Murder and Mimosas Podcast
A true crime podcast with a focus on lesser known crimes and the background of those who commit these heinous acts. Each case is told with a bit of southern sass, but with tons of in depth research and respect for those lost. Join this mom and daughter duo as they sip their mimosas while diving into tragic cases. New episodes every Saturday, just in time for brunch (and a mimosa of your own)!
Murder and Mimosas Podcast
The Electrocution of Baby Lawrence: Justice, Prejudice, and Legacy
The tragic tale of Baby Lawrence Noxon raises uncomfortable questions about parenting, societal attitudes towards disabilities, and the evolution of justice. This case reflects a complex interplay of grief, class divides, and the harsh realities of 1940s America, painting a chilling picture of human life during that era.
• Exploration of the shocking electrocution incident and its aftermath
• The deep-rooted prejudices during 1940s investigations of disabilities
• Legal intricacies in the prosecution of John Noxon for murder
• Class distinctions affecting the trial and public perception
• Familial impact and emotional toll on the Noxon family following the tragedy
• The ambiguous legacy of Baby Lawrence within the true crime narrative
This case provides a poignant perspective on historical attitudes, prompting reflection on how society has transformed in its understanding of disabilities and human worth—an integral part of modern discourse surrounding empathy and justice.
Get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Electrocution-Baby-Lawrence-Murder-England/dp/1538181290
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DarkCast Network. Welcome to the dark side of podcasting.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Murder and Mimosas a true crime podcast brought to you by a mother and daughter duo.
Speaker 2:Bringing you murder stories with a mimosa in hand. With a mimosa in hand, murder Mimosas is a true crime podcast, meaning we talk about adult matters such as murder, sexual assaults and other horrendous crimes. Listener discretion is advised. We do tell our stories with the victims and the victims families in mind. However, some information is more verifiable than others. However, you can find all of our information linked in the show notes.
Speaker 4:Well, I'm Jim Overmeyer and I'm a resident of western Massachusetts, where this book story takes place. I live in Tucson, arizona, now, because you can't put up with the snow forever. Live in tucson, arizona now because you can't put up with the snow forever, um, but um. Anyway, I was at one time the police and courthouse reporter for the berkshire eagle, which is the newspaper in pittsfield mass, and I found out about the. I don't. It's the John Noxon murder case if you're talking about the defendant, or the Lawrence Noxon murder case if you're talking about the victim. I always used to talk about it as the John Noxon case and then people said, oh, it's really about the child you know. Well, you're right, it is. So the book is called the Electrocution of Baby Lawrence, so that's where we came with that.
Speaker 4:I cover the Superior Court, which is the felony court in Pittsfield, and people might think it's like law and order where something happens just like this, and it's not. There's a lot of downtime. The judge is in his office talking with the attorneys about things that we're not privy to hear, like the coming schedule, or he's maybe on the phone with some other case. He's got going halfway across the state, so you sit around and the old-timers, the court officers and the older attorneys start talking and they said well know that John Noxon case was one of the most interesting cases that ever happened here, and so I started to do some research and then I stopped. I'm busy with things. I've written three previous books, all about baseball history, all about Negro Leagues, black baseball before Jackie Robinson and integration and all of that.
Speaker 3:Cool.
Speaker 4:And then we moved to Tucson and so the book Baby Lawrence got started and stopped several times. It's also and we'll get into this it's a real hard book.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I would have to say so you get to run your whole head around, which, of course, the author better do. Yeah, yeah, I would have seen that of the district attorney's parts of the district attorney's files from one connection or another. I said, well, you just got to do this. So I did it, and the book has been published last July and I'm happy I did it.
Speaker 4:I think it's a story that needed to be. It's a story that needed to be told in a lot of ways, but more and more. It's a story that needed to be told in a lot of ways, but more and more. It's well, how were? Lawrence suffered from Down syndrome, although that term hadn't been invented yet. In fact, even the senior specialist doctors on the case referred to him as a mongoloid, which was the awful term applied to these children in those days, because one of the physical characteristics is slanted eyes. Well, he looks like someone from Asia, and somehow they all became known as mongoloids on a good day. In addition, since idiot was applied to almost anyone who had a mental defect, they became known as mongoloid idiots.
Speaker 4:It's just hard to take that in these days.
Speaker 3:So what year around? What year would that be?
Speaker 4:Lawrence died in 1943, and the trial was in 1944.
Speaker 2:Okay, so can you kind of walk us through the circumstances leading up to baby Lawrence's electrocution?
