The Whole Book

On the dark, squally afternoon of April 3, 1950, three ex-convicts shot and killed a messenger carrying $4,960 (along with more than $35,000 in non-negotiable checks) from the Reader's Digest offices near Pleasantville, N.Y. Two months later the killers were arrested. Tried and convicted were Calman Cooper, a paroled bandit, Harry Stein, a sullen thug, and Nathan Wissner, a habitual criminal. They were sentenced to die the week of Feb. 11, 1951--but justice was not to come so quickly.

Represented by tireless and ingenious lawyers, the Reader's Digest Killers (as they came to be known), ran through the whole book of the law, got nine stays of execution. One of their appeals was based on a paragraph in a Reader's Digest article which told how a Yiddish-speaking cop was stationed near the defendants at their trial to eavesdrop as they spoke to each other.

Last week, after three U.S. Supreme Court Justices and New York's Acting Governor George B. DeLuca had rejected in turn their final, desperate pleas, the book was finally closed on Cooper, 47, Stein, 57, and Wissner, 43. Four years, four months and 28 days after they went to the death house, the Reader's Digest Killers went to the electric chair at Sing Sing.

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