criminal records – Yarrow had served
time for highway robbery and breaking
and entering.
Even so, it wasn’t going to be all that
easy. At the preliminary hearing young
Antone Letzgus, who testified he had
seen Honey enter the Essex car on the
night of the murder, refused to identify
George Yarrow as Honey’s companion.
That was a blow to our case – a
momentary one, at least.
Then came another, rather more
startling development. Mrs. Sylvia
Michaels, of Philadelphia, appeared at
the police station to announce that she
was Yarrow’s mother-in-law and in her
view Yarrow had murdered his wife,
Mrs. Michaels’s daughter by a previous
marriage.
What made her think this, we asked?
Well, she told us, her daughter had
married George Yarrow when she
was only 14 years old. They had a
four-year-old daughter named Ruth,
who was now living with Mrs. Michaels.
Suddenly, it seemed, Mrs. Yarrow
mysteriously disappeared two years
ago after a quarrel with her husband.
“Yarrow killed my daughter,” Mrs.
Michaels shrilled dramatically. “She
was the victim in the unsolved crime
in Camden County which the press
dubbed the Hilltop Murder.”
We remembered the Hilltop Murder
case well. It concerned the discovery
of the hacked-up body of a woman,
together with part of her clothing, in
an area of the county known as Hilltop.
The murder had never been solved and
the identity of the victim had never been
established.
Yarrow denied killing his wife with
the same insistence that he denied
killing Honey Sarlo. He and his wife,
he said, had parted amicably. But
then the bits of clothing in the Hilltop
Murder were brought to Mrs. Michaels
for identification and she declared
unhesitatingly that they were her
daughter’s.
We got a dentist to examine the
skull of the murder victim after Mrs.
Michaels told us about certain dental
work her daughter had had done. The
examination revealed that the victim
was a woman probably over 40 years
old and the extent of the dental work on
the skull made it clear that whoever it
was, it certainly was not Mrs. Michaels’s
daughter.
Y
arrow’s trial for the murder of
Honey Sarlo opened at Woodbury
on December 7th, 1927.
Yarrow’s lawyer, Lewis Lieberman,
set out his defence from the outset. The
accused man, declared Mr. Lieberman,
was a Jekyll and Hyde personality and
had suffered temporary insanity as a
result of a shrapnel wound during the
Great War. Because of this he proposed
to offer no defence witnesses.
The jury heard about the broken glass
with the blood spots, of the tyre which
fitted the indentations by the ditch in
East Red Bank Avenue, of bloodstains
found on Yarrow’s clothing, of the letters
Yarrow wrote to Honey and of the
meeting between them on that Saturday
night when Honey was taken on her
death ride.
Prosecutor Joseph Summerhill
declared that Yarrow, an “ex-bandit,
now a murderer,” should be sent to
the electric chair for a most atrocious
murder.
Honey Sarlo, added Mr. Summerhill,
was “the standard-bearer of American
girlhood who had sacrificed her life on
the altar of virtue.”
Dangling the strands of wire which
had strangled her, he pointed out wisps
of her dark curly hair which still clung
to them. “She was a virgin before this
man killed her with this wire,” he said.
Strangely, young Antone Letzgus,
who had failed to identify Yarrow as thedriver of the Essex car, now changed his
mind. “It was Yarrow,” he said. “At first
I said it wasn’t because I didn’t want to
get anyone into trouble. Later I decided
to tell the truth.”
All this was followed by the reading
of Yarrow’s confession. As the jury rose
to retire, defence lawyer Lieberman
announced that he would make an
appeal on two counts. The first was
that the judge had refused permission
to postpone the reading of Yarrow’s
confession for a day, in order to give
the defence time to produce witnesses
to prove it was not made voluntarily.
The second was that the judge had not
summed up fairly, having made out a
stronger case of premeditation than had
the prosecution.
All this was clutching at straws and
it didn’t influence the jury. They found
Yarrow guilty of murder in the first
degree and he was sentenced to die in
the electric chair in the week of January8th, 1928.
The news of Yarrow’s trial and
conviction was kept from his aged
mother, who was seriously ill at her
home in Barnsboro. She was informed
that Yarrow had gone out West. When
she begged to see him she was told that
he was in some sort of dispute over his
car and couldn’t return East at that time.
Now, dramatically, Yarrow’s missing
wife, believed dead for the last two
years, appeared. Unannounced,
this pretty young woman of 21,
accompanied by her four-year-old
daughter, went to the death house at
Trenton Penitentiary and asked to see
her condemned husband.
“I’ve come to help you, George,” she
told him. “I was in Miami when I read
of your plight, so I immediately came
north to see you.”
Gallantly, she joined in the last-ditch
efforts to save her husband. She hired
a new lawyer and went to the state
governor to plead with him for Yarrow’s
sentence to be commuted to life
imprisonment.
Mrs. Yarrow then went to Honey
Sarlo’s grieving mother and begged
her to join in her plea for mercy. But
gazing at a photograph of her murdered
daughter, Mrs. Sarlo refused.
On January 5th, 1928, Yarrow’s
execution was stopped by an appeal
filed on the basis of technical errors in
the trial. It was argued that Yarrow’s
confession was invalid; that it was
obtained by force and intimidation.
The appeal failed and a new date
was fixed for the execution, June 1st,- It was to take place at 9 o’clock
that night, and throughout the day there
were all sorts of moves to try to halt it.
A quarter of an hour before
Yarrow was to be led to the electric
chair the prison governor was asked
to delay the execution for an hour
because the state governor could
not be reached for the moment.
The prison governor refused. At 9
o’clock Yarrow was strapped into
the chair and a few minutes later
he paid with his life for the death of
Honey Sarlo.
Yarrow (right) in his cell after being questioned by Sheriff Tryon (left)Honey Sarlo was “the
standard-bearer of
American girlhood who
had sacrificed her life
on the altar of virtue”