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Before Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., came to trial in late August of 1994, Ron Hanes offered him a deal. Plead to the same charges his mother had been convicted of and he would receive the same sentence.

The deal was carefully explained to Glenn’s attorney Peter Catania, to Glenn, and to Teresa. Catania advised Glenn to take it. Teresa disagreed, and Glenn went to trial.

On August 9, after one hour and five minutes of deliberation, Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. It turned out that it was Peter Catania’s first time trying a murder case.

On August 29, 1994, Teresa Stiles was sentenced to twelve years behind bars, followed by five years probation.

When Arnie Levine subsequently filed his appeal, the state cross-appealed with a brief asking that in Teresa’s case, the defense of battered wife syndrome be disallowed. They wanted an opportunity to go back into court and convict Teresa on first-degree murder.

In the same brief, the state named Cathy Berry Stiles as an unindicted coconspirator.

As for Teresa, Judge Fuente subsequently relented and allowed her to remain free on bond, pending appeal.

“She posted a twenty-thousand dollar bond,” Hanes confirmed. “She put the home up for collateral. Basically, she’d signed off on it back in January of 1993, with the proceeds going to her children, who then put it up for collateral.

“In Florida, manslaughter with a firearm is not included in the intestate statutes as specifically prohibiting a person from collecting on an estate.”

I first started working on this case on October 31, 1994, when I flew to Florida. Having forgotten that it was Halloween, I was surprised when I stopped at a light driving out of Tampa’s airport and Count Dracula looked over at me. He was in the next car. Perhaps it was an omen of things to come.

The next day, my first stop in Gibsonton was at the Giant’s camp, the nerve center of the community and the home of Jeanie Tomaini, “The World’s Only Living Half Girl.” I found Jeanie outside, with her grandson. Soon, we moved indoors to talk, to her daughter Judy Rock’s office, at the far end of their trailer court.

Jeanie sat on the floor, two-and-a-half feet tall, on her torso. It did indeed look like only half of her was there.

“There’s so much crime here now. Kids are just born different. Tampa being a seaport, it’s so easy to get drugs and stuff in. There are more street people now. Little jungles of street people in Gibtown,” said Jeanie.

While Grady’s death was a shock to the community, it was by no means the first time a major crime had occurred thereabouts.

Jeanie recalled that back in the day, “It was just a swamp here. We came here every year, cleared a little more and then, we stayed here. I could adapt myself to whatever. Seems to me I was just a country girl who’s been traveling and working with shows since I was three.”

Her mother had met up with someone who thought Jeanie’d be a great addition to the carnival. How was a girl like her supposed to make a living anyway, let alone attract a husband? And so Jeanie began her life as what would become a legendary sideshow attraction, “The World’s Only Living Half Girl.”

“I enjoyed the show, the traveling. I made friends. I been in every state. The carnivals were family shows. Now it’s dog-eat-dog. People then were more reliable and stable.”

A train rumbled by and the office vibrated. Jeanie held her balance on her hips with ease.

“I never actually knew Grady Stiles,” she continued. “We were on separate shows, but most people in this area thought mighty well of him. The people at Showtown speak highly of him,” Jeanie continued in her soft voice.

Looking up at me, I could see that there was an ineffable tranquility in her eyes that I had never seen in a human being.

“Considering what happened, why not walk away?” she questioned with a flash of anger. “Considering his condition and all,” she believed it would have been easy for Teresa to just leave. “It still boils down to that he was a human being, a live human being, and they took the life away from him.”

Judy, who handled the day-to-day management of the Giant’s Camp and also has a business making gravestones, also had an opinion. She, too, thought that Teresa should have left Grady instead of killing him. We talked a little bit more, then I thanked them for their time and hit the street.

If the Giant’s Camp is the nerve center of Gibtown, then Showtown, USA, with its brightly painted façade of carnival scenes, is the place where jangled nerves are assuaged with booze and conviviality. Chuck Osak runs the place. Fortyish and slim with bifocals, he has a brushy mustache the same color as his sandy blond hair. He was dressed in jeans, a short-sleeved blue shirt, and dark shades.

