THE ELECTROCUTION OF BABY LAWRENCE-James E. Overmyer

burned evidence before police could examine it. District Attorney Charles Alberty and police Chief Sullivan brought a small army of scientists and medical experts to court to try to prove the death was a premeditated murder, with the sentence for first degree murder being death by electric chair. The case drew in newspaper readers from across America, and Lawrence's death was often characterized as a mercy killing at a time when euthanasia societies were publicly advocating for the selection out

of mental defectives from American society. Despite the efforts of his talented defense team at the sena Sational trial, John Knoxon Jr. Was sentenced to death. Afterwards, his dedicated attorneys continued fighting for a new trial, then a commutation of his sentence. The Electrocution of Baby Lawrence is also a story of how society once considered those born with Down syndrome and how John Knoxon Junior managed to get off

death row and gain his freedom. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Electrocution of Baby Lawrence, a murder that shook a New England town, with my special guest, former courthouse reporter, writer and author James E. Overmyer. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. James E. Overmeyer.

He was a corporate lawyer. He worked a lot for the General Electric Company. They had a major plant that employed twelve thousand people, the major driver of industry and income in Pittsfield. His father had been a successful corporate lawyer. John was his associate till his father was crippled in a terrible accident in nineteen twenty six. John took over the practice with a partner, and he was he sort of inherited his father and mother's connection, social connections and

social prominence. Except it turned out that John Junior wasn't a very nice guy, right. He was known as a bully as a kid and sort of looked down on people as an adult and pushed them around if he could. But he also had another aspect. He had been crippled with polio in his early twenties and one leg was completely stiffly encased in a brace and he walked with

two canes. So and his father they took he and his wife, Margaret, took care of his father for ten years because his father was an invalid after his accident which cost him both his legs. So there were aspects to Oxen. He had a lot of woe in his family and literally and then, but he was also a kind of guy who pushed people around and didn't seem to have a lot of regard for personal attachments. His

wife had the responsibility for taking care of that. And then Lawrence comes along, born in nineteen forty three, sort of an unresponsive maybe. They have him examined by his local pediatrician and by specialists in Boston, and the verdict is that Lawrence has what now we call down syndrome. Term hadn't been invented yet, so everybody, including the medical specialists, referred to him as a mongoloid or a mongoloid idiot. There's a lot in this story about how retarded children

were looked down upon in that day. In addition to everything else going on here.

I mean, the chief proponent of this in New York State, Reverend Charles Potter, went farther, he said, you know, the state of New York spends thirty million dollars a year housing and support mental defectives. Maybe they should be euthanized too. Of course, now we're getting right into the Lawrence knoxon territory, so it's very controversial. Doctors and other churches, particularly the Catholic Church all the way up to Rome, are opposed

to this. It's interesting. The Gallup Pole took a poll twice in the thirties and the question was do you agree with euthanasia if it's monitored or administered by the state, And the majority of people did not agree, but it wasn't It was like in the mid fifty percent. So in the mid forty percent of the respondents of the Gallup Pole people said yeah, that would be all right.

family life. Or you could institutionalize the kid. The institution in Massachusetts, a Belchertown State School, was pretty much a warehouse, and even at that time and for somebody of the Noxons level, it certainly was inacceptable. Or you could find a home, and there were people, you know, foster parents, basically, people ran group homes who would take these children in. And I can recommend at least one to you right now off the top of my head. And this is

in August of nineteen forty three, late August. And then Knox said, we'll think about it, and they bundled up Lawrence from Boston and drove back down to Pittsfield. And less than a month later, Lawrence is electrocuted in what was or was not a household accident.

keep her at bay. The child needs extra care while the family and the doctors and everyone else scurries around and finds a placement for the kid, so she'll never see the child again. I mean, the whole idea was these children should be separated as soon as possible from the family. It's just going to call it to cause divorce. It's going to cause psychological problems for the other children, if there are any. I mean, it's just one hundred and eighty degree spin from the way society sees it today.

floor of the house, the library of the house. This is a pretty well, the Oxen's had a lot of money. This was a pretty big and nice house. They called it the bookroom. Lawrence is on the floor and he is clearly dead. And Hunt calls the medical examiner, who is sort of like the coroner in Massachusetts. They're pointed by the governor. They're not elected. There have to be mds.

