The Story So Far: This is part three of five in the Shopkeeper Killer series. Thus far, January 1963 has brought a cold-blooded killer to prosperous, peaceful Harrisburg. His targets are mom-and-pop store owners, and investigators believe he’s an experienced criminal who won’t stop at one killing. Read part one and part two.
More than three months passed, and there was nothing. It’s as if the shopkeeper killer vanished like the ghost he seemed to be.
Perhaps this is why the 67-year-old lunch counter owner had little reason to watch his back while cleaning up after the lunch rush on Monday afternoon, April 29, 1963.
That’s when Domenick Agostino’s killer entered the luncheonette at Paxton and Cameron streets. This time, his strike was a model of fatal efficiency.
The killer came up behind Agostino, raised his German-made .22, then fired it behind the restauranteur’s left ear.
Agostino never saw it coming, police would say later.
Once again, the killer had chosen the perfect moment for his daring, daylight robbery/homicide.
He struck sometime between 3:15 and 3:30 p.m. That’s the small window of time separating the departure of Agostino’s last customer and the arrival of the unlucky patron who found the owner dead.
Mere minutes. But more than enough.
The killer scooped up all the bills from the register, then ripped Agostino’s wallet from the back of his pants, tearing out the seat of his trousers.
Coins falling from the register likely were still rolling and rattling on the floor by the time the killer was gone.
The price of Domenick Agostino’s life was a mere $131 — about $100 from the register, the rest from his wallet, police would confirm later. That doesn’t count all the dreams Agostino must have harbored when opening Spagnolo’s Restaurant with his son-in-law, Anthony T. Spagnolo.
They were stolen that day, too.
It was two and counting, now.
Harrisburg’s shopkeeper serial killer seemed to be just getting started.
‘Mostly similar’
This killer was good and only getting better. More efficient. More lethal.
His first strike was somewhat sloppy – two shots and the wounded store owner clung to life for nearly a day.
This time, Domenick Agostino was dead by the time his body hit the floor. He lay in a heap at the rear of the restaurant, right in front of the lunch counter where he’d served up 15-cent hot dogs and his signature subs, shakes and steaks earlier that day.
Dauphin County Coroner Dr. Thomas J. Fritchey ruled Agostino had been shot once in the neck, just below his left ear. This propelled the .22 slug upward into the skull, deep inside his brain. The killer held his gun so close to the back of Agostino’s neck that there were powder burns on the victim’s left shoulder, the coroner said.
Detectives at the scene wasted little time in confirming to clamoring reporters that the MO was “mostly similar” to Robert Yablon’s killing in January. They needn’t have bothered with the qualifier.
It was the same perp.
The only difference this time was the aggressiveness with which police moved, almost from the first minutes of the investigation.
Suspects were swept up from the streets by the handful. Patriot-News reporters at the 1024 Paxton St. restaurant pegged the number taken into custody that afternoon as being in the “dozens.”
So many, Harrisburg police headquarters remained at “full capacity” for the remainder of the afternoon, all that evening and into the next morning, the newspaper wrote.
In many cases, this wasn’t a matter of a few questions and “beat it.” So-called persons of interest were held for hours.
The entire city detective force was pressed into service. State police assisted. All the brass was there – Chief C. Preston Price, District Attorney Martin Lock and Mayor Daniel J. Barry. They shuffled in and out of the restaurant’s entrance beneath a Spagnolo’s Coke sign.
The unprecedented police response — soon to be billed as the largest manhunt in Harrisburg history — reflected the magnitude of the threat. With the second shopkeeper killing, it was now a serial case.
It wasn’t just a grocery store owner here and a restauranteur there who were being targeted, either.
Harrisburg’s entire business community was in the crosshairs.
No one knew who’d be next.
A casualty of such fear is commerce itself. A city as scared and wounded as this could soon hemorrhage its economic lifeblood.
The only tourniquet to staunch the flow was catching the killer. (Story continues below)
READ THE REST OF THE SERIES:
Chapter 4: 2 teen girls served up as ready-made suspects in 4th merchant murder
Chapter 5: DA Fran Chardo’s quest to unmask the shopkeeper killer 60 years later
City on the brink
At the outset of the 1960s, prosperous Harrisburg couldn’t have envisioned the economic battering it was about to suffer over the course of the next decade or so.
Back then, downtown department stores, theaters and a plethora of mom-and-pop shops catering to virtually every need drew shoppers from around the region. These are just some of the scores of names: Pomeroy’s, Bowman’s, S.S. Kresge’s and Caplan’s department stores; Penn Harris and Harrisburger hotels; Colonial Theatre; Goldsmith’s and Miller furniture; Kuhn’s, Feller’s, Crego’s and Allan Stuart’s men’s stores; Triangle, Book’s, Herman’s, American, Flagg Bros. and Father & Son shoe stores; Jeannette E Howell Gowns; K & M Beauty Salon; Ladies Darling apparel; Troup and Reifsnyder pianos and music; Matango’s Candies; Emporium Luggage; Stein Furs; Ference Cheese Shop; Cardway Greeting Cards; Swenson Travel Agency; Ormond Hosiery; Morris Jewelers; Mary Sachs; Junior Dress Shop; Wambach’s Record Shop; and of course, Woolworth’s.
