F

Fairris, Hurbie Franklin, Jr., 1933-56, U.S. When Hurbie Fairris, Jr., was sent to the electric chair in January 1956 for murdering Detective Bennie Cravatt during a robbery, he was repeating family history.

The Oklahoma boy had an interesting, but sordid past. When he was sixteen months old his uncle Ray Hamilton was electrocuted in Texas for killing a prison guard. Hamilton was an early associate of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Another uncle, Iwana Fairris was serving a life sentence for various crimes. His mother, separated from Hurbie’s father when her son was a tyke, had shot and killed two husbands. The first shooting was ruled committed in self-defense, but when Mrs. Fairris shot her third husband, she drew a five-year prison sentence.

Fairris had a girlfriend named Peggy Ann Fry who was serving time in a West Virginia prison for transporting a stolen car across state lines, and his brother Bethel Fairris was in jail for burglary. It had come as no surprise that Hurbie Fairris, Jr., had resorted to a life of crime. His stint on Death Row at the Oklahoma State Prison was “longer than I’ve ever stayed in one place before,” he explained. He had no final words for the executioner other than to say “let’s get on with it.”

 

Falleni, Eugene (AKA: Harry Leo Crawford; Jean Ford), 1876-1938, Aus. Born in Florence, Italy, Eugene Falleni, whose real name might have been “Eugenie” Falleni, since she was a girl, moved with her parents to New Zealand at an early age. She was a strong, compactly built young woman who yearned to be a man. At the age of sixteen she passed herself off as a cabin boy and signed on with a Norwegian barque engaged in commercial trading along the Pacific rim.

Falleni worked hard and acquired enough of the masculine affectations to fool her shipmates. An Italian named Martello was the only one to see through her ruse. A relationship developed between them, and by the time the vessel moored in New South Wales in 1899, Falleni was pregnant. The child she bore was named Josephine, but seeing no easy way out of her predicament, Falleni continued to pass herself off as a man to secure higher wages and better employment.

Josephine was placed in the care of an Italian couple named De Anglis who resided at Double Bay. Falleni identified herself as Harry Crawford, and paid the De Anglises a small stipend to care for Josephine. At the same time she began to court a widowed cook and housemaid, Annie Birkett, who worked for a prominent physician, Dr. Clarke. Birkett was easily deceived, and quickly fell under the influence of Crawford. She pooled her life savings together and bought a small candy store in Balmain, a suburb outside of Sydney, Aus. Birkett’s teenaged son, Harry, tried desperately to dissuade his mother from foolishly marrying Crawford.

Nevertheless, this is just what Annie Birkett did in 1914, and for the next three years they lived together as “man and wife.” When Mrs. De Anglis died a year later, Josephine came to live with the Crawfords. She kept her rightful mother’s dark secret from Harry, but the widow Birkett finally understood what had taken place. Falleni-Crawford decided to kill Birkett, lest she reveal her true identity and foil her ambitions and future plans. On Sept. 28, 1917, while the two were picnicking near Chatswood, Falleni bludgeoned Birkett to death and then incinerated the body under a heap of logs. The crime had been cleverly disguised, and it wasn’t until two years later, in 1919, that Crawford was arrested and charged with murder. Harry Birkett had gone to live with his aunt during this time, and Falleni quickly found himself a second “wife.”

Convinced that his mother had been murdered by Falleni, Harry and his aunt went to the police. An examination of dental charts established it was the body of Annie Birkett. Confronted by the police with an arrest warrant and the probability of confinement in the men’s section of the prison, there was little else to do but confess to her identity. Crawford admitted that she was a woman and was forced to appear in female clothing on Oct. 5, 1920, for the first time since her daughter was born.

She was found Guilty and given the death sentence, which was commuted to life imprisonment. Falleni-Crawford remained at the Long Bay Jail for ten years, before earning her release in February 1931. Following her discharge from custody, she assumed a woman’s identity. Under the name of Jean Ford, she opened a lodging house in Paddington, which she maintained until 1938, when the place was sold. Several months later, on Oct. 6, 1938, Falleni was struck by a car and was killed instantly.

 

Fallon, Mickey, and McDonald, Eddie, prom. 1934, U.S. Before dawn on the morning of Mar. 3, 1934, Joe Arbona was gunned down in his car on New York’s fashionable upper West Side at 183rd and Riverside Drive. The hysterical screams of his fiancee Lillian Dawson awakened residents to the tragedy. When police arrived, Arbona was dead. A gun shot had torn away most of his jaw. Three men and one woman held them up at gunpoint, Dawson said, but she was unable to provide a positive identification.

Three weeks passed before the New York police could identify the killers. Officers alerted Assistant District Attorney P.F. Marro that a missing girl had returned home after living it up in Manhattan in the company of her boyfriends. Detective John Bunschrow questioned a waitress at the restaurant where the girl once worked. She could not remember their last names, but provided enough salient facts so that Bunschrow felt compelled to write a full report to his superior, Lieutenant Thomas Neilson. He, in turn, notified Lieutenant James Donnelly.

Marro and Donnelly entered the case, and extracted the first names of the other girl’s boyfriends: Harry, Eddie, and Mickey. The waitress was driven around the vicinity of 125th Street and the Hudson River where one of the young men had recently bragged about holding up a shopkeeper. The store owner said that he had been robbed of a .45-caliber Colt revolver, which was the same weapon that had killed Arbona.

Confronted with this evidence, the ex-witness confessed to the police. She identified Mickey Fallon as the trigger man the night of the murder, and Eddie McDonald as the one who supplied the car. According to her, the selection of Arbona as their victim was purely haphazard. A third man, Harry Hood, moved into the front seat with the girl to act as decoys in case a police car drove by.

The four were indicted on charges of second-degree murder on Mar. 22, 1934. McDonald received thirty years to life at Sing Sing Penitentiary, and Fallon was sentenced to thirty-five years to life. Harry Hood was acquitted in a jury trial, and the ex-waitress who was in it for a good time was dismissed after a motion was filed by Assistant District Attorney Marro.

 

Faria, Albert, and Simmons, William, and Chadwick, William, prom. 1930s, U.S. On a rainy day in East Orange, N.J., two sullen strangers entered the Hi-Hat Lunchroom. When the counterman emerged they ordered him to open the cash drawer. At that moment, Patrolman Thomas Ennis, a WWI veteran, entered the diner. The gunmen shot him in the stomach and fled. With the cooperation of the Newark Police Department, the killers of the East Orange policeman were quickly identified and captured. Playing a hunch, Lieutenant Joseph Cocozza investigated the Hi-Hat employees. He learned that an ex-convict named William Chadwick had recently been employed at the Newark branch.

His accomplice Albert Faria was seized at a hospital in Hoboken where he was being treated for a gunshot wound. Faria was a notorious stickup man who had been arrested six years earlier. In the office of Joseph Linarducci, captain of the Essex County homicide squad, a third man, William Simmons, confessed to the crime and identified Chadwick as the “finger man” of the operation. He picked the time and the place based on the layout of the lunchroom. Faria and Chadwick broke down and admitted their roles in the robbery. The three men were quickly brought to trial. Faria and Simmons, who had carried out the robbery, were held responsible for the death of the police officer. They were sentenced to death. Chadwick received fifteen years in prison.

 

Farley, John, 1943- , U.S. A 26-year-old paper hanger from Brooklyn, John Farley was accused of raping and murdering Margaret Burke, forty-nine, in an alley after following her out of a Queens, N.Y., bar on Aug. 21, 1968. Because Farley had an extra set of Y chromosomes, his defense attorney, Marvin Kornberg contended that his client had characteristics of a “supermale,” and was predisposed to violence as a result. Based on research done in European prisons, a theory developed that a disproportionate number of criminals convicted of violent crimes possessed the extra Y chromosome. The prisoners found to have the extra chromosome were also tall and mentally dull and had facial acne. During the trial in the Queens Supreme Court, Justice Peter T. Farrell dismissed the original rape charge against the six-foot-three-inch, 240-pound defendant. Lawyer Kornberg asked the jury to find Farley not guilty by reason of insanity, but on Apr. 30, 1969, after ten hours of deliberation, the jury found the defendant Guilty of first-degree murder. On July 10, 1969, Farley was sentenced to a prison term of twenty-five years to life.

 

Faysom, David, 1959- , U.S. On Oct. 6, 1981, David Faysom, twenty-two, befriended 13-year-old Nicole Lee, who had run away from her home in Chicago. He bought her a meal and persuaded her to work for him as a prostitute. Nicole was reluctant and pretended to be sick to avoid appointments that Faysom arranged, according to Karen Brandon, eighteen, who formerly worked for Faysom. On Oct. 9, the pimp drove Lee and Brandon into an alley and ordered Lee to take off her clothes. He scolded her for not making enough money. He then told her to “Show me your heart,” and shot her with a handgun. When she promised to make more money, he shot her again.

In January 1983, Faysom was convicted of murder, pandering, armed violence, and unlawful restraint. On Feb. 16, Judge R. Eugene Pincham sentenced Faysom to life in prison with no chance for parole. The judge later commuted the sentence to seventy years in prison. Brandon, who was originally charged with murder, pleaded guilty to concealing a homicide and was sentenced to a thirty-month probation.

 

Fazekas, Suzanne, d.1929, Hung. The women of Nagyrev, Hung., an isolated village southeast of Budapest, while their husbands were away during WWI, took lovers from among the prisoners of war in nearby camps. After several years of such promiscuity, the war ended and the husbands returned. But domesticity no longer satisfied the women of Nagyrev, and with the help of local midwife Suzanne Fazekas, they began poisoning their husbands. Once the murders had begun, anyone considered inconvenient was in danger. Fazekas sold arsenic to the women, which she obtained by boiling the flypaper she purchased in bulk. Officials later learned that, for several years, Nagyrev and a neighboring village bought more flypaper than the rest of Hungary combined.

