OUT OF THE PAST

Victor Licata: The Marijuana Maniac

It isn’t often that a crime actually effects change in the law, and usually when it happens, it’s a good thing, like when Amber Alert laws were passed. But sometimes the media runs with a story for a while before people can begin to act, especially when the case has potential to be sensational. Bizarre details are made up in the inevitable game of telephone that journalists play. And when those distorted details get taken for fact, it can result in widespread misconceptions that should not be the basis for legislation. This week on Out of the Past: Victor Licata: The Marijuana Maniac.

On a beautiful day in the month of October, 1933, the Tampa neighborhood where the Licata family lived was bustling—but there was no sign of activity in their house. By mid-afternoon, neighbors began to get curious. Everyone else was out and about; why weren’t the Licatas? Mr. Licata ran two barbershops. Didn’t he need to get to work? This behavior was out of character. Also, a couple of neighbors had heard loud noises coming from the house the night before. Someone contacted the authorities to check on the family’s well-being. The police knocked, but nobody answered. They tried to open the front door, but all the exterior doors were locked, and police had to enter through a back window.

Unfortunately, the officers did not find a safe and healthy family spending the day indoors. Upon entering the Licata home, it was evident that something ruthlessly violent had happened to this family. Inside, police found Michael Licata, 47, dead from a blow to the head. There were signs of a struggle, and his body was found wedged between the bed and the wall. His wife Rosalia, 44; his daughter Providence, aged 22; and his youngest son Jose Licata, only 8, were also found murdered inside, each one dead from a blow to the head with an axe. Police discovered that another son, Philip, 14, was still breathing and moving when they arrived. He was rushed to the hospital where he died soon afterward.

Police continued to search the house, trying to find additional victims. In the bathroom at the back of the house they found the oldest son, Victor Licata, 21—not dead, but cowering in fear and talking to himself, according to some sources, dressed only in blood-soaked underwear.

Officer W.D. Bell asked him while they were still in the bathroom: “What’s the matter, Victor? Why’d you kill your family?” Licata only stared with a crazed look in his eye. Officer Bell tried to ask him again in the police car, “Why’d you kill your family?” Victor responded by asking “Did I do that?”

A crowd gathered outside the Licata home as officers searched. Screams of “get him!” and “kill him” could be heard as Victor left his residence and was put into a police car. He was taken to the police station, his brother Philip to the hospital, and the rest of the family members inside were taken to the J. L. Reed and Son funeral home.

Licata told authorities that he had had a dream, a dream where his father had cornered him in the house and started hurting him. His mother stood there, mocking him and his attempts to get away. His brother entered with a carving knife and also began to taunt him. They severed his arms and made him prosthetics: wooden arms with iron claws attached to the ends. His siblings all stood in the room and laughed at him in his struggle.

Later, Victor said he never killed anyone, kind of. According to the Tampa Times, Licata told reporters:

"Me kill my sister, my mother? Man, you’re crazy! I never killed anybody. I hit them with an axe, and knocked off every _____ _____ that was in there. My uncle, and some old woman. Then two other men and two other women. Six there were, not five! I hit them with the axe like this_____. I knocked them all off but I didn’t kill them. Why didn’t they let me out of here? I go to the door and they shove me back. I shake on the gates and they won’t move. I’m the strongest man in the world, but the gates won’t move. My arms—see, they’re not made of wood. They’re the strongest arms in the world. But the gates won’t move. My arms are strong, but they didn’t kill anybody. They didn’t hit anybody, or hurt anybody. I had a pain in my stomach. I went to the kitchen and got a drink of water and took the bottle with me, somewhere. The axe? It was on the back porch. I took it in and set it down in the fireplace. It was a funny axe. When I picked it up and wrung it out, real blood came out! Not pain, not red ink … My stomach hurt."

Police could easily tell that something was off with Victor, but mental illness wasn’t the aspect of this story that the media was interested in.

One of the first and most significant pieces of news to come out about the case was that Chief Detective W.D. Bush had discovered several places where Licata had purchased “reefer” and that the young man had supposedly been “addicted to smoking marijuana cigarettes for more than six months.”

After this news surfaced, Victor became known as the “Marijuana Maniac” and was used as an example by every politician who had an anti-cannabis agenda. This small detail about marijuana that was never even confirmed is what made this case so famous it actually effected change in the law. But by many accounts, Victor denied having ever even tried marijuana.

