JUST IN: Colorado EXECUTES Innocent Man with IQ of 46 in Gas Chamber – Real Killer Already Confessed 

  Canon City, Colorado. January 6th, 1939. 8:13 in the evening. Inside the gas chamber of Colorado State Penitentiary, a 23-year-old man sits quietly in the chair. The heavy steel door has just been sealed shut. Cyanide gas is seconds away. He is not crying. He is smiling. Not because he was brave, not because he had made peace with what was coming, but because he had absolutely no idea what was coming.

 His mind, confirmed by three state psychiatrists, worked at the level of a 6-year-old child. His IQ was 46. He did not understand death. He did not understand execution. Just hours earlier, he had asked for his unfinished bowl of ice cream to be refrigerated so he could eat it when he got back. He never got back.

 His name was Joseph Arridy, a young man who spent his final months on death row playing with a toy train. A man his own warden described as the happiest man who ever lived on death row. The state of Colorado executed him for rape and murder. There was just one problem. The real killer had already confessed.

 The murder weapon had already been found in another man’s home. And a surviving eyewitness had already named that other man by face. What the state of Colorado did next is almost impossible to believe. Welcome to Red Mark files. If you are new here, subscribe right now because this story gets much darker before it gets any better.

 To understand what happened inside that gas chamber, you first need to know who this story was really about. Her name was Dorothy Drain. Born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado, she lived at home with her parents and her younger siblings, including her sister Barbara and a younger brother.    Three kids, one house, one family just trying to get by.

   Their father, Riley Drain, worked as a foreman for the Works Progress Administration, the WPA. It was a government job created during the Great Depression to keep families off the streets. It was not glamorous work, but it kept food on the table and a roof over their heads during one of the hardest periods in American history.

Dorothy and Barbara shared a bedroom. On most evenings, Riley and his wife would go out, leaving the children at home. The younger brother would fall asleep in his room. The two girls would settle in for the night.    It was a normal routine for a normal family. On the night of August 14th, 1936, they did exactly that.

What Riley Drain could not have known was that a man he had recently fired, a WPA laborer named Frank Aguilar,    had not forgotten about him, or his family, or the house where his daughters slept. That firing would cost Dorothy her life. Barbara survived the attack that night.

 She was in a coma for two full weeks. When she finally woke up, she told investigators exactly who had come through that door. She named her attacker clearly. The court heard every word, and then looked the other way. Now, let’s talk about the two men who set this tragedy in motion. The first is Frank Aguilar.

 Aguilar was 33 years old, born in Mexico, of Yaqui descent. He had been working in Pueblo, Colorado as a laborer for the Works Progress Administration, the same WPA crew supervised by Riley Drain. He knew the Drain family. He knew their neighborhood. He knew their home. Then, Riley Drain fired him. Court records do not state the exact reason.

 But, what happened next made the motive clear enough. When investigators searched Aguilar’s apartment after Dorothy’s murder, here is what they found: an ax head with notches along the blade that matched the wounds on both Dorothy and Barbara Drain, a wall calendar with August 15th circled, newspaper clippings about what were described as sex slayings cut out and taped directly onto the wallpaper surrounding photographs of nude women.

 That was not the home of an innocent man. Aguilar also showed up at Dorothy Drain’s funeral. He cut the viewing line twice to get close to the casket. He pressed 25 cents in nickels into Riley Drain’s hand claiming it was to help the family. He then approached two police officers and asked them where he could find Riley repeatedly suggesting how close he was to the Drains.

 He was arrested right there at the funeral. His mother gave him an alibi. But when forensic examiners scraped beneath his fingernails, they found blue chenille fibers matching the exact fabric of the Drain girls bed sheets. Pueblo Police Chief J. Arthur Grady had seen enough. Now, the second man, Sheriff George J. Carroll of Laramie County, Wyoming, was nationally known.

He had tracked the Barker gang. He had helped recover kidnapped millionaire heir Claude Bocher the second. The press loved him. He loved the press right back. When a frightened, confused young man from Pueblo wandered into his jurisdiction, Carroll saw one thing, another headline. That decision would send an innocent man to his death.

