The Story So Far: This is the final part of the Shopkeeper Killer series. Thus far, four vicious ‘merchant murders’ from 1963-64 go unpunished for nearly 60 years, despite the largest manhunt in Harrisburg history and a detour into injustice for two teen suspects. Then, the current DA’s phone rings. Read part one, part two, part three and part four.
Dauphin County District Attorney Francis Chardo often says he has plenty of “21st-century homicides” to keep him busy. Yet, he couldn’t resist being drawn nearly 60 years into Harrisburg’s past.
The phone call that initiated Chardo’s time travel came more than a year ago. The caller was a member of the Martin and Morris Lock family, once one of Harrisburg’s most prominent.
Chardo declined to name the Lock family member now living in New England, saying the call was private. But the DA described the caller’s inquiry into the case that had consumed two members of his family — Morris, shot dead in his Third Street shoe store in May 1963, and Martin, the county DA who oversaw the investigation into the series of store owner killings in 1963-64.
At the time, Chardo knew little about the case. But as he learned more, he couldn’t resist going down the rabbit hole that is the Harrisburg shopkeeper serial killer case.
Chardo mined the Dauphin County archives for records on the case and reached out to a predecessor in the DA post, LeRoy Zimmerman. Chardo also phoned Martin Lock’s son, Josh, a long-practicing criminal defense attorney in Harrisburg.
Chardo did all this in search of the identity of the serial killer who escaped Harrisburg’s largest manhunt 60 years ago — or did he?
Chardo would learn that a suspect in the first three killings was arrested and convicted — but not for the three merchant murders in 1963.
As for what drew him in so deeply, the DA recounted the many fascinating aspects of the case in a series of interviews with PennLive.
The time and place of the shopkeeper killings are an otherwise golden moment in Harrisburg history. It marked the twilight of the city’s glory days as a vibrant residential and business center. The hundreds of stores, shops and other businesses located across the city were booming. Harrisburg boasted more than 70,000 residents. The crime rate was low, with annual murders often counted on one hand. Gun violence was rarer still.
“You had a lot more shops. There were 50-some shoe repair shops alone. There were lots of shops like that all over the city,” Chardo said.
Unfortunately, someone with a gun saw all those mom-and-pop stores that trafficked in cash as an easy score.
“As far as targets for robbery, it’s a pretty good one,” Chardo said.
One by one, those store owners came under attack in 1963, shocking an entire city.
“This would have caused a panic, certainly among shopkeepers and families of shopkeepers,” Chardo said. “These are true innocent victims.”
The violence proved a precursor to a coming urban crime wave.
As the 1970s dawned, violence and murders spiked in Harrisburg. The years of 1973 and 1974 were particularly bloody, with each exceeding 40 homicides in the city alone. This, as a heroin war raged, Chardo said.
By contrast, a typical homicide rate for all of Dauphin County during any given year these days is usually in the 20s, he said.
“We had a lot more murders in those years of the 1970s than we do now,” Chardo said.
Looking back, the period of the shopkeeper killings marked the beginning of the end of a more innocent age.
Cannot see the map? Click here.
The first three robbery-homicides from January to May of 1963 are particularly cold-blooded in Chardo’s eyes. He said investigators’ early focus on an experienced criminal who was now taking the added, lethal measure of eliminating witnesses seems very on point.
“These weren’t incidental killings. It appeared the perpetrator was killing them to eliminate witnesses,” Chardo said. “This might have been born of (the fact) he got burned before, and he says, ‘I’m not going to have another witness’.”
Finally, there’s Chardo’s long-ago predecessor as Dauphin County’s chief law enforcement officer, DA Martin Lock.
As much as he tries, Chardo cannot place himself in Lock’s shoes. The final, unexpected twist in the third killing in 1963 that had Martin Lock investigating his own uncle’s homicide seems more Hollywood than real-life homicide.
“That is a difficult situation to be in,” Chardo said. “Today, that wouldn’t happen. Within 24 hours of the murder, the DA would have referred the case to the office of attorney general,” he added, citing current conflict of interest statutes of the Commonwealth Attorneys Act.
