George Edgerly has had more brushes with greatness than most career criminals. In 1960, with the help of F. Lee Bailey, Edgerly beat a murder rap and years later he was prosecuted by John Kerry for the 1975 rape of a Massachusetts prostitute.
F. Lee Bailey, of course, is perhaps one of America’s best known defense attorneys with clients like O.J. Simpson and Patty Hearst, among many others. John Kerry is the former senator from Massachusetts and 2004 Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States. As of 2014 he is the Secretary of State of the United States, which disproves the belief that there are no second acts in America.
Bailey and Kerry both pulled a victory out of what appeared to be sure defeat, and in each case their performances helped thrust them into the limelight.
But this isn’t a story about Bailey or Kerry. It is the sordid tale of murder and mayhem that seemed to follow George Edgerly throughout his life.
Act I: The Murder of Elizabeth Edgerly
The story begins in December 1959, when Edgerly’s 25-year-old wife, Elizabeth disappeared after a confrontation with her husband, in Lowell, Mass., across the river from their home in Dracut. The couple had had a stormy relationship and Edgerly reportedly had a wicked temper. On more than one occasion, Elizabeth was seen with bruises and cuts that she blamed on her husband, and several witnesses testified at his 1960 murder trial that Edgerly and Elizabeth had been fighting the day she disappeared.
Elizabeth’s disappearance on December 27, 1959, was the climax of an escalating monthlong fight between the husband and wife that began on Thanksgiving Day when several people heard Edgerly tell his wife, “I’ll kill you yet” when she asked him to go out and buy a loaf of bread. Edgerly was irked because his brother-in-law and his wife were sharing Thanksgiving dinner despite the fact that Edgerly was unemployed at the time.
Two weeks before Elizabeth vanished, Edgerly’s temper once again raised its head when Elizabeth, her brother, and another man were enjoying a few drinks at the Tremont Cafe. Edgerly appeared and tried to pull Elizabeth out of the booth. Elizabeth’s brother, Francis Hawkins, accompanied his sister out to Edgerly’s car and when Edgerly emerged from the tavern, he attempted to throttle Hawkins. The unidentified friend happened to have a handgun and Edgerly reportedly tried to grab it from him.
“He would have killed the three of us,” Hawkins said on the stand.
On December 27, Hawkins, Elizabeth, and Edgerly were drinking together at the Three Pines Restaurant in Middleton, where they ate dinner. The trio then headed to an Allenhurst restaurant where they continued to drink. Hawkins was upset that his wife had become pregnant by another man, and the trio was discussing his options. After about three hours of drinking, the group left and headed back toward Dracut. Both Hawkins and the barmaid said that Elizabeth was so intoxicated when she left the bar that she had to be physically helped to the car. Hawkins said she was unconscious when Edgerly dropped him off at around 11:15 p.m.
No one ever saw Elizabeth Edgerly alive again.
Hawkins and Edgerly met up again around 4:30 a.m., and Hawkins noted that his brother-in-law had changed clothes. Hawkins asked about his sister and Edgerly told him she had “taken off” at the corner of Pawtucket and School streets in Lowell.
“Betty won’t be home tonight,” Edgerly told his brother-in-law.
When Hawkins saw Edgerly in the early morning hours of December 28, he said Edgerly was holding his right hand inside his coat and kept it there until he went into a shed behind his home where he remained for three or four minutes.
Edgerly did not report his wife missing because, according to him, it wasn’t unusual for her to disappear for days at a time. After Elizabeth’s mother contacted police, Edgerly told them that he had stopped to aid a motorist stuck in the snow at the intersection of Pawtucket and School and when he returned she had vanished.
Edgerly became a suspect in his wife’s disappearance when he offered differing accounts of his actions after Elizabeth vanished and contradicted himself about what he was wearing that night.
However, without a body, no outward signs of foul play, and a woman who was known to spend days away from home, the police had no case against him.
Over the next several months Edgerly was repeatedly questioned by police and according to testimony at his murder trial, took more than 20 lie detector tests. It was not until April 11, 1960 that police were able to get the results they were seeking.