“Grady was known in this town. He was a good man. He had his own little sideshow, something you could look at. Grady exhibited himself all his life. I’d sit down with him when he came in off the road and ask him ‘How was the season, Grady?’”

“He was never an excessive drinker. Maybe an hour here at most. The only wife I knew was Barbara. She drank a little bit. Whatever Grady wanted to do, she did. If he said, ‘Let’s go to New York,’ she’d go. She’d roll with the punches.”

If Tony DeCello had been present, he would have added, “No pun intended.” As for Teresa, if things were so bad, “She could have left him,” Osak said forcefully. The same perspective as Jeanie Tomaini. And like Tomaini, Osa, bemoaned the decline of the family shows.

“You knew the kids; they helped you set up. I’d see them the following year and they’re a year older. But the family shows are a thing of the past. How the hell can you compete against Disney World?!”

If I wanted to know more about Grady, Osak recommended I speak to William Roberts. Then he left me with this piece of advice.

“Any carny won’t tell you the truth because they don’t want you to know the truth.”

So I drove over to Kracker Avenue, a Gibtown store called the Pirates Treasure Cove. William Roberts, a former aerialist, runs it. The place makes costumes for circus and carnival people, a truly distinct specialty operation.

“I was on a cruise with him [Grady] and I knew the family,” Roberts told me. But he would provide me with no further information. Osak’s advice rang in my ears.

The Stiles family live in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. After a number of lefts and rights and lefts, past a bunch of apparently empty fields and a tropical-fish farm, I found myself on Inglewood Drive. It is a grand name for a narrow, block-long street, bordered by a bunch of run-down trailers. Walking across the parched grass, I stopped before a chest-high cyclone fence.

The door was opened and I peered into the dark interior. On the floor in the shadows was a crawling figure, who suddenly turned and popped up into a wheelchair. In one motion, he expertly leaned back, turned it, and wheeled himself out of the gloom, into the sunlight.

“Hey, boys, sit,” he said, calling off the four dogs on his side of the wire fence. He introduced himself as Grady Stiles, III. His family called him “Little Grady.” Little Grady wore a dark T-shirt over his barrel chest. My eyes drifted down to his claws. They are different from his father’s, with two fingers on each hand instead of one.

“It’s not a good time. Come back at 5:30 when my sister will be here,” he answered politely. I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 P.M.

I rode around awhile, visiting the park in Riverview where Glenn Newman met with Chris Wyant to discuss the murder of his stepfather, and where the money for the hit allegedly changed hands. Then I went to the cemetery where Grady was buried. By 5:30, I was back at the Stiles place, but Cathy, the family spokesperson while her mother was in jail, had not shown up yet.

“Hey, I’m a showman,” he said proudly, telling me all about how he traveled with and worked the carnival. He particularly loved the gorilla show illusion that Donna and Joe operated.

Why hadn’t the dogs barked when Chris Wyant entered the trailer to kill Grady?

I went back to my hotel room to await Cathy’s call. A few hours later, the phone rang.

It was Glenn’s lawyer. He told me that Cathy Berry had called him and said that I had requested an interview. As her brother’s attorney, he represented Cathy’s interests as well. After I told him that all I wanted was to speak to Cathy to get some background on family matters, he asked me if the family, who was very poor, could, in some way, be financially compensated for their assistance.

“Mr. Catania, I am certainly sympathetic, but I’m a journalist. I don’t pay for information. All I can promise is that I’ll get the best obtainable version of the truth. So can I talk to her?”

“All right,” he said affably. “I’ll advise Cathy it’s okay to talk with you.”

I called Cathy and we made an appointment for 7 P.M. that night. I got there on time. Walking through the front door as Det. Willette had done, I found myself at the crime scene. The body of course was long gone, but you could still feel the vibes, the tension of that night when Grady Stiles, Jr. had three bullets pumped into the back of his head in a nice, neat row.

Everyone acted normal. We just happened to be sitting in your average American living room, in your average American home. Only in this home, the father just happened to have been murdered. His armchair was vacant now, but it was easy to imagine him sitting there, watching Danny Aiello playing Ruby, as Wyant came in to kill him.

