5 True Crime Stories From The 1970s

In the seventies, criminal profiling and DNA technology were in their infancy, and there was no internet surveillance or constant surrendering of one’s personal data. When people disappeared, it was assumed they ran off. Large tracts of land were untouched by real estate or commercial development and were ripe for body dumping. Police would go out hunting for one person in a given area and come back with unaffiliated corpses of people whose identities had long been forgotten. Here's five True Crime stories that embodied the turbulent changes of the 1970s. 

1970: The Murder of Evelyn Okubo

In 1970, 25 years after Japanese-Americans were released from internment camps, they were the largest Asian-minority group in the country, with a population of 591,000. To hammer down their priorities in the midst of the ongoing political divisions and turmoil, the Japanese American Citizens League held a convention in Chicago in mid-July. Approximately 400 delegates would be in attendance to discuss pertinent issues like reparations. 18-year-old anti-Vietnam war activist and third-generation, or sansei, Evelyn Okubo, was excited to attend with her friend Ranko Carol Yamada. They were both from Stockton, California and shared room 725 at the historic Palmer House Hotel with a fellow attendee named Patti Iwataki. The historic hotel was one of the oldest in America, but for its 2,144 guest rooms, there were only five security guards per shift.

On July 17, 1970, Carol gave a 4.5 hour presentation, dealing with topics like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later that evening, after dinner at around 9:30 PM, the three roommates went to hang out in room 862 with some friends. Evelyn left to go back to room 725 thirty minutes later. At 10:30, Carol went to the group’s room to grab something and check on Evelyn. When she entered, she found her friend naked on the floor. A tall naked black man with a natural, or afro, grabbed Carol. According to testimony in Yamada v. Hilton Hotel Corp,  “He forced Carol to lie down and tied her hands behind her back.He cut off her clothes and covered her head with a sheet.He also tied her feet.He turned her on her back…Carol heard him take Evelyn into the bathroom and could hear Evelyn struggling as she was put into the bathtub. Evelyn screamed once and then it was silent.”

The man came out of the bathroom, put on clothes, and then slashed Carol’s throat with a razor before he left the room. Carol freed her hands, but couldn’t untie her legs, speak on the phone, or open the room’s door. As she bled out, she wrote a series of notes in black crayon. They read, “he's black w/ a natural," "it looks gory but there's no pain," and "don't blame him it is not his fault.” She testified that she wrote the notes because she believed she was dying and did not want her family to think her death had been painful. Fortunately for Carol, the blade that slashed her throat missed her jugular vein by a fraction of an inch. 

When Patti arrived to the room, she got help for Carol. The police and media speculated that a Black Panther was responsible, and rumors swirled that the girls had consorted with black men and radical groups. On the same day of the attack, two police were killed by a sniper, which was also blamed on the Black Panthers. It was also falsely reported that the girls had been raped. In November, a 17-year-old former laundry room worker at the hotel, Lonell Robinson raped and robbed the 61-year-old wife of a University of Illinois professor in the nearby Conrad Hilton Hotel. He was briefly investigated as the culprit in Evelyn’s murder, but was cleared. Nobody else was ever arrested or indicted for the murder.

Evelyn and Carol’s families unsuccessfully sued Hilton Hotels, blaming the poor security at the hotel and citing past complaints of frequent room break-ins. The JACL solicited donations in it’s Pacific Citizen Newspaper. Evelyn left behind a widowed mother named Mabel and four siblings. The incident inspired fellow convention-attendee Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto to write a song, start a band named Yellow Pearl, and become an advocate of racial reconciliation. The Palmer House Hotel implemented stricter security protocols. 

1973: The Murder of Joan D’Alessandro

At approximately 2:45 on April 19, 1973 in Hillsdale New Jersey, a 7-year-old girl scout named Joan D’alessandro told her mother Rosemarie, “Goodbye mommy, I’ll be right back.” Hillsdale was a small borough of approximately 12000 in Bergen County with a friendly community. Joan, a 4-foot-3 “confident and happy” girl who loved ballet, jokes, and the color green, was going to start taking piano lessons when she turned 8 in September. The youngest of three children, Joan loved being a Girl Scout. For forty years the organization had been selling it’s cookies, and scouts were encouraged to use the buddy system and be supervised by adults. But on this Holy Thursday, Joan went to a neighbor’s house to deliver two boxes of cookies alone, carrying the sole list of customer names with her. Because “Holy Thursday” was a holiday at her parochial school, Joan and her siblings had the day off. She went down Florence Street and turned the corner to Nicholas Avenue to the home of Joseph McGowan, a 26-year-old high school science teacher who lived with his mother and grandmother. He was described as a “straight laced churchman, a classroom disciplimarian, nice, and smart.” On that fateful day, McGowan was mowing the lawn and told her to follow him inside while he retrieved money for the cookies.

