Ron Smith: No One is Perfect

Thirty years before the oj Simpson trial, a different murder case captured the attention of the country. When a successful Florida businessman is brutally killed in the nineteen sixties, His wife and her nephew become suspects, and their disturbing relationship makes Headlines author Ron Smith tells me about his book No One Is Perfect. Let's talk about this time period. We are in nineteen sixty four Florida. Where in Florida and what is it like for the haves and the have nots in the state.

benchmarks I use is nineteen sixty four. Just a few months before this murder occurred, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. And if you know anything about the launching of a new era in everything, fashion, music, the whole bit, sixty four was really kind of a launch pad for a lot of those things to happen. But that being said, in Florida, in the South, things were still very tense in a lot of ways. You had people that were very intolerant of any kind of change

at the time. If a kid came to school with any kind of hair over his ear, even he was sent home to get a haircut. Sixty four was kind of from that point on, everything became a whole lot more fun in the world for a kid who grew up in those.

children in this family. At some point the parents divorced. The father moved to New York City, the mother and the three children moved to Chicago, which is kind of an important point in what Jack mostra became in the rest of his life to support his family. He had no education, He was a newsboy on the street in downtown Chicago. And if you know anything about downtown Chicago in the nineteen tens, it was controlled by organized crime. There was a fellow named Big Jim Colossimo, which he

preceded al Capone in running the rackets in Chicago. And so Jack Mosler was this young boy that was selling newspapers on the corner in downtown Chicago. These newstands also sold numbers, the lottery tickets. It was the numbers racket. And so even though he was a young boy, he had direct contact with organized crime. And one thing about Jack Mosler was that he had a real innate sense of mathematics. As he grew older, the Mob recognized that

he had these talents. Now none of this, of course, is documented because it is the Mob, of course, but by the time he was seventeen years old, he was living in New Orleans working as a finance manager for automobile dealerships, which tells you he must have been pretty talented to be sent down there at such a young age and to be given that kind of responsibility. At some point he disassociated himself from the Mob, and I'm

not sure how that really happened. But he became pretty much a legitimate businessman, although his business was a little bit shady. He started his own loan company. He started a company called Mossler Acceptance Corporation. And for people that aren't familiar with the term acceptance means, it means it's a loan company that will accept the risk of borrowers who aren't really good credit risk, but they will own

you the money at a very high interest rate. And so he began to make a lot of money just on the margins and the interest that he was charging. He was also quite an entrepreneur in that when cars came to be repossessed, he actually started one of the first rental auto companies in the United States using his repossessed vehicles.

one in Miami. And what was happening was car dealders were sending him customers that their own legitimate lenders would not handle, and the Master Acceptance Corporation would take these people on as borrowers. So he just became very, very wealthy over a period of thirty years or so.

in about for Jock Mossler. In nineteen forty seven, he was still happily married. He was still a pillar of society, if you will, there in New Orleans. And then, of course he met this woman named Candace Massler.

farming families in those days. They need as many hands in the field as they could get, so she was kind of in the middle of that group of nine children. When she was twelve years old, her mother died in childbirth, and so that left her father to be responsible for six or seven minor children. Her father kind of fell apart with the death of his wife. He just basically abandoned the family and moved away to another town, which left the six minor children in the care of her grandparents.

One of her grandparents, her grandfather was a Mormon bishop if you can imagine in rural Georgia back in those days. Well, the kids lived with them, and Candace was She was always fantasizing, and I guess if you put yourself in her position, with all the terrible things that had happened in her life. She was a big fan of movie magazines and fashion magazines. She used to tell the people in her family that one day I'm going to be famous, and one day I'm going to design these clothes for

these movie stars. And so she always had big dreams even as a kid. Well, by the time she was seventeen years old, the depression was going on and her grandfather encouraged her to get married, and so he found a man for her to marry, a man named Norman Johnson, who is twelve years older than her. You can imagine she was not very happy being in this arranged marriage. The man that she married had a job in Aniston, Alabama, which was not far away from Buchanan where she grew up,

