Target (35 page)

Fugate, now retired, freely gave me Alice’s telephone number, a long shot, to be sure, since it was over ten years old. Not surprisingly, it was no longer in service. But I now knew where he had ended his days. New Jersey would only release his death certificate to relatives. But eventually a search of Belmawr-area burial records revealed his funeral home. Although representatives there also would not release information, they contacted Gloria Pagliaro, who had been married to Alice’s son, Thompson’s stepson. Apparently they had her listed as the next of kin. Luckily, Gloria called me. “No way” Thompson died of a suicide, she said. She and her husband were there at the hospital when he expired. “It was a short illness. For some reason, the doctors could not
determine what was wrong with him. He had a lot of pain in his stomach. They were running tests and such. The day he died he suffered terribly. I remember it vividly because it was very upsetting.”

Alice, Gloria’s mother-in-law—the same that Fugate had talked to—was Thompson’s second wife. His first wife, Joan, had been murdered in a 1982 robbery. It had been a big story at the time. The Thompsons had owned a travel agency in a declining Camden neighborhood. It had been Polish-Italian when first started but was changing to Black-Hispanic. Crime rose. According to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
,
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the killer and his brother, locals, entered Thompson’s agency around mid-morning. Thompson, recuperating from a heart attack, was not there. One pointed a .38-caliber pistol at Joan and demanded money. The agency had been held-up before and Joan, just a day or two prior, had told friends she would resist the next intrusion. She pulled out the .32 they kept hidden in a drawer and pointed. The robber said he would shoot. She said, “Go ahead. So will I.”
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Shots followed. Joan was hit in the arm, hand and abdomen and bled to death at the hospital. Her assailant took a bullet in the chest, collapsed outside and also died at the hospital. His brother, who fled, was later arrested trying to retrieve their gun and sent to prison, probably for murder. Gloria did not know Thompson then and never really got to know him even after marrying Alice’s son. “He was a very private person,” she said, and rarely talked about anything, much less the Patton accident. Most people did not know he had been involved. Once Alice brought it up in her presence, she said, but Thompson “blew it off.” Alice was a “controller,” said Gloria, and ran things in the
household. Alice thought Thompson was a “liar.” A second marriage for both, they did not get along, said Gloria.

When Alice died, Gloria went to her house and gathered what was left. She found only two things of Thompson’s in the house: a large
Colliers Photographic History of World War II
and a scrapbook about him and the war. The two items had been in a closet, practically forgotten since she had found them. At my request, she sent the scrapbook to me. It had pictures of Thompson as a young man, maps of Patton’s progression through France and Germany, and news articles about Patton’s accident and death, including those naming Thompson as the truck driver. Apparently, Thompson had been with Patton’s Third Army. There were magazine pictures of a “tank destroyer,” a truck-like vehicle with a tank’s tread and a mounted gun, which Thompson might have driven. I figured his mother had clipped most of the items from newspapers and magazines while he was in Europe. They were pasted into the scrapbook in rough chronological order. Most interestingly, loosely inserted into the very front—not pasted in like the other items—was one of the two multi-page
Spotlight
articles about Douglas Bazata, headlined, “I Was Paid to Kill Patton.”

There he was—Bazata, in various pictures, text, and quotations, making his 1979 claims. The assassin “had arranged for several trucks to be on hand that day. . . . Patton was supposed to die in the auto accident. He didn’t, however, die, so there was even more . . . .” On and on it went. And Thompson, the articles in his scrapbook showed, knew all about it. He had obviously seen it because the last item pasted into the scrapbook was right after the war—thirty years before. This was more recent. Without naming Thompson, Bazata charged in the article that the truck driver, although innocent of the true nature of the plot—killing Patton—was nevertheless involved. It was a damning indictment. Why, since the
Spotlight
articles went
public, had not he challenged Bazata for incriminating him? They had appeared fifteen years before Thompson died. That was a long time to keep quiet. Was he still just too ashamed and leery of any more publicity? Or was he fearful of dredging up something that might lead to more sinister revelations?

Was Bazata right?

