TRAGIC MISTAKE

Evening Star, Issue 23371, 14 September 1939, Page 18

TRAGIC MISTAKE

GUNMEN MURDER THE WRONG MAN i In a Is'ew York suburb stout, cheerful Mr Irving Penn, who bad not an enemy in the world, kissed his wife and two little girls good-bye one morning lately and set off for work humming a tune . . . and before ho reached the end of the street a man stopped from ii car and shot him. Five times the murderer fired his pistol. Mr Penn sprawled on the pavement. The car, which had slowly 1 railed him since ho stepped out of his home, sped away. Police took Mr Penn to the hospital, but the doctors could do nothing for him. Ho managed to tell the detectives standing by his bed: “I don’t know who did it. I don’t know why anvone should do it.” Then he died.

Now York detectives probed into his private life, seeking a motive for the shooting. They found ho had a blameless past. The found ho earned £I,OOO a year, and saved a lot of it. He had made his way in the world by sheer hard work; rising in 22 years from a clerk’s job to managing a department for a music publisher. He never quarrelled with anyone. Nobody remembered ever seeing him angry in his life. The baffled detectives found that Mr Penn never went anywhere more exciting than a baseball match.

They racked their brains. This man’s simple, ordinary life had to bo linked up somehow with the story told by neighbours. The killer’s car, they said, had waited for two hours near his home. There wore four men in it. As soon as he left his door the car moved off in bottom gear, following him. It seemed an obvious gang killing. But where was the motive?

Then, later, the police got word that a gangster had given orders for a racketeer named Philip Orlovski to bo “ put on the spot.” That gave them an idea.

They turned up details about Orlovskn Height, sft Sin; weight, lost, .lust the same as Mr Penn.

The gunmen had shot him down in mistake for their man.