Of the 430 people called for jury service in Princeton, Indiana, in the late fall of 1955, 268 were sent home because they had already made up their minds that Leslie Irvin was guilty. Another 103 were excused because they opposed capital punishment. Of the twelve who were finally seated, eight admitted they went into the courtroom believing he had done it. Six years later the Supreme Court of the United States looked at those figures and set aside his conviction because of what the newspapers and broadcasters had done to the jury before a word of evidence was heard.
The killings behind the case began on December 2, 1954, in Evansville, when Mary Holland was shot in the head at the liquor store where she worked. She was expecting a child. Published accounts give her age variously as thirty-two, thirty-three and thirty-six. On December 23 Whitney Wesley Kerr, a war veteran, was shot in the back of the head at the gas station where he worked in Vanderburgh County. He was twenty-nine, though some newspapers of the time printed other ages. Both were robberies, and an account compiled from the newspapers of the time says three dimes were left with each body; the trial record has not been checked for that detail. There were no more killings for three months. Then on March 21, 1955, Wilhelmina Sailer, forty-seven, was shot in the head in her home in Mount Vernon, in neighboring Posey County, during a burglary.
A week later the violence crossed the Ohio River. On March 28 someone came to the Duncan farm outside Henderson, Kentucky. Goebel Duncan, fifty-one, and his son Raymond were taken away, bound and shot in the head. Raymond's age is given as twenty-one in one account and twenty-nine in another, and the accounts differ on where the two bodies were found. A young woman of twenty, whose first name appears in published accounts as both Mabel and Maple, was shot dead in the house; her two-year-old daughter was found beside her, unharmed. Mamie Duncan was shot in the head and lived, permanently blind. The accounts do not agree on how the two women were related to the two men.
Accounts of how he was identified differ. One says a group of boys spotted his car on a rural road in western Vanderburgh County and their parents called the police. Another, compiled from newspapers of the time, says a woman whose car he had struck in a minor collision saw him turn into the Duncans' driveway and came forward after the murders. On April 8, 1955, Irvin was under arrest.
He was thirty-one, born in Evansville on April 2, 1924, and he had already served nine years in prison; he had been out only months when Mary Holland died. Within days of the arrest the Vanderburgh County prosecutor and the Evansville police issued press releases, intensively publicized, announcing that he had confessed to all six murders. Over the six or seven months before trial the local papers, which reached about ninety-five percent of the homes in neighboring Gibson County, and the Evansville radio and television stations, which covered it too, ran a stream of headlines, cartoons and pictures. They reported his juvenile record, a conviction for arson nearly twenty years earlier, burglary convictions, and a wartime court-martial for being absent without leave; called him a parole violator and a passer of bad checks; described his police lineup, the lie-detector test he faced, and his confession to some two dozen burglaries; and reported both his offer to plead guilty in exchange for a ninety-nine-year sentence and the prosecutor's determination to get the death penalty. One story quoted a sheriff who promised to devote his life to seeing him executed in Kentucky if Indiana failed to do it. He was described again and again as the "confessed slayer of six." A roving reporter recorded people on the street giving their opinions of his guilt and of what his punishment should be, and the recordings were broadcast. His own appointed lawyer was quoted as saying he had taken much criticism for representing him. The confession was never tested at trial for five of the six killings.
A Vanderburgh County grand jury indicted him for Kerr's murder on April 21, 1955. Indiana and Kentucky argued over which would try him first, and Indiana went first. His appointed lawyer at once asked to move the case out of Vanderburgh County, and the court agreed, but only to adjoining Gibson County, a rural county of about thirty thousand people. On October 29, 1955, the defense asked to move it again, to a county far enough from Evansville for a fair trial; the request was refused, apparently because Indiana law allowed only one change of venue. Jury selection began in Princeton on November 14. On the second day, the papers reported, twenty-seven of thirty-five prospective jurors questioned were excused for holding biased opinions, and spectators were quoted saying their minds were made up and that he should be hanged. On December 7 the defense told the court that of 355 people examined so far, 233 had said they believed him guilty. During the second week the prosecutor himself said in a radio broadcast that the unusual coverage by newspapers and radio was making it hard to find an unbiased jury. Over four weeks the defense filed two more venue motions and asked for a continuance on eight separate days. Every one was denied. The defense used all twenty of its peremptory challenges and then challenged all twelve jurors who were seated, without success.
In court Irvin was led in on what looked to the reporters like a chain dog leash, and from then on the papers called him Mad Dog. The prosecutor used the name in his closing argument. He also took the witness stand himself, over the defense's objection, and testified that on April 13, 1955, five days after the arrest, Irvin had confessed the Kerr murder to him orally; in summation he reminded the jury, "I testified myself what was told me." According to the Indiana Supreme Court's later account of the record, it was Irvin who had asked to see the prosecutor, Wever, who had never spoken to him before, and who asked whether it would be enough if he confessed to the killing. Wever told him it would not: he would need other facts to back the admission up. Afterward, with the sheriff, Irvin pointed out the place where he had thrown the gun, and a gun was found in a ditch there. The court believed he had confessed in the hope of avoiding trial in Kentucky. At trial a witness identified him as the last person seen with Kerr alive, a few minutes before the killing was discovered, and when the state rested, the defense offered no evidence at all. The newspapers had reported on the eve of the trial that Irvin had orally admitted the Kerr killing, the robbery and murder of Mary Holland, the murder of Wilhelmina Sailer and the killings at the Duncan farm. On December 20, 1955, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and fixed the penalty at death, and on January 9, 1956, the judgment sentencing him to the electric chair was entered.