“I could go on and on,” Historic Harrisburg Executive Director David J. Morrison said when naming Harrisburg businesses from the early 1960s. Radiating out from Market Street, the stores and shops ran north and south along Second and Third streets, stretching from downtown to deep into midtown.
Harrisburg’s concentration of merchants created a powerful retail magnet.
“People who are now in their 70s remember coming downtown for Christmas shopping season,” Morrison said. “Thursday night was when the businesses stayed open late. That would have still been thriving in the early 60s.”
Yet, forces were already at work that would dramatically reshape the residential and economic landscape — both in Harrisburg and across America.
The automobile, the nuclear family, the post-war prosperity of the 1950s and the constant advertising drumbeat for “new” “better” and “modern” created an upwardly mobile itch that could only be scratched by moving from the city to the suburbs.
The siren song of bigger lots, wide-open backyards, driveways, two-car garages, even swimming pools, prompted many Americans looking for a bigger, better life to pull out of cramped cities in favor of the “countryside.”
Urban sprawl was born.
For a time, these new suburban dwellers were content to live outside the city, but return for shopping splurges and big movie premieres, Morrison said. Dining out on a regular basis still wasn’t major trend in third-tier cities like Harrisburg. There, restaurant dinners were reserved for special occasions, especially among families.
“There were watering holes, cocktail lounges and that kind of thing,” Morrison added of the city’s offerings.
The first big blow to downtown retail centers came from the suburban shopping centers of the 1950s. What’s taken for granted now – a long strip of storefronts situated off busy routes and surrounded by oceans of parking – were revolutionary.
Instead of making special shopping trips downtown, everyday shopping convenience soon ruled the day among newly minted suburbanites. In Harrisburg, the first lures were Kline Village, the Uptown Plaza and the West Shore Shopping Plaza, Morrison said. The latter allowed Cumberland County residents to shop without crossing the Susquehanna River. A great divide was beginning to form.
“How it started to wane was the continued moving to the suburbs that was happening nationally,” Morrison said. “People were moving to suburban, newly-built neighborhoods. The commerce followed.”
The final blow in the retail tug-of-war between downtown and the suburbs was the indoor shopping mall, the first of which hit Harrisburg in 1969, Morrison said.
These were ingenious inventions of meandering, enclosed corridors several football fields long, all lined with sundry shops and anchored by national behemoths such Sears and J.C. Penney’s.
It proved a perfect marriage: Suburban sprawl met shopping sprawl. The late-1960s America that had set sights on the moon just couldn’t resist the modernity of the mall.
Downtowns like Harrisburg’s didn’t stand a chance.
“Those places were convenient and new,” Morrison said of those early malls, such as Harrisburg East and Capital City. “They successfully competed against downtown. A lot of the retail was happening in the suburbs by the end of the 1960s.”
The final force that all-but wiped Harrisburg businesses from the map wasn’t manmade at all. It was Mother Nature and the wrath of Tropical Storm Agnes in June 1972.
Across flooded-out Harrisburg, migration to the suburbs became an all-out stampede. Thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses pulled up stakes. Most never came back.
Only after Harrisburg property values plunged did a group of younger, often college-educated couples come to see the city’s charms buried beneath the smelly flood mud.
These new Bohemians bought into the city for pennies on the dollar, rehabbing old homes and other properties. And when there was talk of bringing in bulldozers in the name of urban renewal, they banded together, creating what became known as the Greater Harrisburg Movement. That spawned the preservation group Historic Harrisburg Inc. Other ventures, such as Harristown Development Corp., followed.
Harrisburg’s precipitous decline had been halted. Its long, slow crawl to recovery and rebirth would take decades, continuing to this day.
Amid all this, the “retail rampage” of 1963-64 is but a footnote in the broader sweep of the city’s fall. But during those years when the lives of city shopkeepers were being stolen, the threat to Harrisburg businesses and livelihoods seemed as mortal and immediate as it gets.
The city’s tension is still palpable in 60-year-old Patriot-News articles chronicling the “merchant murders.” Pressure on police to solve the case was immense.
Luckily, they were about to get their first big break.
A tipster claimed to know where the shopkeeper serial killer had hidden his murder weapon.
Junkyard gun
A half-dozen detectives armed with portable lights borrowed from the fire department were converging on a junkyard on Cameron Street. Night had fallen, but the investigation into restauranteur Domenick Agostino’s slaying was heating up.
