THEY WENT WRONG

These cases which are fairly fresh from the police blotter are reported here by an experienced magazine writer with something of the intention of John Bartlow Martin's Why Did They Kill (Ballantine- 1953) for while the crimes speak for themselves, it is the early history of the criminal which gives them a significance over and above their sensationalism. Robert Brown, reared by society- not his mother- started to steal at six and came out of the Marines at the wrong end of a gun; McManus (who will be remembered from the headlines) was a nervous child of quarrelsome parents whose confused ideas led to fantasies of violence which ended with his crosscountry elopement with a girl of 16 and his shooting of five innocent people; Patrolman Tierney, inclined to rage reactions, gave way to the brutal assault of a minor offender; Homer Loomis, a graduate of St. Paul's and Princeton, was a selfstyled ""Hitler of America"" and guilty of violent persecution--- these and other cases trace anti-social behaviour to its earliest origins- in the home- and prove their point in a direct, noncommittal transcript.