The first murder occurred as early as 1911, the beginning of a spree that lasted nearly twenty years and involved perhaps fifty women. Returning husbands, relatives who owned land, mothers-in-law, even recalcitrant children—few were exempt from Fazekas’ poison. Added to the ease of perpetration was the fact that the official who approved death certificates was Fazekas’ cousin, so when outsiders noted the region’s high death rate, a routine check of the death certificates showed nothing amiss. Further, the village of Nagyrev and its neighbor, Tiszakurt, were so isolated that no one paid much attention—until 1929, when two potential victims of Mrs. Ladislaus Szabo claimed that she had tried to poison them. Once she was arrested, she implicated another woman, Mrs. Bukenoveski, who confessed to having obtained arsenic from Fazekas five years earlier to kill her mother. The mother’s body was exhumed and found to contain arsenic.

Fazekas was arrested, held only briefly when she refused to talk, and then released—free to run from house to house in Nagyrev, letting the women know what was happening, and telling the police whom to arrest. When they came for Fazekas again, she admitted them to her house, drank her own poison and died before their eyes. Thirty-eight women were arrested, chief among them Susanna Olah, the “White Witch of Nagyrev,” who also sold arsenic and was believed to possess the power to protect the women from the law.

Each woman had her own victims and reasons: Rosalie Sebestyen’s husband bored her; Maria Szendi was tired of her husband always having “his own way”; Maria Varga could no longer put up with her husband, who had returned from the war blind—she preferred her young lover, but after five years disposed of him and his grandfather; Mrs. Kardos had an invalid son who was a burden to her—she found it easy to kill him because she had already eliminated a lover and her husband; Juliane Lipka killed, not for love but for real estate—in seven to eight years she disposed of seven relatives, gradually becoming the richest woman in the region. Eventually, twenty-six women were tried for murder. Eight were sentenced to death and seven to life in prison. The rest received varying prison terms. Three of the women committed suicide. The bodies of those hanged were displayed as a warning to others.

 

Fein, Mark, prom. 1963-64, U.S. Wealthy up-and-coming New York businessman Mark Fein settled a $7,200 bet by murdering the bookie instead of paying him. “We had words and I shot him,” Fein said of the murder of Rubin Markowitz on Oct. 10, 1963. And that was the explanation Fein gave when he called his girlfriend, prostitute Carmela Lazarus. He asked her to help dispose of the bookie’s body. When Lazarus came to his Manhattan apartment, Fein had already acquired a trunk in Spanish Harlem and deposited Markowitz’s body in it.

Lazarus called a couple of male friends who carried the heavy trunk to a rented station wagon. Leaving Fein behind, they drove to the Harlem River and pushed the trunk into the water. When the trunk was found, the police discovered a list of Markowitz’s “clients” on his body. The name “Gloria Kendall”, an alias used by Lazarus, was on the list. When the police located Lazarus, she promptly told what had happened. Fein was arrested and tried. Although his defense attorney tried to get the jury to question whether a prostitute with thirty aliases could be relied on to tell the truth, Mark Fein was convicted and sentenced to thirty years to life in prison.

 

Fentress, Albert, 1941- , U.S. On Aug. 18, 1979, Albert Fentress, thirty-nine, a history teacher at Poughkeepsie Middle School in New York, wrote two scripts concerning murder and sexual mutilation. Two days later, he invited Paul Masters, eighteen, into his house for a drink. Fentress then assaulted, mutilated, and shot the boy. Afterward, he cut the body into pieces and cooked and ate them. Fentress, who had no previous record, was committed to a mental institution indefinitely.

 

Ferguson, Paul Robert, 1946- , and Ferguson, Thomas Scott, 1951- , U.S. The Ferguson brothers were just two in a long line of homosexual boyfriends that actor Ramon Novarro, the “Latin Lover,” invited to party at his home in Hollywood. The famed sultry-looking star of the silent screen who made women swoon had stopped making movies in the 1930s. He had built up his fortune in real estate and was still living very well thirty years later. On the night of Oct. 30, 1968, he invited 22-year-old Paul Ferguson and 17-year-old Tom Ferguson to his home. The brothers had heard a rumor that Novarro kept at least $5,000 in cash in his house, and they began demanding to know where it was. While Paul tortured and beat Novarro so he would tell where the money was hidden, Tom looked around the house, tearing hundreds of valuable paintings from the walls, shredding couches, ripping out drawers. He took time out to telephone a friend in Chicago, Brenda Lee Metcalf, and they talked for almost an hour, while Metcalf heard Novarro’s screams in the background. Eventually they found only the money that Novarro had in his pockets, but when they left the mansion, the great screen actor was dead, suffocated by a sexual device.

The next day, Novarro’s secretary, Edward J. Weber, found the destruction and the dead body. The police, carrying out their regular routine, checked Novarro’s long-distance telephone calls for the previous month and located Brenda Lee Metcalf. She told about the call she had received from the Fergusons, old friends who had lived in Chicago until Paul went to Hollywood and Tom ran away from home to join him.

Paul tried to place the blame for the gruesome murder on Tom. At first Tom believed his older brother when he said that Tom, as a juvenile, would only get six months in jail. But Julius Libow of the Juvenile Court said that Tom would be tried as an adult, and at the trial in August 1969, each brother tried to convince the court that the other had committed the murder. District Attorney James Ideman held that Paul had committed the crime. “It was…done cruelly by a man who has no respect for himself or others…who has no remorse, no compassion, no regrets…and who got his brother to perjure himself,” Ideman said. Both men were found Guilty of murder and sentenced by Superior Court judge Mark Brandler to life in prison, with a recommendation that they never be paroled.

 

Ferguson, Walter, 1894-1939, U.S. Walter Ferguson’s tirades often disturbed his neighbors in a Manhattan tenement. Only Elizabeth Schneider, fifty-five, a midget and his upstairs neighbor, could calm him. In July 1939, the 45-year-old Ferguson started raving again, and when Schneider went down to quiet him, he grabbed her and pulled her into his room. Insurance collector Sam Fox saw the incident and ran for police. When they returned, Ferguson yelled, “Nobody can come in here but Jesus Christ!”

The two men forced open Ferguson’s door and found him standing naked over the bathtub, holding the midget under water. The policeman grappled with Ferguson, but the maniac managed to drown Schneider. Fox then called three more policemen to the scene, where Ferguson fended them off, using a table and chairs as weapons, until he suddenly fell dead of a heart attack.

 

Fernandez, Raymond Martinez, See: Beck, Martha Julie.

 

Ferrara, Florence, 1913- , U.S. On Nov. 28, 1942, a woman under a strange delusion went to Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis. She calmly walked into the office of Dr. Marion Klinefelter, a nationally-known bone surgeon. She greeted the physician by saying, “Well, Mister Mad Man, how are you?” The woman suddenly pulled a gun from her coat and shot the doctor in the head. As Klinefelter slumped over in his chair, the woman shouted, “Now, Mister Wilder, you’re exposed.” She then fled from the scene.

The 69-year-old physician, known to colleagues as a “poor man’s doctor” because of the volume of work he did without fees, died before reaching the emergency room. An hour later, the police arrested 29-year-old Florence Ferrara in the parking lot where she left her automobile. She confessed to the killing and gave this unusual account: “Dr. Klinefelter is not the man I shot. The man shot is named Meldrum Wilder and he is the one who killed Dr. Klinefelter in 1904. He has been posing as Dr. Klinefelter ever since and has been chloroforming and crippling people for years. In 1936, I had an infected finger and he treated me for that, but he didn’t get me and he’s been trying to get me ever since. So last summer I went over to East St. Louis and bought a pistol for my own protection, and this morning I decided to go out and see him face to face.

“I said, ‘Mister Wilder, here I am,’ and he grabbed the telephone. He wanted to get somebody to use ether on me, so I shot him in self-defense. He had been having me followed, watched, and the men who were following me were trying to place a cloth filled with chloroform on my face so they could take me to the doctor and he could break my bones.”

After being evaluated by psychiatrists, Ferrara was diagnosed as insane and was institutionalized for life.

 

Fiedler, Paulette, 1949- , U.S. Paulette Fiedler, a 38-year-old employee of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, shot and killed her supervisor, Dale Rowell, thirty-nine, as he sat at his desk in the Lombard, Ill., office. Another worker, Robert Heft, thirty-nine, heard the shot and when he went to check, Fiedler shot him as well.

Prior to the killing, the state had tried to discharge Fiedler, but a psychiatrist determined that she was fit to work. Fiedler’s sex discrimination suit against her union was dismissed on the morning of the crime. She had also filed several complaints accusing her supervisor and others of treating her unfairly.

When Fiedler’s trial began, she first claimed she was mentally unfit and pleaded guilty by reason of insanity. However, in September 1988, a jury found her competent to stand trial. She was convicted in November of murder and attempted murder. Fiedler was sentenced on Dec. 1, 1988, to life in prison.

 

Field, Frederick Herbert Charles, 1899-1936, Brit. The body of prostitute Norah Upchurch, twenty, was found inside an abandoned London shop on Oct. 2, 1931. The discovery was made by a sign fitter and his assistant, Frederick Field. Field told police that the day before he had given the shop keys to a man he thought was a prospective buyer of the property. The man, Field explained to coroner Ingleby Oddie, had prominent gold fillings in his teeth. Coroner Oddie brought the suspect before the jury at the inquest, and as he had no gold fillings, an open verdict was returned.

After nearly two years, on July 25, 1933, Field informed the editor of the Daily Sketch that he murdered Upchurch. Field recounted in detail how he had brought the girl into the shop and then strangled her. He claimed he emptied her handbag of money and dropped it into a ditch at Rose Hill, Sutton. Field repeated the story to police and was arraigned on a charge of willful murder. At his trial at the Old Bailey in September, Field retracted his confession, saying that it was his intent all along to clear his name. His confession contained so many factual errors that it was impossible to link Field conclusively with the murder. Justice Rigby Philip Swift directed the jury to return a verdict of Not Guilty. Field apparently wanted publicity and the reward money offered by the newspaper.

