Pardonable Matricide-Tobin T. Buhk

prowled the streets, akin to a real life Jacqueline Hyde. Ultimately, the book delves into the mind of Robert Irving Latimer, known as the most dangerous prisoner in Michigan and the man who inspired talk about resurrecting the state's long dead death penalty. The book they were featuring this evening is Pardonable Matricide Robert Irving Latimer from Michigan's Most Dangerous Inmate to Freeman, with my special guest journalist and author Tobin T. Booch.

Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Tobin T. Book.

see about borgs on TV. And I love history and so they kind of came together, and in there are a couple of cases that are just delightfully delicious. It's probably the wrong word to say in this context, but they're really twisted and interesting. And one of them was the Irving Latimer case. And I had read some paragraphs here and there about the case, but nothing book length.

And when I started to look into it, as often happens with my writing, I discovered that there was a much more to the story than had been told before. So I started digging, and the rocks that I uncovered, the story that I found underneath there is pardonable Mattress side.

you talk about that case. So tell us a little bit about Jackson, Michigan and this case that sets up this very very infamous case in eighteen eighty eight.

major stop for training. Its significance in our area's history is that it housed the state's first maximum security penitentiary, and that would be the only facility for long term inmates until I believe it was eighteen eighty nine or eighteen ninety when they opened up a second branch of Michigan's up. So Jackson is an interesting situation because it's a city within a city. Most of the I wouldn't

say both. Many of the industries that were at work and Jackson were collateral to or supported by the prison itself. What's interesting about this and how it's different from today is that prisoners, when they were sentenced to prison were sentenced to work at hard labor. Someone was given a sentence of twenty years at hard labor, and hard labor was supplied by manufacturers who essentially purchased labor through the prison.

So a lot of like Jackson Wagon Company, which made wagons for nationwide had a factory literally inside the walls of the prison. So Jackson State Penitentiary is actually called the Michigan State Penitentiary. Jackson State Penitentiary at various times in its history was the largest wall prison in the world, and part of the reason for that is because inside the walls they had all these prison industries which were really run by private firms in and around the Jackson area.

So it's happened because it's a city within a city. Was a family that was murdered in cold blood and the case has never really been solved. How it's relevant to pardonable matricide and the Irving Latimer case is that most of the major players, it's not all of the major players, right down to the prosecutor and the defense attorneys, had played some type of role in that case. And what's fascinating is that the world was so different back then.

When these investigators went to take a look at the crime scene, they allowed the public full view of the crime scene, and so you had reporters and members of the public who were just morbidly curious wandering in and around the Crouch farmhouse, and that led to a little bit of a backlash because there was some criticism that the crime scene had been spoiled by all of the

feet that had gone through that. So when the Latimer case came up and Mary Latimer was found playing in her bedroom, they closed off the crime scene to everybody but a reporter. I think there was one lone reporter in the house at the time during the time of the investigation.

have had with an older woman. The family relocated back to Jackson when Irving Latimer was I believe in his late teens and his dad went back into business as a pharmacist, and eventually Irving Latimer followed in his dad's footsteps and purchased the West Side Pharmacy after his dawn unexpectedly passed away and he became he went into the family business, so to speak, and became a pharmacist. The family itself was very well known in Jackson. They were

very well respected. They were not what you would call upper class. You'd call them more like middling class or middle class. The house was a kind of a standard sized eighteen eighties eighteen nineties style house, not real big, but it was real close to a part of Jackson where the Uppercross families did live in their Victorian mansions. And I think that Latimer had a little bit of an eye for that lifestyle. Now he became I think

that there's essentially public Vlatimer in a private Latimer. He You mentioned in the introduction that he was very much a Jackel and Hide character, and I think that's really a great comparison, because the Jackal was the guy that everybody liked. He was the boy next door. He was the guy who dated the ex sheriff's daughter. He was the guy who the families at the church, at the family Church wanted, wanted their boys to emulate. The hide was the guy that came out at night. He was

the one who got high on his own supply. He was the one that took regular trips to Detroit where he spent his time gambling and taking drugs and spending time in the red light district with the prostitutes. The mother and the father were really well respected, but I think that Latimer's reputation eventually caught up to him. He got involved in a couple of scandals that pretty much ruined his reputation when he was in his twenties.

