San Francisco Examiner

August 23, 1943. This article is reprinted below. Please note that if there were errors in the article we did not correct them. We reprinted the article exactly as it appeared in the newspaper. In this case, we noticed the location was listed as the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity at 245 Valencia. A significant error. It was Annunication, not Holy Trinity.


Jealous Man Kills Rival in Church

Slayer Escapes Pursuit, Then Surrenders to Policeman; Victim Recently Left Army

A childhood friendship, interrupted by the girl's marriage to a man twenty-four years her senior, ended in the narthex of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity at 245 Valencia yesterday morning when Edward P. Daphne, 27, was shot and mortally wounded as he turned from lighting a candle.

The slayer, Panos (Peter) Raftopoulos, 52, a cafe owner of 92 Embarcadero, fled down two flights of stairs, leaped into his automobile and drove wildly to Clay and Kearny Streets to surrender to Officer Harry P. Gurtler as pursuers who had witnessed the shooting were lost in traffic half a dozen blocks behind.

TELLS OF KILLING.

"I have just killed a man," Raftopoulos told Gurtler, without visible emotion. He broke up my family."

As Raftopoulos turned the .41 caliber Colt revolver over to detectives in police headquarters, Steve Pasadis, a sailor, and Cpl. Diogenis Y. Franco of the Army Air Corps arrived to identify him as the man who had fired point blank at Daphne as the three approached the door to enter the mezzanine of the Holy Trinity Church.

In the meantime, Daphne had been rushed to Central Emergency Hospital. There, doctors ordered him taken immediately to Letterman Hospital in the Presidio where he died a few minuted later without regaining consciousness. The bullet had entered just above the right eye and lodged at the back of the skull.

ASKED PROTECTION.

An hour after the shooting, Mrs. Maria Raftopoulos, 28, wife of the slayer, told reporters that she had gone to the Northern Police Station on Saturday and asked for protection for herself and Daphne. She said she told the police there that Raftopoulos has threatened them several times since Daphne's dismissal from the United States Army for physical disability two weeks ago.

"They told me that they couldn't do anything about it," the woman sobbed.

"They told me that I would have to wait until Monday and see the district attorney and get some kind of peace bond."

At police headquarters Raftopoulos admitted that he had fired two shots at Daphne last March, before Daphne had been drafted. He fired the shots, he admitted, as Daphne stood in front of 435 Valencia Avenue, but Daphne ran and escaped injury. At the time Daphne refused to prosecute and the case against Raftopoulos was dropped.

Two months before, Raftopoulis told police, his wife had sued him for divorce. He said that she told him that she had told him that she "didn't want him anymore," although they had a child of 12, he said. He said that she had denied associating with Daphne, with whom she had attended Mission High School, but he told the police he had reason to believe the two had been friendly.

DEATH IN CHURCH.

Pasadis and Franco told police that they had gone to the church with Daphne shortly after 11 o'clock Sunday morning and had ascended the vestibule steps to the narthex. There, they said, Daphne stopped before the candelabra. Completing his genuflection, they said, he turned toward the door as Raftopoulos emerged from the mezzanine auditorium, gun in hand.

Without a word, Pasadis said, Raftopoulos fired directly at Daphne at a range so close that there were powder burns visible on the victim's forehead. As Daphne sank to the floor, Raftopoulos hurdled his body and escaped down the stairs. Pursuing him in Pasadis' car, Pasadis and Franco lost him, they said at Third and Market Streets when he drove recklessly through a red light and into Kearny Street.

Asked why he had carried the gun, Raftopoulos told police that he had been afraid of Daphne and that his wife had told him that Daphne was going to "get" him. He said that Daphne made a threatening move toward him as he stepped out of the church auditorium and that he fired in fear of bodily injury.

ADMITS INTENT.

"Did you intend to kill the man?" he was asked.

"Sure", Raftopoulos said. "Why not?"

"You know he's dead and that it's murder, don't you?"

"Yes, I know it's murder," Raftopoulos replied. "If he's dead, God bless him."

Although she denied, at the home of her sister where she had been living since seperating from Raftopoulos, that she had been unduly friendly with Daphne at any time, Raftopoulos said that his wife had becom interested in her schoolday friend fourteen months ago. It was shortly after that, he said, that she took their 12 year old daughter, Bessie, and went to live with her sister.

APPEALED TO POLICE.

Mrs. Raftopoulos, who has shortened her name to Raftos since the separation, said that her husband had been accusing her of intimacy with Daphne since she met him again at a christening at Holy Trinity church a year ago last spring. She said that she had been told that her husband was carrying a gun and for that reason has appealed to the police for protection for herself and Daphne.

At Northern station yesterday, police said there was no record of Mrs. Raftos having made such an appeal. The homocide bureau also denied any knowledge of such an appeal.

After giving police a full story of the shooting and the events leading up to it, Raftopoulos was booked on a charge of murder and held without bail. He refused to sign a copy of the confession when it was presented to him by police.

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