44-Year-Old Crime Catches Up With Killer

Forty-four years had gone by, and the police had yet to hunt him down. Leroy Strachan rarely even thought of the murder anymore. And when he did, the memory seemed dreamlike across so much time, as if behind a sheath of gauze: the cop shot, the cop falling, the cop motionless on the ground.

On that autumn night in 1946, he had scurried off toward home, his hand gripping the rifle. He stashed it beneath the muddy frame of an old wooden house. The very next day, his mother shooed him onto a bus from Miami to New York, where his father lived. He was 17 years old.

Over the decades, he looked to God and asked forgiveness for that single mad, impulsive moment. The Lord seemed willing enough. Strachan married and enjoyed the blessings of children. He lived in Harlem and worked steady. He planned to retire soon to the quiet of rural South Carolina.

But now after all these years, the secret has come beating out of the past like a bat loosed through a flung-open cellar door. Leroy Strachan was arrested Feb. 16 and charged with first-degree murder, punishable by a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison.

This is such an odd turn, the long arm of the law nimble at the throttle of a time machine. It originated with a conscience-stricken old woman who tardily repeated her recollections to an investigator--the entirety of the Miami homicide squad’s “cold case team.”

Detective George Cadavid is the persevering man who then solved the half-century-old puzzle. It was fascinating work, one clue leading to another. But it was also a sad business because, as Cadavid says, the 61-year-old murderer he caught up with “is such a nice and quiet guy; you can’t help feel sorry for him.”

Strachan (pronounced Strawn), by all accounts, has led an exemplary life in New York. He is a doughy, hunched-over man, his eyes dull behind bifocal glasses. For the past 21 years, he has run a freight elevator in a 12-story building in lower Manhattan.

His lawyer has advised him to fight extradition to Florida, so he sits these days in the dreary city jail known as The Tombs. He is a curiosity in the huge, fearsome lockup. The young inmates call him “Pop.”

By now, some have read his story in the local papers. They know how he has been plucked from obscurity. They ask him how it feels, and he tells them it has hit him pretty hard. Then he bucks up.

“Read the Bible,” he tells them. “Somehow God has a plan for all of us. Be sure that God always has a plan.”

Young Leroy Strachan lived in Overtown, the soul of black Miami back in the 1940s. He was on the wrong side of pudgy, and they called him “Fats,” though that was not the most distinctive part of his appearance. An accident with the handle of an ice pick had left him with a glass eye.

His mother worked days cleaning houses or scooping out coconut, then came home to the tiny, crowded place she shared with her two children and five relatives. She played the piano in church and kept her kids out of trouble, though Leroy recalls the police picking him up from time to time.

In those days, it was sport for white cops to round up young blacks, herd them into a squad car and drive them off to a park. The teen-agers were then matched for a fist fight to entertain their captors.

With white police officers so openly racist, it was good news to many in Overtown when the city finally hired a handful of black officers in 1944. One of the first was tall and husky John Milledge, who already had done relatively well for himself as a chauffeur and “yard boy.”

Like the other new men, Milledge had the power to detain whites, but not to arrest them. He was assigned to the black community. He was on duty the night of Nov. 1, 1946, watching for fence hoppers at a high school football game. Fats Strachan was coming up the street.

Strachan remembers: “A few of the fellows--there were about seven of us--tried to jump the fence, though not me; the game didn’t interest me. The cop came after us with his stick, swinging away, didn’t care at who. He hit me in the back.”

Fats ran fast as he could, and Leroy Strachan can still see it in memory--the young man he was so long ago, surely the seed of who he is now, yet somehow not quite him at all. Fats and the others hurried to Thomas Mims’ house. There was a .22-caliber rifle there. They went back to find Milledge.

Strachan’s attorney stops him from describing much more than that, though Leroy has confessed to the police on videotape. He does go on to say he had never fired a weapon before and he has never fired one since. There was just that one crazy moment, out of all sequence to everything else in his life.

The day after the shooting, a police sergeant said he thought the murderer was “some smart aleck who fired the shot intending to scare but not kill Milledge.” The community quickly raised $500 reward money. Dozens of suspects were questioned at “Negro precinct headquarters.”

Detective Cadavid found some of the yellowed reports in an old file. There had been several leads and a lot of finger-pointing, but no one was charged.

Much of it was just a jumble of names, including Leroy Strachan’s. The young man they called Fats was said to have left town for New York.

The cold air hit the teen-ager in the face as he asked directions to the subway. Soon, he was wandering amid the overcrowded tenements and brownstones of Harlem, where he found his father, a hotel porter.