but they were just dirt poor. He worked in a concrete plant, didn't make any money to speak of, and she had her child. Her first child in nineteen forty was a son that was named Norman Johnson Junior. But again, this restlessness was always in her spirit. She always wanted to get out of this loveless marriage, and so in nineteen forty one, when World War Two began, she signed up to be a hostess with the US SO the

organization that would host the soldiers. There was a man who was one of the most well known people in America at the time. He was one of the Rockefellers. His name was Win Rockefeller and he was a soldier stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, which was only about eighty miles away from where she lived. Well, as fate would have it, she was a hostess at a party that Win Rockefeller and a bunch of soldiers from Fort Benning were bussed up to attend. Some kind of love connection

was made at this USO dance. Within about a year, she was pregnant with Rockefeller's child.

left alone there with her husband Norman. Now, at some point Norman realized that this other little blonde child Rita was not his. I don't know when exactly that occurred, but by the time the war was over, her marriage to Norman Johnson was over, and you asked if he was married. He still was not married when the war ended, and so Candace was actually in New York City for a while where he lived after the war, and they

continued to see each other. But in nineteen forty eight, when Rockefeller married another woman who looked remarkably like Candace, he had a thing, I guess for pretty blonde girls.

banished down to the South, and he was married. And to answer your question, certainly, I assumed that he supported the child in a very comfortable fashion, because there's no signs that Candace was living in poverty in any way, but she was in New Orleans. Candace was always big about inventing things that had happened in her life that never really happened. She used to if you remember, I said,

as a child, she had dreams of being a fashion designer. Well, when she moved back down south, she told all of her family and her friends that she had been a fashion designer for one of the largest firms in New York. She mentioned them by name, and of course somebody had done the homework. She never worked for these people. She claimed that she was the chief designer for them. Of course, at this time she's in her mid twenties and had

no formal training as a fashion designer. So if this had happened today and you had Google, it would be very easy to disprove the things that she was putting out there for people but in the what is she could probably get away with some of it.

How they met is anybody's guests. She came up with this real met cute kind of story later on that she was at the zoo one day And Orleans with her children and this man came by with a camera and who was taking their pictures, and she went over to ask him, you know, what are you doing and he said, oh, I've just got this new camera and I'm really interested in taking pictures of children and moving objects.

And you know, it sounds pretty contrived, but that was the story she stuck with for the rest of her life about how they met. Of course, he was married, so don't know the breakdown exactly of the marriage that he had with his first wife, but in nineteen forty nine he married. He divorced his first wife, and two weeks later married Candace.

very wealthy. They married in nineteen forty nine. They vacationed in Europe for a couple of months. When they came back to the States. I think Jacques or Jack as his friends called him, didn't feel comfortable living in New Orleans anymore with his ex wife and these four children of his there, and that's when they moved to Houston, he and Kansas, and that kind of set the wheels in motion for the rest of his life. For sure.

for these veterans coming home from the war. So he not only was selling mobile homes, but he was requiring those people to ensure the mobile homes through his insurance company. So he was just a very manipulative although nothing unethical about that, but he was just a real smart guy about plugging in one business into the other. So when they moved to Houston, they had to live in a neighborhood.

It was the home to the predominantly wealthy Jewish people in Houston, and there was a pretty good sized Jewish community in the city at that time. They lived in a home there for about two years. It was a neighborhood called Riverside Terrace. It was a nice home. I've driven by. It's still there. But Candace the entire time, being kind of the social climber that she was, was pressuring him to find a home in river Oaks. Now, if you're familiar with Houston, river Oaks is the oldest, wealthiest,

old money neighborhood in the city. In nineteen fifty two, she got her way. He bought a home on Willowick Road in Houston. It was this big, beautiful red brick stately Georgian style mansion that probably had to appeal to her memories of growing up in Georgia, with all these big homes that she could never afford to have gone into, let alone lived in. So by that time she had

