Testimony in the Proceedings Concerning Edward Darwin Caparell

Lucas Stiver: I always thought Ed was a real stable fellow, steady, even-going, you know; but I think now I was just a victim of the common delusion that the stolid, quiet type of character never goes off the track. I've learned a lot listening to Dr. Pike's testimony here and, looking back, I can see things that should have meant more to me at the time they happened. Like one real cold morning last winter, we came out of Grand Central together. It was a brutal day, about 15 degrees below, and blowing hard, lots of snow. When we got to the building it was ten o'clock and there was nobody else in the elevator. Ed hit the 36 button and it lit up and then he hit the Door Close button. Nothing happened, of course, (continued on page 160)testimony in the proceedings(continued from page 121) because the car was programed for so many seconds' wait on the ground floor, and Ed looked up at the ceiling and said, "All right, you son of a bitch, let go of it!" And he stuck his middle finger up, you know. At the time, I didn't think anything about it, but I can see now, it was a little extreme in the circumstances.

Edward Caparell: At the time, I didn't know Mr. Stiver was my enemy, or I might have been more careful about what I said and did.

Lucas Stiver: I'm not your enemy, Ed.

Edward Caparell: In any case, that remark and that gesture, together, were just a reprise of a gag I remember from years ago, at Hootney, Mars and Bean, where we had a notoriously tight office manager, a real penny squeezer, fellow named Bragg; and one day in the can somebody was pulling at the towel machine, which was set up for a long interval, and he said, "Goddamn it, Bragg, let go of the towel, I know you're in there!" That was all that was.

Justice Meany: Thank you, Mr. Caparell. You may go on, Mr. Stiver.

Lucas Stiver: Well, we were standing there, waiting for the elevator to take off, and the Muzak was playing. I didn't notice until Ed called to my attention that the music was a steel band, and they were all singing some calypso song, and Ed said he wished the damned elevator would start up, because he was still cold from walking all the way from Grand Central, and the Muzak was trying to convince him he was in Jamaica. I remember he laughed a little and he said, "I feel environmentally confused."

Esther Meagan: I remember that same morning, because of the snowstorm. When I heard Mr. Caparell come in, I went and got him a jug of coffee, as I did every morning, and then I remembered that the cigarette box on his desk was empty, so I grabbed a pack of cigarettes somebody had left on my desk; I figured I didn't have time to run down to the machine. When Mr. Caparell saw the package, he said, "What are those?" And I said, "Brand-new account, haven't you heard? Treats. They have less nicotine than anything." And Mr. Caparell said, "I don't know about the other folks, but I drink whiskey for the alcohol in it and I smoke cigarettes because I get a message from the nicotine in them and the rich, nourishing tars, so you just drag your ass downstairs and get me a deck of king-size Burtons." He had never spoken to me in such a manner before. I thought it was very strange of him. I was upset.

Justice Meany: Still, wouldn't you agree that Mr. Caparell may only have been angry? Many men react strongly if they are asked to change the habit of years, and I gather that Mr. Caparell had smoked Burtons for some time.

Esther Meagan: Yes, but he kept on about it for so long. He kept making up slogans, like, "Let me treat you to a Treat," and then making noises as if he were, well, vomiting. And after he had finished his coffee, he was standing by the window in his office, it's a big window, the whole wall is window, and he called me in and pointed to the Chrysler Building, which we could just see, through the snow, and he said, "What would you like to bet that by three this afternoon there'll be nothing but that skinny spike on top sticking out of the snow?

Edward Caparell: A whimsy, nothing more or less. Although at the time, I considered it entirely possible and, as a matter of fact, I still do. Not only possible but attractive. To any rational mind, the idea of New York City under 1250 feet of fresh snow is irresistibly appealing.

