A Small Town Noir—The Appendix

Floyd M. Armstrong, arrested for loitering (and possibly stealing a roll of pennies and a box of shotgun shells) on a summer night in 1957, in New Castle, PA. Diarmid Mogg

Martin Fobes woke up to the sound of officers from the New Castle police department banging on his front door.

It was early on a January morning, still dark, and he was lying flat on his living room floor, where he had passed out a few hours previously. The police took him downtown and charged him with driving while intoxicated. They sat him in a chair against a white wall and slotted numbered tiles into a board behind him, to record the fact that he was the four thousand eight hundred and eighty-third person to have been processed in that room. They took a picture of his profile, then turned him to take a picture face-on. While he was held for questioning, the negatives were developed and printed on a small piece of photographic paper that had been cut with scissors from a larger sheet. The print was then taken to a room in police headquarters known as the rogues gallery, where it joined the ever-growing archive of twinned portraits of citizens unfortunate enough to have been caught breaking the law in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.

Sixty-one years later, the photograph dropped through my letterbox in Edinburgh, Scotland, in an envelope containing half a dozen old mug shots that I’d bought for a few pounds from an eBay seller who specialized in historic ephemera.

Martin Fobes Diarmid Mogg

I’d become interested in mug shots through a book called Least Wanted, by Mark Michaelson, which contains hundreds of these strange and beautiful little portraits, taken as a matter of routine by law enforcement agencies across America but made haunting by the passage of time. I was fascinated by the range of expressions, the haircuts, the clothes. Such faces. Who were they? What had they done? What were their lives like?

Almost all of the pictures in Least Wanted are anonymous, having become separated from their arrest information due to the carelessness of police departments, dealers, and collectors. Part of the reason why I bought the bundle from eBay was that the listing noted that they still had their police file cards attached, and I hoped it might be possible to use that information to find out more about the people in the photographs.

Each of the six cards listed various pieces of information, including, importantly, the person’s name and age, the crime with which they had been charged and the date and place of their arrest. All six people were from the same town: New Castle, Pennsylvania, a place I’d never heard of. I checked NewspaperArchive.com and saw that its database contained back issues of the local paper, the New Castle News, going back over a hundred years. A promising omen.

The arrest card of Martin Fobes. Diarmid Mogg

Martin’s mug shot was on top of the pile, so I ran a search on him first. His name appeared in the paper about thirty times over fifty years, from the announcement of the birth of his daughter in 1929 to his obituary in 1969. Most of the mentions were in the paper’s local events pages, where he appeared among lists of routine hospital admissions or as a pallbearer at the funerals of friends and relations—commonplace traces of a normal life.

The articles that came up for the month of his arrest, however, were a different matter: two front-page stories in one week, headlined, “Officers Probe Woman’s Death” and “Cause Of Girl’s Death Is Mystery.” I hope I can be forgiven for feeling a thrill of excitement as I scanned the pieces and saw Martin’s name emerge as part of a far more intriguing story than I’d been expecting. An unconscious eighteen-year-old girl named Anna Grace Robertson had been found lying in the middle of the street, battered and bleeding, in a residential part of town on the morning of 6 January, 1948. The police who woke Martin up from his drunken sleep and took his mug shot told him he had been seen with her that night. Martin said he remembered leaving the Rex Café with her and her sister sometime after midnight, but nothing after that. He had no recollection of how he ended up back home. He had blacked out. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl.

Anna Grace never regained consciousness. She died three days later, after being admitted to the hospital. A post-mortem found the cause of death to be hemorrhages of the brain. She also had a complete fracture of the left jaw, partial paralysis of the left arm and left leg, and friction burns on her face and right knee.

At the inquest, Martin said, again, that he had no recollection of what had happened that night. Others filled in some of the blanks.

Anna Grace’s sister, Eris, said that Martin had taken her and Anna Grace home from the Rex Café, where they had met him. Anna Grace knew Martin, it seemed, but Eris had never seen him before. When they got to the house, instead of coming in with Eris, Anna Grace went off with Martin. They said that they were going to a café called Jim’s Place on the east side, and were then going to the Square Deal café to meet Anna Grace’s mother, who worked there. It was half past midnight.

The bartender of the Rex Café, William Weidenhof, had gone over to the Square Deal after closing up his place, and saw Martin and Anna Grace there. Martin was drunk, and kept asking Anna Grace to leave with him. Eventually, just before two, Weidenhof saw Martin take Anna Grace’s arm and lead her to his truck.

