The Murder Trial of Judge Peel

Jim Bishop

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787204065
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1962, this is the true story account of one of Florida's most chilling crimes.Joseph Peel, a crooked municipal judge of Palm Beach, Florida, is accused of killing fellow judge, Curtis Chillingworth, of the superior court, who mysteriously disappeared along with his wife, Marjorie Chillingworth, from their home in 1955.Peel was publicly reprimanded by Chillingworth in 1953, when Peel represented both sides in a divorce. In June 1955, Peel was scheduled to appear in court to answer charges of unethical conduct in yet another divorce case, and so faced disbarment.Since Peel was also using his position as an elected municipal judge to protect bolita operators and moonshiners by giving them advance warnings of raids in return for financial consideration, Peel faced the loss of his superior position—and thus his lucrative illegal racket…A gripping read."Bishop's reconstruction is well-ordered and well-observed, a stunning form of journalistic jazz, cool, crisp and all on one note, like a headline. […] A simple, speedy, thoroughly satisfying thriller…"—Kirkus Review

PART ONE—THE PROSECUTION’S CASE

The Prosecution’s Case

There was a morning heat mirage on Route A1A. It was a little lake that wasn’t there and it hung about 300 yards ahead of the car. The driver and his partner moved south, not talking much and not seeing much except the white line in the road and the mirage.

There was a beauty and elegance all around them. They passed the gorgeous beach mansions of the Wrightsmans, the Phippses, the Kennedys, the Hales, and their eyes reflected the neatly trimmed hibiscus, the poinsettia, the lawns like big blue rugs, the flaming orange orchids and the stately palm trees, but they saw them not.

Frank Ebersold and Robert Force were carpenters. They were due at Judge Curtis Chillingworth’s beach house to repair a window frame. Judge Chillingworth was a meticulous, humorless man. In the circuit court at West Palm Beach he used to stand outside the door at 9:29 A.M. studying his watch, the charge case in his other hand, waiting for the stroke of 9:30 to step into court and rap for order. He looked like a crane in rimless glasses.

The judge lived by the clock and the law books. Some say he had exactly seven friends.

Ebersold passed through Palm Beach and came to the super-exclusive little community of Manalapan. It bad twenty-seven registered voters. The car turned left, toward the sea, into a small gravel drive. Dead ahead was a two-car garage. One car was in it.

Ebersold and his partner took their toolboxes and walked up the back stairway to the beach house. They knew their place and they knew the people. The judge had a town house at 211 Dyer Road, and in the wintertime he rented this beach house for a fat sum. Now it was summer—June 15, 1955—and Palm Beach was back down to its 2,500 permanent residents, and West Palm Beach, across Lake Worth, had 60,000 people.

The beach house had a flat roof and an open breezeway in the middle. It sat high on the sand dunes, facing the Atlantic. There was a rickety, one-banister stairway down to the beach. The house was done in gray deck paint and hanging from the porch was a ship’s bell with a rope on the clapper. This was a memento of the days when the judge had been a navy commander stationed in Jacksonville.

The carpenters knocked. There was no doorbell. They could look through the glass jalousie of the door and see the small living room with its beige straw rug, the little bridge table for breakfast, and the blue china dishes on the wall. There was a modern kitchen, and a nine by twelve bedroom in this wing. Here there were a night table, twin beds and a cream-colored phone. They knocked again. No answer.

There must be someone around, they figured, because Chillingworth’s car was in the garage. They turned toward the other wing and stepped on broken glass. It came from an overhead spotlight on the porch. The light had been broken.

The second wing had two bedrooms with twin beds, plain dressers, and small lavatories. The doors were unlocked and no one was inside.

“Let’s go for a swim,” Ebersold said. The other man shrugged. They walked down the front steps of the house. The sea was as flat as a million tons of lime Jello. They walked across the pocked macadam of an old road and down the rickety steps.

“Look,” said Force. His partner looked. There were stains on the steps. The carpenters bent and studied the dry drops. It was either paint or blood. They followed the stains down onto the beach. There were footprints in the sand, a lot of footprints. Some seemed to be from shoes coming out of the sea toward the house, others were heading back to sea.

The soft foamy waves of the morning tide were erasing the footprints as the men studied them. “I’m going to phone the judge’s office,” Ebersold said. He went back, got into his car, and drove to the nearest public phone. He told the judge’s secretary that maybe nothing was wrong and maybe something was, but it didn’t look right to him.

