Wisconsin student turned massage parlor maid proved toxic to some - New York Daily News

[massage]

In 1974, Barbara Hoffman dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to take a job in a massage parlor. It was a baffling move.

Hoffman had an IQ of 145 and was a straight A student with a major in biochemistry. Here was a young woman with brains and talent who had earned accolades through her academic career. She was a National Honor Society scholar. She was fluent in three languages. She played the French horn.

Yet, she was willing to endanger a bright future by plunging into the sleazy sex trade business in Madison. But as with every other task she had ever tackled, Hoffman excelled in this underworld, wrote Karl Harter in his book, “Winter of Frozen Dreams.” Before long, the one-time chemistry whiz was being hailed as the “Queen of the Massage Parlors.”

Still, all that studying did not go to waste. Some things the academic star learned in chemistry lab came in handy in her new life — like, for example, how to use cyanide.

On Christmas 1977, Gerald Davies, 31, walked into Madison Police Headquarters and announced: “Last night I helped bury a body in a snowbank.”

Davies, a clerk at the University of Wisconsin, said he did not know the dead man’s identity or how he died. His role was simply to help dispose of the body for his fiancée, Barbara Hoffman.

Davies said that he had spent the night of Dec. 23 at her apartment, drinking and watching TV. He dozed off, but Hoffman shook him awake at 2:30 a.m.

“Jerry, we have something serious to talk about,” she said.

That “something” was a corpse.

Hoffman told him she had come home from work the day before and found a naked dead man, his head bashed in, in her bathroom. She wrapped the body in a sheet and buried it in the snow behind a dumpster in her apartment-complex parking lot.

“You’ve got to help me get rid of it,” she told him.

Davies said he had met his future bride at a massage parlor in the mid-1970s. By 1977, she had left the skin trade and was working for an insurance claims processing firm while taking college classes part time.

Davies urged Hoffman to report the death to police, but she refused, afraid that she wouldn’t be able to explain how a corpse ended up in her bathroom. Her theory was that enemies from her massage parlor days were probably behind it and that they had planted the body to frame her.

Davies finally agreed to cram the stiff into his car and drive it to a ski resort out of town, where they buried it in a snowbank.

That chore completed, the couple parted ways and each went to visit family for the holidays — Hoffman to her parents in Illinois and Davies to his mom’s rural home about an hour from Madison.

Hoffman was willing to endanger a bright future by plunging into the sleazy sex trade business in Madison.

(805promo/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Somehow, he couldn’t get into the spirit of the season. Within a day he was telling all to police.

Missing-persons reports soon led to the identity of the dead man — Harry Berge, 52, a mild-mannered bachelor who worked at Uniroyal Tire Plant in Stoughton. Berge was known as a lonely guy who had lived at home with his widowed mother until her death a few years earlier.

Like Davies, Berge met Hoffman at the massage parlor, was smitten, and started spending a lot of time with her.

The autopsy determined that Berge died of blunt-force trauma to the head and body.

Police discovered some odd legal documents, in which Berge bequeathed his home and a $35,000 insurance policy to a woman named Linda Millar. No one knew who she was until a detective mentioned the name to Davies. It turned out Linda Millar and Barbara Hoffman were one and the same.

After she left massage parlor life, Davies said, Hoffman wanted to start fresh. For that, she needed to create a new identity with a new name.

Millar was also the beneficiary on life insurance policies on Davies.

Police arrested Hoffman on Jan. 18, 1978, and charged her with Berge’s murder. The case relied heavily on one thing — the testimony of a frail, nervous witness who was in love with the suspect.

On Easter weekend, the case against her seemed to collapse when the prosecution’s star witness was found dead in his bathtub. Days earlier, Davies had sent a message to a newspaper, in which he declared, “Barb is innocent, and I wrecked her life. All those stories I told about Barb are false.”

An empty Valium bottle near the tub and the message made suicide seem likely, and it appeared to be a death blow to the prosecution. But, in a surprising twist, Davies turned out to be worth more to the DA dead than alive.

While examining tissue samples from Davies’ corpse, a toxicologist noticed an odd odor — bitter almonds, the telltale scent of cyanide. Davies had enough of the poison in him to kill two men. Berge’s body was exhumed and tested, and his body contained 37 times the lethal dose.

Detectives found documentation linking Hoffman to recent cyanide purchases. They compiled enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury of her guilt in Berge’s murder.

“I did not commit the crime of which I was accused and of which I was convicted. That’s all I can say,” was the only comment Hoffman made in July 1980 upon hearing her sentence — life in prison. Still behind bars, she has not uttered a public word about the crime ever since.

Send a Letter to the Editor
Join the Conversation:
facebook
Tweet

Let's block ads! (Why?)