Amid highly publicized security, Arridy was taken to Pueblo and escorted through the Drain home, where he re-enacted the scenario he'd provided about he and Frank turning off lights and attacking the girls. Then he was taken to police headquarters for a confrontation with Frank Aguilar, witnessed by several officers.
"That's Frank," Arridy said.
Found wandering the Cheyenne train yards, Joe Arridy promptly confessed to a notorious Pueblo murder — and other crimes he couldn't have committed.
Sheriff George Carroll called Arridy insane — but changed his opinion at trial; a jury took 28 minutes to find Frank Aguilar guilty of killing Dorothy Drain and sentence him to death.
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Aguilar studied his accuser. "I never seen him before," he said.
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The more Bob Perske learned about who Joe Arridy was, the more convinced he became that Arridy could not have done the things the police insisted he had. The greater mystery was why anyone in authority at the time, who had access to all the same information and more, could have believed he had.
Arridy was born in Pueblo in 1915, the son of Syrian immigrants who were also first cousins. His father, Henry, worked in one of Colorado Fuel and Iron's foundries. The couple had several children who died young. At least one of Joe's brothers who did live, George, was considered mildly retarded — or, as the doctors put it, a "high moron."
Joe was a more severe case. He didn't utter his first words until he was five. After one year of elementary school, his parents were informed by the principal that he was incapable of learning and should stay home. For several years, he did just that — hammering nails, making mud pies, keeping mostly to himself. When he was ten, his parents were persuaded to commit him to the Colorado State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction.
Perske found the tests Joe took as part of his evaluation at the school. They indicate that he could not correctly identify colors or explain the difference between a stone and an egg. He couldn't repeat a sequence of four numbers. He was described as "slow," with a "stupid, distant look." His examiners considered his father to be of average intelligence; his mother, Mary, was described as "probably feeble-minded."
Henry Arridy regretted putting his son in an institution and took him home after only ten months. But Joe had little supervision there; Henry lost his job and was soon in jail for bootlegging. Joe wandered all over town. At fourteen, he came to the attention of a juvenile probation officer, who wrote a furious letter to the superintendent of the state home, demanding that he be recommitted.
"He is one of the worst Mental Defective cases I have ever seen," the officer wrote. "I picked him up this morning for allowing some of the nastiest and Dirtiest things done to him that I have heard of."
According to the officer, Joe had been "manipulating the penis of Negro Boys with his mouth" and allowing said boys "to enter the 'dirty road' with their penis." ("I would be more technical," the officer explained apologetically, "but do not know the terms.") In another time, Arridy might have been deemed an at-risk teen who'd been sexually exploited by older youths. But in 1929, he was simply a pervert who had to be locked away.
A court sent him back to the state home. He spent the next seven years there, where he learned to wash dishes, mop floors and do other simple chores. The superintendent, Dr. Benjamin Jefferson, regarded him as highly suggestible and vulnerable, often taken advantage of by other boys; at one point, he confessed to stealing cigarettes when he clearly wasn't the culprit. His family asked several times if he could be sent home, but Jefferson responded that Joe's "perverse habits" made it advisable to keep him there. He didn't try to peep at the girls, like some of the boys, but he was inclined to "masturbation, sodomy and oral practices on other boys of his erratic type," Jefferson noted. "His affection is always towards other boys...never towards the female sex."
Shortly after he turned 21, Arridy ran away from the state home, only to return on his own. Then he disappeared again. He was joined in the Grand Junction train yards by three other walkaways. Five days before the Drain murder, they hopped an eastbound freight. The train pulled into Pueblo the next day. That night, they rode it back to Grand Junction. According to one other escaped youth, Arridy was still in the Grand Junction railyard on August 13, 48 hours before the murder. The same youth insisted that he and Arridy didn't make it back to Pueblo until the evening of August 16 — the day after the murder. Then Joe rode the rails alone to Denver and Cheyenne, where Carroll arrested him.
The alibi witness was never called to testify on Arridy's behalf. Perhaps his account was considered unreliable; he was, after all, another "feeble-minded" unfortunate. But how reliable, Perske wondered, was the confession Arridy made in Cheyenne?
The circumstances were certainly suspicious. No one heard the bulk of Arridy's story but Carroll, who made no effort to record it. Arridy started out talking about a club, then it became a hatchet; Carroll knew from the newspapers that it had to be an ax. Arridy didn't start blaming "Frank" for the murder until after Carroll talked to Chief Grady and discovered that Frank Aguilar had already been arrested. And how likely was it that Arridy, who still couldn't get the names of colors right, had provided a detailed description of the Drain home — unless he was prompted in some way?