Hauling in all those supposed suspects for a good, long grilling under harsh lights at police headquarters had borne fruit.
Or had it?
Among the scores swept up in the police dragnet earlier that day were six “youths,” the Patriot-News reported. One was a girl reportedly seen in the “vicinity” of the luncheonette just before the homicide. Two of these teens were held for more than a day, according to news reports. At least one was subjected to a paraffin test to determine whether he had recently fired a gun.
Yet, all the police interest in such young suspects seemed out of character for the case. The operating profile from the Yablon killing was that of an experienced criminal who had probably done time for robbery. Therefore, the previous police focus was on poring over parole records and questioning recently released perps.
In switching gears and pressing these kids, detectives who should have known better might have cost themselves valuable time in what investigators call the “golden hours” following a homicide.
One of the detained and questioned youths was a 17-year-old boy.
At some point during hours of grilling, the boy reportedly cracked. He offered to take police to where the murder weapon had been hidden: A Cameron Street junkyard.
In some respects, the tip seemed to ring true. The site made some sense. It was near the luncheonette where Agostino had been shot dead.
Perhaps, the rapid and massive police response to the scene had panicked the otherwise careful killer. With sirens converging, the killer didn’t want to get caught with the murder weapon.
So, he tossed it in the junkyard.
Better still, someone knew about it. That someone was sitting before a hard-nosed detective, and he just gave it up.
Police didn’t waste a second. An entire squad of detectives raced toward the junkyard, radio car emergency lights swirling in the night.
Finding the gun amid all the junkyard’s debris would be difficult in the dark. But there was no waiting until morning. They’d blast the scene with bright fire department flood lights, then get their hands dirty sifting through the rubbish.
That was the plan, anyway.
Things changed in a hurry.
After reporting the gun tip up the chain of command, perhaps the detective questioning the boy added a final jab. Something like, “This better not be some wild goose chase. For your sake.”
Whatever the reason, the young tipster, already nervous, grew even more twitchy. The steely-eyed detective must’ve caught this and pressed him. Because before the squad of detectives reached the junkyard, the tipster recanted.
He’d made the whole thing up.
The junkyard gun hunt was abruptly called off before cops were elbow-deep in garbage, the Patriot-News reported.
It was yet another dead end in a case full of them.
More red herrings would follow.
‘Psychotic’ killer
The bullet extracted from Domenick Agostino’s brain at Harrisburg Hospital was almost unrecognizably smashed.
It was a .22 slug, all right. But after ricocheting off the victim’s skull and scrambling his brains, state police ballistic tests could not conclusively match it to the two slugs taken from Yablon.
By becoming more proficient in slaying the restauranteur, the killer had further complicated the case. His execution-style shot behind Agostino’s left ear prevented a ballistics match that could have conclusively linked both cases to the same gun.
The best the police lab could do was conclude the .22 slugs from the two cases had come from a “similar” German-made .22 revolver.
Rest assured, however, police were positive.
They were growing ever more frustrated with this elusive killer, too. As days passed and the intensive investigation yielded nothing solid, some in law enforcement began venting their rage.
The brutality of the crimes prompted Chief County Detective Anthony Parry to publicly speculate on the killer’s mental state. He labeled the perp “a psychotic” in comments published by The Patriot-News.
“Apparently he has a psychosis that impels him to kill his victims even though they offer no resistance,” Parry said.
Dr. John H. Mentzer, then the assistant superintendent at the Harrisburg State Hospital for mental patients, told the Patriot, “Such a criminal could be a psychotic or in any case, he would be psychopathic.”
Psychotics are characterized by radical departures from “the normal mode of action,” the doctor explained. He added a psychopath, on the other hand, is “one who is aware of the difference between right and wrong, but isn’t influenced by such knowledge.”
In other words, the cold-blooded killer behind the retail rampage was being described by supposed experts as nothing short of a murderous monster who was out of his mind.
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Fear was out of control.
Missed in all the academic conjecture was the obvious fact that a careful killer was eliminating anyone who could put him behind bars.
Far from psychotic, this motive is so coldly rational, it’s downright chilling.
Worse, the killer wasn’t just getting better. He was becoming quicker.
After waiting more than three months between his first and second murder, the shopkeeper serial killer executed his third victim, Morris Lock, inside his midtown shoe store just about a month later, on May 24.
By the time a customer found the shoe store owner lying in a pool of his blood, it was as if every shop, market and lunch counter in Harrisburg was under attack.
One store owner put it best, telling the Patriot-News, “Turn your back for a minute, and bang. You’re dead.”
The only question was where and when would Harrisburg’s shopkeeper serial killer call again to exact the ultimate price — another life.
PART FOUR: When a fourth Harrisburg shop owner is gunned down in his cut-rate convenience store, everything appears different. Most especially, the two teen-age girls who are all but served up to take the fall for murder. (Read part four of five in PennLive’s cold case investigation)
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