When the body of Cardinals scout Les Wilson was found bloodied and battered in a hotel room, police suspected murder. Turns out, the victim killed himself.
Seventy-five years ago, on Aug. 17, 1946, Wilson, 35, died after a hellish night of hallucinations and destructive drinking.
The demons that tormented him took a terrible toll.
Farm work
Edward Leslie Wilson was born in St. Louis on Aug. 15, 1911, according to baseball-reference.com. He relocated with his family from St. Louis to Fayetteville, Ark., when he was 8, the Associated Press reported.
Wilson excelled at baseball in high school in Fayetteville. A catcher and infielder, he went on to play multiple seasons in the minors.
He broke his hand when Dom Dallessandro, a future big-leaguer, accidently stepped on it during a play at first base, according to the Associated Press.
After the hand injury, Wilson returned to Fayetteville and ran a cab company, the Associated Press reported.
He attempted a comeback as a player, then became an umpire in the minors from 1938-41.
Wilson enlisted in the Army Air Forces on Dec. 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Soon after his honorable discharge on Jan. 15, 1946, the Cardinals hired Wilson to be a scout.
At the Cardinals’ minor-league spring training camp at Albany, Ga., in 1946, Wilson worked with Wally Schang, manager of the Marion, Ohio, team, in selecting a roster, the Marion Star reported.
Early in the season, Wilson spent nearly a week in Marion, “helping shape the team,” according to the Marion newspaper.
Wilson “discovered and signed several of the players now on the active list, including catcher Vern Rapp,” the Marion Star reported. Rapp would manage the Cardinals in 1977 and 1978.
Mystery visit
After his work with Marion, Wilson’s other assignments included helping run Cardinals tryout camps in Canada, Nebraska and Missouri, according to the Ottawa Citizen and the Associated Press.
Eventually, Wilson was assigned to scout in Texas, United Press reported.
During the first week of August, Joe Mathes, head of the Cardinals’ farm and scouting systems, said he spoke to Wilson in Houston, the Associated Press reported. Mathes said he assigned Wilson to be in Colorado Springs, Colo., for the American Legion Tournament Aug. 11-14.
“He wasn’t supposed to be in Dallas,” Mathes told the Dallas Times-Herald.
Wilson checked in to a Dallas hotel on Aug. 13. The next night, Aug. 14, he was told to leave because he became intoxicated and destroyed several pieces of furniture in his room, the hotel manager told United Press.
Wilson was arrested on a charge of drunkenness on the night of Aug. 14 and spent his 35th birthday, Aug. 15, in jail. He was released the morning of Aug. 16 after paying a $10 fine.
Dark night
At 6:05 on the morning of Aug. 16, Wilson checked in to the Savoy Hotel and was given a room on the fourth floor, the Associated Press reported. United Press described it as “a third-rate Dallas hotel.”
That night, Wilson had a hotel porter, William Brown, bring him two bottles of whiskey and a bottle of wine, United Press reported. Brown said Wilson was alone in the room.
Hours later, at 3:15 a.m. on Aug. 17, another porter, Johnny Lee Joe, was summoned to Wilson’s room. The porter “found the room wildly disarranged” and Wilson was “bloody and battered,” United Press reported.
Wilson, alone in the room, wanted ice water. The porter asked Wilson if he needed help. “Wilson said no, he had hurt himself in a fall, but would be all right,” United Press reported.
About six hours later, at 9:45 a.m. on Aug. 17, housekeeper Opal Cooper entered the room and discovered Wilson dead.
Gruesome scene
“His blood-stained, bruised body was found in a sitting position, propped against the wall,” The Sporting News reported.
Police suspected Wilson “died in a desperate battle with robbers in his room,” United Press reported.
“The walls were splattered with blood from baseboards to shoulder height,” according to United Press. “Blood even was splattered on the ceiling. Furniture was broken and blood soaked the broken bed.”
The first physician on the scene saw gashes on Wilson’s head and shoulders and determined those were knife wounds, United Press reported.
“A coroner’s investigation disclosed Wilson had been slashed across the throat and stabbed in the head and shoulders by an unknown assailant,” according to United Press.
“Wilson’s body was a mass of bruises, indicating he also was engaged in a fistfight with his attacker before the fatal wounds were inflicted.”
According to the Associated Press, detective chief Will Fritz “said he believed Wilson had been knocked unconscious in a fight, regained his senses and staggered about the room in a dazed condition. He said that could explain blood stains on the wall.”
Detective Fritz estimated the time of death to be 5:30 a.m.
No weapons were found in the room. On the dresser was a wallet, but the only money found were a few scattered coins, United Press reported.
According to the Associated Press, “on the floor of the wrecked room police found fragments of a torn photograph of a woman.”
An empty whiskey bottle and one half-full were on a window sill when officers arrived, United Press reported.
“Police had not the slightest doubt they were confronted with a murder,” United Press noted. “It promised to be a murder mystery.”
According to the Associated Press, two men dressed in khakis were sought by police in connection with the murder. The men were seen walking down the hotel’s fourth-floor hallway with Wilson the afternoon of Aug. 16.
Police also held three persons for questioning: the late-night porter, and two hotel guests _ a 33-year-old man Detective Fritz said had been arrested many times, and a 30-year-old woman.
Drunken violence
The case took an unexpected twist after an autopsy was ordered by a justice of the peace.
The autopsy was conducted by two physicians at Parkland Hospital in Dallas: Dr. Morton Mason, a toxicologist, and Dr. Charles Ashworth, a pathologist.
Dr. Mason ruled cause of death was “acute alcoholism.”
Wilson “killed himself with alcoholic gluttony in a wild, all-night wrestle with whiskey-produced phantoms,” United Press concluded. “Not one of his many wounds, all evidently inflicted when he flung himself against the walls of his hotel room in pursuit of bottle demons, was sufficient to have caused death,” the doctors said.
Dr. Ashworth said Wilson suffered a smashed nose and swollen upper lip, International News Service reported.
Detective Fritz said Wilson lost considerable blood from nose bleeding, the Associated Press reported.
According to The Sporting News, friends attributed Wilson’s “mental condition to reaction from the war and the death of his father last year.”
Wilson, unmarried, was survived by a cousin and an aunt, both of St. Louis, the Associated Press reported.
Cardinals owner Sam Breadon authorized a Dallas mortician, Vernon O’Neal, to hold funeral services and burial in Dallas Aug. 20 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, according to the Associated Press.
Leave a Reply