Icebox Murder: The Killing of Billy Krewson

 

(Listen to the audio version of this story here)

In the summer of 1941, a Jewish immigrant from Russia was slowly, but methodically, building a retail empire. Thirty years earlier, he had arrived in the United States, attempting to support himself by peddling lemonade on the streets of Washington, D.C. He soon found himself penniless, and, based on his misguided belief that the people of Berks County spoke Yiddish, he packed his bags and relocated to Reading, where he soon discovered that the language spoken was Pennsylvania Dutch.

The young man persevered, however, and immediately went to work selling dry goods from door to door, carrying his wares in a sack draped over his shoulder like a Jewish Santa Claus. By 1921 he had saved enough money to open his first dry goods store on the corner of Ninth and Pike Streets. From these humble beginnings, Solomon Boscov would go on to found a chain of department stores bearing his name. Amazingly, while many brick-and-mortar department store chains are dropping like flies, Boscov's continues to thrive; the chain's 50th location opened last year in West Virginia.

However, Boscov's life was not without its share of nightmares. His first wife, Bertha, died after an operation in 1920 at the age of 25. They had been married for just nine months. And then, one day in August of 1941, Solomon Boscov opened an icebox door-- and came face to face with one of the most chilling murders in Pennsylvania history.

 

Solomon Boscov

 

The Disappearance of Billy Krewson

Eight-year-old Billy Krewson was last seen by his parents on the morning of Wednesday, August 13, 1941. After 48 hours had passed without his return, police began a methodical, but daunting, search of abandoned buildings in the northwest section of Reading. Neighborhood children were questioned by officers, but they were unable to provide answers. A mailman, however, was able to provide police with a clue; little Billy had walked with him on his route on the day of his disappearance. Billy and the mailman parted ways at around 2:30 that afternoon, at a point about a half block away from the Krewson home at 1230 North Tenth Street. This was encouraging news, leading authorities to believe that Billy could not have gotten very far. But, as the day drew to a close without further clues, city police enlisted the aid of five Boy Scout troops to join the search. When this failed, the decision was made to drag an abandoned reservoir about a mile from the boy's home.

On August 18, as the search for Billy Krewson stretched into its fourth day, Captain Jonathan Brightbill of the Reading Company police force announced that every freight car known to have been on a railroad siding near the Krewson home had been opened and searched, with some of the freight cars having traveled as far away as Buffalo. But, yet again, not a clue was found. That same day, the congregation of the Church of God, which was located next door to the Krewson home, prayed fervently that he would be located, safe and sound. Sadly, their prayers would only be half answered. 

 Meanwhile, 50-year-old Solomon Boscov had a plan to lease out one of the buildings he owned, a vacant grocery store at 1300 North Tenth Street, which stood just half a block away from the Krewson home. On the morning of Tuesday, August 19, Boscov was showing a prospective tenant named Harold Stubbs the building when he detected an unpleasant odor. He traced the odor to a large, wooden, industrial refrigerator on the first floor, which hadn't been occupied since early March. He opened the door to the ice compartment, expecting to find long-forgotten steaks, spoiled vegetables or, perhaps, a dead rat. Instead, he found little Billy Krewson.

 
The Scene of the Crime

The child's body had been stuffed headfirst into the ice compartment of the refrigerator. The shoes had been removed, and jammed into the ice compartment under Billy's head. The compartment was only eighteen inches wide, two feet high and five feet deep. A tin box was on the floor next to the appliance. Boscov was neither an expert in matters of crime nor human physiology, but it seemed to the immigrant merchant that Billy could not have climbed into the icebox on his own. After processing what he had seen, he composed himself and notified the police.

Detective Harold Oswald  and Lieutenant Detective A.B. Morris also realized that the death could not have been accidental. Police had a difficult time extracting the body from the compartment, and noted that the latch to the ice box had been fastened from the outside. "I think, without a doubt, the boy was dead before he was placed in there," stated Deputy Coroner Michael Austin, following his preliminary investigation. "However, an autopsy will clear up all doubts."

Since the refrigerator was plainly visible through the store windows, it seemed evident that the body was stuffed into the icebox under the cover of darkness. The body showed no signs of violence, and the prevailing theory was that Billy had been the victim of a "sex maniac". 

 

The Shabby Stranger

Billy was wearing overalls at the time of his death, the same clothes he had been wearing when he had disappeared on the afternoon of August 13. Solomon Boscov remembered that he had paid a visit to the store on August 14 and had noticed that the padlock on the front door had been forced open. He had thought nothing of it at the time; the building was empty, there was nothing inside worth stealing.
An autopsy revealed the true horror of Billy Krewson's final moments. Thirty-seven scratches were found on the inside of the icebox door. The deputy coroner had been wrong-- Billy was alive when he was jammed into the compartment. A half-inch drain pipe had provided Billy with enough air to survive for three or four days of unfathomable fear and agony. His arms and legs were so cramped that he had virtually no ability to struggle inside the ice compartment. The autopsy also confirmed that Billy had been sexually assaulted "many times" before his death. Police learned from Billy's friends that other neighborhood boys had been approached in recent weeks by an itinerant scissor-sharpener-- a man described as a "shabby, unshaven stranger" who had attempted the lure them to a hobo camp about five blocks away from the vacant grocery store. 

