Revenge of the Perverted Patrolman
Martin J. Sullivan If you're a regular reader of the Pennsylvania Oddities blog, you've noticed that Western Pennsylvania has no shortage of mass murderers. There was Martha Grinder, the kind-hearted housewife who was hanged in 1865 for nursing her patients to an early grave. There was Charles Cawley, the teenage genius from Homestead who went berzerk in 1902 and slaughtered his family with an axe... a tragedy replicated in 1939 by 17-year-old Beaver Falls High School student Paul Cook. But one of the most deranged killers in the history of Western Pennsylvania was neither a nurse nor an angry teenager, but a foppish 73-year-old policeman with a fondness for wearing wigs and makeup. A thirty-one-year veteran of the Duquesne Police Department, Patrolman Martin J. Sullivan lived a quiet life at his home on Erwin Street. To the casual observer, Martin presented a non-threatening, if not downright comical, appearance: standing five feet and eight inches, the paunchy patrolman was
