By Monte Mitchell
JOURNAL REPORTER
Freddie Hammer was driving a stolen Monte Carlo on Route 1 about 40 miles southwest of Philadelphia when a state trooper pulled him over for speeding.
It was about 9:20 p.m., Friday Oct. 13, 1978, and Hammer was 18.
He gave the trooper a fake driver's license and told him that he was speeding because his mother had been in an accident.
The trooper didn't believe Hammer and ordered him out of the car. By then, another trooper had arrived. >Hammer was obedient and put his hands on the hood. They asked for his real ID. He gave them another fake one.
They noticed that he was dressed in an old Navy-issue shirt with the name "Hammer" stenciled over the pocket.
When the troopers turned away for a moment, Hammer saw his chance and took off, scrambling over a guardrail and vanishing into the woods.
Police officer's ID found
In the glove compartment, the troopers found identification belonging to a Philadelphia police officer named Charlie Uffelman.
A quick call to Philadelphia confirmed the worst.
Uffelman was dead. About an hour earlier, his body had been found by the side of the road in Philadelphia.
Busloads of police officers rushed to Route 1. A helicopter searched from the air, while officers searched on horseback and dog teams tracked the woods for the young man who was now a suspect in the death of a police officer.
Uffelman was 46 and had spent half his life as a Philadelphia police officer. Assigned to the civil-affairs division, his job that day was to blend in with the crowd at a demonstration.
Friends and family thought that his work in civil affairs suited him. He was friendly and non-threatening, one of those people who seemed like he could have a conversation with anyone about anything -- from classical music to how to respond to a riot.
When he went off shift at 4 p.m., he left his service weapon at civil-affairs headquarters because he didn't like to have it at home with his five children. He carried an unloaded .38 that he was taking to have refurbished for a fellow officer.
He went across the street to DiNardo's, a well-known crab restaurant. It was no secret among friends and family that Uffelman liked a good drink, and he spent more than four hours there before climbing into the driver's seat of his silver 1971 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and heading home. His blood-alcohol content would later be found to be .18.
He drove two blocks and turned onto Delaware Avenue for the 25-minute drive to his home in southwest Philly. He made it about 10 to 15 blocks.
Shortly after 8:40 p.m. a couple walking their dog found Uffelman face down, halfway in the road and halfway on the sidewalk, near a junkyard by the railroad tracks. There was a pool of vomit beside him.
The first officers to arrive thought that Uffelman had been shot because of a bloody wound on his scalp. The medical examiner later found that he had been hit on the head with such force that his skull was fractured.
The Monte Carlo was gone. Uffelman's rear pants pocket was ripped and his wallet was missing. Near his body lay a 4-foot- long railroad tie.
A familiar name
When Trooper Arthur Tuinstra reported for work Saturday afternoon, everyone in the state police barracks was talking about the Philadelphia police officer who had been beaten to death the night before and how a suspect had seemed to vanish in the woods.
Someone mentioned the Navy work shirt with the name Hammer.
It wasn't a common name in the area. But Tuinstra knew a kid named Hammer who had just gotten out of the Navy -- Freddie Hammer. That was the kid from his neighborhood in Lancaster County who had run into Tuinstra's burning house the summer of 1975 and led his wife and seven children to safety.
Hammer had served less than a year in the Navy, and told people the Navy reneged on its promise to let him finish high school.
He was one of six children. His father had been a Philadelphia policeman until being fired about 10 years earlier. He was an alcoholic and left the family when Freddie was 4 years old. Hammer considered his stepfather, John Frohmander, to be his dad.
That night, Tuinstra and two Philadelphia police officers staked out the Hammers' home. Tuinstra spotted Hammer coming up the driveway about 12:30 Sunday morning and arrested him without incident.
They took him to the state police barracks in Avondale, where he was questioned by homicide detectives from the Philadelphia Police Department.
About two hours after he was arrested, Hammer signed a typewritten police statement offering his initial account of what happened. He said he was hitchhiking on Delaware Avenue, and Uffelman stopped and picked him up. Uffelman soon pulled over. He looked like he was going to get sick. He took out his false teeth and put them on the dash.
Hammer said that Uffelman got out of the car and reached into the passenger window and grabbed him. Hammer got out of the car and punched Uffelman. Then Hammer grabbed the railroad tie that was leaning against the fence and hit Uffelman in the back of the head. Hammer told police that he panicked, dropped the tie, jumped in the car and took off.
Uffelman's wallet was on the front seat. Hammer told police that he took $170 from the wallet and put it under the carpet in his bedroom, where investigators later found it.
About 90 minutes after Hammer told police that he had found the wallet on the seat, he signed another statement -- this one stating that he had taken the wallet from Uffelman's back left pocket as the officer was unconscious on the ground.