 Two separate lives were moving toward the same collision point. They had nothing to do with each other, but the state of Colorado would eventually treat them as one story. Here is what was actually happening. On August 2nd, 1936, 12 days before Dorothy Drain was killed, Frank Aguilar struck again.

 Three blocks from the Drain home, he attacked 72-year-old Sally Crumpley and her 48-year-old niece Lilly McMurtry inside their own house. Both women were bludgeoned. A little boy named Burton Beach, McMurtry’s grandson, was the only survivor. No one was arrested for it. McMurtry’s own son, Floyd, was pulled from his life and wrongly committed to a mental asylum for the crime his mother’s killer had committed.

 Aguilar never confessed to the Crumpley attack, not until he was days away from his own execution years later. The street went quiet. The killer walked free. Now, on the exact same timeline, but hundreds of miles away, a 21-year-old named Joseph Erity was doing something else entirely. On August 8th, 1936, Joe slipped out of the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado alongside four other residents.

 They had watched train hoppers pass by the institution fence every day. That day, they followed them. Joe had no plan, no money, no real understanding of where he was headed. Three of his companions turned back within days. Joe and fellow runaway Ben Harvey kept moving. Harvey later confirmed that they passed through Pueblo only once, on August 16th, two days after Dorothy Drain was already dead.

 They visited Harvey’s family briefly, then boarded a train toward Denver. Joe was looking for food, nothing more. Six days later, that search would make him the most wanted man in Colorado. By August 20th, 1936, Joe Erity was exhausted, hungry, and had no idea where he was. He wandered into the railyard in Cheyenne, Wyoming and approached a kitchen car.

   A couple named Glenn and Mrs. Gibson were supervising the car. They took one look at this young man, thin, confused,  barely coherent, and did the decent thing. They fed him. They gave him clean clothes. They let him wash dishes in exchange for meals. He stayed for nearly a week. When the Gibson’s train prepared to leave Wyoming, they drove Joe back to the railyard. He was not an employee.

 He could not travel with them. Railroad detectives George Burnett and Carl Christiansen picked him up shortly after. His khaki clothing made them think he might be an army deserter from Fort Logan. They had no real reason to hold him, but they handed him to Sheriff George Carroll anyway. That is where everything changed.

 Carroll already knew about the Drain murder in Pueblo. The moment he learned Joe was from Pueblo, the questions shifted. What followed was not an investigation, it was a construction job with no notes, no recording device, and no witness in the room. Carroll asked Joe casual leading questions. You like girls pretty well, don’t you Joe? Joe said yes.

 Why do you hurt them? Joe, who had a documented tendency to agree with anyone in authority, replied, “I didn’t mean to.” Carroll picked up the phone and called Chief Grady in Pueblo. Then, before a single detail was verified, he called the press. On the morning of August 27th, headlines across Colorado named Joe Arridy as Dorothy Drain’s killer.

Hours later, Grady told Carroll the truth. Aguilar was already in custody. Physical evidence, motive, murder scene fibers under his fingernails. Carroll’s response was to claim Joe and Aguilar had acted together. Grady had evidence, but no confession. Carroll had a confession, but no evidence. Together, they built a case on a foundation of nothing.

 If you are still watching, hit that like button right now because what happened at the trial is even harder to believe than the arrest. Stay with me. August 14th, 1936, Pueblo, Colorado. Evening settles over the Drain household. Riley Drain and his wife get ready and head out for the night. A routine they had followed many times before.

 Their younger son falls asleep in his room. In the shared bedroom, 15-year-old Dorothy and 12-year-old Barbara settle in for the night. The front door is unlocked. Sometime that evening, an intruder walks in. No broken window, no forced lock, no struggle at the entrance. Whoever came through that door knew the layout of the house.

 He moved directly, without hesitation, to the bedroom where the two girls slept. He carried a hatchet-style tool. He used the blunt end. Both Dorothy and Barbara were struck. Dorothy was also raped. She did not survive her injuries. Barbara was struck hard enough to lose consciousness. She would not wake up for two full weeks.

 The attacker left without touching the younger brother sleeping in the next room. Court records confirm that the wounds on both girls match the specific notches found on the ax head later recovered from Frank Aguilar’s apartment. This was not a random attack. It was deliberate. It was targeted. And it was carried out by someone who knew exactly where those girls slept.

