The Last Lap – The Mysterious Death of Peter Kreis

[00:00:00] Breakfix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

Suicide on the Track, the case of Peter Kreis by William Walker. A longtime fan of open wheel racing, William T. Walker Jr. was introduced to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy 500 by broadcasts of Sid Collins. He grew fascinated by the careers of his cousins Peter Kreis and Rex Mays, both Indy drivers.

The possibility of drivers dying by suicide on track has long been acknowledged, sometimes alleged, but seldom proven. It remains a forbidden topic because drivers are unwilling to admit any weakness, much less depression. The case of Peter Kreiss, however, offers an opportunity to examine a case which resulted in two purposeful deaths at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Peter raced at Indy from 1925 to 1934, when he and his riding mechanic [00:01:00] died in Turn 1. Indy drivers, track officials, and other experts could not identify any obvious cause for the accident, calling it the strangest death in all of racing history. After 50 years of research, William reached the conclusion that Peter took his own life.

The results of his investigation were published in The Last Lap, The Mysterious Demise of Peter Kreis in the Indianapolis 500 by Octane Press in 2023. Please note that the following episode is based on relevance and contains depictions of suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 802 7 3 talk 8 2 5 5 or text home to the crisis text line at 7 4 1 7 4 1.

These services are free and confidential. The following episode is intended for mature audiences. Please note that listener discretion is advised. Mr. Walker is going to talk to us about Suicide on the Track, the case of Peter Christ. He also has a book that’s come out, The Last Laugh and the Mysterious Demise of Peter Christ [00:02:00] in the Annapolis 500.

I’m here to talk about my cousin, who is Pete Criss. Pete raced from 1925 at Indy to 1934. Nine years. Pete was the son of a wealthy man, John Criss. who was a multi millionaire, he built railroads, and he had marble quarries on his land, and many stones from that marble quarry were used to build the buildings on the National Mall in Washington, D.

C. And by the way, I should say, we were the poor side of the family. These people are extremely wealthy. They’re still extremely wealthy. And my side of the family did not inherit any of that wealth, unfortunately. Like a lot of fathers, and especially like, if you know Joseph Kennedy, who fathered John and Robert and Teddy, he wanted to build a [00:03:00] dynasty.

And he pushed his three sons, John Jr. Pete, who is the race driver, and Harmon, and he pushed these kids very hard. He wanted them to be risk takers, he wanted them to be daring. To give you a sense of what Pete was like, they had the biggest house in Knoxville, still beautiful. His sister lives there, and by the way, his sister, who has now departed, helped me tremendously.

Her name was Hazel. And she gave me all of his papers, would answer all my questions. Always had the best cars, Auburns, whatever it was, he had it. Very handsome fella, not terribly attracted to the women, but he was always making jokes, he always dressed. in a three piece suit, and he would come to the track in that three piece suit, and go into the shed and change into his overalls.

Generally, he would leave his tie on. Pete began [00:04:00] driving on the back roads of Knoxville. He learned how to drive using his father’s 1920 Marmon, which he souped up and drove around the back roads. There was one race course in Knoxville, and he drove on it. One day, however, as he was just approaching twenty four, a friend asked to be driven to Knoxville from this rural area where they lived, and Pete looked at him and joked.

Pete was a very gregarious kind of person and had great fun. And he said to this kid, I’ll have you in Knoxville or in hell. in ten minutes. It was a very cold night. They hit some black ice. The Marmon flipped over. The boy was killed and Pete was knocked unconscious. He apparently had a traumatic brain injury.

He began suffering from [00:05:00] flashbacks and things of that sort. But he kept driving. And his father Knew his son was depressed and he knew only one way to go, and that was to keep charging. He and Pete took the train to Indiana and he bought his son a top of the line Duesenberg Roadster to buy that car, which was 10, 000 by the way.

And the average salary, I think, was about 600 a year then. So you can imagine what kind of wealth they had. But he had to become a member of the Duesenberg team. Fred and Augie took him out to the track, tried him out, and they knew that my cousin had speed. This man could travel. Pete got off to a fast start.

In his first race, which was at one of the board tracks in Culver City, California, he couldn’t get the car started. When the flag [00:06:00] dropped, he started dead last and finished second. Going through the field, this man knew how to achieve speed. He was eighth in his rookie year at Indy. The Duesenberg brothers and Peter DiPaolo, by the way, whom I talked with during the course of my research, tried to get him to slow down a bit because he was impetuous.

