Asbury Park Press from Asbury Park, New Jersey • Page 9

A10 Asbury Park Press Friday, April 1, 1994 Fine appealed, even though the plea arrangement included an agreement that Stahl would not appeal. Boswell said the fine is separate from the agreement, since Stahl was never advised he would have to pay it. Both Citta and Mercun, the assistant prosecutor, said if Stahl sought relief from an appellate court, they believed the plea bargain arrangement would be invalidated. In 22 years as a public defender, Boswell said he has never represented an indigent client who was ordered to pay such a fine. "This is not a form of restitution because no restitution can be made," he said.

Boswell called the murder a "tragedy," one that most likely began The remainder of the pension covers home insurance and other incidentals, Boswell said. The home is not in Stahl's name although he has an arrangement to inherit it after his aunt dies. But Citta's $25,000 fine will make it difficult to continue mortgage payments. Citta wants Stahl to begin paying $400 a month beginning May 1. Citta said it was "particularly repulsive" that Stahl was attempting to "shelter" his pension money in a real estate investment "that he intends to enjoy when he is finished with state's prison." Mr.

Stahl should not enjoy a windfall of $800 a month over the next five years," Citta said. That aspect of the sentence may be From page Al years after receiving credit for 700 days already served, the judge said. classified as indigent to qualify for a public defender, Stahl receives the pension for life. That pension is reduced to $800 a month after deduction of a $200-a-month penalty because Stahl was found to have committed official misconduct while a police officer. Stahl uses $600 a month to pay the mortgage on the house he owns in Port St.

Lucie, which is occupied by his aunt. mother, Loretta Costa, he had seen his father wrap his mother's bloody body in a blanket, the grandmother told authorities. Stahl was arrested April 30, after a former girlfriend in Florida told authorities he beat her and threatened to kill her as he told her what he'd-53 done to his wife. Stahl was living irt 'q Florida at the time of his arrest. In November, authorities took Stahl to an undisclosed section of Bricks Township to search for Mrs.

Stahl's body, but Stahl became confused was unable to find where he disposed of it, sources have said. The prosecutor's office has been re: searching old maps of the area dating, back to 1985 to try to learn how much the landscape has been changed by dc-S velopment, another source has The physical search has been disconti-1 1 nued, the source said. The elder Stahl has been described by authorities as having been an infor- 'A mant for the Gambino organized crime' family while he was a New York City police officer. An associate of the. Gambino crime family, Salvatore Reale, has told investigators that Stahl' regularly provided information to the'1' 1 mob about police activities.

He was forced to resign from thel New York City Police Department in 'k May 1984 after he was brought up on departmental charges stemming from' his close relationship to Reale, authori-' ties said at the time. Stahl also will have to pay $30 to the Violent Crimes Compensation, Board. when Stahl was 13 and began to drink. Stahl was drunk when he and his wife argued and Stahl's "ready access" to a handgun precipitated the murder, Boswell said. The body of Dianne Stahl, 30, has never been recovered.

"I'm very, very sorry that this happened," Stahl, garbed in prison blue, said yesterday in barely audible tones. "I know I ruined a lot of lives. I didn't mean to do it. If I could take that day back, I would do it." Dianne Stahl's mother, Loretta Costa of Astoria, Queens, wrote to Citta to ask the judge to properly punish Stahl. In a March 14 letter made public in court yesterday, Costa said the family suffers daily because of the murder.

"We are a close family but we all know that no one can ever take Di-anne's place and her devotion to her children," she wrote. "Throughout their lives, the children will live with the silent rage of knowing their father murdered their mother. He has robbed them of their carefree childhood and of her companionship and unconditional love." Had Stahl gone to trial and been convicted of murder, he would have faced between 30 years and life in prison. Instead, Stahl, 45, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in February, just days before the scheduled start of his trial. The plea agreement eliminated the chance that Stahl could walk out of jail a free man if a jury were to return a verdict of anything less than murder.

A five-year statute of limitation on aggravated manslaughter or manslaughter convictions was in effect when his wife was slain, authorities said. Dianne Stahl disappeared from the couple's former home on Lamplighter Drive in the early morning hours of June 29, 1985, after the couple returned home late from dinner at a Seaside Park restaurant. Dover Township police were called later that day by a neighbor who reported finding a bullet hole in his bathroom. When Patrolman David Meyer went to the Stahl home, he discovered two recently patched holes in the bathroom and a hallway. Stahl told Meyer that he'd had an argument with his wife in which she fired a gun at him.

Stahl said she walked out with the gun and some jewelry, flagged down a passing car and left. Stahl reported his wife missing three days later, on July 2, 1985. But years later, Mark P. Stahl Jr. told county investigators he saw his father dispose of his stepmother's bloody body in June 1985, Mercun said during a hearing in June 1992.

The younger Stahl said he saw Dianne Stahl lying on the floor in the family's home, bleeding from a bullet wound above her eye and a second gunshot wound in her chest, the prosecutor said at that hearing. That statement is consistent with recollections by a stepbrother, Michael, who was 3 when his mother disappeared. Michael told his grand Save 25 to 50 Off Manufacturers Suggested Price List around Mount St. Helens. An ex-forest ranger named Rant Mullens, who' had'- proclaimed himself "Bigfoot's father," later admitted to the hoax; he had strapped on a pair of homemade "feet" and stomped about.

lVf "I tell you, people will believe just about anything," Mullens said. In 1906, the Jersey Devil appeared in South Jersey. A Mrs. J.H. Hopkins ,.3 "distinctly" saw the beast near her barn, a local newspaper reported.

