Leroy Snyder was born in 1931 and was a thirty-eight-year-old junkyard labourer in Camden, New Jersey. He was known as Duke.
On September 11, 1969 he was arrested and charged with the murder of Gertrude Friedman, fifty-eight, who was attacked in the premises that served as both her flat and her linoleum shop. She had been beaten and raped before her throat was cut.
He was held without bail, and was still in custody on July 2, 1970 when he was indicted for six further killings in the city, all committed between February and September 1969. Most of the seven, five women and a man besides Friedman, were friends or acquaintances of his. All had been beaten or stabbed to death, and two of the women were raped.
On July 10, 1970 he confessed to all seven. He said robbery was the motive in six of them, and could not recall his motive for the seventh.
He pleaded no defence to seven counts of homicide. Under New Jersey law as it then stood, that plea prevented the state from seeking the death penalty.
On July 16, 1970 he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment, which required him to serve forty-three years and six months before becoming eligible for parole. He died in prison in October 2001, after thirty-one years.
The presiding judge, referring to a court-ordered psychiatric report, described him publicly as a malignant psychopath and a threat to society, and said he hoped he would never be released.
An earlier version of this entry said that three of the seven killings produced the convictions and the rest were attributed and not charged. That is wrong, and it appears to have been inferred from the three consecutive life terms. He was indicted for all seven, confessed to all seven and pleaded no defence to all seven; the three terms are how the sentence was structured, not a count of what was proved.
That earlier version also set the case against industrial collapse and civil unrest in Camden. Nothing on the record here supports that framing, and it has been removed.