Joan never returned home. Rosemarie wasn’t immediately alarmed, believing Joan went to her friend’s house. It was the seventies, and this was a family oriented predominately Italian-American neighborhood. But after two hours, Rosemarie was concerned. Rosemarie and her husband Frank called the police and drove around looking for her, but returned home. Rosemarie then went on foot around the neighborhood looking for Joan, starting with the McGowan home. Joseph said he hadn’t seen her, and his cold callousness didn’t go unnoticed by Rosemarie. She told FBI profiler John Douglas, “Walking back to my house I knew that he knew what had happened to Joan.”

Police arrived and a search began. Neighbors were advised that Joan left home wearing a “short sleeve turquoise blouse, maroon slacks, and red-white-and blue sneakers.” The next day, McGowan was seen disposing of trash, and Rosemarie told police about her weird encounter with him. Police immediately suspected McGowan, who told them he had been at the grocery store when Joan went to his home. He lied about the circumstances of this grocery store trip, leading to a failed polygraph test. While in custody, McGowan requested to speak to a priest, whom he confessed to killing Joan. He had done so within minutes of her arrival while his hearing impaired grandmother was upstairs watching TV. On Easter Sunday, three days after she went missing, Joan’s body was found beaten, naked, and sexually violated fifty miles north in Stony Point, New York.  McGowan was indicted for her murder on April 24th. The next day, an interview with Dr. Noel Galen found that McGowan had repeated disturbing sexual fantasies of young girls. McGowan reaffirmed his guilt.

After disposing of her body and helping the neighbors look for her, McGowan told the psychiatrist he “slept well.” Though he readily admitted to murder, when asked if he raped the 7-year-old, he lied. A jury was solicited to determine if he had committed the murder “while committing or attempting to commit rape,” which carried a harsher sentence. McGowan suddenly pled guilty to murder to forgo a trial, not wanting the details of his crime to be debated in a courtroom. 

Prior to sentencing, Superior Court Judge Fred C. Galda ordered a psychiatric examination of McGowan. Keep in mind that this was before criminal profiling had been developed. The judge, when considering sentencing, was unsure if McGowan would be a repeat offender. On May 10, 1973, psychologist Emanuel Fisher wrote, “Although appellant came across as “a very proper, conventional, conforming individual, [t]his exaggerated propriety, conventionality and conformity constitute his defensive facade, for himself and for others, against the underlying depression and hostility of which he is unconscious.” 

McGowan was sentenced to life in prison, but was eligible for parole in 1993. Rosemarie D’Alessandro was one of many activists in the powerful victims rights lobby. As we discussed in Lexual Does The 90s, this loose assortment of Americans across the political spectrum pushed for stricter sentencing and an end to parole. Rosemarie wanted to deny the possibility of parole to sexual murders like that of her daughter, and in 1997 New Jersey passed Joan’s Law, which ended parole for those who killed children under 14 during a sex crime. It became national law in 1998. While this could not be retroactively applied to McGowan, he was denied parole in 1993, 1998, and 2008. Rosemarie also successfully encouraged the passage of a law removing the statute of limitations for wrongful death lawsuits. In 2001, she sued McGowan, who had inherited money from a family member, and was awarded $750,000.  

1974: The Disappearance of Amy Billig

On March 5, 1974 in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami, Florida, 17-year-old high school senior Amy Billig planned to meet her friends for lunch at Peacock Park. The Grove was the pinnacle of Miami’s counterculture, and Amy was a natural fit. It had been five years since her family— including father Nathaniel (aka “Ned’), mom Susan, and little brother Joshua— had moved from New York to sunny Florida, and Amy had readjusted just fine. She loved Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins, helped train dolphins at SeaWorld, babysat in her neighborhood, and met plenty of friends thanks to her fun personality. Just six weeks before that March day, she wrote in her journal that a man named Hank asked her to go with him to South America. She said, “I told him he is crazy.” No, Amy, who had experimented with pot before and believed in “free love” and read new bestsellers like The Happy Hooker, aspired to graduate from high school and become an actress.       

