THE MAN WITH THE KILLER SMILE-Mitchel P. Roth

with primitive cutting tools and his bare hands. By the time he concluded his bloody work, he had taken the lives of nine family members, raging in age from two to forty one, committing what one local reporter called the blackest crime in the history of the West Texas Panhandle. Husband, father, uncle, embsler, Syria mass murderer, philanderer, child molester, convict and military deserter George Jefferson Hassel was many things to many people, most

of them bad. His pattern of familicide crime had begun in nineteen seventeen, when he slaughtered his common law wife and her three kids in Whittier, California. Later, in Texas, he married his brother's wife and became stepfather to her

eight children. Using Hassel's confessions and as many interviews with reporters as well as the trial transcripts and reminiscences of those who cross paths with him in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, Mitchell p. Roth presents the first comprehensive account of the life and crimes of one of the least known multiple

murderers in Texas, let alone American history. Roth situates hassel saga within the nineteen twenties Texas criminal justice system, including the death penalty which Hassel ultimately received from Old Sparky the Electric Chair at Huntsville. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Man with the Killer Smile, The Life and Crimes of a serial mass murderer, with my special guest, journalist and author and professor of criminal justice

and criminology, Mitchell p Roth. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Well, thank you for having me. Thanks, thank you so much. First off, tell us how you came to be the author of this book.

mass murder. And I don't think he really knew a whole lot about what he did, but it piqued my interest because I had never heard of this person, and I consider myself an expert relatively on all the you know, major serial killers and mass murders. In any case, I asked him if he had any records or family documents, because a lot of people come up with these you know, stories,

and DAN can't document them. And it turns out he did, and he was kind enough to make a copy of what had been gathered by his family members who had gone up to the Panhandle in the nineteen eighties. Interviewed some of the last surviving jors and witnesses, and you know, basically had put it into this very short family manuscript. So anyway, I held it because I had a lot of other book projects going, and I kept telling myself, this is going to be my next book, This is

gonna be my next book. And I finally got to the point about three years ago, right before a COVID outbreak, that had time to go up to the area that his family had been to and look for court transcripts and go to all the spots and start documenting it all for myself and going full throttle on writing this book. And as a result, I found a lot of interesting facts. I found a lot of interesting inaccuracies in the family manuscript.

And as I went on and on and did further research, which entailed lots of newspapers from around the country, entailed you know, even some pulp nonfiction, you know, detective magazines from the time period, as well as using archives in Austin, Texas State Library and in Huntsville, the Texas Prison Museum. So I was able to cobble together the story of a guy who didn't leave much paper trail. He was.

He was uneducated but very smart, very cunning, and what we know about him, most of it comes from him. So whenever that happens, you need to go look at the ancestor record. You need to go try and you know, find birth records, family records and all of that. And apparently there weren't many people in his family that were proud of him, and he kind of was lost to history. And I have a huge true crime library in my office at home and at school, and I've never come

across his name, which I'm kind of surprised. Surprised since he's had he had thirteen victims in total, and that's at least thirteen when you consider, you know, other killers.

he probably got a lot of his traits from. It might have been a grandfather who had been a familiar presence in the court system in another part of Texas for arson and some other things, but nothing as nefarious as what he did. And you know, the most interesting things I found was that almost every account of the story has his father being poisoned by a second wife and him deciding in his young teens to go and

kill that family. And he admitted this was his first impulse to you know, commit this type of crime, killing a whole family. Well, you know, it turns out, looking through ancestry dot com and other sites, parents didn't die when when he said they did. He wasn't out on his own as early as he said he was, and he didn't commit any murders before as far as we know, I should say, his nineteen seventeen slaughter of his you know, first family.

some money that he ended up, he claimed. George claimed that he fell in with some bad ombres and they spent it all. And of course that was the story of his life, deflecting his bad behavior on other people as well. But in any case, he ended up getting arrested for embezzlement. He was about seventeen years old at the time and pushing eighteen, and he was sentenced to

two years in prison. And what this meant at that time was serving a time in the different prison farm units in the Texas criminal justice system, and you know, these have had, you know, terrible, justly terrible reputations over the years, and you know, he documents some of the things that happened to him. I was very lucky and that I was able to find his records in the Texas State Library of what farms he worked on, and I was able to figure out what his tasks were.

