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Bornman Tells of a Life of Crime and Suicide Attempts

By WILLIAM D. EVANS

In the darkness of a car speeding him back to Cleveland from Newport, Ky., late Monday night to face an armed-robbery charge, William H. Bornman reminisced about his life of crime and heartbreak and said he had tried to kill himself several times.

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Bornman, also known as William Shantley, said his parents were alcoholics, that he had spent eight years of his childhood in a county home and that he first got into trouble when he rolled a homosexual.

All this was in New Haven, Conn.

“THEY CAUGHT me the same day I rolled that guy," said Bornman, “and I went to the reformatory for 10 months. After I got out, I broke into a home and stole a watch and some whisky. So I went back to the reformatory for 18 more months."

Bornman remembered how his father would come

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home drunk and beat his mother, and how as a child he would go to a tavern to pick up his mother.

"Just before the county came and took me, my three sisters and two brothers away from our folks, my dad came home with his pay one day and hid the money down in the basement," Bornman said.

"I saw where he put it and told my mother, and my dad beat me for telling. I'll never forget that beating."

BORNMAN has two sons of his own-aged 7 and 9. They live with his wife in Romford, Conn.

He met his wife in 1951 and worked for a rubber firm for 10 years.

"But my mother was in a mental hospital," Bornman said. "I would sometimes visit her, but my wife didn't want me to go. So we broke up.

"I finally got my mother out of the hospital in December, 1961, but she took an overdose of pills and died."

Bornman said that he had been in a mental hospital several years ago and had been given shock treatments.

"Sometimes I would, get real depressed," he said. "One time I ran in front of a car, hoping it would kill me. It hit me, but I wasn't hurt bad.”

HE ALSO said that he had tried to commit suicide by jumping from a third-floor window of the New Haven jail and by cutting his wrists with a rusty tin.

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He said he had met a girl in New York City several years ago and brought her to Cleveland, where he worked first as a painter and later as a bartender on W. 25th Street.

He denied that he was in Cleveland last June 29, the night that the Barristers Inn, 1212 Ontario Street, was robbed. Bornman is accused of taking part in 'the robbery, in which a policeman was shot,

He was later caught in Baltimore, but twice escaped

from the same hospital where he was taken after swallowing arsenic.

“THE FIRST TIME, they didn't put any handcuffs on me," Bornman said. "I just walked out. The second time, I was handcuffed, but they were real loose. I just took a spring from my watch and worked them free. I walked out in my nightgown and took some clothes from a construction shack.”

Then, he said, he traveled to New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York City and Louisville, Covington and Newport, Ky.

"I sure love the women in Covington and Newport," he said. "The girls there are really different. You tell them you need money and they give it to you. In fact, I just like to make friends and talk to them.

"But I'll never forget this one couple in Brooklyn that kept me for a couple of months. They didn't have to, they just did. Every place I went people were always good to me and helped me out."