Irvin was born in 1924 and had a long record of burglary and robbery. Between December 2, 1954 and March 28, 1955 he killed six people in southern Indiana and Kentucky: Mary Holland, thirty-three, a liquor store clerk; Wesley Kerr, twenty-nine, a filling station attendant; Wilhelmina Sailer, forty-seven, shot in her farmhouse kitchen; and the farmer Goebel Duncan, his son Raymond and his daughter, shot at their home. All were killed in the course of robberies for small sums.
He was arrested on April 8, 1955. The Evansville papers ran the case continuously for months before the trial, publishing his confession, calling him Mad Dog Irvin, and reporting as fact that he had confessed to all six. He was convicted of the Kerr murder in 1956 and sentenced to death, after a jury selection in which the great majority of those questioned said they already believed him guilty. The Indiana press called him the Mad Dog Killer.
He escaped from custody in 1956 and was recaptured in California. His appeal reached the United States Supreme Court, which in Irvin v. Dowd (1961) held that the pre-trial publicity had made a fair trial in that county impossible and that the trial judge should have granted a change of venue. The conviction was set aside. It is one of the foundational American decisions on prejudicial publicity and is still taught as such.
He was retried in a different county, convicted again, and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life. He died in prison on November 9, 1983.
The case is in the archive for the killings, but its significance outside Indiana is entirely the 1961 judgment, and the entry is written so that both are visible.