Joe Arridy
Joseph Arridy was an American man who was falsely convicted and wrongfully executed for the 1936 rape and murder of Dorothy Drain, a 15-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado. He was manipulated by the police to make a false confession due to his mental incapacities. Arridy was intellectually disabled and was 23 years old when he was executed on January 6, 1939, after Governor Teller Ammons refused to grant him clemency.
Many people at the time and since maintained that Arridy was innocent. A group known as Friends of Joe Arridy formed and in 2007 commissioned the first tombstone for his grave. They also supported the preparation of a petition by David A. Martinez, Denver attorney, for a state pardon to clear Arridy's name. Another man, Frank Aguilar, was convicted and executed for the same crime two years before Arridy's execution.
In 2011—72 years after his death—Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. Ritter, the former district attorney of Denver, pardoned Arridy based on questions about his guilt and what appeared to be a coerced false confession. This was the first time in Colorado that the governor had pardoned a convict after execution.
Early life
Arridy was born in 1915 in Pueblo, Colorado, to Mary and Henry Arridy, Maronite Christian immigrants from Bqarqacha, a village in Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, Ottoman Syria. Henry came to the United States in search of work in 1909 via the USS Martha Washington over Patras, Greece, being joined by his wife in 1912. The couple were first cousins and did not speak English. Henry took a job as a molder with a Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill in Pueblo that he learned was hiring workers. In census records, the surname of the parents was inconsistently spelled as "Areddy", "Arddy", and "Arriag".Joe Arridy, the eldest of the couple's three surviving children, was non-verbal for the first five years of his life and only spoke in short simple sentences. Even as an adult, he generally did not talk at all unless spoken to first. After he attended one year at Bessemer Elementary School, his principal told his parents to keep him at home, saying that he could not learn. Arridy did not socialize with other children in his neighborhood, instead preferring to wander town, hammer nails, and make mud pies, a habit he kept up into his mid-teens.
Admission to training school
In 1925, Henry Arridy lost his job and appealed to neighbors to help him write letters to find a place for his son, as Henry was partially illiterate. In October of the same year, Joe Arridy was admitted at the age of ten to the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado. It was noted during formal psychological exams, including a Binet-Simon test, that Arridy was "extremely concrete in his thinking and totally unable to think abstractly about anything", noting he could not tell the difference between a stone and an egg or wood and glass, with other examples including his inability to count past five without assistance, tell apart colors, or name the weekdays. Examiners at the home also had Arridy's family undergo several psychological tests and concluded that his mother Mary was "probably feeble-minded" and his younger brother George considered a "high moron". Henry regretted sending his son away and requested his full release only ten months later, with Arridy returning to Pueblo on August 13, 1926.On September 17, 1929, while Henry Arridy was serving a prison sentence for bootlegging, Joe Arridy was sexually assaulted by a group of teen boys, who sodomized him and forced Arridy to perform oral sex on them. Arridy's juvenile probation officer walked in on the scene and wrote a complaint letter to the school's superintendent Dr. Benjamin Jefferson. The probation officer misrepresented the rape as consensual, citing the same-sex and interracial nature of the assault as evidence that Arridy posed a moral danger to society. The officer wrote "I picked him up this morning for allowing some of the nastiest and dirtiest things done to him that I have ever heard of… The boy MUST be returned. The people of the neighborhood are indignant as they are afraid of the boy and think he never should have been turned loose... I cannot understand why boys of the mentality of this one are allowed to return home". The officer included a separate sheet listing Arridy's "myriad moral digressions", such as "manipulating the penis of Negro boys with his mouth" and "allowing boys to enter the ‘dirty road’", excusing the choice of words by claiming that he "would be more technical, but do not know the terms", and threatened to shift blame onto Jefferson for allowing Arridy to leave the training school. The fate of the assailants, if any, was not addressed in the letter.
Arridy was subsequently recommitted to the school, where it was reported that he could only be taught "tasks of not too long duration" such as mopping floors or washing dishes. He was often mistreated, beaten, and manipulated by his peers, only ever becoming close with one Mrs. Bowers, a kitchen worker who supervised his chores, during his seven-year stay. Dr. Jefferson made note of Arridy's suggestibility and need for constant guidance, outlining an incident in which Arridy falsely took responsibility for stealing cigarettes. Appeals by Arridy's family for him to be discharged were blocked by Jefferson, who claimed that their son was being kept for safety reasons due to his "perverse habits".
On August 8, 1936, 21-year-old Arridy, along with at least four other young men, left the school grounds and, mimicking the behavior of train-hopping laborers in the nearby railyards, he stowed away in freight carts and traveled through Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. While three of them returned to the school at their own volition on August 13, Arridy and another patient split from the group at Grand Junction train station and continued the train rides.
Attack
On the evening of August 14, 1936, two girls of the Drain family were attacked while sleeping at home in Pueblo, Colorado. An intruder entered the house through the unlocked front door and bludgeoned 15-year-old Dorothy and her 12-year-old sister Barbara Drain with a bladed weapon, believed to be the blunt side of a hatchet. Dorothy was also raped; she died from the hatchet attack, while Barbara survived after spending two weeks in a coma. Their parents had been out of the house that night while their younger brother, who slept in an adjacent room, was left unharmed.A fellow runaway from the school, Ben Harvey, would later tell workers that he and Arridy had passed through Pueblo only once, in the late hours of August 16, to visit his family in Bessemer, unaware that they had moved to a different part of town, and getting on a train to Denver shortly after. Following Arridy's arrest, Val Higgins, chairman of the state board of control in charge of the school, launched an independent investigation into the accusation against Arridy on September 1. Although the investigation's findings were inconclusive, Higgins remained convinced of Arridy's innocence and supported him as late as 1937.
By August 18, five suspects had been detained and a reward of $1000 was issued for the arrest of the perpetrator. As neighbors who saw the perpetrator described him as "swarthy", police actively searched for a known African-American offender as a suspect, but also sought a match with the fingerprints of escaped Colorado State Hospital at Pueblo inmate Joseph Qualteri, of Italian descent, who was killed by police outside of Englewood, both to no success.