Joe Arridy

Joseph Arridy (April 29, 1915 – January 6, 1939) 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 born in 1915 in Pueblo, Colorado, the eldest child of Mary and Henry Arridy, recent immigrants from Syria (then part of the Ottoman Empire), who were seeking work; they were first cousins and did not speak English.

Henry took a job with a major steel mill in Pueblo that he learned was hiring workers.

Arridy never spoke for the first five years of his life.

After he attended one year at elementary school, his principal told his parents to keep him at home, saying that he could not learn.

After losing his job a few years later, his father appealed to friends to help him find a place for his son.

Arridy was admitted at the age of ten to the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he lived on and off for eleven years until becoming a young adult.

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".

Both in his neighborhood and at the school, he was often mistreated and beaten by his peers.

In 1929, while living back in Pueblo, Arridy was sexually assaulted by a group of teen boys, who forced him to perform oral sex on them, leading to his recommittal.

He left the school and hopped on freight railcars to leave the city, ending up at the age of 21 in the railyards of Cheyenne, Wyoming, by late August 1936.

On August 14, 1936, two girls of the Drain family were attacked while sleeping at home in Pueblo, Colorado.

Both 15-year-old Dorothy and her 12-year-old sister Barbara Drain were bludgeoned by an intruder with a bladed weapon, believed to be a hatchet.

Dorothy was also raped; she died from the hatchet attack, while Barbara survived.

On August 26, 1936, Arridy was arrested for vagrancy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, after being caught wandering around the railyards.

Laramie County sheriff, George Carroll, was aware of the widespread search for suspects in the Drain murder case.

When Arridy revealed under questioning that he had traveled through Pueblo by way of a train after leaving Grand Junction, Colorado, Carroll began to question him about the Drain case.

Carroll said that Arridy confessed to him.

When Carroll contacted the Pueblo police chief Arthur Grady about Arridy, he learned that they had already arrested a man considered to be the prime suspect: Frank Aguilar, a laborer with the Works Progress Administration from Mexico.

Aguilar had worked for the father of the Drain girls and been fired shortly before the attack.

An axe head was recovered from Aguilar's home.

Sheriff Carroll claimed that Arridy told him several times he had "been with a man named Frank" at the crime scene.

Aguilar later confessed to the crime and told police he had never seen or met Arridy.

Aguilar was also convicted of the rape and murder of Dorothy Drain and sentenced to death.

He was executed on August 13, 1937, in Colorado State Penitentiary.

After being transported to Pueblo, Arridy reportedly confessed again.

When the case was finally taken to trial, Arridy's lawyer pleaded insanity to spare his client's life.

Arridy was ruled to be sane, while acknowledged by three state psychiatrists to be so mentally limited as to be classified as an "imbecile", a medical term at the time.

They said he had an IQ of 46, and the mind of a six-year-old.

They noted he was "incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and therefore, would be unable to perform any action with a criminal intent".

Arridy was convicted, largely due to his false confession.

Arridy was mentally disabled and was 23 years old when he was executed on January 6, 1939.

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, Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon by Colorado Governor Bill Ritter (72 years after his death).

Ritter, the former district attorney of Denver, pardoned Arridy based on questions about the man's 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.