I couldn’t help but notice the picture to the left, of Grady and Cathy; he looked like a proud smiling father. And yet Cathy was an unindicted co-conspirator in his murder.

Harry Glenn Newman, Sr., “Midget Man,” lay sprawled in boxer shorts in front of the television set, that he gazed at intently. A clear plastic line stretched from his nose to a tank. He was on a respirator because of the lung condition he’d contracted back in Ohio when he was a welder. Near him lay a wooden cane he still used to help him stand and move around, because of the fall he had taken.

Cathy Stiles Berry sat in an armchair next to the one in which her father was murdered. A pretty woman, she had the broad shoulders and large arms of a person who has to rely on her upper body to get around. She had no legs and claws like her father’s.

“It’s too rough on her on the road. I just more or less traveled with her. I didn’t work out there. I just traveled mainly to look out for my mother.”

“Little Grady? Well, he has no worries. He’s seventeen. All he knows how to do is go out there, ride, play the games and have fun. I have a lot more [responsibilities] than that.”

“I had to. Living with him [her father], I had to. There was no way that I was gonna let him mess me up.”

“It’s real interesting how some kids who grow up with the kind of abuse you did, respond by turning out the way you did.”

“I’m level-headed. He has scarred me emotionally a lot, but right now I just can’t let it get to me.”

“I think my mom is the most wonderful person. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for her.”

“Why didn’t your mother call the cops when your dad got drunk and abused her?”

“If my mother would have called the cops, you better believe things would have gotten ten times worse.”

Her husband, Tyrill, who had been in the other room taking care of four-year-old daughter Misty, came in carrying the child. Her young face, the spitting image of her father’s, looked ravaged, old beyond her scant years. She was born without legs.

Because the ectodactyly gene comes out differently from generation to generation, Misty’s “legs” stop before the knee; she has a toe or claw up on her hip. She has only one arm with a claw at the end. The other is a stub. Tyrill went over to the cage where he was raising gerbils.

“You didn’t know anything about what your mom was planning?” I asked Cathy.

“I really didn’t feel anything,” she answered in a loud voice. “’Cause I knew what she lived with. I’d had it done to me. I feel sorry for her and my brother, not my father. He destroyed our love back in 1978 when he shot my sister’s fiancé. I didn’t see him do it, but I heard it because I was right in the backyard.

“When I came around the house, he [Jack Layne] was lying on the ground. At that time I was what you call ‘Daddy’s Little Girl.’ Daddy couldn’t do no wrong. But when the cops came and took him away, and he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I did it and I’m glad of it, I’d do it again,’ that kind of destroys everything you have for a person. When I get real depressed, I can still see the abuse.”

Midget Man turned around, pulled the respirator off from under his nose, and lit up a Marlboro.

“Pardon me, but considering you’re on a respirator, is that a smart thing to do?” I asked.

Glenn smiled. His mustache framed a mouth lifted up in an impish grin. It was easy to see why everyone liked him.

“I didn’t like the kid when I met him,” Cathy said firmly. “He looked like the type that takes drugs.”

“He was the only boy that my father would let my brother mess with. My father never let anybody have any friends.”

“With my father, the more he drank, the worse he got. He couldn’t stop at one or two [drinks]. He had to keep going. My dad had the gift to where he could act sober even when he was totally intoxicated. He could turn it right around and make it look like it was a woman’s fault.

“He’d done it with Little Grady’s mother. She called the cops several different times and they came down here to the house and he’d make her look like she was totally crazy [because he acted sober], and not one report was ever filed.”

“He’d get four drinks out of a half a pint,” said Glenn, suddenly turning around.

“There was many a time he was totally intoxicated while working,” said Cathy, a teetotaler. “When I was around five my father used to get drunk and put me on the platform ’cause I was identical to him. He would put me out there to work, so he wouldn’t get in trouble because he was intoxicated.”

When she got old enough to say “no,” she refused to go up on the platform anymore.

“Harry Newman, Sr.,” I said and added, “What’s it like being on the road with the carnival?”

“It’s a very rough life. It separates the men from the boys. I’ll tell you that,” Glenn continued.