And you know, when he talked about what he had to do, whether it was working on a turpentine farm or cutting sugarcane at these different places. You know, this was some of the information I could actually validate. But you know it was for very short periods at each but enough to give you a taste of Texas justice.

Evidently he knew the family of the woman that he married, and he also was familiar with George's sister, who was often kind of his only family member to give him any type of sage advice. And anyway, ultimately George did everything he could to kind of make sure that this situation didn't work, and he ended up leaving to find a job somewhere else, leaving the farm, and eventually, as he claimed, leaving his wife and child, even though he claims there was an agreement for them to kind of

separate and we'd get back together. But once he found a job, You right, though.

married to her. Well, in any case, you know, he acted like she left him and kind of hit out from him, and you know, really destroyed his ego and his life. And I bought into this, you know, not to get far ahead on my research or whatever, but I bought into this until the very end, and I found a letter written forty years after his death by

his only biological son, by his wife. And you know, in the letter he had written to the Texas Department of Public Safety saying he wanted to get information on his father. He didn't know a lot about him, and so anyway, he said the reason they left was because

they were afraid he was going to kill them. And this was right before I turned my manuscript in, and this kind of filled in a nice big gap there, showing that you know, from the very beginning that he was a familicidal type of you know, individual.

which he really wasn't active doing anything else. And there was like a three or four year gap before World War One, leading up to World War One where he must have been either in jail or you know, on the lamb somewhere. But I do believe that he spent two years in succession of jails. I don't know which ones was he you know, he claimed he was in Virginia, he claims he was in California, And without those records,

you know, you cannot substantiate it. But you know, just from everything I've learned about him, I this is what I what I assume looking at a lot of different accounts.

And anyway, none of these visits went well, and you know, he ended up kind of being ostracized from the family and just basically told to you know, hit the road and don't come back. And after leaving the Fort Worth area, he claims that he ended up in San Angelo, Texas. And in San Angelo he met a woman named Marie Vogel. I really doubt that this actually happened. I mean, it's a nice story, but in any case, she apparently had a boarding house and he's sweet talked to her and

pretty soon they're living together. And she had a biological child and she was separated from her husband in San Diego, and so they agreed to hit the road and go to California and you know, kind of start over it together.

One of the problems with this story is you know, she's got this kid, and that reminds him also of one of his child He's never mentioned as he's talking about his road trip and some of the things that he pulls along the way where they, you know, try to pull these extortion schemes, luring men into the bedroom when he's not there and him coming upon them and you know, demanding money to allow the person to leave. It just you know this, it just doesn't this bunko

scheme and all that just doesn't sound right. I think what probably happened is he never met her in San Angelo. There was no reason for her to be there, you know, there was she had no family or friends there, and that he probably met her when he went to California and got a job working on a ranch where she was working as kind of a kind of a caretaker mate and had her child there. You know, That's why

I think happened. It's a great story, like most of his stories, but you know, looking at you know, whatever records I could find it, there was nothing to substantiate that. I couldn't find her in any type of telephone directory or anything from that time period in San Angelo, Texas. And you know, San Angelo was kind of the frontier. You know, what is she doing out there?

all probability were a couple by then. And you know, he introduced himself as a ge George G. Baker, and you know, basically I was trying to, of course, you know, hide his background. And one of the things they needed to do, since she was married, was to assume the facade of being a married couple with a child in order to be accepted there in any case, they end up getting two other children as well, that they supposedly got from an orphanage, claiming that they were a rich person,

and they ended up with these two other kids. And really it's hard to tell how they got these two kids. Some accounts say the sister brought them to them, others say that they got him through some type of orphanage arrangement. But in any case, by this time, about nineteen seventeen, nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, him and Marie and these three little kids, and they're all under the age of six,

are living on this ranch. And if the sister goes back home, back to the Pittsburgh area and never sees her sister again, and George ends up telling people when she disappears and the kids disappear that they had moved on. She'd run off with another guide to Australia or San Francisco, and he continued to live on the property that they had that they were renting. And Wittier you.

