The Bradway Brown burglary murder (1933)

Case summary

Brown, treasurer of a Philadelphia printing company his late father Charles T. Brown had once headed, was found sprawled on the living-room floor of his home, shot in the lung and back. A neighbor, Mrs. Harold West, told police she heard two shots that seemed to come from the Brown garage and saw two men run from the property. His wife, Ruth McCauley Brown, was away visiting relatives in Pennsylvania at the time. Doctors disagreed sharply at first over murder versus suicide — Dr. Dean Lefavor of Palmyra and, after a three-hour autopsy, Burlington County physician Dr. Daniel F. Remer both concluded Brown could not have shot himself and then carried the weapon and himself as the evidence required — while county investigators under Ellis Parker, chief of the Burlington County detectives, initially kept the possibility of suicide open. Brown had earlier been a witness at the 1929 inquest into the murder-suicide of his friends Ruth Wilson and Horace Roberts Jr. at Moorestown.

Parker's investigation eventually tied the killing to a burglary gang. By April 1934 police announced the case "solved" with the indictment of three men: Edward Adamski, who admitted being at the scene; Adam Szewczak, described as already serving time in Philadelphia's Eastern Penitentiary for a $150,000 bond theft, accused of firing the fatal shots during a scuffle in the garage; and Solomon Lutz, a Philadelphia barber held as an accomplice who said he had rented the getaway car. By the time Szewczak's trial opened in Burlington County Court in Mount Holly on June 18, 1934, Adamski and Lutz had already pleaded nolo contendere and were expected to testify against him as naming him the man who fired the shot that killed Brown "outside the garage to his palatial Cinnaminson township home." Mid-trial, after a juror was excused when her husband died overnight, counsel agreed to continue with eleven jurors; Szewczak then abruptly entered his own nolo contendere plea and, on June 21, 1934, was sentenced immediately by Judge Frank A. Hendrickson to life imprisonment. Adamski — by then described as the state's star witness — was sentenced that same day to 20-to-30 years at Trenton State Prison; a follow-up wire item a few days later has him claiming, apparently opportunistically, to hold information on the Lindbergh kidnapping. A later clipping records an Adamski among hundreds of prisoners petitioning the State Court of Pardons. Solomon Lutz's own sentence was not found in the sources opened this session.

Reconciling the two place names. This entry previously existed as two separate pages because the surviving contemporary clippings name the location differently. Associated Press wire stories datelined the story "PALMYRA, New Jersey" on January 17 and 18, 1933, and an April 1934 photo caption likewise places the garage "at Palmyra, N.J." But the body of that same January 18, 1933 Evening Star dispatch states Brown "was found...dead in the living room of his home in Cinnaminson Township," and both the June 1934 trial report and a June 21, 1934 dispatch describe the killing as happening at his home "in Cinnaminson"/his "Cinnaminson township home." Palmyra and Cinnaminson Township are adjacent Burlington County municipalities; Highland Road sits near their shared boundary, and Palmyra was very likely the nearer post office, rail stop, or wire-service dateline point used loosely for the neighborhood, while Cinnaminson Township was the actual civil jurisdiction of the house. No 1930 census or city-directory listing for Brown's household could be reached this session to pin the exact lot line, so the Palmyra/Cinnaminson distinction should be read as a period reporting inconsistency about one house, not evidence of two different killings.

An additional undated clipping headed "Suspect Is Jailed in Brown Murder," datelined Mount Holly and probably from March 1933, describes an unnamed suspect arrested near Media, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday and brought to Mount Holly the next day by Burlington County detective Clifford Cain, accompanied by Riverside Police Chief Voehel. The clipping gives no charge, trial, or outcome for this suspect, and it is not possible from the sources opened this session to confirm whether this arrest led anywhere or how, if at all, it connects to the three men indicted a year later.