100 Murder Cases

patrolman's wife nearly buried by a likely police coverup

For the rest of her days, Alice Forsythe would never forget the sounds coming from behind the door of room 311.

Nor the horrific sight that awaited her when the frightened chambermaid, eyes wide and heart racing, slowly pushed open the door to the room at the Mansfield Hall Hotel on W. 50th St. in Manhattan.

Moments earlier, Forsythe was walking down the hall when she heard moans — low and guttural, followed by a series of soft whimpers.

The longtime hotel employee could tell the difference between pleasure and pain, and these were no cries of passion. It was the noise of a wounded animal in its death throes, and as she put her ear to the unlocked door, it creaked open. Forsythe stepped uneasily into the unkempt room and went weak at the knees.

Lying on the blood-soaked mattress was a woman clad only in her underthings, eyes closed and still making those terrible sounds. Her arms were caked in blood up to the elbows as she clutched the areas between her legs.

The woman suddenly opened her eyes and in a raspy murmur asked the maid to call a man named "Frank" and beg him to come quickly. She rattled off the number, then passed out.

Forsythe made two calls — one to Frank, the other to police. Frank came to the phone. But he never showed.

An ambulance eventually took the woman to a hospital, where she spent 10 days in abject agony flitting in and out of consciousness before she died.

Her death on May 3, 1929, only merited a couple of paragraphs buried in the middle of one of the New York papers. It said that Helen Coberg of Astoria, Queens, the 34-year-old wife of a cop, had succumbed to her injuries — at the hands of a heartless hit-and-run driver.

Her distraught husband, Patrolman Christopher Coberg, was quoted as saying the accident occurred on W. 50th St. and the driver sped away.

It wasn't until an autopsy the next day that the ugly truth was revealed: This was no accident. It was a horrific homicide that shook the city for its audacious level of depravity.

Mrs. Coberg was the victim of a "Jack-the-Ripper sadist," blared the Daily News. The fiend had somehow lured the victim, mother of a 15-year-old daughter and loyal spouse of one of New York's Finest, to the Mansfield Hall Hotel, where he committed his unspeakable atrocities.

There, in the grimy confines of room 311, a man who had registered under the fake name of "Fred Merritt" brutally raped Coberg, stomped her senseless and left the inebriated victim with a deep gash that tore her privates. The medical examiner said she died of blood poisoning exacerbated by her ghastly injuries. The likely consumption of a bad batch of Prohibition-era bootleg hooch didn't help.

The killer disappeared, leaving the helpless woman writhing in pain for an entire day. But another mystery was about to unfold, a troubling blend of bungles and a possible cover-up by authorities The News described as "a curtain of police stupidity and official hush-hush attempts" to keep the true nature of the crime — and the criminal's identity — under wraps.

Once reporters swarmed onto the story — The News called it "a crime of sex-madness and booze that struck home to the [police] department" — an embarrassed NYPD Commissioner Grover Whalen ordered an investigation into why it had taken detectives more than a week to respond to a clear-cut case of homicide.

Especially with the victim being the wife of a patrolman.

Internal investigators soon found a host of suspicious activity by cops involved on the case. It was discovered the first patrolman on the scene had failed to properly report that a bloodied, near-dead woman was found in a hotel room, and that no one bothered to investigate any further.

Then there was the matter of the initial account that Coberg was hit by a car. It was an obvious lie, yet confirmed by her policeman husband. Why would he say that?

Suspicion for the murder now fell on Patrolman Coberg, who had sure taken his sweet time acting on the fact his wife of 16 years, an interior decorator at Gimbels, never returned from work the day before she was found in the hotel.

But then came a shocking twist that turned the case on its head. The alleged killer had been right under the cops' noses all along ― strongly suggesting that several policeman, including Coberg, had known for days who the perpetrator was.

He was Patrolman Frank Gentner, who lived and worked near the Mansfield Hall Hotel — and was a boyhood friend of both Mr. and Mrs. Coberg. He'd also been carrying on with his buddy's spouse for ages.

The case of a bloodthirsty madman preying on respectable women was now a tailor-made tabloid scandal with loads of sordid details. Cops said Gentner met Mrs. Coberg for an illicit afternoon tryst, but that things must have gotten out of hand and he flew into a rage, causing her fatal injuries.

The papers hinted the woman's wounds may even have been caused by botched "criminal surgery," a euphemism for illegal abortion, though a coroner later ruled that out.

Gentner, of course, denied having anything to do with her death. He claimed he was only a loyal friend who ran to Mrs. Coberg's aid when the poor woman, completely soused after an early-morning drinkathon at some speakeasy, phoned him from the street.

The cop swore he only took her to the hotel so that she could sleep it off before going home, and left as soon as the woman fell asleep. He had no idea what happened to her after that.

His story had too many obvious holes, and Gentner was charged with manslaughter after a friend who lived at the hotel told police he had arranged the room as a favor so the cop could meet his married paramour.

Alice Forsythe, the maid who found Coberg, was so disturbed by the incident she disappeared for nearly two weeks. Cops tracked her down, and she also helped nail down the case against Gentner when she told about her phone call to a man named Frank.

And the victim's daughter, also named Helen, dropped a bombshell when she said Gentner had called the Cobergs' home hours before the woman left for her fateful date.

Still, a mystery remained: Why had Patrolman Coberg, apparently aware that his old friend killed his wife, chosen to stay silent? Was it a twisted example of what would come to be known as the "Blue Wall of Silence," the unspoken code that mandated you were to protect your fellow cops at all cost — even if someone murdered your wife?

Perhaps, some wondered, it was simply a case of a cuckolded hubby not wanting to be a front-page laughing stock? Or maybe he initially thought his wife's fatal wounds were the result of a botched abortion, and had asked his colleagues to keep mum?

The questions were never answered. Five months after the death of Helen Coberg, a grand jury failed to charge Gentner with any crime. The disgraced cop walked out of jail a free man and disappeared from public view.

Mrs. Helen Coberg, meanwhile, was a victim three times over. Once by the man who left her bloodied and battered in a hotel room to die. The second by her husband, who for whatever reason refused to get to the bottom of her death.

And the last by a parasitic New York press corps who dragged her name through the mud by painting her as a wanton woman whose lustful misadventures led to a grisly demise.