Murder can sometimes be odd. Odd MO, odd choice of weapon, or odd motive. However, I don’t think anything will truly be as odd as a parrot solving a murder case.
In Harlem, New York City, there was a gem of an establishment. The Green Parrot Restaurant was owned and operated by Max Geller and frequented by a steady base of regular customers. There was a very particular attraction that kept customers coming – Max’s parrot.
The establishment was named in honour of the parrot – whose name I could not find no matter how hard I looked. The parrot was very smart – and very vocal. It would often call out to customers by their first name, and follow it up with an epithet of insults. As stated by The St. Petersburg Times, the parrot was “an old bird with a salted vocabulary”.
On the evening of Sunday, July 12th, 1942, a man came into the Green Parrot looking for a drink. Max refused to serve him – the man was clearly already very intoxicated. In a fit of fury, the man pulled a gun on Max and shot. He lost consciousness as soon as police arrived on the scene.
Max would have been unable to speak even if he had been conscious – the bullet had torn through his vocal chords. He was laid up in hospital, voiceless, in a coma.
Detective Captain Daniel Mahoney and ADA Louis A. Pagnucco – who was on loan to the Harlem Homicide Office from the District Attorney’s office – rushed to the scene when they received word. They found a smattering of witnesses and a parrot. The parrot kept squawking at them, saying something they believed to be “Robber! Robber!” over and over again.
The witnesses refused to talk. Many of them claimed that they’d been “so engrossed” with conversation with each other, that they hadn’t noticed who had done the shooting, only that Max had been shot. The wall of silence was very common in Harlem.
“What a case!” Captain Mahoney told The St. Petersburg Times. “A dying man who can’t talk, 20 witnesses who won’t and a squawking parrot we can’t shut up!”
Three weeks after the shooting, Max Geller succumbed to his injuries. He died on August 2nd, 1942. Pagnucco was officially put on the case.
He was in the process of interviewing uncooperative witnesses when he hit a stroke of luck. Stepping outside for a moment, he heard two women talking to each other. But they weren’t speaking in English. It took Pagnucco, who was quite proficient in languages, a moment to realize they were speaking French. With that cleared up, he figured out what was going on.
The women were scared. They weren’t meant to be at the Green Parrot the night of the shooting – they’d lied to their husbands, and they feared the consequences of their husbands finding. Especially in the case of one of the women.
Pagnucco took one to his office and asked, quite casually, “About your girl friend, does her husband really beat her up?” When the woman appeared confused, he repeated the question in French. From that moment on, the woman realized she could trust him. She told him the truth – and her friend corroborated the story.
The night of the shooting, they’d been sitting at a table at the Green Parrot. They were facing the bar. They saw a man they thought looked familiar, they figured he must have been a regular. They heard Max shout at him to get out, and then they saw the man raise his gun and shoot Max in the throat. Other witnesses stated they saw a man run out of the restaurant with a gun.
Pagnucco thanked the women for their cooperation, and then proceeded to investigate with this new information. He had the help of a very keen police officer, Detective John J. Morrisey.
Detective Morrisey spent copious amounts of time with the parrot. He took meticulous notes and got quite familiar with the parrot’s vocalizations. And then he started speculating.
He realized that the parrot used a very specific stream of words after it identified a familiar face. The parrot would name the person by name, and follow it up with its colourful vocabulary. Detective Morrisey figured out that the parrot was following up it’s statement of “Robber! Robber!” with this stream of words.
With this pattern of parrot behaviour in mind, he approached Pagnucco with his suggestion. What if the parrot wasn’t saying ‘robber’ at all, what if it was, in fact, naming the killer? What could possibly sound like ‘robber’? They speculated that the name the parrot was trying to say was “Robert! Robert!”
It was as good a lead as any. Pagnucco and Morrisey followed up and began going through Max’s customer base looking for a Robert. Through the process of elimination, they came across the name Robert Butler.
Robert Butler was a frequent Green Parrot customer and a cab-driver. He’d also skipped out on work and had quickly disappeared after the shooting.
Friends and family had no idea where he was, and his wife seemed especially blasé and unconcerned as to his whereabouts. This seemed suspicious to Pagnucco and Morrisey. Figuring Butler was keeping in touch somehow, they covered their bases.
Through a very cooperative postal worker, they began tracing post coming and going from the post office closest to Butler’s Harlem residence. They found an unmarked letter being picked up by a friend of Butler’s. A quick perusal of the letter showed that it was from Baltimore, Maryland, signed by a man named “Robert”, and informed the reader that he’d found work at a steel plant, but was otherwise devoid of much detail.
Pagnucco and Morrisey staked out the plant in Baltimore, waiting for Butler to emerge. They soon saw a man that matched the photograph they had. They knew they had their man.
When asked what he knew about the shooting, he tried to deny any knowledge of it.
Then he was asked what he thought of the parrot. “Smart bird,” he replied, growing more and more suspicious.
When he was informed that the parrot had, in fact, named him as the killer, Butler replied: “I never did like that bird.”
Robert Butler was placed under arrest and charged with the murder of Max Geller.
Butler told investigators that he’d gotten into some trouble gambling, and had taken to carrying a gun for protection. The night of the shooting, he was already drunk and raging, and was further enraged when Max denied him a drink. He raised his gun and shot without thinking.
On February 10th, 1944, Robert Butler was sentenced to up to fifteen years in Sing Sing.
As for the parrot – no one knows what happened to it.
— — —
Like what you’re reading? Follow me on Twitter or Facebook for the latest updates!
Sources:
The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes – Robin Odell
The Green Parrot Murder Mystery – Edward Radin – The St. Petersburg Times