Ghost Burglar Interest

Jim King, co-author of the upcoming True Crime book, Ghost Burglar, was recently on a wedding cruise (Not his own.) on the Chesapeake Bay and was asked, "What's your book about?"

His Answer:

It's a case I investigated for about five years.

The wealthy areas in and around Washington were getting hit hard by silver burglars in the mid-70's due to the rising price of silver. There were a lot of criminals doing this, but one MO stood out. Most burglaries were daytime, but these particular ones were in the evenings. They were distinguished as much by what was not stolen as what was. Whomever was doing the crimes took only good silver, jewelry, antiques, art, oriental carpets, and furs. No TV's, stereos, checks or credit cards. Slowly we, the investigators, came to the conclusion it was one person.

But that was impossible. This criminal was hitting three or four times a night, five to six nights a week and no one had ever seen him. He was like a ghost.

In the springtime these particular thefts stopped, only to continue in the fall. It was like he took the summer off. None of the normal police tactics worked. There were no fences, no informants, no witnesses, no finger prints, nothing left behind.

Over the years the criminal was getting more aggressive, maybe even cocky, because of his success. He began to confront people and rather than running, he beat handcuffed and even raped lone women in their homes. We investigators recognized this behavior from other serial criminals and knew he would increasingly confront victims until somebody was killed.

In 1978, from one of the raped women, I discovered that the criminal had a full set of false teeth. I remembered a police meeting from four years before of a similar burglar in the Richmond, VA area. I contacted a detective in Richmond and learned that a suspect had escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility, commonly called Dannemora, a New York prison. Prison records indicated that a man named Bernard Welch had received a full set of false teeth while incarcerated. I put it together.

Bernard Welch, followed the same MO in D.C. as the burglar in Richmond and also hauled his loot to out of state auction houses. I started contacting auction places up and down the East Coast. Welch was from New York and had sold stolen goods in Florida. That effort produced no results so I tried mailing wanted posters to the Midwest. I got one response from Illinois, but it was the wrong guy. I never sent anything to Minnesota, because who would sell hot stuff in Minnesota? It was at this time that Welch was arrested for the gunshot murder of famed cardiologist Michael Halberstam.

Welch went on to escape from an escape-proof jail in downtown Chicago and return to Greensburg, Pennsylvania where he resumed his life as crime as had done in New York, Richmond, VA., and Washington D.C. until he was again caught because he was double parked in a car he had stolen in Wisconsin.

The best line of Jim's tale was, "They all said they would buy copies of the book and read it because it sounded so interesting."

SWEET!