THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY - ALL CRIME, ALL THE TIMEThe Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – Ghosts of St. Mary’s & Charles attend Hogan Fundraiser (2024)

THE GHOSTS OF SAINT MARYS JOIN HOGAN AT SOIREE
FOR U.S. SENATE RACE

BY KEN ROSSIGNOL

THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY

PROLOGUE – One guy was lurking and watching the crowd at Governor Larry Hogan’s soiree at the Running Hare Vineyard on July 26, 2024. The guy, apparently working to provide security, kept appearing in the background as Hogan’s U. S. Senate campaign photographer circulated with his lens the targeting the candidate and partygoers. What the security aide and the photographer didn’t see, and no one else seemed to notice, was the collection of ghosts of politics, law, murder, racial disharmony, and high society in the Maryland genteel history who also attended.

Maryland political figures often dig up graves to show their opponents in a bad light. That happened in 1996 when Republican Delegate John Morgan of Prince Georges County was that year’s sacrificial lamb offered to oppose U. S. Rep. Steny Hoyer in the race for the Fifth Congressional District. Del. Morgan provided to the public the theory that it was Hoyer’s fault that his uncle was murdered.

Hoyer’s 1992 GOP opponent in the Fifth Congressional District was Governor Hogan, then a real estate broker in Prince George’s and Anne Arundel Counties. Larry Hogan Jr. whipped Hoyer in each of the Southern Maryland counties in the district.

That outcome was the best of any Republican against Hoyer since that time, with one year when no one bothered to oppose the very liberal Hoyer who sucks up big bucks from defense contractors and built a record of sending thousands of black males to prison for possession of crack cocaine. Hoyer’s saving grace to Republicans over the years he represented the Fifth District has been his success in moving civilian and military units under the Naval Air Warfare Center from Crystal City in Virginia and Warminster in Pennsylvania to St. Mary’s. In addition, Hoyer snagged specialized units such as the Presidential Helicopter and Anechoic Chamber Testing and flooded voter rolls with Republicans as a result.

Hogan often refers to the generational references in politics, pointing to his late father, Congressman Larry Hogan Sr. of Prince George’s County. Congressman Hogan was the first Republican in the House of Representatives in 1974 to call for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Hogan’s family references are to validate his independence from the Republican Party, of which he has prospered in being elected to two terms as Maryland governor as he campaigns to win the open United States Senate seat. Governor Hogan continues to be the skunk at the picnic special aroma in politics by criticizing President Donald Trump at every opportunity. However, Trump recently got even with him by endorsing Hogan in the Senate race, causing great consternation among liberals and leftists who don’t like the idea of adding to the GOP side of the aisle in the Senate.

Hogan was elected Maryland governor in 2014 and 2018 when faced with lackluster Black Democrat candidates whose confusing campaigns failed to rally the Democratic Party base and made it easy for moderate Democrats, independents, and Republicans to cast votes for Hogan.

Hogan’s opponent in the 2024 Senate race has reached back into the fifties to Seneca, South Carolina, and the death of her grandfather, which she postulates as murder, but the facts do not support it. However, facts in politics, particularly in Prince George’s County, don’t mix well with campaigns. One fact is that the state’s attorney in Prince George’s County, Jack Johnson, who hired Angela Alsobrooks, is still in prison on corruption charges, convicted along with his council member wife.

Alsobrooks won two races for state’s attorney and her first term as county executive without resorting to one of the most blatant lies in Maryland politics, which is really saying a lot in that both parties could win the Super Bowl of Liars Poker if there were such an event. Be sure to read about Alsobrooks using the tragic death of her great-grandfather with her own personal historical spin invented to propel her career, but there are no facts to support her assertion. Yep, believe all women, especially if they are liberal and black and running for office. The Washington Post and several T.V. news outlets all ran with Alsobrooks’s false claim without ever checking the facts.

BACCA PLANTATIONS, HIGH SOCIETY, AND A CHARITY BALL
BROUGHT OUT THE POLITICAL GHOSTS

Prominent among those who paid $100 each to attend the fundraiser for Senate hopeful Hogan was Otway Zantzinger, a freshly minted new generation of a Southern Maryland tobacco plantation family, who now at about the same age as his famous uncle, is emerging into the world of politics and power. His uncle, William D. Zantzinger, was immortalized in Bob Dylan’s 1964 ballad The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and in news coverage of how William Zantzinger attended the annual high-society Spinsters Ball for debutants at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore City on February 9, 1963. An annual charity event, the purpose that year was to raise money for the Baltimore League for Crippled Children and Adults.