J. F. T. Dortmund: I don't believe I had any contact with Ed Caparell on the day Miss Meagan and Mr. Stiver have told us about, but I did talk to him not long afterward, probably three or four days later. I can date it by Miss Meagan's remark on the Treat account. As head of the research department of the agency, Ed would naturally be one of the first I'd call in. We talked about it in general terms at first and then I told him that the Treat people had a kind of secret weapon up their sleeves, a technological breakthrough in the manufacturing process that would enable them to undersell any competing brand by as much as a dime a pack, if they wanted to. And of course I told Ed that we were going to have to come up with a reason, a justification for this, because if you cut the price of a product 25 percent, people are going to think there must be something wrong with it. He said why didn't we work it out that the Treat research people had cut costs by eliminating the major expense, the tobacco itself. He said we could say that the cigarette was made of healthful herbs, impregnated with synthetic tobacco essence, noncarcinogenic and all that. He said that the slogan could be, "Give your tired old lungs a Treat." I tried to see the humor in all this, but I remember thinking that it certainly bordered on the irresponsible, coming from a man of Ed's experience. Later on I remember thinking that perhaps that was the root of the trouble: too many years on the firing line. We're in a rough game, we all know that. Anyway, we went on to other things. I told him a new account executive was joining the agency, he was the one who was bringing the business, and I told him the name, Angelo Salzman. Ed gave a perceptible sign of recognition and, well, surprise, and I asked him if he knew Salzman. He said no, he didn't, but it was an odd name and he had known an Angelo Salzman in grade school. He said it couldn't be the same one.

Justice Meany: Did he explain his thinking?

J. F. T. Dortmund: Yes, he did, but unless it's absolutely necessary, I'd rather not go into it...

Justice Meany: We are concerned here with a man's liberty, Mr. Dortmund, and we require the fullest elucidation of every scrap of information we can find.

J. F. T. Dortmund: Well, Ed said it couldn't be the same Angelo Salzman, because the Salzman he knew had been clearly destined to be a concentration-camp guard or an ax murderer. He said Salzman was the biggest louse he'd ever known and certainly somebody must have shot him by now.

Justice Meany: Were you present when Mr. Caparell and Mr. Salzman met?

J. F. T. Dortmund: Yes, I introduced them.

Justice Meany: What were their respective attitudes?

J. F. T. Dortmund: Ed looked stunned. He went white and then red and at first I thought he wouldn't be able to say anything. Salzman looked surprised, too, but then he seemed to think it was funny, and he laughed and sort of ran at Ed and grabbed his hand and called him Old Jug-Ears. He actually picked him up like a baby and swung him around. He kept saying, "You remember me, don't you, Ed? You remember old Slingshot Salzman from St. Ignatius, don't you? By God, you ought to remember me!"

Justice Meany: I think we should hear now from Mr. Salzman. Mr. Salzman, it will not be necessary for you to testify from the witness stand. You may speak from your wheelchair.

Angelo Salzman: Thank you, your Honor. Well, I met Ed Caparell in the autumn of 1940, when we were both in the eighth grade at St. Ignatius school in Bloomstown, Pennsylvania. We had a normal relationship for that school and that time, I would say, although I would admit that I probably was happier in the eighth grade than Ed was. St. Ignatius was in a kind of across-the-tracks district, and it was known as a tough school. If you couldn't take care of yourself, you could count on a certain amount of trouble. Despite what has happened, I want to be fair, and I have to say that Ed Caparell probably got picked on more than most kids. It is true to say, as he has said, that I picked on him some, but the important thing to remember is that there was nothing personal about it. Partly it was just my nature; I was an overenergized, extroverted kid. Partly, well, in that school, in St. Ignatius, everybody picked on somebody, that's the kind of place it was. And Ed Caparell, he was sort of a natural victim. Now, about the slingshot and my (continued on page 236)Testimony in the Proceedings(continued from page 160) nickname. That year there was a big craze for slingshot in the eighth grade. Every kid in the grade had anything up to six slingshots on him all the time. Some of us were better than others at making them, and better shots with them, naturally. I had a kind of specialty in small slingshots. I kept making them smaller and smaller, until I got them down to not more than an inch and a half high. These were made of spring-steel wire and they shot bird shot. They were for indoor use, in classrooms, say. Now, it happened that Ed Caparell sat three seats in front of me and one row over, and I was fascinated by the way his ears stuck out from his head and the target they made. I used to pot him a good deal. At that distance, I must admit, a bird shot would still be going pretty hard when it hit, and I could often make him let out a yip, and then of course he'd have Sister Mary-Margaret on him. At least twice he was so shaken that he squealed on me, but it never did him any good, because I had a foolproof system: the bird shot I kept in my mouth, only five or six of them, I could even let you open my mouth and look in and you wouldn't see them. The slingshot itself I could hide in the neckband of my shirt, or I'd stick it into a wad of gum underneath my desk, places like that.

