Mug Shots: A Small Town Noir—The Appendix

Mug Shots: A Small Town Noir

By Diarmid Mogg –

Published April 3, 2014

Floyd M. Armstrong, arrested for loitering (and possibly stealing a roll of pennies and a box of shotgun shells) on a summer night in 1957, in New Castle, PA.<br>Diarmid Mogg

Martin Fobes woke up to the sound of officers from the New Castle police department banging on his front door.

It was early on a January morning, still dark, and he was lying flat on his living room floor, where he had passed out a few hours previously. The police took him downtown and charged him with driving while intoxicated. They sat him in a chair against a white wall and slotted numbered tiles into a board behind him, to record the fact that he was the four thousand eight hundred and eighty-third person to have been processed in that room. They took a picture of his profile, then turned him to take a picture face-on. While he was held for questioning, the negatives were developed and printed on a small piece of photographic paper that had been cut with scissors from a larger sheet. The print was then taken to a room in police headquarters known as the rogues gallery, where it joined the ever-growing archive of twinned portraits of citizens unfortunate enough to have been caught breaking the law in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.

Sixty-one years later, the photograph dropped through my letterbox in Edinburgh, Scotland, in an envelope containing half a dozen old mug shots that I’d bought for a few pounds from an eBay seller who specialized in historic ephemera.

Martin Fobes<br>Diarmid Mogg

I’d become interested in mug shots through a book called Least Wanted, by Mark Michaelson, which contains hundreds of these strange and beautiful little portraits, taken as a matter of routine by law enforcement agencies across America but made haunting by the passage of time. I was fascinated by the range of expressions, the haircuts, the clothes. Such faces. Who were they? What had they done? What were their lives like?

Almost all of the pictures in Least Wanted are anonymous, having become separated from their arrest information due to the carelessness of police departments, dealers, and collectors. Part of the reason why I bought the bundle from eBay was that the listing noted that they still had their police file cards attached, and I hoped it might be possible to use that information to find out more about the people in the photographs.

Each of the six cards listed various pieces of information, including, importantly, the person’s name and age, the crime with which they had been charged and the date and place of their arrest. All six people were from the same town: New Castle, Pennsylvania, a place I’d never heard of. I checked NewspaperArchive.com and saw that its database contained back issues of the local paper, the New Castle News, going back over a hundred years. A promising omen.

The arrest card of Martin Fobes.<br>Diarmid Mogg

Martin’s mug shot was on top of the pile, so I ran a search on him first. His name appeared in the paper about thirty times over fifty years, from the announcement of the birth of his daughter in 1929 to his obituary in 1969. Most of the mentions were in the paper’s local events pages, where he appeared among lists of routine hospital admissions or as a pallbearer at the funerals of friends and relations—commonplace traces of a normal life.

The articles that came up for the month of his arrest, however, were a different matter: two front-page stories in one week, headlined, “Officers Probe Woman’s Death” and “Cause Of Girl’s Death Is Mystery.” I hope I can be forgiven for feeling a thrill of excitement as I scanned the pieces and saw Martin’s name emerge as part of a far more intriguing story than I’d been expecting. An unconscious eighteen-year-old girl named Anna Grace Robertson had been found lying in the middle of the street, battered and bleeding, in a residential part of town on the morning of 6 January, 1948. The police who woke Martin up from his drunken sleep and took his mug shot told him he had been seen with her that night. Martin said he remembered leaving the Rex Café with her and her sister sometime after midnight, but nothing after that. He had no recollection of how he ended up back home. He had blacked out. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl.

Anna Grace never regained consciousness. She died three days later, after being admitted to the hospital. A post-mortem found the cause of death to be hemorrhages of the brain. She also had a complete fracture of the left jaw, partial paralysis of the left arm and left leg, and friction burns on her face and right knee.

At the inquest, Martin said, again, that he had no recollection of what had happened that night. Others filled in some of the blanks.

Anna Grace’s sister, Eris, said that Martin had taken her and Anna Grace home from the Rex Café, where they had met him. Anna Grace knew Martin, it seemed, but Eris had never...