NEW YORK MURDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22894, 30 May 1936, Page 13

NEW YORK MURDER

FIORENZA FOUND GUILTY DEATH SENTENCE PASSED NEW YORK, May 28. Fiorenza was found guilty of firstdegree murder. The jury deliberated for; nearly 24 hours, apparently on the question of sanity, prominent psychiatrists during the trial having testified that he was sane, and others that he was insane. He was sentenced to death in the electric chair. Mrs Nancy Titterton, the well-known writer of juvenile stories under the penname of Nancy Evans, was found brutally murdered in her bath in her apartment in the exclusive Beckham place section on April 21. The police declared that she was garrotted with a silk pyjama cord after an attempt had been made to commit a criminal assault upon her. Her clothes were torn to shreds, and the condition of the apartment furnishings further indicated that she had put up a terrific struggle for life. The police later announced the arrest and confession of the perpetrator of the murder, John Fiorenza, aged 24, an upholsterer's assistant, who, having called for a chair for reupholstering the day before, again called at Titterton’e residence next morning. After committing the crime ho calmly returned to the workshop, where he finished repairing the chair 1 . Then, with his employer, he delivered it, and it was they who gave the alarm. A piece of string commonly used by upholsterers and which Fiorenza* inadvertently left behind him was the clue on which the police worked, tracing it from the manufacturer into the upholstery shop where Fiorenza worked.