Justice Meany: I take it, then, that we may assume two points: You were an acknowledged master of the slingshot, particularly the miniature slingshot, and you favored Mr. Caparell as a target?

Angelo Salzman: Yes, sir, although, my God, again I would like to point out that this was all more than 20 years ago, and...

Justice Meany: We understand. I would suggest you rest for a bit, Mr. Salzman. It will no doubt be necessary to call on you again.

Ed Caparell: What about the sparrow, Salzman? What about the piano player? What about them?

Angelo Salzman: You're not running this proceeding, Caparell.

Ed Caparell: What about the sparrow, you yellow bastard, what about the sparrow and the piano player, you afraid to tell about that?

Angelo Salzman: Your Honor, do I have to answer this nut?

Justice Meany: Mr. Salzman, you deserve a severe rebuke for the use of that epithet, and I require your immediate apology.

Angelo Salzman: I'm sorry.

Ed Caparell: I'm sorry I called him a yellow bastard. For all I know, he's just yellow.

Justice Meany: Perhaps you will be good enough to give us the details, Mr. Salzman? If I feel the matter is not pertinent, I will interrupt you.

Angelo Salzman: When we were in second-year high school, Ed got a job as an usher in the Odeon movie theater. The episodes he's referring to, one night a week the Odeon used to show old silent films, and for those nights a piano player came in. Some of us used to sit in the balcony and hit him on the hands with BB shot. If you hit him hard enough, of course, he'd bang down on the keys and make a very dissonant sound, and sometimes he'd blow up altogether.

Justice Meany: You were using air guns in the theater?

Angelo Salzman: No, slingshots.

Justice Meany: What effect did your behavior have on Mr. Caparell? I don't understand the connection.

Angelo Salzman: Well, he was supposed to maintain order and prevent things like that from happening.

Justice Meany: I see. And the sparrow?

Angelo Salzman: Well, one night on the way to the theater I had a wild idea, I knocked a sparrow off a fence and hid it in one of the radiators in the theater, near where Ed's post was. This was in the winter and they didn't find it for several days. It was just a prank. Matter of fact, in Bloomstown, a thing like that was a very innocent kind of prank. My God, girls did worse than that!

Justice Meany: Yes, I have heard that some of the Pennsylvania coal-field communities have unusually liberal standards of civic behavior. Thank you, Mr. Salzman. I will ask Mr. Bartolino to come up, please.

Anthony Bartolino: I am art director at Ballinger, Jason, Mear and, naturally, in that capacity, I was closely concerned with the Treat account. Things went badly right from the first, and it was plain enough to me that either Salzman or Caparell, one or the other, would eventually have to get off the account. They fought constantly. At first they weren't really fights, they just niggled at each other. Each of them would put down any suggestion the other one made. Caparell was supercilious. His attitude was that of a man who hated to have to talk about the obvious, but what could he do, he seemed to be saying, with anyone as dense as Salzman? Salzman, on the other hand, needled Caparell steadily and always ended the discussion by saying that he was, after all, the account executive and things were going to go his way.

Justice Meany: I believe there was an episode involving an ashtray?

