10:45 am, Wednesday

 

The three men sitting in the Chevy convertible in Delhi were getting edgy with the wait. Finally, Manager Jerry Grueter emerged from the savings and loan, got into his station wagon, and drove west on Delhi Pike, then south down Anderson Ferry Road. The trio in the waiting vehicle followed him halfway down Anderson Ferry Road, making sure he wasn’t just driving around the block. But Grueter continued on. He had an appointment on nearby Hillside Avenue. “Okay, I guess he’s gonna be gone for a while,” Kassow said. He turned the convertible around, heading back up the hill to the savings and loan where he pulled into the small lot and backed up against the building to park. The only other car in the lot belonged to the teller.

 

***

 

Kassow stayed behind the wheel while Leigh and Johnson started to get out of the car. Kassow stopped them, saying, “Now there’s only one person in there, the teller. And we can’t have any witnesses, you understand? No witnesses. If anyone else goes in behind you, I’ll follow them and kill them.” Testily, Leigh responded, “Okay, okay.” Leigh and Johnson got out of the car and went into the building. It was a couple of minutes before 11 a.m.

 

11:00 am, Wednesday

 

Helen Huebner usually cashed her paycheck at a bank near McAlpin’s Department Store downtown where she was a part-time sales clerk. But today her husband, Joe, picked her up after leaving his job at the Wiedemann Brewery across the Ohio River in Newport, Kentucky. She decided to cash her check at Cabinet Supreme on the way to their Delhi Township home. They had had an account there for eight years.
Joe and Helen, married for twenty-three years, worked hard to support their three boys. They were looking forward to seeing their oldest, Tom, who was nearing the end of his tour of duty with the U.S. Navy and would soon be home. Still at home were his younger brothers, Daniel, who attended Our Lady of Victory Elementary School, and Larry, a student at Oak Hills High School. The Huebner parents got to Cabinet Supreme about eleven in the morning. Joe drove into the little lot next to the savings and loan and parked to the right of the lot. He usually parked on the left side, but there were already three cars there, and the parking area was small. Joe recognized one of the cars. It belonged to the teller. He saw two women in another car who had driven in just ahead of him. The third car was a dirty old Chevrolet convertible, parked right behind him. Joe parked facing east, away from the building. In his rearview mirror, he could see the walk in front of the doorway and the convertible.
Sitting next to him, Helen clutched her big red plastic purse, got out of the car, and headed for the door. Joe noticed the other two women walking toward the front door about the same time. He knew they all would get prompt service from the popular teller, Lillian Dewald, who had been with Cabinet Supreme Savings and Loan for thirteen years. Lillian was pleasant and efficient. A good-looker, too, a little over average height, weight all in the right places. As the three women went into the building, Joe turned on the car radio, settled back and listened to music. He kept an eye on the mirror so he could spot Helen when she came out.

 

***

 

