BROKEN HEART, BULLET IN HEAD
Nothing pretty about this tale of jilted lover
The man was lying in the gutter of a Brooklyn street, still warm to the touch and dead less than an hour, when an electric company worker heading home from a late shift spotted his corpse on a cool September night in 1937.
The deceased was middle-aged, nattily dressed and well-groomed, and other than a little blood on his head seemed to have suffered a heart attack and dropped where he stood.
The ambulance driver called to the scene certainly thought so, as did the horde of bored patrolmen trying to keep a small crowd of onlookers at bay at 2 o’clock in the morning.
After all, there was no sign of foul play — the blood was chalked up to hitting his head on the pavement when he collapsed — and no indication he’d been robbed. The man had $41 in his wallet — a decent bit of cabbage in the midst of the Great Depression — and a gold watch on his wrist when he gave up the ghost under a full moon. He still even had a neatly folded newspaper tucked under his arm when they carted him away to the morgue.
It wasn’t until the next day when a routine autopsy revealed what really happened: The blood turned out to be from a bullet hole in the back of the man’s head, courtesy of a .32 caliber handgun.
The medical examiner found the slug embedded in the victim’s brain — and homicide detectives found themselves scrambling to catch up to what suddenly turned out to be a juicy murder mystery.
The dead man was identified as George O. Frank, 47, a Flatbush resident who worked as a bank teller on Wall Street. He’d been divorced for several years, had no children, and lived with an invalid mother he doted on and supported financially. Neighbors and coworkers described him as a quiet, unassuming guy who liked listening to the radio and going to the fights.
Frank was hardly a reclusive mama’s boy, though. He was in a long-distance relationship with a younger woman, a concert harpist from a prominent Massachusetts family he’d been dating for more than a year and was set to wed in a few months.
Police were baffled as to who would commit an execution-style murder on a hard-working average Joe who lived on the up-and-up and didn’t have any obvious enemies. Frank had caught a slug to the skull as he walked along South Portland Ave., a quiet, tree-lined block of brownstones just across the street from bucolic Fort Greene Park.
Detectives figured he knew his killer and was strolling with him a little after midnight when the assailant suddenly stopped, pulled out a gun and plugged him pointblank from behind.
Another mystery: What was Frank doing in Fort Greene at that hour on a Monday night, several miles away from his Flatbush home?
A little digging quickly turned up a person of interest — an ex-girlfriend who still carried a torch for the handsome teller.
She was Gertrude O’Keefe, a 37-yearold financial company stenographer who’d been involved with Frank for seven long years spent patiently waiting for her paramour to pop the question.
Cops learned Frank had, in fact, left his wife for the slender office worker, and that O’Keefe — who earned $28 a week — was so smitten she’d lent him $300 so he could get a quickie divorce in Reno.
But the ardor of their illicit romance had cooled to bitter embers over the years. In the summer of 1936, Frank threw her over for the attractive, well-off musician from New England, throwing O’Keefe into heartbroken despair.
Investigators anxious to question O’Keefe were quickly convinced they may have corralled the killer. She lived in a cheap furnished flat in a South Portland Ave. brownstone — just down the block from where Frank’s body was discovered.
But it was her behavior during questioning that confirmed their suspicions. O’Keefe freely admitted she had been with her ex in the hours before his murder, but insisted she had nothing to do with his death.
Her official story just didn’t add up, however. O’Keefe claimed Frank had been stalking her even though he was the one who broke it off more than a year ago, and that he had threatened her life.
The night of the murder, she said, he followed her into a restaurant and sat at her table uninvited. They barely spoke, and she only got away from him by ducking into a nearby theater. When the movie was over, Frank was waiting in the lobby. Only by threatening to call a cop did he go away, but not before he raised his fists in a menacing fashion, she said.
O’Keefe then claimed she took a subway into Manhattan and walked around the Times Square area for a long while to clear her head before getting home at about 1:30 a.m.
Detectives were skeptical about the entire timeline, especially since she would have no doubt seen the commotion of lights, sirens, cops and curious crowd surrounding Frank’s body at that hour.
But O’Keefe sealed her fate when police found a .32 revolver in her apartment — and an aspirin tin hidden in her hair as they were slapping the cuffs on her.
Inside was a key to a safe deposit box crammed with 178 handwritten love letters Frank had sent her over the years, plus typewritten copies of letters she had mailed him.
The missives were a chronicle of a love affair gone from sweet to sour, and police surmised Frank had been desperately trying to get them back because O’Keefe was threatening to show them to his fancy new fiancée.
Cops believed a jealous and enraged O’Keefe, realizing she’d lost him forever,
had finally gone over the edge and shot her lover down.
The New York papers milked the sordid tale for all it was worth. “JILTED WOMAN HELD AS KILLER” blared the Daily News front page, as reporters callously described the scorned O’Keefe as a sad, mousy, palefaced spinster with a loose screw.
Police, anxious to make their case in the public eye, gleefully released the contents of the sappy letters that Frank addressed to his “Darling Goddess.” Cops also trumpeted that they had a witness who could place O’Keefe at the scene of the crime.
But as quickly as they built their case, it fell apart just as fast.
While prosecutors held O’Keefe in jail on $1,000 bail, tests determined the gun found in her closet wasn’t the murder weapon after all.
And the witness who told cops he’d seen a woman lurking behind a car near where Frank was gunned down couldn’t identify O’Keefe in a lineup.
A week after her spectacular arrest, redfaced authorities had no choice but to drop the murder charge on what seemed an open-and-shut case. O’Keefe was released, but not before she got in a final word at her hearing.
“I want to thank you, your honor,” she told the magistrate with a hint of a smirk. “You have acted very intelligently.”
“Don’t thank me,” he answered, clearly disgusted at the turn of events. “I only did what the law made me do.”
The murder of George O. Frank was never solved.
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