And Albert England foreigner comes out and confirms this and what happened, Well, I was working on a radio and by radios is nineteen forty three to radio is about half as big as as a Volkswagen Beetle, you know, with tubes inside. And Lawrence got electrocuted. Well, Hunt and England, this is a leading citizen of the city, kind of pushy too, and so they take his word for it and they leave. They call a funeral home, they leave, Some of them from the Wellington funeral Home comes around,

collects the Lawrence's body and away they go. The police aren't called and for a few hours overnight that's it.

to Oxen, was the source of the electrocution. And after they leave, after the child is collected up by Wellington funeral home attendant, he throws the cord and the baby's clothes in the house's incinerator in the basement and burns them, so the cord is basically reduced to a couple of strands of burned up of black copper wire with no evidentiary value at all.

this happened because down syndrome mongoloid kids had no future anyway. Wow, And well he didn't say that, but that's the he got. He said the first part, it's a good thing this happened, and that's why it was. He thought it was a good thing this happened. He goes back out, I'd like to take a look at that cord. Well, you know, I didn't want around the house disturbing Margaret and the baby's clothes, which had a little blood on him from

leading from the nose. And John is away, John the third is away at prep school, but he's going to come home, and he's a very he's a real tinkerer and experimenter, and I didn't want him near this cord. So he burned it. England, turns around, drive downtown, findes Chief Chief Sullivan tells him the story. Sullivan is disturbed, and he's disturbed at first primarily because a potential someone died in his city and he didn't know that, his

police didn't know about it. I think his institutional pride

is quite affected here. So he collects his two main men, Camille Marcel, who was a captain, who's really he doesn't have this role, he's really a deputy police chief, and Daniel McColgan, Inspector McColgan, who's the head of the detective bureau, and they drive out to the Oxen house and Sullivan is a combination of sympathetic, I'm sorry this happened, though I wish you'd called this, and a little because he's top and there's the death and he's a little suspicious.

But they talk about it and Oxen tells him the story, and that's pretty much in and they're done. By late morning. Stullivan and mccaugun and car Marcel arrived down to the funeral home. State pathologists has been called, but naturally, the Berkshire's being out in the moon means he's got to drive out from Boston, and it takes a little while. So he looks at the body and the body has some burns on it, as you might expect, it has a particularly deep burn on the left forearm, and knox

In maintained all along. It's the trouble court caused it. The trouble court, as Hunt and the two doctors Hunt in England observed, it only had a couple of brakes in it. The biggest one was about three quarters of an inch long. And here you have a burn that's two inches by in one direction and an inch and in three quarters in the other on a baby's arm. That's a lot of burn. And they turn around and they go back out to the house and Stullivan's attitude

has completely changed. He now has in his mind a homicide case and he's gonna, with his assistance of his two aides, is going to get to the bottom of it. And the tough questioning starts. It gets pretty far that day,

that's the twenty third, that's a Friday. On the twenty fourth, Noxen and Missus Knoxon are summoned to the police station where John L. Sullivan, who never had a fistfight with anybody, but he kind of policed, like the priest fighter fors his fights and an assistant district attorney almore code sit down for a long interview with an actions.

working right. He pulls it out away from the wall. He gets this extension chord and the trouble light, and the whole thing becomes known as the trouble cord. In the enduring it has its own it gets it's its own terminology. It's called the trouble Cord throughout the rest of the trial in the case, So he lays all this out and Margaret says, I want to go out in the garden at a victory garden. This is World War two. Pick some corn for dinner. Would you look after the baby? And she puts them on a big

chair with big arms, a wing chair. Says okay, fine, So he starts to work on the radio. He realizes he needs to pop over to the garage. You attach garage, you get a couple of tools, and he doesn't want the baby on the chair, so he wants to put him on the floor. Well, the baby's got a wet diaper and the floor has a sort of American knockof oriental carpet on it. So he goes to the pantry

and he gets a metal tray. He puts the baby on the tray so the diaper won't soil the rug, and he goes out to the garage and he says, I was gone for about three or four minutes comes back in. Lawrence has gotten himself entangled in the antenna antenna wire which runs up to the roof ordinarily excepted. She's been detached from the radio and the trouble cord and he's touched the bare spots and he's electrocuted himself. And I pulled the cord off and he's not responsive.