The historical meeting in Calvert County between Senate hopeful Governor Larry Hogan and Otway Zantzinger in 2024 harkens back not only to the murder of Hattie Carroll in 1963 but also to the commonality of the Prince George’s County roots of both families who have grown over the decades in the business of real estate development and Republican politics.

Hogan often reminds crowds of his father, Prince Georgian Republican Congressman Larry Hogan Sr., who was the first Republican to break ranks with President Richard Nixon in 1974 and call for his impeachment over the Watergate coverup. Rep. Hogan voted for all three Articles of Impeachment against President Nixon.

Governor Hogan is far from a political newcomer, and greeting the prodigy of the killer of Hattie Carroll might have been a serendipity occasion but noteworthy in Maryland history, nonetheless.

Larry Hogan Sr. served in the House of Representatives from January 1969 to 1975. He was also elected County Executive of Prince George’s County, holding office from December 1978 to December 19, 1982. Congressman Larry Hogan Sr opposed Louise Gore for the GOP nomination for the United States Senate in 1974. Gore prevailed with 57,626 votes to 48,887 for Hogan, showing that Republican voters didn’t take too kindly to the traitorous vote of Rep. Hogan to impeach President Nixon. Democrat Marvin Mandel beat Gore with 63 percent of the vote in the general election. Larry Hogan Sr. beat P.G. County Executive Winfield Kelly in 1978; in 1982, Congressman Hogan lost a bid to unseat U. S. Senator Paul Sarbanes. His son, Patrick, won election to the Maryland House of Delegates from Frederick County District 3A in 2002 and again in 2010 after losing a close race in 2006.

Congressman Larry Hogan Sr. died in 2017 and remained the last Republican elected to the Fifth Congressional District of Maryland or as Prince George’s County Executive. Larry Hogan Jr. attempted to wrest the Fifth District from Rep. Steny Hoyer in 1992 but was unsuccessful. Given the demographics in Prince George’s County, it is unlikely another Republican will ever hold one of the congressional seats, which include parts of the enormous county or the post of county executive.

No Republican has since mounted a vigorous campaign for either of the Maryland seats in the U.S. Senate until 2024, as his son Larry is running a close race against Alsobrooks.

See Also

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The crowd at the Spinsters Ball numbered around two hundred, while the Hogan for Senate fundraiser attracted about one hundred and twenty persons, mainly from St. Mary’s County.

The Spinsters Ball was a bit of a pun, as debutantes were celebrated at the age of sixteen, and twenty-six-year-old unmarried women were becoming spinsters. The event was by invitation and held by the Wicomico Hunt Club at the Hotel Emerson, which was, at the time, a handsome hotel in downtown Baltimore. Delegate William Chew Zantzinger, the father of William D. Zantzinger, was a founding member of the Wicomico Hunt Club and the Marlborough Hunt Club.

The event for Governor Hogan was scheduled to be held at the Flat Iron Farm in Great Mills, but the St. Mary’s County event was moved at the last minute to the Running Hare Winery in Calvert.

POLITICAL LUMINARIES

The hosts of the Hogan Soiree were Maryland State Senator Jack Bailey (R. St. Mary’s, Calvert) and his wife, St. Mary’s School Board President Karin Bailey. Senator Bailey is the nephew of the four-term state senator, attorney, gentleman farmer, and musician Paul Jacob Bailey, who was first elected to represent St. Mary’s County in 1946 and ended his final term in 1975 after sponsoring the Refinery Referendum bill, which allowed voters to vote two to one in 1974 against the siting of an oil refinery and 1200 other petrochemical industries in St. Mary’s County.

Former Charles County Commissioner and two-term state senator Jim Simpson, appearing fit at 93, a Democrat, joined the gathering to show support for Hogan. Simpson is a longtime owner of a beer distributorship and was on the board of directors of the now-long-gone Maryland Bank and Trust. Simpson’s senatorial district, from 1974 to 1982, included Charles County and St. Mary’s County.

Simpson was on the Charles County sewer authority and elected in 1970 to the post of Charles County Commissioner President before being elected to the Maryland Senate. He reigned over an era of economic expansion in Charles County that was marked by explosive commercial and residential development growth that transformed the rural county into an extension of Prince George’s County.

Former Annapolis attorney Paul Dorsey and his wife and daughter highlighted a historic political family of St. Mary’s County. Paul Dorsey, who now lives in St. Mary’s County and whose mother, Jeanne Dorsey Mandel, was married to the late Senator Walter B. Dorsey before her marriage to Governor Marvin Mandel, is of counsel to The Dorsey Law Firm in Leonardtown.

