Days
of Yore
| |
as
recounted
by
Bill
Day
|
|
Murder
One evening in Haddonfield in the middle of
1930
in the 200 block of Mountwell Avenue, Curt Dobbins sat reading in
the
living
room of his parents’ home. He was alone in the house.
Curt
was a bachelor, a graduate of Drexel Institute where has had been
an
All-American
center on the basketball team. In his senior year he had
been an
All-American Center. When the front doorbell rang Curt
answered
it,
and when he opened the door he was confronted hy a man holding a
revolver.
Curt ducked back and threw himself down but not before he was
struck in
the body by a bullet. The man ran from the porch and
disappeared.
Crawling to the phone, Curt called the Police Department. (I
found
out since I wrote this that Harry Githens was the cop.) Curt
was
taken to the West Jersey Hospital with a serious stomach
wound.
Dr.
Stan Davis was called, a long time personal friend of
Curt’s.
Carl
Tule, another friend from boyhood was also called, along with
several
others
in case transfusions were necessary. Dr. Everett Hemphill
later
said
the operation performed on Curt that night by Dr. Davis was the
talk of
the hospital. Many perforations in the intestines had been
made
by
the bullet which had to be closed, which took hours. When
Davis
came
out of the operation room crying he told Carl Tule that he had
done
everything
he could but that Curt was going to die. The end came soon
afterward,
and Haddonfield was grieved. Curt’s father, Mr. Dobbins, was
a
New
Jersey State Parole Officer. The first suspect was a parolee
who
had bee employed by Mr. Dobbins to work on the lawn. The
man’s
mother
found a gun in the oven of her gas range over in
Philadelphia.
She
knew this was wrong and reported her find to the
authorities.
Further
questioning of the suspect revealed that he and a girl friend had
been
around Jersey the night of the murder. The girl wouldn’t
talk.
He was imprisoned in the Haddonfield jail as positive proof of
guilt
had
not been revealed by questioning, until one evening Sam Orlando,
Camden
County prosecutor and Haddonfield resident, talked to the girl
friend.
He fabricated; he told her how the man had told them all about
what
happened
when he was parked at a gravel pit out on the Berlin Road near
Gibbsboro.
She was furious and told the story. She said they had been
drinking
and when they were in Haddonfield - she didn’t know exactly where
- he
parked the car, went around the corner on foot, returned a short
time
later
and took off in a hurry. The man was tried and convicted for
murder
in Camden County Court and electrocuted in Trenton. Mr.
Dobbins
went
up to witness the execution. Thus the only known Haddonfield
murder
was solved. Sam Orlando’s story that he told the girl was a
fabrication,
but it worked perfectly and justice was done..
There was just one other murder in
Haddonfield
back in the era of 1905, but no town residents were
involved. Mr.
Herb Gleeson was just a kid at the time, but he remembers that
when his
father’s house was being worked on, at West Cottage Avenue and
Warwick
Road, two Italian workers got into an argument. One hit
the other
over the head with a pick axe. No other particulars were
known.