70 years ago, infant Peter Weinberger was kidnapped and murdered on Long Island

Angelo La Marca didn't know it yet, but he was being watched.

A small army of FBI agents and Nassau County police detectives were posted near his Plainview home on the evening of Aug. 23, 1956. And then, as La Marca emerged from his car alongside his wife and two children, the investigators swarmed. 

“My mother and I had no idea what the hell was going on,” said his son Vincent La Marca, now 79.

The boy, who was 9 at the time, jumped onto one of the men surrounding his father and started throwing punches. He had just returned home with his parents from a visit to his grandparents' house in Elmont. 

Then, Vincent La Marca recalled in a phone interview from his home in Florida, he was “shoved to the ground" by one of the investigators. 

As he lay in front of his parents’ split-level home, which had been built one year earlier, he watched the investigators handcuff his father and lead him to the back of a police car.

Angelo La Marca, then 31 and a mechanic, later confessed to abducting 32-day-old Peter Weinberger on July 4, 1956. La Marca had kidnapped Peter from his stroller on the back patio of the infant's parents’ Westbury home on Albemarle Road. La Marca left a ransom note asking for $2,000.

The 51-day investigation ended with Peter found dead in a wooded area along the Northern State Parkway in Plainview. Months later, a jury convicted La Marca of kidnapping and murder charges and sentenced him to death. On Aug. 7, 1958, he was strapped into an electric chair and executed at upstate Sing Sing Prison.

The case left a mark on the region and beyond.

It shattered Morris and Beatrice Weinberger, Peter's parents, as well as the perception of Long Island as a place of safety and security, where kids could play outside while their parents made dinner.

And it forever altered the life of Vincent La Marca, who still carries the burden of his father’s sins.

The kidnapping had an "influence on all my life's choices," said Vincent La Marca, who became a cop in the City of Long Beach.

Seventy years after one of Long Island’s most infamous crimes, Vincent La Marca remains tied to a kidnapping he did not commit. The case transformed law enforcement, altered federal kidnapping laws and shattered suburban assumptions about safety. But it also left an emotional scar on a man forced to spend a lifetime carrying one of the most reviled names on Long Island.

For years, he's kept prison letters between his mother and father and pored over case files and newspaper clippings. He thinks about the mistakes police may have made, and whether they set "traps" that caused his father to panic. More than 40 years later, his own son was sentenced to prison for fatally stabbing a man.

He was teased in school. Kids called his father a "baby killer."

"I'm not looking for sympathy," Vincent La Marca said. "I had to grow up learning how to fight. ... Fortunately, I didn't go the wrong way."

The kidnapping jolted Long Island, a region in the early stages of transforming from farmland to the prototype of America's suburbs.

Thousands of young families had left New York City for Long Island in the years after World War II, buoyed by the GI Bill and attracted by the promise of quieter, safer streets in places like Westbury. Levittown, the archetype of suburban development, had been built five years before Peter Weinberger was abducted.

And then a man kidnapped an infant in broad daylight on the country’s birthday.

“To read about a child disappearing off a leafy, suburban street, that’s something that must have driven them bonkers,” Lawrence Levy, who was 6 at the time and living in Valley Stream, said in an interview. Levy is executive dean of Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies.

“This definitely was something that shook up thousands and thousands of people, and made them think twice about just how secure they are,” he said.

Newsday spoke to several native Long Islanders who remembered the kidnapping, and consulted its own archives, to report this story.

A stroll, and then a note

Not long before 3 p.m. on July 4, 1956, Beatrice Weinberger placed her 32-day-old son, Peter, in a carriage on the back patio. They had just returned from a stroll around the neighborhood, and “he seemed calm,” Weinberger said then, “so I went inside for a few minutes.”

Weinberger, who went by Betty, adjusted a mosquito net over the carriage. But when she came back outside a few minutes later, she noticed the netting was pulled down. Next to the carriage was a note.

"Attention," it read, in green ink. "I'm sorry this had to happen, but I am in bad need of money, & couldn't get it any other way. Don't tell anyone or go to the police about this, because I am watching you closely. I am scared stiff, & will kill the baby at your first wrong move. ... Your baby sitter."