Gloria got me Thompson’s death certificate. He appeared to have died of natural causes. Similar to Patton, no autopsy had been performed. I visited the house where Thompson spent his final days. Howard Beck, a retiree who lived across the street, remembered him fondly. “I’m not surprised,” he said when I told him Thompson might have been involved in a plot to kill Patton. Thompson mostly kept his Patton background to himself, said Beck. The only reason he knew about it was that once, when the matter came up between their wives, Thompson loaned him a book
⁵
on the crash that said it was an accident, which Thompson wanted him to see. But they would go out and Thompson would tell him how he had been involved in the Black Market in Germany. He was a “dealer, procuring things for his unit, a ‘scrounger,’ I think he said.” He was tall and “homely” and wore glasses, said Beck—“but women liked him. When we’d go out, he talked a lot. He’d tell jokes. They liked the jokes.” Beck said his son was still in touch with one of Thompson’s two sons, the eldest. And he had a daughter too.

He gave me a number.

“My father had a lot of mysteries about him,” Jim Thompson, Robert’s oldest son, told me. Jim owned a New Jersey satellite TV sales and service company. His father, he said, “had his own little things going on. I never got a chance to know him well.” By the time his father died, they were estranged. Among other things, his father was a “philanderer. He tried to hook me up with the daughters
of some of the women he was dating . . . . He was a dog.” He thought his father was seeing Alice, the second wife, before his mother was murdered, and that was one of the reasons father and son became estranged. After he married Alice, Jim said, “he’d always have an excuse why I couldn’t come over and see him. After awhile you say, Jeez, how many times do I have to be blown off before I say forget it.” He stopped calling. “I always thought it was because of her [Alice]. She felt guilty and didn’t want us around.” He did not know for sure, though.

So, in effect, Thompson cut his ties with his first family when he remarried. His father was passive “on the surface” but “paddling like a duck underneath,” Jim said. His mother Joan was more family oriented, the one who organized trips. She would take the kids, skiing, scuba and skydiving, which she enjoyed herself. “She was tough,” her son said fondly, which may have explained the shootout. His father would stay home when they all left, “maybe to see his sweeties,” he joked.

Joan and Thompson had married after he returned from Germany, and Jim was born soon after. But he only remembered Thompson talking about Patton once. “My mother didn’t like it. I guess she was embarrassed,” he said. He was ten or twelve. “We found a bunch of articles cut out and put them into a scrapbook. It’s disappeared now. But he [his father] told me he was driving a truck, out looking for booze for the guys—basically doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing. That was my dad for you.”

I told him I knew where the scrapbook was. He was surprised to hear about it, asked how he could get in touch with Gloria, and continued.

His father, he said, told him, “basically he was coming up an incline or whatever and he turned left and this limousine came over the hill and hit him broadside.” Patton happened to be in the back
and “hit his head or whatever. . . . We hadn’t really heard anything about it until then.... I remember my dad getting a call when the Patton movie came out.... They wanted to interview him and talk to him about it but he refused. He didn’t want any part of it.... I don’t know whether it was because my mom said no or maybe because he had something to hide. But he told us he didn’t want to be bothered.”

An “incline” or a “hill”? That’s why he had not seen the Patton car? That was the first time I had heard that. Mannheim was near the Rhine River. It was on a flood plain. Flat. Travel books attest to it. No witness describes any hills. Fugate, who had traveled there, had sent me pictures. One was taken from the point where the railroad tracks used to be. They are gone now, he said. But the pictures showed the road stretching flat and level far up ahead. The accident spot, which he marked, was roughly in the middle of that straightaway. There were no hills or inclines. Not even a bump.

Jim said his older sister June might know more. He gave me her number. June, like Jim, had been estranged from her father. She had done some research into Patton’s death. “I don’t know if I believe in a conspiracy or not” but “he had a very weak personality. . . . He was not the smartest bulb on the planet. He would have sold his soul to the devil. Anything for a buck.”

She remembers her mother cautioning her about Patton. “We were not supposed to talk about it and in those days you did what your parents said or you were up against the wall.” She remembered her brother assembling the scrapbook and that her father “was supposed to be dishonorably discharged” because of the accident, “but then it became honorable.” She knew, she said, that when he was readying to come back to the U.S. after the war “he had a suitcase full of money but couldn’t bring it back. The Duetch
mark wasn’t worth much here so he just turned it over, the whole suitcase, to an old lady there.”