‘We got him’
Had such conflict-of-interest been on the books in 1963, Martin Lock would have had no choice but to turn the case over. And not just his uncle’s homicide inside the shoe store, but the series of shopkeeper killings from 1963.
But those laws weren’t on the books, and Martin Lock had nowhere else to turn.
The DA, a former World War II infantry officer in the Pacific Theater, would remain at the center of the shopkeeper case until his untimely death from lung cancer in April 1965 at age 47.
When the out-of-town Lock family member phoned Chardo, one of the DA’s first calls was to Martin Lock’s son, Josh. Not only had he remained in Harrisburg, but Josh Lock had also followed his father’s footsteps into criminal law. Except Josh defended the accused.
Josh Lock, now 75, would have been a high school teen when his relative was slain. Still, he recalled it the moment Chardo phoned.
Rather than a gnawing unknowing that disquieted a family for 60 years, Josh Lock told Chardo something astonishing: The three shopkeeper killings from 1963 had been solved.
Moreover, the killer would never see the light of day due to a lengthy prison sentence, Lock told Chardo.
The only catch was the killer had been arrested and convicted for other crimes, but never for the shopkeeper homicides. And Josh Lock couldn’t recall the suspect’s name or the exact crimes that had put him away.
“My understanding is at some point it became apparent that they knew who did and there was insufficient evidence to prove it. But that person was in jail for either much of or the entirety of the rest of his life,” Josh Lock told Chardo.
Not only did Martin Lock know all this, he assured some family members of this fact at the time. It just never became public, nor a matter of record.
How could this be?
Actually, such situations are known to happen somewhat routinely, especially when various cases against the same offender are stronger than others, Chardo said.
“Sometimes in the effort to get justice in Case A, you do it by getting justice in Case B. That does happen,” said Chardo, adding that some prosecutions are problematic, even impossible, despite knowing you have the right guy.
In such cases, family members of victims in the un-prosecuted case would be informed that the offender was meeting justice for another crime.
“That is something we would convey,” Chardo said.
The downside is the un-prosecuted case likely remains on the books as unsolved and open. In a high-profile crime, such as the shopkeeper killings, this would be unsatisfying, to say the least.
“Obviously, that’s going to be frustrating,” Chardo said.
Josh Lock declined to speak to PennLive about any details regarding his impression of how the three shopkeeper killings from 1963 were solved behind the scenes.
His younger brother, Herschel Lock, also an attorney, not only confirmed this story to PennLive but showed his father’s scrapbook of yellowed news articles on the shopkeeper killings.
As Herschel turns to a page of clippings chronicling his great uncle Morris Lock’s homicide in his shoe store, the 74-year-old son pauses. There’s a black-and-white photo of his DA dad snapped at this highly personal crime scene. Herschel studies the image for a long moment.
“To me, I see a somber countenance there,” he said. “It was serious. And not just because it was a relative. Harrisburg was a smaller town back then. People knew each other more. The tone changed.”
Raised surrounded by Jewish rabbis speaking Hebrew and Yiddish while debating scripture in his grandfather’s study, Martin Lock prized the peace and sanctity of his home above all. Shop talk about the criminal world he faced every day was forbidden at the dinner table and during family time in the living room, Herschel said.
But there was no stopping the phone calls, which came at all hours.
“He didn’t talk much about what he was doing,” Herschel said of his dad. “A lot of what he was doing was violence, death and bad things. He was my father. His being DA was secondary for a kid growing up.”
The rare occasions when Martin Lock did speak of his work made lasting impressions.
On one such occasion, a teenage Herschel was volunteering as a history tutor at the Dauphin County Prison. For a Key Club project, Herschel and other teens were helping incarcerated men obtain their GEDs.
Something Herschel’s pupil said startled him.
“He says to me once, he says, ‘You know your dad put me in prison’.”
That night, Herschel asked his father about the young inmate, whom Herschel found “nice enough, an OK guy.”
It turned out the 23-year-old was doing a three-year bit for assault after stabbing his wife. Martin Lock added a cryptic comment.