On that March afternoon in 1974, the guitar and flute playing poet and vegetarian needed to borrow $2 from her father at his art gallery at Commodore Plaza, so she likely decided to hitch a ride for the one mile trip. She’d done it plenty of times before. When Amy left her family’s house and walked down the street, she was seen by a group of construction workers wearing a denim mini skirt and platform sandals, who alleged they saw her get into a green jeep. But when Amy didn’t come home that evening, her family grew worried. When her friends called to ask why she didn’t show up for lunch, the worry turned to fear. The Billig family phoned the police. They were told that due to runaways and falsely-reported disappearances, they needed to call back the next morning if Amy didn’t show up. When she didn’t, the family again contacted the police and the investigation began.

Initially, police, including a family friend named Mike Gonzalez, treated the case as if Amy had runaway from home. The police canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed friends. Her high school, Adelphi Academy of Coral Gables, organized a benefit concert to fund the search on the same day the story hit news. People were told to look out for a 5’5 102-pound brunette with a 2-inch appendectomy scar on her stomach. The Billigs publicized their phone number and begged for people to call with tips. They offered a $1000 reward, hired a private investigator named Frank Rubino, and distributed hundreds of bilingual leaflets throughout Miami-Dade County. 

Susan Billig would later note the difficulty of generating media coverage for a missing teenager. Missing persons stories were not often covered in the national news, which was worsened by race, gender, and class. Many other disappearances that year barely made the news. 14-year-old Margaret Ellen Fox in Burlington New Jersey. 12-year-old Delema Lou Sits Poor of Pine Ridge South Dakota. Giannina and John Colonnaa Aponte in Puerto Rico. Two days before Christmas in Fort Worth, Texas, a 17-year old, a 14-year-old, and a 9-year old were abducted from the Seminary South Shopping Center. Reported Ian Glass in 1975, “There is nothing rate about a missing teenager. The Date County’s missing person’s bureau has the names of 175 of them on file. What makes Amy Billig's case special is the fanatical dedication of her mother.”  The Billig family resources, along with their persistence and privilege, kept Amy’s name in the press. In the years to follow, they closed the Dimensions art gallery, sold their car, and eventually moved to a cheaper home to keep the search going. 

The lead working theory by police involved Amy being kidnapped by a biker gang. At the time of her disappearance, a number of bikers from The Outlaws and Pagans Motorcycle Clubs had passed through Coconut Grove on their way to the Daytona 200. Both gangs invested in criminal enterprise and dabbled in sex trafficking. The late 60s and 1970s were a period of excess for biker gangs, before RICO and organized crime investigations became highly funded. The complex culture of biker gangs was documented in Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 book on the Hell’s Angels, who notoriously beat Thompson nearly to death when they grew annoyed with his questions. By 1974, the Outlaws were in a brewing war with the Hells Angels, and the following month three Hella Angels Members were executed in Fort Lauderdale. The violence and negativity that surrounded these clubs was on the brain when on March 16th, a girl calling herself “Susan Johnson” phoned the Billigs and told them that Amy was abducted by members of The Outlaws. 

On March 18th, Amy’s Instamatic camera was found 250 miles away in Wildwood near the Florida turnpike by a hitchhiker named David Flemming. Because of the overexposure and poor picture quality, it offered little clues except for a picture of a pickup truck in front of a vine-covered building, and another of a white van. Neither vehicle or location were ever officially identified. The Billigs reached out to a lawyer friend who had ties to The Outlaws so that they could see if Amy had been kidnapped by a chapter of the club. They met with a Jewish Outlaw named Sid Fast, which Susan found interesting because the Billig family was Jewish, and another man called “Greek.” The bikers told the Billigs “they’d ask around and help return their daughter if she was “in the outlaw nation.”

On March 22nd, a pair of 16 year old twins named Charles and Lawrence Glasser attempted to extort them of $30,000 at the Fontainebleau Hotel. They were not affiliated with Amy’s disappearance, but did serve time for extortion. The Billigs faced further despair and trauma when three weeks after the disappearance they began getting harassed by an unrepentant caller for the next two decades. The anonymous man taunted them with claims of torture being inflicted on Amy, and because of the randomness and brevity of the calls, which were made from pay phones, the stalker was hard to track.