Following Field’s acquittal, he joined the Royal Air Force, but soon deserted his squadron. He avoided the law until Apr. 4, 1936, when middle-aged Beatrice Vilna Sutton was found suffocated in her apartment at Elmhurst Mansions, Clapham. That same night, Field advised a girlfriend to look for an interesting item in the newspapers. The girl’s mother grew suspicious and notified police, who booked Field on suspicion. At the station, he confessed to killing Sutton, but again gave incorrect details. Before Justice Charles, Field repudiated his earlier statements. When asked how he had been able to describe accurately the victim’s injuries, Field claimed it was supposition. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted Field, and on June 30, 1936, Field was hanged.

 

Field, George Morton, d.1926, U.S. A dynamite blast powerful enough to level a church and kill an intended victim, failed to destroy a single sheet of paper, which implicated George Morton Field. Field, in 1915, was the wealthiest man and the religious leader in rural Mustoch, Kan., where he often delivered vitriolic sermons from the pulpit.

Field also had a girlfriend, Gertie Day, a church choir member, who was more than twenty years his junior. When Gertie Day informed him she was pregnant, he agreed to pay her $2,000 to leave the area, but soon worried of possible blackmail. He planted a dynamite bomb beneath the church, and when Gertie Day arrived to pick up the money, she was killed in an explosion which leveled the church. However, the paper the dynamite was wrapped in, a sermon soon to be delivered by George Field, was found untouched in the rubble. Clerks in Kansas City confirmed that Field had purchased the dynamite and he was arrested by Sheriff James R. Carter. Field was convicted of the murder of Gertie Day and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died while incarcerated, in 1926.

 

Field, Jack Alfred, 1901-21, and Gray, William Thomas, 1892-1921, Brit. William Gray, born in South Africa, sailed to England during WWI where he married an Eastbourne girl who supported him while he kept company with Jack Field. Field was well-known to the police as a petty hoodlum, and after leaving the Navy in April 1920, wandered aimlessly about Eastbourne. On Aug. 19, 1920, the two men met typist Irene Violet Munro, seventeen, and the trio was observed by William Putland and Frederick Wells, who followed them through town. Munro and her companions walked toward the Crumbles, a two-mile stretch of wasteland outside Seaside, Eastbourne. Putland and Wells followed the party just to the outskirts of Pevensey. The next day, a 13-year-old boy picnicking at the Crumbles stumbled upon Munro’s battered body. Wells identified Field and Gray on Aug. 24, as Munro’s companions, and police learned that the suspects had tried to enlist in the military within an hour of Munro’s disappearance. They were charged with murder and brought to trial at the Lewes Assizes on Dec. 13, 1920. The prosecution contended that Munro had refused them sex, and Field and Gray had knocked her to the ground, then hit her with a heavy stone. The jury found them Guilty, appeals were dismissed, and the two were hanged at Wandsworth Prison on Feb. 4, 1921. Before they died, each accused the other of the murder.

 

Fielding, Charles, prom. 1924, U.S. Lottie Freeman of Cumberland County, Maine, first married William Sanborn. He disappeared in the summer of 1910, leaving his wife alone on the farm with three children. Next, two farmhands disappeared. In 1915, Freeman married Alphonse Cote and had one more child. But in November 1924, Cote, too, vanished. Freeman had plotted his death with Charles Fielding, a plumber who was married to her half-sister. Fielding killed Cote with a gunshot in the back and then he, Freeman, and her second son, Ralph, buried the body in the field.

When Freeman reported the disappearance of her second husband, saying he had taken money from her purse and Ralph’s bank account, Deputy Sheriff Norton became suspicious and checked her history. He and two other officials visited her farm where they talked with Freeman, her son, and Fielding, and also discovered a pile of ashes. When the three were brought in for questioning, Ralph confessed, as did Fielding, who was infatuated with Freeman. Freeman admitted nothing. Charges against Freeman’s son were eventually dropped, and Freeman died before Fielding’s trial. Fielding was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. He was later transferred to a state hospital for the insane.

 

Finch, Dr. Raymond Bernard, 1918- , and Tregoff, Carole, prom. 1959-71, U.S. Dr. Raymond Bernard Finch, a prominent physician in Los Angeles, and his wife Francis agreed to divorce so that they could marry other people. Following the divorce, Francis married Forrest Daugherty, and Raymond married Barbara Daugherty, a couple who had also divorced so that these new marital arrangements could be made. The second Mrs. Finch, Barbara, was shocked when she discovered that the man she had married was a wife-beater. In the spring of 1959, she was convinced that her husband was trying to kill her, and therefore immediately informed her lawyer of her suspicions.

In the meantime, Raymond Finch’s latest mistress, Carole Tregoff, left her job as his secretary and moved to Las Vegas, Nev. Finch met her there whenever possible, and it was there, the prosecution would later hold, that they planned to murder his wife. On July 18, 1959, the adulterous pair went to Finch’s home in West Covina, Calif., and waited for Barbara to return home in the evening. When she saw Finch and Tregoff waiting, Barbara drew a gun, threatening to shoot the pair unless they left immediately. Barbara Finch was shot in the back, the sound of gunfire bringing forth the maid, who saw Dr. Finch standing over his slain wife. The maid called the police, and the two conspirators were arrested.

The police found on the lawn of the house an attache case that they called a “do-it-yourself murder kit.” It included, among other items, a gun, a butcher knife, and two hypodermic needles. They also located John Patrick Cody, whom Finch had hired to follow his wife and whom Carole had tried to hire to kill Mrs. Finch. The jury was brought to tears by Dr. Finch’s testimony of how his dying wife had taken the blame for their problems and, saying that she loved him, had died. That jury was not able to reach a verdict. Neither was a second jury. It was only on the third try that the prosecution was able to obtain a verdict of Guilty against the pair. They were both sentenced to prison for life. Carole Tregoff was released in 1971.

 

Fine, Louis (AKA: Henry Miller) prom. 1932, U.S. When the owner of a boarding house noticed an unpleasant odor coming from a new tenant’s room, he called police to investigate. Inside a double trunk they found the strangled corpse of an elderly woman.

Julius Hoffman, proprietor of the Philadelphia rooming house, was pleased to receive three weeks of rent in advance from his new boarder, Henry Miller. But on Mar. 7, 1932, Hoffman called the Atlantic County, N.J., police to report a repulsive smell in Miller’s room, and Police Captain Frank J. Harrold discovered the body of a white-haired woman in the double trunk.

Hoffman explained that Miller, about forty years old, had the quirk of always wearing a dark felt hat pulled down over his face. The trunk, Harrold found out, had been delivered at night by two local truckers, and was sent from Atlantic City at 4:00 p.m. on Mar. 4 via the Pennsylvania Railroad. Investigating leads on elderly women in the area who were listed as missing, police discovered that Mamie Schaff, a wealthy widow, recently had disappeared. According to her maid, who positively identified the body, one of Schaff’s boarders, Louis Fine, had left town the day after his landlady, leaving a note asking the maid to keep his room clean until he returned, and telling her to let Mrs. Schaff know he would be back. In Fine’s possessions police found a locked strongbox; inside were several letters, one of them addressed to “H. Miller” in Atlantic City, N.J.

Waiting for Fine’s return, police hid in his room and surprised him on the night of Mar. 7. Accused of murder by Harrold, Fine claimed he knew nothing and had just returned from a business trip to New York City. Fine also had a heart attack, though only a mild one, and was taken to an Atlantic City hospital. Assured by doctors that Fine was not seriously ill, police brought Hoffman in as the first witness; he positively identified Fine as the man he had known as Henry Miller, as did several other witnesses. Police had found Mrs. Schaff’s will, naming Fine as her beneficiary, and when it was learned he was also wanted in New York for murdering an older woman, he was indicted.

While in prison awaiting trial, Fine continued to deny his guilt, but was overheard by guard Harold Johnson as he exclaimed, “The old fool! I wanted her to give me some money. It was the only way I could get it.” On June 6 Fine’s trial began, and on June 10 the jury deliberated for two hours to return a verdict of Guilty of first-degree murder, with no recommendation of leniency. Fine was sentenced to die in the electric chair, the first time in thirty years that the death penalty had been imposed in an Atlantic County courtroom.

 

Finlay, Edwin, 1934-52, Brit. Edwin Finlay, whose childhood was spent in the shadow of the massive bombings of England during WWII, grew up to become a killer. Finlay was eight years old in 1942, at the height of the bomb attacks on England. He later became a bank clerk at a Glasgow bank and, at age eighteen, successfully stole £900 from the institution where he worked. Although he was under no suspicion, Finlay decided to purchase three revolvers “in case of trouble.” On July 18, 1952, when two plainclothes policemen came to question the clerk, he shot them both, wounding one and murdering Constable John MacLeod, then turned the gun on himself, committing suicide.

Curiously, the six boys with whom Finlay had gone through childhood wartime experiences all met unhappy ends: two were hanged, one was killed in a battle with police officers, one was sentenced to life in prison, and one was jailed.

 

Fish, Hamilton Albert Howard (AKA: The Cannibal; Robert Hayden; Frank Howard; John W. Pell; Thomas A. Sprague), 1870-1936, U.S. Raised in a Washington, D.C., orphanage, Albert Fish blamed his later heinous crimes on his years in the orphanage where sadistic cruelty was inflicted upon children. “Misery leads to crime,” Fish later stated. “I saw so many boys whipped it ruined my mind.” Fish later claimed to have molested more than 400 children in a span of twenty years. He was a sneaky child killer who, according to a psychiatrist examining him before his execution, “lived a life of unparalleled perversity. There was no known perversion that he did not practice and practice frequently.”