where'd they go? You know, you would think they would say goodbye, And he said, oh, they just took off. And this becomes this mantra whenever there's a family disappearance throughout the rest of his life.

of the bodies. And he couldn't come up with anything, He couldn't find the bodies or you know, anything like that. And he still knew this family as George G. Baker, And this would become a problem later on when they're trying to parties are trying to you know, find George Hassele and Wittier at that time, which they would not find.

and works in the oil fields. Based on your research in nineteen twenty two and twenty three, but on several occasions you write that he visited his brother and his large family in Blair, Oklahoma, on the ranch between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty four. Tell us about Tom, his brother, and his wife, Susan Ferguson, both nineteen years old.

And he had by this time, he had eight children, and you know, and soon would be his wife, Susan

would be pregnant with it with another child. Well, in any case, for some reason, they allow one of the daughters to go to California, which George on a trip, and this is around nineteen twenty two or so, and she comes back or she stays out there, and apparently she's pregnant, and George admits to having slept with her, and you know, didn't go into a lot of detail, but it was pretty obvious to understand this, and so she was going to stay in California and look for

a husband. In his words, again, she was still a minor, you know when this was happening. And he goes back and you know, to see the rest of the family again. He's very popular with them. He's a joker. He always a smile on his face. I mean, he's a complete chameleon.

He's everything that you want him to be when you want him to be it essentially, and you know, on these trips back home, you know, really nothing really happened of note, except for the pregnancy, and he tried to you know, pretend that he had nothing to do with it. And I think his mother, his sister in law, you know, you know, believed that he had impregnated her. And you know, this was a long running issue. And the brother, you know, seemed to be a down to earth, successful, hard working guy.

Apparently he had some health problems at this time, and you know, he was well known in the community, and George was kind of a cipher, you know when he

came to visit. You know, he was just a you know, kind of the brother that was there and anyway, one day they're working in the corral by most accounts, and George claims that his brother was kicked by a mule and killed and they were the only two in the corral at the time, and so everybody you know went by, you know, George's count and you know, if you look at the death certificate, it said he died from a hernia, some type of hernia, and it you know, just it

didn't sound quite right, and a lot of people suspected, you know, that it might not have gone down that way. But in any case, there are still others that suggested, you know, maybe there'd been some hanky panky between George and Tom's wife. Others suggested that maybe they got in a fight over him impregnating the daughter. We'll never know, you know, what the with the attention and the story was, or if he really was killed by the it was

a mule, actually killed by the mule. We right, really don't know that.

married and he'd take over raising the eight children. Which and this was like three months after the brother was killed, and in Oklahoma, I'm sure there was a lot of whispers going on, and you know, they felt that the best action would be to hit the road, you know, with the family and with the insurance payout essentially.

someone like George Jefferson. Hassel and the wife worked hard doing you know, the chores that a planes woman would be doing, and apparently, you know, they did a good job, you know, keeping the property up and all of that. In fact, neighboring farmers said, you know, he did a

much better job than would be expected. And really any of his jobs in California, and no one really knew him, nobody could really speak to you know, what kind of made him tick, and so you know, all of it was was that small of his that was so disarming.

missus Hamlin, the landlady judge Hamlin's wife. What does she notice in on October of nineteen twenty six concerning the property.

fact that the wife and George have been quarreling. You know, this is the prohibition era. She's very religious, and Russell Whitestone allow alcohol in the house, and he always has a kind of a bit of an alcohol air to him, and he goes out in the barn and drinks whiskey from time to time. But I think even worse than that, he apparently had impregnated another one of her children, one

of his former nieces. So now he's impregnated two nieces that are that are his step kids, and you know, he really doesn't want to hear about it when he's going to bed. You know that, you know that he has done this, and when he comes to bed, he has alcohol in his breath and she basically basically kind of chases him out of the room temporarily, you know, it kind of starts, it starts the tragedy rolling that would you know, take place.

