CRIME: Case of the Bedroom Slippers

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Frederick Doell of the German Consulate climbed the subway steps into the chill, clear Brooklyn afternoon, trudged eight blocks to a quiet, dead-end street, turned off at the second house in a row of five brick-and-frame cottages.

Mr. Doell mounted the porch steps, rang the bell. Nobody answered. The front shades were drawn. He rapped sharply on the glass door-panels; still no answer.

Mr. Doell walked round to the back of the house, hastily turned his back on a Jewish cemetery which faces the rear door, and rapped again. The door key was on the outside, the door unlocked. Mr. Doell went in. It was 1 p. m.

The house was quiet. Mr. Doell went through the carefully furnished rooms on the lower floor. Without pausing to admire the objets d'art from the Orient and the Near East, Mr. Doell mounted the stairs. Through the open door of a bedroom he noted a rumpled bed, a blue bathrobe flung carelessly over it, on the floor a pair of men's large bedroom slippers. He peeked into a study packed with books, filing cabinets, a globe. On the floor an Assyrian water pipe, two-thirds-filled, caught his eye.

Mr. Doell went to the back of the house, entered the master bedroom. On a three-quarter-size bed, on top of the covers, lay the man he had come to see: Dr. Walter Engelberg, 42, secretary of the Consulate. Dr. Engelberg was dressed in an old-fashioned white nightgown, his hands folded peacefully across his chest, the fingers extended. His head had been smashed by three blows. Obliterated were two sabre scars, marks of duels. He had been dead 24 hours.

That was why quiet, efficient Dr. Engelberg had not reported for work. Mr. Doell called the police. Headlines exploded: Was this an international political crime?

On the chance that it might be, police photographed everything in sight, prepared to make meticulous reports to the German Embassy in Washington, moved through the six rooms foot by foot. Books and letters were everywhere—most in German, many on nudism. There were scores of photographs of naked men, many middleaged. Neighbors had noted that no women went to see black-haired, squat Dr. Engelberg; that his servants were men, his numerous visitors were men.

In the bathroom, police found ten bloody fingerprints of a man's hand; in the front room, bloody handprints on a nightshirt hung on the doorknob. In the garage, near 18 heavy packing cases, was a pile of 100 used light bulbs. Prize clue, the police considered, was the size-11 bedroom slippers. They set a policewoman translator at the Doctor's desk, soon had a list of eight suspects. At week's end they were hunting a heavily muscled young third-rate prize fighter called "Swede," had traced him to a Florida-bound bus. All the paraphernalia of an international murder mystery surrounded the case: only the motive was missing.

Almost as if it wanted the case closed quickly, Berlin sent word that "authorized sources" considered the crime personal, not political. Sniped Walter Winchell: "The murder . . . will be traced to the jealousy of his dearest Roehm mate."