debt because of the hide in him. He was spending his money at night gambling and womanizing and visiting browels in Detroit. So the pharmacy itself would have been a really good business for him, but he had a lot of vices that sort of gotten the way of that. So I think he learned the business from his father, but I don't think he really learned business since from his father.

and alcohol, which is even stronger than laudinum. And people didn't really understand the concept of addiction like they do today, so these substances would have been available over the counter for people as headache remedies. I have a drug label from a Michigan pharmacy just for example, that is paragoric and it's listed as forty seven point five percent alcohol spiked with one point nine grains of opium, So it would be like an ninety four ninety three proof glass

of whiskey spiked with the opium. And on the drug label it give the dosages and the youngest is three months old and they get a couple of the drops of this, and then as ten months old, gets a few more drops, and then we go all the way to an adult who gets a full tea spoonful. So people took the stuff for it for headaches and wow, it felt pretty good. So they started to use it

without really a concept of addiction. And you don't have to go that far back in history, like like my grandfather predated penicillin, and you know, they got sick, they gave the kids a shot or wrong, and it really didn't do anything except treat the symptoms, I think. But we even go back to generation earlier than that they used even harder stuff. And in addition to this, he could have gotten substances beyond that. Substances such as chloroform

was available. If the count ride no idea what people used it for. Maybe if they had stepped on a nail or something and they wanted to take it out put somebody out. People could have gotten their hands on strypt nine and arsenic and strict nine, which is a heavy metal poison, is a rather interesting substance because it was used as a rodent side to kill rats in the granary. But believe it or not, strychnine and fall doses at the time was used as that era's version

of value or diazopin. It was a well, it was an anti anxiety medication, so you could have gotten if we had lived in that era, we could have gotten all kinds of stuff over the counter whatever a carrier caier.

concerned about Mary being alone. Tell us what happens.

work for the latter of her family. And they go in through the basement up into the kitchen and there they find the dog gyp and I think the dog had bloody footprints that he was tracking around the house. But they go up the staircase to her bedroom and that's where they find her kind of a bloody mass.

She had been beaten, she had been shot, She had been slumped over for a chair, and it looked like what happened was she was trying to get to the window, perhaps to open it and call out, when she collapsed and died.

some blood spots on the pillow itself. Now, one of the theories was is that the dog had taken the the handkerchief off of the floor and jumped up on that bed and carried the blood with it, but it didn't quite seem to fit. They also found some blood stains on a gas jet, but probably the single most compelling piece of evidence that they found would have been Mary's dentures, which is essentially then, I think, blown and sprinkled across the floor like marbles. I think is how

I described that in the book. Now, what I mean by being important is that she essentially bit down in her attacker, they thought. And when they did narrow down the field, they it turned out that the attacker had to damage thumb, and that the damage on the thumb would have perfectly fit her bite had he attacked her from behind.

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different than it is today now. When we get through the crime scene hit a pretty good example of a piece of evidence they really wanted to find, which they thought would be like a smoking gun type of proof, but they never did find because the science doesn't support it. And that's something called forensic optography. It was assumed at the time that the human eye functioned just like a camera.

I think the optics are somewhat similar. The physical process behind how a camera took the picture and how the eyeball work were somewhat similar, and that led to the conclusion that a person captured on their eye an image of the last thing they saw in a murder case,

that would inevitably be the killer. So in cases like this this era, they would take a camera and they would prop it up over the body and they would try to take photographs of the eyes and analyze that for the possible image of the killer, which as there's no scientist science behind this, it's maybe a pseudoscience, is what we call that today. But it's a really interesting example of how they did things differently than they did today.

the dog Jip. So again, that's an interesting piece of evidence that suggested it tended to show that the killer may have been intimately equated with Barry Latimer in some shape or form. Brought Robert to He was in Detroit at the time, and he came back to Jackson and he was interviewed in the house with the body still slumped over the chair in the next room, and curiously he had no interest whatsoever in seeing his mother's body.

