CRIME: Champagne & Cyanide

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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.