JOE ARRIDY AND THE DRAIN SISTERS
On August 16th, 1936, a fifteen-year-old girl was sexually assaulted and murdered in Pueblo, Colorado. Her twelve-year-old sister was left injured, but alive. A man confessed to their murders: a man that many would later call “The Happiest Man on Death Row.” This week on Out of the Past: Joe Arridy and the Drain Sisters.
The Drains were an exuberant young family of five who made their home in Pueblo. They were touched by the Great Depression, as most people were, but were able to stay above water financially thanks to Mr. Riley Drain’s job with the WPA, part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Riley and Peggy Drain had it pretty good, especially compared with some other families that year. They at least had it good enough to go out on the town some evenings while they left the children at home.
That’s exactly what happened on the evening of August 16th. They went out for dinner and dancing. They felt they could leave Dorothy and Barbara home alone: Dorothy was nearly sixteen. They were responsible. And the Drains’ youngest, Billy, 9, had an offer from a friend’s family to stay the night. They would go out and not have anything to worry about.
But all the confidence they had that their family was safe had to have slipped away in an instant when Riley and Peggy arrived back at their home. They had a household rule: the living room light always had to be on if the Drains were out after dark. When they got there, the house was pitch black.
They went inside but saw nothing. They turned on the lights and still saw nothing—it was the sound of moaning upstairs that finally led them to the crime scene. Dorothy was dying in a pool of blood; Barbara was barely alive. The authorities and medical personnel were called. After an examination, it was determined both girls been brutally attacked with a sharp object and Dorothy had been raped. They cared for the girls, but Dorothy passed a few hours later in the early morning. Barbara survived and was able to recover enough physically to help with the legal proceedings in the coming months.
The investigation was ordinary at first. They looked at the typical suspects, and after questioning several people they started to zero in on a man named Frank Aguilar, whom Dorothy’s father had recently fired. All the evidence pointed straight to him. They even found what was thought to be the murder weapon—a hatchet—in their searches of his home. They also suspected that Aguilar was responsible for another attack on two women, Mrs. R.O. McMurtree (58) and her aunt Sally Crumpley (72), just a few weeks before. Crumpley died as a result of the assault.
Everything was going smoothly. It was the thirties, so I’m not sure what the processing of their evidence entailed, but long story short, they began to build a case against Aguilar. That’s when everything was turned upside down.
A man who had lived in an institution since he was ten years old, Joe Arridy, suddenly took over the title of main suspect, especially in the media. He had escaped from the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, and authorities found him wandering in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The county sheriff questioned him in the Cheyenne facility, and by the time they were finished, Sheriff George Carol came out of the interrogation room claiming that Arridy had confessed to the Dorothy Drain murder. Everyone back in Pueblo was shocked. He wasn’t an unfamiliar face. He’d lived in Pueblo until he was sent to the institution in 1925.
Back in his early years, he had tried to fit in, but he struggled. The child of Syrian immigrants, racism played a part in his daily life. His parents had tried to enroll him in school, but his teachers sent him back after one year, insisting he was a child who “could not learn.” That’s a pretty extreme judgment to make about a first grader. After this, Joe didn’t have access to education. He had a rough childhood, being consistently bullied and beaten up throughout the time he lived in Pueblo. The institution was no paradise either. Joe Arridy had suffered intensely in his short life. Doctors and specialists claimed Joe had the mind of a five-year-old, and the IQ numbers for Joe Arridy were somewhere around forty-five.
Even with a tight case against Aguilar, police pursuit of Joe Arridy continued. Arridy kept confessing, and each story was a little different, a little bit closer to the truth. Authorities deduced that he must have been an accomplice of Frank Aguilar. Arridy apparently said he was “with a man named Frank,” during interrogation.
During the interrogation of Aguilar, there was one statement he made that implicated Joe Arridy in the crimes, but that statement was retracted. His confession on record doesn’t mention Arridy at all. Some assume this one statement that mentioned Aguilar was the result of police coercion. They might have told him he’d get a lighter sentence if he connected their stories. But ultimately, for whatever reason, Aguilar was not comfortable implicating Joe Arridy in the crime.
Arridy and Aguilar’s supposed “partnership” was never introduced in Aguilar’s trial, nor was the notion of him working with an accomplice at all. He did, however, confess finally to the Crumpley murder and the attack on Mrs. McMurtree. McMurtree came to the courthouse for the reading of the verdict. She told authorities that she could positively ID Aguilar as the man who attacked her a few weeks before the Drains. Aguilar was executed on August 13, 1937. His name is spelled incorrectly on his grave marker.
