In Omaha

Two years ago, stores, theatres ard even churches in Omaha were closed and darkened after nightfall for fear of the "phantom sniper," a creature who, invisible for nearly two weeks, moved through the evening streets firing a silent pistol at whatever human targets took his fancy in the house windows or under streetlights. A contractor was first to die. Then a doctor was slain in his office. A railroad detective was riddled in the freight yards. A bullet smashed past a girl at a drugstore counter. The "phantom" also went shooting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River. His weapon made only a muffled chug in the night as his lead whizzed after pedestrians and into people's homes.

A gang of railroad workers captured the "phantom" in Omaha's outskirts, walking the ties. He was a 45-year-old maniac named Frank Carter. He boasted about his marksmanship, displayed his .22 calibre automatic with silencer attachment. He had been paroled from the State prison after conviction for killing a neighbor's cows. He still wanted to "Kill, Kill, Kill," he said. Nebraska hanged him.

Last week Omaha had something worse.

An old expressman named Joseph Blackman was found murdered in sleep, his head hacked. A bloody hatchet lay near the house.

Waldo Resso, a milkman, found his 21-year-old wife and her 18-year-old sister stripped, hacked, dead. The Resso's three children were untouched.

A Mrs. Harold Stribling woke up in the night. The light was on. A young Negro was in the room, clutching a hatchet. Mrs. Stribling's husband, a powerful man, lay dying in the bed, his head mangled. The Negro chopped at Mrs. Stribling, gashed her over the eye. She begged for mercy. "Well, then, go and wash your face," he said. He went with her, washed his hands. He asked to see her baby and stood over its crib for several minutes. Like a mother partridge playing broken-wing, she begged him to leave the house with her. He took her to the swamps on the edge of town. . . . She got to a hospital, half-crazed.

Omaha's police were mustered out for night duty, 500 strong. They patrolled the streets in squads. Twenty dusky suspects were taken into custody, but none had a hatchet. Mrs. Stribling thought she recognized her attacker in Jake Bird, a 24-year-old ex-convict, though Bird was black and Mrs. Stribling had described the hatcheteer as copper-colored. Bird was hustled to the State penitentiary for safekeeping.

Most deeply concerned about catching Omaha's hatchet-man was Omaha's new police-chief, John J. ("Gentleman Jack") Pszanowski. Chief Pszanowski, a Polish miner's son who began walking a beat in Omaha 20 years ago and reached his present eminence last July, is something new in police chiefs. He does not believe in violence. He is supposed to have used his night stick only twice in his career. Says he: "The day of the bully is done. The day of the treat-'em-rough policeman is over. We must so conduct ourselves, in our relations with the public, that we shall be regarded as public servants who know the rules of courtesy as well as the means of capturing a criminal." The "third degree" (arm-twisting, dazzling with a light, beating with a hose) is not used to extort confessions in Omaha.