County Will Seek $25,000 Reward for Identifying Dead Man as Fugitive

It was just a routine case for Susan Graves. She received a call from Villa View Community Hospital that Bill Biddle, 52, had died of a massive brain hemorrhage there. No known relatives. No one to claim the body or pay for the funeral.

There was nothing at all to indicate that Bill Biddle was a wanted man, senior on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, indicted in 1978 for murder, attempted murder, extortion, attempted kidnaping, racketeering and a number of other serious crimes.

Biddle, actually Leo Joseph Koury, left Richmond, Va., and his wife and four children more than 12 years ago, reportedly with $1 million in cash in the trunk of his car.

Graves’ boss is Barbara Baker, San Diego County public administrator. Baker says she plans to apply for the $25,000 FBI reward offered for Koury’s apprehension. The money, she said, belongs to the county because Graves, an investigator for the department, found the wanted man.

Graves started her routine investigation June 17, the day Biddle died, interviewing neighbors around Biddle’s modest East San Diego apartment, speaking to his employer at Sam’s Convenience Store on University Avenue. She was seeking a source, other than the county, to be responsible for Biddle’s burial expenses.

All that Graves learned from his East San Diego neighbors was that Bill Biddle was a nice guy who helped out people but who kept to himself.

Some of his neighbors and co-workers suggested that he might have a little money put aside, although he never lived beyond his means--a part-time job at the little market and a pension that he said had come from the International Red Cross, where he said he had worked until he had a breakdown in strife-torn Beirut.

But then Graves got an anonymous telephone call, her first tip that she was dealing with more than an overweight, middle-aged convenience store clerk. The caller warned her not to go into Biddle’s apartment “with a principal.” She took that to mean that there was something in the apartment dealing with Biddle’s past.

Graves had sealed the apartment until she and a sheriff’s deputy could search it for clues to Biddle’s past. When they did, they found little to indicate that Biddle was anything other than what he said he was--an orphan whose mother had died at his birth, who had worked for the International Red Cross and now was retired on a small disability pension.

He had taken a job at Sam’s Convenience Store, a block away from his apartment, to earn a bit of money and to fill in the hours, Biddle told most people.

“There were lots of papers in there. There were phone bills, coins, but no large amounts of cash,” Graves said of the apartment’s contents. She also found two billfolds, both containing the ordinary papers of an ordinary man. A Price Club card, a video rental store ID, a voter registration card, all issued to William Franklin Biddle.

The search also turned up a safety deposit box key to a nearby Union Bank, and there Graves found another clue--five packets of money, four wrapped in white paper and the fifth opened, as if someone had been taking a bill or two out of it every once and a while. Graves estimated that the bank security box contained $20,000, $25,000 at the most.

She learned from neighbors and from documents that Biddle had been a Catholic and a veteran, but when she checked with the military records officials in St. Louis, Mo., she was told that Biddle’s records were missing. She tried to trace him through the International Red Cross in Geneva. The Red Cross knew nothing of him.

“I was convinced that there is, or was someone named Biddle,” Graves said. “But his life seemed like an eggshell with nothing inside it.”

Last Friday, five days after Biddle died, Barrett Rossi called Graves’ office from San Francisco. He said he had learned that his uncle had died in San Diego and that he wanted to claim the body.

He gave his uncle’s name as Koury and said that he might have used a different name because he might be wanted by authorities in Virginia.

“That name didn’t mean a thing to me,” Graves admitted. She is not a fan of “America’s Most Wanted” and other criminal search television shows on which Leo Koury has been featured over the years as the man on the 10 Most Wanted list who has evaded the FBI for nearly 13 years.

She made the connection to Biddle after Rossi described his uncle as a short, heavy man with a lot of body hair, who was the son of Lebanese immigrants and who spoke Arabic fluently. The description fit William Franklin Biddle.

She notified the FBI, who quickly confirmed that Biddle was Koury. In the 1970s, Koury was a well-known businessman in Richmond, Va., who held a virtual monopoly on homosexual bars and restaurants there.

According to the FBI, Koury reportedly ordered the death of a rival club employee, whose body was found floating in a river, bound in weights. In 1977, Koury allegedly arranged a shooting incident in a rival club in which one person was killed, two others badly injured.

He also was wanted for conspiring to kidnap a wealthy Richmond businessman for a $500,000 ransom and for several insurance fraud schemes.

Koury was indicted by a federal grand jury for these and other crimes in late 1978 and was placed on the FBI’s Top 10 list in April, 1979. The search for him has led to South America and other countries, and his picture has remained, with age-imaging updates, on U.S. post office walls across the country since then.

But Leo Koury had been living quietly in San Diego for at least 10 years, according to his friends and neighbors who held a small memorial service for their friend Biddle before his body was shipped back to Virginia for formal services.

His San Diego acquaintances still do not believe that their friend Biddle was the FBI’s Koury, but fingerprints don’t lie, federal agents say.

Even Graves acknowledges that it was hard to conceive of Biddle’s criminal past.

“It’s like the case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief.