A Year After Savannah Killing, Police Press for Answers

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

At St. James’s Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side, a small group of family and friends assembled in honor of the memory of Frederick Brockway Gleason III, who died a year ago, at age 64, in Savannah, Ga. The scion of the family that owned the old New York Sun, Gleason was known as a raconteur, a man about town, a history buff and Civil War re-enactor, and the anachronistic embodiment of a gentlemanly era.

During the ceremony last week, his widow, Ann Gleason, sat in the front row. A Lilly fellow at St. James’s, the Reverend Spencer Potter Jr., praised Gleason in a brief memorial with Holy Communion. Apart from the clergyman’s remarks, there was little personal reminiscence at the service; its formal program did not include remarks by the widow or anyone else in the pews. Near the end of the service, there was a silent moment of prayer. Gleason’s daughter, Ann Powell Dewart Gleason, who works in fashion design in New York, and her mother spoke quietly with Gleason’s friends afterward.

While Gleason was being memorialized in Manhattan, the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department has been pursuing its investigation of Gleason’s violent death — to which Mrs. Gleason was an eyewitness. A year after Gleason died of gunshots from an assailant, Savannah police and a series of articles in the Savannah Morning News have raised questions about the unsolved homicide case.

According to the widow’s first statement to the police, Gleason was shot shortly before 8 p.m. on the evening of November 28, 2005, in the Ardsley Park area of Savannah, at 401 Washington Ave., a large new house he and his wife had recently bought. Mrs. Gleason told police that two men in a car pulled up behind her white Mercedes, which was parked in the street in front of the house.

The widow told police that when Gleason came out of the house, one of the men stepped out while the other man remained in the car. The first man confronted the couple and demanded the keys to the Gleasons’ car and “something of value,” according to the police report, then pulled out a gun and shot Gleason three times. The assailant returned to the car and the two men sped off. Gleason died shortly afterward in a nearby hospital.

When asked the color of the car the assailants were driving, Mrs. Gleason first told police that it was white but later told them it was dark, according to the Savannah Morning News. Asked about this discrepancy by the Sun last week, Mrs. Gleason said she had no comment.

After a year’s investigation, Savannah police have yet to name a suspect in the unsolved homicide. But they have named two “persons of interest,” who they believe have information that would be helpful to the investigation: Mrs. Gleason and a man who resides in South Carolina, whose name police did not release to the Sun.

When asked last week to confirm the identity of the South Carolina man, Mrs. Gleason declined to comment to the Sun.

On Sunday, the Savannah Morning News cited “family members” as naming John Vanderhorst as the person of interest. The News reached both Mr. Vanderhorst and his attorney, Robert Wyndham, who declined to discuss the investigation but said his client had talked with investigators a couple of times and gave them a statement.

The Sun spoke with Mr. Wyndham on Sunday night, and he confirmed that Mr. Vanderhorst was his client. He said Mr. Vanderhorst had “sat down with Savannah police on two occasions” and had “answered all of their questions.” Regarding anything else to do with the investigation into the Gleason homicide, he said, “We have no comment.”

When asked by the Sun, a spokesman for the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department, Sergeant Mike Wilson, confirmed that Police Captain Bob Merriman “did describe the male person of interest as the boyfriend” of Ann Gleason. The Savannah Morning News reported on Sunday that “police said she was returning home after spending part of the day with her boyfriend in Charleston” before the night of the homicide.

Regarding Mrs. Gleason, Sergeant Wilson told the Sun last week,”To date we have not obtained sufficient cooperation from her.” In the Savannah Morning News in January, her attorney, E. Pomeroy Williams, said his client had cooperated with police: “She’s given them two or three interviews. They can’t drag her down there 50 times. We’ve told them everything.” Asked by the Sun to comment last week, Mr. Williams’s law partner, Walter Hartridge, said, “What Mr. Williams said, stands.”

Captain Merriman was quoted in the Savannah Morning News on Sunday as saying the shooting was “not random” and he continued to be frustrated by what he called Mrs. Gleason’s “conflicting” accounts of the night of the homicide.

Gleason married Ann Powell Lackey, a University of Tennessee alumna, in 1975. Their daughter Ann was born in 1980, and the couple divorced in 1982, around the time they moved to Savannah from New York. Gleason referred to her as “the once and future Mrs. Gleason.” At one point in the 1980s, Gleason lived in an SRO on 86th Street in Manhattan, with a Howard Chandler Christy painting of his mother hanging on the wall. Gleason and Mrs. Gleason remarried in 1998.

On Sunday, the Savannah Morning News reported that a former landlord of the Gleasons in Savannah from the mid-1980s, John Rosselli, an antiques dealer in New York, sued the couple, alleging they had “trashed the house” and ruined a carpet after hurling gallons of paint during a fight. Under deposition in that lawsuit, which was later dismissed, the News reported Sunday that Gleason said he had himself admitted into a hospital after he had attempted suicide. Mr. Rosselli told the Sun that things broken in the house included ceiling fans, windows, and the dishwasher and stove.

Gleason’s mother and father died in 1997 and 1999, respectively. Mrs. Gleason said her late husband had left a trust to their daughter. Asked by the Sun about inheritance or insurance money, Savannah police declined to comment because the investigation is ongoing.

Regarding her husband’s homicide, Mrs. Gleason told the Sun last week that one of the “day workers” Gleason hired may have asked him for $500 or $1,000 dollars. She said, “He probably told him no,” and the day worker could have become angry, gotten a friend or buddy, and killed Gleason.

The Savannah Morning News wrote Sunday that the Gleasons had reported jewelry stolen in 1998 and 2002 and in November 2005, the week before the homicide. The paper cites Mrs. Gleason as saying — in the most recent police report of stolen jewelry — that she and her husband were having “marriage and financial problems,” that her husband was verbally abusive and had a history of physical abuse, and that she had considered suicide. According to the Savannah Morning News, the report also said they were sleeping in different houses during the move to the new house.

Kathleen Dupuis, who bought the house at 217 East Gaston Street where the Gleasons lived before moving to Washington Avenue, told the Sun that around that time, she was scheduled to meet Mrs. Gleason. But Mrs. Gleason canceled their appointment, saying her jewelry had been stolen. Asked by the Sun last week about this incident, Mrs. Gleason declined comment.

The Sun spoke last week with Joel Coffee, who lives on Washington Avenue, diagonally to the west across from the scene of the shooting. He said he heard two gunshots, rushed out his front door, and was the fourth person to reach Gleason, who was lying in the street. He saw Mrs. Gleason and two bicyclists already there. He did not see an escaping car, he told the Sun.

The Savannah Morning News reported Sunday that one man in the neighborhood heard what sounded like two men running past his mother’s house, two blocks away,”just seconds after the shooting.”

Sergeant Wilson told the Sun the investigation into Gleason’s death was active and ongoing.

***

The shooting of Gleason brought a sudden end to a life that had bridged old and new.

Gleason “was a man of the Age of Reason, the most 18th-century man I have ever met,” his friend William Bryk said, adding that it was hard to describe this slightly rococo figure because he was also “a man of no particular period. Fred would have been at home anywhere, provided of course that there were gentlemen about.”

“He looked as though he’d walked off the cover of a 1957 Brooks Brothers catalog,” a Savannah resident Dr. Benjamin Hubby recalled.

Gleason grew up visiting his grandfather’s office at the old New York Sun. He regretted that the Sun had been sold in 1950 and wrote that by 1967, when the paper closed after being combined with four other papers: “It was the biggest train wreck of great 19thcentury newspapers ever seen. Charles A. Dana’s Sun, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, Horace Greeley’s Tribune, Joseph Pulitzer’s World, and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal all perished in a vast heap of Mergenthaler linotypes.”

After the launch of the new New York Sun in 2002, Gleason would visit the office, wander by reporter’s desks, suggesting news stories and regaling them with stories of his own, sometimes at too great a length for them to get their work done.

[The Sun carried an obituary for Gleason and a related editorial about him on November 30, 2005.]

Gleason kept a bronze life-size bust of his grandfather, William Dewart, the publisher of the Sun between 1926 and 1944, on a marble plinth in his living room. “He spoke to me once of having been downtown in the late 1980s when the old Sun building, a former department store, was being renovated,” Mr. Bryk said. “Fred just walked into the building and up to where his grandfather’s office had been. Time had taken its toll. He remembered the windows and a marble mantle in the office. He arrived there, spent a few moments, and looked at the room and was moved — which for Fred was probably the equivalent of breaking into tears.”

Gleason’s grandparents, William and Mary Dewart, acquired a large farm in Greenwich, Conn. around 1931 called Willmary Manor, where young Gleason enjoyed visiting. His cousin Phyllis Greene said, “He was the only person I knew who would arrive at the pool in a three-piece suit with watch and chain.” Another cousin’s husband, Peter Dooney, recalled Gleason showing up in wool suit and tie in July: “That skin never saw sunshine.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, he joined Phi Kappa Psi, a fraternity on Locust Walk whose members were campus bon vivants and intellectuals – “as though Evelyn Waugh had written ‘Animal House,'” a fraternity brother, Richard Longstreth, said.

Of his navy blazer and tightly knotted tie, a fellow undergraduate, David Kotok, said, “I suspect he even slept in that outfit.” Mr. Longstreth said, “Gleason was somebody you either thought was incredibly amusing or you didn’t; there was no in between.” Gleason had a collection of top hats, including one from a London shop that had not changed its window display in 200 years, a fact that appealed to Gleason a great deal, Mr. Longstreth said.

Another fraternity brother, Dr. Douglas Altchek, said Gleason was an anachronism, even when they met in 1964: He was “an Edwardian gentleman” faced with the tremendous changes overtaking universities and the country in the mid-1960s.

In his room, Gleason had both a camel saddle and a painting by Andy Warhol, who may at one time have visited the fraternity. At a College Bowl on campus, Gleason once corrected the quizmaster’s reference to “GO-eth.” “Do you by chance mean ‘Goethe’?” Gleason asked.

When a verbal dispute broke out between some members of the fraternity and some locals, Gleason, attired in a riding outfit complete with jodhpurs, jumped out of a first floor window. Brandishing a Webley pistol, he inquired,”What seems to be the problem here?” “That seemed to dissipate the argument,” Mr. Longstreth said.

A classmate, Michael Sulzbach, recalled how Gleason would remove parking tickets from his dark gray Peugeot by casually tossing them in the back seat. “If you had an out-of-state license plate, you could park anywhere unless you were careless.” On one occasion, when Gleason’s car was towed, the authorities found a heap of unpaid tickets in the back seat. When Gleason went to claim the car, they locked him up until a fraternity member bailed him out. (At the memorial service for Gleason last week, Rev. Potter said Gleason got so many parking tickets in Savannah that he knew the “meter maids” by name.)

Gleason wrote his undergraduate thesis on the neutrality of Turkey in World War II, and he would walk around the fraternity talking about his Turkish girlfriend. He spent the summer of 1968 working for the Bank of Japan in Tokyo, while he spent the summer of 1969 in London working in finance. A fraternity brother, Harry Fanjul, recalled Gleason visiting him in Spain, obsessed with finding a Byzantine chapel in the ruins of a Toledo hillside.

A New York friend, Thomas Lipscomb, met him in 1972 at the St. Regis hotel. Describing him as aristocratic but not snobbish and possessed with an incredibly cultured, low-baritone voice, Mr. Lipscomb said Gleason was “the oldest 30-year-old I knew,” a “young fogey.”

Friends recalled Gleason in the 1970s and ’80s working at Fahnestock and Co., Ladenburg Thalmann & Co., Sterling Grace Corporation, Daiwa Securities, and PaineWebber, somehow never finding a firm professional footing. “Well,” Mr. Bryk said, when asked about Gleason’s employment, “I think Fred had a great admiration for people who worked.”

Dick Kagan was the features editor at Town and Country when Gleason came striding into the office in the mid-70s to complain about an article on foreign investing. “He had an audacious quality to him, he didn’t hold back or refrain if he had an opinion to share.” He later assigned Gleason to write a few pieces for the magazine, including one on the Veteran Corps of Artillery, an organization Gleason joined in 1972.

Founded after the American Revolution by aging veterans alarmed at what they saw as New York Harbor’s continued vulnerability to the British, the VCA fascinated Gleason, who spent countless hours researching its early years at the New-York Historical Society.