His affect was off, he didn't seem like he acted like a man who had just lost his beloved mother. And even more suspiciously, he offered up an alibi that just seemed a little too perfect. Combined with the fact that Jip knew the killer and that Robert Irving Latimer had had an injured thumb, they started to put one and one together, and they didn't necessarily like what they came up with, but he seemed like the most logical suspect.

of the hotel personnel. The maid in particular was of was of importance here, and they were all convinced that Latimer never slept in the bed, although he attempted to make it look like he slept in the bed. So Boyle, so there's a missing period of time, and it's that missing period of time which he sends you asleep in the bed that they tried to find out where he

actually was. Now they go to Boyle goes and identifies a barber who shaved Latimer the next day, and the barber tells him that Vladimer's got all this blood spots on his shirt and on his clothes, and he even wants to go and use the washbasin the basin to

clean up, So that's suspicious. Then Boyle starts looking at the train timetables and interviews train personnel, and it turns out that train personnel for they saw Latimer on a train that was headed to from Detroit to Jackson around midnight and saw him return on a train sometime around

four o'clock in the morning. So it appeared that what he attempted to do was set up a perfect to Detroit, checking into a hotel, sneaking out of the hotel, jumping onto a train for Jackson, doing the dirty d and then getting back on a train for Detroit and going back, sneaking back into the Griswold Hotel and telling everybody that he had slept during the timeframe of the crime. And it's kind of interesting because he had given himself a

little bit of an out. And I don't know if he had intended to do this when he engineered the perfect alibi, but his out was when they told him, look, you know, we don't think you know, we think you're on these trains. We think he came back to Jackson.

He had a kind of a pocket story that he was looking for this woman named Trixy and he thought he saw her go on to a train headed east, and he followed her on the next train and wound up in Jackson and he didn't find her, so he wandered around so he could catch the next train and never did go home. So when he finally faced up to that story, he'd put himself in Jackson during the timeframe of the murder.

payment was coming due. I think it was coming due in January of eighteen eighty nine, and so there was a fiscal motive for killing Mary Latimer because that way he could get himself out of having to make the payment and inherit her money and pay off his other creditors. So he had some financial motives for doing for the form of the crime. So not only was he in Jackson at the time, but he also had the means of the opportunity.

on this? And again, this is called matricides, So how serious did the press take this and what was the public's response.

for that is because of the matricide element. It's extremely uncommon to commit to commit matricide for a mattress side to occur. You wouldn't think that would be the case, but it is. Usually when it's done, it's a man killing killing the mother, and usually it's done in a bedroom in a location that they're both very familiar with. So that there's a been enough cases over the last hundred years to create a profile, and it's amazing how closely he fits the profile, right down to the age range.

But there hasn't been that many cases. Mattricide is really really uncommon now. The murder of one's lover or spouse is called uxoricide, and that's much much more common. But the fact that it was a mattress side in this era in particular, really I think triggered off sort of a media storm about the case itself. That was something that the media in most cities had never never heard of, are even conceived of before, was the killing of one's mother.

And then there were other interesting facets of the two. The Jeckel and Hide aspect, I mean, the strange case of doctor Jeckylin and Hide I think was first published in the eighteen mid eighteen eighties, I want to say, without looking eighteen eighty five perhaps, and so they used the term jackelone Hide to refer to him. So here you have a case of a real life Jaqueline Hide that fit the fictional version pretty well, which people had pretty much known by this point because it had been

performed in the theaters all over the place. So the media not only took it seriously, but they tended to really investigate. They had reporters who were running around and following his footsteps. They had reporters who were on the creeks, interviewing people, trying to find angles, trying to figure out what's going on, interviewing the women in his life. I wouldn't say that they were incredibly intrusive with mamal suspects

in this era. They often didn't have access to them once they went behind bars, which wouldn't been true for females because of the possibility of a scandal. Female suspects were almost always interrogated in full view of the press, and press were even allowed to ask questions, which creates an interesting layer for a researcher that isn't there for

male suspects. So in this the thig days, I wouldn't say it was necessarily inclusive, But probably the most insidious factor of the media attention in this case was their inability to secure a jury. The defense lawyer during their wayear basically eliminated everybody he could that had heard about the case, and that was pretty much everybody because it had been published so widely in the press.

