Wilson Clemons, a minister in the Church of God in Christ, was found in his front yard at 405 Mahoning avenue, his head split in two by the axe that lay by his side. No one had seen the murder take place, but the neighbours told the police to look for the reverend’s twenty-eight-year-old son, David, who lived with him and worked in a steel mill twenty miles away in Farrell.

David was known to the police. Their files held his mug shot, taken one Saturday night in 1936 when he had been arrested for disorderly behaviour. He had the mental capacity of a nine-year-old, and had recently returned to New Castle after being discharged from the army, just before the build-up to D-Day.

The police drove out to Farrell and arrested David as he was waiting to draw his wages, having informed his company he was leaving town. He confessed immediately.

He told the police his father had reprimanded him for running around. They had argued, and David had gone to bed angry. On the morning of the murder, David’s alarm clock went off at five o’clock. He woke his father and accused him of tampering with it to play a trick on him. They argued again, then David went downstairs, where he sat in silence for the next three hours.

When David’s father came downstairs at eight o’clock, David took up an axe and chased him into the yard. The old man tripped and fell, and David sunk the axe into his skull as he lay on the ground.

It was April fool’s day, 1944. That year, the occasion went largely unobserved in town. The New Castle News remarked, “Wartime conditions eliminate much of the desire for April 1 foolishness.”

David was given a life sentence for first degree murder. After a psychiatric examination, he was sent to Fairview state hospital for the criminally insane, where he joined other hopelessly disturbed inmates such as Frank Palanzo, who had wrapped his shack in bails of barbed wire and shot a state trooper on the orders of witches; Albert Yohoda, who had been told by invisible things to cut down his brother-in-law with an axe; William Jackson, who stabbed his mother to death with a carving knife and suffered hideous third-degree burns while trying to incinerate her body; Clair Young, a Charleroi miner who shot his nineteen-month-old daughter as a sacrifice so that he might go directly to heaven when he died; and Albert Shinsky, who murdered a sixty-four year old woman whom he believed to have sent a black cat down from the sky to tear his side.

David remained in Fairview for the rest of his life.