So I go to the phone and I'm making calls to the hospital and doctor England's home, and I finally track him down and he comes out to the house. That's his story. Margaret says that she had basically confirmed this. She had brought the she wanted to. She went out to the outside the house to the garden. She brought the baby into John and she got the baby's food ready and took them upstairs, and the baby wasn't there. And she came down and there's this whole scene in

the bookroom and she collapses on the sofa. She did not she said she was not there when it happened. I think she probably wasn't. But the question was the question that kept arising was well, where was she and what did she know? And no one ever asked her that it's funny because I mean under Massachusetts law and I think probably all other jurisdictions, a spouse can't be

forced to testify against his or her spouse. But of course you can ask them questions before that, and they can refuse to answer them, or they could say something. It might be no one everybody left her alone, and it's kind of funny. It's of course, this is a very genteel level of Fitsfield society, which wasn't very violent or disrupted to begin with. It's a small city. She was never seriously questioned. She didn't testify in her husband's behalf.

She had she could even cross examined by the eight and that never happened. She's just separated from the case, and whether and what she might have known or suspected is lost the history. I will say that throughout the trial and all the things that happened after the trial, she never wavered. She stood by her husband's side, she supported him, she did everything she could to get him out of prison. Afterwards, her story is a bit mysterious in my mind.

There's a law that requires people to call the police in the case of the death, which there apparently wasn't I'm sure in John O'Sullivan's mind, probably in the US Constitution, but it turns out there was no such law. And at any rate, not to say, hey, I'm a civil lawyer. I never did criminal law. I didn't know that. The Sullivan by the time, because you've seen the baby, and he comes back out. He is rare to go, he says.

When he leaves in the morning, he says, well, the worst I can say, John is you are very very best I can say, John, as you were very very careless. He comes back in the afternoon he said, I know you killed your son. Noxon denies it. Of course, Sullivan's completely flipped his attitude and now he's he's on a hunt to get a confession or enough evidence for a conviction or whatever.

put together a fantastic case. They went to the factory in Connecticut, a GE factory, needless to say, that had manufactured this extension cord and got fifty feet of it and then took it to divided it up into twelve foot lengths, which is the length of the cord originally was when it was sold in the store. Took it to the GE subsidiary in Rhode Island that attached the sockets. The socket, the flug socket and the receptacle socket on

the other end and had them do that. So now they've got these cords and they interview England and Hunt to say, well, where were these cuts and what did they look like? And they replicated. So they replicated the evidence, and they have two eyewitnesses. The two doctors say, yeah, that's that's what it looked like. And they entered those into evidence and they got the state pathologist was a Harvard Medical School factory faculty member who had spent his

whole career in forensic medicine. So he testifies about all of this, and he testifies to the extent he knows about electricity, the effects of electricity. He thinks. He says, if that cord was used the electric cute to cause those burns, it would have been about fifteen minutes and it had to be held onto the body, which of course Notaxen said, I was gone for maybe five minutes at the most, and I didn't even see it happened.

They've got the state chemist, the State Laboratory chemist, the guy who founded the State Laboratory, who's got a PhD. Chemistry, and he does all of these tests on skin from the baby and other things and finds there's copper in these skin cell not on the surface, but down inside the pieces of skin from the burns. So it's and that didn't happen by some accidental sparking and arcing or

anything like that from those wires. You would have had to held something into the skin to make it happen, which, of course rather contradicts Noxon story. The prosecution case was considering the fact that they lost that crucial first day in investigating the case because nobody told them about it was really an excellent piece of work.

the state, and in Boston. He was extremely well known it very good lawyer too, So he had Joey e Lee and Walter Donovan the defense team, and that's a pretty stellar team, both statewide and locally. Stay lined up their own experts and their main medical expert was Milton Helpern, who New Yorkers with any sense of history will recognize him. He was the New York City Medical Examiner for many years.

At that time he was the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner and took this case on the side of course, so he was the equivalent of Allan Morritz, the state pathologist. They also brought in doctor Charles Lunn, who was on the Harvard's faculty and an expert in burns. Doctor Lund had started a project for the government for the military

to evaluate burns at the Boston City Hospital. In the middle of the project, in nineteen forty two, the Coconut Grove fire happened in Boston, and that was a nightclub disaster. Nightclub caught fire and there were exits were blocked, hundreds of people died, and hundreds of burn cases where shipped

the hospitals all over the city. Doctor Lunt had three hundred burn cases on his hands where the hospital did, and so he had he had quite a study, so he was he was an expert in burns and so those along with some electrical engineers who were also also testified for the defense, they had a lineup that equalled the States for sure.

