The Thin Man

For five months, military police and civilians had hunted in vain for un flaco con ojos de loco (a thin man with crazy eyes). Just before the murder of Liberal Leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (TIME, April 19), the thin man had been seen talking with assassin Juan Roa Sierra. If the thin man could be found (Assassin Roa was battered to death), it might be possible to discover who was behind Gaitan's killing.

Last week, after many a blind lead, the woman who had been Gaitan's secretary picked a man out of a line of scrawny suspects. Without hesitation she said: "This is he."

"Why pick me, Senora?" asked 39-year-old Cesar Bernal Cordovez, a mechanic in the printing plant of El Siglo. The woman insisted that he had appeared in Gaitan's office shortly before the shooting, and had given his name as Roa Sierra (the real Roa had been waiting downstairs to ambush Gaitan).

When other witnesses were just as positive in identifying him, detectives triumphantly packed him off for questioning. About all the police knew was that, like Roa, Bernal was a mystic given to double-talk about such things as "thought-transference wheels." They still had to prove that he even knew Roa or that he had any connection with the death of Gaitan. Next step would be a psychiatric examination.

On the spot where Gaitan fell, on the sidewalk of Bogota's bustling main street, citizens have mounted a framed scroll on a crude, flag-draped platform (see cut).

Each morning fresh flowers are put in the earthenware jugs surrounding it, and all through the day passersby stop to read: "At this spot was sacrificed the father, liberator, and leader of the Colombian people."

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