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Aging lothario gets poisoned by hubby of one of his women
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To his neighbors, Walter Lewis Samples seemed a dignified older gentleman, a Spanish-American War veteran and retired civil engineer with silver hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a gentle smile.
A bottle of milk was all it took to wash away his reputation and his life.
The Daily News summed it up neatly in its headline of Apr. 20, 1941:
ELDERLY LOTHARIO KILLED BY POISON; COUPLE INDICTED
The case that would become known as the “Milk Bottle Murder” started on Feb. 25, 1941, when a mysterious item appeared on the porch of Samples’ tidy bungalow in Memphis.
Figuring the bottle was some kind of promotion, Samples, 69, downed a couple of glasses at breakfast, as was his habit.
Stomach cramps started a few hours later. After two days of agony, Samples called his doctor. The symptoms pointed to poisoning.
The doctor looked in the refrigerator and found the milk bottle. One sniff told him that it was the probable cause of his patient’s misery. He detected the scent of phosphorus, a poison.
Samples may not have noticed the odor because he had a cold, which blunted his sense of smell and taste.
The doctor sealed the bottle and rushed his patient to the hospital.
Samples died within four hours. Chemical analysis showed large amounts of phosphorus and starch, the building blocks of rat poison, in the milk. An autopsy found the same toxin in the dead man’s stomach.
There was no getting around it — someone poisoned Samples.
But who? The old man seemed to have no known enemies. Neighbors knew him a widower who lived quietly— almost hermit-like — and spent his days playing bridge and volunteering for the Spanish-American War veterans association.
It wasn’t until police started to explore the victim’s bungalow that they found a possible reason why someone — in fact, many people — might want to see him dead.
Samples’ bedroom was “plastered with photographs of attractive women, young and old, married and unmarried,” The News reported. Many of the photos had inscriptions on them to “Daddy Samples.”
There were scores of images, some new and snapped in the bungalow, others of long-ago loves. They found a secret stash in a locked drawer — photos of women wearing very little or nothing at all.
Then there were letters, some from girls young enough to be Samples’ granddaughters, recalling moments of passion or begging him to come back to them. The “Enigma of the 150 Sweethearts” was how one newspaper described the number of his fair and willing companions.
In interviews with all those women, detectives discovered a very different side of the seemingly mild-mannered Mr. Samples. They told of wild nights of drinking in roadhouses and passionate, addictive lovemaking.
“He was like a drug,” was how one of his lovers described him, wrote Edward D. Radin in his 1953 book, “Crimes of Passion.”
Another young woman said, “Whenever he wanted me, I went to him. Each time, I told myself that I would never see him again, but when he called, I went.”
After all the interviews and reviews of the letters and the photos, detectives had lots of possibilities — jealous husbands and lovers scorned — but no real leads.
Then a friend of the wrinkled Romeo came to police with a tip. One day, she said, she had knocked on his door and saw a former neighbor in his bungalow, “crying as though her heart would break,” The News noted.
She identified the woman as Bertha House, 35, a frequent visitor to Samples’ home. Her husband, Louis Roy House, had, until recently, been the head of a trucking company in Memphis.
In public records, police found that House sued Samples to get back a washing machine that Mrs. House gave him. She had also secretly given $7,000 to the old man.
Not long before the murder, House sold his business, packed up his petite brunette wife, and moved to a plantation in Mississippi.
On the day the poisoned milk appeared on Samples’ porch, neighbors recalled seeing Mrs. House in the area. Detectives visited the couple in Mississippi and brought them back to Memphis for questioning.
In tears, Mrs. House admitted to a long-term affair with Samples, starting in 1925. She dropped him after her wedding in 1930, but he lured her back three years later.
“I tried to break away from him, but no woman can resist him,” she told them. “He was a human vampire.”
Both denied killing him, but then a matron found a typewritten
will in her shoe. It was signed by Samples and left everything to his long-time love.
Investigators determined the will was a forgery. When detectives confronted the couple with this fact, Mr. House blurted out a confession.
At their trial in June, Mr. House recanted his confession, but the jury still found both guilty. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison.
An appeal earned them a new trial 18 months later. Jury selection was still underway when Mrs. House leaped to her feet and ran to the bench. “I can’t stand it any longer,” she shouted, arms flailing.
“My husband is innocent. I did it alone, and he’s trying to protect me.”
Even though her husband had sold his business and swept her off to Mississippi, she still could not break with Daddy Samples. Poisoning him, she said, was the only way she’d ever be free.
Mrs. House may have broken the chains of love, but freedom would still elude her.
She pleaded guilty and got 20 years behind bars.
One of the four men stabbed during a violent robbery at an illegal Brooklyn gambling den has died, police said Saturday.
The bloody clash began inside a basement gambling hall on 58th St. in Sunset Park when at least three robbers barged in and took cell phones and cash from a group of men inside at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, cops said.
Afterward, some of the victims took off after the thieves to get their stuff back.
When they ran into the crooks around the corner on Seventh Ave. the victims were joined by a handful of onlookers.
Surveillance videos recovered from 57th St. show the victims confronting the robbers before a brawl breaks out.
One man appears to be threatening another with a long blade before the fight. Another man pulls his belt, which he tries to use as a weapon in the caught-on-camera fracas.
A handful of others walk across the street to join the crowd, some recording the argument on their cell phones, one video shows.
The thieves knifed the victims and left in a white SUV, police said.
Three pools of blood and torn clothing remained on the sidewalk hours later.
Police said a 46-year-old man was stabbed four times in the chest. A 39-year-old man was knifed twice in the arm and once in the chest and a 42-year-old man was jabbed in the lower back.
All three were rushed to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, where the 46-year-old man died. His name was not immediately released. The other two victims were in stable condition.
A fourth man, 49, suffered a puncture wound to the chest and was treated at the scene, cops said.
There have been no arrests.