A Shocking and Senseless Crime.
On April 18, 1936, an unidentified intruder (referred to as a "degenerate" in newspaper coverage of the crime) entered a home in Pueblo, Colorado through an unlocked door. The owners of the house were not present but their two daughters, fifteen-year-old Dorothy and twelve-year-old Barbara, were asleep in their beds. After clubbing Dorothy to death with a blunt hatchet he had been carrying, the intruder then clubbed Barbara over the head as well. Barbara was left unconscious and the killer fled the scene. Their parents discovered them both the next morning. After Barbara was rushed to hospital, police determined that Dorothy had been sexually assaulted before her death. Tracking dogs were used at the Drain house but no trail was found.
The rape and murder of Dorothy Drain and the attempted murder of her sister was apparently linked to other crimes that had occurred in the Pueblo area over the previous few weeks. Another murder had taken place on August 2 with a woman being bludgeoned to death while her sleeping niece had her skull fractured though it wasn't clear whether the killings had been committed by the same person. Another girl reported being molested near the Drain home though she managed to get away from her assailant.
Police began questioning potential suspects and even offered a $500 reward for information leading to an arrest. Acting on a hunch, the Pueblo sheriff placed men among the mourners at Dorothy Drain's funeral. Among the mourners was Frank Aguilar who was employed on one of the local Works Progress Administration projects supervised by Dorothy's father. Aguilar raised suspicions at the funeral by his odd behaviour and unusual questions about the Drain investigation. Though he was known to be married with three children, he was taken in for questioning. An axe was found at his home which was seized because it resembled the one used at the Drain home.
Arresting Joe Arridy
Another break in the case came later in August when police in Cheyenne, Wyoming picked up 21-year-old Joe Arridy for vagrancy and linked him to the murder of Dorothy Drain. Arridy was the son of two Syrian immigrants who had immigrated to the United States and settled in Pueblo. Despite being born and raised in Pueblo, Arridy was an outcast for most of his life due to his intellectual deficits. He had been an inmate of the Home for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado until his escape on August 2 of that same year. Aside from being a fugitive and a known resident of Pueblo, the evidence linking Arridy to the Drain murder was purely circumstantial. Still, police were able to extract a confession from him after three hours of interrogation.
In the verbal confession he provided, Arridy reportedly stated that he had entered the Drain home after seeing the parents leave the house at 11:00 PM on the evening of April 16. After finding a light switch, he then proceeded to the bedroom the two girls were sleeping in and "criminally assaulted" Dorothy Drain before clubbing her to death with a hatchet he had been carrying. He then clubbed Barbara as well and believed that he had killed both of them. When asked why he had committed the crime, Arridy is said to have replied, "Just for meanness."
After leaving the Drain home, his mother supposedly hid him for a week before he hopped on a train and fled to Cheyenne. Police also took in members of Arridy's family for questioning. Though they insisted that they hadn't seen Joe in years, their houses were searched and two axes were seized as possible murder weapons. As for Arridy himself, he was kept in custody in Cheyenne due to fears that a mob might lynch him if he were returned to Pueblo. Much of the anger directed against the prisoner could be traced to the inflammatory news coverage of the case, all of which proclaimed the crime as being "solved" despite Arridy not even standing trial yet. Most newspapers provided full details of his confession along with any other details of the investigation they could find. There was no mention of Frank Aguilar at first since police were still trying to link the two men.
Building a Case
While Arridy was quietly transferred to the Colorado state penitentiary for safe keeping, police worked to build a case against him. Though one witness was able to verify that Arridy had been in the area of the Drain home about the time of the murder, no other physical evidence could be found. There was no trace of the axe that he had allegedly used and Barbara Drain was unable to describe her assailant when she woke from her coma. The superintendent of the institution that Arridy escaped from came to Pueblo along with police from Cheyenne to aid in the investigation. Interestingly enough, there was no attempt at linking Dorothy Drain's murder to the previous axe murder that had taken place in Pueblo. Since Arridy had an ironclad alibi for the earlier killing, police ignored a possible link.
Along with public outrage over the Drain murder, there was political pressure over how Arridy had managed to escape from the asylum where he had been kept. Colorado's governor ordered all violent inmates from the asylum to be transferred to the penitentiary (regardless of whether they had been charged with anything).
Unfortunately, problems with Arridy's testimony began almost immediately. Described by police as having "the mind of a child", Arridy's confession yielded numerous contradictory details. For example, he had originally said that he had struck the fatal blow with a club though this was later changed to an axe under further questioning. He also mentioned being with a "man named Frank" and was "persuaded" to implicate Aguilar. Not surprisingly, Frank Aguilar denied any involvement in the murders.
More holes in the case began to emerge as some of the other inmates who had escaped with Joe Arridy were recaptured and questioned about what happened after they left the asylum. Val Higgins, chairman of the state board of control (which managed the asylum) went on record in saying that he doubted Arridy was guilty and that even other officers were uncertain whether his confession was true.
Then came a new development on September 3. Frank Aguilar confessed to the murder of Dorothy Drain following nine hours of intense questioning by a tag team of interrogators including prosecutors and prison warden Roy Best. In this new confession, Aguilar and Arridy had carried out the killing together. Any doubts over Joe Arridy''s confession were set aside and the Pueblo district attorney announced that the case was "completely solved."
Going to Trial
The trial of Frank Aguilar and Joe Arridy turned into a media spectacle. Since both men faced the gas chamber if convicted, potential jurors were carefully questioned over whether they had any reluctance over imposing the death (one juror changed his mind in mid-trial). Along with Aguilar's attorney, his mother, wife, and three children were also in attendance. The defense focused on whether the confession was obtained through "merciless grilling" leading to a false confession. Since Aguilar was also "feeble-minded", newspapers began calling for more rigid laws to ensure that similarly "feeble-minded" individuals could be properly incarcerated where they couldn't do any harm.