And so he decided at that point that you know, he once he started, he had to finish the job in his terms, and which would mean killing the rest of the kids. And so he went from room to room, killing them in their sleep, and until he got to two of them, the you know, teenage preteen boys who were hardy farm workers, and they gave him, you know, quite a fight, and he ended up having to get a shotgun, which was the only gun that was used

in these killings, to kill one of them. But he strangled all the other kids, the really young ones, and used razor blades, and you know, it was a very personal type of killing spree. You know, could have been done much easier with just a gun. And so anyway, he was worried that, you know, he knew he had to get rid of the bodies because his oldest son was supposed to come back the next day. Alton was about twenty one, and he would he was out on a work crew, and so he had to you know,

develop an alibi. And all of this explained that they had all gone off to Oklahoma, when in fact he had buried them all in the pit that he had dug. And the question, you know, remains that he dig this pit ahead of time. Was this something that was pre planned or was it spontaneous? And I have a tendency to believe that it was pre planned, since it was kind of similar to his first mass murder.

in the head with a shotgun. And he would later say he died the easiest of all of them, you know, which is pretty much true. But at that point he'd wiped out, you know, the nine family members. Luckily the first you know, the woman the girl that he had had a child with, had moved to California, had stayed there and found a husband, so she was the one remaining member of that family. And nobody heard a thing. Nobody heard the shotgun or anything like that, and he

got everybody buried. And interesting, you know, he rather than flee right away, he sent you figured, well, I stayed around the last time I buried the four bodies, and nobody found out, and I just stayed in the house. So he decided to do that here. But I think also there was a financial reason too. He wanted to sell all the farm equipment and you know, everything that he could. He found somebody to take over the lease

from him. And you know, one of the interesting things leading up to this is his land lady, miss Hamlin, had noticed he has some scratches on his hands and on his face, and someone else had too, And this was after he had killed the family, and he told them he'd fallen off a horse into a stubble pile

or stubble bush and that's how he got them. But that was it's the first started, you know, giving people, you know, reason to you know question you know his story about well, did they actually leave, and also why would he fill that seller in when they just you know, opened it. And you know, he wasn't responsible for filling it. He was just a tenant farmer. So everybody kind of marveled at that. But he started advertising a auction that he was going to have of all of his equipment,

all his farm animals and everything. And the auction basically took place right over the graves of his family. And you know, so you know, over one hundred and fifty people came to this. I mean, you know, there's a whole lot to do on the high planes and these were times for you know, families, husbands and wives to get together and talk and you know, share stories. So anyway, he sells almost everything, and you know, really nobody's questioning

anything except the women. There are several women, including Missus Hamlin, and they decided to go into the house where which was supposed to be off limits, and they find suitcases of children's clothes and things that his wife would have taken with him when they were going up to their new home. And also she left behind all of her religious books. So they started really questioning this, Missus Ford,

Missus Hamlin. They went to their husbands with their suspicions, and then the husband's took it further and went into town and talked to a law enforcement.

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for the show that's True Murder at talkspace dot com. Now, Mitchell, you were talking about that he has covered up his crimes, he believes, but there's a neighbor that has seen this trenches that he had built weeks before and noticed this suspicious behavior, and the women in there that their neighbors are also talking to people like their husband's Jo Ford and other people in the community, and they go talk

to the sheriff. As you had mentioned, before the break, tell us what happens with their investigation post how they proceed.

But he thought he'd covered all of his tracks pretty well and so got to the point pretty quickly, you know, where'd your family go? And he went with his old story, and he basically told them that, you know that they could telegraph send a telegram to a certain person in shallow Water that would say that the family got there safely.

And so the attorney wanted to arrest George, but you know, they both got their heads together, the sheriff, Sheriff Martin and the attorney and decided, you know, they would just keep an eye on him as he went about his business. And he told the bank to let them know if he was withdrawing money or doing anything that might suggest

he was ready to flee town. So they had an eye on him, and their suspicions mounted and were finally you know, confirmed when they got a telegram back from the person they sent it to saying that the family never got there. The family's not and Cassel you know, didn't know that this was done, you know, at this point.

