A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

club where the bartender, who was supposedly an eyewitness to Brad’s stabbing, worked and learned that he had suddenly taken a trip East. But other witnesses were in town and the detectives were soon flooded with informants. On February 24, one called to give them the name of Sonny Jimson*, who was claiming he had seen the stabbing. Fonis and Sanford found Sonny, a tall, lean, transvestite with bright orange hair. He told them he’d seen the killer. “It was ‘Large Tillie’ Schwenk*,” he said firmly.
    Large Tilly, he said, worked as a transvestite hooker and hung around a waterfront tavern. However, Sonny was not as forthcoming when Fonis and Sanford arranged for him to take a polygraph examination. He looked very nervous and admitted he’d made up the whole thing. “I told my sugar daddy that I was there because I was really someplace I shouldn’t have been and I was afraid he’d find out I cheated on him.”
    Just on the off chance that Sonny had been telling the truth the first time around, Sanford and Fonis went to the Seashell Tavern and asked for “Large Tillie.” The bartender said he’d never heard of a “Large Tillie” or of Sonny Jimson. He did identify the mug of Emerson as a transvestite he knew as Jackie, and he promised to call them if he saw Emerson again.
    DePalmo interviewed the dishwasher of the Take 5 who had been on duty when the attack took place. He had observed “Jackie” and Brad Bass, and recalled that they had been friendly until they got out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Then a scuffle had started. “It was the ‘woman’ who was kicking and punching,” the dishwasher said. “The tall guy in the brown shirt was just trying to avoid her blows—but he wasn’t fighting back.
    “Finally, he grabbed at ‘her’ to stop her, I guess, and her wig got torn off.”
    The “woman” had run into the Take 5, screaming she was going to get a knife. When she came out empty-handed, a car had driven around the corner, evidently full of people she knew. She had yelled that she needed a knife and apparently someone in the car had handed one to her. “I didn’t see her stab him,” the witness said, “I looked away for just a second. When I looked back, the guy was looking down at himself and then he held out his hands toward the “woman” as if he was begging her to stop . . .”
    While the witness watched, the person in the green pantsuit had hopped into the car and sped off. Everything had happened so fast. The young man had collapsed to the sidewalk and gone into convulsions, but the witness didn’t know that Brad Bass had been stabbed. Something was wrong with him, so he had called to Ike Stone to get an aid car.
    He was certain of one thing, however. The person the victim was fighting with wasn’t a woman; he was a male in drag. The dishwasher was positive he would recognize him if he saw him again. The man who’d stabbed Bass had had a distinctive broken tooth. When he saw that, he would know.
    It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. Brad Bass had thought that Jackie Emerson was a woman when she came up to his booth. In the dim lights of the restaurant, Jackie had looked very feminine. But in the bright street lights at the corner of Pike and 6th, he would have realized that Jackie was a male and backed away. Jackie Emerson had become enraged and started kicking and beating Brad. And Brad could not bring himself to strike a “lady,” even when he knew she wasn’t a female. He’d backed away and just stood there until Jackie got too rough. Finally, he pushed at “her” and dislodged her wig.
    But this had only served to make Emerson more furious, and he’d borrowed a knife from the passing car when he couldn’t get one inside. No more than two or three minutes had passed during the confrontation, but Brad Bass had been terribly wounded by one snakelike thrust of a filleting knife. Because there had been no blood loss, precious time was lost—time that might have saved Brad’s life.
    On February 25, the detectives were handed the name of another eyewitness to the assault. She was a twenty-year- old girl who made a rather precarious living by her wits. Her nickname was “Chi-Chi,” but her real name was Barbara Palliser*. She reportedly worked as a cocktail waitress. Fonis and Sanford went to the club where she worked only to find that “Chi-Chi” had not shown up for work in three weeks. The manager gave them her last