water.
Disposal of the 60-pound torso, wrapped in copies of the New York Times and a YMCA towel, did not go smoothly.
“The boat was crowded,” Dahl told prosecutor Jacob Grumet, “so I had to pretend to drop the bundle by accident … Passengers sympathized with me, but I said, ‘Well, it was my own fault and fortunately I can replace it.’”
Dahl, suffering from debilitating diabetes, took a plea deal to first- d e gree manslaughter. At sentencing, the roommates’ taboo relationship was raised publicly for the first time.
Grumet said Dahl’s “improper advances” narrative was implausible since the men had shared a bed for 18 months.
Dahl’s attorney, Thomas Sheridan, suggested his client was a waif who had fallen under the salacious thrall of a show business rake.
“Harger dominated this boy — a boy who had come from a respectable Philadelphia family and had been ill for years,” he said. That boy was 30 years old. Some scuttlebutters claimed Dahl clobbered Harger when he announced plans to change teams and marry a woman, though the fidelity of that gossip was flimsy.
His face white as alabaster, Dahl leaned on crutches in a courtroom in May 1946 as Judge George Donnellan sent him away for 10 to 20 years.
But he arrived in prison a short-timer. Dahl survived just 41 months, dying at Green Haven of complications from diabetes on Oct. 29, 1949.