Who Killed John Franks? October 26, 2017

Copyright © 2017                                                        John F. Oyler

October 26, 2017

Who Killed John Franks?

For its October “Second Tuesday” workshop the Bridgeville Area Historical Society interrupted its study of the history of Bridgeville High School to focus on the community’s most famous “cold case”, the murder of Pennsylvania Railroad Station Agent John C. F. Franks attempting to prevent a robbery one hundred and two years ago.

On a peaceful Saturday evening, October 16, 1915, a pair of strangers, whose presence in Bridgeville had been noticed for several days, entered the Norwood Hotel bar-room and enjoyed several drinks. A few minutes before 8:00 they paid their bill and left. They crossed the railroad tracks and were loitering in the lumber yard when the whistle of the 8:00 passenger train from Pittsburgh announced its imminent arrival.

At this point Station Agent Franks came out of the station, probably to determine if the train’s conductor had any mail for him. The two strangers came back across the tracks and entered the station. The westbound train pulled to a stop, blocking the crossing, and discharged its passengers, some of whom proceeded up Station Street toward Washington Avenue. A dozen or so waited patiently for the train to pull out.

At this point Mr. Franks realized that something was wrong and hurried back into the station, where he found one of the strangers rifling his cash box. He immediately attacked him and fell to the floor on top of him. In the meantime the passenger train and left, but before the passengers could get across the crossing an eastbound freight appeared, preventing them.

Two young boys dashed across the tracks in front of the freight and found themselves in the middle of a confrontation. The stranger standing guard at the station door grabbed fourteen year old John Schulte, threw him on the floor, then proceeded to shoot Mr. Franks and rescue his partner. Franks was mortally wounded. Thirteen year old Walter Der observed this from the platform.

By the time the freight train had passed and the passengers had come rushing across to investigate, the two burglars were leaving the station. They threatened the passengers with their handguns, then ran down the tracks and onto Baldwin Street. The shocked passengers found Mr. Franks’ dead body close to the ticket office he had tried to defend. George Moulton had also been outside the station, with Walter Der, and got a good enough look at the burglars to become one of the three witnesses who later were asked to identify suspects.

As soon as news of this tragedy spread, sightings of suspicious characters began to come in from all directions – the Washington Pike headed for Canonsburg, McLaughlin Run Road headed to Clifton, Bower Hill Road headed to Mt. Lebanon, and Carnegie boarding a trolley. A massive manhunt supported with bloodhounds focused on the area south of Bridgeville.

The first suspects proposed were the Wendt Brothers, Walter and Alfred. Afred had killed a constable in Altoona two days earlier, and it was believed the brothers were heading west. The constable’s watch was discovered in a pawn shop in Western Pennsylvania. However when the description of the burglars, one tall and one short with a mustache, was circulated, local police concluded it didn’t match the Wendts.

Every suspicious person who ran afoul of the law in this general area immediately became a suspect, especially if he were either tall or short. Mr. Moulton and the two boys were kept busy visiting lockups and taking the heat off suspects when they couldn’t identify them as the miscreants.

The first real break in the case occurred a week after the murder. John Mokati, a resident of Braddock, was arrested in a Roman Catholic Church in Castle Shannon for causing a disturbance when he refused to leave after praying in the sanctuary for several hours. His erratic behavior and the fact that he was indeed tall moved him to the top of the list of suspects for the Franks murder. Two of the eye witnessed declared that he was indeed the murderer; he was arrested and charged.

The next day a Catholic priest reported that he had seen Mokati in Braddock at 5:00 pm the day of the murder; nonetheless Mokati was held for trial, a trial that never transpired. On November 4, 1915, he had a mental breakdown in prison, was declared insane, and was taken to Woodville in a straitjacket.

On January 5 1916, a potential accomplice for Mokati turned up in the person of William Sanders, a short man who had attracted attention during an overnight stay in the “drunk tank” in the Canonsburg lockup. The plot against him thickened when a railroad ticket agent identified him as one of two men who had bought tickets to Bridgeville the day of the killing and had inquired about the duration of such a trip.

Sanders however claimed to have been a prisoner in the workhouse in Columbus, Ohio, under the name of Fred Scott, the day of the murder. At the same time the ticket agent backed off a little in his identification of Sanders as being the ticket purchaser. The warden in the Columbus prison confirmed that his prisoner Scott resembled the photograph of Sanders that was sent to him. Sanders was released, and never heard of again.

At this point the case was indeed cold and cold it remained for nineteen years. In late October 1934 Thomas Talbott, recently arrested in Pittsburgh, shocked local authorities by reporting that a former colleague of his, James McDonald, alias James Dillon, alias James Dinwiddie, had told him years earlier that he indeed had killed John Franks.

At this point McDonald was in prison in Illinois, about to be deported to his native Canada as an habitual criminal. When the eyewitnesses, all now nineteen years older, were unable to identify him from photographs, the local officials elected to pursue this lead no further; McDonald returned to Canada.

When Mrs. Annie Shusler read about the accusations made against McDonald, she decided to break a nineteen year long silence. She wrote to the County Detectives and informed them that she believed a man named Andrew Wanko was the murderer and that she had seen him running from the crime scene the evening of the murder. Adamantly denying any knowledge of the affair, he was brought to Pittsburgh from his home in Lewis, West Virginia, and identified by Mrs. Shusler. Two days later he was released when the detectives concluded there was insufficient evidence to hold him.

Having presented all this information to the workshop members, the facilitator now asked them to come to their own conclusions and decide whom they thought was guilty. Mokati, possibly allied with Sanders, got the most votes; followed closely by “I haven’t a clue”.

It is a remarkably convoluted story, one that doesn’t paint a favorable picture of the County Detective Department in that era. The fact that the incident occurred in the very building in which the workshop was conducted was particularly intriguing.

The next “Second Tuesday” workshop will return to our review of the history of Bridgeville High School, picking up with the Class of 1939. We hope to get as far as 1942 or 1943. It will be at the History Center at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, November 14.