Word: chessman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Outsider. A psychologist's report, written when Chessman was 18, noted that his "boastfulness is a compensation for underlying feelings of insecurity and inadequacy." Chessman was brought up in the Glendale section of Los Angeles. His father was a bitter, disappointed ineffectual who drifted from one job to another (carpenter, poultry butcher, Venetian-blind installer, yardman), and the precarious family income was battered by heavy medical expenses. Chessman's mother was injured in an auto accident when he was nine, for the rest of her life was a chaired invalid, paralyzed from the waist down...
...first Chessman made up for poverty and physical shortcomings by excelling in schoolwork. A schoolmate remembers him as "very argumentative in class. He always talked way over people's heads, and he had a superior attitude toward other students. A lot of them disliked him. Carol never seemed to make friends with nice boys, and he finally took up with some bad ones...
Over the Wall. By his own accounts, Chessman started pilfering and stealing cars for joyrides back in his early teens. But his first serious run-in with the law came when he was arrested at 16 on a charge of auto theft. Taken to Los Angeles' juvenile hall for a medical examination, he scrambled through a window, jumped into a truck, drove it up to the wall surrounding the place, climbed atop the truck and escaped over the wall. Arrested at 3:30 a.m. next day while looting a drugstore (inexplicably Chessman piled all the cigars in the middle...
...months after his second release from Preston, 18-year-old Caryl Chessman landed in the county jail on another auto-theft charge. With two stays in Preston already on his record, he faced a term in San Quentin. But he summoned his talent with words, wrote a long essay declaring that he was filled with "a sense of repulsion against all things criminal, including myself for having become ensnared in its brutal grip during my formative years." An impressed Superior Court judge put young Chessman on probation...
...year later he was sent to San Quentin on five convictions for robbery and assault.** After two years in San Quentin, as a reward for good behavior Chessman was transferred to the model "open prison" at Chino, where men are trusted not to escape. Chessman escaped, went back to robbing, explained after his capture that he had run away only because he was bent on carrying out a plot to kill or kidnap Hitler. Sent back to prison, he was released on parole four years later, in December...