Murder on Mosholu

The body of a good-looking red-headed woman was found sprawled in a clump of bushes by the side of Mosholu Avenue in New York's Van Cortlandt Park, early one morning last week. It was identified as Benita Franklin Bischoff, alias Vivian Gordon, a racketeering lady of light virtue. She had been strangled to death with a clothesline. With the discovery of her corpse, the city's fetid judiciary investigation, hitherto concerned with Extortion, Bribery and Corruption, now had to reckon with Murder.

Three weeks before her death Mrs. Bischoff had written Counsel Isidor Jacob Kresel--who was relieved as prosecutor for the Seabury investigation when indicted in the Bank of U. S. failure proceedings (TIME, Feb. 2)--that she had "some information in connection with a 'frameup' by a police .officer and others which . . . will be of great aid to your committee." Five days before her demise she communicated the nature of her information to Irving Ben Cooper, Inquisitor Kresel's successor. She told him that she was a painter. Police investigation later revealed that her comfortable income came from "no legal sources." that she had an impressive police record for prostitution and blackmail. To Counsel Cooper, however, she insisted that her one-time husband and a city detective (who later was found to be Andrew B. McLaughlin, already on trial for extortion) had concocted evidence in 1923 which sent her to Bedford reformatory, lost her the custody of her child. Counsel Cooper advised her to secure further corroborative evidence, return with it. She never came back.

A number of people might have wanted to kill Mrs. Bischoff: Shortly before her death she wrote to her husband that she was about to expose him and "make it hot for McLaughlin." On the day of her death, McLaughlin was in Bermuda. Her husband, John E. C. Bischoff, business manager of the Federal reformatory at Lorton, Va., was cleared of complicity in the crime. The motive of robbery suggested itself, for a ring and fur coat worth $5,000 which she had been wearing were missing. Immediate police attention was directed, however, toward one Sam ("Chowderhead") Cohen, onetime burglar, and John A. Radeloff, the dead woman's Brooklyn attorney. These two were held in $50,000 bail following a disclosure in her diary: "I fear only one man and he is Radeloff . . . who, if he wanted, could get Cohen and a couple of his henchmen to do away with me."

On the heels of the Bischoff murder came threatening letters to Referee Samuel Seabury, prime mover in the judiciary inquiry. Three members of his staff and other prospective witnesses were also threatened. Referee Seabury decided to conduct his own investigation of the killing when Counsel Cooper received a communication written on a Western Union blank signed "Dr. X."

Yeast. Meantime the investigation of the judicial conduct of Magistrate Jean

Hortense Norris, New York's first woman judge (TIME, Feb. 28), continued. In clipped, pseudo-British accents she tried to defend herself from the nips of Harland B. Tibbetts, one of the Seabury legal terriers. In one instance a Methodist Deaconess had brought a 20-year-old Greenwich Village girl art student into court, accused her of living with a man. By Judge Norris' order and without recourse, the artist was lodged in a home for wayward girls within two hours of her arrest. Throughout the recital of her alleged irregularities Magistrate Norris preserved a frigid calm, gave as good as she received. But yeast proved her undoing.

Counsel Tibbetts exhibited copies of a magazine in which Magistrate Norris, clad in her judicial robes, urged readers to eat Fleischmann's yeast. She stated that yeast had cured her of insomnia and that- tired-feeling. Queried as to whether she had been actuated by a desire "to carry this message to the world," or by the $1,000 fee she was given for the testimonial, Judge Norris blushed vividly, lost her poise. "As I think of it now," she confessed, "it was unethical and bad form."

The Manhattan Press growled for her resignation.

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