gotten her wish. They were encanced in river Oaks. Been a dream of hers to live in a neighborhood like that, And of course her two children were still living with them at the time, and a remarkable thing happened. One of the points I wanted to make was that together they were this powerhouse couple, and even though they were living in river Oaks, they were still a great deal of social prejudice against Jews and river Oaks. Even it was quite a feat for them to be living there,

but they weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. So Kendace really tried her best to assimilate into river Oaks cafe society, if you will. She was firmly rejected by the wealthy women there, partly because of who she was married to, partly because of just who she was. She was this beautiful woman, but she was extremely You could tell her old poor Georgia roots came through loud and clear. Every time she talked, they made fun of her at every turn.

She was very unhappy about that, and that kind of led to her rebelling in a way later on that Okay, if you're not going to accept me, I'm going to scandalize you women, And at every turn if I came. She did that in ways of buying her way onto the boards of some civic organizations, the opera, the ballet. Of course, these women were on some of those same boards with her, But her husband just had so much money that he could put her on those boards with these huge donations that he was making.

or things like that. He would use his money to put her on some of those boards and things, but he just wanted to keep a low profile and he truly did operate under the radar for the most part, whereas she she wanted to scandalize these people as much as they could if they weren't going to accept her, and the ways in which she did that were to go to these nightclubs that they would never go to.

She loved rhythm and blues music. She would go to clubs in Houston that these River Oaks women would never set foot in. She loved to go to clubs because her husband wouldn't go with her. She would take young

men with her. And whether there was any sexual misconduct on her part at that time, it's hard to say, but I think it's a safe assumption that, yeah, she was beginning to just feel her oats socially and sexually and do what she wanted to do, and she had a husband that pretty much just didn't care, so she was doing all these things. She was by the mid fifties, she was definitely having affairs. One of those affairs was with Chuck Berry.

newspapers in Houston. She's up on the balcony of her master bedroom suite on the third floor of this house, with Chuck Berry standing next to her, wearing no shirt. Today that might sound pretty tame, but in nineteen fifty nine or whenever it was, you can imagine how that just sent the gossip people over the edge.

stuff with other men. Did this just send him through the roof that she is clearly in some sort of a compromising position in the newspapers with a black singer who is very famous.

he spent six months in the county jail. And Elizabeth, his mother, called Candace, her sister, and said, Hey, he's going to get just right back into trouble if he stays up there, He's going to fall back into these scammers that he's been in cahoots with. So do you think Jack could find him a joke, maybe repossessing cars or something down in Houston, to get him away from them. And so Candace said, well, of course we can, so that she without asking Jack, she has him come down

and move into the mansion in Houston. He's nineteen and by this point she's about forty forty two years old. As time goes by, Jock is very reluctant to give this guy a job because he's got no real education, he has no real marketable skills, and he's also got a pretty boorish, bullying type of a personality. He's a big dude, he's about six foot four, and he's very intimidating at some point, Candace and her nephew begin an incestuous affair. One of the most icky parts of this

I told you earlier. When this story happened in nineteen sixty four, I was a kid. I didn't really understand what they were talking about on the news accounts when they talked about incest between this couple. But she was very open about it, much as she had been with a Chuck Berry story and other things. They were going out to restaurants and clubs together, they took vacations together.

She was in the society columns all the time, and it was often mentioning mel as her escort, so it wasn't a great deal of effort on her part to hide the fact that they were going out together. Now, nobody really dreamed that they were sleeping together. But it took a while, but Jacques finally woke up to this and the gossip got to him. Even the household staff told him what was going on, because every time he was out of town, the two of them were spending

time in the same bedroom in the mansion. So even the household staff got disgusted and finally went to Jock and told him what was going on. At that point, he evicted Mel from the mansion. Mel threatened him on the way out the door, saying, essentially, one day, you better always be looking over your shoulder because I'm going to be coming for you one day. And so you would think that that might have ended the affair, but

it did not. Candace rented an apartment for him just a few blocks away from where she was living, and they continued to see each other, and by this time it was pretty common knowledge through at least the River Oak society that you know what was going on. Candace always tried to pass mel Off as Jacques's protege, that he was teaching him the business, and that was really not true at all.

