Park Ave. murder
Wife-about-town eyed, but it was botched rob
Marion Langford and her husband, Albert, were enjoying a quiet Monday evening at home when they were suddenly startled by their pet Pekingese growling at the door to their Midtown apartment.
While Marion stayed in bed, Albert let in two men who said they wanted to talk to his wife about a mutual friend who’d recently died.
The men were short and swarthy, the brims of their fedoras pulled low over their hard faces, and Albert immediately realized he’d made a mistake opening the door.
Moments later, 63-year-old Albert Langford lay dead with his face torn open by a .38 slug, the killers were gone and a hysterical Marion was trying to comprehend why anyone would want to hurt her kindly husband.
It was a question that plagued a makeshift squad of 50 NYPD detectives who in June 1945 descended on the Marguery, a swanky Park Ave. hotel-apartment building where the Langfords lived in a lavish five-room suite, to solve a murder that would baffle authorities for years.
The reason for the heavy police presence was obvious to anyone who read the gossips: The Langfords weren’t your usual run-of-the-mill victims of a senseless big city crime.
Albert Langford was a textile company sales manager who made a darn good living. But his wife was rolling in dough — and made sure everyone knew it.
Mrs. Marion Grimes Langford, 55, was the daughter of a public utility magnate who was as comfortable hobnobbing with high society types as she was with the questionable characters who lived by night in the city’s bustling club scene.
Tabloid reporters trying to dig up some dirt gleefully described her penchant for clubhopping, her heavy gambling losses in underground casinos, her hosting allnight card games at her apartment.
Known for her flaming red tresses and sharp tongue, Langford had been married to a lawyer who died over a decade before, and the merry widow had also forged a reputation as a free-spending patroness of the arts whose proteges all happened to be young and attractive musicians, singers and actors.
After cops found a pair of thick notebooks belonging to her that listed thousands of dollars in “loans” and gifts to hundreds of would-be entertainers, investigators came up with a prevailing theory. With whispers rampant that Marion’s interest in her young charges went beyond helping boost their careers, the men who gunned down Albert were blackmailers who came to the apartment looking for a payday, ran into a hostile husband, and were forced to fire when the scheme backfired.
A second theory: The gunmen were thieves who’d caught wind that Marion kept $100,000 worth of jewels in the apartment, and a robbery attempt went awry.
Still another theory was that given her many friendships with young and exciting men, Marion simply wanted Albert out of the way. The gunmen were hired torpedoes recruited through her many sketchy connections.
The couple had been wed only a few years — his first spouse had also died — and Marion freely admitted to reporters that she had married him because he was “a nice man and easy to get along with.”
Police were especially interested in talking to Reed Lawton, a ruggedly handsome nightclub singer in his late 30s who’d been the main recipient of Marion’s largesse.
A decade earlier, Lawton had been scraping by as the singing emcee of a two-bit club when Marion happened to catch his show. Days later he was working the Rainbow Room thanks to a good word from the well-heeled dowager.
All told, Langford invested more than $100,000 in Lawton, even going so far as to start construction on a new nightclub on W. 57th St., where the curly-haired crooner would be the permanent headliner.
That project fizzled after they had a falling-out, however. Seems Lawton, who publicly swore he was never romantically involved with Marion, nevertheless neglected to tell the smothering older woman he was married — and had gone so far as passing off his wife and young daughter as his sister and niece.
Police were nowhere near solving the “Murder of the Marguery,” but the city’s tabloids served these juicy tidbits about the case for days. Hungry readers were also treated to a jaw-dropping Marion Langford press conference at her apartment in which she broke down several times, telling reporters that everything written about her was a vicious lie.
She insisted she no longer went nightclubbing after marrying Albert, she didn’t gamble and never hosted card games at her home. Most importantly, she said, she had been very much in love with her dearly departed spouse and was offering a $10,000 reward for the capture of his killers.
Less than a year later she was married again, this time to a dental surgeon. With the murder still unsolved, Marion fell out of the public eye.
But five years after the crime, she was back in the spotlight when Manhattan prosecutors announced a huge break in the case — thanks to the Daily News.
A reporter named David Charney had continued digging long after others had forgotten about the story, and his underworld sources had come up with the name of a career criminal who they said recruited two other crooks to rob the couple.
In April 1950, the district attorney’s office confirmed Charney’s info and said Edison Cable, a 44-year-old burglar, had planned a heist targeting Marion’s jewels. While he waited in a getaway car, two unnamed accomplices knocked on the Langfords’ door. Once inside, they pulled handguns, but panicked when Albert resisted and shot him at point-blank range.
When Cable realized what they’d done, he sped away without his cronies, prosecutors alleged. The gunmen then swore revenge, and Cable copped to an outstanding burglary charge so he’d be sent to a safe haven — Sing Sing prison.
But prosecutors hoping Cable would eventually implicate his accomplices were foiled. Fearing he’d be slapped with a murder charge, he never sang. Cable died in 1969 at age 64, taking the truth behind the “Murder of the Marguery” with him.