And somehow this was supposed to protect the courtroom by putting the defendant, who had no weapons on him. He'd been he was under supervision of a couple of deputy sheriffs in the cage. It was described by someone as medieval, and I couldn't agree more. In some part I wish I'd seen it, and a bigger part of me and I'm glad I never had to see it. I mean, it just put the defendant in such a terrible disadvantage in front of the jury.

and they were rejected and rejected and rejected. Judge Manansky finally said, at one point, what you want is for the district attorney to tell you what's in his case now. I became administrative assistant to the DA for trial preparation in that county, that in that courtroom in nineteen seventy nine, and yeah, we in fact the law then we gave them all that stuff. And I'm saying, yeah, judge, that's what he wants and you and then it's prepositive what

Pinansky said. I mean, he's he's not outside the law. He's totally within Massachusetts law at the time. But Pinanski said was preposterous. But that was the law at the time, which fortunately I think changed.

of the body at the funeral home. And as the pictures go into evidence, of course, now the defense gets their copies. Neally said, were there any other pictures taken there? And the corporal says, not to my knowledge, and so he starts to bug Alberta by this in front of the jury. This is live, so to speak. Alberta says, oh, I have more photos here, take this, take this. Now he's fed up, and here's here's diagram of the blueprints at the house. You want to see those. And he's

shoving all this stuff and this. They keep going back and forth, and there's a carton, a cardboard carton under the prosecution table, and it gets you know, Alberta says, I'll give you everything I've got. What else do you want? Really says, oh, do you want to deliver yourself into my hands? You know, it's just getting terribly sarcastic, right in front of the jury, in front of the judge, and Alberti reaches into this cart and pulls out this

baby doll and waves it around here. You want this too, and everybody is what in the courtroom erupts, and the deputy Sheriff's QUI everybody, and Judge VENASKI you know it tells everyone somebody words to sit down and shut up. The doll was to be introduced in evidence later, although it never was. It had marks replicating the burns on it, and it's very unscientific and didn't pass in the end. It didn't pass muster. But of course that's certainly not

the way you introduce evidence. So the case basically, the trial basically starts out with a big disruption in the court caused by the district attorney.

Can a person be electrocuted killed by household current? And the answer is yeah, under certain circumstances, if he's standing, if he's standing in something wet, and yes, that can be. So that became a big deal, needless to say, that became prosecution evidence, and the question was asked roughly at the time that doctor Smith in Boston had returned the diagnosis down syndrome modolism, as I called it. So yeah, that became a big deal at the trial. Are we

are we fishing for ways to kill the baby? Maybe we are. Noxon said, I was just curious. I read it, and I read about a case in the paper. My son John. The third is I likes to experiment with electricity, so I was just curious. So those are the two sides of that story.

And while they're hauling all of this away, under Captain Marcel's direction, in Spectrum McColgan and a state police detective who was assigned to the DA's office, John Horgan, go upstairs and fish around for more evidence because well, nobody another search and seizure and search warrant law hadn't evolved much either in Massachusetts, and they could do this, so they did it, and in a waste basket in the master bedroom they find all these torn up pieces of

paper which went pieced together make three pieces of paper with basically an amount of briefing notes of John Knoxon's story written down in sort of shorthand short bursts of words or bullet point what we would call bullet points now on how what his story is. And the DA they piece these together, they enlarge them photographically to give them to the jury and the Da reads these to the jury, and the prosecution's point is this guy prepared his story. He's not being casual with us, he's not

being you know, forthcoming like a regular person. He wrote all this down, He prepared his story to this false story to give us. Noxon says, well, I've been questioning, questioning question and I'm a good lawyer, so I'm going to write this stuff down so i can get it straight. That's what I do in my profession. And when I was done with them, I tore them up and threw them away. So that was incriminating evidence. If you were the prosecution, is just like, well, it's one of those

things if I did. If you're the defense and the jury, just as the case of many other things, here can look at it, could look at it both ways.

had been cooked. Now, the regular witness could not have gotten away with that characterization, but I guess if you are, if you are a Harvard faculty member who's the state pathologist, you can slip that one in. And that was pretty effective. He also to the extent he could could and he was you know, he was very disciplined. He didn't go

beyond his scope of his abilities or his knowledge. He said, you know, if you're going to use that cord as put in evidence here, the repliccord, you'd have to you'd have to hold that to the baby for about fifteen minutes to get these results anything near these results, which contradicted Noxon's story almost entirely, or maybe entirely so. Martz was the key to the case. His testimony was very solid.