Anthony Bartolino: Yes, there was. My department had run up a number of four-color layouts involving a girl in a fairly startling bikini, made up in the yellow and red of the Treat package. Salzman liked the idea, but Caparell had done a tremendous amount of research on the whole concept and he just blew it out of the water. I don't think there'd be any point going into the technicalities, but he buried the whole idea. Salzman was furious, and the discussion quickly got away from the issues and got out of hand and into personalities. There were opinions exchanged about virility, and so on. While all this had been going on, Salzman had been fiddling with a paper clip, and quite suddenly he came up with a little slingshot; he had a wad of tin foil in it and he said to Caparell, "Jug-Ears, if you don't shut up, I'm going to let you have it right in the head." At that point, Caparell went totally out of control. He grabbed a big crystal ashtray, he stood and took a run and he slung the thing at Salzman with every bit of force he had, like a discus thrower. Salzman just did duck in time. It would have beheaded him. Then Salzman went berserker and several of us had to restrain him by force. Caparell was screaming for us to let him go so he could kill him. We had to take them out separately.

Justice Meany: You did not suspect any element of, say, bluff, in either of them?

Anthony Bartolino: At the end, I don't think Salzman was really trying to get away from us. I don't know if any of us could have held Caparell. He was beet red and screaming. He looked maniacal. I had a type-specification book on the table. It was two inches thick. Ed grabbed it and tore it into four pieces and threw them at Salzman.

Justice Meany: Thank you, Mr. Bartolino. We will hear Mr. Jason now.

Martin Jason: I did relieve Mr. Caparell of responsibility for the Treat account, but I think it likely I would have done so even had Mr. Salzman not been concerned. Frankly, I had seen signs of, well, of strain in Mr. Caparell for some months before. For example, he had objected strenuously to a campaign we mounted for a major Detroit client. The burden of the campaign involved research this company was doing in the matter of the steam-powered automobile, with the implication that the return of the steam automobile was at least possible if not exactly imminent, and that it would go far to reduce the smog problem. Mr. Caparell was in favor of our declining this business on the ground that the idea was impracticable. He amassed a great deal of material to back up his point; indeed. I was told he had stayed in the office for two nights to do so, although I'd told him I couldn't entertain his objections for a moment, since the practicability of the basic idea was solely the client's responsibility, not ours. There were other things. I might say that we at Ballinger, Jason, Mear have a distinctly liberal attitude. We have no use for the Stone Age concept that it's an act of disloyalty for an employee to use products competitive to those we advertise; but Mr. Caparell, it seems to me, made a point of using none of our products. Miss Meagan has told us of his attitude toward Treat cigarettes. That was typical. I repeat, I am not speaking of agency loyalty. Mr. Caparell's attitudes were irrational. They were the attitudes of a man who is cracking.

Justice Meany: Thank you, Mr. Jason.

Mary Adams: When Mr. Caparell went on leave of absence from his work, he insisted that Mrs. Caparell go away and visit her sister in California. He said he didn't want her mooning over him. He made her go away, even though she didn't want to. I thought she was better off. He certainly wasn't good company. He made some terrible scenes around the house when the Salzmans bought the place across the pond. He called up the real-estate people and everything, and Mrs. Caparell couldn't do anything to stop him. He said crazy things, like they were trying to drive him out of town. And after Mrs. Caparell was gone, he began to act real queer. He'd sit there at night drinking whiskey and looking over at the Salzman place through a periscope he had in the living room, some kind of a spyglass, and he'd talk to himself. He had a regular schedule: Wednesday and Thursday he'd be in New York looking for a job. Friday morning he'd come home, before noon, and putter around, and at night he'd watch the Salzman house. And he'd do that every night until Wednesday. I don't know how long he'd keep at it, but he never went to bed before I did, at ten o'clock. Then, about two months ago, he started with the stones, and he ordered the lumber and things.

Justice Meany: You had no idea, I am sure, of the nature of the project Mr. Caparell had in mind?

Mary Adams: No, sir. I'm afraid that 40 years as a housekeeper didn't equip me for that. I just thought he was going dotty, when he began chipping away at those stones. He'd put on his goggles and get his chisels and his hammer and start in every morning, chipping away. And later, about in April, he started work on his machine. And all the time he'd be drinking whiskey, day and night.

Justice Meany: Did he become intoxicated?

Mary Adams: Never. I'll say that for him. He drank all day and half the night and he was never anything but stone sober.

