15. Joseph Arridy and the murder of Dorothy Drain
Dorothy Drain was a fifteen-year-old girl when she was attacked, along with her twelve-year-old sister Barbara, while sleeping in her Pueblo, Colorado home. Both were struck repeatedly with what police believed to have been a hatchet; Dorothy was also raped. Barbara survived the attack, Dorothy did not. On August 26, 1936, twelve days after the murder, Joseph Arridy was arrested for vagrancy in Wyoming. After it was learned that he had passed through Pueblo on a train days earlier, he was questioned alone by Laramie County Sheriff George Carroll. Carroll claimed that Arridy confessed to the crime in Pueblo. Carroll contacted Pueblo authorities, only to learn that they already had another suspect in custody, who had confessed to the crime.
The other suspect, Frank Aguilar, confessed to the crime and claimed to have never met Arridy, who in turn claimed that he had been to the crime scene with Aguilar. Arridy gave several different confessions, with different details each time. He was later determined to have the mental capacity of a six-year-old and was unable to distinguish right from wrong. There was also no physical evidence which pointed to his guilt. Arridy was executed for the murder in 1939, two years after Aguilar was executed for the same crime (Aguilar had been fired by the Drain sisters’ father shortly before the assault). In 2011 after reviewing all of the evidence regarding the case, Governor Bill Ritter, a former prosecutor, granted Arridy a full and unconditional pardon. Ritter found that Arridy had likely not even been in Pueblo at the time of the murder.