The very busy firm was founded by his brother, Philip H. Dorsey III, who is the grandson of the longtime head of the Dorsey political organization and St. Mary’s Circuit Court Judge.

Jeanne Dorsey Mandel was an elected Town of Leonardtown Commissioner and was the first female police commissioner in Maryland. Paul Dorsey is also the brother of NFL great John Michael Dorsey of the Green Bay Packers and the NFL general manager responsible for the restoration of the Kansas City Chiefs to become one of the most successful pro football franchises.

St. Mary’s State’s Attorney Jaymi Sterling, who crushed her former boss Richard Fritz like an old Chevy Belair in a junkyard in the 2022 GOP primary, was beaming as she greeted the crowd gathering to support sending her father to the United States Senate.

HOTEL EMERSON

At the ball, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, heavily intoxicated and giving taps of his cane to various hotel staff, struck a hotel waitress, Mrs. Hattie Carroll, in the head with his cane, part of his evening attire of top hat, white tie, and tails, sending her to Mercy Hospital, where she died. Before striking Hattie Carroll, another waitress suffered several strikes from the drunken Zantzinger across her arms, thighs, and buttocks several times.

Hattie Carroll, 52, was the mother of nine children and the wife of James F. Carroll, a Navy Stewards Mate 2nd Class, World War II veteran, who died in 1987. She worked at the Hotel Emerson to help provide for her family. Mrs. Carroll was an active member of Gillis Memorial Church in Baltimore, and two of her daughters still lived at home. Hattie and James had eleven children, nine of whom survived childhood: Billy, Lauretta, Mildred, Charlotte, James, Leota, Frank, Gwendolyn, and Margaret.

Bob Dylan’s ballad was emblematic of the tunes and folk music of the early sixties, which stoked the moral crisis of segregation and Jim Crow laws perpetrated by the Democratic Party in the South and permeated much of Maryland until the sixties.

Police were called to the Emerson Hotel and nabbed the Zantzingers in the ballroom. The Baltimore Sun reported that Patrolman Warren Todd received multiple bruises on his legs in making the arrest, and Zantzinger suffered a black eye. William Zantzinger is the son of the late Maryland State Delegate Richard C. Zantzinger of Prince George’s County.

After Hattie Carroll died at the hospital, William Deveraux Zantzinger, who police had released on low bail, was sought for homicide by Baltimore Police and his wife, Jane Elson Duvall, for assault for her part in the affray in a statewide alert sent out to all of Maryland. Zantzinger surrendered himself at Baltimore City Police headquarters around noon the next day after he killed Hattie Carroll. Zantzinger was escorted to the police with attorney Claude Hanley of Towson. Referred to in news accounts as a ‘Gentleman Farmer,’ he was placed in a jail cell that Sunday pending a bail hearing the next day with a Baltimore City judge.

THE TRIAL

Charged with murder, Zantzinger was soon behind bars, and the court case was moved to Western Maryland. While awaiting trial, William Edward Park, a car dealer from Toughkenamon, Pa., was charged with trying to extort $2,500 from Zantzinger, promising him he could get the homicide charge reduced. Charles County State’s Attorney John C. Hanco*ck was quoted in a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania newspaper as stating that charges in the case would be referred to the Charles County Circuit Court.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Zantzinger was also convicted of assault with his cane on Mrs. Ethel Hill, another waitress and bellhop George Gessell. The Sun reported on the testimony at the trial by other Emerson Hotel staff working the night of the Spinsters Ball. Mrs. Hill, 30, Negro of the 800 block of Bethune Road, testified that she first noticed the defendant when he banged the cane on the bar and demanded drinks. She said he called “us,” two women behind the bar, “nigg*rs”. Later, the witness testified that as she was clearing glasses from a table, she felt a whack across the buttocks. Zantzinger had struck her with the cane, she said.
Mrs. Hill said she walked away, carrying glasses, but that Zantzinger followed, continuing to verbally abuse her with the cane. “Each time he hit, he hit me harder and harder,” she asserted.
The waitress testified that she placed the glasses on a serving table and, as another blow fell, “I couldn’t bear it anymore; I grabbed the cane.”
She and two other witnesses testified that Zantzinger and Mrs. Hill struggled for the cane until two guests, William B. Sawers Jr and Hal C. Whitaker, separated them and snatched the cane from Zantzinger. Mr. Whitaker hid it and later broke it over his knee and finally gave it to hotel officials for delivery to the police, it was testified.
After Zantzinger was disarmed of his cane, he fell into a full-fledged brawl and was on top of his wife on the ballroom floor, hitting her with his shoe. Zantzinger threw punches at Frank Riggs, a former football player with the Denver Broncos, working in the insurance business in Baltimore, who tried to calm him. The ex-fullback, reported The Sun, decked Zantzinger “with a single punch.”
When police arrived on the complaint from Hill, they found him unsteady on his feet and shoeless. When descending a stairway with their prisoner in two, Patrolman Warren Todd and Gerard Brander testified at trial that Mrs. Zantzinger lunged down the stairs, and both officers and both Zantzingers rolled down to the next landing with all of them piled on top of Patrolman Todd.
At trial, Zantzinger told of a long day of drinking that began when he met friends at Upper Marlboro, continued to a friend’s house in Towson, and then on to several bars in Baltimore before arriving at the Emerson Hotel. He said that he was simply playfully tapping people with the cane and remembered little about exactly what he said or did. Zantzinger testified that he purchased the cane at a farm fair in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the week before the Spinsters Ball.