“Now we have what we want,” Lieutenant George Harnois of the District Attorney’s office told Edgerly after that final test. “I think you killed her.”
Edgerly was nonplussed.
“You have the right to your own opinion,” he replied.
Edgerly had been brought into headquarters for questioning that day because two young boys had found a dismembered female torso in a Dracut brook. The head, arms, and legs were missing, but police surmised that it belonged to Elzabeth.
The autopsy revealed that the woman had been slain just a couple of hours after she had eaten, and that the killer had taken great pains to hide the woman’s identity. The killer had used a hacksaw to dismember the corpse and then taken a knife to remove signs of a goiter.
A search of Edgerly’s shed revealed a package of 12 hacksaw blades with four missing. Police could not find a hacksaw and Edgerly, an automobile mechanic, said he had lost his about a year before.
Police also found evidence of bloody clothes in the trunk of Edgerly’s car, which he explained away as the result of an assault on his wife before Christmas, when she was absent for a few days.
About a week after the torso was found, a search of the area revealed the legs that belonged with the torso. Missing, however, was one foot that was malformed because of a previous injury.
Edgerly went on trial in February 1960, and Bailey joined the defense team about halfway through the 17-day affair.
“George was an interesting guy, pretty unflappable. He was screwing both his mother-in-law and his wife’s sisters. That was evidence in the trial,” Bailey told Jeffrey Toobin in a 2004 New Yorker article on John Kerry. “He was sitting in an iron cage in the middle of the courtroom, which is where defendants used to have to sit in those days.”
Bailey was called in to refute the polygraph testimony, and his masterful cross-examination and summing up were credited by many with helping Edgerly win an acquittal.
“This is a case of circumstantial evidence,” Bailey told jurors. “Nobody saw Edgerly murder his wife and no one so testified. Circumstantial evidence is like a chain and no chain is stronger than its weakest link.”
For their part, the prosecutors admitted that Hawkins was a convicted criminal who hated his brother-in-law, but that the jurors should not hold that against him. The state acknowledged that the case was circumstantial, but explained that this was to be expected.
“When a man intends to kill his wife, he does not invite the same people to the murder that he invited to the wedding,” prosecutor Frank Monarski told jurors.
After 10 hours, the jury decided that the state had not overcome the burden of proof and Edgerly was freed.
Act II: Motorgate
On February 1, 1974, a Beverly, Mass. resident spotted something washed up on the shore of the Danvers River. Investigating, he realized it was a corpse and police were summoned. What began as a routine murder investigation would quietly become a national scandal involving the country’s largest automobile manufacturer. Several people would go to jail for fraud and theft, and George Edgerly would end up on trial for murder once again.
The victim, Francis Smith, was a Boston resident who was employed as a district service representative for General Motors’s Chevrolet Division. Police quickly recreated his last day alive, finding that he had spent his workday at the automobile dealership owned by R. Gordon Butler in Lowell. The last known people to see him that day were a Butler Chevy service department employee, James Dolson, and his boss, George Edgerly. It was Smith’s job to monitor Butler’s warranty repair jobs. The large dealership was expected to perform about $30,000 in monthly warranty work, but Butler was doing nearly twice that.
While police in Middlesex County looked at the criminal side of things, auditors with General Motors began to examine the company’s warranty program for possible fraud. The company would eventually uncover hundreds of thousands of dollars in padded warranty repair bills and large-scale violations of the company’s ethics policy that forbids employees from accepting anything other than “nominal” gifts from dealerships. General Motors would maintain a tight lid on the extent of the problem, but after a 15-month internal investigation, about 36 employees in the company’s Northeast offices were summarily terminated for “violating company policies.”
About the same time that the employees were terminated, Butler, Edgerly, and the dealership’s general manager were indicted by a Boston grand jury for theft and fraud.
Under the direction of the that trio, repairmen for the dealership were submitting false claims to General Motors for warranty work. Customers would bring in their cars for simple repairs — which the mechanics would do — but GM was billed for extensive repair jobs like engine rebuilds and transmission work. GM not only paid for the repairs that were never done, but would also send replacement parts that were subsequently sold to other customers.
