JUSTICE STORY: ‘Fish-eyed’ killer with strange accent terrorized couples in Queens lovers lanes

The men had little in common. Joseph Mozynski, 39, married with two children, was a delicatessen owner from Queens. Noel Sowley, 26, was a swimming and diving champion from Brooklyn. His name, face, and victories had been splashed all over the sports sections of New York newspapers for years.

Despite their differences, the men would become forever linked one week in June 1930: the “Don Juans of Queens lovers lanes,” as the Daily News called them. Both were shot dead by a mysterious killer during petting parties in their cars.

In the early evening of June 11, Mozynski told his wife to mind the store while he ran an errand. The “errand” was a tryst with Catherine May, 19, a pretty brunette who had been his mistress for two years.

The next morning, a passerby found his body sprawled in a ditch along a dirt road in Whitestone. He had been shot twice in the head. Inside his truck was a blood-spattered velvet cloak.

Police traced the garment to May and brought her in for questioning.

May said that shortly after they parked, a strange man appeared from nowhere. He ordered Mozynski to get into the driver’s seat and then shot him. May said the killer pulled some papers from the dead man’s jacket pocket, lit a match, and set them on fire.

He forced May to walk with him for a mile to Bayside, where they boarded a bus to Flushing. There, he put her on a trolley and vanished into the night.

Before he left, he handed her a piece of paper. It had two circular red rubber stamps. In one circle was the name “Mozynski.” In the other was “3X.”

She was too terrified to call the police.

No one believed her until June 17, when a passerby spotted the corpse of swimming champ Sowley slumped in a car at another well-known lovers rendezvous.

The night before, he had picked up Betty Ring, 18, and drove her to this secluded hot spot.

Ring’s story echoed what May had described. Not long after Sowley parked, a man with a gun approached, forced him into the driver’s seat, and shot him twice in the head. Then, cackling, he tossed a newspaper clipping about Mozynski’s murder on the corpse.

As with Mozynski, he looked through Sowley’s pockets until he found something that Ring said looked like an electric company bill. “I have it,” the killer crowed.

Ring described the gunman as short, skinny, and wearing a dirty black fedora. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was lined, pale, and the texture of parchment. He spoke with a strange German accent.

But his eyes were what stood out in her mind.

“They were eyes that never blinked, like the eyes of a fish swimming through water,” she said.

He reached over Sowley’s corpse and tried to kiss her. But he pulled back when he saw she was wearing a St. Joseph medallion.

“Are you a Catholic?” he asked. She said yes. After that, he told her he would not harm her.

As with May, the killer escorted Ring to a bus and handed her a piece of paper before sending her on her way. Once again, there were two red rubber stamps, one encircling Sowley’s name, the other around a 3X.

Sowley’s murder prompted police to look at weird letters that had come into police and newspaper offices in the previous days.

“Lovers’ Lane Fiend Kills No. 2; 14 More Doomed, He Warns” was how the Daily News summed up the messages in its headline on June 18, 1930.

“I am the agent of a secret international order,” one letter declared. He said he was a former German army officer, now working for the Russians. His mission was to secure some crucial documents from other members of the secret organization who had deserted.

“Thirteen more men and a woman will go the same way if they do not return two of the missing documents,” he wrote. “The New York document was found on Sowley last night.” Then he offered a code for the next victim—“W. R. V.-8”—who was slated to die that night near College Point at 9 p.m.

The letters were signed “3X.”

Thousands of officers set out, guarding every mailbox and beating the bushes around lovers’ lanes. Some impersonated petters with one officer dressed in women’s clothes, with rouge and lipstick, hoping to lure the gunman.

Some were assigned to direct traffic. Queens residents stayed behind locked doors, but the threat of a maniac on the loose did little to deter the curious from other boroughs. An estimated 2,100 cars clogged the streets of College Point.

Nothing happened that night.

Another letter sent the same day revealed that W. R. V.-8 had returned the document and $37,000 of blackmail money. About half the targets were now off the hook.

On June 21, the New York Evening-Journal received a new 3X letter. “My mission is ended. There is no further cause for worry,” the note said. “I have no fish eyes. The police have fish eyes. They have been wrong from beginning to end.”

In a P.S. he noted, “Do not let anyone fool you; if any more letters come, they are fakes. … It is settled.”

Police continued the hunt for the killer for a few more months. Many more letters came in, all proven to be fakes. The phantom known as 3X faded from the newspapers and the minds of New Yorkers.

He popped up again briefly in October 1937, when a couple was found shot and stabbed in Hollis, Queens. But investigators turned up no connection to 3X.

Like the earlier slayings, these murders were never solved.

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