Speaker 4:He was six months old in September of 1943, and he had been seen regularly by the family pediatrician who was really sort of the leading pediatrician in Pittsfield and he was just kind of an unresponsive physically healthy but kind of unresponsive mentally or emotionally, kind of unresponsive mentally or emotionally. And Dr George Hunt, their pediatrician, recommended him be seen by a specialist in Boston and they went to Boston and he was diagnosed with Down syndrome just a couple of weeks before he died. The family was presented with alternatives, what they might do for him. They really said we haven't made any decision. It was in September, the holidays were coming up. They had an older son who was away at boarding school, we don't know. They left it at that with the ducks.
Speaker 4:John Doxon said that he, after a busy day in court he's a lawyer. After a busy day in court he was always a lawyer. After a busy day in court he came home and among other things he wanted to fix the family radio. And now this is 1943, and the radio was about the size of the back end of a Volkswagen Beetle. This one in particular literally was 39 inches tall.
Speaker 4:And about three feet wide Console in a cabinet, a great big cabinet and everything. So it's his turn, before dinner time, to watch Lawrence. So it's Lawrence, and puts him in the book room, which is the library of this house, which is one of the more expensive houses in Pittsfield and gets, hauls the radio out from the wall to get in the back, wants to change the tubes, decides he needs he's crippled with polio. By the way, this is not an insignificant. It's not primarily the case, but it's not insignificant.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 4:He walks with two canes and he has a brace on one leg. He can hardly bend it. He goes to the garage for some tools and leaves the extension cord with a light bulb on the end that he's going to use to see inside the radio, because he can't really hold a flashlight and manipulate things due to his physical condition.
Speaker 4:The cord has some worn spots on it, worn all the way down to the wires Short an inch, at the most three quarters of an inch. For another one he leaves for about five minutes, comes back in. Lawrence has been put on the floor because of a wet diaper. He puts him on a metal tray that he had handy so he wouldn't soil the rug. And Lawrence this is the John Knox version of the story. Lawrence has gotten one arm entangled in the ground wire, which is the wire from the old-fashioned radio that makes sure like a lightning bolt.
Speaker 4:From the old-fashioned radio that makes sure like a lightning bolt will fry the radio and the other in the extension cord with the bare spots and he has been electrocuted. John calls Dr Hunt, doesn't call the police, doesn't call the fire department. Calls Dr Hunt. Who comes to the police, doesn't call the fire department. Calls Dr Hunt who comes to the house and confirms the child is dead. Dr Hunt then calls the medical examiner, which is sort of the Massachusetts equivalent of a coroner, except that you have to have it's a gubernatorial appointment, you have to be a doctor, an MD and all of that. So Albert Englund comes to the house and they look the scene over and they accept Noxon's story, Englund, on the way out they look at the extension cord, they give it back to Noxon. On the way out Englund turns to Hunt and says you know, it's probably all for the best, because at that time children with Down syndrome at the best were expected to be institutionalized or put in a group home and they weren't expected really to live beyond their mid-teens.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's crazy.
Speaker 4:They wouldn't go to school, et cetera, et cetera. The stories a fellow from the local funeral home comes, picks the body up, takes it away and the story's over, sort of. Except that I don't know if Dr England sat up all night feeling guilty or if he woke up in the morning and had a bright idea. But he's now not entirely at peace with his suspicion of his non-suspicions of the night before he drives back out to the Noxon house and says yeah, look at that wire once more. John says you know it was so. The whole thing was so awful, my wife was so upset. John III is coming home from school soon and he's an experimenter and a tinkerer. I didn't want him to be near this extension cord so I burned it in the house incinerator last night.
Speaker 4:After he left, england gets in the car, drives downtown, encounters the police chief and I'm not making this up His name is John L Sullivan and he is a pugnacious Irishman. I'm not sure he was a prizefighter, but he was a pugnacious Irishman. He's been a police chief for several years and relates the story to him. Sullivan gathers his deputy chief of police, captain Camille Marcel, and the chief of detectives, daniel McColgan, and they drive out to the Knoxon house and at this point Stolben, you know he's a cop with 30 years experience, he's the police chief. He's suspicious, sort of suspicious about everything, so he's a little suspicious, but he's also concerned. I'm very sorry this happened. You know you were very, very careless, john, you know. Well, yes, I was, and I feel very bad about it. So the policemen leave and they drive down to Wellington Funeral Home where the body has been embalmed already. The evidence, to put it mildly. You know what they say the first 24 hours after the murder are the key to investigating or solving it.
