LUST AND DEATH ON KEY BISCAYNE

Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL) (Published as Sun-Sentinel) - January 29, 1995

Author/Byline: MATT SCHUDEL

Edition: ALL
Section: SUNSHINE MAGAZINE
Page: 8
Column: Florida's Unsolved Mysteries
Readability: 7-9 grade level (Lexile: 1070)
About 1:45, in the dark early morning of June 30, 1964, neighbors of millionaire Jacques Mossler were awakened by a frantically barking
dog outside his luxurious apartment on Key Biscayne.
"I'm bringing him in," they heard a man say.
The neighbors later glimpsed a tall, husky man walking to the parking lot, then saw a white Chevrolet drive away with its lights off. No one
called the police.
Mossler's wife and children had left the apartment just minutes before - 1:20 a.m., she would say. When they came back at 4:30, the
apartment was a bloody mess and her husband was dead on the floor, wrapped in an orange blanket. His skull was broken, and he had
been stabbed 39 times. The family dog, a boxer named Rocky, was leashed to a doorknob in the kitchen.
Murder is never a simple thing, but in Miami it has a peculiar way of turning lurid, sensational, bizarre. It isn't every day, after all, that a
bank president is killed in his own living room.
Over the next two years, the murder of Jacques Mossler would become a twisted saga of sex, money and innuendo. It may still be the
most sensational murder trial ever held in Miami, and it is no exaggeration to call it the O.J. Simpson trial of its day.
Jacques Mossler was a 69-year-old financier with a chain of banks and finance companies from Florida to Texas.
"All we've got to sell is money," he often said.
He owned the Coral Gables First National Bank, the Central Bank of North Dade and Miami's Central Bank & Trust Co. They were known
as the "Yes" banks for their accommodating loans. A huge sign atop the Central Bank building in downtown Miami said, simply, "Yes."
Mossler had a 15-room mansion in Houston, a vacation house in Galveston, a ranch in rural Texas, an apartment in Chicago and another
in Miami, plus the one in which he was killed at Governor's Lodge on Sunset Drive, Key Biscayne.
He was not casual with money, but he was known to be a generous man. Mossler set up pension funds and a foundation to help pay for
the education of his employees. He handed out newly minted Kennedy half-dollars and gave money to colleges and hospitals. He and his
wife, Candace, often attended benefits for charities and the arts. They had adopted four young children, brothers and sisters whose father
had killed their mother.
On the night of Mossler's murder, Candace took the children with her to mail letters and visit the emergency room of Jackson Memorial
Hospital for treatment of her recurrent headaches. She claimed she often ran errands in the middle of night with her children. Three times
in the previous week, she had made after-midnight visits to Jackson's emergency room for sedatives.
Soon after her husband had been killed, Candace received several telephone calls at the hospital from a man describing himself as a
"relative of the family." The police couldn't determine whether Candace's well-timed absence had anything to do with her husband's
death. But after questioning the neighbors, the police were certain that Mossler knew his killer.
Just before his dying words - "Don't! Don't! Don't do this to me!" - the neighbors heard him cry out, "It's you!"
Almost 250 people attended Mossler's funeral on July 2, 1964, at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Miami Beach. He was buried the
following day in Arlington National Cemetery, earning that right as a veteran of World War I.
One day later, on the Fourth of July, a Houston trailer salesman named Melvin Lane Powers was arrested for Mossler's murder. A brawny
6 feet 3 inches and 205 pounds, he matched the description of the man neighbors saw leaving Mossler's building. Powers' age was
variously given as 21, 22, 24 and 27, but what was not in dispute was that he was the nephew of Candace Mossler.
He had a previous arrest in Texas for unlawfully carrying a handgun and had been convicted in Michigan of obtaining money under false
pretenses. He had once worked for Jacques Mossler and lived in the family mansion until Mossler threw him out.

The day before the murder, police learned, Powers flew from Houston to Miami. About 7 p.m., he went to the Stuft Shirt Lounge, a bar on
the Miami side of the Rickenbacker Causeway leading to Key Biscayne. He ordered a drink - scotch - and asked for a large Coke bottle.
He left the bottle behind. Around 12:30, he returned to the Stuft Shirt, ordered a double scotch and asked for another Coke bottle.
"People are always asking for crazy things," the bartender said. "It didn't bother me."
