LIVING HISTORY
24
LEGAL COMMUNITY
SPOTLIGHT
of the two was ever found. The
killers left no fingerprints. For five
long years a shocked community
was left with the insecurity of
an unsolved mystery. And then
one night Holzapfel got drunk
enough to talk, and his drinking
buddy called the police.
Holzapfel pleaded guilty to
first-degree murder. He was the
state’s star witness in the trial
against Peel in March of 1961. He
didn’t even bother to bargain for
a deal.
“People like us ain’t fit to live,”
Holzapfel sobbed at his preliminary
hearing. “We should be
stamped out like cockroaches.”
ST. LUCIE SPOTLIGHT
For seventeen days (not including
Marjorie Chillingworth and
her husband were last seen at
a dinner in West Palm Beach
on June 14, 1955. Though their
bodies were never found, it
was later revealed that they
were drowned in a murder-forhire
plot orchestrated by Judge
Joe Peel.
weekends) the trial took place in the old courthouse in
Fort Pierce, as the window-unit air conditioners droned.
Most of those March days were hot. The New York Times
referred to our locale as part of the Deep South then. Most
Floridians still sported a Southern drawl.
Jim Bishop, a newspaper columnist with Hearst’s King
Features Syndicate, attended the trial and described the
courtroom in the old whitewashed courthouse in his book
The Murder Trial of Judge Peel published by Simon & Shuster
in 1962:
>>
FLORIDA MEMORY PROJECT
Judge Curtis Chillingworth looks over a document at the Florida Supreme
Court in Tallahassee in 1946. Chillingworth had a reputation as an astute
and ethical jurist.
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