When the press got wind of the story in those post-Watergate years, the scandal was quickly dubbed “Motorgate.”
In 1976, Edgerly was sentenced to three to five years in prison. Butler and his general manager, Theodore Kemos, were given two years in prison and fined $2,500 each.
For Edgerly, however, the conviction in that case was small potatoes. A month after Smith’s body was found, Edgerly had been indicted for his murder.
Interlude: The Edgerly Rape Case
John Kerry was beginning his public service career as an assistant district attorney when he was tapped to serve as prosecutor in Edgerly’s 1977 rape case. It was not a very strong case against Edgerly, despite the witnesses to the assault.
The rape began on January 1, 1975 when Edgerly and three other men picked up the young woman, a prostitute, at a Merrimack Street bar in Lowell and drove the woman to a wooded area where they forced her to perform oral sex. She also claimed that Edgerly attempted to rape her, “but was unable to complete the act.” After the assault, the men drove their victim back to the bar.
“Kerry told me this Edgerly was a lucky guy. This could be a snakebit case. It was not a slam dunk,” one of Kerry’s co-workers told Toobin in the New Yorker article. “Nobody was going to try that case if you were looking just to put a notch in your belt.”
Edgerly held the upper hand in the case, Kerry acknowledged.
“It was an improbable kind of case,” Kerry told Toobin. “The victim was very suspect because of her life style and background. The bottom line was that she did not consent, the bottom line was that she had been raped.”
Raped or not, the victim had not helped her own case by trying to extort money from Edgerly to make the case go away. She admitted on the stand that she was willing to accept money from Edgerly, but said it was simply a ruse to get him to admit his guilt.
The other men in the car — each of whom admitted he had lied in previous statements to investigators — testified that Edgerly, 49, had sexually assaulted the woman and the jury convicted him of rape. For the first time in his life, Edgerly was given serious jail time: 18-to-30 years.
Act III: The Murder of Frank Smith
The break in the Smith murder case came long before investigators in the Motorgate fraud case wrapped up their probe — and before Edgerly faced off with John Kerry.
A few weeks after Smith’s body turned up in the marsh along the Danvers River, police were called to the local hospital where James Dolson — the Butler Chevy employee who spent the last day with Edgerly and Smith — was lying near death from a stab wound. He wanted to talk to authorities.
Dolson told police that he had witnessed Edgerly shoot Smith and dump his body in the Danvers River after a 12-hour booze fest. Over the course of their liquid lunch that stretched late into the night, Edgerly was reportedly waving a pistol around and at one point asked Smith “if he wanted to go for a ride.”
Dolson found his tongue after Edgerly lured him to a remote cabin and stabbed him. Another man, Jackie Shanahan, was also present that day and turned state’s evidence to avoid being charged himself.
Edgerly, already serving time for his role in Motorgate and for rape, was charged with assault against Dolson. At trial, he took the stand and said Shanahan stabbed Dolson because of some feud between the two men. Shanahan denied this, but Edgerly was acquitted.
In 1978, Edgerly went on trial for Smith’s murder. The evidence against him was once again circumstantial, but with Dolson’s admission of seeing Edgerly shoot Smith — a man he had reason to want dead — this time it was Edgerly who faced an uphill battle to establish his innocence.
At trial, the prosecution introduced witnesses who would testify that Edgerly asked them for a gun, saying there was someone “he wanted to frighten,” and Shanahan, who admitted getting the pistol for his friend.
Shanahan also testified that Edgerly wanted to get rid of Dolson “because he saw him kill someone.”
Edgerly took the stand in his own defense and blamed the killing on his old boss, Gordon Butler.
Butler, Edgerly claimed, was involved in drug smuggling. On one trip to Mexico, Edgerly found that Dolson was carrying two aerosol bottles filled with drugs for Butler. Edgerly told the jury that he dumped out the drugs in an airport bathroom.
Butler and his Motorgate co-conspirator, Ted Kemos, began pressuring Edgerly for the drugs, claiming that they were connected with the Boston Mob. Panicking, Edgerly told Kemos that Smith had taken the drugs.
It was the Mob that killed Smith, he said.