He didn't get overturned by the defense very much. And you know, he knew he knew when to emphasize what he knew, and he knew not to go on on a limb and speculate, which is not always the case of defense. I mean the prosecution and defense witnesses. I can tell you that. So that's that was Alan Mortz's contribution.

She handled us like a veteran. He covered the case from beginning to end, and as the case went along, she became convinced sitting in that courtroom that John Noxon was innocent, and she became emotional support and a friend of Margaret Noxon, who was in the courtroom nearly every day after the trial was over. Dorothy not in print. I can only find one story of hers, which is clearly biased towards the defendant. But behind the scenes, she was a great supporter of the Noxen family and in

her opinion, helped get Noxen out of prison eventually. Well, she did help. In her opinion, she helped a lot. I'm not sure she helped a lot, but she was working hard at it. And it's a real I mean, I was a newspaper reporter for several years before I

went to work for the DA. I mean, I find her behavior by the journalistic standards of my day in current days just outrageous, although I have to say she managed somehow to keep her reporting and her personal beliefs separate, which is one thing in her behalf.

his body. And actually, you know, you can't get from the right arm to the left arm without going through the heart area, and that stopped his heart and electrocuted him. And there was a burn on the left arm. In addition to the deep burn, there was a sort of burn that everybody eventually described as dumbbell shaped, a thin two thin lines in the middle and larger burns on the end. And the district attorney eventually said that's that

was the result of jabbing with a live wire. But the defense said, look, that's where the that's where the pin, the diaper pan contacted the skin. That's all that that burn shows that this happened. That was their theory. And doctor Lund, the burn experts, said yeah, that could have been in So that's very different from obviously from the defense, I mean, from the prosecution aspect that supported there had explained the dumbbell shape burn and explained how it was an accident.

the examination. He says, did you love your son? He said, I loved him so dearly, you know, and all of that. And then, of course, once you testified, the other side gets to cross his avenue and ALBERTI, this is first murder trial, this first and only murder trial as far as I know, and he tears into him and noxon from this sort of suave sounding composed fellow starts to be the kind of attorney, to be the kind of witness that knocks on the attorney would probably hate to

put on a stand. Well, I can't remember, I'm not sure. Is that what you said to the folice at the time. Well, yes, and that's as best as I can remember. And he's stumbling and he's halting, and then Alberti pulls out the sort of secret weapon he'd been called after the first trial ended in a mistrial and one of the jurors

got sick and started over. And in between, somewhere along the line, he'd been called at home in the evening, at dinner time by someone who worked at the ss Kretsky at Kresky department store and said, you know, I don't know if this is important, mister Alberty, but mister Knoxon was in our store shortly before Lawrence died invought extension court. So Alberti starts to grill him about the extension cort. Well, I don't know. I bought a lot of extension courts. I may have bought that. You buy

one inside August. I don't know if I went in September. I don't really know. Yeah, I may have what store, I don't remember. So he has Noxon's attorneys produce an extension cord from the house and they do it kind of has them over a barrel. Doctn's given permission for this court because he doesn't really have a choice. I guess the cops are going to go in and find it anyway, and Ilian Donovan, you know, they're members of the Massachusetts bar they can't suppress evidence. They're both very

credible people. So they bring this cord in and it's attached to a soldering iron in a sort of amateur now semi amateurish way. You take the soldering iron off and there's this cord and they measure it and it's nine inches short of what it should be. They bring the witness from the Rhode Island plant back and he says, yeah, it's supposed to be twelve feet long and now it's

only eleven feet two inches or something like that. So he confronts them about the ALBERTI confronts NOx And about the cord, and it's just, well, you know, I did this for the soldering cord because the other core, the original cord, is too short, and how come all of this insulation is missing off the end of you know he did was attach this soldering iron to it as well? I don't know. I don't really know. I stripped some of it off for this, and I don't know what

happened to the rest. Couldn't you have used this? Now you can do this across the examination. You can badger the witness relief. Didn't you use this to push these wires into your son an electric edom? No? No, I didn't, But it's there. It's there. All of a sudden, you've

got a credible murder weapon, whereas you didn't before. You had knocks on in the room along with the boy, you had electricity, you had his story that didn't really add up, and you probably had sufficient evidence for a conviction, but you didn't really have the well, not the smoking gun, but the hot wire. And now you do. That's where

that's that's where the testimony concludes. Basically, no one ever accounted for the missing nine inches of wire, but the question is left sort of hanging in the air over the jury's heads. As the testimony ends.