The Evening Star reporter Jerry O’Leary Jr reported back to the Washington, D.C. newspaper from the trial in Hagerstown that the medical testimony was crucial to the outcome. O’Leary noted that Baltimore City State’s Attorney William J. O’Donnell provided witnesses for the prosecution that testified about Zantzinger slinging his cane in assaults on several hotel staffers before striking Carroll. O’Donnell also produced the medical examiner, who noted the cause of death being triggered by the assault.

“There are no marks of violence on the body, no evidence she had been struck,”

Dr. Charles S. Petty, assistant medical examiner, said that the autopsy showed Carroll died of a stroke that caused a cerebral hemorrhage, but there was a cause and effect of the assault and her death. “There are no marks of violence on the body, no evidence she had been struck,” Dr. Petty said. “She already had high blood pressure, and she must have become more excited and apprehensive because of the beating and just had a stroke a few minutes after the attack.”

The defense provided medical experts Dr. Frank W. Davis Jr., a specialist in diseases of the heart and blood vessels, from Baltimore, and Dr. John C. Stauffer of Frederick, a specialist in diseases of the heart, blood vessels, and internal organs.

Both experts testified that the type of hemorrhage suffered by Mrs. Carroll was of the massive kind usually found in hypertensive persons that spontaneously take place even in the course of ordinary life without any aggravating factors, such as when sleeping or during typical daytime activities.
H. Morton Rosen, attorney for the Carroll family, filed a civil suit in 1964 in Charles County Circuit Court asking for a million dollars in damages, which later was settled for $25,000. Rosen also filed an action against the Emerson Hotel in workers’s compensation, which paid about $40 a month on a $15,000 award. The award was never paid in full as the hotel closed in 1968.

When Zantzinger was found guilty of manslaughter at trial in Hagerstown and given six months in jail, Circuit Court Judge D. Kennedy McLaughlin thoughtfully deferred sentencing to begin for two weeks so Zantzinger could finish the harvest of tobacco, corn, and grain grown on six hundred acres at his family plantation known as Mount Victoria in Charles County. Zantzinger was fined $625 for the manslaughter conviction, while a sentence of ten years in prison could have been his fate when he was found guilty by a three-judge panel. The Washington County Circuit Court Judges panel included McLaughlin, Judge Irvine H. Rutledge, and Stuart F. Hamill Jr.

Judge McLaughlin, included in the court’s five-page ruling, said, “When a person by violent action sets in motion a chain of circ*mstances against a victim which might cause her to die sooner than she otherwise would have died, it would be unreasonable and possibly subversive of justice that criminal responsibility should not attach.
“In this case, the victim was afflicted with hypertension and an enlarged heart, causing her to succumb to an assault that would not have endangered the life of a person in ordinary health.
“…it can make no difference that the accused did not know of her condition.”
The court said that Mrs. Carroll’s death was not due solely to disease but was hastened by the defendant’s verbal insults coupled with an assault.

