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Girlfriend's stepchildren didn't trust Cornelius
Tuesday, October 03, 2000 By Jonathan D. Silver, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
To some, Joseph Cornelius appeared the very picture of caring and concern. Despite his unkempt hair and long beard, his drinking and flashes of anger, Cornelius cared for his ailing girlfriend and her mother in an apartment above the West End bar he frequented.
"He was doing everything for them, waiting on them, giving them birthday cards," recalled Jim Politylo, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette route manager who stopped by the house once a week to collect money for the newspapers sold by Cornelius' girlfriend, Helen Arlott. "He was very kind to those two women, honest to God."
Arlott's family, however, has a different recollection of Cornelius, the suspect in the gruesome mutilation murder Sept. 24 of 11-year-old Scott Drake of the North Side. To them, he was a freeloader who found an easy mark in Helen Arlott.
Her stepchildren didn't trust Cornelius around Arlott's money or their children. They said he made them uneasy, with abrupt changes in character and menacing stares.
"I tried telling her, he's crazy," said John Arlott, 28, the second-youngest of Helen Arlott's four stepchildren. "Joe was like the weather. He was unpredictable. One day he'd be nice as pie and then five minutes later he'd be your enemy."
John Arlott's brother, Bill, 24, of Oakdale, said, "He was very strange. He was very quiet. He'd just start staring at people and not saying anything. He just had that real scary look to him. He'd just sit there and squint his eyes and stare at you."
Arlott's relatives said the two met around 1994 and, after about three weeks of living on Steuben Street with Arlott's youngest child, Tara, they moved in together, sharing the apartment above the bar with Arlott's mother.
But a former McKees Rocks police lieutenant investigating the disappearance of 8-year-old William Majewski in 1991 remembers Cornelius sitting in on a police interview with Arlott at that time. Arlott was friendly with Majewski's mother.
Cornelius would tell the family he was heading off to work remodeling buildings on the North Side, but really he was panhandling at the West End or McKees Rocks bridges, they said.
For about six months before Arlott became ill with cancer, she sold Post-Gazettes in the neighborhood. She did the lion's share of the work, with Cornelius lending a hand. Together they pulled in about $50 a week, Politylo said. It wasn't much, but it was the only steady income Cornelius had apart from begging.
"I used to feel sorry for him. He was trying to do the best he could. He didn't have any work other than the newspaper," Politylo said.
When Politylo stopped by, Cornelius would invite him in for coffee and to shoot the breeze. But that congenial personality was not seen by Arlott's daughter, Diane Cranston, 34, of McKees Rocks.
"He spent a lot of time in the bars when my stepmom had cancer," Cranston said. "He wasn't always there with her."
With Arlott in her deathbed, Cranston said she found herself on the receiving end of a torrent of verbal abuse from Cornelius, who accused her of not taking care of her stepmother. Cranston told her natural mother, Barbara Howell of the Hill District, that she was having problems with Cornelius.
A day after Arlott's death in October 1997, Howell paid Cornelius a visit to straighten things out.
"He was calling me all kinds of filthy names," Howell, 55, said. "I turned around to leave and that's when Mr. Cornelius came behind me and kicked me down the steps."
According to a report filed by Howell at the West End police station, Cornelius "became irate and started yelling at the victim. Howell then stated that the suspect pushed her down the steps and kicked her in the face."
Howell, who refused medical treatment, was told to take her complaint to a magistrate, according to the report. But District Justice Daniel R. Diven's office in Sheraden, which said it would have taken the case, had no record of any complaint being filed.
Arlott's relatives said they were stunned to learn that Cornelius had been arrested in Scott's murder. Those who knew the couple believe Cornelius came unraveled as a result of Arlott's death. It was then that he was evicted and began living under the West End Bridge, turning down offers to spend the night or shower at Cranston's home. He stopped distributing newspapers and Politylo had to let him go.
"When she passed away, he just fell apart. He didn't care about anything," Politylo said. "He just more or less gave up."
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