Joe Arridy Was Executed in Colorado’s Gas Chamber — His IQ Was 46, and Another Man Had Already Confessed

It was January the 6th, 1939, 8:13 in the evening. Inside a gas chamber in Colorado, a 23-year-old man sat in a chair. His name was Joe Arridy. He was smiling. He was not smiling because he was brave. He was smiling because he did not understand what was about to happen to him. Just hours before, Joe had asked for his bowl of ice cream to be put in the fridge. He wanted to finish it later.

 He truly believed he was coming back. He was wrong. The state of Colorado was about to execute Joe Arridy for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. But here is the problem. Two years before this night, another man had already confessed to that exact same crime. That man had already been tried.

 That man had already been executed. So, how does one state execute two different men for one single murder? Stay with us. This story only gets harder to believe. Before we go further, hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications because this case is about to take you somewhere you will not expect.

 Dorothy Drain was 15 years old. She lived in Pueblo, Colorado with her family in a small home. Her father, Riley Drain, worked as a foreman for the Works Progress Administration. It was a government program built during the Great Depression to give men jobs. It was not easy work, but it kept the family fed and housed during hard times.

Dorothy shared a bedroom with her younger sister, Barbara, who was 12 years old. There was also a younger brother in the house who slept in a room close by. By all accounts, it was a normal household. Riley Drain and his wife would sometimes go out in the evening, leaving their children at home. This was not unusual.

 It was a routine the family had followed many times before. On the night of August the 14th, 1936, that is exactly what happened. Riley Drain and his wife left the house for the evening. Their young son fell asleep in his room. Dorothy and Barbara settled into their shared bed for the night. There was no warning.

 There was no reason to think anything was wrong. The front door of the house was left unlocked, just like any other night. Dorothy Drain had no connection to any suspect in this case. She was not caught up in any relationship. She was not part of any conflict. She was a child, asleep in her own bed, in her own home, with her sister beside her.

 By morning, one sister would be gone. The other would not wake up for 2 weeks. Frank Aguilar was 33 years old. He worked as a laborer for the Works Progress Administration on the same work crew supervised by Riley Drain, Dorothy’s father. Not long before the murder, Riley Drain had fired him. When police later searched Aguilar’s apartment, what they found was disturbing.

 There was an axe head with notches that matched the wounds on both girls. There was a calendar with August the 15th circled. There were newspaper clippings about violent sex crimes cut out and taped to the wall around pictures of nude women. Aguilar also had a history of violence. Only 12 days before the Drain attack, on August the he attacked an elderly woman and her niece in a house just three blocks away.

A young boy in that house survived the attack. Then there was Joseph Aridy. Joe was 21 years old. He was born in Pueblo, Colorado to immigrant parents. He did not speak at all until he was 5 years old. Doctors later measured his intelligence at 46 on a scale where 70 is considered the edge of disability. His mind worked at the level of a small child.

 Joe had spent years in a state training school for people with mental disabilities. In 1929, he had been sexually assaulted by a group of teenage boys. He was the victim in that case, not the attacker. Joe had no record of violence, none at all. One of these two men had a documented history of violent crime, a weapon that matched the wounds, and evidence hidden in his own home.

 The other could not tell a nickel from a dime. Two weeks before Dorothy Drain was killed, Frank Aguilar had already shown what he was capable of. On August the 2nd, 1936, he attacked 72-year-old Sally Crumpley and her 48-year-old niece, Lilly McMurtry, inside their own home, only three blocks from where the Drain family lived.

 A young boy in the house, 4-year-old Burton Beach, survived the attack. No one was arrested. The trail went cold, and Aguilar walked free. Around the same time, Riley Drain had fired Aguilar from his job on the Works Progress Administration crew. No one connected the firing to the attack down the street. No one saw what was coming. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Joe Arridy was doing something else entirely.

On August the 8th, 1936, Joe left the State Home and Training School for mental defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado, along with four other young men. They had watched trains pass by the school fence for years. That day, they decided to follow them. Joe had no plan. He had no money. He had no real idea where he was going.

 Three of the young men who left with him turned back within days. Joe and one other, a fellow runaway named Ben Harvey, kept moving. Together, they rode freight trains through Colorado into Utah and then into Wyoming. Every day that passed put more distance between Joe and the town of Pueblo. He had no idea that a murder was about to happen there.

 He had no idea his name would soon be tied to it. No real crime here involved planning between Joe Arridy and anyone else because Joe was never actually involved. What happened instead was law enforcement building a case against an innocent man. On August the 20th, 1936, Joe arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, tired and hungry.

