The Butler's Child by Lewis M. Steel

Author:Lewis M. Steel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466884984
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

15

Tony Maynard

At around four in the morning of April 3, 1967, a white Marine sergeant, Michael Kroll, dressed in his uniform and recently back from the Vietnam War, sought to start a fight with a black man and his white companion in a seedy area of New York City’s Greenwich Village. He was blown away by a shotgun blast and died instantly.

The killing was big news. Mayor John Lindsay latched on to the shooting. Kroll was a hero. New York was crime city. Lindsay had bad poll numbers and a reputation for being soft on crime. Voicing outrage, the mayor demanded that the police quickly apprehend the killer and bring him to justice.

That, however, was not so easy. The cops had no weapon, no fingerprints, and no suspects. Here is what they knew: A short time before Kroll was shot, a white navy boatswain’s mate, Robert Crist, also in uniform, had a confrontation in Greenwich Village with a black man, John Barnhardt. According to Crist, who later described himself as intoxicated, Barnhardt propositioned him. Crist was outraged. Barnhardt attempted to get away. Crist chased him and knocked him down near the Blue Onion, a joint on West Third Street. As Crist walked away he was approached by another black man, who was with a white companion. The black man, whom Crist later described as being eighteen to twenty years old, of medium build, and five feet ten or eleven inches tall, berated him for striking an older and smaller man. Knoll drove up as the black and white men walked away. Crist got into Kroll’s car, and the pair decided to seek out the black and white men and finish the argument. When they caught up to the two men, the Marine jumped out of the car and confronted the black man who had berated Crist, Kroll disregarded the black man’s warning to stay away, and was hit by a shotgun blast to his face. The only other description of the black man who fired the shot by the Village nightlife characters in the area was that the killer looked like Martin Luther King, Jr.

* * *

William Anthony Maynard, Jr., was a fixture in Greenwich Village at the time that Kroll was killed. He and his brother-in-law, Michael Quinn, were partners in a soon-to-fail fancy Village clothing store. Tony was thirty-two years old, stood six feet one inch tall, had lean, movie-star features, and looked nothing like Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many months later, when he was arrested in Germany, charged with Kroll’s homicide, and extradited back to New York, the newspapers referred to Tony as a theatrical agent and an actor. But Tony was more of an all-around-type guy who related to, and sometimes got things done for, people he thought mattered—a list that included James Baldwin, the author of The Fire Next Time; the jazz legend Charlie Mingus; and William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was published the same year that Kroll was killed.

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