The secretary called the office of Sheriff John Kirk. In an hour, police officers were all over the house. Kirk, a veteran and a bulldog among sheriffs, crouched in a little thatched hut down on the beach, correlating everything his deputies found. What they found was nothing more than what the carpenters had seen. There was no sign of a struggle inside the house. The stains were human blood. The footprints—who knows? The car was cold in the garage. The judge was overdue in court and Chillingworth had never been late.

The Chillingworth daughters were called. There were three—Ann (Mrs. George Wright); Marie (Mrs. William M. Cooper); and Miss Neva Chillingworth. They offered little. Mother and Daddy had been at their own town house last night, and had left for the beach house around dark—9 P.M. They were not in the house at Dyer Avenue, and the only evidence that they had been in the beach house was the rumpled beds, and two empty glasses which had held nightcap drinks.

The afternoon newspapers said that Judge Curtis Chillingworth and his wife, Marjorie, were missing under mysterious circumstances. Judge Chillingworth was the senior judge in the Fifteenth Judicial District of Florida and had been on the bench thirty-four years. He had served Florida with honor—yes, distinction. His father had been a lawyer, and up around Jupiter and Hobe Sound, the people had called him “judge.”

That evening a laboratory technician established that the blood on the beach steps was human, of the same type as Mrs. Chillingworth’s. Who would kill the Chillingworths? If they had few friends, then it was equally true that they had fewer enemies.

Judge Joseph A. Peel was the one and only municipal judge of West Palm Beach. He was the glamour boy of the legal fraternity, the handsome, wavy-haired, big-eyed epitome of the southern gentleman. He wore white linen suits and big horn-rimmed sunglasses. His salary wasn’t much more than $3,000 a year and his clients were mostly poor Negroes and poorer whites, but he drove around in an air-conditioned Cadillac and his wife used a Lincoln Continental,

Judge Peel? He was born in West Palm Beach. His father was the owner of a small hotel; Buck Peel was popular. Everybody knew the Peels. Joe was only thirty-one, and he was already serving his second term as a judge. His office was in the Harvey Building at the corner of Olive and Datura, and the only gossip tied to his name was a sniveling report that the judge had a penchant for posing ladies nude next to his diploma on the wall, and then rushing the negatives off to the police laboratory for development and printing.

People always gossip over successful men. Judge Peel had begun the practice of law only in 1949 and now, six years later, he was the sole trier of all small cases in and around Palm Beach. His wife was the ladylike Imogene Clark of Lake City, Florida. They had two children and a big happy life in front of them.

The man who became most interested in the mystery also practiced law in the Harvey Building. He was Phillip D. O’Connell, the state attorney. Mr. O’Connell was a prominent Catholic layman, a prosecutor who had turned down better jobs, a lawyer who took in $100,000 a year in fees, a one-time professional welterweight fighter who had a record of fifty-nine wins in sixty fights.

Mr. O’Connell never thought much of Judge Peel. Once when Peel asked for a job, O’Connell said: “I have no job for you, Joe, but I have two vacant offices on the eighth floor. They’re yours if you want them.” Peel had accepted, and had put his name in gold letters on the door. Still, they were not friends. Nor enemies.

The more O’Connell thought of Peel, the less he thought of him. It occurred to the prosecutor that Peel could have killed Judge Chillingworth. Still, he had no case. The Chillingworths were missing, not dead. And even if they were dead, there was nothing in any of the evidence to point to Peel. And yet—and yet O’Connell decided that perhaps he had better go back over the record of Judge Peel. He wanted to see where it crossed the life of Judge Chillingworth. He had a recollection of trouble between these men.

He was still working on it two years later when the courts of Florida declared Judge and Mrs. Chillingworth to be legally dead. Neither one has been seen since.

There is wealth here in Palm Beach. And poverty. The wealth is on a strip of sand along the ocean where a millionaire spends more on his flower gardens than a mechanic earns in West Palm Beach in a year. West Palm Beach is on the opposite side of Lake Worth, where the big yachts sit all winter, awaiting the pleasure of their owners.

Floyd Holzapfel was a mechanic in West Palm Beach. He was also a crook. He worked on cars by day and on people at night. Mr. Holzapfel had hair that waved back off a receding forehead. His face looked slept in.

The one thing that Holzapfel had on his side was nerve. When he found it necessary to fire a gun into the back of a man’s head, he did not hesitate. If it was a duty to take a tiny woman and drop her into the sea at night, Holzapfel sat on his conscience and did it.