 The following morning, neighbors reported seeing a man described as swarthy near the drain home the previous night. Police initially chased two separate leads. One involving African-American suspects. One involving an escaped patient from a nearby institution. Both collapsed completely. When Barbara finally regained consciousness, she identified her attacker without hesitation.

 It was Frank Aguilar. She had seen him before. He had worked for her father. She did not identify Joe Arridy. She was not even asked about Joe Arridy until much later in the investigation. A $1,000 reward was announced. Five suspects were briefly detained. None were charged. Now, here is what court records and direct witness testimony confirm about where Joe Arridy actually was on August 14th, 1936.

He was nowhere near Pueblo. He was still drifting through Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, hundreds of miles away. Ben Harvey, who was with him, stated plainly that they passed through Pueblo only once, on August 16th, two full days after the murder, to briefly visit family before boarding a train toward Denver. Joe had no weapon, no money.

 He could not count past five. He could not tell a dime from a nickel. The real killer was already in custody. The murder weapon was sitting in his apartment. And yet, what happens next is almost impossible to believe. Frank Aguilar, that same night was in the Bessemer neighborhood, three blocks from where he had already killed 12 days earlier. He knew the Drain home.

He had the motive. He had the hatchet. The evidence pointed in one direction. The case went in another. The morning of August 27th, 1936, newspapers across the country ran the same story. Joe Arridy, a young man from Pueblo, Colorado, had confessed to the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain. Sheriff George Carroll had his man.

 The press printed every word Carroll gave them without a single question asked. Nobody challenged the confession. Nobody pointed out that it was unrecorded, that there was no witness in the room, that Joe had not signed a single document. Carroll had hunted the Barker gang. His word was enough.

 Every door was closing on Joe Arridy, and he had no idea any of them existed. Joe was transported from Cheyenne back toward Colorado for a crime scene reenactment at the Drain residence. During that journey, Carroll claimed Joe confessed a second time. But this version was different from the first. Now, Joe said he had used a club.

Now, he said he had waited in bushes outside the house. Now, he said he ran home to his family afterward. His family had moved while he was institutionalized. The addresses Joe gave were wrong. The streets he named did not exist. The neighborhoods he described were from years earlier. Every one of those inconsistencies appeared in the early newspaper reports.

Carroll was never once asked to explain them in court. Meanwhile, Joe’s family paid a price they did nothing to deserve. His mother, his father, and two female cousins, Christine and Frances Marguerit, were all taken into custody. Two axes were seized from the Marguerit home.

 Not one piece of it connected Joe to the crime scene. Then came the staged confrontation. District Attorney French L. Taylor and Warden Roy Best arranged for Joe and Aguilar to meet inside the penitentiary. Surrounded by authority figures, under pressure he could not process. Joe looked at Aguilar and said, “That’s Frank.

” Aguilar told police plainly he had never seen Joe before in his life. Three days later, after a 9-hour joint interrogation, a five-page statement appeared. Every question was structured to include Joe’s name.    Aguilar’s responses were almost entirely the word “Yes.” He signed the document with an X. Joe said nothing.

 Joe signed nothing. Aguilar later recanted completely. He stated he had been threatened with terrible things and told there would be a dead Mexican if he refused to cooperate. The prosecution moved forward anyway. To make the case against Joe stick, the prosecution needed evidence. Real evidence did not exist.

 So, what followed was a series of claims that fell apart one by one, and yet somehow still pushed Joe closer to the gas chamber. First came a pawnbroker named Saul Kahn. Kahn claimed that Joe had walked into his shop on the day of the attack and purchased a cheap pistol. The problems were immediate. Joe had no money, none.  He could not count coins.

 He never introduced himself by his full name to anyone. He only ever called himself Joe. Kahn could not produce a receipt. He also changed the date of the alleged sale multiple times when questioned. The allegation was eventually dropped, but not before it had already done damage in the press. Then came the Helen O’Driscoll claim.

Colorado Springs Police Chief Hugh Davis Harper announced that Joe had been positively identified as having assaulted a woman named Helen O’Driscoll on August 23rd. Her identification came from a photograph she saw in a newspaper, not from a proper lineup. The problem was straightforward. On August 23rd, Joe was washing dishes inside a railroad kitchen car in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 170 miles away.