Speaker 4:Well, that 24 hours is over. Everything is gone. The police got to the funeral home and they see the body Now the body has got some burns on it on both arms Some smaller burns on the right arm, a very deep burn on the forearm, left forearm. It's two inches wide, an inch and three quarters long and, as the medical, the state pathologist, later testified, an eighth of an inch deep. That's a big on anybody's arm.
Speaker 4:Now transpose that in your mind. On a six-month-old baby's barn. I have a photocopy of the police photo of it. It almost covers the entire.
Speaker 4:Oh my gosh, they got a little video Wheels around and drives back and it's all different now and he says, among other things, why did you kill your son? Knoxon says I didn't, it was an accident. And Knoxon is barraged with questions. And now the game is on, the hunt is on. John Sullivan has completely changed his outlook. Right Now the next people to be dragged in or brought in are the district attorney staff.
Speaker 4:Berkshire County at the time was joined with the larger county of Springfield, Massachusetts, which is the biggest city in the middle of Massachusetts. They were in the same prosecutorial district. The prosecutor was from Pittsfield but he was down in Springfield trying a case, was down in Springfield trying a case and the death happened on Wednesday. Sullivan gets onto the case on Thursday. On Friday the assistant DA, who's stationed in Pittsfield, has Mr and Mrs Knox and him for a talk, a long talk with a stenographer. And you know same story. It's an accident. I feel bad.
Speaker 4:Margaret was, where was Margaret? She was out. She was out in the garden. This was World War II. They had a victory garden. I grew her one vegetable. She was picking corn for dinner and she didn't see anything. So Charles Alberti, the DA, is back in town that night and they talk about it, they cut, they go over it on Saturday and Sunday and on Monday at his office. John Noxon is arrested for first degree murder, and that's in September, and in 1944 the case goes to trial. I should let you ask a question or two, if you want.
Speaker 2:I know you had originally kind of heard about this. You said from like the old timers and things like that.
Speaker 4:There's so many aspects to this story and it's an interesting murder case because you don't have any eyewitnesses except John Knoxon, and he's got his story and he's sticking to it.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:Don't have any physical evidence except these burnt strands of wire. There's a photo. Some of the evidence, for some reason, was still residing in the back room of the Purchase Superior Court. At one point, when I got interested in the book again, I hired a photographer to photograph some of the evidence and there's a picture of it in a book. It's just jumbled up strands of wire that evidentially are completely useless, strands of wire that evidentially are completely useless. Yeah, so you have to try this case without an eyewitness, without evidence, and when they did? There's so many.
Speaker 4:There's this class and ethnic divide going down the middle of this case, as there was in Massachusetts at the time, because Eastern European immigrants were starting to pour into Massachusetts, including Pittsfield, which is at the far western end of the state, and Pittsfield had a lot of them, because Pittsfield had a large electrical manufacturing company that eventually was by the 40s was owned by General Electric. So there were a lot of jobs, a lot of good blue-collar jobs, and this started to go over into politics and the English, anglo-saxon, blue-blo blood. Control over Massachusetts was starting to erode. And on this side of the case you had the district attorney.
Speaker 4:Charles Alberti was a first-generation American. He'd come to the United States with his family when he was 12 years old, from a little farm village in Sicily, and I talked to one of his grandsons who had actually been there with this family when he was 12 years old, from a little farm village in Sicily and I talked to one of his grandsons who had actually been there and he says you can't imagine how small and isolated Yonello was. So that's where the Albertans lived until they left to come to America. His father died, his mother had five kids and there's probably ought to be a book written about her too, because the children all went to school. I think they all got at least high school degrees wow they, they worked after school.
Speaker 4:Charlie and his brother john delivered newspapers and did all kinds of ad johns. They all, and he grant charles, graduated from pittsfield and you think that would be. You know, that's good.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well no, he wanted to go to college. Needless to say, he was the first Alberti, at least in that line, to go to college. He went up to. The family story is he went up to Williams College, which is a small but well-regarded liberal arts school in the northern part of Berkshire County, and hung around one Saturday in the main building until the dean of the college said so who are you? What are you doing?
Speaker 4:here, my name is Charles Alberti and I'd like to go to your college but I don't have the money to go. Go to your college but I don't have the money to go. And the dean said they say if you can pass, I'm impressed, if you can pass the entrance exams, we'll find you a scholarship. Well, he passed and that financed some of his needs. He got a bunch of odd jobs, side jobs, and his best one was, at that time, williams College would give you. It was an all-male, small, all-men's college. They would give you a room but they wouldn't give you any furniture. You had to buy your own bed and your desk and everything.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow.
