George Metesky - Identification

Identification

Con Edison clerk Alice Kelly had read the Christmas Day profile and for days had been scouring company workers' compensation files for employees with a serious health problem. On Friday, January 18, 1957, while searching the final batch of "troublesome" worker's compensation case files – those where threats were made or implied – she found a file marked in red with the words "injustice" and "permanent disability", words that had been printed in the Journal American. The file indicated that one George Metesky, an employee from 1929 to 1931, had been injured in a plant accident on September 5, 1931. Several letters from Metesky in the file used wording similar to the letters in the Journal American, including the phrase "dastardly deeds". The police were notified shortly before 5:00 that evening. They initially treated the notification as just "one of a number" of leads they were working on, but asked Waterbury police to do a "discreet check" on George Metesky and the house at 17 Fourth Street.

After Metesky's arrest, early police statements credited the finding of his file to an NYPD detective. Later, a report developed in a reward investigation conceded that Alice Kelly had found the file, and explained the misplaced credit as due to a misunderstanding of the file being "picked up" by the detective (at the Con Edison offices on Monday morning) as meaning that the file was "picked out" (of many). Although the NYPD did officially credit Kelly with turning up the clue that led to Metesky's arrest, she declined to claim the $26,000 in rewards, saying she had merely been doing her job. Consolidated Edison's board of directors also declined to file for the reward, prompting a group of shareholders to file as representatives of Kelly and the company.

Police investigators who later reviewed the path that led them to Metesky said that Con Edison had impeded the investigation for almost two years by repeatedly telling them that the records of employees whose services were terminated prior to 1940, the group Metesky was in, had been destroyed. The investigators said that they had learned of the records' existence only on January 14, through a confidential tip, and that even in the face of police demands and formal requests Con Edison stalled, declaring that the papers were legal documents and that the company's legal department would have to be consulted before granting access. A statement by the president of Consolidated Edison said this was due to a "misunderstanding".