and Hyde type of vibe that he had. The interesting thing about that I find about trials of the era is you have to keep in mind the context This isn't an era before there were reality TV shows, before there was shows like Law and Order and those type of things. And the press. I think in the eighteen eighties they had pretty much explagated anything that was really spicy. And I mean you have to kind of read between the lines when I mean, when when they talk about prostitutes,

they don't use the word prostitute very often. They use a series of synonyms that are a little less a little less racy, you might say. I mean, after all, this is an era where tablecloths go right to the floor, and because they didn't want guys looking at the legs of the table because or later they're gonna start looking at the real thing. I mean that kind of that kind of conservatism, you know, that affected all aspects of life. I mean, people coined the term drumsticks, so they didn't

they didn't use an anatomical term. I mean, it went to excise. I saw a picture of two women who were dragged off to a patty wagon in a patty wagon of the Chicago land because they weren't wearing their bathing suits. They went right down to the ground. And what's crazy about that is that photograph they're wearing skirts and they have bobby socks on and the only skin that's exposed to their kneecaps, and that was enough to

get them a jail. Stin people go to trials, and in trials, the testimony isn't expurgated, so they can get the very best of reality TV, so to speak, and they can get it unadulterated, unedited. And so at the Latimer trial, because he had tried to alibi himself by saying that he was at a bordello, they actually called the matam and some of the prostitutes up to testify. And the just the existence of these ladies, having them right into the public into the daylight, would have been

utterly scandalous, let alone what they had talked about. And so for people, this was the very height of drama, and particularly the part of the community that particularly loved this were the ladies. I've done a tremendous amount of writing about trials that take place in that era SA eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty, and invariably you hear the line that the audience is made up of eighty percent women, and the women in the audience have overflowed the aisle.

The seats in the courtroom for them. You even hear a news reporters who are angry because they have to try to crane their necks to see over the women who are sitting there with their big brimmed hats on. So right away, as you mentioned from the preliminary hearing, you've got because of all of these facets, and what makes this case even more interesting to people is the bordeuble aspect and the mattress side aspect. So and added to which he was a really really popular fellow in Jackson.

Very well.

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Google Play. That's Friends without the R. Best Fiends play today. Now we talked about the trial of basically you call it a trial of the century. The anticipated interest in this trial, never mind from the preliminary it continued to the actual trie While you say, with all the people that were anticipating this, especially the women, but let's talk about what the prosecution, who for the prosecution is and talk about the defense, which is an attorney named Barkworth.

He had motive, he means opportunity, and he has a forensic evidence and he always proceeded on what they would call the mercenary motive, and that was Robert Irving Latimer killed his mother for no other reason than to stay clear of the debt and to where her money so that he could pay off his other debts and continued to do live the life of Riley if you will do what he wants to do. In Detroit, Barkworth had

a little bit harder job. Barkworth had to try to explain how in the world his client had come to be in Jackson at the same time that the crime was taking place, why he lied about it in the first place and tried the best to try to keep his client out of that room, out of that house at the time. And this is where we get into a woman named Trixie Beatrice LaRue was her real name, and she was essentially held up as his alibi, except no one could find her, and I think she might

have headed west and they perhaps changed names. But one thing is certain. She never made an appearance at the trial.

And what's interesting is that the anticipated women who knew Latimer anticipated that he was going to try to pull one of them in as an alibi, and there were several reputations I think that were ruined as a result of their relationship to a known rue, because he was looking for somebody who could be convenient, and ultimately he picked kind of it concreted an interesting scenario because whereas Beatrice, did she exist, did she not exist? Did she exist

in pseudonym only? It's kind of a fascinating story, and it kind of a fascinating sub story really.

