CRIME: Crime

"I'll Kill You if You Scream"

Warren Lee Irwin was a fellow with a screw loose in his head. He stole, lusted continuously after women, and was inclined to kill people who stood in the way of his scheme of things. At 27 he was a hardened jailbird. In the 13 months since getting out on parole (from Michigan sentences as an habitual criminal), he was believed to have murdered one woman, kidnaped another, and to have killed a Michigan gas-station attendant.

He was a harmless-looking sort—he had the severe mouth, high forehead and martyred gaze of a divinity student; he was nearsighted, and wore rimless spectacles. No cop bothered him as he wandered toward the Washington Monument in the national capital one evening last week, with a .38 revolver and a roll of adhesive tape in his pocket. Though it was still light, he ducked, unnoticed, into the front seat of a parked sedan.

Unseeing Search. A pretty, 17-year-old Maryland high-school girl named Carolyn Jane Barker was sitting in the car with her boy friend, 19-year-old Lawrence Gilbert. The pair—interrupted just as the boy had presented an engagement ring—were too startled to utter a sound. Irwin yanked out his pistol. "Drive me to Virginia," he said, dramatically, "the FBI is after me."

The car had gear trouble; as it ground slowly across the Potomac, Irwin cursed impatiently, talked of his crimes, and threatened to kill "many people" if he was not obeyed. Finally he ordered a stop on a dirt road, and forced the girl to tape her fiancé's hands. Then Irwin raped her. Afterward, with a weird kind of reasonableness, he freed the boy, walked the pair to a gas station and bought them Cokes.

"If you talk about this before midnight," he said, "I'll kill the girl." He turned Gilbert loose, and got on a Washington-bound bus with Carolyn. "I know a cheap hotel," he confided. "I'll kill you if you scream." When they walked into the lobby, she winked desperately at a lounging marine; the marine simply winked back. She wept when Irwin shut the door of their room. She was forced to submit to him four more times during the night.

When the pair emerged on the street the next morning, the Washington cops were scouring the city for them; young Gilbert had gotten to a police station by 8 a.m., had pointed to Irwin's picture on a "Wanted" poster, and told the whole story. Yet no one spotted the fugitive and his captive. Irwin hocked Gilbert's watch and the engagement ring for $15, and forced the girl into a bus. Irwin grew confidential again. He was going to rob a rich uncle in Doylestown, Pa. and "give you a car."

"Hello, Uncle." The uncle, an engineer named George Brewer, yielded up no money. Irwin forced his way into the Brewer house, pistol in hand, crying, "Hello, Uncle—get over there and sit down!" Brewer and his fearful wife obeyed. But nothing happened—Irwin just sat down too. The girl wobbled to the davenport, and fell asleep. When she woke up the next morning all three were still sitting motionless in the same chairs. Irwin hustled her into the Brewer's Oldsmobile sedan and drove off. He pulled up at a rural cornfield, raped her again, taped one of his wrists to hers and slept for an hour.