A retired detective scanned the room.
He recalled that Marguerite Vogenberger was found sitting in a chair, wearing a house dress and apron.
A book by James Michener sat in her lap face down, opened to the last page.
A bullet had pierced the back of her head.
Edward Vogenberger lay nearby on a daybed, dressed in the overalls he always wore. The television was on, tuned to channel 6. His right temple bore a bullet hole.
The Vogenbergers, both 77, had been tortured with a stun gun before they were killed.
Their bodies were found 35 years ago Monday morning. The killings remain unsolved.
On Tuesday, as he stood inside the Langhorne farmhouse, Donald Mather, the retired detective, also recalled this: He knew in his gut who killed them.
"And he's sitting there laughing about it," Mather said.
"He" is Francis Lynn Tomlinson, a distant relative of Marguerite Vogenberger who was never charged with the killings because of a lack of evidence, Mather said. And other law enforcement discounted him as a suspect.
Tomlinson, a convicted killer who broke out of prison three times, was on the lam - traveling with another prison escapee - when the Vogenbergers were murdered.
The killings shattered the serene setting of a farm that anchored a historic borough. And the case took detectives to Texas, California and a federal prison in Georgia, where Mather sat down with Tomlinson.
A FARMER AND A KILLER
The Vogenbergers owned a seven-acre farm on Green Street where it meets Marshall Avenue. Marguerite's family had owned the farm since at least 1840, when the front portion of their brick farmhouse was built. The home was originally of clapboard construction. The bricks were added sometime during the 1920s, said longtime Langhorne resident Larry Zetterberg.
The Vogenbergers grew vegetables, including broccoli and tomatoes and cabbages, selling them to folks in the area - including Mather. They also sold milk, embossing their bottles with a large "V" and the Vogenberger name.
A killer grew up a few blocks away. Tomlinson, the son of Marguerite's first cousin, lived on Station Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s.
A troubled youth, Tomlinson once tried to get a job on his relative's farm. But Edward Vogenberger "ran him off the property," Thelma Hudson, a Vogenberger neighbor, told the paper in 1989.
At age 22, Tomlinson was an unemployed handyman living in Bristol. He raped a widow named Lucy Husvar, bludgeoning her to death and setting her body on fire in a Bristol Township basement.
He smiled after leaving his preliminary hearing for that crime.
Awaiting trial, he escaped Bucks County prison - walking past a rookie guard - only to be caught two days later. He was sentenced to life in prison for the murder.
In 1973, Tomlinson scaled a 13-foot wall at a state prison in Dallas, Pa. He was caught within 30 hours.
In 1975, he scaled a 30-foot wall at Montgomery County's Graterford prison. Climbing with him was John Dickel, 50, a convicted armed robber from Philadelphia.
They remained outside the prison walls for nine months - and were spotted numerous times in the Levittown area. One sighting was on March 11, the day before the Vogenbergers were believed to be murdered.
THE DISCOVERY
Mather said he discovered the slain couple while investigating a drug case while a cop for Middletown, which patrolled Langhorne at the time. Some prescription diet pills turned up at Middletown's police station - reportedly found in a garage near the Oxford Valley Mall.
He searched around the mall before thinking someone could've hidden the drugs on the farm.
Mather pulled in, his car tripping an air bell placed across the driveway, the kind once used by gas stations.
The sound had always prompted Edward Vogenberger to meet visitors outside, Mather said. But not that day.
The farmhouse's back doors were wide open. Mather knocked. No one came.
"I'm walking back to the car, and I walked past a window," Mather said. "And I saw her sitting in a rocking chair. I looked a little bit closer, and I saw dried blood on her nose. I knew something was wrong."
Their bodies were in a sitting room. Inside, Mather and a patrolman saw two wires connected to the front of Marguerite's clothing.
Edward Vogenberger had two holes in the back of his shirt, presumably from the barbs of the stun gun.
A MOTIVE
The second floor was ransacked. Shoe boxes in the attic were dumped on the floor, Mather said.
Mather became the lead detective on the case, and he took it with him when he joined the county detectives two years later.
The cops assumed right away the motive was robbery - the stun gun being a torture device to extract information.
It's unclear what - if anything - was taken. The cops didn't know what the Vogenbergers had.