 Multiple eyewitnesses confirmed it. The charge was dropped without any public explanation. Then came the hair. Forensic pathologist Francis McConnell examined a single strand of hair she claimed was recovered from the crime scene. Under a microscope, she concluded it bore the characteristics of someone of American Indian descent and that it matched Joe. Joe was of Syrian ancestry.

His own prison documents listed his race as Hispanic. McConnell’s method, visual hair comparison, has since been completely discredited by modern forensic science as unreliable. Joe’s defense attorney, C. Fred Barnard, argued the hair was never actually collected from the scene at all. That it was taken from Joe after his arrest and then presented as crime scene evidence.

The court was not moved. Ben Harvey’s testimony, placing Joe in Pueblo only on August 16th, two days after the murder, was on record. Carroll never addressed it. The district attorney never challenged it. It was set aside and left there. December 1936, Frank Aguilar finally goes to trial. His defense attorney, Vasquez G.

 CV, tried a desperate move. He argued that Aguilar was mentally limited and therefore not fully responsible. Then he went further, claiming that Joe Arridy had privately confessed to carrying out the attack alone. Let that settle for a moment. It was Aguilar’s own defense team, not the prosecution, making the claim that Joe acted alone.

 It was a legal strategy designed to save one guilty man. Instead, it helped condemn an innocent one. It did not save Aguilar, either. Barbara Drain took the stand. She was 12 years old when the attack happened. She had been beaten so severely, she spent 2 weeks in a coma. When she testified, she described one attacker.

 She identified Frank Aguilar. She did not place Joe Arridy at the scene. She did not recognize him as having been present that night. The jury did not take long. On December 22nd, 1936, Frank Aguilar was convicted of the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain and sentenced to death. Joe Arridy was not mentioned in the verdict.

 The physical evidence, the hatchet with matching notches, the calendar, the nail scrapings, the newspaper clippings, was more than enough. Barbara’s testimony sealed it. The case against Frank Aguilar was airtight, which means the case against Joe Arridy should have ended right there. The actual killer had been convicted on independent physical evidence.

 The only surviving witness identified Aguilar alone. What remained against Joe was an unrecorded conversation in Carol’s office, a coerced document signed with an X, and a single strand of hair with no credible scientific foundation. And yet the prosecution of Joe Arridy continued without pause. A separate sanity hearing was scheduled.

 Three state psychiatrists were prepared to testify. Every piece of real evidence pointed to one man. Joe Arridy had none of it against him, and yet what the jury decided next would define one of the darkest chapters in American legal history. February 1937. The sanity hearing for Joseph Arridy begins. His defense attorney, C.

 Fred Barnard, entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. To support it, he called three state psychiatrists to the stand. All three testified unanimously. Joe’s IQ was 46. His mind functioned at the level of a 6-year-old child. He was unable to distinguish right from wrong in any meaningful way.

 Legally, he was incapable of forming criminal intent. One of those psychiatrists, Dr. J.L. Rosenbloom, put it plainly in his testimony. His words appear in court records. If it was his desire to please, he had a tendency to say yes to anything with a smile. Then the prosecutor, Ralph J. Neery, was allowed to question Joe directly in open court.

 Joe could not name Franklin Roosevelt. He could not name George Washington. He said he had never seen a hatchet and did not know what one looked like. He could not tell a nickel from a dime. His own father was seated in that courtroom. They had not seen each other in 8 years and Joe did not recognize him.

 When asked what was happening around him, Joe looked up and said, “Talking. Talking about me.” That was the man the state of Colorado was putting on trial for murder. Sheriff Carroll took the stand. He would testify eight separate times across the proceedings. In private, Carroll had described Joe as a nut who told us two or three different stories and someone who was, to all appearances, unquestionably insane.

 In court, he told a completely different story. He claimed Joe was articulate, that Joe showed great remorse, that Joe provided accurate details during the crime scene reenactment. Carroll even claimed Joe used a specific adult phrase to describe what he had done to the girls. A phrase no one who knew Joe believed he understood or had ever used.

