didn’t drink whisky and handed him the bottle! I do drink whisky and I didn’t have that bottle of whisky on me!”
The next step in the investigation was tracking down the source of the cyanide. Druggist E. K. Enzor of nearby McElroy’s Pharmacy told police that he had sold two boxes of cyanide to a chiropractor named Dr. Ernest N. Sykes the day before the murder occurred. When questioned, Sykes said that he had delivered the cyanide to Long, who had asked Sykes how much of it would be necessary to kill a man. Sykes replied, “About as much as you can get on the point of a knife.”
All signs now pointed directly to Long, which meant that he had intended to poison Etty, but accidentally killed Dolores Myerly instead. But what was the motive? The two were barely acquainted, and neither seemed to have any dislike for the other.
Upon being called to the witness stand to testify at the coroner’s inquest, however, Dr. Sykes proved that he wasn’t exactly the most reliable of witnesses. He suddenly changed his story and claimed that he had purchased the cyanide for another man: George Coston.
Coston, a former captain of the Orlando Police Department, was recently defeated in the prior sheriff election. Since the loss, Coston had been running his own private detective agency. He was also a longtime patient of Sykes, who now claimed that Coston asked him to purchase the cyanide. Sykes stated, “The last batch I delivered to him the morning of the fatal night.”
On February 19, Long, Sykes, and Coston were held on murder charges, while the man who killed Dolores Myerly, Robert Etty, was released. The pieces to the puzzle were starting to come together.
Remember the gun that was found in Long’s garage? Long claimed that Coston had helped him avoid being charged in the murder of Frank Beane after the gun was found on his property. As repayment for his services, Coston insisted that Long join his detective agency. The business was actually a cover for a series of crimes that Coston had planned to commit. These included the assassinations of several men (one of whom was the sheriff that beat him in the election), the robberies of several jewelry stores, the theft of the contents of a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. safe, and the robbery of valuables from several prominent citizens.
The best part of Coston’s scheme was that he never intended to do any of the dirty work himself. He was going to leave that up to Donald Long and Edward “Buck” Moseley, an eighteen-year-old who was serving a suspended sentence for robbery.
The biggest problem with the scheme was that Long never committed any of the crimes Coston had planned. Long stated, “Coston was beginning to get angry because I had not gone through with any of his planned robberies or murders. He was threatening me.”
Death certificate for Marie Bayouth.
On the evening prior to Dolores Myerly’s murder, Coston picked Long up and drove out to the Colonialtown neighborhood of Orlando to take care of some business. That was when Long told Coston that he was through. “Coston told me if I ever squealed, he’d blow my brains out and kick ’em all over Orange Ave.” He added that Coston wanted to have a drink to end their partnership, but Long declined because he had been drinking beer and claimed to get sick if he mixed the two. Long continued, “He took a drink and killed the remains of a pint bottle. Then he reached in the back of his car and pulled out a miniature and gave it to me.”
It should come as no surprise that Coston denied everything. “We never planned any robberies. We never planned any murders,” he insisted. “I used Long on odd jobs around my private detective agency.”
The real question was whether a jury would believe a bizarre story in which person A (Coston) intended to kill person B (Long) who, in turn, unintentionally had person C (Etty) unknowingly kill person D (Myerly).
At trial, Donald Long, Dr. Sykes, and several lesser witnesses all testified against Coston. Perhaps the most damaging evidence was a series of thirty-three notes that Coston penned while in the Orange County jail and had smuggled through an intermediary to Long. The notes told of Coston’s nervousness while he sat in jail, and placed intense pressure on Long to get Buck Moseley out of town so he wouldn’t squeal. Coston instructed Long to flush the notes as soon as he read them, but for some reason Long opted to hold onto them.
It took a jury of twelve men two and a half hours to deliberate the case. On May 3, 1938, the foreman of the jury, C. J. Chryst, read the verdict. They found Coston guilty of murder in the first degree. This decision came with a mandatory sentence of death. Coston stated, “The only thing I have to say is that I am innocent of the charge, and had nothing to do with it. I was convicted on the perjured testimony of two men and I am innocent.”
An appeal was immediately filed with the Florida Supreme Court. They granted him a new trial that resulted in a mistrial being declared on November 18, 1939.
On February 29, 1940, at his third trial, Coston was found guilty of third degree murder and sentenced to twenty years in the state penitentiary at Raiford. In a way, this was a life sentence for Coston because he died there on September 8, 1942, at the age of fifty-three from a lung abscess.
As for Long and Sykes, they were never brought to trial. The cases against both were dropped in March of 1940.
Arrested for Eating Soup Loudly
1923
Thirty-four-year-old Isaac Hirschorn was arraigned on charges of disorderly conduct in Essex Market Court on December 15, 1923. The reason? He was loud and boisterous while eating a bowl of soup at a restaurant located at 25 St. Mark’s Place.
Hirschorn claimed that he wasn’t being disorderly—that was the way he always ate his soup. Although he did apologize, he felt that he was unable to avoid making noise while eating his soup.
Magistrate McAndrews dismissed the charges, but told Hirschorn, “Eat your soup at home in the future and the other courses of your meal in a restaurant. You are discharged.”
Kidnapper Rides on Car Hood in Nightgown
1964
A woman in a nightgown was seen clinging to the front of an automobile as it was being driven down the road. If your first thought was that the woman’s life was in great danger and that the car should have been stopped, well, you would be wrong.
Imagine this: A car is driving through Spartanburg, South Carolina, with a young woman clad only in a white nightgown on its hood. An estimated twenty-car caravan is trailing behind, trying to stop the driver. While this may seem like fiction, it really did happen on Monday, August 17, 1964.
It all started around 11:30 p.m. the Sunday night prior in Kannapolis, North Carolina. Twenty-six-year-old Grady Lee Steen was at a drive-in restaurant with his girlfriend, Patsy Queen, when a car drove up beside them. Twenty-three-year-old Joyce Kaye LaFevers exited the car, walked up to Steen, and asked to speak with him alone. When Miss Queen refused to get out of the car, Steen told LaFevers that she should get in, too.
Miss LaFevers got into the back seat, pulled a gun out from under her skirt, and ordered Miss Queen to exit the vehicle. She then ordered Steen to follow the car that LaFevers had arrived in, which was now being driven by twenty-five-year-old Stacey LaVern Bigham. They drove to a nearby service station where Steen was ordered to get