On the night of January 18, 1956, he walked out of the Gibson County jail in Princeton using keys he had made from tinfoil and the covers of paperback novels. He left a letter for Theodore Lockyear Jr., one of his two Evansville lawyers. "I know this is the wrong thing to do," it began, "but I can't just go up to Michigan City and wait." If he were ever given a new trial, he wrote, he would come back and face it, and maybe that jury would believe the truth. "All three of us knows that the police lied, and I was convicted before I was even tried." The next morning, the last of the thirty days Indiana allowed, his lawyers filed a motion for a new trial listing 415 grounds of error; on January 23 the judge overruled it, noting that the defendant was an escapee still at large. On February 9 he was arrested in a San Francisco pawnshop while trying to sell a stolen diamond. He first gave the police another man's name, and fingerprints settled who he was. On February 17 he was locked up in the Indiana State Prison.
The escape nearly ended his appeals. His lawyers filed a trial transcript of some five thousand pages and a brief of more than seven hundred, but on February 5, 1957, the Indiana Supreme Court spent most of its opinion explaining that an escapee at large had no standing to move for a new trial. Courts did not bargain with a defendant on the run, Judge Arterburn wrote, and he quoted Dickens's Mr. Bumble on what the law would be if it supposed otherwise. Then, because of the finality of the sentence, the court reviewed the evidence anyway. It found the confession voluntary, noting that Irvin had been allowed to sleep, had been visited by friends, relatives and a priest, and had been served fried chicken and steak, and it found no denial of due process. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case that May. A federal district court and the Seventh Circuit both held that he had not exhausted his state remedies, though Chief Judge Duffy of the Seventh Circuit wrote that Irvin had not received a fair trial, both because some jurors had preconceived opinions of his guilt and because of the prosecutor's conduct. On May 4, 1959, in the first Irvin v. Dowd, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled five to four that the Indiana court had decided his constitutional claim on the merits, which opened the federal courts to it, and sent the case back. The Seventh Circuit then ruled against him.
The second time, the Court looked at the jury itself. Beyond the 268 excused for fixed opinions, the defense had struck twenty and the state ten. The voir dire record ran 2,783 pages, and it showed that 370 prospective jurors, almost ninety percent of those asked, held some opinion that he was guilty. In the opinion of the Court, issued June 5, 1961, Justice Tom C. Clark wrote that the jurors had no doubt been sincere when they said they could be fair, but that where so many had so often admitted prejudice such a promise could be given little weight; as one juror had put it, "You can't forget what you hear and see." With his life at stake, Clark wrote, it was not too much to ask that he be tried by a jury other than one in which two-thirds of the members believed him guilty before hearing any testimony. The conviction was void. The Court ordered him freed from the death sentence but left him in custody under the indictment, and gave Indiana a reasonable time to try him again. Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring, wrote that such poisoning of juries happened too often, "as in this case, with the prosecutor's collaboration." The decision became one of the foundations of American law on pretrial publicity.
Indiana tried him again for Kerr's murder, this time in Sullivan, Indiana, beginning May 21, 1962. On June 13 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder a second time and recommended life; one account says the verdict brought a smile to his face. Some later accounts describe a second death sentence later commuted, but the reporting of the 1962 verdict records a life term. None of the other five killings ever came to trial.
He spent the rest of his life in the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City, where by one account he was regarded as a model prisoner, and died of lung cancer in the prison hospital on November 9, 1983, at fifty-nine.
April 2, 1924: Leslie Irvin is born in Evansville.
December 2, 1954: Mary Holland is shot in the head at the Evansville liquor store where she works.
December 23, 1954: Whitney Wesley Kerr, twenty-nine, is shot in the back of the head at the gas station where he works in Vanderburgh County.
March 21, 1955: Wilhelmina Sailer, forty-seven, is shot in the head in her home in Mount Vernon during a burglary.
March 28, 1955: at the Duncan farm outside Henderson, Kentucky, Goebel Duncan, his son Raymond and a young woman are shot dead; Mamie Duncan survives, permanently blind.
April 8, 1955: Irvin is arrested; within days the prosecutor and police announce that he has confessed to all six murders.
April 13, 1955: by the prosecutor's later testimony, Irvin confesses the Kerr murder to him orally.
April 21, 1955: a Vanderburgh County grand jury indicts him for Kerr's murder.
November 14, 1955: jury selection begins in Princeton, in Gibson County.
December 20, 1955: the jury convicts him of first-degree murder and fixes the penalty at death.
January 18, 1956: he walks out of the Gibson County jail using keys made from tinfoil and the covers of paperback novels.
February 9, 1956: he is arrested in a San Francisco pawnshop.
February 5, 1957: the Indiana Supreme Court rules against him, finding the confession voluntary and no denial of due process.
May 4, 1959: in the first Irvin v. Dowd, the Supreme Court of the United States rules five to four and sends the case back.
June 5, 1961: the Supreme Court of the United States sets aside his conviction because of prejudicial pretrial publicity.
May 21, 1962: his retrial for Kerr's murder begins in Sullivan, Indiana.
June 13, 1962: the jury convicts him of first-degree murder a second time and recommends life.
November 9, 1983: Irvin dies of lung cancer in the prison hospital at Michigan City, at fifty-nine.