“I remember my dad saying, ‘I’m not sure he can be helped’,” Herschel recalled. “That’s all he said. Years later, the guy got out and ended up killing someone. That stuck in my mind.”
The other thing that would stay in the minds of both Herschel and Josh Lock is the statement that the shopkeeper killer from 1963 was going away for a long time on another case. Neither is positive when or why this comment was made, but it clearly came from their father before he died.
“We did get him” are the words Herschel recalls his father saying.
“I recollect that conversation. It was a phone call to the house,” he added. “It’s possible dad was passing word to other Lock relatives. That was my recollection, but I can’t be precise.”
Like his brother, Herschel cannot recall the suspect’s name.
But if the killer’s arrest on other charges occurred sometime in the latter part of 1963, it would explain why the merchant murders suddenly stopped after Morris Lock’s homicide in May 1963. At the time, the killer seemed to be accelerating his pace and sharpening his lethality — only to all but disappear.
The killer’s arrest for another crime not only would account for this, it would mean the fourth shopkeeper killing in 1964 was the work of another killer.
Chardo, for one, believes all this is very possible.
“I think that may be. I don’t want to speculate on that. But I think that is one reasonable conclusion to draw,” he said.
Unfinished work
The Locks aren’t the only ones with the strong impression that the shopkeeper killer from 1963 was stopped by an arrest and conviction for another crime.
Former Pa. Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman, now 88, was a junior prosecutor in Martin Lock’s DA office when the merchant killings took place. He, too, recalls that the killer in the three homicides from 1963 was prosecuted and incarcerated for another crime or crimes.
“My recollection is that it was resolved in some way,” Zimmerman said. “The police, they had found somebody.”
Alas, neither Zimmerman nor the Locks can remember the name of this criminal nor what charges would have put him away for “a very long time.”
“I can’t give you chapter and verse,” Zimmerman said. “I have a vague recollection of this. I wish I could help you more.”
Zimmerman said his most vivid memory of the case was, “It was Marty’s uncle,” describing the May 1963 killing of Morris Lock inside his North Third Street shoe store.
“It was a celebrated case,” he said.
Zimmerman was also around when Stewart Chandler was gunned down in his Allison Hill convenience store in April 1964 and two teen girls were arrested and charged with homicide in that case.
A year later, Martin Lock was dead, and Zimmerman, all of 29, was appointed district attorney. He inherited the unfinished work of the Chandler case and the messy, ultimately impossible, prosecution of the teen girls.
Yet, Zimmerman says he was “this close” to leaving his $3,600 job as assistant DA to earn more to support his wife, baby son and aging mother.
“I was the youngest guy in the office, the lowest guy on the totem pole,” Zimmerman said, recalling when he approached Martin Lock with his letter of resignation in spring 1965.
Matin talked him out of it, telling Zimmerman he was going into the hospital, then taking a vacation. The DA said he couldn’t afford to lose the young lawyer who was quickly becoming the office’s best litigator.
“I loved being in a courtroom. That’s all I wanted to do,” Zimmerman said of his agreeing to stay on.
“The next think you know, Martin goes into the hospital, and he dies,” Zimmerman added. “He was 47 years old. But he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He always had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.”
Veterans in the DA’s office vied for the open position of DA. Zimmerman said he didn’t even think of putting his hat in the ring until a respected judge told him, “You’ve tried a lot of cases, Roy. You should put your name in.”
He did.
Zimmerman was picking a jury for another trial when the president judge summoned him. That’s when he learned he was the county’s new DA. The announcement was low-key out of respect for the Lock family. To this day, Zimmerman acknowledges that his now-legendary legal career was born from a Lock family tragedy.
“That was a loss. Martin Lock’s passing was a loss to the county of Dauphin. He was a very professional prosecutor,” Zimmerman said. “I thought his strength was in the quiet manner in which he conducted the office. He was not a headline nut.”
According to both Zimmerman and Lock’s sons, the DA went to his grave believing the killer in the first three merchant murders had been caught and convicted of other crimes.
But the fourth shopkeeper killing from 1964 grew into a legal mess LeRoy Zimmerman was forced to clean up.
