CRIME: The Moon-Gazers

In the last half-century, millions of U.S. citizens have come to sympathize with one hopeful theory of modern criminology: that a wrongdoer deserves the chance of rehabilitation or psychiatric treatment, and that society profits if he is cured rather than blindly punished. But millions of the same people are becoming increasingly indignant at the follies committed by moon-gazing parole boards. Startled at the string of insane and dangerous criminals dumped upon it from prisons in recent years, the public had two more reasons for renewed indignation last week.

¶ Near Holbrook, Ariz., one Carl J. Folk, 60, a burly (215 lbs., 6 ft.) carnival operator, invaded a roadside trailer and tied up Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Allen, a young Pennsylvania couple who were parked there for the night. He raped Allen’s wife, set fire to her hair and seared her body with burning newspapers. After five hours of torture, he choked her to death. Allen managed to get loose after Folk had gone, got his pistol, gave chase, and shot and wounded the killer. Folk is a paretic who was declared insane in New Mexico after beating and raping a 17-year-old girl in 1949, but was released from a state asylum after only a few months.

¶ At Napa, Calif., two sheriff’s deputies, a judge and the mother and mother-in-law of Paroled Murderer Frank Pedrini waited, armed and in mortal fear of Pedrini, a 46-year-old badman, who was on the rampage again. Pedrini did his first prison stretch for armed robbery at the age of 21. He was paroled in 1935. Three months later, with another paroled convict, he kicked and beat a Napa gas-station operator to death; then, after fighting a gun battle with Napa County deputies, he blazed a trail of kidnapings and holdups from Los Angeles to Stockton. Captured in the wreckage of a stolen car, he was convicted of murder, robbery and burglary, all in the first degree. Judge Percy J. King recommended that he “remain in prison for the remainder of his natural life, and under no circumstances is he to be considered for pardon, parole or probation.” “If it takes 20 years,” Pedrini answered, “I’ll come back and kill all of you.”

But in 1951—even though he had escaped from Folsom Prison during his term, and committed new crimes before being caught, and even though his own mother, afraid of her son, pleaded against his release—Pedrini was paroled. Last month, after pistol-whipping and robbing another gas-station operator, Pedrini began running wild in neighboring Sonora County.

Chairman Walter A. Gordon of California’s Adult Authority explained why Pedrini had been paroled. “Sometimes you judge wrongly. You can’t tell that a man’ll go sour like Pedrini. But murderers have our best parole records, and we take into consideration the best measurements of the human mind now available. I don’t wish to minimize the fear and apprehension of those whose lives have been threatened . . . but men who make such threats under the heat and strain of a courtroom rarely carry them out.” Pedrini’s potential victims could only hope the chairman was right—this time.