In June 1974, an Orlando convenience store owner claimed a girl with a biker gang had been his store multiple times and bought vegetarian soups. This tip stood out to police and Amy’s parents because it wasn’t public knowledge that she was a vegetarian. Police finally decided to sweep Amy’s bedroom, which was left untouched with a note on her mirror saying “I’m Somebody”, for fingerprints. They hadn’t bothered before. 

In January 1976, a biker named David called the Billigs and told them he believed he recognized Amy as a girl he formerly owned. He knew about a “distinctive scar” previously unreleased to media. He told the family that he would talk to the man he believed now had Amy, ultimately claiming she was in Tulsa Oklahoma. When he claimed that he could broker a return, Susan met with him at a Tulsa bar. He got into a fight with other bikers before anything happened, and Susan returned home without Amy. David contacted the Billigs again later to tell them that Amy was a stripper in Seattle— but this didn’t pan out.  The Billigs would receive hundreds of tips and calls for the rest of their lives. Many claimed Amy was no longer in the state of Florida, and for over two decades Susan met with psychics and mediums and traveled to prisons, Washington, Oklahoma, Nevada, and even the United Kingdom following up on tips about Amy sightings. Nothing ever came of them, but Susan continued to hold out hope that her daughter was not dead, and could one day be brought home.

Life in Coconut Grove slowly moved on, though Amy’s disappearance left an indelible mark. Said one of Amy’s former babysitting charges, “it changed the life of everyone in Coconut Grove… it changed the way I thought walking home at night.” The eighties passed without tangible leads, though the harassment calls continued. When Susan was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992 and Ned died of the same illness the following year, she told the stalker, who in turn taunted her. His phone calls were a source of anxiety until October 21st 1995, when his call was finally successfully traced. 48-year-old Henry Johnson Blair, a married father of two daughters who had been employed as a US Custom Service Worker since 1970, was revealed to be the piece of shit calling the Billigs and taunting them. He had called other women with missing children with information culled from newspapers, but Susan Billig had been his favorite victim. He blamed his campaign of terror and misogyny on “mental illness, stress, and alcohol abuse,” and referred at trial to the news coverage he read as “soft porn.” He was convicted of aggravated stalking, with his forgiving wife and daughters in the court room, and given [2] years in prison. In a later civil suit, he was ordered to pay $5 million in restitution. Some wondered if he had something to do with Amy’s disappearance. 

Remember Amy writing about a “Hank” who asked her to go to South America? Henry Blair was known as Hank by friends and family. He’d gone to Coral Gables High School, not far from Coconut Grove. His job required him to go to Miami and South America. He lived In South Miami at the time of Amy’s disappearance.  He had a beige van similar to the one in Amy’s camera photos. Did he know bikers? Did he know Amy? These questions faded into the background when Paul Branch, a former Pagans enforcer, made a confession to his wife before dying. He claimed that he and other members abducted Amy to the everglades where she was gang raped by two dozen men, drugged until fatal overdose, and dumped in a swamp. He mentioned names, including a man who had been imprisoned since May 1974 for murder. That man denied participating.The lead detective on Amy’s case, who talked with Branch’s wife, said the full confession included undisclosed details that matched the case. 

On March 8, 1998, 72-year-old Susan Billig accepted that her daughter was likely dead and hosted a memorial service, saying “This is like a funeral for me.” In 2001, she co-authored the critically acclaimed memoir Without a Trace. Amy’s brother Josh, after dropping out of high school and floundering in drugs and alcohol, became a stonemason. According to more recent interviews, he doesn’t fully accept the deathbed confession of Paul Branch— and the Miami police department still has the case listed as open.  

1977: Colleen Stan

On May 19th, 1977, 20-year-old hitchhiker Colleen Stan turned down two rides. She considered herself a seasoned hitchhiker, and wanted to make sure she was getting into the right car for her trip from Eugene, Oregon to Westwood, California. She accepted the third offer of a ride from 24-year-old Cameron Hooker, who was traveling with his wife Janice and their baby. After a bit of driving, Cameron pulled off the highway to “look at caves” while his wife took the baby to a nearby lake. Instead of looking at caves, Cameron tied Colleen up at knifepoint and jammed a box onto her head. Janice returned to the car with the baby and they drove to their trailer in Red Bluff, California, where Cameron worked at a lumbermill. 