So he did finish 8th at the Indy in 1925. Tommy Milton, a very famous driver, elected to take Pete to Monza to race against Formula One or Grand Prix cars. And Pete started off on the front row, and the second sweep around, you know the Parabolica curve, which is steeply banked. He came out of that curve in first place.

and set fast lap. Now he thought, because of the difference in language, he thought he had set a track record. The third [00:07:00] lap, transmission gave out, and he spun into a curve called the Portalesmo. It’s claimed a lot of cars. It’s still there. When you watch Monza, you will see it. When he set the track record, or set fast lap at Monza, he went downtown that night, and he was always trying to please his father, of course.

He sent him a, a one line telegram. Broke track record and car. Love, Pete. And that’s sort of the way he conducted himself, with self deprecating humor. He gave up his car, he sold his cars, and he would race at Indianapolis. And everybody loved to see him coming. He was just so admired by people. He had driven a couple of the front wheel drive Millers, and he liked them.

He liked bored tracks. So he switched to Miller. And he had purchased a brand new Miller 91 for the 1926 race, a 91 cubic inch engine, a dual overhead cams, [00:08:00] supercharged and front wheel drive. Miller. I don’t know whether you know it, but it is a terrific, it is the epitome of racing in the twenties and thirties.

He was expected to finish high in the 1926 race. Unfortunately, something happened to him, which happened to a lot of us a couple of years ago. He caught the flu. He was hospitalized, and Tommy Milton brought several drivers for him to interview. The one he chose was a man, a little known man from California named Frank Lockhart.

Lockhart took his car and won the race his rookie year. And that event sort of really put the skids to Pete. He never was quite the same after that. Pete never finished another 500. He was running fifth in 1932 in one of those Studebaker junk formulas. Crashed into turn [00:09:00] one at 475 miles. Now there was no doubt about the kind of professional driver Pete was.

You see a picture here of Pete shaking hands with Henry Ford. This was taken in 1932. Ford was standing in turn one. In the infield, Pete came down and did a 360. A Danny Sullivan move. And Ford said, that guy can really drive, I want to meet him. They ushered Pete up and he met Henry Ford. So Henry Ford, who was a pretty good driver himself in the old days, Barney Oldfield days, realized that Pete could handle cars.

And he was well known. for being extremely good at recovering from spins. Another uncle of mine, who’s now deceased, he was very famous in Knoxville, and people would say, Peter, you’re going to win it this year. He had a series of DNFs and crashes. Is this going to be the year? In [00:10:00] 1934, Pete said to him, I’m either going to win it, or I’m coming home in a pine box.

And my uncle swore that he was not kidding. The day of Pete’s death, he saw an accident on the way to practice, in which two people were killed. He stopped the taxi that he was taking to the track, tried to save the lives of these people, and unfortunately, they both died. When he got to Indy, his old friends, very famous drivers, Fred Frame.

People like that who were car owners wouldn’t give him a car. They had heard about all of these accidents. He was very disgusted. Fred Frame finally assigned a car to him with only two days left to qualify. Pete qualified the car. It was a good car. It was a Miller 91. And the crash in 1934 resulted in his death and the death of a riding mechanic, which is one of [00:11:00] the more perplexing problems of this story.

When Pete crashed, it was a national story. Subtitle here says, Death of Pete Kriss, a mystery, drivers say. And then car wrecked while apparently under control. That caught my attention. Here’s what happened. He was going at a relatively slow speed, about a hundred, and these cars could blast along on the straights up to about 160.

He went into turn one and then got on top of the retaining wall and slid perfectly balanced for 75 yards. A state patrolman saw this and swore to this. He said, I could not believe that he was balanced right on top of this. The way he got up on top, look at this element that the track had installed in a few years earlier.

This is a firm.[00:12:00]

And I think that this berm was put in, in hopes that it would push the cars away from the wall and save crashes, because as you know, turn one in India is the most dangerous curve in racing. At any rate, he rode up that berm. got on top of the retaining wall and sat there for that 75 yards. It was a spectacular crash.

They spun off after about 75 yards, hit a tree that was in the backyard of one of those houses on the south end of the track. They hit, unfortunately, right at the cockpit. It killed both Pete and the riding mechanic. It nearly severed. Pete’s legs from his body. The mechanic lived very briefly. Pete was killed instantly.