NEWS COVERAGE HYPED ZANTZINGER INTO BEING A ‘WEALTHY SOUTHERN PLANTER’ WHEN IN FACT HE LEASED HIS FIELDS FROM HIS PARENTS AND BASICALLY WAS A TENANT FARMER

William D. Zantzinger attended Friends School in Washington and graduated from the University of Maryland. He established himself as a real estate operator in Charles County, much to the fashion that his grandfather, Otway B. Zantzinger, developed a large portion of Prince George’s County in the Capitol Heights area after migrating from Baltimore. Otway Zantzinger III was also a real estate developer who died in 2015 in North Carolina. His son, Otway Zantzinger, appeared with warm wishes for Governor Larry Hogan, perhaps, but not likely, unless he has been living under a rock, unaware of the famous William Zantzinger causing the death of Hattie Carroll.

Realtors Selected Zantzinger Chairman of Political Action Committee for Maryland

William D. Zantzinger became licensed as a real estate broker in 1966 and obtained a broker’s license in 1971. In 1984, he was elected as chairman of the board of trustees of the political action committee of Maryland. Zantzinger owned and operated W & Z Realty, located on Rt. 301 at White Plains in Charles County. He also served on the Southern Maryland Board of Realtors’ legislative committee for three years and was chairman of the grievance committee.

SUN PAINTS A FAR LESS HORRIFIC VIEW OF ZANTZINGER IN 1987

An insightful account of the death of Hattie Carroll at the tap of Zantzinger’s cane in 1963 by David Simon in The Sun on February 7, 1988, painted a view of Zantzinger that put the lie to the many accounts of the tragic death and explained the young farmer in a more accurate account of who he was and wasn’t.

Simon’s account accurately pointed out that as for being from a politically powerful family, the Zantzinger father, who served as a member of the House of Delegates, was a Republican in a state always dominated by Democrats.

While Charles County saw Republicans in office until the late 1990s, it is now completely dominated by Democrats. The press painted William D. Zantzinger as a privileged socialite who operated the family plantation. In contrast, Simon soon discovered that the farm had never been a plantation and that the twenty-four-year-old farmer leased the farm from his parents. Blacks and whites in the southern end of Charles County existed together in a friendly fashion, and many blacks cited having a good opinion of Zantzinger, who acted as an auctioneer and real estate dealer.

Simon also noted that few of the reports featured in national news paid much attention to the victim, other than the ballad by Bob Dylan. Simon stated that over 1600 persons crowded into the Gillis Memorial church for Hattie Carroll’s services, but the Baltimore newspapers didn’t even run an obituary for her. The Afro-American newspaper kept up with the progress of the court proceedings and the filing of the family’s lawsuit.
“And so the world never came to know Hattie Carroll, a wife and mother, a homemaker, a religious woman who enjoyed listening to the Gillis Memorial Choir; a part-time waitress at the Emerson, where she was a founder of Nous Les Filles – ‘We the Girls’ – an informal, close-knit club of female employees,” wrote Simon in his article.

Simon attempted to draw out one of the older surviving children of Hattie Carroll for his article and talked to Charlotte Tate, who told him, “We don’t want to bring that all up again. Even after all this time, the family has never gotten over it…I don’t see any point.” Leota Bias, her sister, told Simon, “What is there to say? It’s’ not going to bring her back.”

Slain by a cane that sailed
through the air
And came down through the
room
Doomed and determined to destroy
all the gentle
And she never done nothin’ to
William Zantzinger

“Questions of guilt and responsibility – like questions of race – find their most honest answers in gray areas; William Zantzinger deliberately murdered no one, and yet he cannot claim to be an innocent man. In the early morning hours of February 9, 1963, he was drunk, abusive, and profane, and he caused the death of an innocent human being.”

In his article in The Sun, Simon could have concluded his effort with the following well-written statement…but he didn’t; he continued with the story.
What Simon said was this: “Questions of guilt and responsibility – like questions of race – find their most honest answers in gray areas; William Zantzinger deliberately murdered no one, and yet he cannot claim to be an innocent man. In the early morning hours of February 9, 1963, he was drunk, abusive, and profane, and he caused the death of an innocent human being.”

Defense attorneys Omer T. Kaylor Jr and Frederick J. Green Jr provided a strong retort to the prosecutors, according to the Washington Evening Star, contending that Mrs. Carroll’s death was the result of her own precarious physical condition rather than any action by their client. Green described the defendant as a “…good, honest, hard-working boy” and that the prosecution had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zantzinger even had the cane during his encounter with Mrs. Carroll. Green said that five other prosecution witnesses testified to the effect that fellow guests confiscated the cane after he struck Mrs. Hill with it. Green asserted that the assault by Zantzinger on Mrs. Hill had preceded his assault on Mrs. Carroll.