Weinberger panicked. Soon her husband, Morris, who had taken their nearly 3-year-old son, Lewis, on a drive, returned home and went out searching for the baby. She called the police. Word spread throughout the neighborhood, and then reached the local newspapers.

What do you mean — a [kidnapping]? This is suburbia. We don't have [kidnappings] in Nassau County.

—Nassau police Sgt. Edward Curran

Nassau police. Det. Frank Abramowitz responded after the Weinbergers called the police. He called up his boss, Sgt. Edward Curran, commander of the Third Squad.

"I think we've got a [kidnapping]," Abramowitz told Curran. 

"What do you mean — a [kidnapping]?" Curran asked. "This is suburbia. We don't have [kidnappings] in Nassau County."

"It's a baby," Abramowitz said.

The following morning, Morris Weinberger deposited an envelope with the ransom money under a tree on the corner of Albemarle Road and Park Avenue. Betty Weinberger leaned another envelope against a signpost at a different corner. Police waited, but the kidnapper failed to appear.

Betty pleaded for the kidnapper to return her baby during a radio and TV broadcast, breaking down in tears.

Reshaping the suburbs

The kidnapping, and subsequent chase to find the abductor, captivated the attention of Long Island, with a steady drumbeat of front-page stories in Newsday and other publications.

recommendedHow Newsday covered infant Peter Weinberger's kidnapping and murder in 1956

Peter Leonetti, a former officer in the Hempstead Police Department, remembers reading about the case in the newspaper every day while growing up in nearby Merrick. He was 9 at the time. He recalled his father telling him not to let his younger brother and sister out of his sight in the days and weeks after Peter Weinberger was taken.

“Nothing big like that ever happened in Nassau County,” said Leonetti, a retired sergeant, now 79 and living in Bethpage. “Kids could play outside until the street lights went on.”

Levy, whose family had moved to Valley Stream from the Bronx, said he couldn't remember much of the finer details of the kidnapping. But he recalled that it briefly changed living patterns for parents.

"Locking your door, making sure you knew where your kids were," he said. "There was certainly a perception that if you moved east to Long Island, you were likely to be safer."

Angelo La Marca, as he would later tell authorities, had fallen on hard times; he was $1,800 in debt. When he drove past the Weinbergers’ home on July 4, he saw an opportunity.

The search for the baby morphed into a media circus. Reporters camped out in front of the Weinbergers’ house. The family and police fielded a number of calls purportedly from the kidnapper in the days following the abduction. In one call, the ransom was raised to $5,000 — but authorities later identified them all as coming from impostors.

Local clergy members left their doors open overnight, offering their churches and synagogues as refuges for the kidnapper to leave the baby.

Then, on the morning of July 10, Morris answered the phone. It was the kidnapper. He instructed Weinberger to leave the ransom off Exit 26 on the Northern State Parkway. The father obliged, but the ransom was not collected. Later that day, the kidnapper called the house again. Betty answered. This time, the kidnapper told her to leave the ransom off Exit 28. She did so, but again, it was not collected.

The FBI did not get involved in the case until seven days had passed, as was required then by federal law.

Breakthrough in handwriting analysis 

Authorities finally got a lead when a federal probation officer noticed similarities in the handwriting of the kidnapper and that of a criminal defendant who had just completed probation for setting up an illegal bootlegging operation: Angelo La Marca. FBI handwriting experts then identified several more similarities in the handwriting.

A mix of FBI and Nassau investigators swarmed La Marca in front of his house, sending his wife and son into shock. His 5-year-old daughter, Vivian, was too young to understand what was going on, Vincent La Marca told Newsday.

“That was a traumatic experience,” Vincent La Marca said.

Angelo La Marca at first denied knowing anything about the killing. But then Curran brought La Marca's wife, Donna, into the questioning room. 

"Angelo, did you kidnap this child?" she demanded. "Think of that baby's mother. If you did this and I was the mother, I'd want to know where he is."

He confessed to the kidnapping, and revealed he had left the baby in a wooded area near Exit 37 of the Northern State Parkway. But authorities could not find the child, and so the next morning, La Marca led them to the spot where he had left Betty and Morris Weinberger’s baby.

