Grady's men grilled swarthy ethnic types and former WPA workers who might have a grudge against Riley Drain, checking alibis. Police departments across the Front Range rousted vagrants, known perverts, immigrants and suspicious characters of all kinds. The manhunt stretched all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming — where, eleven days after the Drain murder, Sheriff George Carroll decided to question a bedraggled young man who'd been found by Union Pacific bulls that afternoon wandering around the railyards.
The man's name was Joe Arridy. He was 21 years old, 5' 5", 125 pounds, with a dark complexion — a description not unlike that of the man seen assaulting women near the Drain home, although Arridy's heritage was Mediterranean, not Mexican. But what caught Carroll's attention was that the kid said he'd come by train from Pueblo.
Antonio Sanchez
Author Robert Perske (left) and attorney David Martinez, who won a posthumous pardon for Arridy in 2011, visit his grave on Woodpecker Hill outside Cañon City.
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A former cowboy and newspaper publisher, Carroll was a bluff, confident lawman with a reputation for breaking big cases — and courting the publicity that went with them. He'd helped to track down Ma Barker and several members of her gang after the murder of one of his deputies. In 1933, he'd cracked the kidnapping of Claude K. Boettcher II, heir of a wealthy Denver family, locating a South Dakota hideout and springing Boettcher unharmed. As the Arridy case would prove, he still had a few headlines left in him.
It took Carroll only a few moments of conversation with Arridy to realize that he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. His speech was slow, his words short and simple. But he seemed willing to talk. Carroll would later tell reporters that he asked the man if he liked girls. Arridy said he liked them fine.
"If you like girls so well, why do you hurt them?" Carroll asked.
According to Carroll, Arridy replied, "I didn't mean to."
Carroll questioned Arridy for almost eight hours over the next two days. He would later testify — from memory, since there were no notes, much less any witnesses, for most of the interrogation — that Arridy had volunteered, in his halting way, a harrowing story about the night Dorothy Drain died. He'd spied on the girls from the bushes outside, seen their parents leaving and snuck inside. He'd hit them in the head, taken his clothes off, assaulted Dorothy, dressed and left.
Certain elements of the story made no sense. At first he talked about hitting them with a club, then changed it to a hatchet. He was unable to say where he got the hatchet. But Carroll insisted that Arridy provided details about the Drain house — the arrangement of the rooms, the color of furniture and the walls in the girls' bedroom — that only someone who had been there would know. He arrested Arridy and called Chief Grady to tell him he had a "nut" who couldn't read or write but seemed to know all about the Drain case.
"He's either crazy or a mighty good actor," Carroll added.
This wasn't the welcome news Carroll expected it to be. As the sheriff soon discovered, Grady already had a suspect named Frank Aguilar who looked awfully good for the Drain job. Aguilar had caught detectives' notice by showing up at Dorothy's funeral in overalls and going twice through the line of mourners at the casket. He'd also approached Riley Drain and tried to hand him a fistful of nickels to "help the family."
The officers arrested him. They learned that Aguilar had worked for Drain on WPA projects and had been discharged by him. He had seen the girls at work sites. At his house police found news clippings about sex slayings around the country and pictures of nude women. In a bucket, under some rags, was a hatchet head with distinctive nicks in it that seemed to match up with the wounds inflicted on Dorothy Drain.
Aguilar insisted he was innocent. His aged mother said that he was home that night. But the evidence suggested otherwise. Even some fingernail scrapings taken from Aguilar contained blue chenille fibers consistent with the bedspread in the girls' bedroom.
Still, Sheriff Carroll had found in Joe Arridy another promising suspect. And this one was dying to confess.
Chief Grady, District Attorney French Taylor and other investigators headed to Cheyenne. Taylor brought the hatchet head recovered from Aguilar's house. Asked if he recognized the hatchet, Arridy said that it belonged to someone named Frank. The story had shifted overnight; now Arridy was claiming that he'd committed the crime with Frank, that it was Frank who'd hit the girls with the hatchet. He offered little other useful information, and Taylor told reporters that the suspect seemed to be hung over "from use of marijuana or something similar."
Grady had to adjust his notions of ax murderers on the spot. He'd been pursuing one fiend. Now it seemed he had two. "It is indeed a rare occurrence when two sexually perverted maniacs join forces outside an institution, and even a rarer occurrence when they combine to commit a sexual crime," he wrote in an article for Official Detective. "The Drain murder undoubtedly will find a place in medical history as one of the most unique crimes of the ages."