Fish married in 1898 and the union produced three children. For a good many years he lived a normal life, making a living as a house decorator and painter. But Fish’s mental state seemed to collapse in 1917 when his wife ran away with a half-witted lover, John Straube. Fish had taken his children to a movie and, upon returning home, he found the place stripped of all its furniture and his wife gone.

The brazen Mrs. Fish returned with Straube in tow some time later, asking to stay with Fish. He told her she could return to the family but Straube had to depart. Mrs. Fish ordered her bumbling lover to leave but Fish later found Straube hiding in the attic of the Fish house. Mrs. Fish smuggled him into the attic during the night. Straube stayed in the attic for weeks while Mrs. Fish smuggled him food and visited him nocturnally for sexual bouts. When Fish discovered Straube in the attic he ordered his wife and her dim-witted lover from the house.

The family never saw Mrs. Fish again. Fish himself began to act strangely a short time later. He took his family to a small cottage in Westchester County, N.Y., and there practiced bizarre rites, climbing to the top of a hill at night and baying at the moon: “I am Christ! I am Christ!” He made meals that consisted of raw meat, serving this to his children and saying: “That’s the way I like my meat and you’ll have to eat it that way, too.” He ran around at night naked and howled at the moon, antics that later earned him the press sobriquet, “The Moon Maniac.”

Fish took to beating himself and then encouraged his own children and their friends to paddle his bare buttocks until his flesh bled. Fish made a paddle studded with inch-and-a-half nails. His perplexed son, Albert Fish, Jr., discovered this device and asked his father why he had constructed such an instrument. “I use them on myself,” Fish blurted to the boy. “I get certain feelings over me. When I do, I’ve got to torture myself.” He burned himself with white hot pokers, needles, and irons. For many years he collected articles on cannibalism and became obsessed with flesh-eating, carrying these rare journalistic writings with him until the clippings yellowed and finally crumbled to dust.

Fish was involved in several postal swindles and spent three months in jail for practicing a con game in the mails. He was examined by. psychiatrists but released as a “harmless” old man suffering from a “severe guilt conscience.” Fish was later examined at Bellevue Asylum in New York but was again released as a non-violent masochist. He was known by authorities to practice self-flagellation, burning of his flesh, coprophilia, and other self-punishing acts such as inserting small needles beneath his flesh.

An avid reader of the lovelorn columns, Fish answered scores of ads from lonely widows. Forty-six of these letters were later recovered and submitted as evidence at Fish’s murder trial but the prosecution refused to read from them, so filled with vile obscenities were they. Fish informed these lonely women that he was not at all interested in marriage. He merely wanted these lonely women to paddle and punish him. Fish received no replies. It is not certain when Albert Fish embarked on murder as a way of satisfying his dark inner longings. He later confessed to murdering a man in Wilmington, Del., in 1910. He also said that he had murdered and mutilated a boy in New York in 1919 and that same year noted he had murdered another boy on a houseboat in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C.

By the late 1920s, Fish avidly sought children to attack and, by his own later admission, he molested and murdered 4-year-old William Gaffney on Feb. 11, 1927. On Mar. 3, 1928, Fish abducted and murdered 12-year-old Grace Budd, the crime for which he paid with his life in Sing Sing’s electric chair. Using the name Frank Howard, the killer ingratiated himself to the Budd family. After several visits to the Budds in Manhattan, Fish convinced the naive Budd family members that he was a kindly old gentleman who merely dropped by to see their children. Fish brought them presents and when he suggested he take 12-year-old Grace to a children’s party, Mrs. Budd allowed Fish to take her daughter. It was the last time the Budds saw Grace alive.

The trusting Grace Budd left her home with Fish on June 3, 1928, taking a train with him to White Plains, N.Y. Between them on the seat was a box in which Fish kept what he later described as his “instruments of hell.” The box contained a butcher knife, a cleaver, and a saw. The old man and Grace got off the train but Grace quickly went back aboard and then returned with the box which Fish had forgotten. The pair walked the long distance to the Fish cottage where Fish took all his clothes off. The girl screamed: “I’ll tell Mama!” Fish jumped forward and strangled Grace. He then decapitated her and sawed her body in half. In a later confession, so grisly and gruesome in detail that it caused listeners to retch, Fish happily recounted how he carved up the girl’s body and made a stew out of it which he lived on for several days.

The Budds reported their daughter’s disappearance but continued to believe that Grace had somehow survived and was alive. Then, in 1934, for inexplicable reasons, Fish sat down and wrote a letter to the Budds, telling them that he had murdered their daughter. He took great pains to point out that he had not sexually molested her before killing her. It was about this time that Fish, walking down a street in Fort Richmond, Long Island, spotted 5-year-old France McDonel playing outside his home. He picked up the boy and carried him away, taking him to Wisteria Cottage in White Plains where he strangled the boy.

By then detectives had traced the letter Fish had sent to the Budd family finding the old man shortly after he had killed the McDonel boy. One puzzled detective asked Fish why he had risked revealing himself by writing the letter. The killer became defensive. He told detectives that he had kept track of police activity on “the case in the papers. If they had accused someone else I would have come forward. My best days are over.” Fish was brought before the Budds and they identified him as the Frank Howard who took their daughter away with him. The area around Fish’s Wisteria Cottage was dug up and Grace Budd’s remains were found.

Placed on trial, Fish’s attorneys pled the cannibal killer not guilty by reason of insanity but the prosecution provided a small army of psychiatrists who testified that he was sane. After a prolonged trial, Fish was found Guilty and sentenced to death. Fish was sent to Sing Sing, handcuffed to another killer named Stone. Ironically, both Fish and Stone had had forefathers who had fought in the American Revolution. While awaiting execution, Fish delightedly told newsmen and prison officials that he was ecstatic at the prospect of being electrocuted in Sing Sing’s electric chair. “What a thrill that will be if I have to die in the electric chair,” Fish said with a broad smile. “It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven’t tried.”

On Jan. 16, 1936, Fish walked without help into Sing Sing’s execution room and sat down almost eagerly in the electric chair. He helped the executioner affix the electrodes on his legs. The enthusiasm Fish displayed toward his own painful death shocked reporters who were present to witness his execution. Fish, the oldest prisoner ever to be electrocuted in Sing Sing, smiled happily as the electrodes were applied to his head. When the switch was pulled, a jolt of 3,000 volts coursed through his body. A blue cloud of smoke rose from Fish’s head as he let out a guttural laugh. He did not die. Thanks to the hundreds of tiny needles he had inserted in his body over the years, the old man’s abused body actually short-circuited the electric chair. Another prolonged charge of electricity was sent through his body before Albert Fish was pronounced dead.

The cannibal’s last statement had been given to one of his defense attorneys only an hour before Albert Fish encountered his “supreme thrill.” Reporters begged the attorney to release the statement but the lawyer grimly shook his head, saying: “I shall never show it to anyone. It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.”

 

Fisher, Dennis, prom. 1975, U.S. When a young, healthy farmer suddenly and inexplicably disappeared, his wife and a farmhand came under suspicion, and soon confessed to murder. In Delaware County, Iowa, the sheriff’s office received a missing person’s report from 19-year-old Myra Miller, mother of three, telling how she and her husband, Howard Miller, had an argument two weeks earlier, after which he had gone to Dubuque, driven there by the Millers’ farmhand Dennis Fisher. The sheriff found no reason for the prosperous farmer to have left the home which he valued and cherished. Nor had the farmer contacted any of his Dubuque relatives.

In the next two months, Fisher and Myra Miller auctioned off most of the farm machinery and cattle. Arrested on Apr. 23, they were discovered to be in the process of moving to a new home in West Plains, Mo. According to police, both admitted their guilt the night they were arrested, with Fisher admitting that he shot his employer when Miller threatened to kill his wife because of her liaison with the farmhand. Digging up the dirt floor of the calf shed at the Miller farm, police found the corpse with bullet holes in the right shoulder and the head. Fisher was sentenced to life in prison with the help of Myra Miller’s testimony against him, while the widow, originally charged with murder, was allowed to plead guilty to reduced charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice, in exchange for her evidence against Fisher.

 

Fisher, Julius, 1912-46, U.S. Catherine Cooper Reardon, 37-year-old librarian at the Washington, D.C., Cathedral, went home for lunch on Mar. 1, 1944. She shared a small three-room apartment with her invalid widowed mother. After lunch, Catherine returned to work. When she did not return home by nine that night, a friend reported her as a missing person to the police.

The following morning the Washington police received an anonymous call. “A young woman has been murdered at the Washington Cathedral,” a male voice said, “You fellows had better get busy.” At the same time John Bayliss, the curator of the library, and Helen Abbey Young, an archivist, had just reported to work. They noticed bloodstains on the basement floor and began a search of the library. In the attic they found Catherine Reardon’s coat, gloves, hat, and purse. In the sub-basement they found Reardon’s battered body. Only moments after the anonymous call the police were notified of the murder.

The victim had been beaten on the head and neck. Her clothes were bunched around her head and her panties were missing. At first police believed the woman had been sexually assaulted. Within the hour, the police had a suspect in the case. He was Julius Fisher, thirty-two, a workman at the library. In his home they found bloodstained clothes. Fisher, who was in a restaurant when police arrived, pulled a .32-caliber revolver but was quickly subdued by detectives E.E. Scott and Richard Felber. Fisher confessed that he killed Reardon when she complained about his work. The murder weapon was a piece of firewood. The killer had not raped the woman but removed her panties to “sop up the blood.” The autopsy confirmed this.

On Dec. 20, 1946, Fisher went to the electric chair at the District of Columbia Jail. That same day two other men were executed in the same jail for the murder of women. Joseph Dunbar Medley was executed for the murder of Nancy Boyer, and William Copeland was executed for the murder of his sister-in-law.

