Editor’s note: This is the first of five parts of PennLive’s Shopkeeper Serial Killer series.
It was already the biggest manhunt in Harrisburg history.
Then, the sitting Dauphin County District Attorney’s uncle was gunned down inside his shoe store.
The emergency call late Friday afternoon, May 24, 1963, brought out every cop in the city, on-duty and off. For 18 weeks, Pennsylvania’s capital had been gripped by what the media dubbed a “retail rampage.”
Someone was killing store owners inside their mom-and-pop businesses, then taking their cash. Sometimes, this amounted to just a few hundred bucks. Such was the price of a life.
With the discovery of Morris Lock face-down in a pool of blood on the floor of his North Third Street shoe store, it was now three shopkeeper killings and counting. In banner headlines, the serial killings were being called “the Merchant Murders.”
This time, the body lying next to a pair of loafers spilled from a shoe box wasn’t just any businessman. This time, it was personal.
Morris Lock was the uncle of District Attorney Martin Lock. Together, they were members of one of the most prominent Jewish families in Harrisburg.
Current Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo said he can’t even imagine this highly personal turn in the already high-profile case. Frankly, it seems more the stuff of fictional Hollywood movie scripts than facts from the case files of an actual Harrisburg homicide investigation.
Yet, it’s just one of the enduring elements of the shopkeeper serial killer case of the 1960s that has Chardo digging through 60 years of files in search of the elusive killer. Chardo has shared what’s he’s discovered with PennLive for this five-part special report.
On a more personal note, Martin Lock’s now 74-year-old son Herschel recalls how the mood darkened inside the Lock family home after their relative was gunned down. His already-burdened DA dad now carried an even heavier load.
“I can tell you this, it was very sobering. That was the atmosphere in the house,” Herschel told PennLive.
“It was more shocking. Killings were more shocking then, than they are now,” said Herschel, who was 14 at the time.
In the wake of the DA’s uncle being shot dead, Harrisburg Police Chief C. Preston Price ordered a full-court press on the investigation.
The Midtown shopping district was bustling that Friday afternoon. The glorious spring weather filled the sidewalks with people. All were now potential witnesses to a killer who had yet to be identified, despite two previous brazen, daylight robbery-homicides at shops elsewhere in the city.
Mayor Daniel J. Barry, standing outside the William Penn Shoe Store that was now a crime scene, expressed “shock” at the latest homicide. The killer, he told the assembled press, “is a constant menace to our city.”
At least half of the district attorney’s office turned out, too. Those responding included future U.S. Congressman George Gekas, then a top assistant DA. Much further in the background was the unlikely successor to Martin Lock, who would be dead, himself, in just two short years.
That young assistant was LeRoy Zimmerman. For decades to come, the future state attorney general would often explain that the great fortune of his meteoric legal and political career began with the terrible fortunes of the Lock family.
Everyone was on the case.
“Within minutes, almost the entire police department, including off-duty men and office workers, poured into the area. Hundreds of curious persons crowded the sidewalks around the tiny store,” the Patriot-News wrote in next morning’s edition.
The clear message from all the manpower on the street that day was that the robbery-killings plaguing Harrisburg, then the region’s retail center, had to stop. Hundreds of people would be interviewed in the 24 hours after Morris Lock’s body was found around 5 p.m.
Two persons of interest, including an AWOL Army soldier who was inside the store, would be held by police and questioned for more than a day. But the real key to finally solving the “Merchant Murders” and unmasking the cold-blooded killer could be right upstairs from the shoe store.
That’s where a young mother of two had just finished watching her favorite afternoon TV show. She was awaiting her husband’s return from work when she heard a commotion from the store below.
Could she finger the killer? (Story continues below)
READ THE ENTIRE SERIES:
Chapter 2: The killer’s sloppy first strike inside a Harrisburg grocery store nearly gets him caught
Chapter 3: The killer’s 2nd strike at lunch counter puts businesses on edge & manhunt in overdrive
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
Ear Witness
Joan Snyder was in perfect position to solve the case.
Almost immediately after switching off the television right around 5 p.m., Snyder heard scuffling sounds from the store below. Then, almost simultaneously, a single gunshot.
Snyder dashed down the stairs from her apartment and was steps away from peering out the door window with a direct view onto North Third Street — and the shoe store’s entrance.
Snyder froze, instead.
“When I got down toward the bottom (of the steps) I became frightened. I thought if there was a shooting going on, I had better stay upstairs,” Snyder told the Patriot-News that evening.
Snyder said she thought of her two young children, asleep upstairs. She retreated back up the steps without looking through the door window.