When Leigh and Johnson walked into the small thrift, Johnson went up to Lillian Dewald at the counter and said, “I want to make a deposit in my account.” She was not particularly happy to see the big red-haired man again. He had been in before and acted strangely, Lillian thought. But she turned to pick up deposit slips. At that point, Leigh whipped out his automatic and Johnson announced, “This is a stick-up.” Johnson reached into his back pocket, pulled out his white-handled revolver and pointed it at Lillian.
The teller stepped back, her eyes on the gun. Johnson reached over the counter and rifled the cash drawer, knocking to the floor a cardboard box holding account cards and deposit slips. As he grabbed a handful of money, three women walked through the front door. Leigh stared at them. “Oh shit!” Johnson turned his head, saw them, then looked back at Lillian behind the counter. The newcomers walked just a few steps into the lobby, then stopped. Transfixed, they stared at the gun in Leigh’s hand. For a moment, nobody moved. This was more than the holdup men had bargained for. It was a small office, and Kassow had said there was seldom more than a single customer at a time in the place, especially in the morning.
“Okay! Everybody into the vault!” Neither man later remembered who actually said the words. It all happened so fast. Johnson took their handbags, and the four frightened women were herded into the six by ten foot vault, made more narrow by a safe and storage cabinets which lined the walls. The teller tried to duck between the safe and a filing cabinet, but the space was small and she still was exposed to the gunmen. Johnny Leigh panicked. Hungover and unnerved by the unexpected presence of three more women, Kassow’s no witnesses kept running through his head like a broken record. No witnessess! From the doorway of the vault, he faced the women—shaking from alcohol, little sleep and an adrenaline rush—and the gun went off.
Johnson stood stock still. At the sound of the first shot he turned to stone, a statue holding three women’s pocketbooks and a .22 revolver. Leigh kept shooting. One shot each felled the two older women who seemed to cling together. Then Helen Huebner dropped, a bullet in her head and her McAlpin’s paycheck still in her left hand. The women fell on top of each other. There was no place else to fall.
Leigh fired twice at Dewald because she just kept screaming, then his gun jammed. He turned, snatched Johnson’s gun out of his hand and fired again. Dewald fell forward, her head landing on the vault doorsill. Leigh stood over her, firing one more time. Then that gun jammed, but Lillian’s screams had stopped.
A wispy thought found its way into Leigh’s booze-soaked brain. This was all wrong. He shouted to Johnson, “Let’s go!” but the big man didn’t move. “Christ, Red, come on!” Leigh finally took Johnson by the hand and led him out. They walked rapidly back to the convertible, where Kassow was watching and waiting.
Leigh and Johnson got into the car, and Kassow said excitedly, “I know two of those women! They’re sisters, two of them who went in there. They live on my street! Are they all dead?”
Leigh snapped, “I guess so. Get the hell out of here.” Kassow gunned the car and it took off, back the way they came.
Speeding east on the road along the Ohio River, Kassow gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead, his mind churning. Four women. All dead? “Did you really kill all those women?” He kept his eyes on the road, not looking at Red sitting next to him, or at Johnny in the back seat. Kassow didn’t really believe anyone would actually be killed, despite his exhortations.
Leigh answered, “I think maybe one of them was still alive when we left.” Johnson broke his silence. “You had to do it,” he said. John Leigh looked at the strange expression on Kassow’s face and knew that what he had to do was get out of town.

 

* * *

 

Four women were murdered and they had missed their prime target, which was not the handful of bills from the cash drawer. John Leigh already had 400 stolen dollars in his pocket. Kassow wasn’t carrying cash, but he had a $600 savings account of his own in a Cincinnati bank. What they went into the savings and loan to steal was “thousands of dollars of Jerry Grueter’s own money” which Kassow had said the manager kept in a box in the vault. Kassow knew that in addition to Grueter’s salary as manager of the savings and loan, he derived personal income from more than a dozen rental properties in the Eighth and State area. Kassow thought Grueter was rich, ripe for the plucking. The unexpected arrival of the three women and quick shootings froze Johnson to immobility, and left Leigh with one thought: get away and get lost. Once the shooting started, the men didn’t look for more money, never even tried to get at the safe or anything else. It was an ill-planned, almost ad lib hold-up.

 

***

 