"There's no question in my mind that the baby is still alive," Morris said, not long before authorities found Peter. The baby died of asphyxia, with starvation and exposure serving as "contributory causes," Nassau County Medical Examiner Dr. Theodore J. Curphey testified during La Marca's trial.

Vincent La Marca continues to wrack his mind about what went wrong. After his father was executed, Vincent reviewed legal papers kept by his father's attorney for insight.

Not long after the kidnapping, Vincent La Marca said, his father was ready to drop off the baby in exchange for the ransom at an agreed upon location. But when he got to the site early to check it out, he saw a mob of police officers and journalists, according to the files.

"That's when he panicked," Vincent La Marca said. "That's when he pulled over to the side and left the baby there."

Sweeping federal impact

Peter's kidnapping, and killing, had far-reaching consequences: The federal government amended the Federal Kidnapping Act to allow the FBI to intervene in kidnapping cases after just 24 hours, instead of waiting seven days. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law on Aug. 6, 1956.

Angelo La Marca, meanwhile, was indicted on charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder.   Nassau's District Attorney, Frank A. Gulotta, prosecuted the case himself before a jury of 10 fathers and two grandfathers. The jury convicted him on both of the counts.

Vincent La Marca had not been following the case before his father was arrested, he said. But then it was unavoidable. During one prison visit, he asked his father if he could change his last name. 

"The name was not a good name on Long Island anymore," he said. "He told me if that's what I wanted to do, I could."

His father's execution was delayed for about 18 months amid a series of appeals. During that time, Angelo La Marca exchanged a series of intimate letters with his wife, Donna. Vincent said his father had wanted Donna to forward one of the letters to Betty Weinberger, whom he had learned was pregnant with another child. 

"It never made it out of the prison, because all of the letters were censored," Vincent La Marca said. His father was trying to "apologize to" Betty Weinberger in the letter, he said.

A cycle of shame

In 1957, Betty gave birth to a third son, Joseph. His father, Morris, said he "looks like the traditional Weinberger."

Most of the law enforcement officials who worked on the case have died, as have Donna La Marca and Betty and Morris Weinberger.

Peter's brothers, Joseph and Lewis, could not be reached for comment. Vincent La Marca is one of the only living parties who could vividly remember the saga.

His grandfather Vincenzo was an immigrant from Sicily whom Vincent described as the "most ethical and logical man" he has ever known. Vincenzo revered the United States and the police.

Vincent La Marca said he studied hard to become a Nassau County police officer.

But in his recollection, he had no real chance of succeeding: The man administering the psychiatric exam, La Marca recalled, said he was instructed to fail him. He walked out without taking the test.

Vincent La Marca became a Long Beach City police officer and spent two decades on the force. But he wasn't successful in breaking his family's cycle of shame. His son, Joey, pleaded guilty in the fatal stabbing of a Long Beach man in 1996. The story provided inspiration for the 2002 film "City by the Sea" in which Robert De Niro portrayed Vincent. Joey, who was released to parole in 2013, blames Vincent for his violent streak, Vincent said.

“He said it's in his genes,” Vincent said of his son, who could not be reached for comment.

In his later years, Vincent said, he has found peace. He lives with his "wonderful wife" in Sebring, Florida, a city of about 11,000 known for its lake beaches about 90 miles outside Tampa. A few nights a week, he plays poker and shoots pool with friends.

"I'm very happy," Vincent said.

He maintains that his father was not a monster. He has empathy for the Weinbergers, he said. He also chooses to remember the side of his dad the world didn't see — the man who would bathe him every morning and night as a child with polio and massage his limbs. He attributes the hot baths to helping relieve his symptoms.

Vincent has all of his parents' letters, and at one point considered using them as source material for a book. But he found the effort too difficult. He plans to destroy the letters some day.

When Betty Weinberger was still alive, Vincent said, he had considered sending her his father's letter of apology. But then he thought better of it.

"I just," he said, "left that alone."

Betty Weinberger died on April 16, 1984, and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens — right next to her son Peter.