Harrison Graham was found guilty in 1988 of the first-degree murders of seven women in North Philadelphia. He was a former dishwasher, known as Marty, and the women died in his apartment over about 11 months up to the summer of 1987, according to United Press International. Police found their remains there in August 1987 after his landlord, who had just evicted him, called them. Graham fled, and was arrested about a week later.
The case is remembered in Philadelphia for its setting, a filthy apartment that the press called the "House of Death," and for the sentence that followed. The trial judge, Robert A. Latrone, gave Graham one life term and six death sentences and ordered them served in sequence, so that the death sentences could be carried out only if the life term were ever commuted. Seven years later the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that a judge has no power to do that.
UPI described him as a former dishwasher, aged 28 at his sentencing. His mother and his foster mother sat in the front row throughout his trial.
His apartment was in North Philadelphia. In Graham's own account to police, as the state Supreme Court later summarized it, each of the women came to the apartment with him.
The women's names do not appear in the Supreme Court's opinion, which describes them only as seven women. The lead case number in the court's capital case records is 87-08-3948.
In the summer of 1987, neighbors complained repeatedly about a foul smell from the apartment. PhillyVoice reports that Graham was ordered to leave the building because of it. UPI reported that the arrest followed the neighbors' complaints about odors.
When he left, he took very little with him. One of the few things he carried away, UPI and PhillyVoice both reported, was a Sesame Street puppet.
The landlord called police. Officers responding to the call, the Supreme Court wrote, found the remains of seven women in Graham's apartment. PhillyVoice noted that the discovery came while Gary Heidnik was still awaiting trial in another Philadelphia case.
He was not free for long. PhillyVoice says he turned himself in; UPI dates his arrest to August 16, 1987.
He then gave police a statement, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court summarized in 1995. Every death, he said, happened the same way. A woman came to the apartment with him, and he choked her. He called the deaths accidental, and said he would wake up to find the woman dead.
He was charged with seven counts of murder and seven counts of abuse of corpse.
Graham was tried without a jury in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, before Judge Robert A. Latrone. The trial lasted seven weeks, UPI reported. The prosecutor was Roger King, who sought the death penalty for every killing. The defense lawyer was Joel Moldovsky.
The prosecution relied on Graham's statement and on witnesses who had been in the apartment and had seen him with some of the women; their testimony, the Supreme Court later wrote, corroborated his account of how the women came to be there. Graham sat passively through most of the trial, according to UPI.
The judge rejected the claim that the deaths were accidents. He called it "self-serving and wholly incredible," and the Supreme Court, reviewing his findings, pointed out that under Pennsylvania law the intent to kill can be formed in a fraction of a second. Latrone found Graham guilty of seven counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of abuse of corpse. UPI reported that the verdict came a week before sentencing.
Latrone sentenced Graham on May 3, 1988, the date recorded in the court's capital case records. Under Pennsylvania's death penalty statute, the judge, sitting without a jury, had to weigh aggravating circumstances against mitigating ones for each murder.
For one of the seven women, the case filed under indictment 87-08-3948, the judge found no aggravating circumstance proved, and he imposed life imprisonment. For each of the other six, he found two aggravating circumstances: that Graham had been convicted of another offense carrying life imprisonment or death, and that he had been convicted of another murder. He found two mitigating circumstances: that Graham had no significant history of prior criminal convictions, and other mitigating evidence about his character and record. He found that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating ones. UPI reported that Latrone used the life sentence for the first killing as the aggravating circumstance for the later ones, as the law allows in cases of successive murders.
He also imposed seven terms of one to two years for abuse of corpse. Then he ordered every sentence to run consecutively: the abuse-of-corpse terms first, then the life sentence, then the six death sentences. The life sentence, he wrote, would be "an assured life imprisonment without opportunity for parole." In practice, Moldovsky told reporters, Graham could be executed only if his life sentence were someday commuted.
Moldovsky compared the judge to King Solomon, and said he believed the combination of sentences was the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. King said the ruling protected every part of society and all of its interests. Latrone said a court does not exist only to serve victims and their families, and that he could not act as "a conduit or instrument of revenge"; he declined to debate the merits of capital punishment.
After the first death sentence was read, Graham leaned toward his lawyer and said, "I'll commit suicide; they'll never kill me," according to his attorneys. At the end of the hearing he stretched, snapped his fingers, and, as deputies led him away, asked for his Sesame Street puppet. The judge refused but let him keep the glove and finger puppets that had been on the defense table. His mother and foster mother were not in court that day; Moldovsky said he had not been able to reach them in time.