“You never have time for yourself. On your day off, you’re washing clothes.” Glenn added.

“We lived in trailers, but some of the help, they lived in trucks and tents,” Cathy recalled.

“Sometimes you have to for security,” Tyrill explained. “Some spots like New York City, you’d get people slash up the tent.”

That led to a discussion about the increase of violent crime in Gibsonton. Grady Stiles’s death was not mentioned. I looked up and saw Little Grady walking on his hands into the living room. So swiftly did he walk into the living room and pull himself up onto the couch, that I had no chance to react.

“Cool,” he answered brightly. He enjoyed the attention the family was getting.

“What would you like people to know about your father, Cathy, that needs to be clarified?”

“That he wasn’t a helpless person. That he wasn’t handicapped. He could do just as much as anyone else could do. The state is acting like my father is an indolent person who couldn’t abuse anybody.”

Mindful of the rash of vehicular robberies and murders in Florida, Tyrill advised, “Watch yourself. If someone bumps you, you keep going.”

Both Cathy Stiles and I were in the 2014, “Evil Kin” episode about her father, on the Investigation Discovery Channel. In 2005, Cathy Stiles guest-starred as the “Lobster Girl” on the HBO cult series, Carnivale.

Both Mary Teresa Stiles and Christopher Wyant served their time and were subsequently released from prison. Harry Glenn Newman, Jr., 39 years old, is still serving life without parole. Teresa still has a cemetery plot reserved for her next to Grady.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos are courtesy of the Florida State Attorney’s office.

The crime scene, shot from across the street by the police photographer—that’s the family’s camper parked in front of their trailer.

Grady Stiles, Jr., slumped over in his armchair after he was murdered—that’s iced tea in the glass, not booze.

Notice the picture of Grady and Cathy behind the chair Grady was sitting in when Wyant blew his brains out.

The author’s favorite shot—the bloody box of Pall Malls shot by a terrific photographer.

Glenn hung out here at this strip mall before meeting Wyant and concluding the deal to kill Grady.

The neighborhood where the Stiles family still lives, photographed from the air.

The footstep that the police found near the spot where the murder weapon was dumped.

Boyishly handsome, Ron Hanes was the state’s attorney who prosecuted all the people involved in the murder of Grady Stiles.

Sandra Spoto assisted Hanes in the prosecution of all the people involved in the murder of Grady Stiles.

The Stiles family gather to listen to Arnie during a break in the trial (Donna on far right).

The rowhouse in Pittsburgh from which Grady fired a rifle, murdering his daughter’s fiancé.

The author standing in front of the showman’s section of the Tampa cemetery where Grady is buried.

Defense attorney Arnie Levine makes a point to the judge during Teresa Stiles’s trial.

Paul Dinas is easily the most unique editor I’ve ever worked with. It is Paul who saw the possibility of this book way before I did, and who provided unparalleled support in its research and writing. He has more journalistic integrity than most journalists I know.

Thanks, too, to my family and friends for their support, especially my wife, Leah, and my mother and stepfather. My researchers Billy Koskotos and Michael Shapiro also deserve credit.

And my special thanks to Michael Willette, Ron Hanes, Brian Donerly, Sandra Spoto, Mike Mahan, and Rob Sumner in Tampa; Merrill McCubbin in Norfolk; and Tony DeCello and Commander Ron Freeman of the Allegheny County Homicide Division in Pittsburgh, for their openness and candor.

This book is based upon an extensive amount of interviewing, including all the members of the Stiles family in Tampa, all the attorneys involved and investigating officers. Two people I wanted to talk to, however, I did not.

Chris Wyant was never released on bond and was not available to be interviewed. Neither was Barbara Stiles. Despite efforts by the police and the Florida state attorney’s office to locate her, she remains a phantom.

Merrill McCubbin filled in a lot of gaps on the last summer of Grady’s life. Commander Ron Freeman of the Pittsburgh Homicide Squad went out of his way to give me special access to the police records of the Layne homicide in 1978.

Official court and police documents provided invaluable information. So did other background research materials, including newspaper and magazine articles.