 

Fitzgerald, Thomas Richard, 1880-1919, U.S. On July 22, 1919, 6-year-old Janet “Dollie” Wilkinson failed to come home for dinner. Around midnight, her parents, who operated a grocery store on Chicago’s Rush Street, around the corner from their Superior Street home, reported to police that she was missing. They mentioned to police a neighbor, Thomas Fitzgerald, who worked as an elevator operator in a Rush Street hotel, as a possible suspect because he had shown unusual interest in the little girl. Police brought Fitzgerald to the station for questioning, beginning a six day interrogation that newspapers dubbed “the fourth degree.”

Fitzgerald, whom police described as “a moron,” admitted during questioning that he knew the Wilkinson girl, but denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. One of his fellow employees, however, told police that he had seen the two together, the girl sitting on Fitzgerald’s lap in the basement of the hotel only a week before.

Given this, police and reporters grilled the suspect for more than eight hours, during which time he was not allowed to use his eyeglasses. At one point a reporter dressed as a priest entered the room, and the police left the two alone. “As a priest of the church it is my duty to visit my brethren in distress,” the reporter said.

“Yes, father,” Fitzgerald answered.

“I want you to tell me the truth. If the girl is alive, tell me where she is and I’ll have her sent back, so they will never know you had her…”

“But…”

“Now wait, my friend, if she is dead I’ll have the body located and…

“If I knew I’d tell you, Father. I know you are bound by the vows of the church not to repeat what I tell you in confession, but I don’t know. I really don’t. So help me God, I don’t.”

Sometime later another reporter came in and posed as a relative of the dead girl. “If you loved your mother, tell us the truth,” he pleaded with Fitzgerald. “The girl’s mother is nearly dead from grief and suspense. She cannot live another eight hours unless she knows where Janet’s body is. Tell us! Tell us! Tell us!”

Fitzgerald was unmoved by the plea: “Why, if I knew I’d tell you.”

Through hours and hours of relentless questioning, Fitzgerald continued to deny his guilt. “I wish to sleep,” he told his interrogators. “Please let me alone.”

But he wasn’t allowed to sleep. The police and reporters worked in shifts; a few would slip away for breakfast or a catnap as another crew took their place. Their prisoner was forced to stay awake. When his head would nod, somebody would slap him lightly until he was fully awake. “Tell us the truth,” they would demand.

At last, Fitzgerald looked up, “Send down Mr. Howe,” he said quietly.

A few minutes later Lieutenant Howe was at his cell. “You have been the only friend I have had. I wouldn’t tell anyone else. But I think I’ll tell you. I’m afraid you’ll think me a horrible man,” Fitzgerald said.

“No, I won’t,” the police officer said. “What I’ll think is what I have thought all the way through this case: that you have a diseased brain. Tell me the truth, my man.”

“I did it,” Fitzgerald said with his head bowed, “I killed her.”

“How did you do it?”

“Just the way you have described it twenty-five times, Mr. Howe. Just as you told me. Every time you described the killing in detail I shivered.”

“I know you did, Fitzgerald, I saw you tremble.”

“It was just the way you pictured it, even to the taking of Dollie’s body down to the coal pile…I’ll show you the spot. I want you to stick by me and be a friend. I need friends. And say, Mr. Howe, you won’t hang me now, will you? I’ve confessed, haven’t I? They won’t string me up if I’m crazy, will they? Tell me, Mr. Howe.”

“I don’t know,” Howe said.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Fitzgerald explained later. “When I married fourteen years ago I found I was not fit for marriage. I lured Janet into the apartment with candy. While I held her in my arms she screamed, and in my excitement I choked her. She was unconscious. I hurried down to the basement with her and covered her with coal.” When police examined the body they found cuts on her head and broken teeth. It was later determined that the girl was probably still alive when Fitzgerald buried her in the coal.

Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney James C. O’Brien was assigned to the case. O’Brien was known in the argot of the underworld as a “rope man” for the many death sentences his prosecutions had achieved. He was also known as “Red Necktie” O’Brien for the color of the tie he was known to wear to sentencing hearings, to remind the judge and jury of the victim’s blood. In the Fitzgerald case he was successful again. On Oct. 17, 1919, Thomas Richard Fitzgerald was hanged for the murder of Janet Wilkinson.

 

Flanagan, Sean Patrick, 1961-89, U.S. In 1987 in Las Vegas, Sean Patrick Flanagan, twenty-six, met James Lewandowski, a 45-year-old chef who bought the younger man clothes and rented a room for him. Not long after accepting Lewandowski’s assistance, Flanagan strangled and then dismembered the older man, leaving body parts in plastic bags in a trash bin near the motel where he stayed. Four days after murdering Lewandowski, Flanagan took a ride with pianist Albert Duggins, fifty-nine, before he killed him. Arrested for jaywalking in Orange County, Calif., soon after Duggins’ murder, Flanagan voluntarily returned to Las Vegas to show police the vacant lot where he had left Duggins’ corpse.

Refusing to seek appeals of his death penalty, Flanagan explained, “Every man who has committed a crime of murder knows deep down inside he should die for taking another man’s life.” The confessed killer gave a seven-page statement in which he said he hated his homosexuality, and thought he might have been motivated to kill other homosexual men with “the thought that I would be doing some good for our society.”

Before his death by lethal injection on June 23, 1989, Flanagan told Deputy County District Attorney Dan Seaton, “You are a just man.” Strapped to a gurney at the Nevada State Prison in preparation for the execution, Flanagan lifted his head to tell Seaton, “I love you.” Since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing states to resume using the death penalty, Flanagan was the fourth person to be executed in Nevada, and the 114th person to be put to death nationally.

 

Flavell, Joseph Edward, 1902- , Brit. A slow-witted crane driver, 24-year-old Joseph Edward Flavell was violently jealous of his half-brother, James Thomas Bayliss, an intelligent and promising 14-year-old art student. In March 1926, at the home they shared in Dudley, Flavell killed the sleeping Bayliss with an ax. Flavell confessed to Birmingham police, explaining his sibling had not felt any pain because, “I did it while he was asleep.” At the trial at the Worchester Assizes, he was defended by attorney Marshall Hall. Evidence showed that there was a history of Bright’s disease and epilepsy in Flavell’s family, and some of his relatives had been confined to or had died in asylums. It was also determined that Flavell, who was known as “the village idiot,” had a history of cruelty to animals. Hall’s plea for a guilty but insane verdict was rejected. Flavell was found Guilty of murder, and Justice Avory sentenced him to death. On appeal, the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

 

Folkes, Robert E. Lee, 1922-45, U.S. One of the most gruesome train murders on record occurred at the height of WWII when U.S. railroads were packed with servicemen. Some were transferring between bases, others going home on their final leave before shipping overseas, still others were returning to their duty stations. Ensign Richard F. James was traveling south from Seattle, Wash., with a contingent of other Navy personnel being transferred to a new base in California. The ensign’s wife of four months, Martha James, twenty-one, from Virginia, was traveling with her husband aboard the Southern Pacific’s Oregonian. When the train reached Portland, Ore., on Jan. 23, 1943, the newlyweds were separated. Mrs. James lost her reservation to some California-bound servicemen. Twenty-five minutes later, she boarded the next southbound train the Southern Pacific Railroad’s West Coast Limited, making its 1800 mile run between Seattle and Los Angeles. Mrs. James was assigned the lower sleeping compartment in berth number 13.

At 4 a.m., as the train neared Tangent, Ore., halfway between Salem and Eugene, a woman’s piercing scream broke the stillness of the sleeping car. “My God, he’s killing me!” the voiced cried out. Private Harold R. Wilson, twenty-two, of the U.S. Marines, was jerked from a sound sleep. After a moment of fumbling, he snapped back the curtain on the upper compartment of berth 13 and looked into the darkened aisle, still half-asleep. A dark man was moving rapidly down the aisle toward the rear of the train. Wilson later described the man as being about five feet, ten inches, with a heavy build, smooth-shaven, with curly hair combed straight back and wearing a brown pin-striped suit. He thought the man was black, but he was not sure. As other faces peeked out from behind slightly parted curtains, the body of Martha James slipped almost silently from the lower berth into the aisle.

The nightgown-clad woman was covered with blood, her throat slashed. Wilson looked toward the end of the car, but the dark figure had disappeared. He jumped from the berth and headed toward the back of the train, but a quick search proved fruitless. On his way back to the murder car he stopped in the galley of the dining car where he found a black cook at work, wearing a white uniform. He asked the man if he had seen anyone run by and the man said no. Told that a murder had been committed in one of the sleeping cars, the man grinned and asked Wilson if he had been drinking. When Wilson returned to the sleeping car, the body of Martha James still lay in the aisle, but someone had draped a sheet over her.

Police boarded the train when it pulled into Eugene, Ore. Crew members told them that a man fitting the description supplied by Wilson had been aboard the train but could no longer be found. A trail of blood spots led from the murder berth all the way to the back of the train. The door leading to the small observation platform of the last car was open. Police believed that the man could have leaped from the train soon after the murder. Sheriff Herbert Shelf on found footprints in the Tangent railroad yard and surmised that the man could have leaped off the southbound train and boarded one heading north. Police and posses of private citizens searched for the killer in the area but found nothing.

On board the train, police searched the victim’s possessions, which seemed intact, and this included over $100 in cash. Robbery was ruled out as the motive. The body was removed at Eugene, but police stayed aboard the train, questioning passengers and crew, as it made its way toward California.

When the Limited reached Los Angeles on Jan. 25, Robert E. Lee Folkes, twenty, the black cook that Private Wilson had found in the train’s galley, shortly after the murder, was arrested. According to police, he first denied but then confessed to the murder. He then recanted the confession saying he did not commit the crime but he knew who did. Police had originally suspected Folkes after finding he had a police record for, among other charges, assaulting a woman and attempting to rip rings off her fingers, and for attempting to break into a house where three women lived.