Speaker 4:So Charlie would buy furniture from graduating seniors, store it over the summer and sell it at a markup. Freshman.
Speaker 2:That's clever.
Speaker 4:The family story is that he made about $2,000. We're talking about 1917 here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Part of which he sent home and part of which he lived on. And then he decided he wanted to go to law school, not just any law school. He went to Harvard, oh wow.
Speaker 2:That's impressive.
Speaker 4:This case is very Harvard-centered. This is, as far as we know, the only murder case where the judge, the DA, the chief defense attorney and the defendant were all graduates of the Harvard Law School.
Speaker 4:Oh that's really interesting Only one we know of. So he went to Harvard, came back to Pittsfield. Not satisfied to be the first Italian-American lawyer in Pittsfield, he got interested in politics. He worked as the city attorney for a while and he decided he wanted a position for himself. He ran for district attorney in 1942. Now Pittsfield has got the smaller part of the constituency. Springfield is heavily Democratic. Charlie is a Republican. His son told me every weekend we'd get in the car, we'd drive down to the Springfield area, we'd go to picnics, he'd knock on doors and people got to know him and he won by less than 1% of the vote.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's close yeah.
Speaker 4:He certainly wasn't a regular practitioner of criminal law. I'm not saying he didn't take some criminal cases, but he's the. Da for nine months and the Knoxon case falls into his lap. But he never. It's pretty clear he never considered anything other than first degree murder. This was a murder case. He wasn't about to shuffle it off, as he could have, you know.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah.
Speaker 4:Prosecutors have the right not to prosecute a case and bring charges. Well, he wanted to do that. Sullivan was a second-generation American. On the other side, noxon, was an eighth-generation American. His family had come to the United States, to Long Island, in the 1680s. His chief lawyer, joseph Ely, was a former governor of Massachusetts whose family had come to Connecticut about that time. He was an eighth-generation American. The first Ely to reach the shore was one of the founding fathers of Hartford, connecticut. Wow, you've got bluebloods on one side, you've got immigrants on the other, and I'm not saying that that had anything to do with the prosecution of the case. After the trial was over and there were two or three years of political maneuverings in the Boston Statehouse to finish off this case, ely had a distinct disadvantage over the case. Ely had a distinct disadvantage over the immigrant.
Speaker 2:DNA? Yeah, I could see that that makes sense. When it went to trial, I know that there was kind of the mindset that, like you talked about earlier of well, since baby Lawrence had Down syndrome, that this might have been the best thing for him and others who felt very differently. Can you talk about kind of like that divide as well among the general public?
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Speaker 4:There were really three camps to this. There was the camp that Alberti and John Sullivan were in. They said this is murder. This is a murder case, right. It's the camp that John Noxon and his lawyers are in and others are saying, well, no, it was an accident. This is sad. Household accidents happen. These are often. Noxon said he felt bad about it, but it was an accident. So there's this middle camp. That's probably the biggest camp of all. He said yeah, he probably killed him, but it's for the. You know, as Albert England said walking out the door that night at 1030 West Street, it was probably for the best. Mercy killing, euthanasia mercy killing was a significant topic in those days. There were actually national euthanasia societies in America and in Great Britain. In terms of treating the mentally deficient, including Down syndrome kids, compared to what we know now, it was an awful time.
Speaker 4:And that camp, that big camp in the middle and Lawrence's passing, is too bad but it's not so bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know that, like at that time, eugenics was a big kind of like key term in politics.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:Do you think that had a big play on that middle camp?
Speaker 4:Yeah, the eugenics spilled over into this. You know, I mean eugenics goes all the way from medical science to improving literally we can literally now improve genes, I guess all the way over to the dark side where we kill off the unrevivable, so to speak. I think the fact that the Nazis in Germany I mean before the Holocaust, before that started, their first step was to call the German population a mental deficiency and incarcerate them and eventually kill them. And I think when that became known, that sort of took the air out of eugenics in the United States. So, yeah, so did it have anything to do with the trial directly? No, did it have? Was that sort of the underlying scientific basis for the less rational approach to the Lawrences of the world? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So what about the family as a whole? How did the tragedy of baby Lawrence, how did that affect not just the father, who obviously went on trial, but the mother and the brother?
Speaker 4:Margaret Noxon she came. Noxon came from a pretty wealthy family. His father, john Sr, had been a highly successful lawyer. Margaret's father was a highly successful doctor who died in his 40s and left the family. I went to the courthouse and I went through the probate papers for both John and Mary, knoxon and Mrs Swift that's Margaret's mother their estates and when you apply inflation, inflators the families were both worth in the low millions Wow, in the low millions, wow. And John was still where John was most, one of the most successful, which you can easily translate into high-priced lawyers in Pittsfield.
