Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

“When he told us he was sure this old boy was eighty years old, and said how he had studied out the lay of the land and how he would get the old man to open the door by telling him one of his friends was sick — well, it looked pretty good to the bunch of us.”

The Editor’s Pill

Then Jimmy Kramer went on to relate the stubborn opposition they had unexpectedly met from the old couple. And he whined and whimpered that if he had ever known to what revolting lengths Morris would go in order to extort the money from the old man he would never have joined the expedition.

Morris, the handler of the red-hot poker, collapsed as pusillanimously as his hirelings.

Like Judd Gray in the recent Snyder murder, he sought to cast the blame for it all on the woman — in this case, May Lang.

“She put it into my head,” he whined. “She could make me do anything. She has won me away from my wife, made me forget my home and two babies. I met her in a dance hall. She’s a wicked, wicked woman.

“She’s had me starving my wife and children, and I was on the verge of losing the little home I’ve paid installments on — all on account of her, of her demands for money to satisfy her silly and expensive whims. That’s how it all came to happen in the first place.

“She brought me the newspaper clippings that told about old Green running a sort of a bank in the little village for his neighbors. She said how easy it would be to go down there some night and get his money. She said she had heard he kept as much as ten thousand dollars in the house at a time.

“I kept telling her I wouldn’t dare do such a thing. And she kept taunting me with being a coward. And then she said she could round up four men who would go down there with me and would not expect much of the loot. She said if five of us showed up masked it would scare the old couple so hard they’d give up the money without a struggle.

“It was her that went down there and got the name of Len Purdy for me to use to get the old man to open the door. She threatened if I didn’t go down there and get the money she’d never see me, never speak to me again on earth, and I couldn’t do without her — I was so blind in love with her I felt I couldn’t live without her. But it was her put up the whole job — May Lang, she did it.”

“Was it May Lang,” demanded O’Mara, “who told you to burn old Mrs. Green’s feet?”

Twenty-three years at hard labor was the little fiend’s prison portion; May Lang got fifteen. And fifteen years each was meted to the others in the dastardly affair.

And Editor O’Neal manfully swallowed his pill. No higher praise was given O’Mara’s achievement than was contained in the editorial on the subject which appeared in the Pittsburgh Dispatch.