Michiah Shobek

Victims

3

Years active

December 5, 1973 - January 26, 1974

Location

Nassau, The Bahamas

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Executed by hanging on October 19, 1976 A 22-year-old handyman from Milwaukee, Shobek changed his name from James Michael Shoffner - on emigrating to Nassau, in the Bahamas. On October 18, 1976, he was sentenced to hang on conviction in the stabbing death of Irwin Borstein, a New York accountant murdered on vacation.

He was born James Michael Shoffner in Milwaukee in 1954 and changed his name to Michiah Shobek. He was working as a handyman in Nassau in the winter of 1973.

Between December 5, 1973 and January 26, 1974 he stabbed three American tourists to death: Irwin Borstein, forty-four; Paul Howell, fifty; and Katie Smith, seventeen.

He was arrested, and told investigators that his victims were angels of Lucifer and that he had been directed to kill them. He was convicted and hanged in Nassau on October 19, 1976, aged twenty-two.

The accessible record is contemporary Bahamian and American press reporting and encyclopaedia summaries. The proceedings, including whether his mental state was examined at all, are not documented in anything available, which for a capital case turning on statements of that kind is a substantial gap. It is the second Bahamian case in this archive, with Cordell Farrington.