‘A Long Time Ago’
Stewart Chandler’s murder in April 1964 never really fit with the three merchant murders in 1963. Chandler was killed at night with five shots to the torso. The robbery was so sloppy, the killer didn’t get away with any cash.
Early on, police went after juveniles who frequented the store. A sketch of a young female suspect led to the unusual arrest of two teen girls from York.
Cressie L. Kearse, 15, and Romaine F. Dawson, 17, were jailed for three years on the strength of confessions given without a lawyer present.
Chardo refuses to second-guess the investigation he can only view through the filter of nearly 60 years.
“It did seem a reasonable conclusion that it was a different actor,” he said.
“The modus operandi was different in a number of ways. The time of day. The manner. It did seem different,” Chardo added. “The sophistication wasn’t increasing, it was decreasing. And that fact that he is using the same firearm in the previous three and then changes. It’s not dispositive, but it is a factor.”
Chardo also wouldn’t touch how the case against the two teen girls was handled.
“When there is a sudden change in the law, sometimes law enforcement doesn’t catch up right away,” Chardo said. “This seemed to be right around the time when the law related to giving warnings before taking statements was changing. I think that is why the suppression (of the confession) eventually occurs.”
Database searches by PennLive indicate neither Cressie Kearse nor Romaine Dawson had other brushes with the law after their releases from jail in June 1967. Whether this means they were innocent or the beneficiaries of a legal technicality that negated their confessions, Chardo wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say.
“I don’t want to speculate on that,” he said. “The change in the law was sudden, and police had statements that couldn’t be used.”
The DA who ultimately withdrew the case against the last defendant being held, Romaine Dawson, doesn’t recall any details.
“It’s a long time ago,” Zimmerman said.
PennLive’s attempts to reach Cressie Kearse and Romaine Dawson were unsuccessful. A person matching Kearse’s full name and age died in 2004 in Maryland. A person matching Dawson’s full name and age was reached by PennLive, but she said she was a life-long West Coast resident who had never lived in Pennsylvania.
The last hope to put the final pieces of the shopkeeper serial killer case into place now rested with Chardo’s quest for 60-year-old records and his efforts to reach long-retired Harrisburg police officers.
Holding out hope
To a DA’s chagrin, the paperwork machine that is the American justice system had no record whatsoever of the 60-year-old case that once shocked a city.
“I was sort of surprised by that,” Chardo admitted. “We were looking everywhere, through microfiche. There were no paper records, but we were hoping there would be something in the microfilm and microfiche.”
Chardo’s overtures to some Harrisburg officers from the period, now retired in Florida, turned up little.
“They remembered the case, but no details that were going to bring closure,” Chardo said.
The case doesn’t even merit a full-blown review by Chardo’s cold case team. It just wouldn’t be worth it.
“A case like this, when we’re talking about the early 60s, the likelihood that the offender is even alive is very, very low,” Chardo said. “It’s not something you would ever put resources into. Just checking records is not going to take a lot of resources. It didn’t expend a lot of resources to check this.”
Chardo’s best window into the case has been the dozens of news articles in the Patriot-News and other publications of the time. From these, he sees a very professional investigation, doggedly pursued.
“They certainly wanted to convey that no stone was unturned,” Chardo said of the police chief, DA and detectives. “That was accurate. They were working, and they were working very hard. It looked like a very thorough investigation. And a lot of it was done very, very publicly. There were detailed disclosures.”
Just not the one detail that would finally put a face on the shopkeeper killer from 1963.
Still, Chardo is holding out hope and pointing to PennLive’s five-part special report on the case.
“That is one of the good things about these look-back pieces,” Chardo said. “They trigger someone’s memory. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone knows something.”
So how about it, readers?
Can you help solve the Harrisburg shopkeeper serial killer cold case? Who was the Shopkeeper suspect arrested and jailed for another crime or crimes, likely in the later half of 1963? Please email reporter John Luciew at jluciew@pennlive.com. PennLive will forward all information and tips on this case to DA Chardo, as well as publishing follow-up stories on any new developments.
Ad Choices