THE KILLER WHO WOULD BE GENERAL

In the early evening of June 6, 1986, Pennsylvania State Police Troopers in radio-equipped cars maintained a tight surveillance of all the country roads leading in and out and criss-crossing Allentown. It was the 42nd anniversary of D-day, history's greatest military invasion, and the invasion of the First National Bank of Bath had been nearly as bloody. In the sordid business of bank robbery this one would be regarded by underworld characters as the unquestioned bloodiest.

At 11: 12 a.m. a brown Monte Carlo pulled into the parking lot of the bank, its creamy white brick and glass projecting from a spread of wheat fields. Two men stepped out of the car, nicknamed U.S.S. Lexington, and surveyed the dark, sourdough skies overhead. The threat of rain meant that the local Dutch farmers would skip work that day.

The thin, wiry man of 5-feet-8-inches seemed to be in charge. He had the sullen face of a Marine drill instructor and walked like a General. The second man, heavier and taller, fumbled with his .38 caliber pistol, purchased two weeks earlier at an Army-Navy store. Hesitant, and obviously confused, he didn't look like he was ready for a heist of such magnitude. "It'll be a snap," the little man assured his nervous companion as they approached the bank doors. The ruggedly built man grunted, "Okay." Disciplined, composed, and armed with a 9mm automatic pistol, the smaller man swaggered into the bank first, jumped into the tellers' area from the lobby, vaulting a low barrier with grace and enthusiasm, while his partner, brandishing his shiny new .38, shoved startled customers into an alcove in front of the lobby.

The smile disappeared from the face of teller Hazel Evans, a 55-year-old grandmother of three, as she looked up from her cashier drawer into the muzzle of the 9mm. Two quick pops between the eyes and she was dead. She hit the floor with what her killer would later described as "a queer expression on her face."

The man with the 9mm pivoted on his heels and fired two more bullets, striking teller Janice Confer, extraordinarily beautiful, at 47, and the mother of two small children. Her twisted body hit the floor in the stillness of death. Customer service representative Jane Hartman, 33, stood paralyzed, too scared to move. Nevertheless, the crazed gunman shot her four times. She fell headlong across her desk, her face a mask of blood and loose-hanging flesh ripped by the savage volley of bullets. Bank manager Marcia Hauser was luckier. A bullet fired at her grazed the woman's skull, sending her spinning, and knocking her unconscious. The tally might have ended there, but a customer, Thomas Marchetto, a former marine sergeant, made a mad dash for the nearest exit and was felled by two pistol shots to his thigh and left leg.

The second bank robber, the rough-looking guy, unleashed a withering, belch of gunfire of his own. He raked anything that moved and some things that didn't move. Customers cowered in fright behind desks or chairs, fearing the next bullet would have their name on it. His terrifying staccato explosions of a .38 shattered glass, ploughed through walls and knocked picture frames crooked, but never drew blood.

Scooping up $2,000 in coins the two robbers bolted out the door, leaving behind $15,000 of stacked bills in plain view. The penny-ante heist, botched by anxious trigger fingers, had all the charm of a Pretty Boy Floyd massacre.

It was a day that would go down in infamy for Allentown, Pennsylvania. The robbers were as swift as they were deadly -- they had sprinted into the U.S.S. Lexington and were speeding away, south, toward the old Bethlehem Steel buildings.

Within minutes, sobbing relatives of the murdered victims were surging through hastily formed police lines in the parking lot toward the scene of the crime so heinous that it would go down as the worst massacre in the state's history.

The first detectives to arrive described the scene as "ghastly" and "horrifying." The entire room had been perforated like a roll of player piano. In front of them lay the lifeless bodies of Evans, Confer, and Hartman, blood dripping from head and chest wounds forming large pools of blood on the checkered tile floor.

Marchetto was barely alive he had lost so much blood. Only one other bank employee had come out of the holocaust unhurt, although that woman picked a bullet from the sleeve of her jacket.

Now the entire police department of Allentown had mobilized a vast army of searchers for the killers. Word came from the Pennsylvania State Police barracks: "Get the First National Bank killers. Get them alive if possible, but get them!" Gloom settled over Allentown like billowing black clouds emanating from a chimney.

