HER FATAL LOVE FOR COP, HORSE
She was head over heels for him – & he was just one horrible heel
On what would be the last day of her life, Irma Pradier had never been happier.
On July 19, 1937, the Manhattan woman by way of Marseille, was about to bid adieu to her lonely, love-starved existence.
She’d quit her job as a maid at Mount Sinai Hospital, withdrawn her life savings — about $350, equal to $6,400 today and quite a tidy sum in the midst of the Great Depression — packed her bags and told her roommate she was off to sunny California to marry the handsome, strapping young man she’d met only a month ago.
At 8:30 p.m., just as the sun set on a balmy summer night, the roommate watched from the window as Pradier’s paramour pulled up in front of their E. 98th St. roominghouse in a pea-green sedan.
For Pradier, a 37-year-old, sweet-natured brunette who spoke with an alluring French accent, the marriage was a ticket out of her humdrum routine and the end to her fears of dying a literal old maid.
Little did the smitten spinster know she was about to take a one-way ride beyond the black veil.
At 5:30 a.m. the next morning, just as the sun was starting to rise, two bakers on their way to work approached a parked cop car and breathlessly told the officers what they’d just seen.
A woman’s body was lying on the grass along the Harlem River Speedway (now known as Harlem River Drive) near W. 165th St.
She was fully clothed in a dress and jacket, missing a shoe, and pretty banged up. Her fface was cut andd bbadlydl bruised, her mouth was bloodied and a couple of teeth were loose.
The victim had been shot twice at point-blank range — a .38 bullet to the stomach, another just above the heart. Homicide dicks figured she’d been killed in a car and dumped on the side of the road in the dark, wee hours. There was no purse, but her jacket pocket held an odd clue: six lumps of sugar in a little paper bag.
As soon as a graphic photo of the mystery woman’s corpse made the papers, police had a name — Irma Louise Pradier, who’d come to the U.S. in 1929 — as well as a likely culprit.
Her roommate told investigators all she knew about the Frenchwoman’s fiancé, which wasn’t much. But she did recall Pradier saying he was a cop. More specifically, a cop who rode horses.
Whichhh wouldld explainl the h sugar found in the dead woman’s pocket. Not to mention the .38 slugs that killed Pradier, the same caliber most officers used in their service revolvers.
The NYPD was suddenly on the hunt for one of its own, and officials vowed they would find the fiend responsible for desecrating his badge with such a callous crime.
Over the next week detectives interviewed more than 300 of the city’s mounted policemen, whittling down the list of suspects to about 50 — all while quietly trying to find a connection to the peagreen car belonging to Pradier’s secret suitor.
They caught a break when an investigator searching car sales records found that someone with the same name as an NYPD mountie had recently bought a Buick sedan in that color.
His name was Arthur H. Chalmers, a married father of two from Jackson Heights, Queens, who’d been on the force seven years. The wellbuilt, chestnut-haired policeman was promptly brought in for questioning and immediatelytel ddeniedid kknowing Pradier. But after hours under the lights, he finally owned up to shooting her after investigators said they’d found a .38 bullet hole in the front seat of his car.
Yet Chalmers claimed Pradier’s death was just an unfortunate accident — and that he’d acted in self-defense against an obviously unbalanced woman who’d grabbed his gun.
The 34-year-old cop said he’d met the petite, attractive maid a month earlier, when he came upon her feeding sugar cubes to his horse at the National Guard Armory at E. 94th St. and Madison Ave., where Chalmers’ Troop B stabled its steeds.
Pradier apparently had a thing for horses — and the mounted officers who cut dashing figures in their spiffy uniforms and shiny boots. She often hung around the stables near her little apartment, and had taken a shine to Chalmers from afar.
Chalmers said she made the first move and asked him for a date, which he nobly refused on the grounds he was a
married man with two children.
A chance meeting in Central Park a couple of weeks later led to nothing more than an innocent get-together, he claimed. But when they agreed to meet again on the evening of July 19, things went haywire, Chalmers said.
Somehow, he claimed, Pradier had gotten it in her head that the couple was going to run away together and start a new life out West. Why, she even showed up with two suitcases and the crazy idea that they were to be wed, he told investigators.
She was angry and unreasonable when Chalmers reminded her he was married, and he said they drove around a bit before he reluctantly succumbed to her feminine wiles inside the car, hoping it would calm her down. A little while later, he gave in again, he said with a straight face.
But the postcoital calm was quashed when Pradier again demanded they skip town. When he resisted, Pradier got hysterical and reached for a revolver he kept in the glove compartment.
He didn’t know whether she meant to kill him or herself — or both — but in the struggle to wrest the gun away, it went off. Twice. He couldn’t remember anything else because his mind went blank, he said.
Detectives considered the mountie’s story to be nothing more than a load of horse hockey, and he was charged with first-degree murder.
It didn’t help Chalmers’ credibility any when police found out he had set off on a weeklong, sex-filled road trip through New England with a married waitress just two days after Pradier was killed.
The jury at Chalmer’s trial the following year didn’t buy his story, either. It took barely an hour to convict the disgraced cop, who was sentenced to 20 years in Sing Sing.
He was in the news a couple of times afterward, once for writing a play from behind bars that a producer tried peddling to Broadway. The other was in 1946 when Chalmers, who studied law while in prison, tried to appeal his sentence.
He was paroled in 1951 after only serving 13 years, and died in 1961 at age 47. But any sympathy he may have garnered for what could have indeed been an accident vanished at the trial, when it was revealed that after pulling the trigger, Chalmers dragged Pradier out of the car and placed her on the grass in the dead of night while the poor woman was still alive.
She died alone, the shot to her heart a sad metaphor for what she mistakenly thought was her last chance at love.
r. Richard Lestz, a dentist with over 25 years experience in dental cosmetics, implants and general dentistry, has a unique calling card. Above a caption, which reads “dento-facial symmetry,” it shows horizontal and vertical lines drawn through a face. What does this have to do with Dr. Lestz’s specialty, you may ask? Plenty.
“These are proportional and symmetrical,” he explains. “Faces that we consider to be beautiful, or ideal, fit into these lines.When teeth are crooked or missing altogether, there is a loss of bone and other supporting structures, which may cause the shape of the face to collapse inward and vertically. By cosmetically reconstructing the teeth and their supporting structures, we can achieve a more esthetic, healthy and youthful appearance.”