Slain Phila. socialite had become 'a lost soul'
Peter Stickney Anderson , a former Center City investment banker and socialite down on his luck, lunched at the Four Seasons that Friday, seated beside his business friend Michael Rogers.
Anderson, a bright, urbane raconteur and past president of the Philadelphia Securities Association, "was his usual charming self," Rogers recalled last week of the May 3 luncheon.
Forty-eight hours later, a maintenance man looking for aluminum cans discovered Anderson's body, nude, stabbed and sexually mutilated, in a green trash barrel along the westbound Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County. More than a week would pass before the corpse was positively identified.
And after a month, state police in charge of the investigation say they have neither a suspect nor a motive and very few clues.
Detectives continue to puzzle over the murder in an arduous investigation that has taken them from that rural Pennsylvania roadside to New York City - places as different as the several separate lives of Peter Stickney Anderson .
Anderson, 54, was a jovial and proper gentleman, a blue blood, a Trinity
College graduate, a bow-tied Son of the Revolution who traced his lineage to Asa Stickney, a Massachusetts private in the Continental army. He was on the Social Register and made the rounds of society balls and philanthropic events.
He had been a banker and financier. "Old family money" described his New England origins and his lifestyle. Though often described as an elitist, Anderson had a reputation for compassion, generosity and good humor.
But in recent years, according to police and friends, Anderson's charmed life lost its luster. His second wife filed for divorce five years ago. He left his job as assistant vice president and portfolio manager of Mellon Bank's Center City Trust Group in 1988.
And though Anderson's business card still read, " Peter Stickney Anderson ,
Investments," he remained without work and suffered financial reversals.
He drank heavily. Friends tell of their embarrassment at watching Anderson slip: At no-alcohol luncheons he brought a flask to tip into his tomato juice. He drank himself unconscious at one of his regular haunts, the Blue Parrot, a bar in Center City. He passed out at a Christmas party on the Main Line, only to be degradingly draped with decorations plucked from the yule tree.
Bit by bit, according to those who knew him, Anderson was drifting away. He seemed in terrible health, ate almost nothing and carried a mere 100 pounds on his 5-foot-2 frame. He became "a lost soul," said a fellow National Guardsman who served with Anderson in Philadelphia's historic First City Troop.
"He was very upset that he hadn't found a job," said a friend in the finance industry who did not wish to be named. "Peter was in a very depressed state. And (in such a state) you can do things - take a walk on the wild side . . . almost like a death wish. "
A male prostitute who went to Anderson's one-bedroom apartment in the exclusive Wanamaker House on Walnut Street about a month before the murder said last week that he'd found the place in a shambles. The prostitute, summoned by a man staying at Anderson's apartment, said the apartment was occupied by three men - one of them Anderson, the second a purported drug user and the third a heavy, unconscious drunk on the living room floor.
Not long before he disappeared, Anderson told friends that his car and checkbook had been stolen.
"He knew who it was, and he was going to prosecute," Rogers said. Yet Anderson had not said who the thief was, and after the car was found, he reportedly told others it only had been "borrowed. "
State Police Sgt. Carl Harnish, one of the lead detectives in the case, said investigators know who took the car and checkbook, but he declined to identify the person or discuss the circumstances.
*
After seeing Rogers at the Four Seasons on May 3, Anderson rode to New York City with his friend Tony Brooks.
Brooks, a former aide to Philadelphia City Councilman W. Thacher Longstreth, was then a Republican primary candidate for an at-large City Council seat.
Anderson was chairman of the Brooks '91 Committee. The two men were headed for a Brooks fund-raising event hosted by a friend of Brooks', Robert Browne, at Browne's apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan.
Anderson had said he would not ride back to Philadelphia with Brooks, but would stay the night in New York, Rogers recalled.
Brooks declined to talk about the case.
The fund-raising party is the last place that police will say they have positively placed Anderson alive. Harnish said last week that he had only an ''unsubstantiated" report that Anderson returned to Philadelphia over the weekend.
Browne, the New York real estate agent who held the Brooks fund-raising party, said Anderson and Brooks arrived about 5 p.m. Anderson was dressed in his trademark bow tie and had a suitcase, Browne said.
It was Browne's first meeting with Anderson, whom he described as "a very friendly, nice guy. It seemed like he had a lot to drink. "
Browne said about 35 people attended the party. Anderson was one of the last to leave, around 10 p.m. Anderson and another man said they were going to get dinner, Browne recalled.
Detectives interviewed the man Anderson left with, but they would not disclose what they learned.
Back in Philadelphia, Anderson did not turn up Saturday evening, May 4, at the Blue Parrot or Raffles, two of the Center City bars he frequented for their piano sets of his favorite Cole Porter and George Gershwin music, employees said.
The grisly discovery came the next afternoon, when the turnpike maintenance worker pulled open several layers of garbage bags and gazed down at what he later said looked like a human shoulder. Anderson had been stabbed "several times" in the abdomen, police said, and there was additional "damage to the pubic area. " He had been dead at least 12 hours and possibly as long as 36 hours. No weapon has been found.
Harnish said Friday that investigators spent two days last week combing again through Anderson's apartment near Rittenhouse Square, and would return to New York to conduct more interviews this week.
"How could such a brilliant and talented man die such an ignominious death?" the Rev. Tim Dobbins, rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn
Mawr, asked in the eulogy at Anderson's memorial service May 21. "In days such as these, the silence seems to scream."