After a second confession, police put together this story of the murder: On the night of the killing Folkes had attended a party with other members of the dining crew and had consumed a great deal of liquor. During the party some of the crew discussed the various attractive women aboard the train, and the striking blond in berth 13 had been prominently mentioned. After the party, Folkes put an overcoat over his white uniform and entered the Pullman sleeping car. He opened the curtain on Martha James’s berth and slipped next to the woman. As he was closing the curtain, the woman suddenly awakened. “She wanted to know who I was and told me to get out,” Folkes told police. He placed a knife to her chin. “I told her to keep still. She hollered and tried to throw me out. So I cut her.”

Folkes, who later recanted both confessions, was convicted and on Apr. 26, 1943, Judge L.G. Lewelling sentenced him to the Oregon gas chamber. Almost two years of appeals followed. On Jan. 4, 1945, Oregon Governor Earl Snell refused to commute the death sentence and told reporters: “I have before me evidence, information, and confessions that convince me beyond a doubt of Folkes’s guilt. He was tried in the circuit court, appealed to the state supreme court and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. Other appeals for habeas corpus writs were filed in the state supreme court, U.S. District Court, and the Marion County Circuit Court. In view of all circumstances, I do not see how I could possibly interfere.”

The next day, Jan. 5, 1945, Folkes proclaimed his innocence for the last time, then said: “So long, everybody.” With a smile on his face, he walked into the gas chamber in the state prison at Salem, Ore., without a blindfold. About 100 witnesses watched as the poison pellets were dropped at 9:07 a.m. Six minutes later, Folkes was pronounced dead.

 

Forsyth, Francis Robert George, and Harris, Norman James, and Darby, Christopher Louis, and Lutt, Terrence, prom. 1960, Brit. Four broke, young men prowled the streets late at night on June 25, 1960, and met up with 23-year-old Alan Jee who had taken a shortcut down an alley. Francis Forsyth, Norman Harris, Christopher Darby, and Terrence Lutt found him alone and vulnerable. Lutt, only seventeen, knocked Jee down, then the others tried to take his money. When Jee resisted, 18-year-old Forsyth kicked him in the head with his pointed Italian shoes. The shoes still showed traces of blood when he was arrested.

Alan Jee died two days later. When 23-year-old Harris bragged about the killing in public, the police found the foursome. Forsyth admitted the crime in his mother’s presence, saying, “I’m sorry, Mum, but I did it, and that is all there is to it.” The four were tried for murder. Lutt, as a juvenile, was sent to reform school. Darby, a 23-year-old coalman who did not, according to all four, play a role in beating Jee, was sentenced to life in prison. Forsyth and Harris were hanged on Nov. 10, 1960.

 

Fortner, Clifford, 1944- , U.S. When 12-year-old Lorna Lax left her parents’ home near San Francisco on Nov. 14, 1959, she left a note stating she was “mad at the world” and would return the next morning. Her parents were not alarmed, explaining later that Lorna was “an unfortunate child, physically retarded and emotionally troubled.” When she had not returned by Monday morning, they grew concerned. That afternoon Norman Fortner, thirteen, found Lorna’s body in a wooded area about two hundred yards from her home. Fortner told how Lax had often used the thicket as a “sex club,” charging “initiation fees” of thirty-five cents to a dollar to local boys. Visitors to the sex club were questioned. Clifford Fortner, fifteen, told police he had gone to the thicket with Lorna early that night. Eventually, Fortner admitted that he had had sex with Lorna and then “something came over him.” He first battered her head with a torch, then strangled her with a rope from a swing nearby, and finally stabbed her in the stomach several times. Fortner was sentenced to be detained for an indefinite time.

 

Fowler, George E., and Leatherberry, J.C., prom. 1943, Brit. Two American soldiers stationed in Colchester, England, during WWII were charged and convicted of murder.

An abandoned taxi was discovered with its lights still on at 11:30 a.m. on Dec. 8, 1943, between Birch and Colchester. There was evidence of a struggle inside the car, including a bloodstained raincoat and a blue jacket with a sleeve inside out, identified as that of driver Claude Hailstone. Hailstone was last heard from the previous night between 11:00 and 11:10, when he told his landlady he would not be stopping for dinner because he had a job. Hailstone’s body was later discovered lying in the bushes, scratched and bruised. He had been struck repeatedly and killed by strangulation. Blood from Hailstone’s coat was of the rare AB type.

A raincoat found along the road was traced to Captain J.J. Weber of the 18th Canadian General Hospital, Colchester, who led police to Private George Fowler. Apparently Weber and Fowler had met and had drinks together. When Weber left the room, Fowler grabbed the overcoat and ran out.

Fowler denied any knowledge of Weber or the December killing, but a search of his belongings turned up a sergeant’s tunic with type AB bloodstains, and a Dec. 6 pawn ticket for a Rolex Victory watch, which Weber had already told police was in the overcoat pocket. Fowler testified that he found the pawn ticket on Dec. 3 or 4, but the watch was not pawned until Dec. 6. Fowler frequently changed his testimony, and contradicted concrete evidence. He fit Weber’s description of the man who took his coat. Fowler tried to absolve himself by implicating Private J.C. Leatherberry. According to Fowler, the two men had been riding in Hailstone’s cab, Leatherberry with the expressed purpose of robbing the driver. Fowler said that when the cab stopped in Colchester, he got out and Leatherberry attacked Hailstone. By the time Fowler climbed back in the cab, Leatherberry had killed the driver.

Leatherberry’s story was entirely different. He said he and Fowler were not together the night of the murder. But a search of his belongings revealed a bloodstained shirt, pants, and vest. Investigators found human blood under the nail of the third finger on Fowler’s left hand and under all of Leatherberry’s nails. The woman Leatherberry claimed to have been with on the night of Dec. 7 swore she was not with him then.

Both men were convicted of murder. Fowler was sentenced to life imprisonment with forfeiture of all civil rights, and dishonorably discharged. Leatherberry was sentenced to death by hanging. Just prior to his execution at Shepton Mallet, he confessed to his role in the crime, but said Fowler had actually killed Hailstone.

 

Fraden, Harlow, c.1930- , and Wepman, Dennis, c.1929- , U.S. Harlow Fraden had always been an awkward misfit from his Bronx, N.Y., upbringing onward. His mother’s treatment of him alternated between abuse and overindulgence. In the morning, his mother would tell him he was a sissy whom nobody would ever befriend, and in the evening he slept by an air conditioner while his parents sweltered in the next room. His mother protected him from a fire marshal after he set fire to the apartment one night. His father remained passive.

Fraden’s mother had been nagging him to use his chemistry degree from New York University to get a job “like other boys.” When Fraden immersed himself in poetry instead, she called him a fairy and eventually kicked him out of the house. With a generous allowance from his parents and the financial help of roommate Dennis Wepman, Fraden was managing. But when he still failed to get a job, the allowance was cut off and real problems in the Fraden family began. Aware that he would get $96,00 in insurance at his parents’ death, Fraden and Wepman made plans.

In August 1953 Harlow told his parents he had finally found an appropriate job, and the family gathered for a celebration. The son poured three glasses of champagne, but added cyanide to his mother’s and father’s drinks. After one toast, the two were on the floor. Shortly thereafter, they were dead. Fraden staged it to look like a suicide, but followed the funeral with a series of extravagant purchases and a string of parties. Detectives became suspicious. Fraden and Wepman had a falling out, and in the end Wepman confessed everything.

Fraden was committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane. Wepman was diagnosed as being mentally ill, but not insane, and was sentenced to twenty years to life in Sing Sing.

 

Franc, Max Bernard, 1930- , U.S. On Aug. 25, 1987, a California rancher found a human head and torso alongside a rural highway twenty miles north of Fresno. The head was that of a teenage boy who had dyed black hair which was cut in the current punk fashion, according to the Madeira County coroner. The boy had been shot in the head and had been dead about two days.

Two days later, more body parts were found wrapped in a sheet alongside a guardrail on the Golden State Freeway near Valencia in north Los Angeles County. “Both the torso in Fresno and the body parts in Valencia were mutilated with the same type of instrument, like a chainsaw,” reported Sergeant John Andrews of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office. “The way the remains were hacked, it appears to be the work of the same person.” At the same time a Los Angeles equipment rental company had reported to local police that one of their chainsaws had been returned with what appeared to be blood and skin tissue on it. On Aug. 29, 1987, Los Angeles police arrested the renter, a California State University professor, Max Bernard Franc, fifty-seven, at his weekend apartment in West Hollywood, and charged him with the murder of the boy whose identity had not yet been discovered.

The arrest shocked the Cal State campus at Fresno where Franc, who was single, had taught political science since 1969. “I find it rather incredible that he has been accused of this,” said David Provost, who had once been Franc’s department head. “He’s a very low-key kind of individual….He was one who was always seeking compromise when faculty disputes arose. He was…a very gentle type of individual.”

Another professor at the university reported that “I saw him about ten days ago on campus. He had finished his summer school course and was upbeat, friendly, chatty. He looked as positive and as constructive as I had seen him in years. Nothing seemed amiss….None of this fits the psychology of the person I know…He’s not the kind to blow up. He’s more the kind who tries to avoid a sticky situation.”

But police investigating the man, who was known as a conservative professor in Fresno, found that Franc lived a double life. In West Hollywood, they had learned that he was a known homosexual voyeur who paid young men to allow themselves to be photographed in sexual poses. A search of his house in Fresno uncovered a large collection of homosexual pornography as well as the ongoing construction of what police believed was intended to be a soundproof room. In Franc’s desk at the university, police found a handgun which was later, through ballistics analysis, identified as the murder weapon.

The victim was identified as Tracy Leroy Nute, eighteen, who had followed countless others when he had run away from his Kansas City home in hopes of becoming a Hollywood actor. Instead, Nute ended up on the streets of West Hollywood where he supported himself by working as a homosexual prostitute.

