JUSTICE STORY: Fugitive ex-con killer nabbed in NYC after shooting taxi driver

Around 6 p.m. on Dec. 19, 1956, holiday shoppers along Tremont Ave.’s busy retail section heard startling sounds that in no way reflected the joy of the season.
First, there was the steel-on-steel crunch of cars crashing, then screams and gunshots.
“Sprays Bronx With Bullets, Cops Fell Him” was how a Daily News headline summed up the chaotic scene on Dec. 20.
The shooter was a fugitive, Leroy Keith, 42, wanted for a murder in Akron, Ohio a day before Thanksgiving.
Keith, two women, and another man were traveling in a taxi driven by David Suro, 49. Before they reached their destination, Keith pulled a gun on the cabbie.
At that moment, Suro spotted a parked police cruiser. In desperation, he slammed into it.
Keith and his companions leaped out. As he fled, Keith took two parting shots at Suro, hitting him in the abdomen and chest.
Then, with five detectives on his tail, Keith “ran wild with a blazing gun,” The News reported.
After a two-block chase, his gun empty, Keith dove under a car. Cops ordered him to come out. Instead, he reloaded and started shooting. Fortunately, none of those bullets hit their mark.
Police had much better aim but, despite five slugs in his body, their crazed prisoner had to be subdued by a gun to his head.
Even as hospital doctors struggled to save his miserable life, he raged on.
“You’re not dealing with a dope,” he screamed after ripping an anesthesia mask off his face. “I’ll get out of here.”
Then he let loose with a “long list of prison-ripened profanities,” observed the Akron Beacon Journal.
Keith’s operating table outburst may have sounded like mad ravings, but he had a point. His history included a remarkable decades-long record of evading justice.
Twice, parole boards gave him a second chance to make good on the outside. Twice, appeals courts allowed him to dodge a date with the electric chair.
Those decisions would cost three men their lives.
Born in Akron, Keith started his criminal career in his teens. In June 1932, he landed in a reformatory for car theft. Less than a year later, he was paroled.
On the evening of July 24, 1934, steelworker Fred Greist was sitting in his parked car in Warren, Ohio.
Scores of pedestrians got a clear view as two young men yanked the car door open, shot Greist in the heart, and fled.
In mid-August, police nabbed one of the killers, Ernest Baugh, 17. The youth confessed, saying that their plan was to rob a grocery store. “We should have a car to get away in,” Baugh recalled Keith saying. Greist was chosen at random.
About a week later, Akron police spotted Keith roaring along in a stolen car. They forced him to drive into a tree.
In November, a jury found the 20-year-old guilty of first-degree murder with no recommendation for mercy. Keith got the death penalty. Baugh, the state’s star witness, got a life sentence.
Keith’s lawyers appealed and won a new trial.
While awaiting his second trial, Keith attempted to break out. Later, he tried to murder a buddy by slashing his throat with a razor. In the coming years, he’d earn the nickname “Cut” for his bloody antics with sharp implements.
“Doomed Second Time,” the Akron Beacon Journal observed on Nov. 22, 1935, when Keith got his repeat guilty verdict and death sentence.
“I’ll be back for another trial,” Keith gloated to reporters.
His lawyers went to work, and in March 1936 his sentence was reduced to life in prison.
He was denied parole at his first hearing in 1945.
Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge Lynn B. Griffith offered a harsh opinion at the time. “Under no consideration should this man be placed on parole as he is a dangerous character and a menace to every law-abiding citizen, and the life sentence should mean that and not a minute less.”
In July 1956, Keith was freed on parole.
On Thanksgiving eve that year, Coburn E. Von Gunten, 40, an Akron businessman, was sitting in his convertible on a downtown street.
Police on routine patrol noticed a teenager and an older man approach Von Gunten’s parked car. Moments later, the detectives heard gunshots and saw the older man running. After a brief gun battle, the shooter disappeared into the night.
The detectives caught the teen, who said that he, Keith, and another man had come to Akron to rob grocery stores. They decided to steal Von Gunten’s car for their getaway. When he resisted, Keith shot him.
Despite a nationwide dragnet, there was no sign of the fugitive until a few days before Christmas, when he turned up in David Suro’s taxi in the Bronx.
Suro died two days later, his wife weeping by his bedside.
Keith survived, but it took about two years before he was well enough for a trial. Like the jury for his first murder in 1934, the New York jury declared him guilty of first-degree murder, with no recommendation for mercy. He was sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and 11th-hour pleas to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller delayed the execution until July 1959.
This time, though, no mercy meant no mercy.
“Cabbie Killer Is Executed At Sing Sing,” The News reported on Jul. 24, 1959, a quarter of a century after his first murder.
“Sooner or later, we all come to justice,” were Keith’s last words. “I am very disappointed in Gov. Rockefeller.”