Constable Sperling: At 12:06 p.m. on Saturday, the fourth of May, a call came in from the Humphrey's Pond district, caller not identified, asking for an officer to go to Angelo Salzman's house on Hill-view Road. The caller, a lady, was upset and said the house was "being exploded." I took Officer Gunnerich and we arrived at the top of Hillview Road about five minutes later. The first thing we noticed when we came near the Salzman place was that his Volkswagen had the left front wheel knocked in and there was a tremendous dent in the roof. Salzman himself was behind a big oak tree. Then Gunnerich yelled and pointed and I saw an object come flying through the air across the pond and hit the house just under the eaves. It went out the other side. I noticed that the roof was broken in several places. Almost right away, another object came over and this one hit the chimney, destroying it altogether. Then another, and by this time, we could both see that the objects were round and about twice as big as baseballs. Salzman was yelling and pointing, he was saying that the things were coming from the Caparell place across the pond. Gunnerich and I watched, and it was true. The pond is only about 200 yards wide at that point and we could clearly see Mr. Caparell in his front yard working some kind of apparatus, and we could see these big balls flying out of it on a straight line. I yelled across to him to stop it, and I believe the next ball was aimed at me. I could see it coming and I stepped aside. This one went through Mr. Salzman's house in the living-room area and was the one that destroyed the color-TV set. I then drew my revolver and fired twice in the air. This had no effect. Accordingly, Gunnerich and Salzman and I piled into the patrol car and started around the pond toward Caparell's place. When we came to the head of his driveway, which is a long and straight one, Salzman yelled to look out, that he was aiming the thing at us, and I could see that he was, and I could see what he had. It was a very big slingshot mounted on a timber framework with old automobile wheels under it. We all saw the first ball coming. It hit the car dead center. It went through the grille, the radiator, between the two cylinder banks, taking out the carburetors, came through the fire wall, wrecked the short-wave radio, went through both seats and left a dent as big as a man's head in the trunk. The car stopped, of course. We jumped out and ran for Caparell, or started to, but by this time he had reloaded and that shot took down a six-inch-thick maple tree right beside Officer Gunnerich. We ducked down behind the stone wall bordering the front of his property, and almost at once a ball came through the wall and struck Mr. Salzman. Officer Gunnerich was badly cut around the head by flying pieces of stone, and I stood up and told Caparell that if he moved a muscle I would shoot him dead. He surrendered peaceably.

Justice Meany: I believe you later had an opportunity to examine the weapon Mr. Caparell had constructed?

Constable Sperling: Yes. It was a slingshot using ten full inner tubes for power, with a very ingenious electrically driven compound pulley arrangement, so that Caparell could pull the pouch back almost immediately after shooting and shoot again. It had a telescopic sight. The balls were hand-chipped round stones and they all weighed exactly six pounds.

Justice Meany: Thank you, Constable. Nurse, I think it will not be necessary for Mr. Caparell to remain longer. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Caparell.

Dr. Abel Pike: There is no question in my mind, and none in the minds of my staff members, that Mr. Caparell is hopelessly schizoid; and while I am entirely in sympathy with the purpose of this hearing, I must register strong opposition to his release from Merrylegs Farm. He is extremely dangerous.

Justice Meany: Were he to escape, I presume we would be justified in feeling some concern for Mr. Salzman's safety?

Dr. Abel Pike: Indeed. But his escape is a remote contingency. He is under maximum-security surveillance, but it is also important that he shows no particular wish to leave Merrylegs. We are as permissive as the condition of our patients permits us to be, and we are apparently keeping Mr. Caparell quite happy. You will recall that Mrs. Adams testified Mr. Caparell prepared the round stones before he began to make his slingshot. That is what he is doing now. He is making his stones. He is more ambitious now. These are 100-pound stones. It takes about six weeks to make each one perfectly round. We have an ample supply of raw material for him, and he tells me he intends to make 250 stones before beginning on the slingshot. This amounts to something over 28 years of work. Mr. Caparell is content, and I would say that he has a busy and, to him, a rewarding future stretching ahead.

Justice Meany: I am sure it is a comfort to all of us to know that.