Dialogue has been reconstructed on the basis of the memories of those interviewed and the official documents. As with any homicide case, there are sometimes different memories of the same event. In those cases, I have evaluated the competing claims and presented an account based on my considered judgment of what happened.

The four-lane blacktop that is Federal Highway 41 rises gently into a bridge that spans the Alafia River.

The Alafia is a lazy body of water filled with recreational boaters and fishermen. But it was the Cargill Fertilizer Plant on the river’s western banks that really dominated the scenery.

Smoke spewed from long stacks that climbed toward the sky. Set off by its ominous-looking, gunmetal-gray machinery encroaching on the water’s edge, the fertilizer factory gave the river an ugly, grayish pall.

On the other side of the Alafia, a sign at the bottom of the bridge reads GIBSONTON.

The first building on the right is the “Giant’s Camp.” It literally is that, a place where a giant camped.

At eight feet six inches, Al Tomaini was a giant of a man. During the 1930s, he was exhibited in the “World’s Fair Freak Show.” It was there that he met and wed his wife, Jeanie Tomaini, “The World’s Only Living Half Girl.” Jeanie was born with the lower half of her body missing.

Al and Jeanie had heard from their friend “The Crocodile Man” that the place to go during the off-season was Gibsonton, a town on the Gulf of Mexico, twenty miles south of Tampa.

“In those days,” Jeanie recalls, “there wasn’t much here, just swampland and not much else.”

But the carnies came nevertheless, to winter away from their public. After a while, the town had a thriving population of dwarfs, bearded ladies, human blockheads, magicians, fire-eaters, sword swallowers, clowns, strippers, and the real backbone of the carnival, the roustabouts.

When Jeanie and Al decided to quit touring for good, they opened the Giant’s Camp, a combination restaurant/bait and tackle shop/trailer court. On any given morning, you can still see Jeanie behind the counter, “The Bearded Lady” in the corner, “The Human Blockhead” shoving unimaginable things up his nose, and out back, a fire-eater working on a new trick.

Decorated like somebody’s kitchen, you can get a complete meal of home-cooked food for $4.

The men and women in the small restaurant, which formed the main room of the Giant’s Camp, shared a hard-bitten look that they wore like the uniform of their trade. The carnies came by their money the hard way. They work at least seven months out of every year on the road, traveling throughout the United States, wherever a carnival could be set up with its tents and rides and midway.

Be it a deserted field in Holcomb, Kansas, or the parking lot of the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, sooner or later the carny would play your local town.

Beginning with films like Nightmare Alley, in which Tyrone Power became a geek—a sideshow performer who bites the heads off live chickens—carnivals and carnival folk have become the focus of derisive portrayals in all facets of the media.

Yet with all the bad publicity, they never told the real truth, carny people asserted. Carny people are kind and caring. For instance, you never see a crippled child on the midway without a toy given them by carnival people.

Most nights, Gibsonton residents gather for a drink in the famous Showtown USA on Highway 41. A mid-sized local pub with a well-stocked bar and a small stage area for live local bands, it affords the locals a place to blow off steam and swap stories.

Many of the carny folk live in trailers cemented to a foundation. They build on room additions as money permits, but most of them look unfinished. Number 11117 Inglewood Drive, on the east side of town, was no exception.

Number 11117 was a long, wide, dark brown, aluminum trailer set on a concrete slab, with a room addition on the east side of the structure that opened on the street.

On the night of November 29, 1992, the side door of the trailer was open, spilling light on the ground. Standing in the doorway was a haggard-looking woman. Her name was Mary Teresa Stiles.

“Come on, Glenn, you wanna come with me?” she said to her teen-aged son in the trailer.

In the shadows, their neighbor Chris Wyant, 17, watched them go. He waited a few moments before going inside. He wore a black leather jacket with a Raiders hat turned around backward, black Nike Cavericis tennis shoes, a black-and-white IOU T-shirt and blue jeans.

Having been to the house many times before to play chess with Glenn, Chris knew the layout. He sneaked along the passage, passing the kitchen and stepping into the living room.

“I said get the fuck out of my house! And don’t ever come around here again.”

