NYC lawyer slain in Detroit sparked huge investigation

The middle-aged gentleman took one last look in his hotel room mirror before heading downstairs, and he couldn’t help but smile at his good luck.

The native New Yorker, dressed to the nines in an elegant three-piece suit and pockets flush with cash, was ready to paint Detroit red.

Waiting for him in the lobby was not one, but two winsome redheads half his age — sisters who’d worked as burlesque dancers, no less! — he’d met the prior evening, and the hotsy-totsy siblings had made it abundantly clear they were primed for a rip-snorter of a good time.

His big night didn’t quite turn out as expected.

On the balmy summer morning of June 27, 1935, a group of laborers tending to Rouge Park, Motor City’s massive public greenspace, stumbled upon the body of an older man lying facedown in the grass next to a dirt roadway.

Detectives called to the scene initially pegged it as a gangland rubout. While Detroit was no longer a hotbed of rumrunner violence, there was still enough bad blood left over from Prohibition days to result in a bullet-riddled stiff turning up every now and then.

The victim, who’d been killed at another location and dumped there, had taken a slug to the head and another in the chest at close range — typical signs of an execution-style hit after being taken for a “ride.”

The man’s wallet was gone, but cops found his expensive watch and gold lucky charm inscribed with “Je porte bonheur” — French for “I bring happiness” — so robbery was ruled out as the main motive.

It wasn’t until the following day that officials learned the John Doe lying in the morgue was no run-of-the-mill mobster with a defective talisman.

He was Howard Carter Dickinson, 52 — a widely respected attorney for a Manhattan-based white shoe firm.

He also happened to be the nephew of Charles Evans Hughes, the sitting chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The mysterious murder was naturally front-page news across the nation — and a hot topic in New York City. Family, friends, colleagues and newspaper readers alike were by turns aghast and astounded at how the buttoned-up, Harvard-educated lawyer was shot and dumped in a desolate park in the middle of the night on what was supposed to be a routine business trip.

There was certainly nothing in his private life that would indicate he’d ever end up the victim of foul play. Dickinson, whose father was a reverend, lived in suburban North Tarrytown, N.Y. (now called Sleepy Hollow) with his longtime wife and 20-year-old son. After Harvard Law School, he worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before going into private practice with a partner at a Rockefeller Center office they shared.

With nothing much to go on, Detroit police working with imported New York detectives set about trying to retrace Dickinson’s last hours. The legal case that had brought him 600 miles away from Manhattan by rail — he was on a fact-finding mission to get information on a woman claiming to be the daughter of late lumber baron William H. Yawkey, patriarch of the family that owned the Boston Red Sox — didn’t seem to have anything to do with his death.

No one at Dickinson’s hotel or the local law firm he was working out of could recall seeing anything out of the ordinary with the quiet, unassuming attorney.

But when investigators learned from friends and family that Dickinson was known to carry huge amounts of cash on trips — said to be a few thousand dollars — they revisited the robbery angle.

Dickinson, they now figured, was likely targeted by a local stickup gang who may have seen him flashing a huge wad of bills around town. Cops started searching for a local hood who had bragged he was meeting up with a lawyer — “a guy with plenty of money” — just before Dickinson was killed.

As quickly as that lead fizzled came a huge break. Two days after the murder, a stool pigeon in Fort Wayne, Ind., told police there that the folks responsible were lamming it in a local hotel.

A motorcade of Detroit law enforcement officers promptly drove the 160 miles to Fort Wayne and came home with four suspects in Dickinson’s slaying.

The alleged ringleader and triggerman was William Schweitzer, 24, a small-time grifter who once beat a murder rap and was most recently wanted by Detroit cops for kiting checks.

Yet his accomplices were hardly the brutal henchmen people were expecting. They were instead a trio of comely young women — redheaded sisters Florence and Bobbie Jackson and “party girl” Lillian Winters — who police said helped set a honey trap for Dickinson in a robbery gone bad.

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Schweitzer initially denied killing the lawyer. It was Winters who confessed all to police, leading to the four being formally charged with murder.

After arriving in Detroit, Dickinson was eating dinner alone in the hotel restaurant when he struck up a conversation with the Jackson sisters. A little flirtation and a lot of drinks later, the lawyer ended up in the girls’ hotel room, where they were joined by their “friend” Schweitzer, described in the New York Daily News as a “procurer” — a nice way of saying pimp.

Realizing Dickinson was probably loaded, Schweitzer and the sisters hatched a plan to get the lawyer drunk and take his money. But Dickinson somehow kept his wits about him and left the party unscathed.

The group made plans to meet the following night for more fun and frolics, when they were joined by Winters. After more heavy drinking — Dickinson at one point sipped whiskey out of one of the girls’ shoes — Schweitzer, the three women and the unsuspecting, scholarly lawyer having the time of his life piled into Schweitzer’s car on the pretense they were going club hopping.

Dickinson never made it back alive. After driving into Rouge Park, Schweitzer pulled over, ordered the women out of the car and decided to shoot Dickinson dead after rolling him for his wallet. The women insisted at their trial later that year that they had no idea Schweitzer planned to kill Dickinson to prevent him from going to the cops.

Expecting their haul to be a few thousand dollars, the take was instead $134, or about $3,000 today — a princely sum during the Great Depression but hardly worth the four life sentences Schweitzer and the women received.

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