Preface
There are families that keep secrets, and then there was mine.
Many families bury truths that never resurface—it happens with surprising regularity. But concealing a murder? Obscuring a cross-country chase and one of Boston's most sensational criminal trials? Erasing headlines that dominated newspapers nationwide throughout the late 1940s?
How does someone completely erase their original family from a new one living mere minutes away? How does a person transform into a celebrated artist whose work captured the likenesses of politicians, judges, and film stars—someone who moved effortlessly among luminaries like John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and Rupert Murdoch?
And how does someone commit murder at President Martin Van Buren's historic mansion in Kinderhook, New York in 1972 and walk away untouched by justice?
You'd have to ask my parents, because they accomplished all of this.
Until 1994, when I was twenty-eight years old, my father preserved his extraordinary secrets even from his grave, where he had rested since 1976. A man whose actions once commanded national attention for months had reconstructed his identity so thoroughly that his own child remained oblivious to his past. My mother, his friends, and our entire family maintained this elaborate deception throughout his life and long after his death.
Most of those who guarded my father's secrets have now passed, making certain chapters of this memoir less complicated to write—no reputations remain to protect, no one to discomfort or expose. Yet documenting the years I shared with my father presents a more nuanced challenge. My cousins, siblings, and family friends continue living with their own versions of our history. Where do my experiences end and theirs begin? Which threads of our interwoven past am I entitled to unravel?
Our family narrative pulses with contradictions. Under one roof, each of us experienced entirely different relationships with our parents. My sister Lucy found in our father a wellspring of affection and nurturing, while her connection with our mother remained fraught. I inhabited the opposite reality—my father's presence typically brought tension and harm, while my mother offered sanctuary and understanding. These conflicting truths coexisted, each authentic in its own right.
Memory itself proves selective and intensely personal. My siblings and I frequently recall identical events through vastly different lenses—or sometimes recall nothing at all. I've discovered that people can inhabit the same spaces, share childhood experiences, belong to the same family, yet emerge with profoundly different emotional landscapes carved by their individual perceptions.
Though others necessarily appear in these pages, this memoir tells my story alone. It honors my truth while acknowledging that those who shared these years with me carry equally legitimate versions of our collective past.
Part One
The Father I Did Not Know.
Chapter One
August 18, 1948
Summer lingered on Boylston Street that afternoon; the kind of heavy Boston heat that made even the polished mahogany in Chippendale Fine Furniture's window sweat. Inside, the showroom smelled of lemon oil and old wood. Mario Gubutosi, who worked for the owner, Jacob Kohn watched the tall man with dark hair move through the store like he was reading a book—thoughtful, unhurried, his fingers trailing across carved headboards and inlaid tables.
The man paused at a four-poster bed, its posts rising toward the ceiling like temple columns. Jacob Kohn, who'd been arranging a display of Georgian side tables, drifted over. At sixty-eight, Jacob moved with the careful precision of someone who'd spent a lifetime handling precious things.
"American black cherry," Jacob said, "Hand-carved."
The man nodded, circling the bed like a careful dancer. When Jacob named the price, he smiled apologetically. "I'll need to discuss it with my wife," he said, his voice cultured, educated. The kind of voice that belonged in a store like this.
The next day unfolded like any other. Light spilled through the front windows, catching dust motes that danced around Queen Anne chairs and Sheraton secretaries. The usual parade of customers came and went—society wives shopping for occasional tables, young couples starting their collections with a single fine piece.
At 6:15, Jacob began his closing ritual. He'd developed it over many years of ownership: check the back door, count the day's receipts, adjust the displays one final time. The bell above the door chimed—one last customer. The same man from yesterday, his dark hair catching the dying light.
What happened next would be pieced together from fragments: the shouts that brought neighbors running, the broken hammer handle lying beside Jacob's body. The police found him still breathing, but barely. His skull was crushed, blood pooling on the floor beneath him like spilled wine.
In that spreading crimson lake lay three keys, their brass surfaces dulled by blood. They would become the first pieces in a puzzle that would take investigators from Boston's Back Bay going door to door looking for a fit and eventually to Madison Avenue in Albany, New York.
But in that moment, as the summer evening settled over Boylston Street and sirens wailed in the distance, there were three keys in a pool of blood, waiting to unlock a mystery that would haunt Boston, Albany, New York, and the nation.
Jacob Kohn died four days later at Massachusetts General Hospital, taking with him the answer to the most important question: why would anyone murder a gentle old man who sold beautiful things to Boston's elite?
The hammer's broken handle suggested rage—a violence beyond mere robbery. But nothing was taken from the shop. The cash register stood untouched; its drawer initially reported to be still full of the day's earnings. The only things missing were Jacob's life and the identity of the man with dark hair who'd been so interested in a four-poster bed.