Janice approved of the kidnapping because she wanted her husband to channel his sexual rage and abuse to another target. For the next three years, the couple kept Colleen in a box 23 hours a day underneath their waterbed. When Janice gave birth to her second child on the couple’s bed, Colleen was underneath it in her box. The box was a mere 72x 33 x15 inches. When the Hookers moved from their trailer to a house between 1977 and 1978, she was kept in a 96 x 96 inch “self-made basement,” or workshop, where she was “forced to crochet, work on macramet, and shell nuts.” These items were sold by the Hookers for spare cash. 

Being inside of the box for most of the day was itself one form of torture, but being outside of it wasn’t any better. Cameron tortured Colleen with elaborate bondage mechanisms and sodomized her, initially forgoing vaginal penetration in a twisted vow of fidelity to his wife. Cameron told Colleen that she and her family were being watched by an organization called “The Company” who would kill her family if she tried to escape. Over time, this violent abuse and brainwashing led to Colleen’s complete submission, and she was allowed out of the box for larger and larger periods. In 1978, Cameron forced Colleen to sign her life over in a slave contract. The text for the contract was extracted from an “underground pornographic newspaper." Upon signing, Colleen was allowed to eat dinner with the family and clean and cook for them. 

Called “Kay” or “Kay Powers", she became a caretaker for the couple’s two daughters and was even introduced to neighbors. Janice would later testify that she and Colleen left the home together sometimes to go shopping or visit bars, where she alleged that Colleen met men… but still always came “home” to the Hookers. Colleen told Cameron she loved him in 1980, hoping to be trusted more and receive better treatment. So complete was Cameron’s control over Colleen that he allowed her to make supervised calls to her parents and sister Bonnie Sue to assure them she was okay. Her family believed she was in a cult, but didn’t want to scare her off.

In 1981, Cameron Hooker accompanied Colleen on a visit to her family, to further assure them she was safe. He told Colleen that the Company was watching and that he had paid an exorbitant fee to sanction the trip— and that she better be on her best behavior. Brainwashed and broken down, Colleen pretended to be Cameron’s girlfriend during the visit with her family. Her sister Bonnie Sue said they didn’t seem like a real couple. Despite being on her best behavior, after this visit Colleen was once again put in the box under the bed for 23 hours a day. The Hookers told their children and neighbors that “Kay” was moving back home.

Janice was reportedly jealous of Colleen, and soon learned that her husband had broken his vow to forgo vaginal rape of his victim. Janice claimed that she told Colleen in 1982 that she could leave, to which Colleen allegedly said “God doesn’t want me to go yet.” By 1983, Colleen was again let out of the box regularly and told to get a job at a nearby hotel as a maid. Cameron intended for her to be his second wife, and even made plans to abduct more women. When Janice objected to this, Cameron instructed her to read the bible to him and emphasized her required subservience as his wife. In a twist of irony, Janice began going to church in July 1984 to alleviate her guilt. She told a reverend about Colleen, and he told her to report Cameron to the authorities and send Colleen home. 

Though Janice wrestled with this, she eventually told Colleen on August 9th that they were not apart of “The Company.” On August 10th, both Colleen and Janice left. Colleen, now 27-years-old, went to the bus station, calling Cameron from a payphone to tell him. He cried. Janice took her two children and went to her parent’s house. Colleen agreed with Janice’s pleas to not go to police so that Cameron could, in her words, “redeem himself.” In September 1984, Colleen wrote a letter to Janice saying she forgave them and wished she was “home” with them.  She was no doubt having problems readjusting to life after being kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Janice was also having trouble detaching from the abusive relationship, and she briefly returned home to her husband with the children, but left after the abuse started again. In late 1984, Janice reported her husband for not just the kidnapping of Colleen Stan, but the 1976 kidnap, torture, and murder of a 19-year-old named Marie Elizabeth Spannhake.

Cameron disputed murdering Spannhake, and claimed that Colleen was a drug addict and a motorcycle gang 'pass around' when he charmed her into a consensual BDSM relationship. Prosecutors and Colleen disputed this, and Janice backed up the kidnapping claims when she testified against her husband for full immunity. She claimed that she herself had been abused and brainwashed by him since their first date. These themes of brainwash and psychological torture in a kidnapping case were relatively novel— and had only been addressed so publicly in the Patty Hearst trial. Colleen’s forgiveness of her captors, plus the “freedom” she had been given, was befuddling to many 1970s observers who didn’t yet understand the damning effects of torture.

Though Colleen remembered seeing a picture of Marie Elizabeth Spannhake during her earliest sessions of torture, she couldn’t corroborate Janice’s allegations of murder, and Cameron was never charged with her murder. Cameron, however, was found guilty of kidnapping Colleen and got 104 years in prison in 1988. He was paroled to a state hospital in 2021.

