Ignatius DiManuele, 60, a man born in Italy, spent the late hours of April 30, 1969 behind the bar at Pete DiManuele’s Bar on Easton Avenue in St. Louis, working a night that must have felt ordinary right up until it didn’t. Customers drifted in and out, and around 10:30 p.m. the room held a familiar mix of regulars and conversation. Then three young Black men came through the door, moved about the tavern as if they belonged there, and slipped into the restroom before leaving again, the
kind of small, forgettable moment that barely registers until it returns with terrible meaning.
Not long after, close to 11 p.m., the same trio came back. This time, they fanned out with purpose—one at the bar, one near the entrance, one angling toward the rear—then pistols appeared and the pretense fell away. It was a holdup. Patrons were ordered to keep still as the robbery unfolded in tight, brutal motions: someone vaulted the bar and took money from the register; customers were shaken down; even a gun kept at the bar was taken. DiManuele was struck and shoved from behind the bar, hit again hard enough to drop him to his knees. As the robbers headed out, one of them turned back and fired twice—one shot tearing through DiManuele’s foot, the other driving into his left lower chest. He was rushed to the hospital, but he died at 12:30 a.m. on May 1, 1969, from the chest wound.
In the days that followed, the case moved from shock to identification. On May 3, police arrested David Harrison Richards while he was in the company of Allen Edward Smith, and the investigation quickly pulled in Winford LaVern Stokes as well. The three were placed in a lineup with other young men, and witnesses viewed them separately; one or more of the witnesses identified Richards, Smith, and Stokes as the robbers who had come into the bar that night. The paper trail of the case also captured a telling detail about physical evidence: Stokes had been arrested while seated under the steering wheel of a car with a passenger, and just before the arrest, the gun taken from the bar—along with a loaded clip—was thrown from the right-hand side of the vehicle.
The legal aftermath split across different paths for the three men. Court records show that Richards was identified as the robber who fired the shots, and he was indicted along with Smith and Stokes for first-degree murder; Richards was tried separately, convicted by a jury, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Smith, also jointly indicted, later pleaded guilty as an accessory in the case.
Stokes’s accountability for the 1969 tavern owner’s death surfaced repeatedly in later reporting about his criminal history. A contemporaneous account of his execution decades later described how he had previously served time after being convicted of manslaughter and other charges in the fatal 1969 shooting of a St. Louis tavern owner—time that ended with his release back into the world, long before the later murders that ultimately put him on death row.