Proud of his ancestry, Gleason had a great-grandfather, Thomas Wheeler, who enlisted in the Union Army and became wealthy as a Standard Oil purchasing agent. Gleason possessed a drawer full of ribbons and rosettes of lineage societies he belonged to, such as the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Military Society of the War of 1812, the Saint Nicholas Society, the Aztec Club of 1847, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Society of Colonial Wars, the Colonial Order of the Acorn, the New York Society of the Order of the Founders and Patriots of America, the Society of the Descendants of the Colonial Clergy, and the Descendants of Mexican War Veterans.

One friend recalled Gleason’s chagrin when ushers stopped wearing white gloves at St. Thomas Church. When the world ends, Gleason said, the beginning of the decline could be dated to that moment. “I think he missed the clarity of the old days,” said the Reverand C. Thomas Farrar, who knew Gleason since the second grade.

Gleason felt the 19th-century Democratic Party had been a vehicle for agricultural interests and had never quite been able to overcome a sort of feudal antipathy to capitalism, Mr. Bryk said. Last year, Gleason attended a PEN literary panel on power and literature. With a glint in his eye, Gleason rose to ask: Would they agree the Englishspeaking world, led byAmerica, was the only intact survivor after the death of European civilization in World War I?

Mr. Bryk said, “Because he so admired his ancestors who served in the Civil War, he saw Republicanism as revolutionary.” Mr. Bryk gave an example: When Gleason was preparing to teach in Savannah, he asked a retired mailman, who had been active in the NAACP, to write a letter of recommendation for him. The elderly black man said Gleason would be the first white man ever to make such a request of him. To which Gleason replied, “It will be an honor, sir,” Mr. Bryk said.

Gleason served as a student teacher at an inner-city Savannah school wearing a double-breasted, brass-buttoned jacket, replete with pointed handkerchief. “These children had never seen anything like him,” Dr. Hubby said, and yet he connected to them.

Coming from the North, Gleason nevertheless managed to find some ancestors from the South and became a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A friend, Dr. Ernesto Ego-Aguirre, recalled Gleason telling him by phone of his quixotic launch of a Georgia chapter of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S., an organization originally launched by Philadelphia veterans who had served as an Honor Guard for Lincoln’s funeral cortège. In launching it, Gleason was president and sole member.

“Savannah was sufficiently unusual to appeal to Fred,” Mr. Longstreth said. Gleason joined the English Speaking Union, the Georgia Historical Society, and the Savannah History Museum. He drove a pea-green Mercedes, visited the Savannah Golf Club, dozed off at a local bookstore, and lunched late at Saigon Thai alone with his newspaper. He served on a local public broadcasting board battling against a takeover. Gleason was a member of the crew of a muzzle-loading cannon at an old fort. “It was the kind of very primitive but precise art that Fred delighted in,” Mr. Bryk said.

Gleason appeared in the film “Glory”as an extra.”He showed me the video and paused it a couple times at a place where the Union forces are rushing along a path in the woods,” Mr. Bryk said. “There was this pair of legs sticking into the lower part of the frame. He stopped it and said, ‘That’s me.'”

In recent years, Gleason was an occasional stringer for Reuters, reporting, for example, on Senator Thurmond’s illegitimate daughter. He traveled to France to attend the funeral of a pretender of the French throne.

In the “great attic of his mind,” a New Yorker active in hereditary societies, John Mauk Hilliard, said, “there were “wonderful things stored away.” “It was the fine details of things that intrigued him,” a friend, Alan Z. Feuer, said. He could opine on Greek history, the Civil War, literature, opera, travel and politics, places of resort, urban life, the 18th century, or genealogy.

“He knew more about New York cultural and social history than any man I’ve ever met,” Mr. Feuer said. Gleason could relate stories without pause, and one could sit and listen for a couple hours. He had a circle of friends whom he could call and talk with until late in the evening.

One story the details of which many who knew Gleason would like to know is that of his killing. Rev. Potter said Gleason’s favorite Gospel was John, which opens, “In the beginning was the Word.” Gleason loved words, but the final word has yet to be written about his untimely death.


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