The youth had visited the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center shortly before his murder, reported Youth Services director Gabe Kruks. “He came in on a Saturday, tired of it all. He was seventeen and he wanted help….Underneath Nute’s tough street punk image was a sweet kid, but confused. He had not been happy in Kansas City, but he was not happy here.” Kruks said he had seen many runaways drift into a life of prostitution. “He was like a kid in a candy store, very naive. He was prostituting for survival, both material and emotional. He needed love and a little security.” Instead Nute found Max Bernard Franc, death, and mutilation.

Franc refused to confess to the killing. He told police he had rented the chainsaw to cut up a dead dog that he had hit with his car. Later he admitted that the chainsaw had been used to dismember Nute’s body, but he blamed the killing on an acquaintance named Terry Adams. But Adams was never found and, according to Deputy District Attorney Sterling E. Norris, who prosecuted Franc in front of Judge John H. Reid, “Adams is a figment of the defendant’s imagination.” On June 28, 1988, a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court found Franc Guilty of first-degree murder. On July 29, 1988, Judge Reid sentenced Franc to twenty-five years to life in prison, the maximum allowed by California law, which will leave Franc eligible for parole in 2005 at the age of seventy-five. The judge then told the defendant, “You’re two different people,” and he urged Franc to use his education to help prepare his fellow inmates for life on the outside.

 

Franklin, Timothy, 1928- , Brit. In 1971, Timothy Franklin smashed in his lover’s face, wrapped a rope around her throat, and when she was finally dead, buried her six feet under the wind shelter in his flower garden in an effort to give her a Christian burial.

Franklin, a 43-year-old business consultant from North Otterington, England, met sophisticated Tina Strauss while on a business trip in Jamaica. They soon fell in love and moved in together back in England. But the whirlwind affair was over as quickly as it began. She was tired of life in the small village and he grew weary of her constant complaints and vicious temper; one more threat by her to move back to Jamaica proved more than he could stand. The final fight left Strauss mangled beyond recognition.

Franklin attempted to hide his vicious crime by telling friends Strauss had left him for another man, and once flew to Jamaica to send telegrams in her name to her mother and lawyer saying all was fine on her splendid vacation.

Eventually rumors concerning Strauss’ real fate reached Scotland Yard Detective Arthur Harrison. Harrison contacted Franklin for questioning and knew immediately from his sweaty glance that Franklin had committed murder. All the evidence he needed to convict the killer was the date on Franklin’s passport and corresponding dates on the telegrams Strauss supposedly sent from Jamaica.

In a tearful hearing, Franklin swore he killed his beloved out of self-defense. He was “devoted to her, loved her, cared for her and cherished her.” But he had been overpowered by her and was fearfully forced to crush her skull, nose, cheekbone, jaw, and voice box. The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life in prison at York Assizes.

 

Franks, Robert (Bobby), See: Leopold, Nathan F., Jr.

 

Fratson, George, b.1899, Brit. Despite two attempts at appeal, widespread public doubt of his guilt, and the outright confession by another man, George Fratson remained incarcerated for murder.

Fratson, thirty, was originally sentenced to die at Manchester Assizes, England, on July 9, 1929, for the murder of George Armstrong, 65-year-old manager of a men’s clothing store. Armstrong was in the habit of entertaining young men in his shop after hours. One night he entertained the wrong man, and the next day, May 4, 1929, his body was found on the floor, badly beaten. Fratson was found in a brothel in Preston and immediately arrested. Taken aback, he made fifteen different statements to the police. The first fourteen were contradictory, inconclusive, and incoherent. The fifteenth statement was a confession. At his trial he recanted his confession, claiming he was despondent and wanted to die. However, Fratson was sentenced to die.

After the sentencing, Fratson’s attorney revealed a key fact that the jury had not heard. Fratson was granted a new trial so the jury could learn of a cardboard collar-box that had been found in Armstrong’s shop after the murder. It was stained with blood and marked by a fingerprint that matched neither the victim nor the accused. The new testimony was enough to cast doubt about Fratson’s involvement, but not enough to acquit him of the murder.

On Aug. 9, Fratson was reprieved and given still another chance at the Court of Criminal Appeal. He sat before five King’s Bench judges, instead of the usual three, and all evidence was methodically re-examined. Fratson’s conviction was upheld and he was again given a life sentence. Years later, Fratson went insane and had to be admitted to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (now Broadmoor Institution).

Later still, a man named Walter Prince was found Guilty of murdering a young woman named Harriet Shaw. Faced with the death penalty, he confessed to also having killed George Armstrong. This confession carried little weight, however, when Prince was found to be insane. He was committed to Broadmoor, where both men lived out the remainder of their lives.

 

Frazier, John Linley, 1946- , U.S. The coastal village of Santa Cruz, about forty miles south of San Francisco, Calif., was the setting for a reenactment of the 1969 Manson killings. On Oct. 19, 1970, the home of wealthy eye surgeon Dr. Victor Ohta went up in flames. After firemen brought the blaze under control, they found the bodies of Ohta, his wife, Virginia, their two children, Taggart, eleven, and Derrick, twelve, and the doctor’s secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader. A note attached to the family’s Rolls Royce read, “Halloween 1970. Today WWIII will begin, as brought to you by the people of the Free Universe. From this day forward, anyone and/or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop.” The note was signed “Knight of Wands—Knight of Pentacles–Knight of Cups-Knight of Swords.”

The ritualistic nature of the murders indicated that a cultist familiar with tarot cards was responsible. The groups of hippies camped in the adjacent woods suggested another Manson cult. Police came to suspect 24-year-old John Linley Frazier, a local car mechanic who experimented with hallucinogenic drugs. Frazier was separated from his wife and lived near a hippie commune in Felton. He was known to be a militant ecologist and tarot card practitioner. He had a criminal record at the time of his arrest, and had been seen driving Virginia Ohta’s station wagon the day after the murders. Frazier refused to confirm or deny his guilt, but his fingerprints were found on the Rolls Royce. He was ruled legally sane, tried, and convicted on five counts of murder. Frazier was sentenced to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber, but California abolished the death penalty in 1971, automatically commuting his sentence to life imprisonment.

 

Freedman, Maurice, 1896-1932, Brit. An ex-policeman, Maurice Freedman, thirty-six, professed to be in love with Annete Friedson. Although he was already married, Freedman courted the young woman and constantly promoted the idea that his wife was going to divorce him. Finally, the dissatisfied Friedson decided to end the relationship and told her brother of her decision. On Jan. 26, 1932, just after this decision, Friedson went to her job in London. At about 9:30 a.m., she was found with her throat cut on the stairwell leading up to her office. Freedman was arrested the next morning as he went out for coffee with a friend. Three days after his arrest, a passenger on a bus discovered a blood-spattered safety razor behind the cushion of his seat, and took it to the Snow Street Police station. The bus conductor remembered picking up Freedman at about 10:50 a.m. the morning of the killing. Freedman was tried at the Old Bailey before Justice Hawke on Mar. 8, with prosecutor Sir Percival Clarke bringing out that the unusual blood type found on the razor matched Friedson’s own. Freedman claimed that he had gone to see the woman to change her mind about leaving him, and had brought an old fashioned straight razor along to frighten her into believing he was going to kill himself if she did not change her mind. After pleading his case with her on the stairs, he had taken the razor out and laid it against his throat, they had struggled, and she had been accidentally slashed. The safety razor blade, which was obviously the murder weapon, and which the accused said he had never seen before, would not have been able to deliver a fatal cut or cuts under those circumstances. Freedman was found Guilty of murder and was executed at Pentonville Prison on May 4, 1932.

 

Freeman, Jeannace, 1940- , and Jackson, Gertrude, 1928- , U.S. Jeannace Freeman and Gertrude Jackson took Jackson’s two children for a walk in Oregon’s Peter Skene Ogden Park. Freeman and Jackson had been lovers ever since Jackson’s husband left her and the children. Freeman, who dominated Jackson, had been raped at the age of four by her male baby sitter.

In the park, Freeman stripped the 6-year-old boy and strangled him to death. Once he was dead, Freeman castrated the boy with a knife and threw his body over a cliff. Jackson then joined her in the murder of the girl. The women tossed her into the canyon to land near her brother.

The naked bodies of the two children were discovered by a park visitor who told rangers she had seen two children’s dolls lying at the bottom of Crooked River Canyon. Rangers identified the children as those of Gertrude Jackson, who had left her Eugene, Ore., home two days before with Freeman.

The two women were captured in Oakland, Calif., after a description of their car led investigators to a used car lot where Jackson had sold the automobile. They were arrested at their home and charged with the murders. Jackson immediately confessed to the crimes and explained that Freeman was the dominant partner in their relationship and had engineered the children’s deaths.

Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The sentences were commuted to life in 1964.

 

Freeman, John Gilbert, 1930- , U.S. Described as “a danger to society,” John Gilbert Freeman was to be released from the Arizona State Mental Hospital in 1975 after four years of confinement. A 1971 diagnosis of mental incompetence kept Freeman from standing trial for the murder of seven people. By 1975, it was technically illegal to indict him.

The Arizona prosecutor’s office was outraged, and a legal battle ensued between the state’s attorney and defense counselors. The state supreme court reviewed Freeman’s case, and ruled that he could indeed be indicted because the 1971 diagnosis prevented the state from indicting within the specified 120 days. In early 1975, Freeman stood trial for the murder of seven people in Phoenix on the evening of Sept. 3, 1971.

In May 1970, Freeman’s wife, complaining of her husband’s behavior, left their Phoenix home with their two children. Freeman searched for a way to explain his wife’s actions. A former co-worker had recently told him of his extramarital affair. Freeman became obsessed with the idea that the unfaithful man had seduced his wife and caused the abrupt end of his marriage. He flew to destinations around the country looking for the adulterous couple. He frequently visited Novella Bentley, his former friend’s wife, and questioned her about her estranged husband’s activities. Bentley was never able to give him any information.