I think. And he was sentenced to death, and no one wanted to hang him, so the hanging was done by proceeded was done by a fellow tavern owner and a long term rival with Stephen Simmons. As the story goes, Simmons was a bit of a brute, but he was a real soft spoken and eloquent man. And on the scaffold he got up in center prayer and then he sang him in a beautiful baritone, and people in the crowd, even those who were pro death penalty, and that instant

turned against it. And when the State of Michigan came into being, one of the first things that the legislators did was ban the death penalty for state crimes. Now, I have to clarify that there have been people who have been put and currently put on death row and even executed for crimes that occurred within Michigan's borders, but they would be crimes that were done in territory overseen

by the federal government. So there is an individual on death row in Tarahoe, Indiana today for a crime that was committed in Manistee National Forest, which is the part where the crime was committed is overseen by the federal government. But state crimes, we don't have one. Now. Over the course of our history, the death penalty comes up from time to time and a debate, and usually it's triggered by some type some type of really nasty crime or

series of crimes or crime wave. Latimer and his crime and a crime of a fellow named Justice Tonto basically led to a very vigorous debate as to whether a death penalty should be enacted in the state of Michigan. And it came very close to passing. What a lot of people don't know when I speak about this kind of fascinating that they don't know this is that that death penalty build that was triggered by the matter side

was going to involve three different types of executions. One would have been hanging, which would have made Michigan consistent with the other states at the time, hanging being a penalty that was the most common electrocution, the electric chair it started to be installed in mistake prisons around the country. And the third one was the guillotine. They were going to bring a guillotine to Michigan and behead at people as the ultimate punishment, and that would have been inspired

by the crimes of Latimer. Obviously, it didn't get passed, but every now and again through our history, ever dozen or so years, it comes up again. I think Latimer inspired three different conversations about a death ponly, and some of them got to be very very very close, very

close in voting. Part of one of the second instances that he influenced the talk, I think Barkworth with one of the voices against it, and the problem they had was they didn't want to execute people who are convicted solely uncircumstantial evidence, and he certainly had in my Latimer,

because Latimer was convicted on circumstantial evidence. Now, while that sounds may sound really bad in the twenty first century, at the time, I think that was considered not so much problematic because they didn't have the type of forensic science that we have today, so they couldn't conceive of something like a DNA match or even a fingerprint. A lot of the evidence and murder trials or the case was in fact circumstantial.

didn't have a care in the world. He either had convinced himself that he was going to get out of it or he really didn't didn't care or understand the gravity of it. And that seemed completely odd and indifferent to everybody in the courtroom, who is sort of expected him to be, you know, maybe tearful about the fact

that his mother was ben shot. Now, the interesting thing about about Irving Latimer in the Affect is when he was in jail, he asked to he seemed completely indifferent about his mother being being dead, and he asked to be let out to build her funeral, and they believed

they let him. They were going to let him go to his mother's schedule, and he had the last minute change his mind, and they thought that basically what he was trying to do was trying to drum up some support by looking to be devastated by his mother's loss. But when they actually called the bluff and said, okay, we'll go escort you get to the funeral, he didn't go. So part of the theater of absurd is his entire demeanor in this entire play, if you will, this is kind of a tragic comedy.

get to the train and get to Jackson. So if he had attempted at one point in time to aliby himself by saying that he was there, but I think that her presence really really harmed him, and it wasn't just in that way, it was proof that she knew him, that he was a known associate of a well known Bravo owner, and that he had run up you know, he had spent a lot of time there. I mean, in order to be intimately associated with him, he would

have had to spend time there. And that is I think for the community who wanted to indemnify him, who were convinced of his good boy image, this was like pulling back the curtain to see the person really, even the real Robert Irvy Latimer and a guy who was intimately associated not just with Madam Pinkerton, but her what they would have called inmates at the time, and not

just one of them, but several of them. He had spent time in a Bravo, he had spent money in a Bravo, and that proof that he had run up debts, he was a luay, you know, a womanizer, and that he was intimately associated with the Red Light district. And I think that just kind of just helped make Parkinson's motives come to life and put a face on it.