Police surmised that Powers smashed Mossler on the head with the heavy bottle, leaving shards of green glass in the apartment. Powers'
palm print was found on the kitchen counter, even though the counter had been wiped down hours before. His fingerprints were found in a
white 1960 Chevrolet parked at the Miami airport. There were bloodstains inside the car.
"Oh, pooh," said Candace Mossler, when told her nephew had been arrested for killing her husband. "That's absolutely the most
ridiculous thing I've ever heard."
And as this deadly little drama developed, it was apparent that Aunt Candy was no ordinary widow.
She was a blue-eyed Southern belle of indeterminate age who spoke with a little-girl voice. Small and buxom, she had well-styled hair that
she made sure was always blond. She seemed to have been lifted straight from the pages of a play by Tennessee Williams: She was
fragile, needy, charming, bubbly, manipulative, and all-too aware of her effect on others - especially men.
After the police found letters and photographs strongly suggesting that she had had a long affair with Powers, Candace checked herself
into a Houston hospital. She gave bedside interviews in a pink negligee, denying the rumors of an illicit romance with her sister's son.
"Why, I call everybody darling," she said.
The papers ran a picture of Candy and Mel holding hands at the Sun Valley ski resort in Idaho. The police confiscated other photographs
and a cache of love letters in Candy's handwriting.
"You mean the whole world to me and I love and want you more than I can tell you," said one letter.
"You are everything to me, darling," read another. "My love and kisses for you."
A postscript added, "It is cold here - I'd like you to keep me ever so warm."
Detectives consulted a handwriting analyst, but they hardly needed to. The letters were signed "C. Mossler."
Candace's age - indeed, much of her life - was a matter of conjecture, or perhaps whim. Her passport gave her birthdate as Feb. 18,
1920, making her 44 in 1964. Most newspaper accounts said she was 45, but two years later they still gave her age as 45. When she was
stopped for a traffic ticket on April 30, 1964, she said she was born in 1927, which would have made her 37.
Whatever her age, Candace Grace Weatherby grew up on a Georgia farm as one of 10 children. Stricken by polio at age 8, she
recovered with therapy and a strong will.
She proudly claimed that her grandfather was a bishop in the Mormon Church. She wasn't so quick to admit that her brother, DeWitt
Weatherby, had been convicted in the 1950s of killing a man during a poker game in Georgia.
When she was "much too young," Candace married a civil engineer named Norman Johnson and had two children, Norman Jr. and Rita,
who were 21 and 20, respectively, in 1964.
Candace claimed to have been a model and fashion designer in New York during her marriage, but by 1947 she was divorced and living
in New Orleans. She met financier Jacques Mossler when she persuaded him to make a donation to the local opera.
"Not that he cared much about opera personally," she said. "But he thought it was a fine cultural thing."
They were married in 1948, and by 1964 Mossler's personal fortune was between $28 million and $33 million. In 1957, the Mosslers
adopted four Chicago children orphaned when their father, a mental patient, shot their mother to death, claiming she was possessed by
evil spirits. Candace cultivated an image as a dutiful wife and doting mother.
But no later than the spring of 1962, she began to take a special interest in her strapping nephew, Mel Powers. She got him a job, moved
him into the house and started to slip away with him on trips. Less than two weeks before Mossler was killed, Candy and Mel spent three
days at a hotel in the Bahamas, though they were registered in separate rooms. It also turned out that Powers was younger than most
people thought. Court records showed that he was born Sept. 13, 1942, and was only 21.
Jacques Mossler knew something strange was going on between his wife and her nephew. He fired Powers and kicked him out of the
house in October 1963, took steps to revise his will and kept notes on telephone conversations he overheard.

"If Mel and Candace don't kill me first," he wrote in a personal memo, "I'll have to kill them!"
Several weeks after Powers was arrested, Candace was charged with first-degree murder, as well. She hired an expensive team of
lawyers from Texas and Florida, led by the flamboyant Percy Foreman. She gave him some of her jewelry as a down payment on his
$200,000 fee.
One of the greatest trial lawyers this country has ever seen, Foreman had been arguing cases since 1927. He was a lifelong Texan, 6
feet 41/2 inches tall, with a booming drawl. After being compared to the legendary Clarence Darrow, Foreman retorted, "I've tried more
murder cases in a year than Darrow did in a lifetime."
