The Murder of Harriet Hannah Chattin
by Steven J. Baeli
April 5. 2011

Victim: Katherine and Julian Tomaszewski & Harriet
Hannah Chattin (12)
Accused: Gildo
Plazziano
Date of Incident: 1915
& October 4, 1917
Offense: Murder-Suicide
Verdict: None
Sentence: Suspect
died before being arrest
The following is a strange and disturbing story that involved two murder scenes and three victims, the first being the killing of a husband and wife in what was believed to be a robbery, and the second a murder-suicide that followed the probable sexual assault of a twelve-year-old girl. Both homicide scenes ended in arson to cover up the crimes.
All three murders took place in Pasadena, an area
of Ocean County that has been largely reclaimed by nature. This particular region was located in Union
Township, which later became Barnegat, Ocean, and Lacey Townships. The area was known for its rich underlayment
of clay, which gave birth to an economically sound brick and terra cotta
industry started by Lewis Neill & Company in the mid-1800s, dubbed locally
as the Union Clay Works. Two other kilns
later sprung up in the area, one being the Townsend Clay Manufacturing Company
in Wheatland, and another south of it, called the Brooks-Brae Brick Plant where
the death of Harriet Hannah Chattin took place.
By 1917, the Brooks-Brae plant had ceased
operations, but its owners had employed Gildo Plazziano, an Austrian hired as a
watchman to protect the machinery that was still being stored in the various
wooden buildings around the property, in one of which Plazziano had set up
house. Although the watchman had been
around the plant for several years, most of the locals considered him a
stranger and an odd sort they tended to avoid whenever possible, especially
since he was suspected of killing a married couple and burning down their house
to hide the crime two years prior to Chattin’s murder.
The New
Jersey Courier had reported that a husband and wife going by the name of Smith
had “perished when flames destroyed their isolated dwelling…September 14,
[1915]. The caretaker’s real names were
Julian (63) and Katherine (61) Tomaszewski reportedly from Philadelphia.
On the day of the first incident, smoke from the fire that had
risen above the thick wooded area was spotted by some local farmers and
cranberry workers in the early morning hours, but by the time they got to the flames,
the shack had burned to the ground and the Tomaszewskis were “burned beyond
recognition.” The couple's daughter, Alice Smith, was contacted in Philadelphia and
told of the sad news, after which she immediately came to the scene. Locals who were familiar with the Tomaszewskis
had said that “there was something mysterious” about them that just did not sit
right, an assumption that probably began after it was discovered that Smith was
not their real name.
Coroner Owen B. Shuts and Prosecutor Harry
Ellsworth Newman conducted an investigation and initially determined that the
fire had started in the chimney, sending smoke into the house and asphyxiating
the victims, but public concern forced them to reconsider their decision. Apparently the people in the area believed
that the Tomaszewskis were murdered for money and the house burned down to
cover the deed. As the fire had
effectively destroyed any evidence of murder, however, the Coroner could draw
no definitive conclusions and labeled it as accidental. Plazziano was never mentioned in the investigation, but two years
later his evil act put things into perspective and gave some validity to the
theory that the Tomaszewskis had been murdered.
Despite the forewarning of danger where Plazziano
was concerned, Mrs. Chattin had allowed her daughter to frequent his shack
against the wishes of her husband, Samuel.
He had warned his wife not to let twelve-year-old Hannah be alone with the
man, but the woman naively saw “no harm with a child of those years,” and
dismissed the attentions of the Austrian, who had “[thought] so much of the
little girl.”
On the day of the murder, Hannah informed her
mother that she would be over at Plazziano’s house and left out at seven in the
morning to help him with some wallpaper hanging. When the girl did not return by noon, her
parents became worried and set out to find her.
Seeing smoke coming from the area of the brick plant, Samuel Chattin and
his son immediately headed over and found the watchman’s building aflame. Braving the danger, they looked into a window
and there saw Gildo Plazziano and Hannah Chattin laying together on the bed,
but by that time the fire had engulfed the entire building causing the roof to
cave in, stopping any effort to save the girl.
Seeing the smoke from nearby Chatsworth, local
residents, George Bozarth and Charles Hathaway, went up to see what was going
on, and once there tried to help the Chattins get the two bodies out with rakes
and sticks, but they were beaten back from the heat of the flames. The men did manage to pull the cot nearer to
the window, but in their excitement wound up turning it over, which caused the
bodies to tumble to the floor. Before
long the main plant caught fire as well and at the end of the day the entire
complex was nothing but a smoldering ruin. When it was finally safe to search the ruins,
what was left of the victims was recovered, but the fire had burned so hotly
that it had incinerated most the tiny girl’s body, leaving only her torso and
part of her head.
When it was finally safe to search the ruins,
what was left of the victims was recovered, but the fire had burned so hotly
that it had incinerated most the tiny girl’s body, leaving only her torso and
part of her head. The next afternoon Sheriff
Brown, Coroner Brouwer, and Prosecutor Plumer came down and inspected the scene
of the fire, which had not yet fully burned out, arriving just as the bodies
were being removed from Plazziano’s shack.
Coroner Frank A. Brouwer, who had himself been the subject of a trial
for the murder of his wife in 1905, examined the remains and issued burial
permits. It is assumed that Hannah
Chattin was interred at Greenwood Cemetery, as the article reported that her
burial would take place in Tuckerton, but there was no mention of where Plazziano
was buried, although it is possible his grave was dug somewhere on the plant
property.
Inside the shack was found four rolls of charred
wallpaper, which corroborated Hannah Chattin’s reason for being there, and on a
table several bags of candy that was assumed to have been purchased specifically
for the girl by Plazziano on a trip Philadelphia. The general consensus throughout the
community was that Plazziano had given in to his “base desires” and had sex
with the little girl, and realizing what he had done, killed her, set the shack
on fire, and then laid down next to her before killing himself.
Plazziano had seemed to find himself often in the sights of the law, when in an unrelated matter he had been arrested and convicted
of selling moonshine out of his shack three years he killed Hannah Chattin. The $200 he was
fined apparently did nothing to dissuade him, as a couple dozen quarts of
whiskey were found at the scene of the crime.
While that may have nothing to do with the murders, any law enforcement
officer will tell you that such a disregard for the law goes to a criminal lack
of credibility. It should also be pointed out that he didn't quite fit in with the locals in the area who thought him to be “queer,” and tended to keep their distance from him.
We can never be sure exactly what caused
Plazziano to kill the girl, but we can reasonable assume that he was guilty of
that crime based on his own suicide and the placement of the bodies on the bed. As was the case in the Tomaszewski fire, the
condition of the charred bodies eliminated any forensic evidence available at
that time that may have made clear the facts of a murder-suicide, but when we figure
in Plazziano’s criminal history, his strange and hermit-like behavior, and the
fact that both crime scenes were set on fire, it is safe to assume that he
was guilty of all three murders.
The
death of Harriet Hannah Chattin was the first known
such sexual assault and murder of a child in Ocean County, but would
unfortunately not be the last as seen in the cases of Keven Hammond in
1978, and Eddie Werner in 1997.