Houston on occasion. Now, he had made the mistake earlier on in their marriage of putting canvas on the board of his businesses, so they had to bump into each other when he came to town for board meetings. But I can't imagine how uncomfortable that might have been for everybody else in the room. But for the most part, he remained in Florida and they had adopted four children.

Back in the fifties, there was this really tragic story in Chicago where Jock had a bank, and just to cut to the chase on how that happened, these four children came from a family where the father was mentally stable, killed their mother, killed one of their siblings, and he was committed to a mental institution, leaving these four children as wards of the state. So Jacques was in town read the story and he called Candace and he said, hey,

let's adopt these kids. So by the time the story moves to Florida, there are these four children that are part of the family.

all the conversations that you have with her. The lawyer had led him to believe that because of this incestuous behavior that they might be able to avoid the prenuptial agreement in a divorce court. But so Jock is keeping this diary, and after one particularly heated discussion on the phone with Candace, he writes into the diary, and it was the last entry that he ever made. I guess I'm going to have to kill Candace and Mail before

they kill me. In May of nineteen sixty four, Candace comes to visit in Miami with the four younger children and her older daughter, Rita, who is the Rockefeller child. They're visiting him in his apartment. The apartment is too small to hold all these people. It's only two bedrooms, so they had taken a hotel room nearby for the children to stay in, but they were using his apartment

there as a base of operations. It was near the beach, and so one night May thirty first, the last day of the month, she and the children make this game out of it's time to pay the bills. The first of the month is tomorrow, So as she tells the story, one kid would address the envelope, the other would put a stamp on the envelope, the other would put the return address on it, pass it to her where she was writing out checks. Well, when they finished this exercise,

she realized that she didn't have any stamps. As hokey as this may sound, she says, it's midnight, and she says to Jaque, I'm going to take the children and go buy some stamps and get these bills in the mailbox. He says, fine. So this all occurs about midnight. He goes out and sits out on the balcony for a while by himself, and about twelve thirty he sees a

car headlights coming down the street. It's a car that he recognizes because it's one of the cars from his repossession lot in Miami, and he just assumes it's Candae coming back without the children, probably going to spend the night in the second bedroom there at the apartment. Well it's not canvas. He goes on and goes to bed because he wants to avoid her. But he's in his bedroom getting dressed or undressed actually, and he hears his

dog barking in at the door. But the dog quiets down almost immediately and at the door opens and he hears someone talking to the dog, and it's obviously someone that the dog recognizes, because the dog settles down. Well, he opens his bedroom door and he recognizes this big, large person in the darkness that we can assume was Melbourn Lane Powers. Jacques is completely undressed at this point. He's wearing only an undershirt and he panics and he's wondering,

I need to get away from this guy. And he makes a bolt for the sliding glass balcony door of the apartment and he's hoping, I guess that he can get to that door and call out for someone outside to come help him, or maybe someone in the other apartments below him will come and help. Well, he doesn't make it to the door. He's bashed over the head with what was later believed to be a coat bottle, and then he is stabbed thirty nine times.

up late reading tonight. They open the door, they find the body, and she sends the children downstairs, and for thirty minutes, they go off the air. They don't call the police, they don't call an ambulance. No one knows what's going on in the apartment for thirty minutes. And the first phone call she makes is not to the police or an ambulance. She calls Jock's personal physician. Now

he's dead. I don't know what good a doctor is going to do at that point, but the physician tells her, Candice, you need to hang up, you need to call the police, which they do. Finally, when the police arrive, her story is so full of holes they know immediately that she's lying to them. She claims that this was a robbery gone bad. I had left several hundred dollars out on the kitchen counter. It's not there anymore. I had some very expensive jewelry in the bedroom it's not there anymore.

