Death Among Thieves

The Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pa., sometimes called "the country club," is also a rough place, the scene of several recent beatings and sluggings and the home of several gangland veterans of a 1952 riot at the Chillicothe, Ohio prison. Last week one, or two, or three Lewisburg inmates crept into a third-floor, four-man cell and swung a brick in a knotted white sock down on the head of a sleeping man. The victim: William Walter Remington, B.A., Phi Beta Kappa (Dartmouth), M.A. (Columbia), and convicted perjurer.

After the attack, Remington crawled down a flight of steps, was found by a guard on the second-floor landing, dazed and bleeding. In the prison hospital he tried to speak, but the words would not come. Next day, a surgeon operated to remove chips of bone and relieve pressure on the brain from skull fractures. Sixteen hours later, Bill Remington died.

Promptly the FBI arrested two car thieves, charging them with murder. The accused: George Junior McCoy, 34, of Grundy, Va. and Robert Carl Parker, 21, of Washington. D.C. Later, the FBI added a third inmate to its list of suspects, another car thief named Lewis Cagle, 17, of Chattanooga.

Born 37 years ago, William Remington was well on the way to a distinguished career in Government in 1948 when Elizabeth Bentley named him as one of her sources of secret defense information at the time that she was a Communist spy. He had worked for the National Resources Planning Board, the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board and the President's Council of Economic Advisers. After the Bentley charges, he was suspended as chief of the Commerce Department's export program, but later was reinstated by a loyalty board that rejected the Bentley testimony. When more evidence against Remington came to light, Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer fired him.

In 1951 Remington was convicted of perjury, but a Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the verdict on the technicality that the trial judge's charge to the jury had been vague. Early last year, on the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, of his divorced wife Ann Moos Remington and others, Remington was found guilty of lying when he denied that he had known of the Young Communist League at Dartmouth and that he had given secrets to Bentley. Between the two trials, Remington remarried; a son was born a month after he started his three-year Lewisburg term in April 1953.

By week's end the murder motive remained unclear. Inevitably, there was talk that Remington had been killed because of his Communist background. Said the Daily Worker: "To shocked humanity it will smell strongly like the jails of Hitler and Mussolini.'' The FBI and Remington's lawyer doubted that politics played the slightest part in the crime.

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