The jury did not believe him, and in 1978, Edgerly was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Edgerly, now an extremely old man, is in custody at the Massachusetts Department of Corrections Shirley Institution.
Notes
Gribben, Mark. “Murder in Three Acts.” MalfactorsRegister.com. (n.d.) Retrieved 22 September 2014 from http://malefactorsregister.com/wp/?p=195 ↩
I, MICHAEL J. FLYNN, swear under the pains and penalties of perjury under the laws of Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Florida and the United States, that the statements made in this affidavit are true.
1) On Monday, July 23, 1984, I received a telephone call from a reporter from the Boston Globe who advised me that affidavits were being filed on that date in the case of Miller v. Flanagan, Los Angeles Federal District Court, relating to claims by an individual named Ala Tamimi, that I had participated with him in the attempted forgery of a two-million dollar check drawn on an account of L. Ron Hubbard. Up to that date, I had never heard the name Ala Tamimi. To this date, I have never met with him, seen him, talked to him on the telephone, or had any involvement with him of any nature or description. He is a total stranger to me. The meetings, conversations, and involvements described by Tamimi in his affidavit with respect to me are completely false. As to Tamimi’s participation in the check incident, I have no knowledge of what he did or did not do, but the first information that I have ever received relative to his participation in this incident was on July 23, 1984, when the reporter called me on the telephone and advised me of Tamimi’s affidavit.
2) I first learned of an attempt to pass a two-million dollar check drawn on the account of L. Ron Hubbard on June 14, 1982, while I was staying at the Holiday Inn Surfside in Clearwater Beach, Florida. I was in Florida at that time as special counsel to the City of Clearwater for the purpose of dealing with various matters in the aftermath of the hearings held before the Clearwater City Commission in May 1982, relative to L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology. While at the Holiday Inn Surfside, I received a telephone call or calls from Mr. Joseph Snyder of Security Management Services, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, who had been retained by the Bank of New England for the purposes of finding L. Ron Hubbard and obtaining information from Hubbard as to the circumstances surrounding the two-million dollar check. Mr. Synder informed me that approximately one week prior to his phone call, someone had attempted to pass a two-million dollar check on an account of L. Ron Hubbard in the Middle East Bank in New York City.
3) I had met Mr. Snyder for the first time many months prior to his calling me in Florida, when I delivered a speech concerning L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology to a group called the American Society for Industrial Security. The speech was well received and related to the intelligence/espionage tactics of Scientology which kindled the interest of many of the investigators present including Mr. Snyder. The speech to the group of which Mr. Snyder was a part was the only involvement with him that I had ever had
-2-
of any nature or description up until the time that I received the phone call from him in June 1982 concerning the check.
4) When Mr. Snyder called me on or about June 14, 1982, he said that he had attended the speech that I had given relative to Hubbard and the Church of Scientology and that he was working in the employ of the Bank of New England for purposes of finding Hubbard. He was reluctant to give me any details on the telephone but agreed to pick me up at Logan Airport in Boston when I arrived back from Clearwater, Florida. After returning from Florida, I met with Mr. Snyder and his colleague, Andrew Fink, on several occasions, provided them all of the information that I could relative to Hubbard and Scientology, and thereafter I had a telephone conversation with Mr. Kevin Sheehan, an executive at the Bank of New England relative to the check incident.
5) In November 1982, as a result of several factors set forth below, Ronald DeWolf, the oldest son of L. Ron Hubbard, decided to bring a “missing person” petition in Riverside Probate Court in order to obtain a judicial determination of his father’s legal status. I represented Mr. DeWolf in this petition. During the pendency of the petition, I was contacted by numerous individuals both inside the Church of Scientology and outside relative to circumstantial evidence suggesting that some of L. Ron Hubbard’s closest aides may have been involved with the
-3-
check incident. This information included the fact that one Jan R. Goergen, president of Intercap, Ltd., L. Ron Hubbard’s primary investment advisor, had received large sums of money from the same Hubbard account at the Bank of New England on which the 2 million dollar check was drawn, and that Goergen was involved in several gem transactions involving L. Ron Hubbard. Most significantly, the vice president of that company, David Delozier, had been indicted by an Arizona Grand Jury and Delozier was then being investigated for his contacts with organized crime.