In the third trailer, which sat on the northwest side of the property, Marco Eno was lounging with the gorilla. It was actually a gorilla suit, used in a carnival illusion done with mirrors and light that purported to show a woman changing into a gorilla.

Marco had been working as a roustabout for years. In his mid-thirties, his body was all edges—slim and sharp, arms tattooed. On his upper left arm the inscription read “Carnie Power.” He had lank black hair, and a jet-black handlebar mustache.

Marco was watching TV about 11 o’clock when he heard shouting coming from the brown trailer out front, then the shots.

Eno ran outside to see what had happened. A moment later, a young man in a dark jacket whom Marco did not recognize sauntered out the side door of the brown trailer like nothing had happened and disappeared into the night.

Eno strained his ears. The yard gate creaked. And then … silence. What the hell was going on?

When Glenn heard the shots, he ran out of his half-sister Cathy’s trailer in back of the property. He immediately recognized Chris Wyant fleeing from the back door of the brown trailer. Then he saw Marco Eno running toward him from the other side of the yard.

“Oh no, it might be Grady,” Teresa said with anxiety in her voice. She had joined her son along with her daughter, Cathy, and son-in-law, Tyrill.

Grady was sitting in his favorite armchair. Dressed in undershorts and nothing else, he was slumped over, his face almost in his lap. And there was blood. Lots of it.

Beginning to go into shock, Marco plodded forward unsteadily. It was like a dream, or some horror movie. There was Grady all right, but he wasn’t alive like he had been a few hours before when Marco saw him. He looked stone-cold dead.

The blood came from bullet wounds on top of his bald head. It dripped down his face in rivulets, and some of it had coagulated in a dark reddish pool on the floor, under his chair.

Northeast of Tampa in one of the city’s bedroom suburbs, Det. Michael Willette was asleep in bed. His wife, Melanie, was curled up beside him. When the phone rang, he woke up quickly. In his line of work, he was used to being woken up late at night.

He listened for a few minutes, mumbled a few things, wrote down the address, and climbed out of bed. He dressed quickly. Melanie awoke briefly, then turned over. She’d been through this before.

Outside in the dark, he fit his stocky five-foot-ten, 220-pound frame behind the wheel of his 1988 Ford LTD, an old police car painted white for unmarked duty.

Traveling south on Interstate 75, the super highway that paralleled Federal Highway 41, Willette made Gibsonton in forty-five minutes. While he’d been to Gibsonton before, he had never been to Inglewood Drive and had to consult the book of maps he always carried with him.

Willette arrived at the crime scene at 12:25 A.M. Opening the LTD’s trunk, Willette rummaged through a pile of rumpled clothes before finding a simple tissue-sized cardboard box and extracted a couple of pairs of surgical rubber gloves. Thrusting them into the pockets of his jacket, he slammed shut the trunk.

“What’s going on?” Willette asked the uniformed deputies, who were milling out front.

“We took a statement from a guy named Marco Eno, who lives in a trailer out back. Says he heard the victim arguing with somebody and then shots fired. Says he saw a young guy leaving the trailer right after the shots were fired. Then he went in and found the body. The vic’s stepson called it in.”

Willette nodded, writing down the name in his notebook. He pulled his jacket tighter around him.

Like a doctor entering surgery, Willette donned his surgical gloves and entered the crime scene via the front door. It was unlocked, and Willette immediately noted no signs of forced entry.

Willette made special note that “The head area of the victim had visible trauma, possibly caused by bullets.”

Continuing his examination, Willette noticed that the kitchen area was on the south side of the room, separated from the TV/family room by kitchen cabinets that backed up to the chair the victim sat in. On top of the kitchen cabinet directly behind the victim, Willette spied blood that had splattered across the top and down the sides of a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes. On the counter itself was more blood, mixed in with what appeared to be human body tissue. There were also a single pack of cigarettes with one cigarette sticking out invitingly, and a notebook filled with paper.

The carton, the single pack, and the notebook were damaged. Willette had the impression that a bullet or bullets had passed through them. Looking further, Willette saw an indentation in the countertop surface. He figured that a bullet had struck the counter surface first, traveling from south to north, toward the victim’s head.