In doing this, I became attracted to this story [00:13:00] when I was a little kid. So I wanted to solve the mystery. A bunch of drivers and officials, winner of the Indy 500, concluded In one of the print stories, they said, This is the strangest death in all racing history. And I was determined to solve that mystery.

I did some research on suicide. The article had given me some evidence to think that there might have been suicide involved. Freud, of course, started his research on the death wish. That’s notorious. We know that it’s spurious to some degree. But he said that people who go through a trauma, as Pete did when he killed the young man, have one of two reactions.

The first reaction is people flee away from the danger. And you know that’s notorious about what happened to World War I veterans. They would hear a car backfire and they would hit the ground, thinking that it was shell fire. The [00:14:00] second reaction, however, and this is a rare reaction, is that people, if they’ve gone through this trauma, try to do it again to prove that they can conquer the fear that this trauma induced in them.

So we know more about PTSD now, and I think Pete had a case of PTSD. A medical doctor at Harvard has done a lot of research into suicide, and he found that potential Victims of suicide engage in a series of near death accidents to practice subconsciously their final act. Their psychological pressure closes them off from other people.

They lose friends. There is often a slight precipitating factor that may be very tiny, but it kicks them off. And then in some cases, and this is of course the key to proving suicide, there’s an announcement in a note or gesture. Pete [00:15:00] began to practice suicide. One of my uncles knew him well. Pete decided to buy an airplane.

Eddie Rickenbacker had talked him into it. Peter DiPaolo told him it was a great idea. And Pete bought a Waco biplane. And one day he was taking off from an airport in Knoxville. And the engine cut out. They couldn’t turn around. It flopped into the Tennessee River upside down. Pete got out very quickly.

His co pilot was trapped. But Pete went back down into the water and freed this guy from the seatbelt. Lost part of a finger. Had bones. As you can see, damaged his eye, and as we go through this, you’re going to see that more and more Pete began to have what we would call accidents, but they’re not really accidents.

Three personal wrecks in 1932. He saw five deaths at [00:16:00] Indy in 1933. Plane crash was 32. Then, I found this interesting item. Dave Lewis, a driver who had been an Indian, raced several years, had retired and moved to California. Dave, one day, shot himself. And I found an article in the Indianapolis newspaper that said there was a lot of talk about suicide at the track the other day.

He said, many people don’t believe that Dave Lewis committed suicide. And then a driver is quoted as saying, Dave would not have done it with a pistol. If he had wanted to kill himself, he would have just lifted his hands when he was going into one of the turns at Indy and crashed through the wall. As much as we would like to believe that suicide is not something that’s considered in racing circles, this proves that it was a pretty hot topic from time to time.

[00:17:00] I want to show you those two slides. This is the same man over nine years. Look at the change from this optimistic young man. In 1925 to this old man in 1934, that’s hard to account for nine years. He looks like he’s aged 30 years and I think this gives us a clue in 1935. At Daytona Beach, Malcolm Campbell was trying out the Bluebird, the AP reporter for Racing, got together a group of Indianapolis experts.

Pop Myers was there, if you know him, he was vice president, Eddie Rickenbacker’s brother was there, Bill Cummings. who had won the 1934 race, and they had drinks in a bar at the Clarendon Hotel right on the beach. They went through what I call an inquest, coroner’s jury, into what happened to Pete Criss.

And they [00:18:00] noted these things, that it was practice, there were no other cars on the track, he was driving at a relatively slow speed. They had examined the car. There were no mechanical defects. There were no impediments on the track. No skid marks. He hadn’t tried to brake. He hadn’t tried to steer out of the thing.

As the reporter said, it appears that his car was under control when he went up on the wall. And then this phrase appears, and Pete was apparently in good health and spirits. If you know anything, that’s an invitation to draw a conclusion that this was suicide. But they didn’t draw that conclusion. They said they finally decided they just couldn’t reach a conclusion.

They called it the strangest death in all racing history. Questions remain. If this is suicide, could he have taken a riding mechanic along with him? That’s the biggest objection. The researchers that I’ve [00:19:00] read point to the fact that when someone is on the verge of suicide, he’s got a psychic vision that just closes down and he doesn’t consider other things.