Speaker 4:So, margaret, she went to a private school in Switzerland for a while. She came back to Pittsfield and graduated from Miss Hall School, which is a well-known women's prep school, went to got a degree from University of California, berkeley, and came back to Pittsfield and married John and they were highly successful. She was I can't say he was that I mean clearly he made donations to the church and to the things like that but she was the one out that she was involved in this organization, that organization you know, charity organization, support organizations, and she was a sociable, vivacious person until September of 1943. And after that, every time you see her or see pictures of her or see her interviewed, she's just a wreck. She's just a wreck. But she stood by John completely.
Speaker 4:And one of the big questions about this case that not only never got answered, it never got asked, this case that never not only didn't never got answered, it never got asked it's just where was she when this was going on and what was she doing? She brought the baby into John. She went out, supposedly to the garden. Well, they had a part-time housekeeper who was in her late seventies and hard of hearing which turned out to be kind of a drawback as a witness. Because what did you hear? Well, not much. Who didn't see, who didn't remember her seeing doing anything outside, but just standing and looking off in the distance not picking corn? But she, you know, did she?
Speaker 4:I'm not saying that there's any indication that she had a hand in the electrocution, accidentally or deliberately, but did she know what was going to happen? We don't know. We don't know. The DA left her alone. Now, she couldn't be compelled. The DA left her alone Now she couldn't be compelled to testify against her husband. There's laws about that. But you could have questioned her. I mean, you could have asked. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 4:But they didn't. There's sort of this old-fashioned chivalry thing here. It's not anything more. It's like we're not going to bother. Margaret, yeah, when the police go out to the house later to seize the radio and the rug that Lawrence is laying on and all of that, knoxon's law partner is sort of their lawyer. He's not a criminal practitioner either, but he's a lawyer and he's a family friend. So he tells the police look, yeah, you can get whatever you want, but look, don't bother.
Speaker 4:Margaret, she's already upset but she sticks with him. She's post-conviction. She's active in trying to get his death sentence overturned. She's active in trying to get him out of jail and when he finally gets out she's right there with him. She sold the house in Pittsfield. She said to witnesses that she would never live there again. She said she's over at. She starts to. She's asked would you go back to live in Pittsfield? She starts to cry and says oh, oh, no, I suppose there are some good people in Pittsfield, but no, she buys a house in Eastern Connecticut on Long Island Sound, an ice little cottage on the water. And then John gets out of prison and they move there and they live there the rest of their life and she always maintained he was innocent. She always said she would do whatever she could for him. They had the older son, john III. I'll just get him in here real quick. He was away at Kent School, which is a prep school in Connecticut.
Speaker 4:Most of the graduates went to Ivy League schools, as did John Went to Harvard. No, he went to MIT. He was a real. He was interested in electricity in a good way he was interested. He went to MIT. He got his master's and PhD from Harvard and became one of the world's renowned scientists, experts on hydrogen. He could gather samples. He went on sea voyages. He climbed mountains. I mean, there was something to be found out about his subject. He would circle the earth and find it In his day. John Knox III was a famous guy.
Speaker 4:He died in the 80s in his 50s, a loss to the scientific world. It was made clear by his obituaries and memorials written about him. But yeah, he was, but he was not there at the time. It was all over, you know, and he was down at Kent School. But a bright, a bright guy and very accomplished. But a bright guy and very accomplished, more famous in his branch of the world than his father, was infamous in his yeah, well, that's good, yeah, so how long was John in prison?
Speaker 4:How much time did he serve he?
Speaker 2:was convicted in July of 44.
Speaker 4:July of 1944. And the only at that time in Massachusettsth century pile of stone in Boston. It was the state prison. When it came time to do something about it, they tore it down rather than rehabilitate it and he was not executed. And in 1946, he appealed to the Supreme Court State Supreme Court and appeal was denied. So he's back on the hot seat literally almost again.
