CRIME: Champagne & Cyanide

Until he killed his parents last summer, Harlow Fraden was unable to work out any really satisfactory way of shaping his environment to fit his ego and personality. He tried immersing himself in poetry, but his mother—whom he habitually described to friends as “that hateful paranoid”—would have none of it. After he graduated from New York University as a chemistry major last June, she plagued him to get a job “like other boys.” Instead, Harlow—a tall, thin, languid youth with cropped red hair and heavy hornrimmed glasses—lounged about the family’s Bronx apartment, owlishly reading verse. Eying him, his mother bawled the word: “Fairy!”

Harlow’s father finally told him to “get the hell out of the house” and to stay out until he had made something of himself. In a way this worked out rather well—as the youth might have guessed it would. His parents had alternately berated and pampered him all his life. When he was small, his mother jeered at him as a “sissy”—and bribed other children to play with him. When he grew older, his parents bought an air conditioner for his bedroom, although they sweltered through summers without one themselves. When he set six fires in their apartment one night during his teens, they doggedly protected him from a suspicious fire marshal.

Having thrown him out, his anxious parents gave him $2,000 to make a start in life and sent him a liberal allowance. Harlow got a $215-a-month apartment on Manhattan’s East End Avenue, and invited a dark, handsome young man friend named Dennis Wepman to live with him. But after a while, his parents cut the allowance in another attempt to force him to get a job.

“Who Are You?” That was pushing Harlow too far. and he decided that life would be much more attractive if his mother and father were out of the way. The elder Fradens lived simply and both worked—Mrs. Fraden as a $6,3OO-a-year teacher in the public schools, her husband, a physician, at a $6,800-a-year post in the city health department. But they had managed to set aside a considerable nest egg; counting insurance, savings, pension benefits and some jewelry, they were worth in the neighborhood of $96,000—dead. Harlow found it ridiculously easy to kill his parents.

After careful discussion of the matter with Roommate Wepman, a Miami attorney’s son with vague literary pretensions, Chemist Fraden decided to use potassium cyanide as a terminal agent. One evening last August, he put a vial of the stuff in his pocket, got a bottle of champagne, called on his parents and joyously announced that he had got a job. He poured three glasses of wine, added cyanide to two of them, and asked his parents to join him in a toast to his future. They drank and toppled to the floor.

Harlow hurried to the door and called Wepman in to witness his triumph. The elder Fraden, still conscious, looked up at the newcomer and asked, “Who are you?” Neither youth bothered to answer him. Harlow reached for the vial of cyanide, knelt carefully, and poured more poison into his father’s mouth. The partners in crime stayed on for more than an hour to make sure the parents were dead. Then they put the third champagne glass into a paper sack, broke it, and departed, dropping the fragments into a sewer on their way. Two days later, Harlow came back to the apartment, found the bodies, called the police and wept hysterically at his parents’ “suicides.”

The Unfettered Life. After that, Harlow’s life was improved. He bought a $4,000 Oldsmobile, made a deposit on an $18,000 Rolls-Royce, which he proposed to pick up later in London. He read poetry, ate well, and enjoyed the company of kindred spirits. His existence was not completely smooth: two Bronx detectives spent weeks tailing him, and on one occasion had the temerity to ask him if he had killed his parents. He replied that he was a gentleman; otherwise he would tell them what he thought of such a “dastardly” suggestion.

Neighbors in his apartment house complained at the noisy, late parties he gave for his men friends. He was evicted as an “undesirable tenant” after one of his guests tore a washbasin off the wall, loosing streams of water which did $15,000 damage to the building. Harlow moved airily to an expensive room at the St. Moritz hotel.

Last week, however. Harlow had cause for real annoyance. He had a falling-out with Roommate Wepman. who had expected a small fortune, but had got only $120 for his work as a murderer’s apprentice. Wepman hit Harlow over the head with a blackjack, leaving a gash which took 18 stitches to close. Worse, Wepman suffered pangs of conscience, and blabbed the story of the crime to a girl. The girl told her doctor. The doctor sent her to the police. The police arrested the pair.

Wepman told the whole story. Harlow sat placidly by, reading from the Oxford Book of English Verse and icily ignored the whole undignified affair, although he looked up at one time and said coldly: “He speaks for himself, not for me.” Harlow himself talked only after the police accused him of murdering for gain. Nothing, he announced indignantly, could have been further from the truth—he had killed his mother simply because he hated her and killed his father because he was under Mrs. Fraden’s thumb.

The two youths were put in a detention cell prior to being charged with murder. “We’re going to the electric chair,” Wepman bawled at other prisoners. “Where are you going?” Harlow ignored him. Harlow was reading Dryden.