Victor Licata was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1912. He was described as a generally shy and antisocial child. The details of his life were actually very different from those reported by the media on this case. Many of those stories begin with “A quiet, normal kid smokes a marijuana cigarette and transforms into an axe murderer.” They act like Licata was a completely typical American youth: your average young man. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Victor Licata actually struggled with mental illness starting from a young age.

But in fact, most news articles from 1933 don’t fail to mention Victor’s struggles with mental health. Victor had been diagnosed with dementia praecox and was considered psychotic. Because of this, he was never prosecuted for the murder of his family. He was instead committed to a mental hospital, where he could hopefully get some help.

But after he was committed, talk about his case didn’t cease, and people continued to use Victor’s story in their fight to criminalize marijuana. It was one of the favorite stories of the notorious anti-cannabis Commissioner of Narcotics, H. J. Anslinger. It was an inspiration for Reefer Madness, the 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film that has become a stoner cult favorite. And writer Cornell Woolrich, who wrote a number of classic crime books, including the story that inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window, probably had the case in mind when he wrote Marijuana: A Drug-Crazed Killer at Large in 1941 under the pseudonym William Irish.

Just after the murder, there were a lot of contradictory statements in newspaper articles. Some papers disagreed about what Victor was wearing when he was found, for example. Some papers say he was found in blood-soaked underwear, while others state that police only saw the bloody underwear when Victor removed his clean clothing. Other sources say no blood was ever found on him.

But between 1933 and 1938, it wasn’t just little discrepancies anymore. Writers began to take a lot of liberties with the story. By the time H. J. Anslinger’s Article “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth” was published in 1938, he was blatantly making details up to help support his cause. In that article Victor is described as an ordinary boy who had no mental health problems until his first puff of marijuana—that turned him into a stone cold killer. There’s no mention of the fact that the case was never prosecuted due to Victor’s mental state.

Detective Chief W. D. Bush , who actually worked the case, also wrote an article in 1938 for Inside Detective magazine, with the help of ghost writer Jack DeWitt. What you need to understand about these types of “pulp” publications is that the writer is expected to take some liberties to make the story juicer. This results in Bell and/or DeWitt lying all the way through the article. They sexualize the victim Providence in a way that made me want to stop reading. They even make up a bizarre story about how the smart and brave family dog identified Victor as the perpetrator after he’d been attacked himself. Neighbors and friends have confirmed that the Licata family never had a dog at all.

Here’s a couple of excerpts to show you what it’s like:

MOONLIGHT streamed through the window and cast a soft radiance over the bed. Like fairy fabric, woven of star-dust and the silver brightness of a Florida night, the moonbeams fashioned a coverlet for beautiful Providence Licata.

Providence slept with the tranquility that comes with twenty-two years of healthy young womanhood. Her hair was a dark mist against the moonwashed white of the pillow. Long lashes touched the delicate curve of her cheeks. Her full red lips were slightly parted. She had flung back the covers, for the night was warm, and she lay like a sleeping Venus in the soft sheen of the glorious night. Through the open window the scent of sweet jasmine floated on a soft breeze that stirred from the gulf.

The door opened an inch on silent hinges. Two hot eyes glared from the darkness. Providence Licata sighed. She flung one slender arm across the pillow. The warm breeze from the open window quickened and stirred the dark ringlets against her forehead.

Weird.

Later, when the police find the scene:

“Found something?” I turned and faced J. Rex Farrior, the state’s attorney.

"I hurried over,” he explained, "to see if I could help. “Tried to have a talk with that young fellow Victor, but his mind is unhinged. The shock has been too great."

I tapped the pocket where I had put the reefers. "A marihuana addict did this," I said. "He washed up in here and smoked a few reefers.”

So, I don’t need to tell you what happened in the United States during the 20th century with marijuana prohibition. The propaganda from people like Anslinger was definitely effective. But, let’s take a few steps back and actually look at the facts in this case, and try to figure out why it became the propaganda tool it did.

This was a tragedy. Five people lost their lives at the hands of an ax-wielding psychopath. In my opinion, all the evidence indicates that Victor Licata was responsible for the murders. He was at the scene, he was soaked with blood (according to some sources), and most importantly, his ramblings sounded like he was describing the crime in a strange, distorted way. He knew he’d done something wrong, but with his dementia praecox, I’m not sure he was looking through a lens to reality. He obviously knew that something had happened, but couldn’t put the pieces together on account of his mental illness.

