[25]
25 WhenSheriffFoxgotbacktotheofficeafterinterviewingthesuspect’swife, he was handed a copy of a report that cast more mystery than light on the investigation. It was from the Texas DPS crime lab and contained an FBI ballistics report sent to Superintendent Gonzaullas by J. Edgar Hoover.132 Under a cover letter from FBI director Hoover, the report summary stated, “Acknowledge your letter of April 12, relative to type of bullet and cartridge used in the murder of Mrs. Hazel and Nancy Frome. Cartridge case bearing the head stamping DWA: You are advised that information in the files of the FBI indicates that cartridge cases of this type were produced by the Deutsche Waffen Aktiengesellschaft of Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany . No information is found concerning the identity of any importer of this type of ammunition in the United States.” The report provided identification only of the slug that killed Nancy Frome, noting it was the kind of ammunition manufactured for use in 7.65 mm German and Eastern European automatic weapons. The FBI lab had nobetterluckthantheTexaslabinidentifyingtheheavier,badlymutilated slug found in Hazel Frome’s skull. However, the slug that killed the younger woman was distinctly marked with a letter S stamped in the base of the lead bullet. It was identified as a type of ammunition not legally imported by arms dealers anywhere in North America. The FBI had only recently acquired a sample of this type of bullet. It was manufactured in Germany for special automatic weapons issuedtoNazielite.TheFBI suggestedthatthepeculiarammunitionmight possibly be obtained south of the border. The earlier theory that the weapon might be an old Spanish-model revolver commonly found in Mexico was now out the window. How did a slug,positivelyidentifiedasatypeonlyrecentlymanufacturedinGermany, end up in the brain of a murder victim in the middle of the vast West Texas desert? The Rangers and Sheriff Fox were no closer to identifying the murder weapons than they were at the beginning of the investigation. It now 144 fetch the devil seemed, however, that at least one of the guns used in the execution-style slayings was possibly a German-made automatic, if the weapon could be assumed to match the ammunition. An increasingly frustrated Fox notified Rangers and other investigators of his sparse findings from the interview with Helga Dorn Lukian.133 The tearful interview had convinced him that this self-styled doctor was certainly cruel enough to have committed murder. By Fox’s measure, any man capable of abandoning his wife and infant without food or a roof over their heads was capable of just about anything. The sheriff ’s report to fellow lawmen on April 26 named the doctor as his chief suspect and urged that, upon his arrest, the man be made available for extensive interrogation at El Paso. Chris Fox was not content to simply let fellow lawmen know of his interest in the man who was now his prime suspect in the Frome case. He leaked word to the local wire-service reporters, identifying the suspect by name and aliases. Since newsmen were clamoring for any tidbit to update the sensational murders, the leak was telegraphed and widely published across the country. As hoped, the publicity resulted in a flurry of calls and letters to the El Paso sheriff ’s office about sightings and mostly unpleasant encounters between good citizens and the con man doctor. Meanwhile, in Culberson County, Sheriff Anderson surfaced some witnesses who definitely placed Trotsky, known there as Dr. Lukian, in Van Horn at the time of the Frome murders. “Dr. Lukian tried to make several women in Van Horn, but seems to have had no luck,” Anderson told fellow investigators. “He hung around Audrey’s Beauty Shop a lot. I talked to Imogene Martin, a hairdresser, and she tells me that the doctor was there quite a bit, and that he tried to make the proprietor, Audrey. At the time she thought he was just kidding and paid no attention to him.”134 Sheriff Fox also noted in his report that a judge in San Diego, Texas, a small South Texas town more than 650 miles from El Paso, called to say that Lukian or Trotsky had resided in his community for most of the last thirty days. He had left in a hurry, “owing a lot of people money.” “This doctor was in partnership with a local Mexican doctor,” the unnamed Duval County judge told Fox. “At the time he was here, he made statements to certain people that he was in El Paso...
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