Anderson, a bright, urbane raconteur and past president of the Philadelphia Securities Association, "was his usual charming self," Rogers recalled last week of the May 3 luncheon.
Forty-eight hours later, a maintenance man looking for aluminum cans discovered Anderson's body, nude, stabbed and sexually mutilated, in a green trash barrel along the westbound Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County. More than a week would pass before the corpse was positively identified.
And after a month, state police in charge of the investigation say they have neither a suspect nor a motive and very few clues.
Detectives continue to puzzle over the murder in an arduous investigation that has taken them from that rural Pennsylvania roadside to New York City - places as different as the several separate lives of Peter Stickney Anderson .
Anderson, 54, was a jovial and proper gentleman, a blue blood, a Trinity
College graduate, a bow-tied Son of the Revolution who traced his lineage to Asa Stickney, a Massachusetts private in the Continental army. He was on the Social Register and made the rounds of society balls and philanthropic events.
He had been a banker and financier. "Old family money" described his New England origins and his lifestyle. Though often described as an elitist, Anderson had a reputation for compassion, generosity and good humor.
But in recent years, according to police and friends, Anderson's charmed life lost its luster. His second wife filed for divorce five years ago. He left his job as assistant vice president and portfolio manager of Mellon Bank's Center City Trust Group in 1988.
And though Anderson's business card still read, " Peter Stickney Anderson ,
Investments," he remained without work and suffered financial reversals.
He drank heavily. Friends tell of their embarrassment at watching Anderson slip: At no-alcohol luncheons he brought a flask to tip into his tomato juice. He drank himself unconscious at one of his regular haunts, the Blue Parrot, a bar in Center City. He passed out at a Christmas party on the Main Line, only to be degradingly draped with decorations plucked from the yule tree.
Bit by bit, according to those who knew him, Anderson was drifting away. He seemed in terrible health, ate almost nothing and carried a mere 100 pounds on his 5-foot-2 frame. He became "a lost soul," said a fellow National Guardsman who served with Anderson in Philadelphia's historic First City Troop.
"He was very upset that he hadn't found a job," said a friend in the finance industry who did not wish to be named. "Peter was in a very depressed state. And (in such a state) you can do things - take a walk on the wild side . . . almost like a death wish. "
A male prostitute who went to Anderson's one-bedroom apartment in the exclusive Wanamaker House on Walnut Street about a month before the murder said last week that he'd found the place in a shambles. The prostitute, summoned by a man staying at Anderson's apartment, said the apartment was occupied by three men - one of them Anderson, the second a purported drug user and the third a heavy, unconscious drunk on the living room floor.
Not long before he disappeared, Anderson told friends that his car and checkbook had been stolen.
"He knew who it was, and he was going to prosecute," Rogers said. Yet Anderson had not said who the thief was, and after the car was found, he reportedly told others it only had been "borrowed. "
State Police Sgt. Carl Harnish, one of the lead detectives in the case, said investigators know who took the car and checkbook, but he declined to identify the person or discuss the circumstances.
*
After seeing Rogers at the Four Seasons on May 3, Anderson rode to New York City with his friend Tony Brooks.
Brooks, a former aide to Philadelphia City Councilman W. Thacher Longstreth, was then a Republican primary candidate for an at-large City Council seat.
Anderson was chairman of the Brooks '91 Committee. The two men were headed for a Brooks fund-raising event hosted by a friend of Brooks', Robert Browne, at Browne's apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan.
Anderson had said he would not ride back to Philadelphia with Brooks, but would stay the night in New York, Rogers recalled.
Brooks declined to talk about the case.
The fund-raising party is the last place that police will say they have positively placed Anderson alive. Harnish said last week that he had only an ''unsubstantiated" report that Anderson returned to Philadelphia over the weekend.
Browne, the New York real estate agent who held the Brooks fund-raising party, said Anderson and Brooks arrived about 5 p.m. Anderson was dressed in his trademark bow tie and had a suitcase, Browne said.
It was Browne's first meeting with Anderson, whom he described as "a very friendly, nice guy. It seemed like he had a lot to drink. "
Browne said about 35 people attended the party. Anderson was one of the last to leave, around 10 p.m. Anderson and another man said they were going to get dinner, Browne recalled.
Detectives interviewed the man Anderson left with, but they would not disclose what they learned.
Back in Philadelphia, Anderson did not turn up Saturday evening, May 4, at the Blue Parrot or Raffles, two of the Center City bars he frequented for their piano sets of his favorite Cole Porter and George Gershwin music, employees said.
The grisly discovery came the next afternoon, when the turnpike maintenance worker pulled open several layers of garbage bags and gazed down at what he later said looked like a human shoulder. Anderson had been stabbed "several times" in the abdomen, police said, and there was additional "damage to the pubic area. " He had been dead at least 12 hours and possibly as long as 36 hours. No weapon has been found.
Harnish said Friday that investigators spent two days last week combing again through Anderson's apartment near Rittenhouse Square, and would return to New York to conduct more interviews this week.
"How could such a brilliant and talented man die such an ignominious death?" the Rev. Tim Dobbins, rector of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn
Mawr, asked in the eulogy at Anderson's memorial service May 21. "In days such as these, the silence seems to scream."