Speaker 4:His sentence was commuted to life in prison by Governor Maurice Tobin in 1946. And that's not too unusual. The death penalty in Massachusetts was a hot ticket politically well into the 80s when I was working as a legislative aide. But in truth after Noxon's sentence only three people went to the electric chair. One was a career criminal who killed a liquor store counterman in a holdup and the other two were a pair of guys who had a pair of robbers who had their colleague, who rubbed out their colleague when they thought he had given away one of their crimes. So after that governors readily commuted the death penalty Most, almost all the time, and by the end of the 40s jury in first degree cases juries were allowed to recommend leniency, which is to say a life sentence without parole, and they started doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sentence without parole, and they started doing that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that was I mean. Politicians talked about it for years, but that really was the end of the death penalty in massachusetts. So it's not that unusual that noxious was commuted to life, but that that was not enough for the Knoxon camp. They filed a petition for a pardon after Maurice Tobin was defeated in 48 and 47. And in 48, his successor took office. Successor took office, and if you thought that John Knoxon's and Joe Ely's blood was blue, well, this guy was named Robert Bradford. He is a direct descendant of William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth colony, the Pilgrim.
Speaker 4:And not maliciously or facetiously, but the newspapers in Boston used to refer to Robert as the second governor of Bradford, and you would think he would be the perfect guy to pardon John Knoxon. But there were a couple of problems. Bradford was a Harvard man and almost everybody there was, and after he graduated in the 30s he went to work as a legislative aide for the governor of Massachusetts. The governor was Joseph Ely, so he had a connection to Joe Ely going back to 1932 or 33.
Speaker 2:And when.
Speaker 4:Ely left office, bradford went with him and they formed a law firm left office, bradford went with them and they formed a law firm. And even now, in 1948, bradford had elected district attorney of a large county right outside of Boston and he stopped practicing law. But they never Ely always referred to it. Yeah, that's Bob's leave of absence. Well, they never took his name off the firm's title. So the letter delivering the pardon to Governor Bradford is on the letterhead of the firm of Ely Bradford, etc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that seems like a conflict.
Speaker 4:Immediately talk about. Look, you should kick this over to your lieutenant governor, and you know this is a conflict of interest. And he wouldn't do it. But the case kind of went down the rabbit hole for months and months, and months, and so I don't know, I don't know if he's hoping it would go away.
Speaker 4:I don't know, magically disappear yeah, and he's defeated for re-election Massachusetts. It's hard to believe if you know it's politics now. But it was very evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats and the governorship, which was only ayear term, was like a revolving door. It would sweep back and forth between the parties. Well, bradford is beaten by a Democrat and he's about ready to go in the Christmas time or New Year's of 1949, and he makes his move and he says look, I can't grant a pardon. I was a prosecutor and I don't believe you can only grant a pardon to someone. You think you should only grant a pardon. But anyway, the woman you think is not guilty and I think he's guilty, so I can't pardon him. But you know the little the aura of mercy killing wafts through the room. But I'll tell you what I can do. I'll commute his sentence further, from life to six years to life, six years minimum to life. And now the six years is an important number because then, as I believe, still you are eligible for parole after two-thirds of the minimum sentence.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:In case of a violent crime. Well, two-thirds of six is four, and John has been in prison for like four years and six months.
Speaker 2:So it's very calculated there.
Speaker 4:Well, he's eligible for parole, but the parole board has got to let him out. The parole board consisted of three guys. Was Matthew Bullard, who was one of the highest-ranking African-American public person in Massachusetts at the time, and he's absolutely against it. He's not. You know, I'm never voting. I am never voting for this.
Speaker 2:Does it have to be unanimous or just a majority you?
Speaker 4:want. Okay, you want against? There's a guy who's never thought that there shouldn't be a parole or a pardon, so there's a one-to-one and in the middle is a guy named Frederick Bradley who's on the fence and there's a side. But an important but interesting side character comes into play here. An auction trial was covered by a reporter from the Boston Globe named Dorothy Wayman, who is a well-known feature writer for them and wrote books afterwards, and she became friends with Margaret Knoxon and became convinced that John was not guilty.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:And she even tried, she even threw her weight in. While she's covering the case and you want to talk about, yeah.
Speaker 4:Journalistic ethics, not trying to get the pardon. Talking to Bradford off, trying to close doors, trying to get push the pardon forward. Well, bradley's a businessman in downtown Boston who Dorothy describes in her letters as someone with a lot of heart, a former Harvard football player with a lot of money and not many brains, and he did business with a friend of hers, the son of a former governor. Dorothy has connections all over the place. Yeah, so, according to her, she and her friend go to work on Bradley and lean on him over New Year's, christmas, new Year's, and he finally says I'll vote for, I'll vote for parole. So, two to one, he's out Parolees are supposed to live in Massachusetts. They're supposed to get a steady job. He moves to Connecticut because that's where the house was. They transfer. He never gets another job, but then he didn't need one. He lost his law, he was disbarred, he lost his law license. What's he going to do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean doesn't have a lot of prospects, that's not too outrageous.
