THE CHILLINGWORTH MURDER MYSTERY
On a June night in 1955, Judge Curtis Eugene Chillingworth and his wife Marjorie of West Palm Beach, Florida disappeared. Their bodies have never been found, and for several years, no one had any idea what had happened to them—at least, no one who was willing to talk about it. When the secret of their demise was finally revealed, with it came shocking revelations about an extensive web of corruption and murder. This week on Out of the Past: The Chillingworth Murders.
Curtis Chillingworth, who preferred his middle name, Eugene, was an extremely distinguished member of the West Palm Beach community. He came from a prominent family, was a WWI Navy veteran, and served as County Circuit Judge for over thirty years. He began this position at the age of 26, just two years after graduating law school, and still holds the record for the youngest person ever to take that job.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Chillingworth’s career was his progressivism. He was unusually scrupulous for the time about ensuring fair treatment for non-whites and women. For example, in 1933, four black men were arrested for the murder of a white owner of a fish market. The case was a complete mess: they had used coercion to obtain obviously false confessions. Chillingworth’s decision to grant them a retrial was controversial. That’s right, in 1930s Florida, it was controversial for a judge to care that black men received their constitutional rights. It was quite common for other judges at the time to put their disdain for other races above their duty to uphold the constitution.
In his twenties, Chillingworth married Marjorie McKinley, a Cornell girl. She was smart, bold, and aggressive, and this caught Chillingworth’s eye. She was considered a progressive woman herself, and she kept a close eye on her husband’s work. They had three daughters together, all of whom were grown by the time our story begins.
On June 14 of 1955, the Chillingworths went out for the evening in Palm Beach. They dined with a family friend and had conversations about their upcoming cruise around the world. Their three daughters were due to arrive for a visit the next morning, so they retired relatively early, driving back to their beautiful beachfront cottage just a few miles away in Manalapan where they planned to spend their golden years.
The next morning, their contractor Frank Ebersol arrived to repair a window, and was surprised to find the house empty with the door open. In addition, Chillingworth missed a 10:00am court date. This was unheard of. He was almost obnoxious about punctuality, so it was frankly shocking for him to be late for anything. Before long, the police were on the scene. At first, they found no obvious signs of a struggle. The engines of both the Chillingworths’ cars were cold. Their beds had been slept in but not made. A porch light was broken. Soon they discovered that the path down to the beach was spattered with blood droplets every few feet, as if someone with an open wound had been walking there.
Police sealed off the scene so it could be examined. The problem was, they had no idea what they were doing. Police in the area at that time had very little training on how to investigate a crime scene, and they contaminated the house beyond the point of finding valuable forensics. One of the biggest offenders in this regard was the sheriff of Palm Beach County, John Kirk.
Other officers remember Kirk as being sloppy at the site, walking through blood and constantly smoking. When he was finished with a cigarette he would just drop it onto the floor. After he walked through a room, there was no way to tell whether footprints and cigarette butts came from him, the victims, or the assailants.
In later years, some police officers would speak candidly about John Kirk. He was said to be the most crooked and racist sheriff they had ever encountered. Chuck Nugent, county solicitor, said that John Kirk was the most corrupt public official he’d ever seen, and went on to say that it was actually a point of pride for Kirk. He would brag about it. When he first became sheriff, he was offered 7500 dollars a year. To friends, he commented that he wouldn’t do the job unless he was earning that much each week. With his ties to organized crime and the illegal gambling and narcotics scene in Palm Beach, he was easily able to reach this number. His reputation grew, and rumors were whispered all over town. People said he had no problem taking down anyone who stood in his way. Others chattered about him killing innocent black men and tossing them into the canal.
Kirk went on and on to the press about how many officers were working the case. It was true—more men than usual were looking for a missing person, but most of those men were not trained for what they were doing, and they weren’t using focused, organized methods. Focus is the key word here. Focus was the biggest problem with this search.