A third cousin of Will Rogers, Foreman was an old-fashioned courtroom orator who always made lively copy. He would later defend
James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
The defense team of five attorneys worked out of the office of Walter E. Gwinn, Candace's chief Miami counsel. Because Foreman had
special permission to plead this case in Florida, Dade Circuit Judge George E. Schulz told Gwinn he was responsible for Foreman's
conduct.
"I wasn't so presumptuous as to think I could control Percy," says Gwinn, who still lives in Miami. "Percy was a titan."
When a reporter asked Foreman to name the best lawyer of the 20th century, he replied, "Well, since I was born in 1902, the question is
really irrelevant, wouldn't you say?"
The trial opened on Jan. 17, 1966. In those days, women could serve on juries in Florida only if they specifically registered to do so.
When the jury was sworn after 11 days, all 12 members were men.
Things were already looking up for Candace Mossler, for if there was one thing she knew, it was how to get sympathy from men. When
the jurors took their seats, Candy patted her forehead with ice cubes inside a pink lace hankie.
The chief prosecutor was Dade County State Attorney Richard Gerstein, another tall man (6-5) who was a highly decorated pilot in World
War II. His team of four prosecutors highlighted the "sordid, illicit love affair" and accused Candace and Powers of plotting the murder.
They said Powers threatened Mossler when the banker fired him in October 1963 and kicked him out of the house: "You, Mr. Mossler, will
regret this to the longest day of your life!"
When Foreman took the floor, he launched a full-scale attack on the character of the murdered Jacques Mossler, calling him an
unscrupulous businessman and a sexual deviant who slept with an ax beside his bed.
"If each one of the 39 wounds on Mossler's body had been inflicted by a different person," Foreman thundered, "there would still be three
times as many people with real or imaginary justification for homicide."
He was just warming up: "The evidence will show that except for the shoe fetish, there is no fetish in psychopathic sexuality that Jacques
Mossler did not indulge in. He had them all: transvestitism, homosexuality, voyeurism . . . every conceivable type of perversion,
masochism, sadism."
These outrageous charges, probably cooked up by Foreman, were almost certainly not true. They contradicted everything previously
known about Mossler. Born in Romania in 1895 as Jacob Moscovitz, he came to the United States as a boy with his family. By 1910, he
was selling candy on Chicago commuter trains, and in 1913 he sold his first car in New Orleans. He served in World War I, married a
Catholic woman - he was Jewish - and was the father of four daughters.
Mossler's 75-year-old brother, Samuel Marcu Moscovitz, came from Tel Aviv for the trial. When he met Candace, he refused to shake her
hand.
"Oh, no," he said. "I am not pleased to see you."
Reporters from around the country covered the trial, and as many as 40 photographers crowded the halls of the Dade County
Courthouse. The New York Daily News, the largest newspaper in the country at the time, featured the trial in its prime-time television ads.
Spectators were turned away.
"This trial is not being conducted for anyone's entertainment," Judge George Schulz pleaded, to no avail.
It was, quite simply, an irresistible spectacle. A carnival worker testified that Candace and Powers offered him $10,000 to kill Mossler. In
explicit terms, he described the sexual acts Powers claimed he and Candy performed.
Another witness said Mel once claimed that Candace was pregnant with his child. Candace gasped - then smiled.

A Texas woman said she saw the couple parked in Powers' Thunderbird on a Houston street known as Sin Alley.
"They were too passionate for relatives," she said. "They were in each other's arms. They were close together. They were kissing."
When an attorney cut her off to ask another question, the witness interjected, "I'm not through. There's more to it ..."
There were times when all nine attorneys argued at once, shouting objections and counter-objections. Because he didn't have a gavel,
Judge Schulz rapped on his desk with his knuckles.
"I don't want to have to clear this court," he warned. "This is not a show."
Columnists were shocked - shocked! - at the sordid nature of the trial: "If you like wholesome atmosphere, stay away from the sixth floor
of the Dade County Courthouse . . . This trial has overtones of homicide and incest that even Dostoyevsky would find a little too much."
Candace often greeted the spectators - many of them elderly women - who stood in line for 2 1/2 hours to attend the daily sessions. The
bailiff sternly turned away young people claiming to be students at the University of Miami: "I don't care where you're from. If you can't
prove you're 21, you can't get into this courtroom."
