Michiah Shobek was a handyman from Milwaukee who was hanged in Nassau, the capital of The Bahamas, on the morning of October 19, 1976. He was 22. A Bahamian court had convicted him of murdering Irwin Bornstein, a 44-year-old accountant from New York, who was stabbed to death in January 1974. He had also confessed to killing two other Americans in Nassau over the same winter: Paul Howell, a 50-year-old lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, and Katie Smith, a 17-year-old from Detroit. He was never tried for either of those deaths.
He said that his victims were "angels of Lucifer" and that God had told him to kill them. His lawyers argued that he was insane. The trial court and the appeal court were not persuaded, and after two and a half years of appeals, embassy talks and a mother's plea to the White House, he became one of the few Americans ever executed in The Bahamas.
His name appears in more than one form. The Associated Press and the historian William Steel Lofquist print it as Michiah Shobek; The Tribune of Nassau has used Michaiah. The name of the man he was convicted of killing also varies: the Associated Press gives Irwin Bornstein, while United Press International and Lofquist give Bernstein, and The Tribune printed Borstein.
Little is known about Shobek's early life. The Associated Press described him in 1976 as a Milwaukee handyman, and UPI called him a Milwaukee native. The Tribune in Nassau, looking back at the case in 2013, said he had moved to Nassau from Milwaukee. His mother still lived in Milwaukee, where she worked as a cleaner, and other members of his family were with her there in the hours before his execution.
It is not known when he first went to The Bahamas, what work he did there, or how he came to be living in Nassau in the winter of 1973. His date of birth has not been reported.
All three people Shobek confessed to killing were Americans visiting New Providence, the island on which Nassau stands, and all three died within about seven weeks.
The first was Paul Howell, a lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, who was 50. According to Lofquist's history of executions in The Bahamas, he was killed on December 5, 1973. Little more is known about his visit or about the investigation into his death at the time.
The second was Irwin Bornstein, a 44-year-old accountant from New York, who was stabbed to death in January 1974. His death was the one for which Shobek was tried. UPI, summarizing the accusation against him, reported that Shobek was alleged to have posed as a taxi driver and met Bornstein at the airport, offering to take him to his hotel, and that Bornstein was robbed of about $900, including $500 in traveler's checks he was made to sign over, before he was killed.
The third was Katie Smith, a 17-year-old from Detroit, who was killed on January 26, 1974, according to Lofquist. The Associated Press described her as a tourist.
Little is known about the three as people. Paul Howell was a lawyer from Massillon, Ohio; Irwin Bornstein was an accountant from New York; Katie Smith was still a teenager. No public statement by their families has been reported, and no memorial or campaign in their names is known.
Shobek confessed to all three killings. The Associated Press reported in October 1976 that the confession had come 29 months before his execution and that it covered Bornstein, Howell and Smith. He said that God had told him to commit the killings and that the three Americans were "angels of Lucifer."
UPI reported that he was charged with the murders of Howell and Smith as well as Bornstein. Only the Bornstein case went to trial. Lofquist, whose study draws on the Nassau newspapers and Bahamian archival records, writes that Shobek was tried and convicted only for Bornstein's murder. Neither of the other two deaths was ever tried in court, so in law they remain confessed killings, not convictions.
The trial in Nassau turned on his state of mind. In court, according to UPI, he said: "God, my Father, told me who to destroy in Nassau." He described the three Americans as "Angels of Lucifer." His defense argued that he was insane.
The court convicted him of murdering Bornstein. UPI reported the conviction as taking place in 1974. Lofquist gives September 26, 1975, as the date on which he was sentenced to death. The gap between the two dates has never been explained, and the court record itself has not been published.
Shobek appealed. A statement prepared in the White House press office, now held in the papers of President Gerald Ford's press secretary Ron Nessen at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, records that the American Embassy in Nassau had helped him obtain "a prominent Bahamian attorney," who pursued his right of appeal. The statement says the guilty verdict was affirmed on appeal. UPI reported that the appeal court rejected the psychiatric evidence offered on his behalf as unconvincing.
UPI, reporting before the hanging, said that a year earlier his lawyers and the American Embassy had persuaded the Bahamian government to allow more time for appeals, saving him from the gallows by a matter of hours. Lofquist writes that the execution was delayed after his mother raised claims about her son's mental health.
In the month before the execution, according to UPI, the Bahamian Minister of Home Affairs, Donald Rolle, announced that the appeals had run their course. The Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy rejected a plea to spare his life, and the execution was set for October 19.
His mother's appeal reached the United States government. The Ford Library statement records that "last Saturday" the embassy had passed to the Bahamian government an appeal that Shobek's mother had made to the United States government. The Associated Press reported that President Ford had relayed her appeal to the Bahamian authorities but was unable to become further involved in Bahamian affairs.