When they begin to press her on like even a description of what the jewelry looked like, she kind of blanked out them and couldn't even give a description of it. So then she begins to tell them that, you know, it was a robbery, and the cops say, no, this a robber is not going to stab somebody thirty nine times. We believe that whoever killed him must have known him, And so then they began to delve into did he

have any enemies? Did you know of anybody that was looking to harm him, and she said, oh, he was in the repossession business. There are all kinds of people that would have liked to have killed him, which they thought was a very odd answer. But she never, of course, mentions mail powers. And when they discount the burglary story, then she tries to float an entirely new theory, which is, I think my husband is now a homo sexual. He had gone to Europe, and when he came back from

Europe he was acting very strange. Just the other night I answered the phone and it was somebody from Texas. It was one of his Texas boyfriends. The cops didn't really buy that story. Either. But I have to mention here there was an awful lot of corruption in the Miami Dade Sheriff's Department in those days. The lead detective on the Moss case turned out to be somebody who was in the pocket of the gangster that ran all

of the gambling enterprises in Miami. He wasn't the only one on the force that had connections to organized crime. It was just kind of, yeah, you do your thing outside of work. That being said, they were very good detectives. They were very thorough. They wanted to catch the killer. Mail Powers made it pretty easy for them. In the apartment, the killer had left bloody handprints by the kitchen sink. They immediately matched those handprints to mel because he had

a prior record from his arrest in Michigan. Within about seven hours they had that identified. Then the car that he was driving, this white Chevy, was found parked at the airport garage, about fifty feet away from a police substation that was inside the airport. Then they find inside the white Chevy a parking stub that showed that the car had entered the garage at five point thirty nine in the morning. So the detectives who are pretty sharp.

One of them goes into the airlines, and I believe it was National Airline in those days, had daily flights to Houston from Miami. He goes to the manager of the airline desk and asks, can I look at your manifest for the last couple of days, particularly this morning, and he finds the name m. Mossler Powers as a passenger on the flight leaving at seven point thirty in

the morning after the murder going back to Houston. He digs a little deeper and he finds that the same person flew from Houston to Miami the night of the murder and arrived about three hours before the murder occurred. With a little more digging, they find a bartender that identified mail Powers as the person who had come into his bar killing time, apparently before he went to the apartment to kill Jock. So within four days, Mail Powers

is arrested. Unfortunately for the prosecutors, they did not read them any miranda rights. Oh no, they did not even have a valid arrest warrant yet. Because all of this was occurring on the fourth of July weekend, the courthouse was closed. The prosecutors in Miami couldn't even find a judge that could issue his arrest warrant. And then, to top it all off, the coupdo gra was that they finally got a confession out of mel In which he

admitted killing Mossler. They re tape recorded that confession, but again they did not read him as rights, so before the trial even begins, the confession is thrown out.

to do it. So when they get to trial, Candace had hired to represent Mail Powers, one of the most famous trial lawyers in the United States in those days, a man named Percy Foreman Percy. The saying in Houston was that if you hired Percy, it was an admission of guilt, but he would get you off, and that was typically the case. So when they get to trial, Percy had no affection for the truth. He gets up and makes his opening statement. It makes a ton of

wild remarks about Jock Mossler defaming his character. He was recruiting young boys out of nightclubs under the name of doctor Wilson. He was just making things up. But you've got this jury of people that they don't know that it's not true. The prosecution made a key mistake in my opinion, in that they decided to try both Candace

and Mel together. They still had, even without the confession, a lot of evidence against Mel his fingerprints, there was blood in this white Chevy that he was driving to the airport. When they picked him up in River Oaks. They found blood on the clothes that he had worn to Miami. He was guilty, red handed, even without a confession.

well after the murder had occurred. But she kept getting phone calls all night long from somebody, and they assumed it was mel giving her an up to date report on where he stood in the murder. But they had nothing on her that was tangible to convict her with.

So what they decided to do was they started sainting the jails and the they found a bunch of people that would testify that Candace had approached them to be the hit man to kill Jock Mossler, which sounded like a believable story until he started putting these characters on the stand. One guy was an habitual heroin attic. He called the authorities himself and said, I know Candace Master, and I met with her before I came to prison. This last time, she offered me money to kill Jock.