 He was picked up by railroad detectives who suspected he might be a runaway soldier. They handed him to Sheriff George Carroll. Carroll knew about the drain murder back in Pueblo. When he learned Joe was from that town, his questions changed. He asked Joe if he liked girls. Joe said yes. He asked why Joe hurt them. Joe, who was known to agree with anyone in authority, replied, “Well, I didn’t mean to.” There was no recording.

There was no lawyer present. There was no signed statement. Within hours, Carroll called the newspapers and named Joe as the killer, even though the real suspect, Frank Aguilar, was already under arrest in Pueblo. Days later, prison officials arranged a meeting between Joe and Aguilar inside the penitentiary.

Warden Roy Best and District Attorney French Taylor then questioned both men together for 9 hours. At the end, a five-page statement was written saying Joe had helped Aguilar. Aguilar signed it with an X. Joe signed nothing at all. Before we continue, if this case is already making you angry, imagine how much worse it gets.

Hit subscribe now because the next part of this story is even harder to accept. On the evening of August the 14th, 1936, Riley Drain and his wife got ready to go out. This was normal for them. They had done it many times before. Their young son fell asleep in his room. In the next room, Dorothy, who was 15, and Barbara, who was 12, settled into their shared bed for the night.

 The front door of the house was left unlocked, just like on any other evening. At some point that night, someone walked through that unlocked door. There was no broken window. There was no sign of forced entry. Whoever came inside moved straight to the girls’ bedroom without hesitation. This was not someone wandering through a strange house.

 This was someone who already knew where to go. The attacker carried a hatchet-like tool. He used the blunt side of it. Both girls were struck while they slept. Dorothy was also raped during the attack. Dorothy did not survive. She died from the injuries to her head. Barbara was struck hard enough to lose consciousness.

 She did not wake up again for two full weeks. When she finally did wake up, she was able to describe what had happened to her. The younger brother, asleep in the room next door, was never touched. Whoever entered the house that night had no interest in him at all. The parents returned home to find their daughters attacked and their house forever changed.

 The next morning, neighbors began talking. Some said they had seen a man near the Drain house the night before. Word spread quickly through Pueblo. A 15-year-old girl was dead. Her sister was fighting for her life, and somewhere out there, the person responsible was still free. Police did not yet know his name, but the evidence that would lead them to him was already sitting inside his apartment, just waiting to be found.

By the next day, the town of Pueblo was in shock. A reward of $1,000 was announced for information leading to an arrest. Police detained five suspects in the days that followed. All five were released. None of them had done it. Then came the funeral for Dorothy Drain. Frank Aguilar showed up.

 He was dressed in his work overalls, not funeral clothes. Witnesses noticed him cut in line to view the casket, not once, but twice. He then pressed 25 cents in nickels into Riley Drain’s hand, saying it was to help the family. After that, Aguilar approached two police officers standing nearby.

 He asked them where he could find Riley Drain. He kept mentioning how close he was to the family, and how close he was to the daughters. That was enough to raise suspicion. Police arrested Frank Aguilar right there at the funeral. At first, his mother gave him an alibi, saying he had been home that night, but investigators were not finished.

 When they scraped beneath his fingernails, they found blue chenille fibers. Those fibers matched the exact fabric of the bedsheets in the Drain girls’ room. The man who handed Riley Drain 25 cents at his daughter’s funeral was now the prime suspect in her murder. When investigators searched Frank Aguilar’s apartment, the evidence lined up.

They found an ax head with notches that matched the wounds on both Dorothy and Barbara. They found a calendar with August the 15th circled. They found newspaper clippings about violent sex crimes cut out and taped to his wall around pictures of nude women. Along with the blue chenille fibers already found under his fingernails, the case against Aguilar was building fast.

This was not guesswork. This was physical evidence sitting inside his own home. At the very same time, in a completely unrelated event, Joe Arridy was arrested in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Railroad detectives had picked him up, not for murder, but because his khaki clothing made them think he might be a soldier who had run away from Fort Logan.

 There was no connection to the Drain case in that arrest. There was no reason to think Joe knew anything about Pueblo at all. Two investigations were happening at the same time in two different states for two completely different reasons. One was building a real case against a real suspect based on fingernail scrapings, a matching weapon, and physical evidence found inside his own apartment.

