Pennsylvania City Confronts 2 Racial Killings 31 Years Later

On the night Ted Kennedy drove off a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, four black men with guns took aim at an armored police truck crossing a bridge over a creek in a small industrial city in southeastern Pennsylvania.

One bullet, fired from a high-powered rifle, ripped through the steel plating and punctured both lungs of Henry Schaad, a 22-year-old rookie cop. He died in a hospital 13 days later.

Three days later, as Americans celebrated Neil Armstrong’s walk in the soft dust of the moon, angry white thugs spotted a gray Cadillac carrying black people and opened fire.

With the car stalled on railroad tracks, one woman got out. Lillie Belle Allen, a South Carolina preacher’s daughter, was “shot almost in half” by gunfire, one police officer said, and died in the street. She was 27.

A week of racial rioting, with shootings, firebombings and looting, easily the ugliest chapter in the history of this Colonial-era city, was hardly noticed elsewhere as the nation coped with huge stories of triumph and grief.

The deaths of two and shootings of 28 made scarcely a ripple outside the city. But no one was ever charged in the killings, and that rankled, even after bitterness subsided and memories dulled.

Now, 31 years after the killings--and a few months since the suicide of one potential witness--authorities have reopened the murder cases. They are taking a page from a book being written by prosecutors and civil rights advocates, most of them Southern, who in recent years have hunted down aging, racist killers and won convictions.

Groundbreaking Action

Historians say York may be the first, however, to delve into unsolved killings that resulted from racial street riots rather than single attacks. York’s riots were a small-scale version of the violence that ripped apart the Los Angeles Watts neighborhood (August 1965, 34 dead); Newark, N.J. (July 1967, 26 dead), Detroit (July 1967, 43 dead); and Washington, D.C. (April 1968, eight dead).

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., says it knows of no reopened investigations from race riot homicides other than this one in York, 20 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line.

“Until now, reinvestigations of these cases have been viewed as a Southern question purely . . . usually something involving the Southern [Ku Klux] Klan,” said David Garrow, a historian and author who teaches civil rights litigation at Emory University’s law school.

“The York case strikes me as being even more poignant and powerful” because of its circumstances, Garrow said--a white officer and a black woman shot dead in a little-known race riot in a Northern state, where authorities are now investigating both deaths simultaneously.

As prosecutors impanel a grand jury to consider new evidence, angry old questions are resurfacing.

“The most disturbing thing about it, to me, is how can a town keep a secret for 31 years, that isn’t even really a secret?” says Jim Kalish, a retired consultant and amateur historian.

Kalish recently published “The Story of Civil Rights in York, Pennsylvania: A 250-Year Interpretive History,” which was commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the York Human Relations Commission.

Secrets will linger awhile longer. President Judge John C. Uhler, the county’s top judge, has put a gag order on the proceedings. Uhler declined several interview requests from the Associated Press, as did city District Attorney Stanley Rebert, the police chief and the lead detective.

Also declining to talk on the record was Mayor Charles Robertson, who as a police officer in 1969 was among those who found Allen’s body next to her sister’s car on Newberry Street.

But others believe the truth will finally emerge because of guilty consciences, the suicides of four white gang members, and the doggedness of the city’s two newspapers--the York Dispatch and the York Daily Record--both of which worked hard to keep the story alive all these years.

“For years, their side of the track was quiet, and so was ours,” said Barry Schaad, a metals salesman and older brother of the slain police officer. “And then, people started dying off,” which loosened people’s tongues.

“The papers kept writing about it, and finally” the police began reinvestigating, Schaad said.

“The city has finally recognized the fact that it’s got a problem, and that it’s going to have to go a little bit further to solve it,” said Wm. Lee Smallwood, a black councilman who remembers well how things were in York just a few decades ago.

The city’s overall rate of joblessness was 2.5% in 1969. In the black neighborhoods, it was three times higher.

“Substandard” was a kind word for much of the housing available for the black community; the late Mayor John Snyder, who referred to blacks as “darkies” and walked around town with his own German shepherd, refused to accept federal funds to build public housing.

The police department’s aggressive K-9 unit, unleashed on a crowd of black youths at York High School the year before the riots, was widely feared.

Leo Cooper, director of York’s NAACP branch, said he hopes the new investigation will help the city put some old ghosts to rest.

“The community needs to believe that the powers that be, the system, has done the best it could do,” Cooper said. “Whether they get the perpetrator of the Schaad killing or the Allen killing, that needs to be uncovered. And those people who were responsible for conducting the original investigation, and for protecting people--if they did that--they need to be held accountable.”

Suicide Tapes

The case burst back into the news in April when the body of Donald E. Altland was found alongside the Susquehanna River with a .22-caliber bullet in his head.

Altland, 51--a former member of the Newberry Street Boys, a white gang long suspected of involvement in the Allen shooting--had been questioned the day before by York police and, apparently anguished, had talked with his wife long into the night.

Altland left behind two cassette tapes, in which he admitted shooting at Allen’s car from a nearby rooftop the night of July 21 and said he was overcome by years of guilt, according to Northeastern Regional Police Chief Darryl Albright, who investigated the suicide.

The night before he killed himself, Altland asked his wife, Cindy, for forgiveness, Albright told the York Dispatch. “He said, ‘I can’t say for sure if any of my bullets did any harm,’ ” Albright told the paper.

Three other members of the gang had taken their lives earlier: Richard “Dickey” Wales in 1974, Robert Downey in 1979 and Mike Messersmith in 1998.

Police questioned members of the Newberry Street Boys after the Allen killing but couldn’t make a case. The gang’s leader, Bobby Messersmith, Mike’s brother, was later arrested for shooting and wounding two black men on July 17, the first night of the riots.

In the Schaad killing, witnesses told detectives they saw four black men with guns aiming at the armored truck as it crossed the College Avenue bridge July 18.

Schaad’s father, Russ, was a police detective and supposedly knew the names of the men who shot at the truck, said Nevin Barley, a retired York police officer who worked with the canine unit during the riots.

Russ Schaad died of a heart attack in 1977 without divulging any information he had. Barley said he felt Schaad was concerned what might happen if blacks were charged with murder and no whites were arrested for Allen’s killing.

Dennis McMaster, a former York police officer who is now police chief in East Pennsboro Township in neighboring Cumberland County, recalls how thinly police were stretched as reports poured in of arsons, shootings and beating.

“There was danger everywhere, policemen were being hurt, and one of them was killed,” McMaster said. “We didn’t do what would be considered, today, an adequate investigation . . . and I’m talking about immediately afterwards.”

Investigators in the South, however, have had notable successes with reopened investigations in the last decade.

Eighteen civil rights murders have been reinvestigated since 1989 in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Recent Southern cases include the May indictments of two men suspected in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church that killed four black girls, and the 1998 conviction of Sam Bowers, a Ku Klux Klan leader, for ordering the 1966 firebombing that killed Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP representative in Hattiesburg, Miss.

“In many of these cases, we’ve seen the long sleeping consciences of witnesses reawake,” Potok said. “We’re seeing a new generation of prosecutors . . . and new juries eager to convict when the evidence is there.”