Upstairs, she dashed to a window overlooking the street. But precious minutes had passed. The elusive killer was gone. Snyder later told police she didn’t see anything — or anyone — unusual.
She was an ear-witness only. Snyder couldn’t even phone police about the unmistakable gunshot she just heard. The family had recently moved into the apartment, and the phone line wasn’t hooked up.
“I thought of calling the police, but I would have had to go outside to do it,” Snyder explained, referring to a now-extinct pay phone.
“I’m glad I did not go out. If I had seen the killer, he might have shot me too,” she said.
‘Execution style’
A would-be shopper stumbled upon the gruesome scene inside the shoe store.
Morris Lock’s body lay in the rear of the store. The small alcove was hidden from the street. He was face-down, his feet pointing to where he did shoe repairs in back. The only signs of the struggle that Joan Snyder heard from upstairs was a spilled box of black leather loafers next to the body.
It was as if someone had asked Lock to try on a pair of shoes. And when the store owner turned his back, the killer struck.
Once again, the murder, itself, was coldly efficient. In police parlance, it was “execution style.”
The killer pressed his .22 revolver behind Lock’s left ear and fired. The slug, extracted at autopsy, was badly smashed. It likely ricocheted inside Lock’s skull, doing maximum damage.
The store owner died instantly. He never saw it coming.
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The crime scene had all the earmarks of a killer who was perfecting his trade. This, after an especially sloppy killing the first time out, back in January 1963. Worse, he was accelerating the frequency of his deadly attacks on Harrisburg’s store owners.
Almost immediately after inspecting the scene and examining the body, county Coroner Thomas J. Fritchey declared the circumstances of Lock’s homicide as “completely similar” to the two prior shopkeeper killings
All three store owners had been shot dead with a small-caliber handgun, almost certainly the same German-made .22.
Lock’s fatal head wound was the size of a dime, encircled with gun powder. From the small entry wound behind the left ear, the bullet would have taken “a beeline” to his brain, Fritchey said.
Unlike the two prior robbery-homicides, in which the killer ripped out the back of his victims’ trousers to steal wallets ripe with cash, Lock still had money in his pockets. But the cash register, left hanging open, was all but cleaned out.
Despite the early moments of the Lock probe, investigators were unshakable in their certainty that it was the same killer.
The term “serial killer” wouldn’t be coined until 1981 in reference to Wayne Williams, the man behind the murders of at least 31 children in Atlanta, Ga., from 1979 to 1981. But it certainly could have applied to the growing number of “merchant murders” in Harrisburg.
That’s why, with virtually all the city and county law enforcement on the scene that Friday evening, investigators were determined:
The deadly retail rampage had to end here.
The Third Degree
One-, two- and three-man detective teams shuffled in and out of the shoe store crime scene all evening.
The full-court press of police work sometimes bordered on the absurd. A trio of detectives was spotted questioning an eight-year-old boy. The boy was “the perplexed center of attraction for a while as three detectives talked to him in the City Youth Bureau office,” the Patriot-News reported.
Clearly, no stone was being left unturned.
Police interviewed virtually anyone and everyone who was in the area of the shoe store that Friday afternoon. The 8-year-old wasn’t even the youngest.
A six-year-old girl also was questioned, the newspaper added.
But as to whether all the canvasing and interviews resulted in any leads or solid suspect descriptions, detectives at the scene were non-committal.
“We don’t have anything definite yet,” one told reporters. “There is still a lot to be sorted out here. Talk to me later.”
The youngest pair of potential witnesses, who were said to be at the scene during the time of the shooting, provided police with “conflicting descriptions” of persons near the store.
Then, with hopes of a break dwindling, a potential suspect fell right into investigators’ laps.
That evening, a 19-year-old man who would turn out to be absent-without-leave from the U.S. Army attempted to enter the shoe store as if nothing had happened.
The AWOL soldier was at the store’s doorway, and he wanted inside.
When astonished officers asked him why, he said he’d left his transistor radio at the store while he was purchasing shoes earlier in the day.
Instead of retrieving his radio, the man was frisked. And when an officer pulled a large wad of cash from his pocket, their interest in him as a murder suspect piqued.
Was this the killer returning to the scene of his crime?
Burying the Dead
The soldier, who was never identified in published reports, was taken into police custody and extensively questioned over the next two-plus days.
A neighborhood man who lived near the shoe store and had argued with Lock also was held and questioned over that long weekend.
Both were described as promising persons of interest at the time.
Police also examined a hand-written letter Lock had addressed to a local woman. Police would not disclose the contents of the letter, penned in ink on note-type stationery. But it was consequential enough for the woman to come forward and turn it over to law enforcement.
By that Sunday, however, the high-pitched intensity of the homicide investigation was petering out -- and Morris Lock’s funeral was at hand. Time had come to bury the dead.
The two suspects taken into custody with fanfare were quietly released. Police turned over the AWOL soldier to the Army, where he would face military justice, rather than answer for murder.
No one dared admit it right then, but police were no closer to the shopkeeper serial killer than they were before Morris Lock had been shot.
The next day’s banner newspaper headline said it all: “UPTOWN STORE OWNER KILLED; 3RD VICTIM WITHIN IN 18 WEEKS”
It seemed only a matter of time before there’d be another one.
Fighting Back
Morris Lock had just celebrated his 58th birthday that Monday.
The following Sunday, he was buried.
His wife, Jennie, gathered with their adult children — daughter, Mrs. Louis Getz of Bayside N.Y. and son, Lawrence of Harrisburg, along with Morris’ two brothers, a sister and a grandson — to lay their loved one to rest in the Jewish tradition.
Prior to his tragic death, Morris knew full well of the shopkeeper killer stalking the mom-and-pop stores of Harrisburg, killing their owners and stealing their cash.
The shoe store owner was unbowed by all of it.
In fact, Morris had talked with neighbors about the “merchant murders.” He vowed he wouldn’t end up like the other victims. That’s when he began keeping a butcher knife in his shoe store for protection.
“If somebody tries to get me, I’m going to get him first,” a neighbor quoted Morris as saying.
Instead, he lay dead inside a coffin lowered beneath the earth that Sunday.
Prepared as Morris was, he had turned his back. In that instant, the killer didn’t hesitate.
He stole Morris’ life, then his money.
This fact is telling. It indicates the killer didn’t appear threatening. Perhaps, Morris even knew him.
Why else would a knife-packing store owner on high alert drop his guard?
The killer must look like an ordinary shopper.
In fact, police studying the crime scene later said Lock was removing a box of shoes from a rack in back of the store just before he was shot.
When the killer pressed the .22 to the back of Lock’s neck did the owner drop the shoebox, the pair of black loafers tumbling out.
This accounts for the commotion Joan Snyder heard from her upstairs apartment.
In the end, there was no struggle, however. Morris never had the chance to pull his knife.
And while Snyder was too timid to peer out the downstairs door window to possibly glimpse the killer, her ear-witness account would add a key piece of evidence to the investigation.
How did he know?
In hearing the shot right after switching off her favorite program, Joan Snyder fixed the time of the murder at just before 5 p.m.
This is crucially important.
In the prior two merchant murders, police could only pin down the time of the killings to half-hour-long windows. But in each case, the killer was able to strike while no one else was inside the stores.
The question was, how did he know?
In taking Morris Lock alone and by surprise, the killer’s timing was even more precise.
Lock had a long-standing practice of closing his shop right around 5 p.m. This was so he could drive to the state Capitol, where wife Jennie worked. Morris picked her up and drove her home, before returning to the shoe store and reopening for the evening.
It was his routine, and his killer seemed to know it.
On a busy Friday afternoon, the Midtown streets filled with shoppers, the killer struck precisely when Lock’s shoe store would be empty — right before Morris would be locking up at 5 p.m.
Again, how did he know?
This was the strongest evidence yet of a calculating killer who carefully selected his targets to minimize the risk of getting caught.
Moreover, his cold-blooded executions of the store owners weren’t out of malice or some psychopathic urge. They were done to ensure there’d be no witnesses.
The mom-and-pop stores weren’t the richest targets. Just the least risky. The few hundred bucks in cash taken from the shops’ tills and usually, the store owners’ wallets, wasn’t big money. But it was a nice return on a few minutes’ work.
Given all this, there was little reason to believe the killer would stop anytime soon. He was too good at it now.
As Morris Lock was laid in his grave, the killer appeared to be just getting started. Yet, authorities seemed no closer to catching him.
DA Martin Lock knew the challenge he and his investigators faced. In the days following his uncle’s funeral, he said this:
“The entire city police force will remain assigned to the case until this psychopath is caught. There are many men working many hours on the case. There are dozens of leads to check and re-check. We are actually conducting three investigations, which we are confident will lead us to one man.”
One reason for Lock’s confidence?
As good as this killer was, he did make mistakes.
His sloppy first killing nearly ended his retail rampage before it even began.
To solve the case, it was time to go back to the very beginning and re-examine every last detail.
PART TWO: A Harrisburg grocer receives his Monday morning meat delivery, routine as clockwork. What happens next is anything but. The shopkeeper serial killer begins his retail reign of terror, yet makes a huge mistake in the process. Read part two of five in the PennLive cold case investigation.
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