Exclusive | Hero NYC cop who nabbed killer behind Posts famed Headless body in topless bar headline dies
He always had them laughing their heads off.The hero cop who nabbed the killer behind the legendary 1983 New York Post headline “Headless body in topless bar” died Friday after a long, fittingly colorful life.Retired New York City Transit Police Detective Frederick “Freddy” Mack, 79, passed away while in hospice care, his daughter Debbie Comstock told The Post on Sunday.“He was a man full of character,” Comstock, 58, said.“He always had stories and jokes to tell.
He was loved by many.”Perhaps Mack’s biggest story of all unfolded in April 1983, after 25-year-old lowlife Charles Dingle spent a night drinking in Herbie’s Bar in Jamaica, Queens.A thoroughly sauced Dingle got into an argument with the topless watering hole’s owner, Herbie Cummings, and shot the barkeep in the head, killing him.Rather than flee the horror, Dingle decided to plumb deeper depths of depravity, tying up four women who were in the bar and eventually raping one of them.After discovering another woman there was an undertaker, Dingle ordered her to cut off Cummings’ head and put it in a box.Dingle held two of the women hostage, drunkenly driving them to Manhattan in a stolen gypsy cab until he fell asleep.The women ran off to a nearby subway station and hopped a train to Columbus Circle, where Mack was stationed as a transit detective.An initially skeptical Mack went to investigate the frantic women’s story, coming face-to-face with the ding-a-ling Dingle, who was just waking up and reaching for his gun.Mack, who had left his own weapon behind at the station in the rush, didn’t hesitate to take action, said his friend Mike Fanning, a retired NYPD detective.“That’s when he confronted the suspect, wrestled him, took [Dingle’s] gun and then looked in the backseat and saw the head,” Fanning said.Comstock said she remembers her raconteur father coming home afterward and telling the stranger-than-fiction story at the dinner table.
She said he found the bar owner’...