It is the darkest murder I have ever heard of.
On a late June morning in 1982 I sat in the breezy lobby of my apartment building which opened onto the bay waiting for a friend to car pool to work. I was a new lawyer, new to south Florida and as I waited on my friend I was reading the Miami Herald newspaper.
I became so riveted to a story that I got annoyed with my friend for breaking my concentration when he showed up.
A former Palm Beach County judge, Joseph Peel, who had been convicted in 1961 of the 1955 murders of Judge C.E. Chillingworth and his wife Marjorie, had been paroled from prison, he was dying of cancer, and had given a deathbed interview to a Herald reporter in which he all but confessed to being the mastermind of the contract killings.
"Punk ass, where've you been?," I growled from my black study to my startled friend when he came into the lobby.
It was Florida's Crime of the Century.
Phoro: the headstone to the double empty graves.
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