On the morning of June 2, 1954, Dorothy Westwater, fourteen, left her family's apartment in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, to go to school. In the building a man seized her and dragged her under a staircase, stabbed her eight times in the neck, back and chest, raped her and struck her skull with a lead pipe. She was still alive when she was found and was rushed to the hospital, where she died.
She was the fourth. On November 15, 1953, Rosa Chronik, eighty-five, came home to find a burglar in her apartment and was stabbed to death. On April 8, 1954, Marion Brown, seventeen, a waitress, was followed through the apartment complex where she lived and worked, raped in a secluded hallway and killed. Eight days later, on April 16, a cab driver, Alexander Jablonka, forty-three, was stabbed to death in his taxi, with the same knife. The Yorkville police at first denied that the killings were connected, saying there was not enough evidence and that talk of one killer would cause panic. By June men in the neighborhood were walking girls to and from home, and the papers were calling the killer the Devil of Yorkville.
On the night of Marion Brown's murder, the man who had killed her took a call from his fiancée, Yolande Graspo. She had heard about the killing and was frightened, and asked him to walk her home. He did, and left her there unharmed.
On June 5, three days after the attack on Dorothy Westwater, Patrolman Gustave Roniger saw a car being driven on the wrong side of the road in Queens and pulled it over. The driver had no license. Asked what he was doing, he said he was just out for a pleasant day. The car had been reported stolen, and in the trunk police found a knife and a lead pipe with a bloodstain on it. The driver was John Francis Roche, twenty-six, a plumber's helper.
He was born on September 6, 1927 in Port Chester, New York, one of three children of Irish immigrants, and grew up in New York City. His father, Patrick, was an alcoholic who beat his wife and once tried to kill himself. Roche was committing petty crimes by twelve and was sent to reform school at thirteen. In 1951 he was jailed for armed robbery and was out again before the summer of 1952.
Questioned by Manhattan and Queens detectives, he confessed to six killings: the four in Yorkville and two in Queens for which other men had already been convicted. Josephine Brown, twenty-three, had been strangled on a deserted street in Queens on July 26, 1952, and Oliver L. Freeman, eighteen, had been convicted of manslaughter for her death. Edward Bates, a sailor of twenty-two, had been beaten and stabbed to death in Queens on August 22, 1953, and Paul A. Pfeffer had been convicted of his murder in January 1954. The Queens district attorney, T. Vincent Quinn, said those two confessions were without basis in fact; four of the six, he said, were true. Even so, Pfeffer was granted a retrial.
Roche was tried for Dorothy Westwater's murder in the fall of 1954. He did not deny it. He said he would rather die than spend his life in prison, and rather be executed than go to a mental hospital. "I am sorry," he said. "She was only 14. I thought she was 18." His lawyer, James Murray, told the jury his client's mind was like scrambled eggs and that he was insane. On November 9, 1954 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder without a recommendation of mercy, which made death mandatory, and on November 30 he was sentenced in General Sessions Court and taken to the death house at Sing Sing.
The first execution date passed, and a later one, August 24, 1955, was put off because his testimony was needed at Pfeffer's retrial. In January 1956 the charge against Pfeffer for the Bates murder was dismissed; Pfeffer was already serving life for a separate killing. Before his own execution Roche admitted he had not killed Bates, and said he had claimed it out of sympathy, because both men had led seamy lives.
On January 26, 1956 he ate a last meal of fried chicken, potatoes, tomato salad, strawberry shortcake and ice cream and met with a chaplain. The Rev. Thomas J. Donovan led him into the death chamber at 11:01 that night. He had no last words, and he was pronounced dead at 11:04. He was twenty-eight.
The count is four murders accepted by the district attorney, one of them proved in court; the two Queens confessions were rejected, and he withdrew one of them himself.