It was captured in "Hunting Park, N.J.", A publicist, Norman Jeffries, later" came forward and announced the crei-i: ture would be exhibited at a -4' phia museum. It turned out to be painted with green stripes, with bronze "wings." Jeffries didn't confess to the hoax until 1929; he was the one who had planted the story in. the Jersey newspaper. Remember Rosie Ruiz? She won the Boston Marathon in 1980. Until a wit- ness came forward and said he had ti seen Ruiz bolt from the crowd a half-1 mile from the finish line.

Foolishness From page Al been caught by hunters in Africa and who would entertain audiences by swallowing coins and grunting a lot, turned out to be William Henry Jackson of Bound Brook. "Well," Jackson told his sister before he died, "we fooled them a long time." It was Barnum, after all, who said, "There's a sucker born every minute." What would you do if giant grasshoppers 3 feet tall! invaded your town? Well, they invaded Tomah, in 1937, snapping off tree limbs as they hopped around the local orchards. It was a hoax concocted by farmer A.L. Butts and J. Fuller, publisher of the local paper.

The story created a panic, even if the disclaimer at the end said newspaper reporters "were thought to be the darnedest liars in the world." No kidding; they have been responsible for some of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetuated. The Killer Hawk of Chicago, for one. It terrorized the Windy City in January 1927. A reporter for the Chicago Journal was the first person to see the feared predator. The only one, too; the Journal had cooked up the story.

An Illinois newspaper editor, according to Carl Sifakis, author of "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," got so tired of fraudulent moneymak-ing offers in the classified ads that he came up with his own. It was a cat ranch, with 100,000 cats that would produce $100,000 profit in cat skins every day! How would the cats be fed? With rats at an adjacent rat ranch. And how would the rats be fed? With cat carcasses. "We feed the rats to the cats and EXTENDED 1 the cats to the rats," the ad noted. The Associated Press picked up the story.

Investors from all over the country called up. Men from Mars The greatest hoax of all at least in terms of the reaction it provoked occurred the night before Halloween 1938. "Flash!" it began. "Meteor reported landing near Graver's Mill, New Jersey 1,500 killed no, it's not a meteor, it's a flying metallic cylinder. Poison gas is sweeping over New Jersey The Martians are using death rays." It was Orson Welles' dramatization of H.G.

Wells' "War of the Worlds." Thousands believed that Martians had landed. Two men, their faces "white with fear," according to The Home News, rushed into the Highland Park police headquarters, "and fairly shook" as they asked questions. "People are getting killed," one of the men said. "It's terrible. Why, the gas masks are being eaten right off people's faces." In Indianapolis, a woman ran into a church and shouted, "New York is destroyed it's the end of the world.

I just heard it on the radio!" Much of the hysteria, according to Sifakis, subsided the following day. One Midwest niayor, though, threatened to come to New York and personally punch Welles in the nose. A year later, a similar broadcast caused listeners in Quito, Ecuador, to flee panic-stricken into the streets. When they discovered the broadcast was a hoax, they burned down the radio station and newspaper plant. Twenty-one people, including six of the show's performers, were killed in the melee.

Devilish fun Many people believe in modern-day monsters Nessie, Bigfoot and our own Jersey Devil. In 1982, hikers found Bigfoot's footprints in the woods MORE WEEK! Thurj Fri 9:004:00 Sal 10-5 LAST DAYS TO SAVE) THE SUCCESS OF DOVER'S JACUZZI SALES, Florida swamp land? "If you believe that," the old saying goes, "I have a bridge in New York to sell you." Well, George Parker made a living out of selling the Brooklyn Bridge. Tried selling Madison Square Garden and the Statue of Liberty, too. He would just walk up to a potential sucker on the street, introduce himself as the bridge or building's owner, show faked documents, and sell it on the spot. Parker eventually went to prison; he died in Sing Sing in 1937.

Did you know map makers regularly put fake streets on their maps as insurance against copyright; infringement? A woman named Sober Sue was a Broadway sensation in 1908. The theater offered $1,000 to anyone who could make her laugh. The city's top comedians tried, but failed. They had been had. It was later revealed that Sober Sue couldn't smile, much less laugh.

She suffered from paralysis of the facial muscles. Many hoaxes are so transparent one wonders how they could fool people, but somehow they do. Take our very own Plainfield Teachers, the small-college football team, led by star Johnny Chung, the "Celestial Comet," that piled up impressive wins in 1941. The scores were reported in The New York Times and other papers. But the Teachers were a hoax, invented by a group of Wall Street brokers, according to Sifakis.

Time magazine exposed the scam. In a category all his own was John R. Brinkley, who became a millionaire in the '20s by providing men with transplanted goat glands, a guarantee, he said, of sexual prowess. Brinkley's pitch: "Just let me get your goat and you'll be a Mr. Ram-What-Am with every lamb." Which leads us, somehow, to the X-Ray-Proof Underwear Hoax of 1895.

Shortly after William Roentgen discovered X-rays, a rumor spread that an English company was about to introduce glasses that would allow one to see through clothes. Another company announced it was going to market "X-ray-proof underwear" that would render the glasses useless. So much for some of the great hoaxes in history. Have to go now." Elvis is in the lobby, right on time for his appointment with the Home News Editorial Board. Highlights of that exclusive interview Sunday.

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