Speaker 4:His supervision is transferred to the Connecticut Parole Department, who apparently forgets about him because one of the conditions of his parole is not supposed to leave Connecticut except to go five miles to the east, to Westerly Rhode Island, where all the shops and stores and doctors were Right. They go to Europe. Twice I talked to somebody After I wrote the book. I was contacted by somebody who was a kid. Their parents knew the Knoxians and met them on this wide-ranging tour of American national parks.
Speaker 3:Oh, oh, my God.
Speaker 4:So well he didn't commit any more crimes anyway. Well, there's that my God?
Speaker 2:Well, he didn't commit any more crimes anyway. Well, there's that, I guess.
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Speaker 4:But yeah, so they moved to Stonington, connecticut, and they lived their life there and kind of, I think, below the radar. They had some friends. I know they had a few friends, at least a few friends, but they're not really active in anything. They're not really active in anything. He dies in 1972, and she lives well into the 80s. He had emphysema and a heart condition, but she was almost 90 when she died. Wow, that's the. I mean. Ironically, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1944 and wound up outliving. Almost all of the major characters in the case the DA, attorney Ely, judge Panansky, the judge in the case, chief Sullivan died before he did. Wow, he outlasted all of these people who were battling in the court not all of them, but most of the people who were battling in the courtroom over his fate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they all had high-pressure jobs and he's just doing whatever he wants, so traveling around the world.
Speaker 4:He had oh, he and Dorothy Wayman had kept correspondence for years and he'd write about where they. Oh, he and Dorothy Wayman had kept correspondence for years and he'd write about where they were. He or Margaret would write about where they were going and where they'd been, and you can look into Ancestrycom and see the passenger lists. You know where they were coming and going and uh, that's crazy.
Speaker 2:Didn't tie him down that's crazy didn't tie him down. Being an ex-con didn't tie him down. No, no, it didn't slow him at all. So do you think that the like the whole case of baby lawrence because obviously, like this is a big case at that time but it's not a case you hear about in like the true crime realm anymore? Do you think some of that is because it was overshadowed by something else, or do you think that it was more history wanting to sweep it under the rug and not really talk about it?
Speaker 4:I think mostly it was overshadowed by World War II.
Speaker 2:Fair yeah.
Speaker 4:A D-Day took place while the trial was going on, and from that day, judge Manadsky opened the court with a moment of silence for the troops in.
Speaker 4:Europe and I think that well you know the Berkshire Eagle had a lot of news in it and I worked for them for several years. It's a very good newspaper, it's a well-run paper and they didn't stint on the column inches that they produced in news every day, produced the news every day, but every day the trial is on the front page, say on the right side, where the the premier place, and and the war news is on the left side, and if the war news is really hot then they'd switch places, but they're both on the front page right and um, once the case was over and the war news was always on the top right of the front, and I think that had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 4:I think that, well, it was a murder case, you know, and another murder always comes along.
Speaker 2:Yeah, true, that's true.
Speaker 4:And you can find newspapers on the West Coast. I mean they were wire service stories, obviously, but newspapers on the West Coast, I mean they were wire service tours, obviously, but newspapers on the West Coast were covering it the Boston. The courtroom was full, the sheriff had to make room for about 20 reporters a day.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:Mostly from Boston or the one from Pittsfield and frequently the one. There's another smaller city in Berkshire County, north Adams, that their reporter would come down for the high points. The Boston Papers sent everybody out. They wrote five or six of them in business in those days and New York the Times, the Daily News, the New York Post would pop up when something hot was going on. The Albany Times Union in New York, which is only 40 miles away, would send somebody over. So it was pretty. It was a heavily covered case.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:But it didn't last and I think the warden. There wasn't anything happening. The case was over, except when it went to the appeal and then all the chicanery in the statehouse started to happen. But day by day there wasn't anything happening and the war news pushed it away, right. So many other things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that makes sense. At that time, the war affected lots of people where this case was almost just like okay unless it directly affects me, you may not care to read about it when lots of people's loved ones are fighting in the war at the time. What do you hope, then, that readers take away from learning about Baby Lawrence's case and about the events that took place?
