World War II veteran Harry Walker was joking around with his retiree pals while playing pinochle at the U.S. Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C.
On that lazy morning in 1964, two strangers walked into the recreation room. One of them wore a police badge.
Walker’s smile froze.
“Are you Harry Walker?” Summit County Prosecutor George Pappas asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever gone by another name?”
Walker slumped in his chair and gazed at Akron police Sgt. Jack Carlton.
“I knew it was coming,” Walker said. “It has been a long time. I was hoping it wouldn’t.”
“Are you Leroy Dunlap?” Pappas demanded.
“Yes.”
After 44 years and five months as a fugitive, the phantom killer had been caught.
Dunlap, who at age 19 became the only man in Summit County’s history to be tried and convicted of murder in absentia, managed one last joke before being taken into custody.
“We were going to have chicken and ice cream for lunch today,” he said. “Couldn’t you fellows have waited until after lunch?”
It was an ice-cold night on Jan. 13, 1920, when five hoodlums went on an East Akron joyride in a stolen car. They passed around a handgun, trying to get up the nerve to rob a store, but they kept chickening out.
Around 1:30 a.m., the gang pulled up to the Eagle Restaurant, a late-night diner owned by Greek immigrant brothers William and Christ Louis at East Market and Fulton streets.
Five youths — George and Louis Neichter, Ralph Richardson, John O. Smith and Dunlap — took seats at the counter and casually ordered meals.
Their waiter was Steve Bossos, 33, also known as Steve Bastas, a Greek immigrant who came to the United States in search of a better life.
“The five of us went into the restaurant on Fulton Street just off East Market and ate,” Dunlap later said. “We didn’t have any money to pay for the meal so I said, ‘Give me the gun.’
“I pointed the gun at the man … and my hand was shaking. I was very nervous. I had never held a gun before. I started to switch the gun from my right hand to my left. It had a hair trigger and it went off.”
“I’m shot!” Bossos cried before collapsing to the floor.
A bullet had pierced the waiter’s heart. He died within minutes.
The hoodlums escaped, dividing $12 that they had scored in their big heist. Barberton police found the stolen vehicle abandoned near Kenmore.
In a dragnet, police picked up Smith, a burglary suspect, and he ratted out his pals. Officers traced Richardson to Watertown, N.Y., and he implicated Dunlap as the triggerman.
On March 13, Dunlap and the Neichter brothers were arrested in Clinton, Ky., while stealing men’s suits from a store. Authorities extradited the suspects to Akron and locked them in the Summit County Jail on South Broadway.
A 12-man jury was seated May 12 for Dunlap’s first-degree murder trial before Summit County Common Pleas Judge Willam J. Ahern.
The next morning, Akron residents awoke to an outrage.
A jailer had discovered an empty cell at 4:40 a.m. Using a blade smuggled in by a girlfriend, the Neicherts and Dunlap sawed through bars and escaped on a knotted blanket.
Judge Ahern was furious, but he ordered the trial to continue without the defendant.
Defense attorney Carl Myers pleaded for leniency, saying his absent client was “a victim of circumstances.”
“He will surely be caught and brought back, and will have to suffer the penalty imposed by you,” Myers said. “He is too young to be put out of existence, and there is a chance to make a man out of him. A verdict of manslaughter would be consistent with the facts.”
County Prosecutor Cletus G. Roetzel told jurors: “Let your verdict be a notice to this defendant that whether he is here or at large, this community serves warning on him and his kind that their wanton acts of lawlessness shall not go unpunished or unnoticed.”
Dunlap was found guilty of murder May 17, but the sentence was delayed until his capture. The killer was expected to die in the electric chair within 100 days.
George Neichter was caught quickly, tried, convicted and sentenced to die. Thirteen minutes before execution, Gov. James M. Cox spared his life. He served 13 years in prison before being pardoned in 1933.
Louis Neichter fell to his death Jan. 25, 1928, from a 40-foot water tower in Massillon while working as a painter under the alias William Burton.
Smith and Richardson were sentenced to life terms, but were paroled after 11 years.
No one knew what happened to Dunlap. Over the decades, newspapers retold the story of “the phantom killer.”
In October 1964, a Denver police clerk sent a note to Akron police and wondered whether it was OK to throw away Dunlap’s wanted poster.
Maj. Carroll Cutright decided to give the case one last try.
“I’ll bet no one has checked the military file,” he said.
Within a week, the FBI discovered that the fingerprints matched veteran Harry Walker, who lived on a $109 monthly pension in Washington.
Dunlap knew the game was up when the officer arrived. “I took one look at him and I said to myself, ‘This is it,’ ” he said.
As news of the arrest caused a national sensation, Dunlap recounted what he had been doing for the last 44 years.
After the jailbreak, he hopped a train to Rochester, N.Y., where he found a job as a waiter, an audacious occupation, given the crime. He then enlisted in the U.S. Army under the name of Harry Walker, served in the infantry and reached the rank of corporal.
Dunlap moved to St. Louis, worked as a streetcar operator and got married. His wife, Ruth, and their son, Harold, knew nothing of his past.
In 1942, Dunlap deserted his family to join the Army Air Corps and served in the Pacific during World War II. In 1946, he re-enlisted in the Air Force and served 12 more years, retiring in 1958 to Washington.
Dunlap used to have nightmares about the electric chair. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t forget his crimes.
“I did a lot of drinking and when I was drunk, I’d tell people about shooting a man,” he told the Beacon Journal. “But when you’re drunk, nobody believes what you say and nobody ever took me seriously.”
He insisted, however, that the shooting was an accident.
“I swear before God, I had no intention of killing him,” Dunlap said. “He is the only person I have ever hurt in my life.”
After the fugitive was returned to Akron in handcuffs, Summit County Case No. 6908 was dusted off. The legal process had been in limbo since Dunlap’s escape in 1920.
Nearly all the witnesses were dead. A shorthand record of the trial was destroyed in the 1950s to clear space.
On Jan. 8, 1965, Judge Stephen C. Colopy ruled that he could “not pass the death sentence on anyone” whose original transcript was lost.
Hearing he would be spared the electric chair, Dunlap exclaimed: “That’s wonderful!”
He waived his right to a jury trial and pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter on March 26, 1965. A three-judge panel sentenced him to serve one to 20 years at the penitentiary.
In a case with many twists, the final surprise came a year later, when Dunlap, then 65, was paroled. He was released from prison on April 7, 1966, to live with his son in St. Louis.
Waiting for a bus, the smiling ex-con told reporters about his plans: “I’m going to get a rocking chair and just rock.”
He planned to legally change his name to Walker and leave the past behind. “I was born a Dunlap and I killed as a Dunlap,” he said. “I don’t want to die as Leroy Dunlap.”
Harry Walker died at age 79 in 1980. He is buried at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis.
His son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters met him at the St. Louis bus station.
“At last,” Walker said before stepping into anonymity. “I’m so happy to be here at last.”
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
