Mary Forni, 91; her encounter turned into hunt for Nazi spies

In a scrapbook brimming with newspaper clippings and photographs, a headline reads "Mary Forni, Spy Catcher," in gold letters slightly faded from the years. The yellowed articles tell the story of a snowy night in November 1944, when Mrs. Forni left her friends after a night of playing cards and drove her Chevrolet down West Side Road, where she caught a glimpse of something in her headlights that turned her world upside down.

Hancock Point, Maine, where she lived, was a rural town, and the two men walking along the road seemed out of place. Perhaps it was the lavish topcoats they wore, or the attaché cases and large suitcases they carried -- or just that it was unusual to see a stranger during the winter.

The men, it would turn out, were spies for the Nazi party, and a month after she tipped off local police to their presence, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced that they had been arrested. Mrs. Forni's name was etched into history on the front pages of many newspapers.

"For three days, the telephone rang right off the hook," she told the Globe in 1984. "All the reporters wanted to know about the story. The FBI came to my house to talk with me. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened in my life."

Mrs. Forni, 91, was at her home in Hancock Point, making sweets for Christmas, when she died on Dec. 16. The cause of death has yet to be determined.

Reflecting on her 1944 adventure, she told the Globe, "If it had been summer, I would have driven by without thinking anything of it. But you don't see strangers walking around here in the winter."

Her husband, Dante, urged her to not worry about it. But as soon as he left for work the next day, Mrs. Forni told her neighbor, the deputy sheriff, Dana Hodgkins, what she had seen. His son, Harvard, said he had seen the same men, and the elder Hodgkins decided to do a little detective work. Footprints in the snow suggested they had come from the shore -- a surprising starting point for such well-heeled travelers. He alerted the FBI office in Bangor.

Erich Gimpel, one of the two men, was a prominent member of the SS, from Merseburg, Germany, and a professional when it came to intelligence surveillance. William Colepaugh, an East Lyme, Conn., native known for extolling the virtues of the Nazi Party during his student days at MIT, was his accomplice. The two spent some time in Holland and Germany training for their mission and left Europe aboard the 252-foot U-1230 submarine on Oct. 6, 1944, and arrived off Maine Nov. 10. They spent two weeks underwater off Mount Desert Island.

On the afternoon of Nov. 29, they moved in the submarine to Hancock Point. The two men, clad in their expensive attire, with wristwatches, compasses, and .32-caliber Colt automatic pistols, were rowed to shore. Mrs. Forni's tip sent the FBI into a frenetic hunt. The two were arrested in New York, after Colepaugh had second thoughts about their activities and turned them in. They were sentenced to death by a military court, but their sentences were commuted at the last minute by President Harry S. Truman.

In a twist to the story, decades later one of the men on the submarine set out on a mission to find Mrs. Forni.

On July 4, 1984, Horst Haslau knocked on her door and they became fast friends. Haslau had just turned 20 and was serving as a submarine crewman in Hitler's navy when the sub arrived off Maine.

"We came here so secretly, and we dropped off the two spies, and there was Mary waiting for them," he told the Globe at the time, as Mrs. Forni looked on, smiling.

Before parting with her, he gave her a gift, partly as a token of his gratitude for her delay in reporting the men: a small camera, with the words "spy camera" written across the wrapping.

"I'm grateful to Mary," he said. "If she had not waited until the next morning to notify the authorities, if she had called right away, well, we might have been trapped in the bay. I don't want to think of what may have happened to us."

Despite their divergent backgrounds, "she absolutely worshipped him," said her daughter Eleanor Lippert of Denver.

After her three children grew up, Mrs. Forni worked at a local fashion shop, Alice's Fashions in Ellsworth, Maine, but things were never the same for her after the spy incident, family said.

Rather than shunning the media, "she loved the attention that the 1944 incident got her -- she had more than her 15 minutes of fame as you can imagine," her daughter said.

Outgoing and upbeat, Mrs. Forni, who was born in Sullivan, kept a busy social schedule, her family said. She also had a feisty streak. She climbed mountains in the area at least two or three times a week until bad knees made her alter her regimen. She turned to walks around Bar Harbor.

On the morning of Dec. 16, Mrs. Forni was getting ready to make fudge and Russian tea cakes for family as part of holiday festivities. When a granddaughter showed up to help her, she discovered her grandmother had died.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Forni leaves a son, Jack of Ellsworth; another daughter, Jean of Venice, Fla.; four grandsons; and four granddaughters.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Jan. 13 at the Hancock Congregational Church.