And so in any case, he goes about his business, goes back home, he has dinner with his the new leases who are living with him, a husband and wife, and that night, after a meeting with all of the people in town, he was starting to you know, feel the walls kind of collapsing on him, you know, that that he might you know be in you know, danger

of you know, being caught. And in the middle of the night, he yells out that, you know, for the guy who's leasing the house to come in his room, that he needs help, and he's got blood all over him. It turns out he'd stabbed himself a bunch and he said, go get the sheriff and go get you know, other the doctor and so forth, and so it looked like

his attempt to kill himself. He didn't say why or anything like that, and obviously, you know, as soon as this took place, people began to put two and two together. Perhaps you know that he felt guilty, or you know, he just couldn't take it anymore. So they end up the sheriff comes in there and with the help, and they take him to the sanitarium, the Baptist sanitarium and Clovis, which isn't real far away, and they treat him and

he survives all of this. But at the same time, everybody is convinced that the secret to where the family is, especially once they got the response that they hadn't reached it, that they were in the you know, the filled in cellar root celler, and they get a group together, they unbury the body as they find it all out and George, meanwhile,

he's been treated at the hospital, he's in jail. He doesn't know the bodies had been found, and he doesn't know that someone did not support his contention that his family had reached where he said that they were going right away.

the other side. There is lots of accounts that he was the only person there when this took place, and so you know, he protests a little too, you know strong, you know, in this situation, and people were wondering that he killed the brother, you know, the fact that this seemed to validate the good possibility of that, and of course it brings into question, well, if he killed the brother, who else did he kill? Because eventually they'll find out.

You know, the first mass murder was in nineteen seventeen, the second was in nineteen twenty six, and you know those were his only murders. So it brings up a lot more questions as far as the death toll.

bodies have never been found. And you know, most people thought George was kind of a braggert that you know, this is a bit of braggadocio on his part. And since this crime never been reported, so they checked with the Whittier police and so forth, and they had no

reports of a Hassle family missing. They had no reports of any people missing at all there, and you know, and it's almost like he wanted to, you know, prove that you know, he was, you know, much deadlier than they thought, and so he could remember where, you know, where the bodies in the house were. And so here we have him in jail, and you know, basically he's under his real name, Jefferson Hassel, George Jefferson Hassel, and they can't find any records of him ever living in

the Whittier area. He was living under the name Gee Baker at that time. So anyway, a picture appears in the newspaper of him after his arrest, and he's in I think the first picture of him was in his coal working on the railroad railroad tracks in the oil industry in California, and one of his ex neighbors kind of notices it wasn't that our neighbor. And here nine years later he's being accused of committing a mass murder.

And they're kind of putting it all together. And so anyway, they reach out to you know, authorities and say, well, you know, we think this is who the person is, this is where he lived, this is Everything seemed fishy the way that family disappeared, and you know, they couldn't find the bodies. The same cop that had gone out there in nineteen seventeen. The last name was Way. I think his name was Ray Way. They still couldn't find it. So, you know, George didn't like to be called a liar.

You know, that's the one thing he didn't mind being killed, called a you know, a pedophile, a murderer, but don't call me a liar. And he drew a map when he was in the Walls unit by this time in Huntsville, and he drew a map where to find it, and they published it in the La Times. In fact, it showed where it was and ultimately, you know, he was able to you know, lead them to the bodies pretty quickly and validate what happened.

he believes that that might be his fate. Tell us about this seeking the death penalty and also his demeanor on everything that fascinatingly happens after he is indicted for this and is set to be executed.