The prosecutors may have established that Candace and Powers had an affair, but that wasn't why they were on trial. Murder was
another question entirely. Aside from the palm print in the kitchen, the forensic evidence was not conclusive, and the prosecution's
witnesses proved to be an unreliable lot of criminals, drug addicts and dimwits.
A Texas convict named Billy Frank Mulvey said Candace Mossler offered him $7,000 to kill her husband.
"I've never seen or heard of this man!" Candace shouted.
Mulvey claimed he had met Powers in jail in 1962, but Powers proved that he was in a hospital at the time for a tonsillectomy, sanding of
his acne-scarred face, correction of his protruding ears - and a circumcision.
In his cross-examination of Mulvey, Foreman handed him a sheaf of 34 pages - his police record. Mulvey had been convicted of 21
felonies and was a heroin addict of long standing. Asked to clarify his profession, he explained, "I'm a thief, not a burglarizer."
Several witnesses were called perpetual liars by members of their own families, and it appeared that prosecutor Gerstein was building a
case to prove that not a single word of his key witnesses could be believed.
An Arkansas prisoner named Arthur Grimsley claimed Powers had asked him to kill Mossler in 1962. Despite criminal convictions in six
states and, by his own reckoning, more than 50 arrests, Grimsley was considered a trustworthy witness because he had found the Lord in
prison, had studied the Bible and become a licensed preacher.
Rising to cross-examine the witness, Foreman asked, "Are you really an authority on the holy writ?" "I don't understand about those writs,"
Grimsley replied.
Foreman asked if Grimsley was familiar with the biblical figure Ananias: "Have you modeled your ministry after him?"
When Grimsley admitted that he couldn't quite place Ananias, Foreman jogged his memory: "He was the biggest liar of all time."
(In the Bible story, Ananias was struck dead after withholding a gift from the church and lying about it.)
The testimony lasted seven weeks, but neither Candace nor Powers ever took the stand. The long trial took its toll on Candace, who was
excused from the proceedings at least four times for nausea, headaches and faintness. Several times she came to court wearing a neck
brace.
Walter Gwinn, her Miami lawyer, recalls that Candace once raced from the courtroom to throw up.
"Goddamn you," Foreman snarled when she came back. "When you have to get sick in the future, do it in front of the jury!"
During the three days of closing arguments, the prosecutors accused the defense of placing everyone on trial but the defendants.
Pointing to Candace, Gerstein shouted, "She is the mastermind and manipulator of this entire scheme!"
The final word - five hours of final words, in fact - belonged to Foreman. He rambled on, citing Shakespeare, the Bible - "Let him among
you without sin cast the first stone!" - and tales of Ku Klux Klan castrations in old Florida. When he sat down, he had a smile on his face.
The case finally went to the jury on the trial's 34th day. When a female spectator presented Candace with a dozen red roses, she was as
radiant as anyone could be, under the circumstances.

After two days of deliberations, the jurors sent a note to Judge Schulz, saying they could not reach a decision. The judge told them to
work harder. A day later, Sunday, March 6, 1966, they came back with unanimous verdicts. Both Candace Mossler and Mel Powers were
declared not guilty.
Candace immediately burst into tears. Mel kissed her on the lips.
"Do it again!" photographers begged.
Instead, Candace kissed everyone else: lawyers, reporters, family members, total strangers. When a reporter asked if Candy and Mel
would get married, she drawled, "Why no. What makes you think that?"
Mel shook hands with the jurors, as Candy hugged and kissed each one. The exonerated couple left the courthouse in a gold Cadillac
convertible, with 150 people pressing close, asking for autographs. Candy blew kisses to the crowd.
The editorial page of The Miami Herald deplored the trial as "a phantasmagoria of sex and slaughter . . . This lurid case had all the
elements of a sick society raised to the nth power."
"That was a strange trial, I'll tell you," defense attorney Walter Gwinn says today. "I've been through a lot before and a hell of a lot more
since, but that was the strangest case I ever worked on."
Within eight days of the verdicts, two paperback books on the Mossler case were published. But the story was hardly over. Candy and
Mel returned to Houston and openly lived together for a couple of years. In 1969, she filed assault charges - later dropped - accusing him
of hitting her and trying to run her off the road.
In 1971, Candace married a 37-year-old electrical engineer named Barnett Garrison. She was, by conservative guess, 50. A year later,
Candace's butler found Garrison lying on the ground outside their home, with a pistol, bullets and $1,000 in his pocket.