Because Parkinson, the whole time his case was predicated in the idea that Robert Irving Latimer murdered his mother a get out of the debt and b to acquire her money so that he continued to do these type of things. So I think that whatever the purpose of her going to the stand was, it was devastating for Robert Irving Latimer's defense.

he interviews people. I think Latimer had brought up a number of names with people who would give him an alibi, and so he goes to Detroit and interviews this woman, as you mentioned, that was on her deathbed, and of course she said that she wasn't even home at the time he came knocking, and she was with a friend and at that exact period of time. And what's kind of fascinating about this, though, is I wonder how truthful she really was. I mean, he was a bit of

a virus for anybody at this point in time. Anybody to be associated with him was going to have a reputation killed, especially given the fact of how people were in the era, with the way they handled sexuality and things like that. So respectable woman in Detroit as an affair with a very good looking younger man. Maybe she's even with him that night, Maybe she's even with him earlier in the night. She's not going to say it publicly,

She's can probably even say it in inaffidated. So I think that there's a little bit of wiggle room there to a little bit of reasonable doubt to suspect that she and maybe several others knew him. And I mean, like in the biblical sense, knew him and at this point in time, wanted to just distance themselves as best as they can, and he kind of wonder whether one of them actually was with him that night or part

of that night. Doesn't mean he didn't do it, doesn't mean he didn't have time to sneak back to Jackson. But he certainly knew these people. He didn't just pick them out of the hat. And so part of the interesting part of my research was trying to reconstruct Laddimer's Little Black Book, if you will, in an era where people didn't want to talk about this type of thing and it was really, really, really tricky. So anyways, that's

what that was all about. Barkworth was trying to find, trying to find witnesses that I think his rather troublesome client was bringing up as a desperate attempt and trying to get him out of Jackson or at least away from the house at the time the murder occurred.

testimony is probably the most fascinating. And again, this idea that he was hunting for this woman that no one was able to locate, no one was able to find, with nowhere in sight. That the sheer lunacy is the idea, the incredibility of the idea that he had taken a trained definder and just happened to be in Jackson at the exact same time that his mother was, and that

he was using this as a defense. And of course you have the ever evolving story that he first said he had been in the Griswold hotel and he hadn't been in the hotel. And what's really when your research cases like this. This is where newspapers can really be a vital aspect of the research because what happens too often is the trial transcripts, if you can even find them, are just Q and A. That's generally how they are,

just Q answer a answer. But to really get to the aspect, you go to the reporters who sat in on the testimony, and this is where you can hear the voices in the tone. So the lawyer loses his temper and he raises his tone. That's not something that's going to come through the trial transcript, but that comes

through the newspaper for articles. So on a side note, the real key is a researcher is to try to find the most accurate newspaper articles, and the best way to do that in an era where they sensationalized everything is provide a trial transcript and compared the two. So you become as a researcher very much like a detective.

talk about though, also the show is psychopathology. Here you also talk about a woman that he sees in the courtroom. Tell us about that.

His ratation is destroyed basically, and ever the Ladies man, his mind is focused on a female attendee who he'd like to meet and date. And I think that to a certain degree, he was actually under the impression that he was going to beat this thing and be able to go out and date like that again. And either he's completely fooled himself or you have an individual who has a real break with the idea of what reality is.

