You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“She was very short, very stout, and she suffered terribly with asthma. She was a most beautiful woman, Doctor, my mother was. We had a painting of her and it stood on an easel, and I used to come and kneel before it and worship it as though it were the picture of a saint, and when the brute ignored her for other women, I killed him.”
The inmate was just leaving after having served seventeen years for the murder of his father.
“If anyone should tell you, Doctor, that a father cannot love his daughter with the same love that a man bears for a woman, don't you believe it. I know it, so help me God!” Then he had a fit of coughing which left him very much confused and embarrassed, and it was with difficulty that he resumed the interview. “You see, it was the treatment of her by her step-mother that drew her so much closer and one thing led to another, until—my God—I was a tiger, and not a man.”
Inmate is just leaving after having served a sentence of eight years for the rape of his sixteen-year-old daughter.
“What I objected to most was having my sister take me on her lap and fondle me and call me ‘Baby’ when I was a big boy, almost sixteen. They always made me feel that I was not complete.” Here he helps himself with his native tongue and says, “Ich war nicht reif. I have always felt that. I could never pass my classes as the other boys did, and when my father started me in business, I lost the money and the business. Here in America I am washing dishes, but a thing like me is in great danger in America. You see, in Germany they look upon this thing as a sickness and here it is a crime.”
He had just been admitted on a sentence of four years for sodomy.
The man was just leaving after having served twelve years for murder. He was prematurely old, intensely embittered, and full of hate for society. He wasn't sure what finally led him to commit the act. He