A bag full of quarters, dimes and nickels worth hundreds of dollars was left behind by the killers, Mather said. There also was hidden cash that they didn't find.
A brother of Edward Vogenberger arrived from California. He said he had once worked on the farm, and his brother socked away his pay for him in some rafters.
His search found nothing.
Detectives visited a psychic in the state of Delaware they occasionally hired. Her fee was a steak dinner if she helped solve a crime, Mather said.
Money was on that farm, she told them. It was hidden somewhere near an electrical socket.
The cops returned to an outbuilding the brother had searched. A detective felt around behind an outlet until he pulled out a tin container the size of a brick, Mather said. Inside was a stack of $20 bills. The detective reached back and found another container with $10 bills. They found more than $4,000.
A BOOT PRINT
Tomlinson and Dickel became suspects within days, their "wanted" photos running in newspapers.
Mather listed several reasons why he believed - then and now - they killed the couple.
The cops learned through Vogenberger's relatives that - years before - Tomlinson had burglarized the farmhouse, stealing money from a safe. But, Mather said, the couple didn't want to report it.
Another piece of evidence was a sole print from a Sears Roebuck work boot found in the ransacked attic. Mather said he learned that Tomlinson's partner, Dickel, bought all his clothing and shoes from Sears.
Then there were the guns. Edward Vogenberger was shot with a .38 caliber, Marguerite a .32.
Two guns likely meant two killers, Mather said.
Several weeks after the murders, a man gazed over the Maple Avenue bridge spanning the Neshaminy Creek, a couple of miles from the farm. His search for trout found a .38 caliber revolver.
Its cylinder had five rounds and one spent shell. The bullet that killed Edward Vogenberger was recovered - but it was too damaged to match the gun's firing pin, Mather said.
The cops traced the gun's ownership to Cary, N.C., which is just outside Raleigh. Police there said the .38 had been stolen during a rash of Christmas-time burglaries in the same area. A .32 also had been stolen from a nearby house.
THE K&A GANG
The North Carolina cops believed an East Coast burglary ring was responsible for the burglaries. Based in the Kensington section of Philadelphia near Allegheny Avenue, they were called the K&A gang.
Its exploits were detailed in Allen Hornblum's 2006 book "Confessions of a second story man: Junior Kripplebauer and the K&A Gang."
Kripplebauer's car was spotted outside a North Carolina motel, Mather said.
"We said, yeah, we know Junior," Mather said he told the North Carolina cops. "He does burglaries."
Tomlinson and Dickel had connections to the K&A gang, Mather said. And when Kripplebauer got caught for a burglary in Houston, Texas, Mather and his partner John Mullen flew down.
"Junior admitted to doing North Carolina," Mather said. "But he said he didn't deal the guns. Another guy did."
The detectives talked to more guys in K&A. But they couldn't pin the guns to Tomlinson and Dickel.
The detectives learned who reportedly drove the duo to California right after the murders because their photos were all over the papers, Mather said.
So, the detectives flew to California.
"We took (one of the guys) to dinner to read him Kripplebauer's interview," Mather said. "He said he had to go to the bathroom and ran out the door."
Mather believed another clue connected Tomlinson to K&A.
A couple of weeks after the murders, a woman called one of Bucks County's police radio room operators. The woman asked about the Vogenberger murders. Were watches and bonds taken? Did one of the killers have a nickname?
The operator didn't get the woman's name and couldn't connect her to a detective at the time, Mather said. But she made the phone call from a Kensington pay phone.
"She knew whoever did it," Mather said. "She had to know something, especially if he had a nickname."
Tomlinson was called "Gator" because he had a skin condition that looked like hives or psoriasis, Mather said.
California police caught Tomlinson and Dickel in July after they robbed a bank and armored car in Anaheim.
The case went federal, superseding the duo's charges and state prison sentences in Pennsylvania.
Still, when Mather and his partner got the chance, they flew to a federal prison in Atlanta and sat down with Tomlinson.
"We introduced ourselves, and he says how's your sister doing?" Mather said. "I said she's doing well. They went to Neshaminy together."
Tomlinson admitted nothing, Mather said.
FRUSTRATION
Mather remains frustrated, believing still that the two men did it: "They were running together - and doing holdups together. They needed money. They were connected to Kripplebauer and his gang through a mutual party. Tomlinson knew the Vogenbergers. And he knew they had money because he had stolen from their safe before."
