MET HIS DEATH WITH STRANGER IN NIGHT
Exec’s battered body found in suite at the Waldorf
There were few things Colin MacKellar enjoyed more than his frequent business trips to Manhattan, where the mild-mannered sales manager from Montreal would let his hair down, hit the bars and be himself after a long day of buttoned-up client meetings.
On a balmy November evening in 1948, the 56-year-old textile company executive followed his usual routine whenever he was in the city. After an evening flight into LaGuardia Airport, he checked into a suite at around 10 p.m. at the ritzy Waldorf Astoria hotel at Park Ave. and 49th St., and wasted no time walking across town to one of his favorite haunts, the bar at the Hotel Astor near Times Square.
The next morning, a chambermaid who let herself into MacKellar’s 19th-floor suite ran screaming into the hallway the moment she stepped into the living area.
Sprawled on the floor, face up and eyes open, was MacKellar’s battered body. The pants pockets of his pricey three-piece suit were turned inside out. His empty wallet was near his head, which was caked with dried blood.
He’d obviously been the victim of a robbery that escalated into a vicious murder, and detectives who rushed to the scene had several enticing clues to go on. On a table were four highball glasses and a bucket of melted ice water. Two of the glasses had been used and contained the dregs of Scotch whisky. The bottle was missing, but a cop found a discarded Dewar’s wrapper in a trash can.
MacKellar had apparently invited someone into his suite, had drinks with the person and was then set upon by the killer — who after savagely beating the businessman to death and stripping him of his cash added insult to fatal injury by swiping his booze.
While his skull had been severely fractured, the cause of death was the result of a sadistic attack on his lower body. MacKellar died of an abdominal hemorrhage after the killer stomped him until his intestines ruptured.
The New York newspapers immediately jumped all over a juicy story that could have served as the plot for one of the film noir crime dramas that were popular at the time: Wealthy tourist is brutally slain by a mysterious visitor at a world-famous hotel.
“An unwanted guest named Murder crashed the swank Waldorf Astoria early yesterday,” began the Nov. 6, 1948, Daily
News story on the murder, adding that the grisly crime “gave New York police their greatest homicide mystery” in years.
There was nothing in MacKellar’s background that gave any indication he’d meet such an ugly demise. A World War I veteran who served in the Canadian artillery and had worked his way up the ranks of the Dominion Textile Co., he was married for more than 20 years and had two children in college. He was well-off yet unassuming. A friend described him as kindly, gentle and “very even-tempered.”
As investigators tried to trace MacKellar’s steps from the night before and determine whether the killer was a man or woman, a stranger he’d met at a bar or a fellow Waldorf guest, one of the interviews with the overnight staff hit pay dirt. The hotel’s elevator operator said MacKellar had returned to the hotel in the middle of the night, obviously soused.
With him was a good-looking young man likewise in his cups.
The elevator operator took them both to the 19th floor. A short while later, he brought the man back to the lobby, and recalled asking him whether he’d put the drunken MacKellar “to sleep.”
“Yes, he’s sleeping,” the stranger answered.
Armed with a description of the likely killer, detectives scouring the suite soon came upon another intriguing lead: a paper matchbook cover advertising a Times Square-area tavern.
It was a clue straight out of a cheesy noir movie, but it helped police solve the mystery less than 12 hours after MacKellar was found dead.
As the sun set, cops converged on the West 45th Street Cafe, a popular tavern that promised patrons “you will always find your friends here,” according to the matchbook.
Detectives canvassed the joint and instantly knew they’d found their man.
Sitting at the bar with a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other and a faraway look in his eyes was a well-dressed man who fit the description of the stranger seen with MacKellar at the Waldorf: Young, tall, handsome and husky.
As the cops approached him, Ralph Edmond Barrows, 19, instantly knew who they were and why they were there. He surrendered without a fuss.
It took a few hours under the lights but Barrows eventually confessed to killing MacKellar — but only because the older man had come on to him in the suite after a night of heavy drinking and he felt threatened, he said.
The strapping youth, born and raised in Grand Rapids, Mich., certainly looked the part of the Midwestern, all-American boy. He was a former high school football player who said he worked as a salesman, but investigators soon discovered his attractive veneer belied an ugly dark side.
Barrows had come to New York City the day before the murder after having recently pleaded guilty and given a suspended threeyear sentence for robbing and badly beating a man in an alley after the two met in a bar.
Like with MacKellar, Barrows claimed the older man, in his 50s, had made a pass at him.
Barrows had also been arrested twice before using the same MO — he trolled taverns known to be gay hangouts, lured the older men out of the bar, then robbed and assaulted them.
There was more: Barrows had been charged in yet another case with raping and assaulting a Grand Rapids girl, but was only slapped with a $75 fine after the rape charge was dropped.
Once the press got ahold of his divorced parents, other sordid details of his life were revealed. Barrows had been married to a woman eight years older — when he was just 15. His mother told reporters she had the marriage annulled. He’d also spent time at a reform school for stealing a uniform and posing as a sailor.
In an apparent ploy to gain public sympathy, his mother claimed that her breakup with his father when Barrows was very young deeply affected her son, adding that he had always been a “strange” boy.
Feeding off society’s less than tolerant attitude toward gay men, Barrows’ strategy at his January 1950 murder trial was to claim he lost his mind and acted in self-defense when MacKellar embraced him and forbid him to leave the suite after propositioning him.
It may have worked. Barrows dodged a Sing Sing death sentence when an allmale jury convicted him of first-degree manslaughter, which carried a 10-to-20year sentence.
But the judge wasn’t swayed. Citing the savage attack on a defenseless victim and his previous record for similar crimes, the judge slammed Barrows as being an incorrigible “menace to society” with a “psychopathic, abnormal, sexually perverted and sadistic personality,” and promptly doubled his sentence to 20 years to life.
JUSTICE STORY has been the Daily News’ exclusive take on true crime tales of murder, mystery and mayhem for nearly 100 years.