Chapter Two
How To Find a Needle in A Haystack
In the heart of Boston's Back Bay, desperation drove the police to an unusual strategy. They made thirty copies of keys found at the murder scene, methodically working door to door in what seemed like a fool's errand. They had precious little else to go on.
The victim, Jacob Kohn, had managed to give a description before succumbing to his injuries: the attacker was chunky, middle-aged, around five-foot-eight. My father, at six-foot-two and twenty-nine, bore no resemblance to this portrait. But given the extent of trauma to Kohn's head, investigators dismissed his final words as the confused ramblings of a dying man.
The night that would change everything, my father had scrounged eight dollars from a friend. With it, he bought a bottle of wine and attended a performance of Hamlet - perhaps finding some dark resonance in Shakespeare's tale of murder and conscience. The following morning, he purchased a plane ticket for his wife Eleanor to Albany, forty-eight dollars that would buy her last glimpse of him for what would prove to be a very long time.
September 15th brought the breakthrough. One key slipped perfectly into the lock at 477 Washington Street, opening the door to my father's apartment. The search revealed damning evidence: a shirt soaked in Jacob Kohn's blood, hastily concealed beneath the bathroom sink. The discovery sent shockwaves through the department. What had begun as a routine homicide investigation suddenly took on new urgency. Here was physical evidence linking my father directly to the crime scene, contradicting the victim's dying words.
I often wonder about that shirt, about the moments after whatever happened in that room with Jacob Kohn. Did my father's hands shake as he stuffed it under the sink? Did he believe, in that desperate moment, that such a flimsy hiding place would suffice? Or was it simply the best he could manage in his panic?
What followed was peculiar even for a man fleeing potential murder charges. My father chose to vanish in a Sunbeam Talbot, an ostentatious English sports car capable of reaching 200 miles per hour. It was like trying to hide while wearing a neon sign. The vehicle's flash and power made tracking him easier, yet somehow more maddening.
The story caught fire. From the Albany Times Union's initial small print mention, it exploded across front pages up and down the East Coast, headlines screaming above mastheads. My father's flight transformed him from a "person of interest" into something far more sensational - a cause célèbre that sent reporters into a feeding frenzy. They descended upon our family like locusts, each seeking their own angle on the story.
My grandparents recoiled from the twin horrors before them: the savage nature of the crime their son was suspected of committing, and the ruthless invasion of privacy as newspapers dissected our family's life. They watched helplessly as the manhunt unfurled across the United States and into Canada, each day bringing new headlines, new theories, new shame. Their carefully constructed world of respectability crumbled with each passing day.
The press, having tasted blood, only grew hungrier. What began as a simple murder investigation had morphed into something else entirely - a spectacle that would captivate the nation and tear our family apart, piece by piece. Reporters dug into my father's past, unearthing old acquaintances, former lovers, his war records. Each revelation was presented as a possible clue to his current whereabouts or his state of mind.
Eleanor, my father's wife, became an unwitting celebrity in her own right. Her flight to Albany - was it an escape had she known? The papers couldn't decide, but they were happy to speculate. She retreated into silence, refusing all interviews, which only fueled further speculation. The forty-eight dollar plane ticket became a subject of endless discussion: Was it just a coincidence that she flew out the morning after the murder?
Meanwhile, the Sunbeam Talbot roared across the countryside, my father at the wheel, leaving a trail of sightings and speculation in his wake. Gas station attendants, motel clerks, and roadside diner waitresses all had their stories to tell, and the newspapers eagerly printed them all. The car became almost mythical - a modern-day Flying Dutchman, appearing and disappearing at will, always just ahead of the law.
Some nights, I lie awake imagining him in that car, the engine's purr beneath him, the freedom and damnation racing neck and neck on the open road. Was he scared? Excited? Did he feel remorse for what he'd done - if he'd done it - or was he simply running on instinct, like an animal fleeing a forest fire? The answers to these questions would come later, but for now, the mystery only deepened with each passing mile.
Josh Powell is a healthcare writer, consultant, and former CEO of a leading multidisciplinary surgical center in New York. Most recently, he served as Project Manager for Columbia University's NIH-funded HEALing Communities Study, addressing the opioid epidemic through evidence-based interventions.
His book, "AIDS and HIV Related Diseases," published by Hachette Book Group, established him as an authoritative voice in healthcare. Powell's insights have appeared in prestigious publications including Politico and The New England Journal of Medicine. As a recognized expert, he has been featured on major media outlets including CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS.
Having recently completed his memoir "Father and Son," Powell is now crafting his debut work of fiction—a medical crime thriller that draws on his healthcare experience.
I'm hooked, Josh!