One day in 1953 he had a small claims court action. Someone advised him to try a good lawyer. Floyd went to see Municipal Judge Joseph A. Peel. These two conferred, and in no time at all the judge was calling Mr. Holzapfel by his nickname: Lucky. They got along.

The judge surprised Lucky by reciting some of the Holzapfel background. He said that Floyd had been a bookmaker in California when he was only seventeen years old. Lucky was impressed. The judge also knew that Holzapfel had been convicted, and pardoned, for two armed robberies in Florida.

It is ironic that such knowledge could be the basis for an enduring friendship. The mutual esteem grew, in time, to a partnership. It was such a happy situation that there was room for a third man. He was George David Lincoln, known to his friends as Bobby. Lincoln was a big Negro with a steady, mean stare. He asked few favors and granted none, even among his own people.

Lincoln was a power among the Negroes north of West Palm Beach. He had two poolrooms and two taxicabs and still worked a little job on the side. In addition, Bobby Lincoln was in the moonshine and bolita rackets in Palm Beach, but when he sat behind the wheel of his decrepit truck, he looked deceptively like a poor colored man trying to earn a desperate dollar.

Bobby could lend thousands of dollars, if he chose. In Holzapfel’s case, he chose. According to Lincoln, he and Lucky and Judge Peel became partners in the sale of racket protection. The judge wanted $7 a week from everybody in the bolita racket and moonshine. Lucky supports Lincoln’s contention in saying the judge got it.

The bolita racket is the old numbers game with a Spanish twist. The poor play any number from one to a hundred. They play any amount they please. If they have the right number, they are paid odds of seventy to one. The bolita operators keep the rest. About $10,000 a week is played in bolita in and around the Palm Beaches.

The cream comes to about $3,000 a week. The numbers runners get $1,000 of this, and that leaves $2,000. The operators of bolita were not satisfied with $2,000. They had to figure a way of fixing the game.

The winning number is determined by putting tiny plastic balls, with numbers on them, into a beanbag. It is tossed around in a group, and when the head racketeer yells “Stop,” the person holding the bag reaches in and picks a ball. That’s the winner.

The racketeers began to look over the daily lists of numbers played and decided it would be nice if the number played the least could be the winner. Let us say that very few people played number 17. The racketeers could fix the game in one of several ways: (1) have all the plastic balls in the beanbag, unknown to those who were throwing the bag around, numbered 17; (2) put plastic ball number 17 in a refrigerator, freeze it, and have a confederate pick the winning number merely by feeling inside the bag for one cold ball; (3) have a little pocket in the beanbag with the winning ball in it.

Holzapfel was in it. So was Lincoln. So, they claim, was Judge Peel. He also received money, his old friends say, from shine.

Shine (the word is a contraction of the word moonshine) is probably the oldest racket in Florida. The sale of moonshine is illegal. Tax-dodging liquor is distilled in all parts of the state. It is sold in jugs and Mason jars by the half gallon and gallon for a fraction of what legal liquor costs.

There is a third racket, smaller economically than the others, called Loteria Cubana. This one is based on a legal lottery manipulated in Cuba. The numbers selling in Cuba are duplicated in Florida by the racketeers, and they pay off on whatever number is drawn in Havana.

The state charges that Judge Peel took a little from everyone. If true, it was done with benevolence because when the police wanted to raid a bolita parlor or a shine saloon, they got their search warrants from Judge Peel. If he was crooked, he had three choices: (1) to make out the warrant and then warn the place in advance of the raid; (2) to draw up a defective warrant so that, when the bolita and shine racketeers were convicted, they would, on appeal, be acquitted; (3) to convict a few friends who were paying, and then deduct the small fine from the $7 a week they paid him.

Whatever the gallant judge was doing, he was doing it well when the roof fell in. On July 6, 1953, he was charged with representing both parties in a divorce action. The matter was heard by a judge of the Florida Circuit Court and referred for action to Judge Curtis Chillingworth.

Judge Peel was unhappy. He knew that Chillingworth was about as warm and friendly as a starving polar bear. The old judge was sudden death to shysters. Joe Peel worried himself sick waiting for the blow to fall. However, Chillingworth surprised the young man. He heard the evidence and he said that a public reprimand would suffice, “because of the youth and inexperience of counsel.”

It was after this close brush tha...