Robert NIXON

AKA "Brick Moron"

Classification: Serial homicide
Characteristics: Juvenile - Rape - Robbery
Number of victims: 5
Date of murders: 1936 - 1938
Date of arrest: May 29, 1938
Date of birth: 1920
Victims profile: Women
Method of murder: Bludgeoning with bricks
Location: Illinois/California, USA
Status: Executed by electrocution in Illinois on June 15, 1939

Robert Nixon killed five women and injured one other in Chicago and Los Angeles from 1936 to 1938.

His claim to fame was his very basic but odd choice of murder weapon. Bricks. Nixon was a career petty criminal that moved on to murder when he broke into the Chicago home of Florence Castle on June 29, 1936, and looted her house before bludgeoning her to death with his faithful brick.

In the Spring of 1937 he continued his slayings in L.A., claiming three more lives, including a mother and daughter. He left one surviving victim.

Nixon was arrested after returning to Chicago and killing his fifth and final victim on May 28, 1938. He confessed to the brick attacks and sentenced to death for the last Windy City slaying. Nixon was electrocuted on June 15, 1939.

Brick slayer is likened to jungle beast

By Charles Leavelle - The Chicago Tribune

June 5, 1938

Beneath an alley fire escape policemen and detectives stand three and four deep. From a fifth floor window others lean out and call: "Let him come."

Handcuffs click. A slouchily dressed colored youth detaches himself from the crowd of detectives and begins making his way up the side of the building effortlessly. At the second floor, where the fire escape begins, he poises himself lightly and swings over on to it.

"Look at him go," says a policeman. "Just like an ape."

By the time this has been said the youth has swung himself over the sill and is in the fifth floor room where two years ago he raped and murdered with a brick Mrs. Florence Thompson Castle. As detectives watch he shows in pantomime how he committed the crime, one of the five savage murders he has confessed.

Comes from Little Town.

The Negro youth is Robert Nixon. He is 18 years old and comes from a pretty little town in the old south -- Tallulah, La. But there is nothing pretty about Robert Nixon. He has none of the charm of speech or manner that is characteristic of so many southern darkies.

That charm is a mark of civilization, and so far as manner and appearance go, civilization has left Nixon practically untouched. His hunched shoulders and long, sinewy arms that dangle almost to his knees; his out-thrust head and catlike tread all suggest the animal.

He is very black-- almost pure Negro. His physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species.