The media and townsfolk were all worked up over the case, as they saw it as an attack on the legal system. Around three weeks later, another judge and friend of the Chillingworths, Phillip O'Connell, received a terrifying and mysterious phone call. All the person on the other line said was “You’re the next to go.” This prompted O’Connell to get involved with the investigation.
Every branch of law enforcement with a station near Palm Beach got involved with the fruitless search. They had never worked together in that capacity before, and it didn’t work out well. Police came away with almost nothing. The little forensic evidence they found proved nothing of importance. They typed the blood that dripped down the path, and found that it matched Marjorie. This was just typing, of course; they couldn’t narrow it down any further in the 1950s. They did, however, assume that the blood was indeed Mrs. Chillingworth’s. When nothing more was found, attention dwindled and Eugene and Marjorie Chillingworth became just two more names on the Missing Persons Registry.
One particular individual ought to have been singled out as a suspect much sooner than he eventually was: another judge named Joseph Peel. In 1953, Chillingworth had given Peel a severe public reprimand for working both sides in a divorce case, angering and embarrassing him a great deal. A couple of years later, trouble was still following Peel around. In May of ’55, he was accused of professional misconduct in another divorce case—this time, for falsely informing a woman that her divorce had been finalized when in truth he had failed to file the paperwork—and it looked like Chillingworth would be overseeing the case. Chillingworth was reported to have remarked that he would make sure Peel would “never practice law again.”
Joseph Peel was a confusing man. Judges at his level made $3,000 dollars a year, but Peel and his family lived like millionaires. Where did he get all the cash for his extravagant lifestyle? It turns out Sheriff John Kirk was far from the only corrupt official in Palm Beach. Peel was partners with a number of shady individuals who ran profitable rackets around town: moonshine, gambling, prostitution, insurance fraud, narcotics, you name it. Peel would routinely make sure that his business partners had enough time to move evidence if law enforcement ever came around to search their property. He was in charge of signing the warrants, after all. This legal cushion was perhaps the most important part of the operation in Palm Beach. If Peel was kicked off the bench, they would all be in serious trouble. And kicking Peel off the bench was exactly what Chillingworth wanted to do. So Peel clearly had motive for wanting him gone. But as it turned out, Chillingworth’s disappearance did Peel little good. He was disbarred for 90 days by another judge for his mishandling of the divorce case, and shortly after this he resigned from his own position as judge and his work in law finally fizzled out entirely.
Everything might have ended there, but two years later, Peel ran afoul of the law again when two of his associates, racketeer Floyd “Lucky” Holzapfel and insurance agent James Yenzer, were charged with the attempted murder of Peel’s law partner Harold Gray. Peel, it was later revealed, had taken out an insurance policy with a double indemnity clause on Gray. (Double indemnity clauses dictate that the company pays out double the amount of the policy in the event of a violent death.) Peel then hired Holzapfel to kill Gray. In court, Holzapfel’s botched attempt to murder Gray was defended on the basis that Holzapfel couldn’t control himself, as he flew into a rage when Gray insulted his wife. For some reason, the jury saw this as reason enough to acquit. Even more bizarrely, the charges against Peel and Yenzer were dropped.
If it’s not clear why we’re discussing all of this, hang in there, because as you’ll soon see, it will eventually lead us back to the Chillingworth murders. But first we have to talk about yet one more murder involving the gruesome cast of characters we’ve assembled.
In 1958, with his law career washed up, Peel moved to Brevard County and embarked on an investment scam with Holzapfel. During this time, Holzapfel and another of his and Peel’s criminal conspirators, moonshiner and gambling boss Bobby Lincoln, murdered a man named Lew Gene Harvey, whom they suspected of snitching on West Palm Beach moonshiners. When Harvey’s body was found in the canal where they dumped it, Sheriff Kirk, called in assistance from the Florida Sheriff’s Bureau. Ironically, by doing this, the racist, corrupt, incompetent Kirk turned out to be the one who initiated the chain of events that would crack the Chillingworth case.
