In The Bronx

RATTLER LOOSE IN BRONX, BITE KILLS IN 15 MINUTES, screamed New York's tabloid News one day last week. In varying versions New Yorkers read of one Paul Mosher, 25, who, lounging with a friend in his Bronx backyard, had heard a sinister rattle, beheld four 7-ft. Texas rattlesnakes coiled and ready to strike. Stoutly the friends had seized rocks, crushed the life out of three serpents. But the fourth had escaped.

At once police, detectives and the Bronx Zoo's reptile house keeper Fred Taggert, began scuttling about the neighborhood. Mothers locked up their children.

Next day Dr. Raymond Lee Ditmars, famed herpetologist, examined the dead snakes. Quietly but firmly he announced that they bore no bruises, had been dead at least 24 hours before the alleged stoning. He thought the Texas rattlers, which cannot bear exposure, had probably died of sunburn.

Soon conscience-stricken Paul Mosher, an amateur taxidermist, hurried to Dr. Ditmars to confess that he had invented both the story and the fourth snake. The snakes, he said, were indeed dead when he got them from Hawaii Joe, snake charmer at Hubert's Museum on 42nd St. Said Hawaii Joe, who has a coiled rattlesnake tattooed on each cheek and a butterfly on his forehead, and whose real name is Charles Chillingsworth: "In my business I use up from eight to ten rattlers a week. I get 'em from Texas at $1 a pound. . . . I can't use dead snakes in my stunt, so I gave him all three. Next thing I see in the papers is a big story how these two guys killed the snakes with stones. That's not true. I'm the one that killed 'em. I use 'em up fast. They get exhausted fighting me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.