There is no actual evidence that Victor ever even tried cannabis. There was no drug testing conducted in this case, and fantastic rumors would make their way to the papers on a daily basis, sensationalizing it even more.. Victor denied having used Marijuana and would continue to stand firm in that claim throughout his life. In his book from 1939, On the Trail of Marihuana, the Weed of Madness, Earl Rowell recounts a story about Victor’s father making marijuana cigarettes in his home and forcing his son Victor to peddle them on the street. According to this story, Victor eventually started to get high on his own supply.

I can’t find any mention of Mike Licata being caught up in the marijuana trade in a single article from before 1939. This seemed to be blatantly made up by the author (or the people he heard it from), but people clung to this story and it became part of this marijuana urban legend.

This was one of the most horrific crimes that had ever been committed in the Tampa area. Politicians saw an opportunity when this happened, especially when they learned the perpetrator was so young and mentally unwell. They chose this case as a great tool for the agenda they already had—they wanted to criminalize marijuana, and tying a story this horrifying to the drug would certainly help sway things in their direction.

I think it is very unlikely that marijuana made Victor Licata commit this crime. In 2020, we have a lot more information about how cannabis affects the brain than they did in 1933. Cannabis is not typically associated with violence. In fact, with the flower child movement of the 1960s, it really became more associated with peace. In my gut, I believe Victor’s consistent claims that he never tried the drug. I think he was simply used as a political pawn. But again, that’s just my gut feeling.

Of course, there’s a chance that he was on the drug and the high pushed his psychosis to a new level. Cannabis can trigger the onset of schizophrenia when a person is already genetically predisposed. But we’ve got to remember that Victor suffered from dementia praecox and was sick for years before the event. He wasn’t experiencing the onset of psychosis, his mental illness had already set in. He was already being treated for his psychotic issues.

The debate is ongoing as to whether there is any meaningful link between marijuana use and homicide. What seems clear, however, is that even in cases where cannabis is associated with violent behavior, there are generally more factors at play than marijuana use alone. I’m not aware of any documented cases in which pot actually causes someone to go on a murderous rampage. Well, other than Victor’s story, which is highly questionable at best.

This is an unsolved mystery because nobody was actually ever prosecuted for the crime. The cases were never closed.

There are some people out there who not only think Victor never tried cannabis, but that he was completely innocent of the crime, and there’s some interesting evidence to examine that supports their point.

There was a trend of mass axe murders in Florida in the 1920s and 30s. A Tampa Daily Times article from October 1933 mentions that including the Licata family, 19 people had been murdered by axe murderers in Tampa since 1926.

There are people out there, specifically on a site called reefermaddnessmuseum.org Who believe that this shines reasonable doubt on Licata. There were already axe murderers working in the neighborhood. There were plenty of suspects in the other cases that had been released. They argue this crime could have been committed by one of those men.

I don’t subscribe to this school of thought. It seems pretty clear according to the evidence that Victor was the perpetrator. Just because there were other axe murderers in the area doesn’t mean that Victor couldn’t have picked up his own axe.

What I do agree with this site on, however, is that marijuana is not responsible for this crime, and the absurd lies and embellishments by the media created the perfect story for anti-cannabis propaganda. It created the right climate for prohibition, mostly based on lies.

In 1945, five men described as “dangerous” escaped from a mental institution in Chattahoochee. Victor Licata was one of them. While the other four were captured and recommitted almost immediately, Victor spent five whole years on the lam. He worked as a laborer and moved from city to city to avoid being caught. He was eventually apprehended in New Orleans in 1950 and was sent back to Florida. At this time, he acknowledged that he had committed the murders, but insisted that he’d never tried marijuana in his life. He also claimed that he'd been declared sane after twelve years in the institution, but they wouldn’t release him.

Victor was once again locked up, despite having never actually been convicted of the murder of his family. He hanged himself with a bedsheet in his cell four months after returning to Florida.

This is a tragic case. Five people lost their lives, and their murders were spiced up by propagandists to make them fit their agenda. This is a case that should remind you that not everything you read is gospel truth. Writers change details. Politicians have agendas. This affects the way we receive news, and it always will.

That's all for this week. From the land of legal weed, I bid you farewell.

I’ll see you next time on out of the past.