Not everyone shared Mather's theory.
In April 1976, Tomlinson and Dickel were no longer considered suspects in the Vogenberger murders, according to Middletown's police chief at the time. Fingerprints taken from the scene didn't match.
Howard Shook, then chief, told the newspaper in 1976: "As far as this department is concerned, (Tomlinson and Dickel) are now 99 and 44/100s percent eliminated" as suspects.
Retired Lt. James Duncan told the newspaper in 1989 that he didn't believe Tomlinson was a suspect, either. He cast his suspicions on members of the K&A gang, he told the paper then.
Tomlinson served his time in federal prison for the California heist. He is now in Graterford, serving out his life sentence for the 1966 murder in Bristol Township. He is 66 years old.
Tomlinson did not respond to a letter from the newspaper asking him if he killed the Vogenbergers. He denied killing them after his capture in 1976.
The newspaper was unsuccessful in finding out what happened to Dickel. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan Bensinger said he was paroled in 1991 from the state prison system. She said the department has no other information on him, other than he had served time for robbery.
SERENITY
The Vogenbergers were buried in the Middletown Friends Burying Ground not far from their home.
A vegetable farmer bought their farm, owning it through the 1980s. But in 1989, community members raised enough money, with the help of state grants, to preserve the property, which is now owned by the borough.
Each year, about 100 people now tend plots at the farm's community garden. Ten artist studios - mainly for painting and quilting - fill up some of the out buildings.
Few people - if any - sense the tragedy that occurred on the farm, said Carol Zetterberg, who helped found Langhorne Open Space Inc., which preserved the property.
"They get the most serene sense here," she said of the gardeners and artists, one of whom paints Marguerite into her paintings.
"I think the Vogenbergers would love to know that," Zetterberg said. "And I think they do."
Comment from the original post: Before "gator" went to jail for murder, he was called Frannie, which is how I new him. Right before he killed the woman in Bristol, I ran into him at the "breakaway pool hall in Penndel. I had just got home from Marine corps bootcamp and school.I was 19 at the time and Frannie was 21. We went drinking, winding up drunk, and trying to get more at Dom'S cafe in Bristol Terrace on a Saturday nite. Franny told me he just got married, he said he " Knocked up a 16 year old and she was cutting him off sexually. So he said the 46 year old woman next door was more then willing, so he was happy.
ReplyDeleteWhen I got home the next time, I was reading in the courier about his trial for murder.
I did a report in criminal justice at "BCCC" on Franny in 1972. I do not defend any of his actions, but I do take a closer look at how the system let him down. He had mental disorders that were completely overlooked and left to get worse and worse.
Franny was a pyromaniac ( a mental problem), was thrown off of Langhorne fire company for setting fires. He had Psoriasis so bad his arms would just start to bleed ( a nervous disorder) , He was a manic depressant, a chain smoker and had a guilt complex. Who knows where he would have wound up had these disorders been taken care of. On top of this, and again I do not condone his actions, the woman he murdered reputation was not admitted in court. She was as bad as he was, she was 46 and he was 22. she cut him off and he flipped out. He hit her in the head with his hammer ( in a rage) threw her down the cellar and set her on fire (pyro). I have little doubt that Franny had something to do with his aunts death, but if I remember correctly, he had a cellmate who got out of jail before Franny did and he had all the info he needed on Frannys aunt and uncle.
The womans brother committed suicide a few years later, threw himself off a bridge.It was not part of the trial but had the womans background been looked at a little closer it may have proven why he went into a rage.certainly not that she deserved to die, but since he never got help for his problems and she didn't know about his problems, she actual sent him over the edge.
My grandmother rented from Lynn's father for years and as I grew up I was told many stories about him. My mother was a friend of his and she told me that he use to babysit me as a child. That was until she caught him trying to set my dress on fire. He called me Dolly. I've often wondered about him. His father was a miserable old man who bossed my grandmother something silly. I have no doubt that he hid things in the house she was renting. She often thought he would hide there too. Something was very strange with them.
ReplyDeleteEye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Once a looser, always a looser. He can rot in jail for life. No brother of the woman that he brutally murdered in 1966 ever committed suicide. Get your facts right!!!!
ReplyDelete