The circumstances have never been made clear, but Garrison apparently tried to scale the wall of the 62-room mansion after finding
himself locked out in the middle of the night. Still, that doesn't explain why he fell from the third-floor roof. Garrison suffered brain damage
with almost complete memory loss and was hospitalized for two years. Candace divorced him in 1974 and went back to using the name
Mossler.
She had inherited her husband's wealth - about $33 million - and his banks. As chairman of the board, she was late for directors' meetings
and demanded that the vice presidents greet her with a kiss. Several top executives resigned, and the business grew shaky.
A 1976 article in Esquire magazine described Candace's lavish parties in Houston and her odd personality. Estimates of her age ranged
from 43 to 56, but she still had a youthful, alluring figure.
In October 1976, Candace flew to Miami for a board meeting of her Central Bancorporation. After checking into the Fontainebleau Hotel
on Miami Beach, she summoned a doctor to treat a migraine headache. He gave her injections of demerol, for pain, and phenergan, for
nausea.
The following morning, Oct. 26, 1976, Candace was found dead, lying face down in one of the five pillows on her king-size bed. She was
wearing a peach-pink nightgown and full makeup.
An autopsy showed that Candace died from "postural asphyxia," caused by sedatives and her face-down sleeping position.
It also revealed something else.
"Candy Mossler was a drug abuser of long standing," said Ronald Wright, then the chief deputy medical examiner of Dade County. She
had "thousands and thousands" of needle pricks in her buttocks from years of drug injections.
Her illusion of youth lasted until the end. Candace was not 43 or 55 or - as her family thought - 59. Birth records indicated that she was
born in 1914 and had died at age 62. She was 50 years old - Mel Powers only 21 - when she was accused of murder in 1964.
More than 100 people attended a memorial service for Candace at Riverside Memorial Chapel on Miami Beach - the same chapel in
which Jacques Mossler's funeral was held 12 years before.
Mel Powers came to pay his respects, accompanied by a shapely blonde.
"She didn't know the difference between notoriety and fame," lawyer Percy Foreman said after Candace's death. "But she had more good
than bad in her personality."
After helping to win her freedom, Foreman had to sue Candace to collect his $200,000 fee.

It is now more than 30 years since Jacques Mossler was killed, and many of the people connected with the case have died or moved on.
Percy Foreman died in 1988, and prosecutor Richard Gerstein died in 1992. Gerstein's chief assistant prosecutor, Gerald Kogan, now sits
on the Florida Supreme Court.
As far as can be determined, none of Candace Mossler's natural or adopted children lives in South Florida.
Mel Powers, now 52, is still in Houston. Press accounts have described him as a "flamboyant millionaire developer," but he has also been
plagued by bankruptcy and tax troubles. If he knows what happened in Key Biscayne that night in 1964, he has never said. No one else
has ever been tried for Mossler's death, and the case is still unsolved.
Candace herself, the ageless party girl who may have gotten away with murder, departed this life with one final flourish.
She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery beside the grave of Jacques Mossler, the man she was accused of killing. Chiseled on her
tombstone are her maiden name, Candace Weatherby, and one last, lingering wink at the world: she lied about her age.
MATT SCHUDEL is a Sunshine staff writer.
Caption: PHOTOS 8 DRAWINGBefore his death in 1964, banker Jacques Mossler (left) suspected an affair between his wife, Candace,
and her nephew, Melvin Lane Powers.(color)"That was the strangest case I've ever worked on," says Walter Gwinn, who was Candace
Mossler's lead Miami counsel."The evidence will show that there is no fetish in psychopathic sexuality that Jacques Mossler did not
indulge in," flamboyant defense attorney Percy Foreman told the jury.Candace married Barnett Garrison in 1971. A year later he suffered
brain damage in a fall at their Houston home.Jacques Mossler, a veteran of World War I, was buried in Arlington National Cemetary in
1964. Twelve years later, Candace, lying face down in her pillows, died from "postural asphyxia" and was laid to rest beside the murdered
millionaire.llustration/CARY HENRIEDrawing: (color) A flirtatious wife, a handsome nephew and a murdered millionaire added up to
Miami's most sensational trial.
Index terms: CRIME MURDER; FLORIDA HISTORY
Record: 9501190239
Copyright: Copyright 1995 Sun-Sentinel Company