Police now had a fair description of the suspects and the get away car - but no license number. Roadblocks were set up, and armies of police cars passed one another as they crisscrossed backroads ever on the alert for the culprits. As the news raced across Allentown, scores of reporters headed for the First National Bank of Bath. Several others - bystanders, onlookers, the merely curious - joined the rush. If anyone thought the police department was going to extremes in their search for the killers the criticism was not heard.

The chief of police deplored the murders. The governor of Pennsylvania called emergency police conferences. Bishop Taylor issued a special prayer for the fallen victims - and he could not wait for Sunday, he said, to pray for the apprehension of the sadistic bank robbers. The president of Crime Stoppers asked every member to join in tracking down the killers. Few people remained calm. Terror had come to Allentown.

With the entire metropolitan area looking for them, the two bank robbers raced for safety, sticking to the remotest roads they could find, pressing the U.S.S. Lexington to her fullest, her speedometer needle shivering between 80 and 100 milers per hour. Ten minutes after the massacre, the neighboring states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, and West Virginia, had received the alarm by police Teletype and city editors of their metropolitan morning newspapers already had started to remake their front page headlines.

Helicopters were ready to go, but stormy Pennsylvania skies held them back. One private pilot took off alone, but was forced down by dark clouds and rushing winds. Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Charles Marshall was cruising a back country road when he noticed a whirling dust storm off in the distance. He made a U-turn and took off after the racing automobile. He only got close enough to jot down the license number when the U.S.S. Lexington whirled down a dirt road and submerged into nullity.

But through Marshal's fast-thinking, a license number had been acquired, and arrest of the two fugitives was only a matter of time.

Marshal later became the town hero, but he looked annoyed with all the hullabaloo, a local tabloid said. His demeanor merely made him more popular. To people subject to heavy-handed violations, penny-ante thievery, burglary, carjackings, rapes and murders and icons who prove to be humbugs and cowards, Trooper Marshal came as a knight in shining armor. The two robbers turned out to be Stanley Hertzog and Martin Daniel Appel. Around 3 o'clock on the afternoon of June 6, 1986, the robbers were sitting in the kitchen of Appel's mobile home celebrating their heist with cream soda and potato chips. Then just at the apex of this ecstatic state of euphoria, the beginning of the end loomed in the distance. Outside a loud staccato of police and FBI sirens filtered the 98 degrees air.

"I remember that day sitting in my trailer with two dozen cops and FBI guys all around me," Appeal later said. "I just sat in the kitchen drinking soda like I was having a party. I wasn't even sweating. It was hotter than hell. They questioned me for six hours. Old Marty just sat there enjoying himself. “We really didn’t give a shit.”

"You know what stands out in my mind most that day? Not the killings, not the money, not anything to do with the bank. One state trooper, after being totally frustrated in his attempts to get a confession from me, says: 'We should have sent you to Vietnam, we would have won.' How's that for a compliment?"

The two men were booked into the Allentown jail. The bigger of the two, Hertzog, stared blankly at the floor. He only spoke once, to say he was hungry. A Marine corporal's hat was pulled down over his shaved head, and he wore a sleeveless T-shirt which accentuated his log-like arms. Typical of Appel's boastfulness and bravado, he was wearing an Army lieutenant's shirt with battle ribbons.

Several witnesses stared at the unsmiling faces - mug shots are not noted for the subject's vivacity of expression, and this was a police photo lineup.

"Yes," each one said in succession. "Yes, these are the two men." Each photo had a story to tell, but Appel's was the most interesting. As a kid growing up in Cape Cod, he had always been interested in rockets and experimented with chemistry and people predicted that the boy with the black-rimmed glasses would grow up to become famous in scientific circles or maybe win the Nobel Prize for inventing something that would replace the human heart.

Young Marty would spend hours on end in the basement of their home, working with his chemistry set, or erecting cardboard replicas of outer space rockets. He envisioned himself as Captain Kirk, commanding the Starship Enterprise - the cellar was plastered with Star Wars posters. When he played games in the front yard, he always chose to be a German storm trooper. "I would have been a great Nazi," he said, "because I love to give orders. That's why the Germans were so successful. They were all well disciplined and had a mission."