1978: The Murder of Betty Gardner 

There is no photo online of Betty Gardner.

In Beafort County, South Carolina, mother of two Betty Jean Atkins Gardner often caught rides from strangers to work at her fathers farm on St Helena Island, an area rich with Gullah Geechee culture. On April 12th 1978, outside of her brother’s home, Betty accepted a ride from John “Butch” Arnold and John Plath, two criminal cousins from York, Pennsylvania cruising around in a green pontiac. Butch had been arrested 19 times since the age of 11, and Plath 11 times since the age of 16. Both had been arrested in the past for shooting someone.

In the green Pontiac they borrowed from a marine, they were accompanied by Plath’s 17-year old girlfriend Cindy Sheets and Butch’s 11-year-old victim Carol Ullman. The group dropped Betty off and decided to circle back when Butch suggested they kill her. His reasoning? “I hate [nwords].” The group picked Betty up, beat her, orally sodomized her, and stabbed and strangled her. After using the bathroom on her corpse, Butch carved KKK into her body and left. Plath and Sheets went back to York and Butch and Carol remained in South Carolina.

Betty’s family filed a police report, and her brother reported the green Pontiac. The owner of the Pontiac told police about the Johns, and the perpetrators were arrested. While Carol was seen as a victim and was too young to be charged, Sheets brokered a deal for immunity, leading police to Betty’s corpse 11 weeks after her murder. In 1970s South Carolina, it was not clear that a racially motivated murder would yield guilty verdicts. Betty left behind a 14-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter who were raised by her sister, a teacher named Earnestine. They all wanted justice for her. When the trial began in February 1979, lawyers for Plath and Arnold unsuccessfully pressed to have details of the oral sodomy and urination suppressed, claiming that it would make the jury blindly convict on the murder charge. The jury selection was a circus, with The Beaufort Gazette reporting, “One juror was excused after saying he believes oral sex is deplorable. Another was asked if he objected to interracial sex, and homosexuality.” Black prospective jurors were also quizzed for potential prejudices against “young white girls” who received immunity, no doubt referring to Cindy Sheets. In the end, eleven of the fourteen selected jurors were white. Plath complained that he wanted the sole black female juror removed. 

The crime was salacious enough to make prosecution hopeful for convictions. Drawled tobacco chewing prosecutor Randolph ‘Buster’’ Murdaugh (yes, the grandfather of murderer Alex Murdaugh!) to the jury in opening statements, “if you don’t return a guilty verdict, its just not decent. You can hang a sign out on the highway— welcome to Beaufort County where you can have oral sex with people and kill people and we’ll turn you loose.” Plath and Arnold attempted to claim that Cindy Sheets was the sole murderer because she was jealous of her boyfriend raping Betty. “Plath said he had persuaded Gardner to have sex with him for money, that the two women argued and Sheets killed Gardner,” reported the Beaufort Gazette.  Caroll, who was 12 at the time of the trial, was described as “beer-drinking, pot smoking” and “showed no apparent emotion as she graphically narrated the sadistic slaying.” 

After listening to all of the evidence and arguments, a jury with only two black people took 80 minutes to deliberate— and found John Plath and John Arnold guilty of murder. They were sentenced to death. A retrial in 1981 ended with the same results. All of their appeals failed. This was a rarity and would remain so up until their respective executions in 1998. From 1976-1998, 113 black people had been executed for murdering a white victim, compared to just six white killers of black people. Throughout his incarceration, John Plath was in correspondence with York mayor Charlie Robertson, a former police officer who incited violence at the 1969 York Race Riot and was likely responsible for the shotgun murder of a black woman named Lillie Belle Allen, for whom he was acquitted of killing. He testified as a character witness for Plath, who continued to claim he hadn’t done the murder and appealed his death sentence, pointing to his conversion to Christianity. He was adopted by a 70-year-old mother of three named Gem Johnson in 1992 and put to death on July 10 1998.

As for John “Butch” Arnold, whose mother’s name was Betty, he lobbied to be executed as soon as possible and led two hunger strikes in an attempt to die sooner. When he was finally executed on March 6 1998, his paternal aunt claimed his body— and she was also disturbingly named Betty. Said Betty Gardner’s family, "This murder has left a void in our lives that we will never fill... Now with the death of Betty's murderers, we can continue to move forward."

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