And then there were a couple of other people, one who had worked on the mast ranch in Galveston, but they were all such disreputable characters that you can imagine how the defense attorneys made mincemeat of these guys on the stand, and it really just made Candace look like a sympathetic figure before it was over with that she the cops were picking on her and trying to railroad her into this conviction, so it was a crucial mistake

on their part. The trial went on for a full month, and Candace, being the diva that she was throughout the trial, was always commanding attention in her own way. She fainted a couple of times, had to be carried out of the courtroom, almost threw up one time, and all of these things happened, of course when there was testimony being given that was unfavorable to her. You could read her

like a book. But the gallery of the trial was always filled with a lot of old women who would stand in line for two or three hours if they had to, to get a seat in the courtroom each day, and they were her groupies. They would applaud her when she walked in, and they would compliment her on the way that she was dressed and the diamonds that she was wearing, and she played it to the hilt. But

the trial goes on. When they get to the final arguments, everybody in the world knows that Candace is not going to be convicted.

And so you had these guys all sitting at the same defense table in the courtroom, and they would see that each other and they would try to out grandstand one another and make the other one look silly if they could. It was not conducive to a great defense, but nonetheless, at worked they were both acquitted, and Candace, being glory the attention hog that she was. She called a press conference immediately after that at the hotel where she had been staying. I failed to mention too, this

was a nationally covered media trial. It was the OJ Simpson trial in its own way, before satellite dishes. But she calls this press conference. She has her attorneys there, she has all of her children standing behind her. Mail powers are seated next to her. The reporters are calling out for them to kiss each other. She didn't know

when to leave well enough alone. She had to pontificate about how this was all of miscarriage of justice and she was just so for her poor children that she was going to be able to go home with them.

to people to the rodeo, Welcome to Houston. She was not popular with anybody that she served on any of those committees with but she was bound to get attention. The rest of her life was really sad. She and Mail did stay together after all of.

She claimed that he beat her up one night he went to Mexico was arrested when he tried to come back into the country because there was a warrant for his arrest. But then she dropped the charges when she realized that they were both going to have to testify. She was going to have to testify against him. She didn't like where that was going, with the kinds of questions that she might be asked about their life together for all these years, so they broke up. She remarried

another man. He didn't come to a happy ending either. He ran some nightclubs. He was about twenty years younger than she was. They had an argument one night, he went out and got drunk. He came back and she had locked him out of the house. So he went to the back of the house and was trying to climb up to the third floor, where the bedroom was. He almost made it, but there was a slate roof and he started to slide. He lost his grip. He fell three stories and landed head first on a metal table.

It did not kill him, but it's severely It did severe brain damage, and so she eventually divorced him because they couldn't live together. He was always in rehab for the rest of his life, and she herself died in nineteen seventy seven of a drug.

Fountain Blue in Miami. She fell as sleep rolled over onto a pillow, and she was so heavily sedated self sedated that she could not breathe and wasn't alert enough to roll over and start breathing again, and so she died at the age of fifty seven.

I tried throughout the book to tie it into some topical events that were going on at the same time. A lot of people would have no idea if they've never heard of Candace musterl just how well known she was because of this murder trial. There was one newspaper editor who made the remark that only Candice Master could knock Jaqueline Kennedy off the front page, and it was

true as despicable it was. There were also newspapers in the country that midway through the trial began to stop covering it because of the salacious material that readers were complaining that I don't want to read about these ancestual relationships, but I can tell you, living in Houston, boy, it was on the news every night and be laid it.

to do with Candace. But Rita was put in place to run the banks. She was, by all accounts, a very good business person, and she currently livesically on Kivas Gain and one of the high rise towers there, and she and her husband are very generous with a lot of the charities, particularly those having to do with the Red Cross and heart disease. So I can say that, yes, the money was eventually used for some good things.

by On Bradley. Curtis heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.