Gay Bashing, 1936 style

In 1936, how does the largest-circulation newspaper in the United States tell its millions of readers that a murder victim was gay without actually saying it?

When 35-year-old R. Walton Ford was tied up and strangled at the Hotel Sutton on East 56th Street in Manhattan, the New York Daily News described the room:

On a dresser, police found a number of pictures of handsome young men and beside them perfume and a powder-puff.

The Daily News and its competitors dropped other hints. They called Ford an interior decorator, code during that era for an effeminate man. They said he met two young men at a bar and invited them up to his room for drinks — at 2 a.m.

The suspects, Walter Seymour and Harry Martin, both 19, were captured a few days later and confessed to bludgeoning Ford and strangling him with two neckties and a towel. They robbed him of $40 (worth about $900 today).

Prosecutors charged them with first-degree murder but allowed them to plead guilty to second-degree murder and avoid the electric chair because Ford’s family, living in Virginia, wanted to avoid the scandal of a trial.

I learned about the Ford case when I visited the Hotel Sutton a few years ago to research the 1942 murder at the center of “Madeline Gets Life,” the true crime book I’m writing with M.J. Van Deventer.

The hotel is now called AKA Sutton Place, and a desk clerk shared clippings about the 1936 murder as well as a homicide in 1955 – a chef at the Sutton killed a dishwasher. The clerk was unaware of the 1942 killing.

Ford’s murder also gets a mention in “Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall,” an engaging examination of violence against gay men in the 20th century by James Polchin.