Where did he get the money?

She did not know. “I do remember him saying he was grabbing pieces off Patton’s car and selling them. He was a shyster. I also remember contraband. He was really into the Black Market.” When I asked her about the hill which her father told Jim had prevented him from seeing the Patton car, she said, “My father was a really good liar—I do not know about the ‘good,’ but I do about the liar.” Married, herself, to a German, she said she had been to Mannheim partly because she knew that was where the accident had taken place. “It’s flat. It’s a flood plain,” she confirmed. There were no hills, as far as she had seen.

June gave me the number of her other brother, Ed, Thompson’s youngest, now a car dealer. He echoed his siblings and gave the intriguing news that Thompson’s friend, Robert Delsordo, a New Jersey lawyer, had recently surprised him by saying, “you should see what’s in your father’s will.” Nobody in the family knew what he was talking about, nor had they yet found out.

I called Delsordo, a former municipal judge, who acknowledged there was a secret he knew regarding Thompson and the Patton accident. It was not in Thompson’s will. It was a “confidence” Thompson had given to him and he was not going to divulge it, even to the family. “His family doesn’t know about this,” said Delsordo. “He didn’t trust his family. . . . It’s something he disclosed to me in confidence . . . . I will not disclose it during my lifetime. He asked me not to and I’m going to honor that.” The secret information, he said, exonerates Thompson—at least in his (Delsordo’s) opinion. Thompson gave it to him, he said, in case accusations were ever made against him after he was dead and it was needed to prove his innocence. I was at least inquiring, I pointed
out, but he said, no, he was not going to divulge it—not until someone states flat out that Thompson deliberately caused the accident. Then he would defend Thompson with it. Otherwise, he said, it is in his personal safe deposit box and will remain there until his death when he plans to will it to a nephew who is attending West Point. The nephew, whom he did not name, can then do with it what he wants.

Delsordo had never heard of Bazata, he said, and did not know Thompson had articles about the OSS officer’s charges. But when Thompson had seen
Brass Target
, the 1978 movie about the accident staged so an assassin could shoot Patton, he had wanted Delsordo to sue, an action Delsordo discouraged, he said, because the movie was fiction. Nobody was saying it was true. Then he told me what Thompson had revealed to him about the accident—in effect, Thompson’s attorney giving me his client’s version. Such a version was not exactly unbiased but the closest to Thompson’s version I would probably be able to get.

He said he did not know why Thompson was in Mannheim. Thompson had not told him—or he (Delsordo) had forgotten. But Thompson was alone in the truck. Delsordo emphasized this. No passengers. Thompson was low on gas. He saw a fuel dump and decided to turn in to it. There was not any traffic at the time. He turned uneventfully—which is contrary to what Woodring and General Gay said. But before he could proceed across the entrance, he saw a little ravine ahead with water in it. The big truck was in two-wheel drive and he did not think it could make it across. He stopped, and with most of the truck still extending out into the highway, exited the cab and changed to four-wheel drive. “If you remember the deuce-and-a-half, you had to go out and lock the hubs.” He got back in the truck and was beginning to slowly pull forward through the rivulet when he said “over the hill this car
came flying at him. He [Thompson] said, ‘I never could understand why he [Patton’s driver Woodring] didn’t go around me. I was in low gear. I couldn’t move out of the way fast enough.’” The Patton car slammed into the truck broadside. It hit in back of the cab where the outside gas tank was. Thompson expected a fire or explosion. Then he saw the general’s flag on the car and said, “Oh shit!”

Those were all the details he had.

I reacted by saying there was no hill—at least according to all available evidence. Delsordo said Thompson said there was, and he believed him. It was not part of the standard story, he speculated, because, in Thompson’s opinion, the standard story was a “saving story” for Woodring. “Bob seemed to lay the blame on Woodring,” said Delsordo. “He told me, ‘For God sakes, why didn’t he [Woodring] go around me?’” The answer, he ventured, was that Woodring was “Patton’s buddy.” The witness by Gay and Woodring that Thompson had made the sudden left turn in front of them was a “fiction”—in other words, a lie—made up to save Woodring. That was what he now believed based on what Thompson told him.