"I wish I could have been born in the 1930s," he said. "Then I could have fought in the Korean war and got some glory and honor." He almost made it to the Vietnam War, but the war ended before he could enlist. "Ohhh, was I mad," he said. "I think I would have held up well under fire." By his mid-teens, Appel's boyhood fantasies had become more militaristic.

While the other kids went out for football, baseball, or girls, Appel clung to his fantasy of becoming a war hero. He enlisted in Dieruff High School's Air Force ROTC, and through unflagging determination became commander. "He worked hard," a retried Air Force major recalled. "He was what I call an overachiever."

It was unthinkable to Appel that he would follow anything but a military career and become a general. Military men, he said, rise above the ignorance of the civilian world because they are mentally stronger and more capable of controlling others.

Even as a grownup, Appel was busily devising plans to rescue hostages. He, and a few of his misfit friends played the game Dungeons and Dragons for hours on end, where they turned a mere game into a thinking man's battleground.

The task of starting a revolution in Communist countries was not arduous to Appel. But, as a friend of his recalled, "Martin was always in another world." Even at home he kept a military clean house, with sparkling clean kitchen and a bed you could spin a quarter on.

In 1976 Marty Appel graduated from Dieruff High School with more ROTC awards and ribbons than Audie Murphy had medals. Most of 1979 he spent training at Fort Bragg, N.C. "I fired every weapon the Army has and even tossed a few grenades," he said boastfully. "It was the best time of my life." In 1980 he graduated a second Lieutenant in the Army from Bloomsburg State College's ROTC draft. His superiors were in agreement on one point: Martin Appel was a little too gung-ho.



Martin Daniel Appel

Appel reported to Ft. Gordon, Ga., on August 13, 1980, his uniform trousers so neatly pressed the seams could cut butter. At night he lay in his sack dreaming of leading his men, just as he did as Captain Kirk, in the cellar of his Cape Cod home. One night while on leave he met Ginger, an unmarried mother of two, and they had an affair, probably Martin's first. "I never met a Southern girl before," he said. "I like that Southern dialect." He kept her captivated with stories of his military adventures. So far, so good.

Before they could tie the knot, Martin was transferred to a NATO base in Stuttgart, West Germany. The superpowers were at peace, and NATO forces had the melancholy job of standing guard over Western Europe. Appel's sentry duty took in the officer's club, which he likened to "a pizza hut manager."

This was no life for a genius who envisioned himself as another General George Patton. Disillusioned and weighted down by paperwork, Appel went over the hill. As the army scoured the Stuttgart area for him, Appel smuggled himself aboard a commercial flight for Georgia, ... and Ginger. In Georgia, Appel joined the long list of jilted lovers; Ginger was engaged to another man.

"Boy was my girl shocked to see me, especially since she had another guy. I said: "Son-of-a-bitch.' I went AWOL from the Army and this girl doesn't even love me anymore. Life is a gas. "

With the M.P.'s hot on his trail, Appel swiped a car and headed west. On the outskirts of town he ran a stop sign and was pulled over by a cop. Three days later Appel was sitting in a brig in Stuttgart. His court martial resulted in a bad conduct discharge, his dreams of becoming a great Army general shattered.

"I thought the Army was going to be my whole career," he said. "They let me down, giving me menial work instead of letting me show them what a brave man can do. My whole wold was falling apart." Back in Allentown, Appel knocked on a neighbor's door and smiled. "Would you like to buy a vacuum cleaner lady?" It was an embarrassment to a man who envisioned himself Captain Kirk or the hero of Rat Patrol. Three days later he was selling used cars.

"I hated it," he said. "I didn't like cheating and lying to people and that's what happens when they go to buy a car. You can call me a murderer and you can call me a robber, but don't call me a liar."

The murderer, the robber, Appel, strolled the streets at night, past the flophouses and rusty railroad tracks, stopping to exchange small talk or to occasionally sit in a bar nursing a beer and listening to Billy Joel on the juke box. His baggy eyes, thin face, and five o'clock shadow, no longer resembled the handsome man who masterfully dealt with the myths and realities of modern Military history from Pickett at Gettysberg to the courage of Rommel in the Western Desert.

No loss is a total loss. In his deepest moment of desperation Appel turned to a relative who got him a job as a guard at Lehigh County Prison, nestled between the Allentown Art Museum and the Eric movie house. Marty was happy again. He got to wear a uniform with a patch of the American flag. He strolled the corridors with his head high, shoes shined, pressed shirt and pants, a whistle, a club, a baseball cap with an LCP insignia and a shiny name tag. He barked out orders to jump and the inmates asked, "How High?"