CROOKED LANDLORD LANDED DOUBLE PUNCH AT HAPLESS SLUM DWELLERS AND LACKADAISICAL CHARLES COUNTY GOVERNMENT

According to Maryland Land Records, William Zantzinger, involved in partnerships and direct ownership of scores of properties in Charles County, ran into financial troubles in business and found federal and local tax liens swallowing up his various rental properties.

However, losing the title to the properties didn’t deter Zantzinger from continuing to collect the rent for five more years, properties often described as too high, from properties often described as run-down slums, and violating housing codes, as they were in Charles County.

Some shacks in the community, known as Patuxent Woods, had no water or heat, and Zantzinger even took some of the residents to court when they failed to pay his rent. With county officials in La Plata being the typical fiefdoms of incompetence, as are most Maryland county governments, they were informed by news reports of the fraud being perpetrated by William Zantzinger.

Thus, William Zantzinger was charged with fraud and indicted by the Circuit Court Grand Jury on two felony counts of unfair trade practices. He entered a guilty plea on November 18, 1991, to fifty misdemeanor counts for collection of the rent on the properties he lost in 1986 for not paying county property taxes.
Charles County State’s Attorney Leonard C. Collins asked Charles County Circuit Court Judge Steven L. Platt to throw the book at Zantzinger. Instead, Judge Platt fined Zantzinger $50,000 and ordered him to serve 2,400 hours of community service to groups that advocate for low-cost housing. Zantzinger told the court he had never intended to hurt anyone, but he found himself in a financial hole and kept digging deeper, saying that he had learned his lesson. The Sun reported on January 6, 1992, that Collins would have none of that. The prosecutor told the Judge that Zantzinger was “dumb like a fox” and stated in divorce papers in 1988 that he had lost the properties even while he was collecting rent from the tenants.

LAST DAYS FOR ZANTZINGER WERE SPENT AT BACHELOR’S HOPE
IN ST. MARY’S COUNTY

Joseph V. Stone and Mary Lynn Runco Stone, insurance and real estate entrepreneurs in St. Mary’s County, sold their historic plantation home in Chaptico, Md., known as Bachelor’s Hope, which was surveyed in 1814, to William D. Zantzinger and Suzanne K. Zantzinger, on January 29, 1999, for $675,000. On February 28, 2001, the Stones won a judgment of $150,000 plus $22,500 in attorneys fees and another $7500 in late interest fees on an overdue mortgage note and part of the original sale. On April 9, 2001, the judgment was satisfied.

William D. Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009. His estate included two small rental houses in Leonardtown near the Leonardtown firehouse, lots in Longview Beach near Maddox, Md., and low-income homes in the Southampton subdivision in Hermanville, Md. Following his death, Suzanne Zantzinger continued to own Bachelor’s Hope until she sold it for $925,000 to Bachelors Hope LLC in 2013.

WHO GOT WHAT IN THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
OF WILLIAM D. ZANTZINGER

An examination of William D. Zantzinger’s lengthy and involved final disposition of assets reveals that most of his estate went to his wife Susanne and his children—various claimants against his estate, including her and others, for significant amounts. More minor claims included one from a La Plata Hardware store, which is a good place to purchase a shovel that can be used to dig for buried treasure or discover where a body is buried.
The most curious disbursem*nt is of an antique desk. With William D. Zantzinger spending decades in the real estate and auction business and having historical personal, political, and economic ties to St. Mary’s County, his will show a final act of recognition of a proper restoration of history to Saint Mary’s County. Zantzinger insisted that upon his desk, a favored possession of a “Partner Desk” owned by Phillip Barton Key remain in St. Mary’s County and be donated to the St. Mary’s County Historical Society. The historical society is in the famous manor home of the Key family, Tudor Hall, located next to the St. Mary’s County Circuit Courthouse in Leonardtown.

An inspection of the furniture located on the first floor of the historical society didn’t reveal a desk as is described in some accounts. Still, they could have hauled the heavy and backbreaking artifact to the second floor or let someone hornswoggle them out of this piece of history. The best part of this examination of Zantzinger’s will is that of learning of the background of and demise of the son of Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Philip Barton Key was the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and enjoyed the reputation of being a lady’s man, sometimes dallying with the wives of other gentlemen. Congressman Daniel Sickles, Democrat of New York, caught Key in communication with his wife waving a hanky at him from a window of the congressman’s home on Lafayette Square across from the White House. Congressman Sickles confronted Sickles and, with his pistol, shot him dead.

Taken to a criminal trial in the matter of homicide, a jury found Sickles to have acted in a moment of temporary insanity and found him not guilty after deliberating but seventy minutes.

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