One particularly strange detail they discovered was that a few neighborhood children had been heard chanting "Billy is locked in an ice box" long before the body was discovered by Solomon Boscov. As local children were known to have played inside the abandoned building, police wondered if some of the neighborhood boys had stumbled across the body but had been too terrified to report their find to their parents. Some even wondered if the heinous crime might have been committed by one of Billy's playmates. Detectives recruited children of various sizes to crawl into the death chamber, and concluded that it was possible for a boy of Billy's size to squeeze into the compartment, raising the possibility that Billy might've tried hiding from his abuser. 

The building where body was found still stands as a grocery store.

 

Dreamed of Child's Cries

After the discovery, Rev. H.C. Stoppe of the Church of God spent the day consoling Billy's grief-stricken family, comprised of roofer Amos Krewson, his wife Lena, their oldest son, 13-year-old Russell, 11-year-old Paul, and teenage daughters Beatrice and Pearl. "I used to dream my son was calling for help," said Lena Krewson. "I couldn't eat because I kept thinking Billy was hungry, somewhere. That's all over now. I know where my boy is."

 

It seemed that bad luck had followed Billy Krewson since an early age; when he was four years old, he fell on the sidewalk and fractured his skull, and just one year before his death he suffered a broken leg after being hit by a car. As a result of his injuries, Billy never had the opportunity to attend school, though his parents had hoped to enroll him in September. On Friday, August 22, a private funeral service for Billy was held at the family home on Tenth Street, and his body laid to rest at Forest Hills Memorial Park. More than two thousand mourners paid their respects at the funeral home for the viewing the previous evening, with lines stretching around the block. Mingled among the mourners were several undercover officers.

Hunting a Scissor-Grinder

With only a few clues to go on, detectives searched hobo camps along the Schuylkill River for the tramp known only as "Tony". Dozen of vagrants were rounded up by authorities and questioned, but nobody seemed to know the whereabouts of the wandering scissor-sharpener. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Detective Morris was not ready to rule out the possibility of accidental death. Coroner Good wasn't ready to commit to either possibility, stating that, while the body clearly showed signs of sexual assault, there was no proof that the assault had been carried out the same day he was put into the icebox. To calm public fears that a serial molester might be on the loose, Mayor Harry Menges assigned 200 city patrolmen to make daily inspections of all vacant and abandoned buildings in Reading.

As the week drew to a close, the sex maniac theory was somewhat weakened when detectives learned that Billy, a weak and sickly child, had been subjected to severe bullying from an early age by older boys in the neighborhood, raising the possibility that the actual perpetrator might be a boy not much older than the victim-- perhaps even a relative. 

 

Though the strange death of Billy Crewson was one of the most sensational stories of 1941 in Pennsylvania, by year's end, very little was printed about the investigation. And then, on December 7, the nation's eyes turned to a little-known naval base in Hawaii. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States into World War II, and the war provided the murderer-- if such a murderer ever existed-- an opportunity to escape justice. 

It's interesting to wonder if the unknown killer received cosmic justice thousands of miles away on the battlefields of Europe or on the islands of the South Pacific, of if perhaps guilt compelled him to seek a watery grave in the Schuylkill River just a few blocks away from where a future retail tycoon made a blood-chilling discovery inside a forgotten icebox. If the true killer was a boy about Billy's age, he would be around 91 years old today, meaning there is a remote possibility that he may still be alive.
However, there are a few other interesting footnotes in this story. Billy's father, Amos Ellsworth Krewson, died at the age of 56. His date of death is listed as August 21, 1947-- the sixth year anniversary of the day when thousands of Berks County residents lined up to pay their respects to Billy Krewson. According to his obituary in the Reading Eagle, he died from a fractured skull after falling from a roof on which he was working on Carsonia Avenue (at the time, the Krewsons were living at 1827 Cotton Street). It is also interesting to note that Billy's older brother, Paul, appears in 1950 census records as a 20-year-old inmate at the Huntingdon Reformatory for Young Offenders. Since the reformatory housed offenders between the ages of 15 and 25, it's unclear if Paul was a minor at the time of his conviction.

Since there doesn't seem to be any records describing what crime, or crimes, he had committed to wind up in such a place-- and since all members of the immediate family are now deceased-- one can only wonder if he was in any way connected to his brother's tragic death. Of course, it would be wrong to rush to any judgment (for all anyone knows, Paul could've been sent to Huntingdon for robbing a newsstand or taking someone's car for a joyride), but as far as the case of Billy Krewson goes, it seems rather strange that the story should drop off the front pages of every newspaper in Pennsylvania after only a week. To my mind, this suggests that the case was indeed solved, but the age of the perpetrator prevented his identity from being disclosed to the public. But, then again, I could be wrong.
if anyone knows how this story ends, let me know!

 




Sources:

Allentown Morning Call, Aug. 17, 1941.
Harrisburg Telegraph, Aug. 18, 1941.
Mahanoy City Record-American, Aug. 19, 1941.
Hazleton Plain Speaker, Aug. 20, 1941.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Aug. 19, 1941.
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Aug. 20, 1941.
Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug. 21, 1941.
Allentown Morning Call, Aug. 22, 1941.
Reading Eagle, Aug. 22, 1947.