On the night of June 15, 1955, Circuit Judge Curtis E. Chillingworth and his wife spent the evening at the home of friends. At 10 p.m. they drove to their oceanfront home south of Palm Beach and disappeared. On the night of Nov. 3, 1958, a smalltime bootlegger, Lew Gene Harvey, 21, left his home with a mysterious companion. He, too, vanished in the night. Harvey's body, weighted with chains and with a bullet hole in the head, was fished out of a canal near Palm Beach a few days later, but the Chillingworths were never found. Last week, after years of painstaking detective work, Florida police marked both cases as solved: the Chillingworths and young Harvey, announced Sheriff John Kirk, had all been killed by the same hired assassin.
Lethal Rendezvous. The first break in the case came when Harvey's widow recalled that the name of her husband's companion on the night of his death was "John Lynch." The name was also an alias frequently used by Floyd Albert Holzapfel, 36, a man with a curiously black-and-white background. A handsome, intelligent man, Holzapfel had been a wartime paratrooper who was wounded at Bastogne, a member of the Oklahoma City police department, a house detective at Miami's lush Deauville Hotel, an organizer of a West Palm Beach Young Republican Club and an assistant scoutmaster. He had also served time for bookmaking and armed robbery, had been arrested for attempted rape.
In December 1956, Holzapfel and Joseph A. Peel Jr., a West Palm Beach lawyer and a former judge, were arrested for attempted murder. Peel had driven his law partner, Harold Gray, to a tavern, where Holzapfel was waiting. The partner was given a brutal beating but survived. The motive, police charged, was a $100,000 insurance policy on Gray's life. After years of trials, the case was dropped when Peel agreed to resign from the bar.
Deep-Sea Grave. Backtracking diligently, the cops discovered that Judge Chillingworth had once rebuked Lawyer Peel for representing both sides in a divorce case, after which Peel's promising political fortunes had slumped. Had Peel hired Holzapfel to wreak his revenge for the courtroom embarrassment? Were the Chillingworths murdered in the same fashion as the young bootlegger? With the evidence gradually falling into place, the police lured Holzapfel into a trap last October. In a Titusville motel room, two of his friends met the ex-convict, poured him several drinks and told him that Peel had hired one of them to kill him. Shaken and drunk, Holzapfel spilled out a gruesome story, which the "friends"—both undercover agents for the police—were careful to record on tape.
He and a Negro companion had been hired by Peel, Holzapfel said, to kill Judge Chillingworth for $2,000. Mrs. Chillingworth was an accidental victim because she witnessed the assault on her husband. The two were taken from their home to a waiting boat on the beach and taken four miles offshore. There, trussed in chains and 30-lb. weights, they were quietly dropped over the side. Mrs. Chillingworth was the first to die: "Ladies first," said Holzapfel politely, as he pushed her overboard. The judge, a strong swimmer, struggled in the water and nearly managed to escape, but a blow from a shotgun butt sent him to the bottom.