So much coercion and unsavory police work went on here, it's difficult to even take other parts of Aguilar's confession as truth. My question is, why? If you have a man confessing to the crimes, why even try to coerce a confession from another suspect? And the pressure to confess didn’t even come from Pueblo police, who had jurisdiction over the case. Joe Arridy was interviewed in Cheyenne and confessed to authorities there. Why would Wyoming police pressure a man to confess to a murder in Colorado? When Arridy was sitting in the Cheyenne interrogation room, who brought up the Drain incident first? Him, or the cops? Either way, everything that happened from this point on is now considered cruel and unusual treatment of Joe Arridy.
In 1937, it was Arridy’s turn for trial. Unlike the prosecution strategy in the Aguilar case, in this trial they focused on Arridy being an accessory to Aguilar’s crimes. The existence of this partnership was essential to their case. Arridy was convicted as well, and his sentence was also death. Gas chamber was the method proposed.
What was obvious through all the proceedings was that Arridy had absolutely no idea what was going on. He didn’t understand the gravity of the charges against him. Some said he didn’t really even seem to understand what a trial was. He tried to make friends with people in the courtroom.
After the trial, this childlike innocence stayed. He didn’t understand what was going to happen to him, and as a result had a happy and optimistic demeanor. Definitely not something you’d expect to encounter on death row. The Warden, Roy Took, took a liking to him, and would sometimes bring him little presents like toy trains. His optimistic, childlike manner earned him the nickname “The Happiest Man on Death Row.” It’s wonderful that he was happy, but it’s also disturbing to think that he was only happy because he didn’t really understand what was going to happen. That’s really troubling.
Joe was led to the gas chamber in 1939. The supreme court held up his conviction. This whole Colorado community was okay with this mentally disabled man being put to death, even when he obviously didn’t understand what was happening. He was offered a last meal, but everyone in the room knew he had no idea what that meant. He had bowl after bowl of ice cream. The warden let him have as much as he wanted.
Joe Arridy asked to take his favorite toy train into the gas chamber with him. The warden explained that he wouldn’t need it, as he was going to die. Joe insisted, “No, no. Joe won’t die.”
Joe Arridy passed away on January 6, 1939.
This case became an example for many who were looking to do research on false and coerced confessions. People believe that Joe’s confessions were a result of coercion and leading questions, and the only reason he ever got any information correct was because the police were feeding it to him, even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were doing.
Joe Arridy was granted a posthumous pardon in 2011. By that point in American history, sentencing mentally disabled people to death had been deemed unconstitutional, and many people thought that he wasn’t involved with the crime at all. He was just a victim of bad interrogation techniques.
As for who murdered Dorothy and hurt Barbara, we can only assume that it was the other person convicted, Frank Aguilar, but given the lack of quality in the Arridy investigation, It’s hard to say anything with certainty. Someone deserved to pay for what happened to those girls. Whether any of the right people were brought to justice, I don’t know. I hope so. I hope there aren’t more victims of an unknown assailant who was never caught.
If you want to make a difference in the life of someone like Joe Arridy, I recommend making a donation to the Innocence Project. They are committed to freeing prisoners who’ve been convicted but are innocent or there is great reason to believe they’re innocent. They've been responsible for freeing Darryl Hunt, George Allen, and William Barnhouse to name a few. No innocent person should ever be forced to live their life in prison or die for something they didn’t do.
Everyone has a right not to be murdered. Everyone has a right not to be violated. What happened to the Drain sisters is absolutely horrifying, and I often feel like their tragedy is overshadowed by Joe Arridy’s story. Let’s not forget Dorothy Drain. She was a young lady whose life was ended just as it was beginning. Barbara, in addition to being assaulted herself, had to live with the memory of her sister’s murder all her life. These sisters have been treated horribly. In 1937, the media covered her story in a lurid detective magazine. It sexualized the tale of her attack. You can tell from the image on the screen that these scuzzballs had no moral issue with trying to bank on the idea of sexualizing a 15-year-old girl’s murder. It’s horrifying. To help people who have experienced trauma like this, consider donating to https://www.rainn.org/, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. I’ll have the link in the description box.
That’s all for this week. I’ll see you next time on Out of the Past.