Word: fraden
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Until he killed his parents last summer, Harlow Fraden was unable to work out any really satisfactory way of shaping his environment to fit his ego and personality. He tried immersing himself in poetry, but his mother-whom he habitually described to friends as "that hateful paranoid"-would have none of it. After he graduated from New York University as a chemistry major last June, she plagued him to get a job "like other boys." Instead, Harlow-a tall, thin, languid youth with cropped red hair and heavy hornrimmed glasses-lounged about the family's Bronx apartment, owlishly reading...
...That was pushing Harlow too far. and he decided that life would be much more attractive if his mother and father were out of the way. The elder Fradens lived simply and both worked-Mrs. Fraden as a $6,3OO-a-year teacher in the public schools, her husband, a physician, at a $6,800-a-year post in the city health department. But they had managed to set aside a considerable nest egg; counting insurance, savings, pension benefits and some jewelry, they were worth in the neighborhood of $96,000-dead. Harlow found it ridiculously easy to kill...
After careful discussion of the matter with Roommate Wepman, a Miami attorney's son with vague literary pretensions, Chemist Fraden decided to use potassium cyanide as a terminal agent. One evening last August, he put a vial of the stuff in his pocket, got a bottle of champagne, called on his parents and joyously announced that he had got a job. He poured three glasses of wine, added cyanide to two of them, and asked his parents to join him in a toast to his future. They drank and toppled to the floor...
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...