Leroy told him the awful story, but the two saw no need for any hiding out. There was no talk of using a phony name. By Leroy’s memory, he never even feared being caught. Why would he? The witnesses “were friends of mine,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone would ever say anything.”

Strachan got his first job working a freight elevator. For a while, he also tried to finish high school, but the night classes interfered with his new passion: choir practice at the Refuge Temple, the church of our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.

In Miami, he had been to church often enough, but it was nothing like this. Here, they had a soul-rousing preacher and a choir that sounded better than anything on a record. People always seemed to be going in and out--and they made him feel welcome.

He discovered peace with head bowed. “I asked God to forgive me for what happened and hoped and prayed that the (Milledge) family would forgive me too,” he said. “Yes, that I did. And I believe God listened.”

The guilt dissolved. “You think one would think of it all the time--and you do think of it, and you’re sorry it happened,” he said. “But then you don’t think of it so much. Other things are on your mind.”

In 1957, a young woman visiting from South Carolina spotted him in the choir. Toney Dell asked to meet him, and she liked what she saw. He was as religious as she was: no drinking, no cussing, no smoking, no carrying on.

They were married and had three sons, whose upbringing they came to fret over. In 1973, Toney took the boys to live in Orangeburg, S.C. “Dope was getting started real good then, and we thought it best to get them out of Harlem,” she said.

Leroy stayed put. “There was no job for me in South Carolina where I could earn New York kind of money,” he said. He moved into a cheap room half a block from the church. He sent cash to Toney every month, enough to make payments on a house. He visited when he could.

“He was always giving somebody something,” said Deborah Cleare, a niece. “We’d say: ‘Uncle Leroy, why don’t you move into an apartment; you can afford it.’ And he’d say he’d rather use the money he’d spend on rent for helping people out.”

Lately, with overtime, he was earning more than $500 a week. His normal day lasted from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. “Tell him to do something and he’d do it, whether he liked it or not,” said Cephas Larkin, his boss.

There are four freight elevators in the building. People could always tell which one Strachan was on by what Larkin calls the “drift of church music.”

Leroy rode up and down all day, singing his hymns.

Mary White did not witness the shooting, but she did see people running by her front porch, one of them with a rifle. Her steady beau was at her side. He told her: Don’t you ever say anything.

That boyfriend stayed with her until he died a few years ago, then the gears of conscience started revolving again. Mary White watched all those TV shows about unsolved crimes. She liked the idea of solving one herself.

Last summer, she called the Miami police “CrimeStoppers” number and told all that she knew. A skeptical Detective Cadavid went to see her.

Before this, the detective’s idea of a really old case had been one from 1980 or 1982. But 44 years? “I’m thinking no way,” Cadavid said.

The department did not even have a record of the Milledge murder in its three file rooms. The only folder was at the medical examiner’s office.

Worse yet, the information from the old woman was flimsier than moth-eaten cloth. She believed the killer was someone named Freddie Stubbs, and all she really knew about him was that he had “a lazy eye.”

Still, Cadavid, a young, by-the-book sleuth, started to dig. It turned out that the Freddie Stubbs she spoke of was probably a Carlos Stubbs, and he had no trouble with an eye. All this seemed to be leading to a dead end.

Then again, there was another possibility. The reports mentioned a Leroy Strachan who had a cousin named Freddie. This Strachan had left for New York, suspiciously soon after the murder. The detective thought: maybe, just maybe.

Cadavid asked the New York police to run the name, and back came a copy of a state identification card with a photo on it. Sure enough, one of the man’s eyes seemed out of sync with the other. The detective brought the picture to Mary White. “That’s him,” she said.

If the lead seemed promising, Cadavid was still hesitant to jump to conclusions. “We had a positive identification of a guy across 44 years time,” he said. “You can’t take that to court. I mean, no way.”

Yet he was also excited. He began plotting the confrontation. That is his favorite part of the job--”interviewing the bad guy.” The main thing is to act like you know it all, he says; never let them sense you’re fishing.

In January, he and another Miami detective flew to New York and staked out Strachan’s boarding house for three days. They never saw him and returned with nothing but sniffles and the bills for $179 a night at a Marriott.

Weeks later, their break came courtesy of a New York detective, who went by the place again and left word with the landlady that he wanted to speak with Strachan about “something that happened a few months ago.”

