********
First to trial, first to be convicted of the Drain murder, Aguilar also got the gas first. He did not go gently.
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.
Details
Related Content
More About
On his last day — August 13, 1937, an unlucky Friday — he had a hell of a row with his wife in his cell. His octogenarian mother collapsed and was taken to the prison hospital. He was hauled to the death house "whimpering and cringing," the Denver Post gleefully reported.
It was one of the most heavily attended executions in state history. Riley Drain had a front-row seat as Aguilar bucked, strained against the straps and fought the cyanide gas for almost a full minute. One of the spectators, a Missouri Pacific railroad conductor, dropped dead of a heart attack just as Aguilar expired.
Reporters made much of the fact that Aguilar's henchman, Joe Arridy, did not bid him farewell during his march from death row. But then, Arridy had told the men in court that he didn't know Frank Aguilar.
That same day, Sheriff Carroll and the two railroad employees who nabbed Arridy collected a $1,000 reward for solving the case.
********
Like Sheriff Carroll, the warden of the Colorado State Penitentiary was a tough lawman who knew his bad apples. But Roy Best could see a world of difference between the likes of Frank Aguilar and little Joe Arridy.
A former state patrolman and driver for the governor, Best had been one of the troops called out to put down a bloody riot that all but gutted the pen in '29. In the shakeup that followed, he became, at 31, one of the youngest wardens in state history. He would stay on the job for twenty years.
Best not only rebuilt the prison, he remade it, according to his own hard-nosed ideas about discipline and rehabilitation. He pushed for better sanitation, silent periods, individual cells, prison industries, an array of privileges that could be used to reward good behavior. He preferred to flog convicts who misbehaved rather than send them to solitary confinement. He befriended (and all but adopted) some of the prison's most vulnerable inmates, including Jimmy Melton, who'd been tried as an adult for murdering his sister when he was twelve.
Arridy was one of Best's special cases. The warden brought him picture books, a battery-powered toy car — and, toward the end of his stay, the toy train. "Joe Arridy is the happiest man who ever lived on death row," Best told reporters.
The twenty months Arridy spent in Best's domain were unlike anything he had known before. Taking their cue from the warden, the guards didn't harass him. The other condemned men humored him and put up with his games. They didn't call him a feeb, a pervert or, worse, a diseased germ plasma. Perhaps he reminded them of the children they had once been. To others, it may not have seemed like much of a life, but it was something like acceptance.
Yet when Bob Perske retraced those last months of Arridy's life, he couldn't help feeling that his subject had become a kind of afterthought in the Drain investigation, collateral damage in someone else's scheme. He had been required for a specific purpose, to provide a confession implicating Aguilar, and now he was expendable.
"They needed Joe to get Aguilar," Perske says. "But you couldn't unring a bell. Once they had what they wanted, people just gave up on him."
One man did not give up. Prominent Denver attorney Gail Ireland agreed to take on Arridy's appeals at the request of Ben Jefferson, the superintendent of the state home. Correspondence between the two reveals that both men were convinced of Arridy's innocence; but as a legal strategy, Ireland's briefs didn't contest "the fact that Arridy was present when the crime was committed." Instead, Ireland challenged the finding that Arridy was sane. A man who is mentally incompetent cannot adequately defend himself at trial, Ireland argued, and cannot be legally executed in such a condition.
Ireland obtained nine stays of execution. The Colorado Supreme Court found his arguments intriguing, but, as Justice Norris Bakke opined, their job was to interpret "the law of the state as it now is, not under what we wish it might, or should, or may be at some time in the future."
Arridy was less impressed. He scarcely looked up from his toys when told of the reprieves. He didn't seem distressed when the petitions eventually failed, either. Death was not real, the way the train was. (Headline from the Chieftain: HE DIES FRIDAY BUT LAUGHS TODAY.)
Eleventh-hour appeals for another sanity hearing and for clemency from the governor failed, too. The day of ice cream arrived, and Arridy was persuaded to give up his train and say prayers with the chaplain, who recited slowly, two words at a time, so Arridy could repeat after him: "Our Father...who art...in heaven..."
The little man shook hands with the other doomed men and handed out his toys. A sparse crowd watched him head to the death house, flanked by Best and Father Schaller. Riley Drain had vowed to return to see Arridy executed, but he didn't attend. Outside the chamber, Arridy was stripped to his socks and shorts. He smiled as the guards strapped him to the chair and Best patted his hand. Then he was alone in the room.