Only minutes after Joe Huebner turned on his car radio, he glanced at his rearview mirror and sat bolt upright. He saw two men coming from the building at what he thought was a pretty fast gait. And one of them was carrying—it was unmistakable—his wife’s big red purse. He watched them hurry along the walk towards the old Chevrolet convertible parked just behind his own car. Joe turned around to get a better look and watched them get into the Chevy. He could see a third man in the convertible. Joe jumped out of his own car and strained to read the license plate on the convertible as it pulled away, heading west on Delhi Pike. Joe ran inside the building. There was no one in the lobby. He started walking towards the back, then was stopped in his tracks.
On the floor in a growing pool of blood, just beyond the swinging gate which separated the lobby from the office area, Joe Huebner saw Lillian Dewald. Her face was turned towards him, blood flowing from her nose and mouth. She was lying across the threshold of the small vault to the left of the office area. Joe went to the vault door just in time to hear Lillian’s last moan. Behind Lillian in the narrow vault were three more women, grotesquely sprawled one on top of another in a bloody mess on the floor of the small walk-in vault. One of them was Helen, Joe’s wife.
Huebner yelled, “ Helen, are you hurt?” No answer. He screamed, “ Helen, are you hurt?” Her head turned slightly, but she said nothing. It was the last move she ever made. The whole thing had happened so fast that Joe reached the vault as the last two women to be shot were taking their final breaths. The horrified husband wanted to go to his wife, but hesitated about going into the vault. There wasn’t room to move between the bodies and Helen was at the rear of the vault, toppled backwards across the head and shoulders of another woman. It was a deterring sight. Joe was reluctant to touch anything. Rather than handle the telephone in the savings and loan, he ran to the house next door to call for help.

 

11:12 am, Wednesday

 

Delhi Police Chief Howard Makin was in his office with two of his men. It was a routine planning session, suddenly shattered by a booming broadcast from the office monitor.
“Delhi Police Car number 829!” came the urgent voice of county communications. “Respond to Cabinet Supreme Savings and Loan on Delhi Pike. Armed robbery reported.” The same imperative sent a county sheriff’s patrol car to the scene.
Officer John Eschenbach, in the office with Makin, was running Car 829 that day. He bolted out of the room, picking up Officer Don Redman as he ran. Redman had just gone off-duty; he went anyway. They leaped into the cruiser and sped out of the Neeb Road police station.
Right behind them in a second cruiser was Chief Makin with another off-duty officer, Don Jasper, who had been part of the interrupted office talk. The cruiser radio crackled, “Vehicle seen leaving Cabinet Supreme is a 1953 or 1954 dark green Chevrolet bearing license plate 5344 BC.” Makin saw Eschenbach head south on Neeb towards Delhi Pike, and told Jasper, at the wheel, to turn east on Rapid Run Pike.
Makin said, “If John and Don don’t get them, they could head north on Anderson Ferry and maybe we can catch them at Anderson Ferry and Rapid Run.” But the car they were hoping to see already had run in the other direction, south on Anderson Ferry Road towards River Road. As their cruiser raced the clock, Makin and Jasper heard another broadcast, for the Delhi Life Squad. Four persons had been shot. The quiet suburban community was jarred to its rural roots.

 

***

 

Delhi Hills, christened Delhigh when it was established as a township in 1816, is ten-and-a-half square miles of rolling, hilly terrain above the Ohio River, just west of Cincinnati, Ohio. Some of it had been farmland, but primary occupations of early settlers kept the area in pasturage and greenhouses. Except for residential growth and a rising political consciousness, not much had changed by 1969. There weren’t many cows and horses left, but many greenhouses still dotted the township which had grown to a population of 25,668.
It was a time of burgeoning suburbia, a place where people moved to get away from the city, to raise children in a less stressful environment. Slow and steady still characterized this suburban township, partially because of limited developable land. The 1990 census showed population growth of just 4,582 persons in the previous twenty years. Most of the greenhouses gave way to new home construction.
There had been considerable development along the major artery where Cabinet Supreme Savings and Loan had relocated from Lower Price Hill, but not much zoning change. The highly charged emotional zoning battles which characterize growth in many bedroom suburbs of large urban areas flared only briefly in Delhi. There was a transition period in the 1970s when the township threw off the yoke of county domination and established control of its own zoning destiny. The added commerce mostly has been within existing commercial corridors. Now, where there used to be blocks of homes interspersed with business along Delhi Pike, the private residence on that street is a rarity. The little building which housed Cabinet Supreme still stood at the time of this writing, but it changed hands many times after the crime which no one living there has forgotten.