On the night before the hanging, Thomas Cannon, a Legal Aid Society lawyer acting for the family, tried once more. At about midnight he spent 45 minutes on the telephone with the President's chief of staff, pleading for intervention, the Associated Press reported. The attempt failed. Lofquist sums up the outcome in one line: American authorities refused to intervene.
His mother did not travel to Nassau. "There's nothing I can do now to save him," she had said, according to the Associated Press. She spent the night in a vigil with relatives in Milwaukee and heard the news of his death on the radio.
Shobek spent his last 48 hours in a cell next to the gallows room at Fox Hill Prison, the stone-walled prison about five miles east of Nassau. On October 19, 1976, he was woken at 6:30 a.m. and given a breakfast of orange juice, bread, sausage, grits and coffee, the Associated Press reported. He was hanged shortly after dawn. The prison physician, Victoriano Fermo, pronounced him dead. As Bahamian law required, a notice of the execution was posted outside the main entrance of the prison.
Security was tight. Reporters were not allowed near the prison, and about two dozen uniformed police manned a barricade, according to the Associated Press. A demonstration planned by a religious group did not take place; the Associated Press suggested heavy rain overnight and early that morning may have kept people away.
He was buried the same day in a common grave at Old Trail Cemetery, a burial ground the Associated Press described as holding the bones of forgotten paupers and murderers. Some 150 onlookers and about a dozen reporters were kept back. The ground had been cleared two weeks earlier, when graves for Shobek and two others were dug, and his grave was unmarked. "The sun always shines when someone is hanged," one onlooker remarked, the Associated Press reported, though the morning had been wet.
The family had wanted his body brought home. Cannon said Shobek's mother wished it returned to Milwaukee but could not pay for it. The American Embassy told him that embalming, a container acceptable to customs and the flight home would cost most of $1,000. "She is a cleaning lady and simply does not have access to those kinds of funds," Cannon said.
The question of the body did not end with the burial. In a confidential cable dated October 21, 1976, later published by WikiLeaks and reported by The Tribune in 2013, the American ambassador, Seymour Weiss, wrote that the Bahamian Attorney General, Paul Adderley, had "categorically stated" that exhuming the body would be illegal. Weiss told Washington that the government had been "remiss in the extreme" in not telling the embassy about the legal obstacle sooner, and he questioned whether the legal argument was genuine. He suspected the refusal reflected anger at American press coverage of the execution, and he concluded that further pressure from the embassy would probably achieve nothing and might make matters worse.
Shobek's hanging was one of several in The Bahamas in the 1970s. Lofquist, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Geneseo, reconstructed the history of executions in the country from the Nassau newspapers, the Department of Archives, Fox Hill Prison records and the British National Archives. He counts 86 documented executions in all. In the 1970s he lists Charles Glinton, hanged on April 13, 1971; Philip Humes and Wendell Burrows, hanged together on October 15, 1974; Errol Dean, hanged on February 3, 1976, under heavy police security; and Shobek, on October 19, 1976.
Among the Americans executed in The Bahamas, Lofquist identifies Alvin Table Jr. and Billy Sees, hanged on May 9, 1961, and Shobek. He records the last execution in the country as that of David Mitchell, a Haitian, on January 6, 2000.
Shobek was convicted of one killing. His responsibility for the deaths of Paul Howell and Katie Smith rests on his own confession and on the charges UPI reported, not on any verdict. Neither case was tested before a jury, and the evidence linking him to those two deaths has not been made public.
The precise dates of his arrest, trial and sentencing are also unsettled. UPI places the conviction in 1974, while Lofquist dates the death sentence to September 26, 1975. The Tribune's 2013 account gives a sentencing date of October 18, 1976, the day before the execution, which does not match either earlier account. The question of his sanity was raised by his defense at trial and later by his mother; the trial and appeal courts did not accept it.
December 5, 1973: Paul Howell, 50, a lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, is killed in Nassau (Lofquist).
January 1974: Irwin Bornstein, 44, a New York accountant, is stabbed to death on New Providence.
January 26, 1974: Katie Smith, 17, of Detroit, is killed (Lofquist).
1974: Shobek confesses to all three killings and is convicted of murdering Bornstein (UPI).
September 26, 1975: sentenced to death, according to Lofquist.
About a year before the execution: his lawyers and the American Embassy win more time for appeals, hours before a scheduled hanging (UPI).
Before October 1976: the conviction is affirmed on appeal (Ford Library press office statement; UPI).
The month before the execution: Home Affairs Minister Donald Rolle announces that the appeals have run their course; the Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy rejects clemency (UPI).
Night before the execution: a Legal Aid Society lawyer makes a final appeal to the White House by telephone; it fails (Associated Press).
October 19, 1976: Shobek is hanged at Fox Hill Prison and buried the same day in a common grave at Old Trail Cemetery.
October 21, 1976: the American ambassador reports that the Bahamian Attorney General has called exhumation of the body illegal (The Tribune, 2013).