Getting ahead became an obsession with Appel and soon he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He took his prison job very seriously. According to a former lover of his, his neatly pressed gray shirts were hung in a row in his closet, and he would dress methodically, admiring himself in the mirror, "and then march out the door like he was headed for some parade."

Appel fell in love with a black woman we'll call Dotti. He often took Dotti and her three kids on shopping sprees. "He was like a little kid himself," Dotti recalled. "We'd go to McDonald's and he'd load up on burghers and fries and we'd just laugh and laugh. If love is something that makes you feel good for a while, then yes, I loved him."

Love is increasingly expensive and Appel's $250-per-week paycheck wouldn't cover the $581 worth of clothes charged at Sears, or the $51 Dotti spent for cosmetics or the thousands more put on his Mastercard to wine and dine her. With bill collectors dogging him, Marty became bad-tempered and he and Dotti fought like lions biting. The children cried. Dotti walked out on him.

One night Appel appeared on the front lawn of her rented house, raised a .357 Magnum to his head and threatened to kill himself if she didn't come back to him. "Go head!" she shouted out her window. "Shoot yourself!" She didn't call the cops, but a relative showed up and took the gun from him and took him home.

Mission accomplished: Marty's heartthrob returned to him the next day. By 1984, Appel was as bankrupt as a Kosovo undertaker. The curse of a credit card and meager paycheck could not keep up with his spending temptations. He became a desperate man, unwilling to knuckle under to a world that saw him as a flunky, an ignoramus who was a disgrace to his family and country. According to Dotti, this is when he went off the deep end.

For example, he was driving downtown Allentown one night when a car cut him off. He chased the man, pulled him over, hopped out of his car, and flashed his identification card, and screamed that he had a mind to arrest the other driver. Appel was arrested for impersonating a police officer. His family was mortified when they read The Morning Call, which headlined: "Lehigh Prison Guard Convicted of Impersonating a Policeman." He was fired.

"I wanted to be a general so bad," he said in a prison interview with reporters. "But then, things didn't work out. Then, of course, the impersonating a police officer happened and I lost the respect I had from my family and friends. It did me in. I was the great potential for my family. When I failed, that was it. So here I sit, my reputation gone. I let them down."

In a period of comparative peace and quiet, now 28, Appel drove a cab for Quick Service Cab Co., and lived in a cloistered trailer park three blocks from the First National Bank of Bath. During his "time off" he peered through his telescope at the stars and remembered how he always wanted to enjoy the recognition befitting Captain Kirk or a general. He even wrote his own epitaph: "Here lies a man who would be general." At the Quick Service garage, where Marty drove a cab 10 hours a day, he befriended a big, lovable oaf named Stanley Hertzog. They became as inseparable as Siamese twins. They shot pool and drank beer together. They ate at the same coffee shop. If they weren't together, someone would always ask, "Hey, where's your buddy at?"

Appel's girlfriend didn't like Hertzog. "Here's this beautiful girl jealous over Stanley Hertzog," Appel said. "Can you beat that?" Dotti testified at his trial that she thought Appel and Hertzog were carrying on a homosexual affair. Hertzog's defense attorney jumped on it and claimed it was Appel's ability to control his client through homosexuality that got Hertzog in trouble.

"I didn't go for that sort of thing," Appel said. "There wasn't anything like that between us. I’m no goddamn queer." A man who had known Appel all his life told police, " Stanley would have never gone into that bank if not for Martin. It was the classic master-slave relationship. He looked at Martin, who was much shorter, with awe."

His appetite for high-life, for everything a dollar could buy for his sweetheart, was too deep-rooted for the man with the military dream to ignore. These circumstances and being saddled with a $15,000 debit, more than anything were grating on Marty's nerves when he sat down to map out the most perfect plan since the mauling of the Panzers at Kursk. "I, like the Japanese kamikaze, get the satisfaction out of knowing that I've made a difference, There was simply no other way. I needed that money for myself and my girlfriend. I reasoned that at least one of us would get the money and win," said Appel.

