"I know an awful lot about the Joe Arridys of this world because I've worked with them in the community all my life," Perske says. "Joe, he never gave any data. This was a case of a sheriff who saw one more chance to be famous."
Much of the "data" Arridy did provide in his confession turned out to be wildly untrue. He said he ran from the Drain home to his family's house, where his mother and sister beat him and kept him in an upstairs room for days. He provided several addresses for his family, none of which panned out; the detectives who tried to check out his story soon learned that his family hadn't seen him in years, and that the bungalow in which they lived had a dusty attic that hadn't been entered by anyone for a long time.
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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Arridy also confessed to other recent assaults. A woman in Colorado Springs said that a picture of Arridy in the newspaper looked exactly like the man who'd attacked her on August 23, and Arridy readily admitted to the crime. The only problem was that investigators soon determined that he arrived in Cheyenne three days before the Springs assault and stayed there, working with a Union Pacific kitchen crew until he was arrested on August 26. Cigarette thefts, rape, murder — the agreeable Arridy would have 'fessed up to the Lindbergh kidnapping if they asked the question right.
Yet Arridy wasn't the only one telling strange tales about the Drain murder. After first denying that he knew Arridy, Aguilar changed his story, too. Several days into his interrogation, Aguilar gave a statement in which he claimed to have met Arridy in a park a few hours before the murder. The two of them plotted the attack on the Drain girls — Aguilar had already learned that the parents were going out that night — and then carried it out together. Much of the "confession" consisted of terse yes-no answers to leading questions ("Then Joe assaulted the big girl, didn't he?"). Aguilar later disavowed the whole thing, claiming that he'd been threatened and bullied into signing it.
Coerced or not, the statement reeked of desperation, a diversionary tactic by a man who could feel the noose tightening and was eager to share the blame. Perske found it ludicrous. Even if it could be positively established that Arridy was in Pueblo the day of the murder, one would have to believe that Aguilar, the prime suspect in a series of brutal but carefully planned attacks on women, had impulsively recruited a dull-witted stranger, fresh off a boxcar, to join him in his latest homicidal venture. A unique crime of the ages, indeed.
Yet what most impressed Perske wasn't Aguilar's ever-changing story; it was Joe's own words. He was allowed to speak for himself in court only once, for a few brief moments in a sanity hearing, during which the defense argued that he was too imbecilic to know the difference between right and wrong.
In response to a series of questions from the prosecutor and his own attorney, Arridy said he didn't know who Franklin Roosevelt was — or George Washington, for that matter. He didn't know Dorothy Drain or Frank Aguilar. He didn't know what a hatchet was. He didn't know why he was in court. He did know the difference between a dime and a nickel, and he did recognize the doctors from the state hospital who had been on the stand before him, "talking about me."
"What about you?" prosecutor Ralph Neary asked.
"Oh, about something," Arridy replied.
"Don't you know what they were talking about?"
"No. Forgot."
"Can you tell me anything they talked about?"
"I don't think so."
********
The murder of Dorothy Drain touched off waves of hysteria and political recrimination across Colorado, much of it directed at the phantom menace of train-hopping, sex-crazed mental defectives who needed to be put away, if not put down. Governor Edwin "Big Ed" Johnson fired off a telegram to Ben Jefferson, demanding a full report on the Arridy boy and an explanation why "this pervert" hadn't been transferred from the low-security institution in Grand Junction to the state asylum months ago. "Have you any more dangerous persons in your school who should have closer supervision than you are equipped to give?" he blustered.
PEOPLE OF COLORADO BLAMED FOR IMBECILES RUNNING LOOSE, blared a headline in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. The story claimed that the state had six times more imbeciles than could fit in existing institutions: "Some of them are dangerous criminals, and some of them are sex perverts.... Hundreds of them are hidden in homes under the watchful care of loving relatives."
Chief Grady had vowed there would be no lynching; Arridy and Aguilar were kept in cells at the state prison at Cañon City, rather than the Pueblo jail, out of fear of mob violence. But the climate hadn't improved by the time the cases went to trial.
Aguilar went first. His attorney, Vasco Seavy, labored unsuccessfully to exclude his client's multiple confessions, including one Aguilar made to Riley Drain when the grieving father joined in the prison interrogations. But it was another member of the Drain family — young Barbara, who'd spent weeks in the hospital recovering from the beating she received — whose testimony made the case. At DA Taylor's urging, the girl stepped down from the stand, stood in front of Aguilar, and identified him as the man she saw in her bedroom the night she and her sister were attacked. She didn't say anything about a second man.
