Elmer “Bud” Schifko
By Colleen Nelson
It was the crime that brought 1970 in with a bang and made headlines until 1973 when the last man, United Mine Workers president W. A.
“Tony” Boyle, was convicted of ordering the murder of archrival Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, his wife Margaret and daughter Charlotte in their Clarksville home.
The crime took place the night of December 31, 1969, and the bodies were discovered five days later, a grisly gangland style execution that shocked the nation.
Retired State Police trooper Elmer “Bud” Schifko opened up one of his scrapbooks on the table of his home on Carpenter Lane, Waynesburg, and pointed to a tall trooper in a clipped newspaper photo, one of many.
“I was the first officer there. They were murdered in bed. It was a pretty bad case.”
Schifko and his wife Earlene are known to many for their years of good-hearted volunteering with the American Cancer Society, at church and door-to-door with Meals on Wheels. But there’s more to this man known as Bud than his wide genial smile might suggest. Take a look in those scrapbooks and you’ll find murderers, thieves and United States presidents. And Schifko has met them all.
“When I became a state trooper in 1958 you joined for two years then you had to re-enlist and they could refuse you. We were paid $3,000 a year and worked six days a week and were on call 24/7. It’s not like that now. Now it’s a job you can retire from.”
Schifko’s stint as a trooper with a knack for investigation and interrogation became a tour of duty when the Army recruited him in
1959 to serve as a military police criminal investigator. Newly married and about to be become parents, Bud and Earlene took up housekeeping in Tacoma Park, Md. “Our first child Debra was born at Walter Reed.”
Walter Reed Hospital was Schifko’s beat and keeping an eye on presidents and their wives when they checked in for treatment became his specialty.
One photo shows a frail Dwight D. Eisenhower being helped out of a car. Schifko is standing at attention in the background, tall, unobtrusive and watchful.
“When Eisenhower walked down the hall – they had a wing on the third floor for presidents – the doctors walked with him and me and the Secret Service walked behind them. Ike was nice and so was Maime. I sat with her on the couch once when she was spending time at the hospital while Ike was dealing with the Berlin Crisis. But don’t ask me about Nixon or you’ll get some bad remarks. Kennedy? Never got to meet him. He was Navy and went to Bethesda.”
After Walter Reed, Schifko went back to being a state trooper, hundreds of miles from his hometown of Rices Landing.
“When I came in you weren’t allowed to go to your home troop for 10 years so I went to Erie. Then I was stationed in Uniontown but was living in this house. Then I transferred to Waynesburg. We raised five kids here and when they moved out we moved our parents in. It’s big but we keep it because when the kids visit they want to come home.”
Getting to peruse Schifko’s scrapbooks and listen to his remembrances of having been there is the best kind of history lesson, especially over coffee.
The dry details of the first report filed in the Yablonski case paint a detective’s picture of the interior of the big fieldstone house and the scene of the crime, the cut telephone wires, flattened tires and spent shell casings. Details from the many newspaper stories make it real – the cold slush of a January funeral, the grim faces of the miners in uncomfortable suits, out to mourn one of their own, Robert Abbadini’s first-hand account of being the last person to see his friend Jock alive on December 30. Ironically, they had been out that evening attending a funeral.
Newspapers ran with the story as it developed. “Yablonski Probe Most Intensive Since M.L.,” heralded congressional and FBI investigations and “600 Are Interviewed in Yablonski Murders” was headline news. UMW officials denied any union implication and offered a $50,000 reward.
But the hunt for the killers was soon over because they had a glaring mistake.
“In a way Jock solved his own murder because he wrote down the license plate number of the car that was seen around Clarksville and casing his house before the hit. That’s what lead to Cleveland and that’s how they found their men,” Schifko noted.
And woman. A particularly vivid photograph shows Schifko, surrounded by officers toting machine guns, helping escort 29-year-old Annette Gilly into the Washington County courthouse to change her plea.
It was her father, Silous Huddleston, a Tennessee official with the United Mine Workers District 19, who contacted her and her husband,
Paul Gilly, in Cleveland to carry out the crime. Paul Gilly, 37,
recruited 27-year-old Claude Vealey and Aubran “Buddy” Martin, a baby faced 21-year-old to be part of the execution. Like the amateurs they proved themselves to be they drove to Clarksville in Annette Gilly’s 1965 Chevrolet sedan and were ultimately nabbed by the numbers Yablonski had written down.
Vealey was the first to confess and on January 24 Navy divers were brought in to seach the Monongahela River near Fredericktown for the murder weapons.
“It was a cold winter that year. They had to break the ice on the river to dive. One diver was from Guam,” Schifko recalled.
One clipping shows Schifko carrying a box containing the high-powered rifle pulled from the river, another shows him bringing in Huddleston after his arrest. Each step in the carefully conducted murder investigation and subsequent trials and convictions for first-degree murder brought Schifko and the law closer to the man who orchestrated it all.
It was not the UMW’s finest hour. Yablonski and Boyle fought a bitter battle for the presidency of the UMW in 1969 and Yablonski lost the December 9 election. By New Years Eve he and his family were dead and Yablonski’s sons, Kenneth and Joe, were openly calling the murder an assassination.
It took nearly three years, but the evidence and confessions and sentencing of those who killed, and those who followed Boyle’s orders to embezzle $20,000 in union funds to pay for the crime, helped veteran Philadelphia trial lawyer Richard Sprague indict Boyle on three counts of first-degree murder and get convictions.
Schifko, a principle investigator, stayed on the case, working with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents, “they had specialities that were very good” witnessing confessions and presenting testimony in court.
“In the beginning the UMW people in Tennessee were real helpful. But when we started going after Tony Boyle they clammed up.” In the end it was the paperwork, the checks sent to Tennessee with Boyle’s signature on them that cracked the case.
More murderers and thieves lurk in those scrapbooks, but Schifko isn’t one to dwell on the past. They’ll be put away until the next curious friend comes calling. For Schifko, the best memories of his years as a lawman are ones where he was able to get some young man he’d arrested for a misdemeaner a job “back when there were jobs in the mine” and hold him on his honor not to mess up again. Or the friendly lectures given with a traffic violation explaining the consequences of such actions, given along with the citation.
“It’s funny but most of those people ended up thanking me before I left,” Schifko said.
His favorite piece of sleuthing?
“The case I solved because I knew where the chicken wings came from.
You got to pay attention to details.”
The smile on Schifko’s face, so genuine and friendly, was matched by the smiling face of a long-haired bearded man, beaming from a painting on the dining room wall. He looked friendly, kind, oddly familiar.
“It’s Jesus,” Schifko explained, his grin growing even larger. “You never see him smiling so I had this painting done. What do you think?”