On January 18, 1974 an accountant from Oceanside, New York arrived in Nassau on an Air Bahamas flight from Miami. Irwin Bornstein was forty-four and traveling on business, and he had a wife and three children at home. A young man at the airport offered him a ride, drove him out of it, and stopped the car.
When the knife came out Bornstein got the door open and ran. He was caught and stabbed to death. An employee of the Ministry of Fisheries found him the next day on Yamacraw Beach, wearing only his socks and shoes, with multiple stab wounds.
Beside the body were a pen and a pair of sunglasses belonging to the man who had killed him. Eight miles away on Paradise Island a black bag was recovered containing some of Bornstein's papers and the killer's driver's license. When the killer was arrested he had Bornstein's pen on him.
He was born James Michael Shoffner in Milwaukee in 1954 and grew up with his mother, Juanita Spencer, who cleaned at a Milwaukee school; he never knew his father. At two he caught a viral illness that left him with permanent brain damage. There was mental illness in the family. One half brother, Alex Shoffner, a newspaper copy boy and city chess champion, admitted in 1965 to dozens of burglaries, robberies and purse-snatchings, and his case went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which widened the legal definition of insanity so that he could be sent to a mental hospital rather than prison. Another half brother, John, had been institutionalized since 1961.
As a juvenile he was arrested seventeen times, for larceny, assault and battery, marijuana possession, false fire alarms, purse-snatching and taking a car without permission. He once nearly died of an overdose. He was sent to a boarding school and ran home. As an adult he worked as a handyman and wanted to be a songwriter. In November 1973, at nineteen, he went to the Bahamas to bum around, and changed his name to Michaiah Shobek. He later said a vision of himself riding a horse had told him to go.
Bornstein was the second of three. The first was Paul V. Howell, fifty, a lawyer from Massillon, Ohio, who was in Nassau for a convention. On the evening of Wednesday, December 5, 1973, someone knocked at the door of his hotel room, and when he opened it he was stabbed in the chest and throat and killed where he stood. The police worked on the theory that he had surprised burglars, and by that Sunday his body had been sent home to Ohio for burial.
The last was Katie Smith, seventeen, a student from Detroit visiting the islands with a chaperoned school group. She was seen walking with Shobek on January 25, 1974. The next day she was found in a ditch beside a cardboard box, strangled. The three killings were seven weeks apart in all, and all three victims were Americans.
He was arrested after Smith's death, still nineteen, and what he said afterward is the reason the case is remembered. His victims were angels of Lucifer. He had been sent on orders from God.
A preliminary hearing set for February 18, 1974 was cut short because of a bank robbery investigation running at the same time. The Bahamian authorities decided to try one murder rather than three, since a single conviction was enough to put him on the gallows, and he was tried for the killing of Bornstein alone. He pleaded insanity and diminished capacity, saying he had killed on God's orders, and during the proceedings he confessed to the other two. He was never separately tried for either of them. A psychiatric examination established that he had been traveling back and forth between the United States and the Bahamas for about two years; whether he killed anyone else in that time is not known.
On May 14, 1974 he was sentenced to death. A photograph taken that day shows him leaving court. He was first set to hang on October 8, but the United States Embassy appealed, arguing that the court had not been given substantial information, and he was granted an indefinite stay.
He was twenty when he was sentenced and twenty-two when he was hanged. He spent almost two and a half years at Fox Hill Prison, five miles east of Nassau, waiting. His mother stayed in Milwaukee. Asked about it, she said there was nothing she could do now to save him. The day before the execution a Legal Aid Society lawyer acting for her asked President Gerald Ford to make a last-minute appeal, and a presidential aide refused.
On the morning of October 19, 1976 the trap opened under him. The rope was removed and the prison physician, Victoriano Fermo, pronounced him dead, and the chief of the investigation department, Addington Darville, confirmed the death. An official notice of the execution was posted outside the main entrance of the prison, as Bahamian law required. He was the first American to be hanged in the Bahamas in fifteen years.
He was buried the following day in a common grave, among the bones of paupers and of other men who had been hanged.