There was, of course, a precipitating event. We know that suicide can be an impulsive act. He could, however, and this is my alternative, had been having a flashback. He mentioned these flashbacks. He talked about them, and he said, Every now and then I lose my nerve, but I get it back. It may have been that he was having those flashbacks.

But the biggest thing, of course, is there was no note or gesture. I told you about Pete’s sister, Hazel. Hazel Bill was quite old when I met her. A wonderful lady, just a wonderful person. Strong, energetic. All three of her brothers died and she took over the family, ran the outfit. Called me one day and said, Bill, I need you to come down, we need to have one of our talks.

And when I got to her home, this big Italian [00:20:00] villa, She said, Bill, I have something I haven’t told you. And I could see she was getting old and she knew she was headed for the last round up. And I said, well, Hazel, what is it? And she said, Pete knew he was going to die that day. I said, well, Hazel, how do you know that?

How do you know that he, he knew? She said, he had a premonition. We’d been talking for years, and she hadn’t told me this story. I said, well, how do you know this? She said, Pete had a diamond ring. And I used to tease him about that diamond ring. Every time I would see him, I’d say, Pete, when are you going to give me that ring?

I want that ring. He would tease her back, they were very close, and he’d say, No, no, Hazel, it’s not time for you to get the diamond yet. Right before the practice run, right before Pete went out for his last run, he took the ring off, gave it to the pit captain, and said, If anything happens to me, make [00:21:00] sure that my sister gets this ring.

Now, Hazel saw this as a premonition that it was God’s will that Pete was going to die, and he knew it, and he accepted it. I see it as a gesture announcing that he had decided to commit suicide. And that’s the final, near the closing chapter of the book. That’s what has convinced me, I don’t know of any other way to interpret this.

I don’t believe in premonitions of this sort. His tombstone is in my family cemetery in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now, when Pete was killed in 1934, his father hired an Italian sculptor to make that tombstone. As you can see, it’s probably 5 feet tall, 18 feet long. It’s huge. They had to put a concrete foundation 6 feet deep underneath it to keep it level.

And [00:22:00] it has on it an exact replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Down to the bricks. Thousands of little carved bricks. The other remarkable thing is that car goes off right where Pete went off the track and was killed. You can see it in the lower right. When I saw that first, when I was four or five years old, In those days, we would go to the cemetery to clean the graves and that sort of thing, and I would always take a a little racing car and bump it around the track.

And by the way, you can see that the motto on it is the last lap, and that’s where the title of the book I was captivated. It was over for me. I had to know more about this guy. And I have spent off and on through my life learning about Pete, Chris, now the end of the Chris Dynasty. Pete’s father was overjoyed because the tombstone was named the [00:23:00] best tombstone of the year 1935 by the New York Times.

I guess that’s a runner up prize, but, uh, at any rate, you can see here the car. Pete’s brother, John, died in a car crash that he caused. He was encouraging a man to go faster. One of the old throttles on the steering wheel, he jammed the throttle forward, crashed into an abutment, and it killed him. His brother Harmon had been gassed in World War I, and he died of alcoholism a year later.

They all died within three years. Three self destructive deaths. None of the boys reached 40. It’s just like the Kennedy story. Three sons dying of violence. His wife, John’s wife, died of heart attack. And then, if you’re writing a novel, you could put this in. The state condemned their beautiful farm and converted it.

And I have said that that makes an ironic statement about what kind of family it was. [00:24:00] I believe that the father was one of these hard driving patriarchs who drove his sons to death. And then John, shortly after World War II, died in a fall from the barn. The Chris line ended, no male heirs, and the dynasty dissolved into thin air.

There are no Chrises left. The family continues to have some unbelievably either bad luck or self destructive tendencies. This is all that’s left. There’s the tombstone. That is the story of Pete Criss. And let me thank you for your attention, but let me also say, I am particularly eager for you to ask me any question that might offer another alternative to the story of Pete’s demise.

I had to reach the conclusion I reached, and it’s not a happy conclusion, but if you have other ideas, you won’t offend me. I’ve been questioned [00:25:00] by CNN, New York Times, and you won’t offend me by any questions you may have. So, thank you very much. Well, thank you. This

Please, go ahead. Can you please read the line on the tombstone, on the bottom, the very bottom? This guy is weighing five, and it says the last lap was speedway. This is a portrait of me, but I really inflated his son’s reputation. The

last lap indicates, suggests, I think, that there was a victory involved. The black and white checkered flag suggests that someone misleading, and some of the people in Knoxville remarked on that when it came up. Did Pete’s brothers have any children? [00:26:00] The sad part about this family is there’s a history of suicide in this family and to be honest with you I had promised Hazel that I would write this biography and I did not include the notion about the other people committing suicide.