6) During the pendency of the Probate petition relative to Hubbard’s missing person’s status, and in other litigation in the United States relative to Hubbard and the Church of Scientology, substantial evidence was produced that Hubbard’s name had been forged on several legal documents, that David Miscavige had allegedly notarized Hubbard’s signature during a period when both the Church of Scientology and Hubbard’s attorneys had claimed that there were no means to communicate with Hubbard, that no one had communicated with him since February 1980 and that no one connected with the Church of Scientology had seen him since that period of time. However, David Miscavige was then the highest ranking official of the Church of Scientology. Additionally, Mary Sue Hubbard had filed affidavits in various cases stating that she had not seen her husband since late 1979. However, evidence was adduced that she and her husband had purportedly signed powers of attorney together in July 1980, in Los
-4-
Angeles, approximately seven months after she had allegedly last seen Hubbard. The foregoing facts, together with the indictment of Intercap’s principal, David Delozier, together with the attempted passing of the two million dollar check, which was attempted at the same time that large sums of money were paid to Intercap by Hubbard, together with the fact that Hubbard had been defaulted in the Cooper case and was about to be defaulted in other cases, and lastly based on the fact that Hubbard’s own attorney, Alan Goldfarb, stated that Hubbard was a missing person, all warranted a finding that Hubbard was indeed missing. However, the day before the Riverside Probate Court was going to rule on Hubbard’s missing person’s status in connection with a motion for summary judgment filed by Mary Sue Hubbard, a declaration purportedly signed by L. Ron Hubbard was produced stating that his affairs were being handled by Author Services, Inc. Based on the declaration of L. Ron Hubbard, the Court adjudicated that L. Ron Hubbard was not a missing person.
7) During the pendency of the Probate proceeding relative to Hubbard’s missing person’s status, Hubbard’s attorneys retained Eugene M. Ingram. Ingram had previously been dismissed from the Los Angeles Police Department for pandering, pimping, conspiring to run a house of prostitution and aiding narcotics dealers. Ingram was also indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice and on the pimping, pandering and prostitution charges, but the indictment was later
-5-
dismissed.
8) Between May 1983 and the present, Ingram, other private investigators including Andrew Palermo of Boston, Massachusetts, and various Scientology agents, have engaged in a consistent course of conduct to harass, intimidate and to “frame” me for the check incident. This conduct includes close constant surveillance by as many as four automobiles at a time following me in Boston, Los Angeles, and other locales, contacting my clients and informing them that I was a drug dealer, that I was connected to organized crime, and that together with my brother, Kevin Flynn, I had attempted to pass L. Ron Hubbard’s two million dollar check, for which I was going to be indicted, that I was going to be disbarred, and similar statements.
9) In January 1984, Ingram placed full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Boston Globe offering a one hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the two million dollar check incident. Individuals responding to the advertisement including several newspaper reporters such as Beverly Ford of the Boston Herald and Glen Fowler of the New York Times were told that the primary suspects in the check incident were Michael Flynn and his brother, Kevin Flynn and that evidence existed to prove that Kevin Flynn had trespassed into various areas of the Bank in order to steal checks of
-6-
L. Ron Hubbard. Ingram used the reward offer as a means to pay Ala Tamimi and his brother, Akil Tamimi a large sum of money (at least $25,000) for purposes of signing a false affidavit. Tamimi is currently wanted in four countries, and he has been indicted for fraud, and in two separate cases for perjury.