this case is pretty clear. They've got murder on their they got murder on their minds his first degree, which is punishable at that time only by death and the electric chair, or second degree, which is punished by life. So that pretty much tells you which way it's going. They're not out for law, and the judge explains this to them, and they go in and they're not They're back pretty soon first degree murder. The jurors heeded the judge's instruction and our advice not to blab to the public.

Apparently no one ever gave an interview or anything. But of course they had pieces of paper left behind which were their vote their ballots, and of course the deputy sheriff's who I soon wore the leaks, scooped these up and disseminated the information to the press, and there was They took foot ballots and there was never a not guilty vote. There was one abstention on the first ballot

for some reason. It was all first degree or second degree, and finally the one holdout for second degree came over and they had a first degree conviction, and the next day he was sentenced to the electric chair. Public reaction was very mixed. There were letters. Letters started flowing in to the governor of Massachusetts at the time, Levertt Saltonstall

seeking clemency for an accent don't elect acute him. Many more than were in favor of the sentinels being carried out local people, so there was some reporting about local attitudes, not really quoting anybody, and people were surprised he was convicted. They figured that a guy at his stature and wealth would get off. As I always said, there were three camps here in this case. There was the camp that convinced it was murdered at the beginning, There was the

camp they was convinced it was an accident. And there was a big camp in the middle the people said, well, it may have been a crime, but it was for the best, it was a mercy killing, and this guy should not get the death penalty, or he should not be in jail for very long, or whatever. So there was a lot of a lot of that attitude. Margaret never publicly said anything other than my husband is not guilty.

Eally was distraught at the verdict. He's visibly distraught in the courtroom and immediately without further fee, I might add, because Chris lost his livelihood, took the case up. There was getting the governor at the time where he's tobin to hopefully commute the sentence from death to life. Then there was an attempt at getting a pardon from the next governor to clean get him out of prison and clean the record completely.

This is per state law, and I still is. There's a mental examination of the defendant in case there's an insanity flea that the state wants its witnesses, its psychiatric doctors to weigh in. Well, there's no question of insanity. But at the same time they said a social worker from the state nearest state hospital to do to question

people in Pittsfield and do a report. And she talked to some obvious people, Margaret Knoxen, Michael Eisner, and John's law partner on a few other people identified as who were family friends. But then they talked to people that she didn't name, a city official, and no one ever figured. I mean, I have some ideas, but nobody knows who that was. Members of the police department. Oh really, I wonder what they thought. And they came away and she wrote up this Danning report, which was the basis of

John Knoxen was a terrible person. He was a bully. As a kid, he stole things from the Pittsfield Country Club. Unfortunately his father was a member and they brushed in under the rug. And then as an adult he made passes at both young men and young women, and he was known not a town on business to consortative prostitutes. Now there's no proof of any of this, but you but you hear it a lot, and you know there's probably I can't you wouldn't want to vouch for any

single thing, but there's a lot of trend here. And then they also bring in a Afidavid from a conductor from who worked the route from Pittsfield to Albany to Boston, which came in through Pittsfield, obviously, And he's a chatty guy. He loves gossip. Heays, yeah, I talked to people on the train from Pittsfield and they said NOx is a terrible person, and they corroborate and a lot of the

things that the social workers report has turned up. And now the defense is introducing all of his terrible stuff about their client, which sounds crazy, except, of course, the alternative is to go to the electric chair, so maybe that's not so bad. They're just saying, you know, he's an awful person. How could you have ever gotten a

fair trial? And that doesn't work. Next, now they've got people start coming forward who knew two of the jurors, and they said, well, long before he was expressed, after he was arrested, before he went to trial, which, of course before they were picked his jurors, they expressed the

opinion that he was probably guilty. One of them did so on a car ride to his job with another fellow employee, and it was sort of a passing comment that was never repeated again, and that was sort of not very important The other guy was a guard at a defense plant that made magnesium nearby, and he couldn't stop talking about the case to his fellow guards, about, man, this guy is guilty. He ought to be hung. I