I think that he's only interested in the things that interest him at that moment, and those that would be a characteristic of what we call a sociopath today, I believe, And that's kind of a fascinating question. Was Robert Irving Latimer a sociopath? They would of course had to like that they wouldn't apply to them. So for me to talk about him being a sociopath, there's a bit, a

bit like being a Monday morning quarterback. But if you look at the characteristics, somebody who lies and lies really well, somebody who is narcissistic, sexually uninhibited. These are all characteristics of that that condition. So it's really fascinating now. I think commonly, at one point in time was so involved, so emotionally invested in that cross examination that he hammered his hand on the table to the point where it

looked red like steak. So you could imagine the situation in the courtroom where he's thundering away at robbery Vladimer. Every time Latimer says I don't recall, he gets angry or anger at the point where he's just bashing his hand on the table, on the lawyer's table to make the point, and the end of the table is hoy, he's a horse, and his hand is red, it looks like hamburger, and he's I don't recall two hundred and sixty nine times.

have dinner. All of a sudden they have dropped their forks and their spoons and run back to the courthouse because because the verdict had come in so soon, and I people crowded into the courtroom to the point where I think that the lawyers had to crawled through the windows because there was there was so much interest in what was going to what was going to take place. And sure enough they sided with the prosecution and slammed the cell door. In early Latimer life in prison at hard Labor.

tell us about Latimer's stay in prison, just briefly. What happens as he goes to prison.

So they treated people really harshly. And when that prison administration came to an end, the next incoming warden was a little bit too loose with the criminals, and so prisoners were allowed privileges and they had a lax administration that either turned a blind eye or were just negligent on the things that prisoners were bringing in. And what do you do with a pharmacist when bees behind bars while you let him sell medicines to the other inmates.

Of course, as the lattermer started to pedal patent medicines to the other inmates that he was allowed to free be bring into the prison. How far do you want me to go with what happens next?

into that good night. But it goes wrong because one of the keepers that he poisons drops a whole bunch of fishes as he collapses onto the floor, and that alarms the other keepers and Latimer has to sort of do an audible. He never gets to release the rest of the inmates, but he does get out of the prison, and his grand escape, which ultimately costs the life of one of the keepers, lasted about two days, I believe.

penalty cases that they wanted the death penalty. Of all they wanted to enact would include cases of inmates who kill prison personnel. So the media now all of a sudden, Robert Irving Latimer because front page News. Again, this is quite rare. I mean, this is not something that in the state of Michigan happened a lot and inmate well, it never happened. It never happened, just a person anywhere.

I mean, think about think about this, an inmate acquiring a deadly poisoned cyanide and using it to poison to prison officials. It's it's really a kind of a bizarre, shocking case when you think about it.

for negligence. The things that caused him to be rejected for parole slash pardon by governor after governor after governor after governor were those actors, the murder of the keeper and the mattress side. Now what's interesting about this is these governors had pardoned all kinds of murderers mail and femail over the years. There was a governor named Woodbridge, Nathan Ferret cet a record for the number of students and paroles he gave around Christmas nineteen sixteen, and Latimer

was not one of them. And the reason that most people believed was the mattress side. It was the nature even more so than the murder of Keeper George. It was the mattress side itself, with such an appalling crime that just didn't want to let him out. They got to be so out of hand, so the justice thought to be alongsided because they had let out other people who had murdered, murdered people, and sometimes less than ten years, sometimes ten fifteen years they did in prison and let

them out. Vladimer's in prison forty six years and why because of the nature of his crime the Mattress side, so it led. He had some crusaders that were on his side and to characterized his prison sentence as a political crime. Eventually, after pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, Robert Irving, Latimer was let out. But he was an old old man in side note about his story is that when he was let out, he was the only inmate left

in the old Jackson State Penitentiary. They had opened up a new facility and he didn't want to move, so he wound up being the old effect. They called him the warden of the old prison, and he basically had free use of the grounds. He could come and go when he wanted to. As are is that he's a lifer murdered guard and he's free to come and go in the prison that he wants to. He became very a depth at landscaping around the prison, but not a free man, not till nineteen thirty five.

for Ford Motor Company. He did get a chance to fly a plane for the first time, and he took a trip. But this is the height of the Great Depression nineteen thirty five, and so he fell into a state of utter despair. He wanted to be a homeless on apartment.

around the state. I also run a blog called Dark Corners of History where people can go if they want to trade around the darker Corners of History and China, flashlight in there and see what they can see.