On the night of Sept. 3, 1971, Freeman purchased two .38-caliber revolvers and ammunition before visiting Novella Bentley. When Freeman arrived, Bentley was entertaining relatives in her Phoenix home. Freeman burst into the house and shot Bentley, her daughter, and her daughter’s husband. Four children slept through the attack in a back bedroom. Freeman reloaded the guns, and shot each of the children in the head. Police apprehended him as he walked from the house. Shortly thereafter he was found insane and transferred to a mental hospital.

In 1975, the jury found Freeman Guilty and the judge sentenced him to seven consecutive life terms. Following sentencing, Freeman was ordered back into treatment at the mental facility that had previously certified him sane.

 

Freeway Strangler, The, See: Bonin, William.

 

French, Harry, 1907- , U.S. “Tonight about 6:30 Harry French shot Claude L. McCracken, editor of the Modoc Mail, with an automatic pistol. Condition of McCracken serious,” was the message received by wire services on the evening of Mar. 25, 1937. The story was sent by McCracken as he died in his Alturas, Calif., office after being shot five times by French, the son of a rival newspaper publisher.

McCracken, forty-six, editor and publisher of the Modoc County Daily Mail and Associated Press correspondent, was eating dinner at his home with two newspaper employees when the drunken French burst into the house and shot him five times. French was the son of R.A. and G.P. French, who had been involved in a professional rivalry since McCracken began publishing the Modoc Mail three years earlier.

The resentment started in 1934 when McCracken moved to Alturas and began printing his daily Modoc Mail in direct competition to the French family’s established weekly, the Plaindealer & Modoc County Times. For years, the two publishers had playfully insulted each other often printing practical jokes and insinuations about the other in their respective newspapers. The Frenches’ response to a McCracken letter ridiculing the Plaindealer was to print a falsified story on the McCrackens’ arrest for narcotics. McCracken then ran several stories in the Modoc Mail listing individuals named French who had been arrested for various crimes. On the day of his death, the Modoc Mail ran a story about a Montana man named French who was hanged for stealing horses.

Upon surrendering to police, immediately after the shooting, Harry French confessed and said, “I have stood all of the insults my family can stand.” He was convicted by an Alturas court on July 2.

 

Friend, Wilbert Felix, 1910- , U.S. On the early morning of Sept. 1, 1936, a woman out for an oceanside walk in La Jolla, Calif., found the badly beaten body of Ruth Muir, forty-eight, a YWCA executive secretary, near a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Following his examination, Dr. F.E. Toomey, the San Diego County coroner’s surgeon reported that the woman had been beaten with a club and raped the night before. San Diego Police concluded the killer crept up behind the vacationing woman as she sat on a bench enjoying the ocean breeze.

Police Chief George Sears ordered a roundup of all persons arrested on morals charges in recent years and by evening more than twenty suspects had been questioned. Two of them, E. Carl Eckdohl, forty-one, and Leon Russell were held for further investigation. Eckdohl had been arrested at his hotel just as he was packing to leave town. Police also issued an all-points-bulletin for a bright yellow roadster which had been driven back and forth in front of Muir’s cottage on the night she was killed. The roadster was never found and neither Eckdohl or Russell was ever charged with the murder. Unknown to police at the time, detectives had actually interviewed the murderer in their initial roundup of suspects. Not until May 1955, almost nineteen years after the murder was the case finally solved.

At that time, Wilbert Friend, forty-four, an unemployed gardener, went to place flowers on his mother’s grave over the Memorial Day weekend. In the fit of remorse that followed, he called the San Diego Union and told a reporter that he had killed Ruth Muir. Friend had been a 25-year-old caddie at the La Jolla Country Club at the time. Friend admitted robbery had been his original motive but when he discovered Muir had no money, he dragged her into the weeds, raped her, then killed her.

The killer’s remorse evaporated by the time Friend came to trial in August 1955; he pleaded not guilty. After examining the details of Friend’s confession a jury found him Guilty of murder and on Aug. 17 Superior Court Judge John A. Hewicker sentenced him to death. The verdict was upheld on appeal, but the California Supreme Court ordered a new sentencing trial. On June 20, 1957, Friend was once again sentenced to die. As the verdict was read, Friend bolted for the back door of the San Diego courtroom. He was tackled by two deputies who dragged him back to the defense table.

There was confusion as to how Friend would be executed. California’s gas chamber law had gone into effect in 1937, a year after the murder, and a provision of that law was that murderers condemned before that date should be hanged. But in August 1958, twenty-two years after the murder, a judge ruled that because Friend had been sentenced to die, the execution could take place in the pea-green gas chamber at San Quentin Prison. Execution was then scheduled for Oct. 10, 1958. On Oct. 8, Governor Goodwin J. Knight commuted the sentence to life in prison. Friend was paroled on Sept. 23, 1974. On Oct. 23, 1978, he was released from parole and, at the age of sixty-eight, Wilbert Friend once again became a free man.

 

Fugate, Caril Ann, See: Starkweather, Charles.

 

Fugmann, Michael, 1884-1937, U.S. During the Easter season in 1936, in the midst of labor strife in the coal-mining region near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., six men received what appeared to be gift boxes of cigars. On Good Friday, Tom Maloney, a former anthracite coal miner’s union leader who had recently defected to the United Mine Workers of America and his 4-year-old son were blown up by a bomb when he opened his box. Shortly thereafter, 70-year-old Mike Gallagher became the victim of a second bomb. Luther Kniffen, a former county sheriff, received a similar parcel, but escaped injury when he inadvertently opened the bottom of the box and saw the deadly contents. Police broadcast warnings and the remaining cigar boxes were returned undetonated.

Michael Fugmann, a fervent opponent of the United Mine Workers, was apprehended and charged in the bombing attacks. Arthur Koehler, who was instrumental in tying Bruno Richard Hauptmann to the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. through the physical evidence of wooden fragments from a ladder rung, was brought to Wilkes-Barre. Koehler determined that the wood used in the bombs matched wood found in the home of Fugmann. Fugmann was subsequently convicted of the murders and executed in the electric chair in June 1937.

 

Fullam, Augusta Fairfield, 1876-1914, India. While stationed with her husband Edward in Agra, India, Augusta Fairfield Fullam began a love affair with Dr. Henry Lovell William Clark, a Eurasian assigned to the Indian Subordinate Medical Service. The couple met at a military ball in 1911. Clark told Fullam that he found his wife and four children no longer desirable, and Fullam responded by saying that she had had about enough of her husband, an accounts examiner. Fullam and Clark began to see each other regularly and started a correspondence that was to be their undoing. Clark wrote several notes to his wife, one of which read: “I am fed up with your low disgusting ways, for I am quite sure you don’t care a damn what becomes of me. With fond love and kisses to self and the rest at home, I remain, Your affectionate husband, H.L. Clark.”

By the autumn of 1911, both marriages had deteriorated badly. Mrs. Fullam resolved to kill her husband, and enlisted Dr. Clark, whose medical skills helped him select a suitable poison for the job. It was decided that sprinkling arsenic in Edward’s soup would simulate heatstroke. But after Augusta applied inordinate quantities of the poison to the food with no visible effect, Clark injected Fullam with a powerful dose of an alkaloid poison known as gelsemine. Fullam died on Oct. 19, 1911, from what Clark recorded as “heatstroke.”

On Nov. 17, 1912, four Indians with swords crept into Mrs. Clark’s bedroom and slashed her to ribbons. The killers took the sum of 100 rupees, or about $5 per man. When questioned by police about his movements on the night of the murder, Clark said he was dining with Mrs. Fullam. Investigators searched her residence and found a large tin box under the bed. An officer who attempted to pry the lid open was sharply reprimanded by the murderess. “That’s Dr. Clark’s dispatch box—you dare not touch it!” Inside the box was a stack of carefully preserved letters. The correspondence told of the unfolding murder plot, and it proved to be enough evidence to convict the pair before the judges of the high court in Allahabad. Clark was executed on Mar. 26, 1913, after his lover turned king’s evidence.

Augusta Fullam bore Clark’s baby in prison. A year later, on May 29, 1914, she died in prison from what doctors diagnosed as heatstroke.

 

Furnace, Samuel James, 1890-1933, Brit. Samuel Furnace, a builder who served in the Black and Tans Regiment during the Irish uprising of 1921, tried to fake his death to hide a murder. On the night of Jan. 3, 1933, in a dilapidated wooden shed in Kentish Town, he murdered his friend, Walter Spatchett, from whom he had borrowed £60. Furnace had rented the building, allegedly for business purposes, and it was destroyed by a fire of mysterious origin. Firemen pulled from smoldering rubble a man at first believed to be Furnace. The victim apparently left a suicide note that read, “Goodbye to all. No work. No money. Sam J. Furnace.” It was known that Furnace was only £90 in debt. He was happily married and had a child, which made coroner Bentley Purchase doubly suspicious. After examining the body, he concluded that the deceased had been shot in the back of the head, and had not died in the fire. The teeth were those of a much younger man than Furnace. Purchase’s conclusions were confirmed by the discovery of an overcoat found hanging in the shed. It contained a passbook listing the name of the rent collector, Spatchett. Police surmised that Furnace murdered Spatchett for the money he was carrying, and then tried to make it look like suicide.

An intensive manhunt involved nearly every law enforcement agency in Britain. On Jan. 14, Furnace wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, Charles Tuckfield, revealing his whereabouts in Southend. Tuckfield gave the letter to the police, who arrested Furnace. He told police he had shot Spatchett by accident, and not knowing what do, he decided to burn the body beyond recognition and then fake his own death. He threw the murder weapon into Regent’s Canal. In his cell, Furnace consumed hydrochloric acid and died at St. Pancras Hospital the next day. The coroner’s jury found Furnace Guilty of murder.