The elevator operator dutifully phoned in and agreed to a meeting. Cadavid got back on a plane and was there when Leroy quit work. “I’m from Miami,” the detective said. “Do you mind if we take a ride to headquarters?”

They sat their suspect in a small, windowless room, his back only an inch from the wall. The detective leaned in close. He remembers it this way:

“I told him we’re investigating the death of John Milledge, and he gets a stunned look on his face. I told him I’m there because I know he’s the one who fired the shot.

“I told him I realize he was a young man back then and young kids sometimes do things without thinking. I used to be a kid myself. . . . I told him I had done background checks on him and that he is an outstanding citizen.

“At that point, a normal reaction I’d expect from an innocent person is to be angry, you know: Who do you think you are, accusing me? But he’s passive, which tells me either he did it or he knows who did it. . . .

“Then he starts saying he wasn’t in Miami back then. . . . I told him we knew he was there; we had done the research. We weren’t asking whether he was there. We were saying he did the shooting.

“Then he admits, yes, he was in Miami, in a crowd and heard the shot but didn’t know who fired. So I have to go through the bluff all again, how we know he did it, how we’re not asking him, we’re telling him.

“Then he denies it and says Thomas Mims did it but died in 1958. I know the name Mims from the reports. But I won’t accept the story. I push at him some more. . . . And then finally he looks at me and just says: ‘OK, I shot him.’

“Oh man, I almost fall out of my chair.”

His secret shared, an exhausted Strachan asked what would happen next. Go home, the police told him; there’s nothing to worry about. The detective offered him $10 taxi fare, but Leroy said no thanks.

Cadavid took his time. He returned to Miami, corroborated the story, decided on charges. He did not come back to New York to arrest his murderer until a few weeks later. Leroy was on his lunch break. The cop waited.

By Cadavid’s reckoning, Strachan must have been tipped off. Lunch went on far too long, and the detective found Leroy across the street, talking on a pay phone with $6,100 in cash and checks in his pocket.

Strachan had on a wool cap, pulled low and covering most of his face. As the detective called out to him, he dropped the phone and tried to walk away with a limp, which Cadavid figures was an amateurish attempt at disguise.

Strachan denies making any feeble attempt to flee. “For what? At my age, where would I go?” he said. “Yes, I heard them call ‘Leroy,’ but there are a lot of Leroys in this town.”

The arrest hit the front pages in both Miami and New York. People who knew the kindly and modest-living man were astonished. “May that (Mary White) in Florida bite her tongue off,” said Leroy’s elderly landlady, Beatrice Ellis.

Even Strachan’s wife was stunned. Toney had once overheard some cousins say something about a shooting, but she blithely put it out of her mind. Now she reasons that Satan had once entered her husband and left an evil mark.

“The devil tricks us like that, you know,” she said. “Sometimes you think you got it made, but then he is back on you again.”

The family needed help. A niece contacted the high-profile, white-haired civil rights lawyer William M. Kunstler. He is fighting the extradition in court and gathering written testimonials, stalling for time in hope that the justice system will show his client some sympathy.

“Look at all these,” he said, offering a stack of letters from people who have prayed with Strachan, worked with him, borrowed from him. “He got me a job. . . .” one man wrote. “He even got me clothes to wear to get the job.”

To Kunstler, time has healed the murderous wounds. “This was a borderline prank with tragic consequences from 44 years ago,” he said. “This is one case they ought to just let go.”

That forgiving attitude--to let the old debt go unpaid--is not so easy for everyone. Ralph White, 73, was another of Miami’s first black officers. He can recall Milledge’s widow sobbing beside the coffin at the funeral.

“I’m just elated that I lived long enough for the man to be apprehended,” he said. “No one should be allowed to commit murder and get away with it.”

Prosecutors have contacted the slain man’s surviving family, a sister, nieces and nephews. Milledge’s relatives have said they don’t ask the death penalty for Strachan, but they do want the case to go forward.

“Based on the facts, we feel Murder One is the appropriate charge,” said Don Horn, the assistant state attorney in charge.

So the past of Leroy Strachan is about to catch up to his present, the 17-year-old Fats there beside the 61-year-old elevator man, the two of them in a crucible together.

Locked in The Tombs, Strachan ponders the situation, wondering what might be God’s divine purposes. Such things are always so hard to figure.

Could it be, he prays, that this will turn out like one of his very favorite Bible stories, Chapter 12 of the book of Acts?

He said: “You know, King Herod had Peter chained and four guards to hold him. Then an angel came down. . . .

“Peter rose up, and the chains fell from his hands, and he walked out into freedom.”