add to that, that's a little different. So a out of their emotions to overturn the jury because the verdict, because the jury was prejudiced. Well, Howard Brown, who made this kind of often common on the way to work, It was one thing. But Harvey Crittenden, Chittenden was on this all the time. And three of his fellow guards came forward and you know, testified that he said all these things. And the judge said, you know, they were

examined under oath. They said they didn't have any prior prejudices, And he says, what can I say? They I asked them these questions under oath, and they said, since vav good jurors. I don't know. Today it's hard to imagine Chittenden's outverse not caring more weight if someone asked for a new trial. But then that was you know, then it was pretty strict Massachusetts law. You think of Massachusetts as a progressive state as far as criminal law. It had a long way to go in nineteen forty four.

and not given a full pardon, which would dismiss any criminal charges and criminal record. So there was a movement, and Margaret was active in this as well, meeting with two governors over the years to see if she had any influence in speaking to them personally. But that was the weight of her influence that she was able to get an interview with the governor, an audience with the governor for twice.

for forty more years. But in reality, from the time John Knoxon was the sentence was commuted, only three more people were electrocuted, and everybody the day were involved in, you know, straightforward vicious crimes involving firearms and a robbery and a mob rubout the death penalty. Future governors always found way to commute those sentences to life, and in the late forties, statute was passed allowing juries to recommend the life sentence instead of the electric chair in the

first degree case. So in reality, commuting knox on sentence to life wasn't that unusual. But he's still in prison and the next step is to file for a pardon. And by now Governor Tobin has been what was essentially a revolving door between Republicans and Democrats equally represented in the state at the time. Tobin is out and a guy named Robert Bradford is in. He's the Governor Robert Bradford. John Doxon's family had come to the United States from

England in the late sixteen hundreds. Joe Eely's family had come to the United States. His original ancestor in the United States in nine sixteen thirty six or something like that, and they were both newcomers to Robert Bradford's family. He was directly descended from William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony who came on board in sixteen twenty with the Pilgrims. People used to refer to him after he got elected as the second governor Bradford, and the

pardon is before Bradford. But there's he's the kind of guy who might want to grant the pardon because you know, the Noxon's and the Eli's are in his social strata, ancestral strata. But he's the kind of guy who couldn't either because before he became got into politics as an elected official, he worked for a governor and the governor was Joe Eally. When Eally left office, they formed the law firm together and Bradford was still on the firm's

letter had he was on a leave of absence. In fact, the pardon petition to Governor Bradford came under a letter The letter had was the law firm of Elie Bradford, et cetera, etcetera, etcetera. So he's kind of hung up and he denies calls to abdicate the case and pass it on to his lieutenant governor, but he also sits on it for like months and months and months, and then he gets defeated. The swinging door swings again. He

gets defeated by a Democrat. He's leaving office in January nineteen forty nine, and he comes up with this solemonic solution, and he says, I could never grant a pardon because I really don't think he's innocent. He'd been a da in his day. I don't think he's innocent. But I'll tell you what I'm going to do, and you can you can sort of feel the mercy killing breeze wopting through the executive chamber. Here. I can commute his sentence again, and I can make it. I'll make it six years

to life. From Massachusetts law then now was after two thirds of your minimum sentence for a violent crime, you can be eligible for parole. Well, Doxon at that time was over four years, so he's eligible for parole. Now. The parole Board's got to come around and it's split. The chairman, Matthew Bullock says, I will never go for this. One of his other members says, I always thought he

should be out. So you've got a guy in the middle named Bradley, who's Dorothy Weyman describes as a Harvard former Harvard athlete, lots of money and not so many brains. But he's in business with a social, social, and political friend of hers. There's usually not a lot of difference, and they work him over, she says in her private papers,

which unfortunately we're available in a college archive. They work him over, and I'm not sure they only convinced him, but I'm sure they had something to do with it. And he jumps off the fence and jump and votes

for parole. So Knoxen, after less than five years in prison, who eventually who originally was headed for the electric chair, is out, still convicted a first degree murder, still on parole the rest of his life, although no one the prole board never seems to have spent much time supervising him. To see fifty seven year old guy on Caynes is not likely to go out and rob a convenience to or murder anybody else.

Do you have a website or do any social media I.