Speaker 4:Well, you've got all these different aspects, yeah, but more and more. I mean my editor in Roman and Littlefield. In my head this was always I had the perfect title for this. It was Electricity the John Noxon Murder Case. And so Becca Boyer, I said this is my idea for a title. She says nobody knows who John Noxon is anymore. And I says you're right, there are probably people in Pittsfield who don't know. He said this is about the baby, this is about Lawrence. I said yeah, you got a good point. I said but you got to, but the word somehow, the word electricity, has got to be in the title. I worked too hard with all these years, so it's electrocution if they even learn. A couple of you know the last chapter of the book is about reaction. The last half of the last chapter is about subsequent reaction and people who worked hard on the defense case spent years insisting that Noxon was innocent, including the chief defense medical witness who was the chief medical examiner of the city of New York. He'd seen a murder or two.
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Speaker 4:Thank you for reading and reviewing Willow's Wounds. He's a very pushy, aggressive guy, by the way. Everyone agrees. Everyone agrees about that. He's not a pleasant. He's a successful person that you want to stay on the right side of, particularly if you need a.
Speaker 2:You need a good lawyer but before he was disbarred you need to like him very much yeah, is there anything else that you wanted to add or touch on that we didn't touch on today? I didn't want to cover everything because I want people to read the book. It's very well written, it's great, um, I really enjoyed it. It also I guess it's not something I really think about how different people thought about children with disabilities mental disabilities at that time and how far it's come. I mean, definitely there's still strides we could make, but it's come a long ways from where it was. But is there anything else you wanted to touch on that we didn't today?
Speaker 4:The last thing I said about Knox is that he was an aggressive guy and nobody liked him very much. At the beginning of the case there had been a psychiatric exam which is standard in a murder case and, I bet, everywhere else. Either a psychiatric exam which is standard in a murder case in Massachusetts, I bet everywhere else, either. You want to see if the defendant is of sound mind in case an insanity defense comes out. Well, he was certainly. There was never any question.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:But as part of the investigation, the two psychiatrists, one of whom was the director of the mental health of the mental hospital in Western Massachusetts, sent one of his employees, a social worker, around Pittsfield to gather information and she talked to Mrs Noxon. She talked to a couple of family friends and of course they only had good the law partner. They only had good things to say about him and her report says I also talked to a city official and it doesn't say who and members of the detective unit and what. This is, among other things, is a classic example of what people will say if they're assured anonymity is they trenched the guy?
Speaker 3:Oh.
Speaker 4:He was sexually promiscuous even as a young man. He stole things. Family belonged to the Pittsfield Country Club. Obviously his father was an avid golfer. He stole things from the country club but it always got covered up because who his dad was and he attacked young women and young men, made approaches anyway to young women and young men. And this continued when he was an adult. Sat down to dinner at someone's house one night, sat next to an attractive young woman who got up in the middle of the meal and said I thought I was seated beside a gentleman. No details.
Speaker 4:So this thing sits around and after he's convicted, one of the attempts to get him under trial was a defense motion citing this and an affidavit from a conductor on the Boston to Albany train which went through Fitzfield who liked to chat, apparently a real gossip collector. Yes, people were talking about this, what a terrible guy he was and how he deserved it. And a lot of the things he was saying were the exact same things that Rhoda Coles, the social worker, put in her report. Now you've got to wonder. You know, again, it's the rumor mill. But if you hear the same rumors, all the time you might just believe them.
Speaker 4:We didn't get a new trial. We didn't get a new trial.
Speaker 4:Charles Alverde's argument was hey, if you knew some of this in advance, why didn't you ask for a change of venue? Why didn't you ask the case to be moved to another county? And we didn't. So then the judge denied the motion and his denial of the motion was upheld by the Supreme Judicial Court. Yeah, but some of that you know. You hear the same things over and over, even from we don't know if they're unreliable because you don't know who the hell they are.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:So A mystery source, but they're anonymous sources. There's got to be some ring of truth in it. I'll tell you I have I collected well photographs, or pictures of him in a paper all the way back to when he was at kent school, and he's never smiling. And now the photos taken during the trial right but before that he's never smiled.
Speaker 4:The only picture I find where he is smiling is a picture taken when he is released from prison and he's walking out of prison on Marver's arm, having been paroled, with a big grin on his face. Wow, he was not a happy man until that day.
Speaker 2:Guess he had to learn to take freedom and be happy with that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the Electrocution of Baby Lawrence available from my publisher, the website Roman and Littlefield R-O-W-M-A-N and Littlefield. You start to look for them online. Amazon has it, barnes Noble has it, bookshopsorg has it. Barnes Noble has it, bookshopsorg has it. So it's out there, available on hardcover and a Kindle version. Yes, and one of the things I dearly dislike about being an author these days is you're supposed to shill for your book. So if you read it and like it, please, please, put a review up on Amazon of Goodreads.
Speaker 3:We always recommend more bubbly and less OJ Cheers.
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