John Francis Roche was born in 1927 and worked as a plumber's helper. He was twenty-seven when he was sentenced.
He robbed, beat and stabbed his victims across 1953 and 1954. The account of his method describes two men and four females between the ages of thirteen and eighty-five, with at least one of the women also raped.
He was convicted on November 9, 1954 of the rape and murder of Dorothy Westwater, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from Manhattan. That is the murder he was tried and condemned for. He confessed to four other homicides.
He was sentenced on November 30, 1954 and taken from General Sessions Court to Sing Sing's death row. A press photograph of that day shows him sitting in a car outside the court; another shows him leaving the Tombs, unshaven, with a Department of Correction officer. The execution was set for January 10 and carried out on January 26, 1956.
The count needs care. He was convicted of one murder and confessed to four more, which is where the figure of five comes from. The description of his method refers to six victims, two men and four women or girls. Neither the five nor the six can be checked against a court record in anything available here, so both are set down as they stand.
The sourcing is thin: a short coding entry and the captions to two press photographs. Those captions supply the victim's name, her age, the dates of conviction and sentence and his occupation, none of which the earlier version of this entry carried.