CRIME: Champagne & Cyanide

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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.