Was crying with other prisoners and everybody else, and you know, he wanted to make authorities wait until the you know, he was basically in the chair before he'd reveal you know, all the information on what took place in Wittier. But I think the more they doubted him, the less he could wait, because he wanted that office. He you know, wanted them to say, well, he's telling the truth more than anything else. And so he gave it up, you know,

a lot earlier than he had planned to. Where the bodies were buried.

you know, claim insanity. And so of course this came up with the resentencing hearing and all of that, and it pretty much fell on deaf Ear simply for the fact of, you know, how much planning was entailed in this crime and the previous crime, and he was as sane as you could be, you know, considering the ability to tell right from wrong. Was you know, the idea that he would kill himself, you know, over the bodies

being found. You know, he knew that was wrong and having you know, remembered that he had the bodies buried and wittier. So psychiatric side of things that, you know, never really played out for him. And the thing is is when you're sentenced to death, you're given an automatic thirty days ninety days you know, to basically be observed

by psychiatrists and everything. And one of the problems was they'd sent him from plain view after he'd been sentenced, back down to the death row in Huntsville when in reality, he should have been kept up in plain view until the appeals process played out. So he actually had two stints on death row, and one of them was shorter than the other. But you know, he never really talked about being insane or anything. The only thing he could say is, you know, he doesn't know why he did these acts.

there was a lot of animosity. There was talk about lynch law and people coming in breaking him out and hanging him and that sort of thing, although you know a lot of it was just bluster, and you know, they basically waited until most of the people were gone to you know, from the courtroom to give their sentence again of death.

And this came out during the trial. It wasn't published in most of the newspapers, but it was in the court transcripts. You know, you know, his confession was he confessed to all of this. You know, he basically distanced himself from the second pregnancy simply for the fact that she was, you know, between thirteen and fifteen years old, and he was trying to blame it on someone else who was on the scene at the time it supposedly

took place. And any case, this to most people was seen as the you know, the worst part of the crime.

absolutely no remorse. You know, people would say, you know, they would say, well, you know, you know, are you know sorry you did this? You're sorry did that? But he, you know, there was no mea culp was, you know, forthcoming from him.

But it took place out on the countryside in the nineteen twenties, you know, basically, you know, as far as a small community, most of the people wanted to move beyond that. But no matter what, when you have a crime in that area, you know, it stays in kind of the dna of the community for a very long time.

And you know, and basically I think that that's why other people have never heard about this, which is surprising, and it made me wonder, well, what other cases are there like this, you know, And so I right now, as I'm looking at my next projects, you know, I'm trying to find cases that no one's ever written about, because you know, how many books can you write about Bundy and Dahmer, and you know, you know the Hall of Fame of serial killers, and but I think that

the community just wanted to get beyond it because they didn't want to be marked by this crime. But it's not great for chamber of commerce material and so surprisingly until recently they were doing a play, a local play, a theater play based on the crime. And interesting when I went up there to start my research, you know, I would go into different places, you know, I thought

might be helpful. In fact, the hospital where he was treated where he tried to kill himself as an antique store now and they had kept a lot of the hospital architecture still there. And I went in there and

spoke to a gentleman who ran the place. And as soon as I said I wanted to talked about the George Hassele case, you know, he was ready to kick me out the door because people don't want to talk about it, you know, you know, talk about a Nobel prize winner or you know, prize winning col or something, but not about a murderer. But I won his confidence, I will say, over time. And so anyway, so you know,

he shared a little bit of information. But you know, all the witnesses from that time period are gone and the only thing you have are family members of the family members that were involved, and you have their you know, their stories about what happened, and you know, and that was the whole idea of this is to set the record straight and perhaps you know, bring more attention, you know to this type of crime, to this crime and

the Panhandle. And over time, over the fact, more recently I found there's a lot more interest in this book up in the Panhandle than there is anywhere else, you know. So you know, I'm in talks with doing you know, you know, lectures and book signings and stuff up in the you know, up in the West Texas and Panhandle.

remembering this particular type of crime. And anyway, a historical group got together and you know, one of the people that I dedicated the book to a woman named Teresa and Sira, and she's been you know, one of the facilitators for you know, making the cemetery look a lot better, you know, cleaning it up and getting with others in the historical associations a new tombstone. And so she gave me a tour, showed me where you know, this person was buried that was you know, tangential to the crime.

And it was hard to find the cemetery unless you had local knowledge. But it's brought you know, more attention to it, and there's been some findings, you know, of other graves that people didn't know existed there. You know, I'm hoping maybe this book will bring more tension, you know, to the cemetery as a historical place, right and in any case, they have a beautiful gravestone there that was donated, as well as all the help to clean the cemetery.