About twenty minutes later, a man called Louis Smith found Anna Grace lying in North Mercer street, unconscious, with a bloody nose and a bruise on her forehead. He called the police, and an officer took her to the hospital.

People who had met Martin in town the next night, back in the Rex Café again, told the inquest that he seemed “pretty well loaded” and had scratches on his face. A friend of Martin’s, Joseph McKee, asked him if he knew what had happened to Anna Grace, but Martin ducked the question, saying only that he had been in a wreck at the harbor at about half past four in the morning, but that everything was “on the up and up.” Later that evening, he passed out in the bar.

At the end of the inquest, the members declared that they were unable to determine how Anna Grace sustained the injuries that caused her death and recommended further investigation. There was none. Anna Grace had already been buried, the witnesses had said all that they could and Martin Fobes wasn’t saying anything else. The case appears to have been dropped. The paper doesn’t mention it, or Anna Grace, again after that day. Martin was charged only with leaving the scene of a crime.

No one seems to have been certain what happened in the missing twenty minutes between Martin and Anna Grace leaving the Square Deal and Louis Smith finding her in the street. Anna Grace’s injuries suggest that she jumped from Martin’s speeding truck, but why did she jump? The most likely scenario would seem to be that Martin made a move on her as they drove through town, they struggled (which would be when his face was scratched) and she jumped from the truck to escape. That must have been obvious to anyone involved in the case but, if it occurred to the inquest’s members—all men—they chose not to pursue it. Perhaps it struck them as just a tragic accident, and not the kind of thing over which they should ruin the life of a hard-working family man.

I realized, of course, that it was impossible to say for sure how culpable Martin was, and also—at this date—quite unnecessary to try. The story itself was enough for me. I wrote it up and posted it online. It was the start of a project that would end up occupying all of my creative energy for years to come, in the form of a website called Small Town Noir, which has evolved into an attempt to chronicle the history of one small American town through the criminal records of its citizens.

None of the other mug shots in the bundle matched Martin’s for dramatic incident, but I researched the subjects’ lives as fully as I could, with a growing sense that I’d stumbled on something unique and valuable. By the time I was done, I’d uncovered a good few compelling stories and read an awful lot of old copies of the New Castle News—enough to make me feel that I’d perhaps caught a glimpse of something that might be more interesting than the stories themselves: the town in which they took place.

Katie Payne, arrested for “felonious cutting.” Diarmid Mogg

Like me, you’ve probably never heard of New Castle. It sits midway between Lake Erie and Pittsburgh, over by the Ohio border. It was founded after the Revolutionary War, in a valley that had been settled by the Lenape people, before they were forced out. Its growth was phenomenal. In the 1890s, its population increased by 144 per cent, faster than any other town in the country.

By the turn of the century, it was one of the most industrially productive cities in America, with the biggest tinplate mill in the world and thousands of immigrants from Europe arriving every year to work in its steel factories, ceramics plants, foundries and paper mills.

All that’s gone now, of course. The Great Depression hit it hard, and the disastrous collapse of industry in the Northeast in the latter half of the century all but finished it off. Its present population is around 23,000, down from a wartime peak of nearly 50,000. You can imagine what the depopulated parts of town look like these days.

Yet something about New Castle captured my imagination. The place names—Locust Street, Croton Avenue, Shenango, Neshannock—were powerfully evocative of a certain idea of America, although one that, in all honesty, probably exists only in the minds of Europeans like me, whose imaginations have been shaped by a love of B-movies, pulp novels and old crime stories. None of the people in the photographs would have looked out of place working in Robert Mitchum’s garage in Out of the Past or hiding out in the boarding house where Burt Lancaster is murdered in The Killers. The more I learned about their world, the more their lives began to feel like the back-stories of minor characters in a richly detailed film noir that Hollywood had somehow neglected to make.

There were more New Castle mug shots on eBay, all from the decades between 1930 and 1960, and I bought as many as I could. The pictures had ended up all over the world—San Francisco, Tokyo, even a small island off the coast of Scotland. I always asked the seller how they had originally come by the pictures. The usual answer was that they’d bought them from other collectors. No one knew for sure how the photographs had first ended up for sale, but I gradually worked out that, sometime in the 1990s, the police department had cleared out its files and thrown hundreds—maybe thousands—of old photographs in the trash. A few hundred images were surreptitiously saved from destruction by a police officer nearing retirement.

The ones he picked up happened to come from the middle decades of the century. If he had passed by earlier, he might have come away with a selection from around the First World War.