TEENS’ SAVAGE
Brutally tortured & killed vagrants just for
As the body was fished out of the East River and placed faceup on a lonely pier under the Williamsburg Bridge, the small crowd inched forward for a closer look.
Bruised, bloated and barefooted, the man had been the object of an intense three-day search by police divers ever since a witness reported he’d seen a gang of young toughs thrashing the victim and tossing him into the cold, murky water to die.
Standing on the Brooklyn. side of the bridge on this gray and misty morning in August 1954 was a grim-looking gaggle of uniformed officers, homicide detectives, reporters and photographers — and the four teens charged with beating, torturing and killing Willard Menter, a 31year-old factory worker and father of two young kids.
The sodden corpse at their feet was the depraved delinquents’delinque final act of wanton savagery in a sadistic, summer-long spree that left two men dead, another set on fire, several more battered and hospitalized, and two teenaged girls traumatized after being set upon by the hoods and horsewhipped like animals.
The teens, dubbed the Killfor-Thrills Gang by the tabloids, had already confessed to cops and been front-page fodder across the country for days. An extraordinary photo on the cover of the Daily News’ Aug. 20, 1954, issue, in fact, showed the suspects, each cuffed to a detective and heads hung low in shame, obviously forced to pose pointing to Menter’s body in a tacit admissionadmission of guiltguilt.
The cruel quartet hailed from Brooklyn, but much was made of their not being stereotypical inner-city kids from broken homes one would expect to have committed such shocking acts of violence. Rather, they were “nice” Jewish boys from middle-class families who did well in school and had never been in trouble with the law before.
The series of random attacks began in July 1954, when
Jack Koslow, 18, high school seniors Melvin Mittman and Jerome Lieberman, both 17, and sophomore Robert Trachtenberg, 15, decided to spend their summer vacation pummeling vagrants, drunks and homeless men they’d find drinking and dozing in local parks.
The brains of the outfit was Koslow, an unemployed, avowed neo-Nazi with a wispy mustache modeled after his idol, Adolph Hitler.
Mittman, a beefy 220pounder who reportedly told cops he used victims as “punching bags to see how hard I could hit,” was the brawn.
Both young men had higher-than-normal IQs, according to cops. But their supposed intelligence was superseded by a perverse desire to hurt, maim and eventually kill just for the thrill of it.
Koslow had amassed a deep-seated hatred for the city’s “bums,” whom he likened to cockroaches, and he somehow convinced his pals to join him in a twisted campaign of late-night terror. The packpack was soon prowling the parks in search of easy prey who would be made to “squirm and suffer,” as the ringleader put it.
Their usual M.O. was to surround, swarm and severely beat their hapless victim into submission. But in one particularly brutal attack, the teens poured gasoline on a sleeping man and set him ablaze, then scampered off laughing as he desperately tried to smother the flames.
The gang soon grew bored