Hammer had also changed his story about the confrontation with Uffelman:
The man didn't try to pull him out of the car, Hammer said. He was sick, and he threw up. Hammer said he rolled down the window and asked if he was all right. He didn't answer. Hammer got out and went to where he was sitting on the curb. He said he kept asking him if he was all right, and Uffelman told Hammer to leave him alone. Hammer leaned over and slapped him in the face to snap him out of it. Uffelman punched him in the chest. That's when Hammer grabbed the railroad tie and started hitting Uffelman in the head.
He told detectives that Uffelman was on his knees by the car when he hit him in the head.
Why did you hit him? they asked.
"I don't know why I did it," Hammer said.
Yet another story
The murder trial started five months later. By then, Hammer had a different story of what happened on Delaware Avenue.
He testified that Uffelman gave him a ride and made an unwanted sexual advance. Hammer hit him, he testified, in self-defense.
The testimony was filled with lurid details
"Do you want to make some money, kid?" Uffelman asked him, Hammer said.
"And then the next thing I know, he was reaching over and grabbing me," Hammer continued.
"Where did he grab you?" asked his attorney.
"My thighs," Hammer said.
"I pushed him away, and I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?' And he just said, ‘Well, I want to see what you're made of.'
Hammer went on to testify that Uffelman pulled a gun on him, holding it to his face, before pulling over to the side of the road and stopping at the curb. The confrontation continued outside the car, he said, with Uffelman throwing him against a chain-link fence.
"Then I grabbed this post that was laying up against the fence and I was going to protect myself with it," Hammer said. "It was the only thing I knew that I could do. And then I seen him go for his gun, and that's when I just swung the post and hit him in the head."
Hammer had begun his testimony by telling about his father, George Hammer, a former police officer and a violent alcoholic.
He and Hammer's mother divorced, he testified, and as he grew up, he learned from his older brothers and sisters that his father was homosexual.
Uffelman, Hammer testified, brought back memories of the father who had abandoned him.
"Freddie, what was in your mind when he pulled you out of the car?" his lawyer asked. "Tell the jury."
Hammer appeared to stumble over his words.
"It was in my mind, why I thought, I was thinking about. It just seemed like that was my father who -- he reminded me of my father in a way," he said.
Joan Uffelman didn't believe for a second that her husband propositioned Hammer. It was ridiculous, and she was certain that it was a lie.
Tuinstra was in the courtroom for part of the trial. He didn't believe Hammer's testimony about Uffelman, but he thought that Hammer would be able to appeal to the jury's sympathy. He was dressed nice, with his hair combed. He looked like an altar boy.
After 31 hours of deliberation, the jury rejected premeditated murder charges, as well as other charges related to robbery and theft of Uffelman's car, and convicted Hammer of third-degree murder, a felony that applies to a killing that is not intentional. He was sentenced to 71/2 to 15 years in prison.
The jailbreak
Hammer hated prison. He considered himself wrongly convicted and didn't think he deserved to be there.
About three years after his sentence began, on July 21, 1983, he ran.
Hammer and about a dozen inmates were on a work detail outside State Correctional Institution Camp Hill in Camp Hill, Pa., about two hours west of Philadelphia, when Hammer hit a guard with a pipe. Four of the prisoners jumped into the prison truck, with Hammer at the wheel. When he stopped, two of the inmates went in one direction and were quickly captured.
Hammer and another inmate ran through woods and came to a small house.
They went inside and closed the curtains. They found guns and clothes to change into. They heard the police and dogs go by. They might have gotten away except for a UPS driver who arrived to deliver a package. He sensed that something wasn't right at the house and called the police. When the police returned, Hammer and the other inmate climbed into the attic. They could hear the police dog searching inside the house below them.
Police knew that they were in the attic but waited until dark to fire tear gas. They shot holes all through the house.
Hammer was coming out the front door when he felt a bullet fly through the hair on his head. He hit the ground and crawled out.
The assault on the guard and the escape added nine years to Hammer's sentence.
On June 28, 1985, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court voted 5-2 to overturn the verdict in Uffelman's killing and ordered a new trial. The court said that the trial judge had acted as an advocate for the prosecution.
At the second trial, the prosecution was limited in the evidence it could present against Hammer because of the acquittal in the robbery charge at the first trial. Hammer was acquitted on May 23, 1986.
Hammer still had time left on his sentence for the escape. He served another 18 months and was let out on Nov. 12, 1987, getting an early release for good behavior and completing prison programs.
Shortly after his release, Hammer gave an interview to his hometown newspaper, the Intelligencer Journal, which portrayed him as an innocent man.
By then his mother and stepfather had moved to the Florida Keys. Frederick Phillip Hammer was 27 and filled with nostalgia for his old neighborhood, the Octorara Pines subdivision, a neighborhood built by his stepfather where two streets -- Frederick Way and Phillip Drive -- were named for him
"When I was little I used to go fishing down at the lake there," he told the newspaper. "I used to go back in the pine trees, running, or just walking. About this time of year, the geese would be coming. It was really beautiful.
But even during the newspaper interview in a local restaurant, he felt like people were looking at him differently. He wondered what they were thinking. And he thought how good it would be to get away from a place where so many people knew his name.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.