10) On Monday, July 23, 1984, Hubbard, and the Church of Scientology through its attorneys John Peterson and Donald Randolph, launched an international “black propaganda” campaign against me by filing the false declarations of Ala Tamimi and Akil Tamimi in the Los Angeles Federal District Court, issuing press releases throughout the United States which were sent to most of my clients and friends, and holding press conferences in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Clearwater, Florida. In the press releases, the press conferences, television and radio appearances, and in private interviews with individuals from the media, Ingram, Heber Jentzsch and John Peterson have falsely stated that I offered $400,000 to Ala Tamimi to forge one of L. Ron Hubbard’s checks. This media blitz to destroy my reputation based on completely false testimony of an indicted perjurer, (Tamimi) procured by Eugene Ingram, a known sex offender, and paid off by the Church of Scientology whose top eleven leaders have all been convicted of a variety of crimes for which they were incarcerated in Federal prison, is despicable beyond description. The media blitz was timed to defuse the recent judicial findings made by Judge Paul Breckenridge of
-7-
the Los Angeles Superior Court in the case of Church of Scientology v. Armstrong, C.A. No. C 420 153, wherein Judge Breckenridge ruled that Hubbard was a “pathological liar” and that the Organization was a “massive fraud” that engaged in a “form of blackmail and extortion against its members.” Similarly, a high court judge in London in a 50-page opinion, ruled that Scientology was “immoral, corrupt and sinister” and that its methods were “grimly reminiscent of the ranting and bullying of Hitler and his henchmen.” In an effort to counter the growing world-wide awareness of Scientology, its methods and practices, Hubbard, Peterson, Ingram, and agents of Hubbard have implemented the familiar policy of “attack the attacker” for purposes of destroying my reputation based on knowlingly false testimony.
11) As a result of the constant, close and harassive surveillance, and as a result of the frame-up now being engineered against me, which is being disseminated in the news media world-wide, my family and I have suffered extreme emotional anguish, great loss of reputation, and substantial interference with my law practice.
12) The pattern of conduct now engaged in by Hubbard and his agents is similar to past activities they have engaged in against their critics, including the frame-ups of Gene Allard, Paulette Cooper, and Gabriel Cazares, the mayor of Clearwater, as well as numerous harassive activities taken against judges, lawyers, the American
-8-
Medical Association, reporters, and anyone who has attempted to speak out against Hubbard and his Organization. For some examples of this type of conduct, I have attached the “Sentencing Memorandum” of the United States Government hereto, as Exhibit A.
13) The Church of Scientology and Hubbard through its agent, Eugene Ingram, have also procured an affidavit from George Edgerly stating that I offered a bribe to Edgerly not to testify in his own defense in exchange for the payment of $500.00 per week to Edgerly’s wife, that Edgerly accepted this proposal and that I paid him $1,000.00 several weeks later. The statements of Edgerly are completely false. Edgerly has been convicted of first degree murder and is presently serving a life prison sentence in Massachusetts. He has also been convicted of fraud, and he had previously been indicted for the murder of his wife. He is a well-known and infamous criminal in Massachusetts. The fact that Hubbard and Scientology would accept as true the statements of a convicted murderer is indicative of the desperate measures that they are now willing to employ in order to rebut the truthful findings of Judge Breckenridge in the Armstrong case and of Judge Latey in England.
14) The Edgerly and the Tamimi affidavits both procured from infamous criminals by Eugene Ingram in exchange for the payment of large sums of money is a transparent attempt to frame me as Hubbard and his Organization have previously
-9-
done or attempted with Paulette Cooper, Gabriel Cazares, and Eugene Allard. See for example, documents attached hereto as Exhibit B, reflecting “operations” against the above named people by Scientology. Hubbard and his Organization have also attempted to victimized judges and lawyers who have fought to bring them to justice. See for example, the article attached hereto as Exhibit C, “Scientologists’ War Against Judges.”
In sum, the recent “attack” against me by Ingram and Hubbard based on the false declarations of convicted criminals, both of which are now serving time in prison, is transparent and outrageous. I have turned the entire matter over to the United States Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts and have requested that criminal charges be brought against Ingram, and others responsible for manufacturing this outrageous attempt to frame me.
Finally, the Church of Scientology and the Hubbards have unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify me from representing my clients in other Scientology related proceedings. I have attached hereto as Exhibit D, a copy of the Los Angeles Superior Court’s ruling in the recent case of Church of Scientology v. Armstrong, No. C 420 153, in which disqualification was denied. I have also attached hereto as Exhibit E a copy of the Court’s decision in that case.
-10-
Signed under the pains and penalties of perjury this 10th day of August, 1984.