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. Of the twelve who were finally seated, eight admitted they went into the courtroom believing it. Six years later the Supreme Court of the United States looked at those figures and set aside his death sentence, the first time it had reversed a state conviction chiefly 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, thirty-three, was shot in the head at close range at the place where she worked. She was three months pregnant. On December 23 Whitney Wesley Kerr, twenty-nine, was killed the same way at his job in Vanderburgh County. Both were robberies, and there were no more for three months. Then on March 21, 1955, Wilhelmina Sailer, forty-seven, a housewife in Mount Vernon in neighboring Posey County, was shot in the head in her own home 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, twenty-nine, were shot and left along a nearby country road. Maple Elizabeth Duncan, twenty, the wife of Raymond's brother Dorris Ray, was killed; her two-year-old daughter was left unharmed. Goebel's wife, Mamie, was shot too and lived, permanently blind.
What led to Irvin was a car. A witness remembered seeing his near the Duncan property shortly before the shootings, and the papers reported a dent in its door. A group of boys out driving on a rural road in western Vanderburgh County spotted a car with that dent parked down a lane, pulled in behind it and shouted at the driver, not really sure who he was. Their parents called the police, and on April 8, 1955, Irvin was under arrest. Officers said they later found weapons and stolen property tying him to one of the killings.
He was thirty-one, born in Evansville on April 2, 1924, and he had a record. In 1945 he had been sentenced in Indianapolis to ten to twenty years for armed robbery; he served nine and moved back to Evansville in May 1954, months before Mary Holland died. Within days of the arrest the Vanderburgh County prosecutor and the Evansville police issued statements, printed and broadcast everywhere, announcing that he had confessed to all six murders and, they added, to some two dozen burglaries and robberies. The confession was never tested at trial for five of the six killings.
Indiana and Kentucky argued over which would try him first, and Indiana went first, on Kerr's murder. 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 place of about thirty thousand people where, the Supreme Court later noted, ninety-five percent of homes took the papers that had been carrying the story. When the defense asked to move it again, the request was refused because Indiana law allowed a single change of venue. Over about four weeks of jury selection the defense filed two more venue motions and eight for delay. Every one was denied.
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. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to death.
On January 20, 1956, he walked out of the Gibson County jail in Princeton using keys he had made from paperback book covers, tinfoil and glue. He headed west. On February 9 he was picked up in San Francisco trying to pawn rings stolen in a Los Angeles burglary.
His case went to the Supreme Court twice. In Irvin v. Dowd, decided June 5, 1961, the Court held that a jury seated in that atmosphere was not the impartial jury the Constitution guaranteed, and ordered the conviction vacated. Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring, went out of his way to condemn the prosecutor's cooperation with the press campaign. The decision became one of the foundations of American law on pretrial publicity.
Indiana tried him again for Kerr's murder, and on June 13, 1962, he was convicted a second time. This jury sentenced him to life. 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, doing leatherwork by hand, and died there of lung cancer on November 9, 1983, at fifty-nine.