The man the Bureau sent was Henry Lovern. In investigating the Harvey case, Lovern had conversations with James Yenzer, the insurance agent who had been involved in the double indemnity murder attempt with Holzapfel and Peel. It emerged during the course of their talking that Yenzer had inside knowledge about not only the Harvey murder, but the Chillingworth disappearances as well. Lovern was soon able to use the promise of reward money to entice Yenzer into acting as an undercover agent.
Lovern learned from Yenzer that Holzapfel was a key player in the murders, and in order to unravel the whole story, they would need to get him talking. But around this time, Holzapfel got into even more trouble, running guns to Nicaragua. He was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He jumped bail, however, and fled to Brazil. Lovern immediately set about planning a way to get him back to the states. He added one more undercover agent to his employ: Jim Wilber, the bondsman who put up the money for Holzapfel’s bail.
While Holzapfel was in Brazil, Peel continued to send him his cut of the investment scam they were in on together. Holzapfel felt that Peel was shorting him, however, and complained. Peel became worried that Holzapfel’s dissatisfaction might result in him spilling the beans about the Chillingworths. So he hired Yenzer to lure Holzapfel back to Florida in order to have him killed. Remember, unbeknownst to Peel, Yenzer was already working for Lovern, along with Wilber, to do this same thing (minus having him killed)!
In 1960, Yenzer and Wilber succeeded in getting Holzapfel to come back to Florida, where they arranged a meeting in a hotel room. Lovern set up shop secretly in the next room, and over the course of three days, recorded their drunken conversations, which revealed everything about the Chillingworth murders: most importantly, that Peel had indeed been behind them, and that Holzapfel and Lincoln had carried them out.
Authorities offered Lincoln immunity in exchange for a confession, which he gave. He confirmed that Peel had paid him and Holzapfel to murder the Chillingworths. Based on this and the testimony they were later able to get from Holzapfel, this is what happened to the Chillingworths that June evening:
Holzapfel and Lincoln took a boat to the Chillingworth property. Holzapfel rang the doorbell and greeted Chillingworth with a story about his yacht breaking down. He asked to use the phone. When the judge let him in, Holzapfel pulled a gun and told him he was being robbed. He made Chillingworth call his wife downstairs, and soon, with the help of Lincoln, he bound and gagged the couple.
As the two men led the judge and his wife down to the shore, Marjorie managed to work her gag loose and screamed. Holzapfel pistol-whipped her, and she bled profusely—the source of the droplets that were strewn along the path. Chillingworth tried to bargain with Lincoln. Still assuming that money was the motive, he promised the moonshiner $200,000 if he would release them. This got him nowhere, obviously.
Soon they were out on the open water, and it became even clearer that this was no robbery. At one point, the small boat’s motor began to fail. At that point,
Chillingworth did something that at first sounds absurd: he told Holzapfel what to do to get it running again. Although it turned out to be a terrible idea, his reasoning is understandable upon reflection: he was probably trying to forge a bond between himself and his abductor, making it harder for him to kill him and his wife.
Before long, they were far from shore, in the middle of nowhere—above a place that Holzapfel would later refer to as “a hole out there in the middle of the ocean.” The Chillingworths must have known their time was almost up. They exchanged poignant declarations of love, and then the two hired killers put a weight around Marjorie’s waist and pushed her into the water. Alive. The men disagreed about whether Eugene jumped into the water on his own, or was pushed. Either way, he didn’t go under at first. Lincoln suggested shooting him, but Holzapfel pointed out that the sound of the gunshot might travel across the waves and draw attention. So he hit the judge over the head with his shotgun, and when he still didn’t pass out, they tied an anchor to his body, and he finally sank into the depths to join his wife. Neither of their remains have ever been recovered.
Upon completing this grisly task, Holzapfel called Peel and recited a short sentence to let him know his wishes had been carried out: “the motor is fixed.” It’s somewhat creepy how fitting this bit of code is in light of the assistance the judge gave Holzapfel in keeping the boat running.
