DOUBLE EXECUTION

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1931, Page 2

DOUBLE EXECUTION

WOMAN AND A MAN “Iron Irene” Schroeder, a 22-yeat-old bandit, paid the. penalty for the murder of State Trooper Brady Paul, when she was put to death in the electric chair at Bellefonte prison, Pennsylvania l , on M&fch 2. A few minutes later she was followed by Walter Glenn Dague, her lover and companion in crime. Schroeder was the first 'woman to be electrocuted in the State of Pennsylvania and every effort was exhausted by her counsel and her friends to Have the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Both the condemned persons met death calmly. Neither required assistance in the last walk from the cells to the execution chamber. The woman, whose conduct throughout the trial earned her the sobriquet “Iron Irene,” maintained a smiling, care-free pose to the end. On the day before the execution she asked for all the Sunday comic papers, which she read with apparent enjoyment, and she slept soundly until awakened at dawn the following morning for the ordeal. Dague, who was solemn and composed, declared that he was satisfied and ready. He applied himself diligently to reading the Bible. Both the murderers had abandoned their legal mates and families in West Virginia to embark on a career of crime. Dague asserted that he was completely under the influence of the girl, who forced him into evil courses. The man, a motorcar salesman and Sunday school teacher, had a wife and two children, while Schroeder had a fiusfiand and a five-year-old son.

When the pair fled together they engaged in a series of robberies andhold ups. These culminated, in December, 1929, in the murder. When two Pennsylvania troopers tried to stop their car and arrest them, both the fugitives drew revolvers, opened fire, killed Trooper Paul and severely wounded his companion. Schroeder’s boy was in the car when the trooper was shot and his evidence helped to convict her.

The couple then fled across the Continent in a car, pursued by the police. In Texas they were joined by a man named Wills. At one point they were fired on by the local police, while in Arizona they kidnapped a deputy-sher-iff and forced him to act as their guide across the desert. Located by police, they were again fired on and the sheriff was wounded. They callously threw him out of the car and continued their flight until they had to abandon the car on the bank of a river.

Finally the two criminals took up a defensive position behind some rocks. By this time aeroplanes had joined in the pursuit. They continued to hold off the police until, the girl collapsed, whereupon they gave themselves up after a chase that had lasted for weeks.