 The other began with a sheriff who simply heard the word Pueblo and decided to ask a few more questions. Only one of these paths was based on evidence. The other was about to change everything. On August the 28th, 1936, Frank Aguilar confessed to the murder of Dorothy Drain. This should have ended the case. The confession, combined with the ax head, the calendar, the newspaper clippings, and the fiber evidence gave police everything they needed against one man.

But Sheriff Carroll did not let go of Joe Arridy. Carroll had already told the press that Joe confessed. He had already built a story around him. Rather than step back, Carroll began saying that Joe and Aguilar had acted together. To support this claim, officials arranged a meeting between the two men inside the Colorado State Penitentiary.

 Warden Roy Best and District Attorney French Taylor were both present. When Joe saw Aguilar, he simply said, “That’s Frank.” At first, Aguilar told police he had never seen Joe before in his life. Then came a 9-hour joint interrogation. At the end of it, a five-page statement appeared saying that Joe had helped Aguilar carry out the attack.

 Aguilar signed the document with an X. Joe said nothing and signed nothing at all. Aguilar later said he had been threatened during that interrogation, warned that there would be, in his words, “a dead Mexican” if he did not cooperate. One man had confessed based on real evidence. The other had been placed into his story through a staged meeting and a document he never signed.

In December of 1936, Frank Aguilar’s trial began. His defense attorney, Vasco Sevi, argued that Aguilar was mentally limited and should not receive the death penalty. He even claimed that Joe Arridy had privately confessed to acting alone. It did not matter. The evidence against Aguilar was too strong.

 On December the 22nd, 1936, Frank Aguilar was convicted of the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain. He was sentenced to death. Barbara Drain, the surviving sister, had already testified. She described one attacker. She identified Frank Aguilar. She did not mention Joe Arridy at all. By this point, the case against Aguilar was closed through real evidence.

 Yet, Joe still faced trial for the very same crime. In February of 1937, Joe’s sanity hearing began. Three state psychiatrists testified. They said Joe’s intelligence measured at 46 and that his mind worked at the level of a 6-year-old child. One psychiatrist explained that Joe had a tendency to say yes to anything simply to please the person asking.

 In the courtroom, the prosecutor questioned Joe directly. Joe could not name Franklin Roosevelt. He could not name George Washington. He said he had never seen a hatchet. He could not tell a nickel from a dime. His own father sat in the courtroom that day, a man Joe had not seen in eight years. Joe did not recognize him. Despite all of this, the judge ruled Joe legally sane.

 On April the 17th, 1937, a jury found Joe Arridy guilty of murder. He was sentenced to death for a crime already answered by another man’s conviction. Joe Arridy spent 21 months on death row at the Colorado State Penitentiary. During that time, an attorney named Gail Ireland took on his case without pay. She fought for him again and again, winning nine separate stays of execution.

She told the Colorado Supreme Court plainly, “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.” While Joe waited, Warden Roy Best treated him with unexpected kindness. Best brought him picture books, crayons, and eventually a battery-powered toy train.

Joe would roll it along the floor between the cell bars, and other death row inmates would catch it and roll it back. Guards said Joe was the happiest man on death row. On August the 13th, 1937, Frank Aguilar was executed in that same gas chamber. He was 34 years old. Joe remained on death row for almost a year and a half longer.

 On the morning of January the 6th, 1939, Joe’s mother arrived for a final visit, along with his sister, an aunt, and a cousin. His mother broke down crying saying, “Joe, my Joe.” Joe simply said, “Hello.” and looked away. He did not understand what her tears meant. For his last meal, Joe asked for ice cream. He did not finish it.

 He asked for the rest to be put in the refrigerator, believing he would return to eat it later. That evening, Warden Best walked with Joe toward the gas chamber. Joe was reported to be smiling as he walked in. When the blindfold was placed over his eyes, his smile faded for a moment, but returned when Best held his hand.

 At 8:13 in the evening, the gas was released. Joe took three breaths. At 8:19, he was declared dead. He was 23 years old. For 72 years, Joe Arridy’s grave sat without a name. No stone, no marker, nothing to show a person was ever buried there. In 2007, a group called Friends of Joe Arridy placed the first tombstone on his grave.

 Then, on January the 7th, 2011, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter granted Joe a full and unconditional pardon. It was the first pardon after execution in the state’s history. Ritter said it was in the interests of justice and simple decency to restore Joe’s good name. Think about that. The state of Colorado had already executed the real killer.

The case was already closed. And still, they executed a second man. One who could not tell a nickel from a dime for a crime he never committed. What part of this story hit you the hardest? Tell us in the comments below. If this story moved you, subscribe now and share it with someone who needs to hear it.