 Carroll was not cross-examined about a single inconsistency. Judge Harry Leddy ruled Joe legally sane. On April 12th, 1937, the murder trial began. Barnard challenged every piece of prosecution evidence. Carroll performed for the courtroom once more. 3 and 1/2 hours after the jury began deliberating, they returned. Guilty of rape and murder.

Sentence, death by gas chamber. Shortly after the verdict, Sheriff Carroll and the two railroad detectives who first arrested Joe each collected $1,000 in reward money. Joe Arridy spent 21 months on death row at Colorado State Penitentiary. During that time, pro bono attorney Gail L. Ireland fought tirelessly on his behalf.

 She secured nine separate stays of execution. She stood before the Colorado Supreme Court and made her position clear. “Believe me when I say that if he is gassed, it will take a long time for the state of Colorado to live down the disgrace.” Governor Teller Ammons refused clemency. He refused to acknowledge the public petition submitted on Joe’s behalf.

 On the very night of the execution, the Colorado Supreme Court denied a final request for a sanity hearing. Every door closed one by one. Inside those walls, something unexpected happened. Warden Roy Best, a hard, no-nonsense man who had seen everything a prison could show a person, became Joe’s fiercest protector.

 He brought Joe crayons, picture books, a toy car, and eventually a battery-powered toy train. Joe would roll it along the floor between cells. Other inmates, all convicted killers, would catch it and push it back. Nobody complained. Nobody refused. When reporters asked Joe about his situation, he told them, “No, I want to get a life sentence and stay here with Warden Best.

At the home, the kids used to beat me. I never get in trouble here.” When staff told Joe he was going to be executed, he went quiet. Asked four separate times whether he understood he was going to die, he gave the same answer each time. “No, I am not going to die.” On January 5th, 1939, Best gently convinced Joe to give his toy train to fellow death row inmate Angelo Agnus.

Joe spent his final hours playing alongside Agnes and another inmate named Norman Warden before reluctantly letting the train go. The next morning, January 6th, 1939, Joe’s mother Mary arrived with his sister, an aunt, and a cousin. Mary broke down the moment she saw him, crying, “Joe, my Joe.

” Joe said hello and looked away. He had no framework for what her tears meant. He ate ice cream with her and smiled each time someone brought another bowl. For his last meal, Joe asked for one thing, ice cream. He did not finish it. He asked for it to be put in the refrigerator so he could have it when he got back.

 He was led up Woodpecker Hill past the prison chicken coop. Best asked if he would raise chickens in heaven. Joe said he wanted to play the harp. He smiled walking into the chamber. He smiled when the blindfold was placed over his eyes. Roy Best held his hand. At 8:13 in the evening, the gas was released. Three breaths, then stillness.

 At 8:19, Joseph Arridy, 23 years old, was declared dead. Only 50 people witnessed it. Roy Best was weeping. Frank Aguilar had been executed on August 13th, 1937. A spectator in the viewing area died of a heart attack while watching. Angelo Agnes and Pete Catalano were executed together on September 29th, 1939. Both men held their breath for a full minute after the gas dropped.

 George Carroll remained sheriff of Laramie County until 1942. In 1939, the same year Joe died, Carroll was convicted of assaulting a waitress. He was sentenced to 6 months in jail and a $100 fine. The sentence was suspended. He served no time. For decades after his execution, Joe Arridy’s grave at Woodpecker Hill in Cañon City had no no no name, no stone, nothing to say a person had ever been there.

 In 2007, a group called Friends of Joe Arridy changed that. They commissioned the very first tombstone ever placed on his grave. Then, on January 7th, 2011, 72 years after the gas was released, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter granted Joseph Arridy a full and unconditional posthumous pardon, the first of its kind in Colorado history.

 Ritter’s words are on record. It is in the interests of justice and simple decency to restore his good name. A man who played with a toy train on death row, who asked for ice cream on the last morning of his life, who smiled at the people watching him die, because he did not know they were watching him die. Joe Arridy never understood what they took from him, but we do.

 What moment in Joe’s story hit you hardest? Tell me in the comments. I read every single one. If this story moved you, please subscribe and share it. Joe’s name went unspoken for 72 years. Make sure it gets heard.