After an eight-day trial, Frank Aguilar was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain. The trial had come to an abrupt close after Aguilar's defense attorney told the court that his client had confessed to him. Though he tried to change his client's plea to guilty by reason of insanity, this was denied and the death sentence was handed down instead.
As for Joe Arridy, the outcome of his trial in January seemed almost a foregone conclusion.
Newspaper coverage already declared him guilty and his attorney made no attempt to question any of the evidence against him or how his confession had been obtained. The only real sticking point was whether some so mentally challenged could be held responsible for his actions. Testing revealed that he had an IQ of 45 and three state psychiatrists agreed that Arridy was "“incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and therefore, would be unable to perform any action with a criminal intent." There was also the fact that Barbara Drain had only identified Frank Aguilar as being at the crime scene and not Arridy.
Still, Frank Aguilar's confession implicating Arridy, along with the anger surrounding Dorothy Drain's murder, overrode any of these objections. While there would be no question of executing someone with this kind of intellectual disability today, the 1930s was a very different time. It only took a jury four hours to find Joe Arridy guilty and to recommend the death sentence in his case.
"You Can't Kill Joe Arridy"
Both Arridy and Frank Aguilar were held at Colorado state penitentiary where the executions would be carried out. In Frank Aguilar's case, the execution took place on August 13, 1937, only months after his conviction. It was a bizarre spectacle considering that a witness died of a heart attack at the same time that Aguilar died in the gas chamber. His elderly mother died in hospital soon afterward. Riley Drain, father of Dorothy Drain, voiced his satisfaction at watching Aguilar die. "I am happy tonight," he told the press. "But the job is only half done. I want to be there when Joe Arridy goes too."
But not everyone agreed that Joe Arridy deserved to die. Warden Roy Best, a man who was widely known for his tough-minded stance on crime, found himself sympathizing with this condemned inmate who had the mind of a child. He even bought a toy train for Arridy to play with and later described him as "the happiest man on Death Row." Along with a warm bed and regular meals, Joe Arridy was happy at being treated better than he ever had been in his life. He certainly never experienced any of the teasing or bullying he had endured for much of his life. Guards, inmates, and the prison chaplain, Albert Schaller, went out of their way to protect him from the brutal realities of his imprisonment. Whenever he wound up his toy train and sent it along the floor of the cell block, another inmate would wind it up and send it back to him.
It was Warden Best who recruited Gail L. Ireland, a crusading attorney would would later become Colorado's attorney-general. Through his dogged efforts, Ireland managed to secure nine stays of execution until the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in a three to two decision to let the execution proceed. The end finally came on January 6, 1939, two years after Frank Aguilar's execution. The governor of Colorado had already phoned the warden and told him to schedule the execution. Albert Schaller and Roy Best then proceeded to explain to Joe Arridy that he was scheduled to die. As Roy Best told reporters, the condemned prisoner seemed unable to understand that he would be executed. At one point, he was quoted as saying, "You can't kill Joe Arridy because Joe Arridy never killed anybody."
Even on the day of his execution, Joe Arridy requested ice cream and lots of it for his final meal . Whether he was fully aware of what was going to happen seems hard to guess at this late date though he definitely enjoyed being the centre of attention. Albert Schaller came in and carefully read the last rites to him and Joe crossed himself before going back to play with his train. Then Roy Best came in and read the death warrant before he was taken to the gas chamber to be executed. To ensure that everything was in working order, a pig had been killed in the chamber one day previously.
Stopping only to give his toy train to his death row neighbour, Arridy was placed in the chamber where he was strapped down and blindfolded. Roy Best patted his hand and the chaplain gave him a simple, "Goodbye Joe" before the chamber was closed. No members of the Drain family were in attendance though Joe' s mother had been there for one final visit before the execution. Grinning until the very end, he took three deep gulps of the hydrogen cyanide gas that ended his life. He was formally declared dead just minutes after the gas cleared from the chamber. The next day, Joe Arridy was buried the next day in the Woodpecker Hill cemetery on prison grounds.
Was Justice Done?
So, was he really guilty? Or did the police take advantage of his intellectual disabilities to extract a false confession? Decades after his execution, Joe Arridy's case has become a rallying point for opponents of the death penalty as well as disability activists. In 1995, Robert Perske, a prominent legal activist working for the rights of the intellectually disabled, published a troubling book looking at the Arridy case and numerous others like it. The book, Unequal Justice?, highlighted how vulnerable people with intellectual deficits or similar disabilities are to giving a false confession during police interrogations. Describing Joe Arridy's conviction, along with over seventy other cases in which people coerced into giving false confession, Perske's book generated renewed interest into Joe Arridy's case. Inspired by the book, a group calling itself The Friends of Joe Arridy launched a grassroots campaign for a posthumous pardon.
On January 7 2011, Colorado governor Bill Ritter Jr. issued an unconditional pardon for Joe Arridy, the first of its kind in Colorado's history. The pardon came nine years after the landmark Atkins v. Virginia case outlawing the execution of prisoners deemed to be mentally retarded. Today though, police interrogation of suspects with intellectual disabilities is still a controversial issue in many jurisdictions and cases of false imprisonment involving disabled prisoners continue to be reported by groups such as the Innocence Project.
Visitors to the Woodpecker Hill cemetery on the grounds of Colorado's state prison can find Joe Arridy's carefully tended grave. A new tombstone, two feet tall, was placed on the grave in 2006. It features a picture of Joe and his toy train.
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