13 Aug The Tragic Story Of “The Happiest Prisoner On Death Row”

Joe Arridy was a good-natured child growing up, but as he grew older his parents noticed something was wrong. By first grade he couldn’t keep up with the lessons, and the principal asked his parents to keep him at home. The tests Joe took as part of his school evaluation revealed he could not correctly identify colours, explain the difference between a stone and an egg, or repeat a sequence of four numbers.

In his late teens, Joe was admitted to the Colorado State Home for Mental Defectives at Grand Junction, where he spent most of his life. With an IQ of 46, he was frequently beaten and taken advantage of by the other boys at the state home. In August 1936, he and a couple of others decided to hop on a train that routinely passed by the home. They took the train all the way back to Joe’s hometown of Pueblo, a 24-hour trip.

That week, the town was whipped up into a frenzy. Two teenage girls had been attacked in their own home. Dorothy Drain, 15, had been raped and killed with a hatchet, while her sister, 12, had barely survived a savage beating. Their father, who had been out that evening, came home to find them both on Dorothy’s blood-soaked bed. The younger daughter, Barbara, was in a coma, and a funeral service was held for Dorothy. Everyone was on the lookout for what the newspapers were calling a “perverted maniac”.

Unlike the other boys, Joe hadn’t returned to Grand Junction, instead choosing to wander the railroads alone. The police found him in Cheyenne, some 200 miles away from Pueblo, and took the boy in to see the Sheriff. Carroll, something of a celebrity in those parts, and frequently courting the attention of journalists, believed their might be some connection between the wandering man and the murders that had occurred in a nearby town. After hours of interrogation, Joe willingly confessed to the murder.

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