In Pennsylvania every death sentence goes automatically to the state Supreme Court. After Graham's sentencing, however, the trial court never gave the court reporter and clerk the directions that the appellate rules require to start that review, and the Supreme Court found that nothing happened in the case until March 1993.
That month Graham's lawyer wrote that Graham did not want any post-trial motions filed and did not want to appeal. A memo dated March 24, 1993, canceled a post-trial motion hearing that had been listed for April 22. A notice of appeal carrying the unsigned words "(Automatic Appeal)" was filed on April 6, 1993, and docketed in the Supreme Court on April 14. The trial court filed its opinion on May 20, 1994, and sent the record up on May 26.
Graham asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the appeal. He argued that he had a right to waive review, that the Commonwealth had not challenged his sentence in time, and that the court should leave things as they were so that he could serve his life sentence. The prosecutors, for their part, argued that Latrone had had no authority to make the death sentences wait behind the life term.
The court heard argument on January 26, 1995, and decided the case on July 18, 1995. Justice Zappala wrote the opinion for a court made up of Chief Justice Nix and Justices Flaherty, Zappala, Cappy, Castille and Montemuro, the last sitting by designation.
It refused to dismiss the appeal. Automatic review of a death sentence, the court held, does not depend on the defendant's own appeal rights; it is "an integral and absolutely essential procedural safeguard." It noted that Graham's position differed from those of defendants such as Gary Heidnik, who had accepted their death sentences, but the purpose of the review was the same.
The court then reviewed the evidence on the six murder counts that carried death sentences and found it sufficient for each. It found that the sentences were not the product of "passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor," and that they were not excessive or disproportionate compared with similar cases.
On the consecutive order, the court agreed with the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania's death penalty provisions stand in their own part of the sentencing law, it reasoned, and the general power of a judge to make sentences concurrent or consecutive does not reach them. The other provisions on consecutive terms apply only to terms of imprisonment. Allowing a judge to add discretion of this kind to a capital sentence would undo the statute's design, which was written to channel and limit discretion as the United States Supreme Court had required. The judge, it held, "has no discretion to order that such sentence be consecutive to any other sentences then being imposed or previously imposed." A death sentence, the opinion said, "is sui juris and stands entirely apart from other punishments prescribed by the Sentencing Code."
The court affirmed the death sentences, vacated the judgments to the extent that they made the death sentences consecutive to the other terms, and directed that the full record be sent to the Governor. The arrangement that had kept the death sentences behind a life term was gone.
The court's capital case records show that the United States Supreme Court extended Graham's time to seek review until December 15, 1995. A motion for a stay of execution was filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on November 27, 1995, and granted on December 1. On May 28, 1996, a collateral petition was filed in the Court of Common Pleas.
Graham was not executed. In 2002 the United States Supreme Court barred the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, and in 2003, PhillyVoice reported, a Pennsylvania court threw out his death sentence. In 2017 he was serving a life sentence at SCI Coal Township, a state prison in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Graham's claim that the deaths were accidental was heard and rejected by the trial judge, who found him guilty of first-degree murder on every count; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld that finding on the six death-sentence counts.
The date of his arrest is reported differently. UPI gave August 16, 1987; other, unconfirmed accounts give August 17.
PhillyVoice wrote in 2017 that he was convicted of manslaughter as well as murder and abuse of corpse. The Supreme Court's opinion lists only seven counts of first-degree murder and seven of abuse of corpse.
The exact date and grounds of the 2003 ruling that ended his death sentence were not reported.
About 11 months up to August 1987: Graham kills seven women in his North Philadelphia apartment, over a period UPI put at 11 months.
Summer 1987: neighbors complain of a smell; the landlord evicts Graham, who leaves and takes a Sesame Street puppet with him.
August 1987: police called by the landlord find the remains of seven women.
August 16, 1987: Graham arrested (UPI); he gives police a statement admitting he choked the women.
1988: seven-week non-jury trial before Judge Robert A. Latrone; found guilty of seven counts of first-degree murder and seven of abuse of corpse.
May 3, 1988: sentenced to seven terms of one to two years, life, and six death sentences, all consecutive.
March 1993: nothing has happened in the case since sentencing; Graham's lawyer writes that he wants no motions or appeal.
April 6, 1993: notice of automatic appeal filed (docketed April 14).
May 20, 1994: trial court opinion filed; record sent up May 26.
January 26, 1995: argument in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
July 18, 1995: Commonwealth v. Graham; death sentences affirmed, consecutive order vacated, record sent to the Governor.
December 1, 1995: stay of execution granted.
May 28, 1996: collateral petition filed in the Court of Common Pleas.
2003: a Pennsylvania court throws out the death sentence (PhillyVoice).
2017: reported serving life at SCI Coal Township.