There was one son of John, the older brother. He wanted to be an opera singer, and they had the money to make that happen. And John was trying out to be an opera singer. One day he had been put down by a music director and was told he just did not have the voice to be an opera singer. He went home and chiseled out a part of the floor, a wooden floor, and he took a butcher knife, and jammed the handle of that butcher knife into the floor and then fell on the knife and killed himself.

And this is the way this family has lived. Very sad [00:27:00] business. And I could tell you, you would know them. This family owned all of the Ruby Tuesday restaurants in the United States. That’s what they did with their money following the sad event. But it’s a family that is filled with tragedy after tragedy and still going on.

I wonder if today it would be possible to do a computer simulation of that situation and see the circumstances under which a car could leap up over that wall. It is an amazing situation. I wondered about that, and then I came across this picture of the berm. And I think if it were going fast enough, and a hundred would certainly be fast enough, that it would go up that berm, get a bump off that berm, and then be propelled along the wall.

I found this in a book by the official track historian, and it just said these berms were intended to direct cars back onto the track. If they [00:28:00] were headed into the turn wrong, they tended to get cars airborne, and they were done away with two or three years after that. I wish I knew more. If you’ve ever tried to research things at Indianapolis, it’s difficult.

You know, you need to go through Really do a deep dive into archival stuff to find that out. But I think it was that berm. And there were berms at each of the corners. What was his relationship with this riding mechanic? Because he was killed, right, in a wreck. I mean, it seems like he tried to save people.

He would do that and take the life of somebody and stuff. You know, that’s the one, to me. That’s the one flaw in my argument. Could he really have decided to do himself in at a time that he had another person in the car? I must admit, I gave in to psychological theorizing. And what I said was that it might have reminded him [00:29:00] of the young man he had in his car when he had the accident.

In Knoxville, that he had a passenger in the right front seat, and that’s the only thing I have, and I, and I must say, I thought long and hard, and if you read the book, you will see my sort of agonizing over this interpretation, but the diamond ring story. is such powerful evidence that I have to believe that that’s what he did.

And what about his brother and his father? Was, was that a suicide too, or? Uh, no, I don’t think he did. He was, uh, this man, Never gave up. Never gave up. He was the son of a Civil War hero. They did foolish things to test their luck. Foolish, foolish things. And he taught his sons to do foolish things. So it was a difficult thing.

I see we’re reaching the end and I’ve enjoyed this. Can I tell you one more story? This combines a [00:30:00] lot of the elements of this weekend for me. Some years ago I had written part of this book, and I’ve written this book a hundred times, different ways. Uh, I decided that the quickest way to get the story out would be to get Paul Newman to do a movie about it.

I thought about how to do that. And I knew a man that probably many of you have met, Reeves Calloway. Reeves set up his cars, Paul Newman’s cars. And I gave Reeves a call, very welcoming sort of fellow, really nice guy. And I said, I need 15 minutes of your time to tell you a story. And he said, sure, come on up.

And my wife and I drove up to Connecticut, and I had a picture book then, and I gave him this, this whole thing that you’ve just seen. And he said, that’s a very interesting story. How do I fit in? And I said, I want you to give this to Paul Newman and see if he’ll do a movie of it. And he [00:31:00] said, Paul will love this story.

And he took the books and took them to Paul Newman. And Paul decided he could not do it because he was too old to play the lead. And so now I have a very nice letter from Paul Newman on my wall. And that’s the end of my near miss, let’s say. Thank you very much.

very much. We can all help prevent suicide. The 988 Lifeline provides 24 7 free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention, and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States. If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts or a crisis, please reach out immediately to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800 273 TALK, 8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

These services are free and confidential. This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor [00:32:00] Racing Research Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and race series. The center’s collection embodies the speed, drama, and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

The Center welcomes serious researchers and casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series, and race cars captured on their shelves and walls and brought to life through a regular calendar of public lectures and special events. To learn more about the Center, visit www. racingarchives.

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