From Omaha In The Time of Saints:
TWO GUYS IN THE WRONG NEIGHBORHOOD
1961
Westgate was a
quiet and safe neighborhood protected by the reputation of its inhabitants.
There was rarely any crime reported among the rows of middle class homes with
green lawns and newly planted trees. Jimmy Screws had moved from his downtown
apartment and bought a house on Joseph Street. He lived alone in a three bed
room house with an attached garage. The house was unassuming and plain. He paid
the neighborhood kids to mow his lawn in the summer and to shovel the snow off
the walk and driveway in the winter. Jimmy liked living in the suburbs. He especially looked forward to the week end
barbeques in the backyards of his wise guy neighbors.
In the summer
of ‘61 Omaha was plagued by a rash of unsolved abductions and rapes. Young
women reported to police of being abducted and raped by two men driving a dark
sedan claiming to be Omaha police detectives. The police had little to go on
other than the description of two middle-aged white males driving a Ford or
Chevy sedan. Most the rapes had occurred in South Omaha, near the packing
houses in the stockyards district. The packing houses operated 24 hours with
three shifts. Second shift workers would
end their shift at 11:30 P.M. Many young, single women would leave the well-lit
parking lot and head home on the dark streets or onto the highway to other
areas of the city farther away.
The two rapists
were a couple of scum bags who had done prison time for a string of highway
stickups. They'd done their stretch and were back on the street. The two failed stickup men would dress in
cheap suits and drive their dark blue Ford Galaxy to other parts of the city to
find their prey. They would stake out parking lots around the packing houses or
restaurants where women leaving their night jobs could be easily spotted and
followed. The two scum bag rapists would pull behind a woman's car, put a
magnetic red flashing light, which plugged into their Ford's cigarette lighter,
on the roof of their car and pull the woman's car over. From there the woman
would be ordered out of her car and the abduction would occur with the rape
taking place several blocks away in the back seat of the scum bag's Ford.
One hot summer
night, the two rapists scoped out the parking lot of Westgate Plaza. They
watched a young woman leaving the one bar in the shopping center and walk to
her white Corvair. She pulled out of the plaza parking lot and drove into the
quiet streets of Westgate. The rapists
followed.
The young woman
drove onto Joseph Street with the intention of driving up the hill to 79th
Street. Just as she turned on to Joseph
Street, a dark sedan pulled in behind her with a red light flashing on its
roof. She pulled the white Corvair over to the curb. She stopped short of a
street light. The sedan with the flashing red light stopped behind her idling
car. The driver got out of the dark sedan and approached the young woman’s car.
He knocked on the Corvair's driver’s side window.
Inside the
darkened houses on Joseph Street, one resident was still awake and sitting at
his kitchen table. Jimmy Screws was going over the week's book making receipts
from the illegal sports gambling wire the mob ran in Omaha. He probably would
not have been aware of the activity across the street from his house had it not
been for the red flashing light on the roof of a dark sedan. The red flashing
light irritated him. He cursed to himself and wandered what dumb-ass cop was in
his neighborhood.
Jimmy flicked
the ashes off his cigar smoldering in an ash tray and stuck the heater in
between his lips, stuffed a .45 caliber automatic pistol in the back of his
pants under the belt, and stepped outside into the darkness. He knew
immediately the man standing in the street talking to the young woman in the
car wasn't a cop. Cops always had radios on, Omaha cops didn't drive Ford
Galaxies. Omaha detectives drove Plymouth sedans. The mob had brokered the deal
for the Omaha PD with the local Plymouth dealer on the unmarked sedans the
detectives drove. Jimmy made this guy and the other guy still in the sedan as
the rapists that had been in the news. He could hear the man standing next to
the white Corvair ordering the young woman out of her car. She was refusing.
Jimmy approached the scene from the darkness of his front yard.
“Stay in the car, honey”, Jimmy said as he walked up
behind the rapist standing next to the young woman's Corvair. Jimmy could see
the young woman was terrified. The fear in her eyes pleaded to Jimmy for help
without her uttering a word.
“Who the fuck are you?” the startled man asked. He turned
to face the big man who had appeared out of the darkness. Jimmy ignored the
man.
“Honey, go ahead and drive home. This guy isn't a cop”,
Jimmy said in a calm voice.
“Stay right there lady. Don't move that car!” the rapist
commanded the young woman. She was obviously scared and confused. Jimmy pulled the .45 out of his waist band
and motioned with it to the young woman.
“Go ahead honey, get the fuck out of here. I'll take care
of this,” Jimmy said as if he was handling a neighborhood squabble between two
kids. The young woman put the Corvair in gear and drove up Joseph Street and
turned onto 79th Street.
“Listen mister, you better go back inside. You're
interfering with official police business”, the man standing outside the Ford
cautioned Jimmy. Jimmy could see the man still sitting in the passenger seat
was visibly upset and scared.
“That a fact?
You're a cop”, Jimmy said as he walked around to the passenger side of
the Ford. The guy in the passenger seat of the Ford tried to hide his face from
Jimmy's view.
“What about this guy?
Is he a cop too?” Jimmy asked the man standing in the street.
“Yes. He's a
detective”, the shaken man said in a trembling voice.
Jimmy looked
into the Ford then pointed the .45 at the man's head, and fired the pistol
through the closed window of the car. The man's head in the passenger seat
exploded, blowing his brains all over the windshield and driver's window of the
Ford.
The man
standing in the street started sobbing, his knees giving out as he struggled to
remain standing.
“You still think that guy's a cop?” Jimmy asked the
trembling man.
Jimmy took the
heater out of his mouth and blew on the lit end. Cigar ashes flew up into the
dark and floated in the summer breeze. Jimmy pointed the .45 at the sobbing man
and fired a round into the man's face. The man was knocked backwards through
the dark and landed on his back on the concrete. His head made a sickly thud as
it hit the pavement. Other wise guys appeared out of the dark, some in their
bathrobes, carrying guns. They remained silent, waiting for Jimmy's orders.
Jimmy replaced the cigar between his lips and looked at the dead man lying on
the concrete. Most of the man's face was a dark, bloody crater.
“Some of you guys want to clean this mess up?” Jimmy asked
to no one in particular.
“Yeah, Jimmy. We'll
take care of it”, a voice answered from the darkness.
“I gotta' get back to the book”, Jimmy said as he walked
back to his dark house.
Ten minutes later there was no evidence that two men had been gunned down on Joseph Street. Any glass, blood or bits of skull and brains were gone. The street was washed clean. The bodies of the rapists and their Ford Galaxy simply disappeared. The rash of unsolved rapes in the summer of 1961 ended.