After all this came out, Holzapfel was arrested, but Peel fled when he heard the news. They caught up with him in Chattanooga a month later, however, and the case against him and his hired killers went to trial. The prosecutor was state attorney Phil O’Connell Sr.—the man who had been marked as Peel’s next target after Chillingworth. If all had gone according to the original plan, Holzapfel and Lincoln would have repeated their bloody actions with O’Connell as their victim. Peel had even driven Holzapfel up to O’Connell’s house and pointed him out.
Since Lincoln had agreed to testify, they had one of the two witnesses they needed in order to satisfy corpus delicti. Up to this point, Holzapfel had held out, claiming his innocence. But when he finally went on the stand in the trial a few months later, he confessed and entered a guilty plea. He gave heartfelt testimony and even cried. Even with his criminal past, the jury found him credible.
Peel testified in his own defense. He tried to claim that Holzapfel was responsible for the murders, and had pinned it on him because he believed Peel had slept with his wife. (Though clearly a desperate lie, this claim was actually not quite as ridiculous as it might sound; Peel was a notorious womanizer who even took advantage of his own female clients.) Peel even tried unsuccessfully to escape when he was being held for the crime, and attempted twice to have Holzapel killed in jail. Ultimately, he could not escape the damage done by Holzapfel’s testimony. The jury took two hours to convict. They recommended mercy, and Peel received a life sentence. He was paroled in the early eighties, just days before dying of cancer. In the end, he admitted to knowing about the murders, but continued to deny ordering them.
In this mismanaged, crazy case without bodies, the state of Florida was still somehow able to bring people to justice. And I definitely think they got the right guys, even though there are a couple of suspects that people like to bring up.
A man known as “Daddy Jack” murdered three women in a rooming house in 1950. Chillingworth sentenced him to life in prison, but he got out after only a few years. He would have had motive.
And earlier that same year, the Gambino crime family commited a murder that was eerily similar: a couple was murdered on the ocean—thrown in and weighed down, very much like Holzapfel said it went down with the Chillingworths. I don’t know that the police ever looked for a connection between these two cases.
One of the most striking things about this case is the fact that they were able to obtain convictions without remains. When a jury enters a deliberation room, their duty is to determine whether the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Without bodies, there exists a reasonable doubt that a crime was even committed. Doubt that the victim is even dead. This is where the legal concept of corpus delicti comes in. This legal principle dictates that murder charges cannot be brought against a person without concrete evidence that a crime has been committed. They can reach this requirement in two ways: if bodies are found and the manner of death is determined to be homicide, or if at least two eyewitnesses saw the murder being committed. In this case, Peel was charged before they had either of these things. Fortunately, by the time they got to trial, authorities had finally obtained a confession from Holzapfel in addition to Lincoln, and could thus move forward.
In cases where there are no remains, many legal professionals are uncomfortable bringing up capital punishment. Unfortunately for Holzapfel, these people weren’t making the decisions in his case. After giving the prosecution what they finally needed, another eyewitness account of the murder, he had done them a favor. But they turned around and slapped a death penalty on him, sentencing him to the electric chair. (I can’t help but think it was because he was such a palpably loathsome character. In recordings where he recounts the murders, he jokes and chuckles about them in a way that is positively spine-chilling.) He held true to his nickname, however: “Lucky’s” conviction was eventually commuted. He would have become eligible for parole in 2009, but he died in prison in 1996. People who tried to think of something positive to say about him could only come up with the weak epitaph “At least he brought Joe Peel to justice.”
This case has so many twists and turns, so many small stories that seem irrelevant until they finally fit into the bigger picture. It was very popular with the media, but because the details are so intricate, many articles seem a little bit confused. I can’t promise that I’ve completely escaped this trap myself.
If you want to learn all the details, I would recommend listening to the podcast “Chillingworth.” It’s a thirteen-part series that examines each and every little facet of the case. It’s put together by Florida residents John Maass and Jonathan Paine. Their familiarity with the area and its history makes for a very interesting examination. They also have access to audio tapes that nobody’s heard since the 1950s and 60s. They go over absolutely everything, so if you find this case interesting, I would recommend doing more than watching my bite-size YouTube video and dive into the Chillingworth podcast.
That’s all for this week on Out of the Past.