Inspired by history, he picked D-day, June 6, 1986, to storm the First National Bank of Bath. Fascinated by courage and daring, Martin, the general, would hold the customers and employes at bay while his lone artilleryman, Hertzog, would scoop up the money. Appel chose a 9mm pistol "because that's what officers carry." For days on end, he took his unschooled confidant into the desert for target practice. But Hertzog couldn't hit the Pacific if Balboa pointed it out.

Appel's last minute details on their quarry included a diversionary bomb threat at the Allentown-Bethleham-Easton Airport to befuddle authorities minutes before the assault on the bank.

Days before the heist, Appel took the U.S.S. Lexington on a "dry run" past the state police barracks to the bank, to see how long it would take for the police to respond. "Every detail has to be worked out," he told Stanley. "That's the beauty of a military invasion." "I had to train Hertzog and I thought I trained him well," Appel continued. "I could instill fear in him and I hoped that it would be enough to make him go through with the job and not make any mistakes. The military teaches you that when it's all stacked against you to use frontal assault. It's the most direct and effective. Boom, right through the front door. That's what the bank was all about. We're going in the front door and blamo, we're going to shoot everyone in sight. Take no prisoners." His method was simplicity itself.

During their three minute "frontal assault" 18 shots were fired and three innocent people were cut down in the prime of life. Two were critically wounded. Two employees escaped out the rear exit, a blunder that seemed to fit the general's profile.

Janice Confer stuck her head up when she heard the blistering burst of gunfire. Appel shot her twice. "I noticed she was twitching, still alive," Appel said. I heard her gargling. It sounded like she was lightly wheezing or something. She was face down on the floor and trying to move a little bit. I figured, 'Oh, shit, this lady ain't dead.' It might sound weird - people say I'm not capable of mercy, but I seen the lady suffering and I put her out of her misery. I aimed at her head, but the bullet hit her in the spine and killed her. My gun has a tendency to go for the spine."

Appel's urgent voice was barking directions to Stanley when he noticed Jane Hartmen squeezing her slender frame beneath her desk. "She crouched under her desk right in front of me," Appel said. "I don't know why she tried to hide. I just held the gun over her desk and - Pow, pow - she was history."

Two more shots and Hazel Evans was history. Today, a gold plaque bearing the names of Evans, Confer, Hartman, Hauser and Marchetto is permanently attached to the front of the bank. Their arraignment took place on June 6, 1986, in the Nazareth office of District Justice Elmo Frey Jr. The unprovoked bank murders aroused law-abiding citizens of Allentown as no earlier crime had done. A lynch mob formed, and state troopers were brought in to protect the killers. "It was scary," said Appel.

The following morning someone spray-painted "Hang 'Em High" on the side of Appel's trailer. On June 9, 1986, Appel tried to plea bargain with FBI agent Dick Fritz. "I asked to see a representative of the CIA," he said. "I figured maybe they could use me on a suicide mission to Iran or Libya," he said. Having failed, he signed a confession.

Appel put up no defense and asked for no trial. He contacted several literary agents trying to sell his autobiography, "666" the sign of the devil, for $5,000 so he could send it to his girlfriend. No takers. Marcia Hauser finally recovered, but she sustained everlasting brain damage. Stanley Hertzog got life without parole.

Appel was confined to a psychiatric hospital for a time, but was released with a note saying he was obsessed with proving to society that he was in command. On September 3, 1986, Judge Robert Albert Freedberg sentenced him to death in the electric chair. Appel's comment: "You can never destroy evil. Evil can't be destroyed. It can only be restrained. Evil's like trying to kill the wind. You can't kill it because you can't catch it.” At this writing Martin Daniel Appel sits on Huntington State Prison's death row, hoping to be executed "for historical reasons." He wants to be the first person executed in that state since 1962.

"There's no glory in anything but first," he explained. "You know, it's strange," Appel said from death row, "people talk about getting tough on crime, they talk about wanting to execute me for the thing I did. And I say, go head. But look, I'm still here. I think it boils down to the fact that for all the tough talk society does, it doesn't have the balls to kill me.

"I was thinking about what I'm going to say if they ever strap me into the electric chair. The final statement. Well mine's going to be short and sweet. It's from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. "The Terminator." I'm going to say, 'I'll be back.' That ought to give them something to think about."