The United States failed to execute 73-year-old criminal Tom Creech, who had been in prison for 50 years.
73-year-old Thomas Eugene Creech was scheduled to be executed in Idaho on February 28. However, at the last moment failed: It was not possible to install a drip for him for injection. Creech was sentenced 40 years ago, and in total he spent half a century in prison. Now the criminal will have to wait again. The main mystery of this man remains that no one knows how many crimes he actually committed. Lenta.ru tells the mysterious story of one of the strangest prisoners in the United States.
Thomas Creech became a friend to many prison staff
The use of capital punishment against Creech should have been become for Idaho, the first such event in 12 years. However, many prison employees, as well as human rights activists, fought to the last to save the criminal’s life. And their prayers seem to have been heard. Creech has now spent 41 years awaiting sentencing, longer than anyone before him.
For the jailers, he has long become just Tom – a quiet elderly prisoner with whom they communicated kindly for many years. While behind bars, Creech became interested in writing poetry, and dedicated some to the guards. Even the former head of the prison, who was a friend of the condemned man, advocated the abolition of the execution.
There are guards who literally grew up with Tom Creech. Our boss has a long-standing, warm relationship with him. There is a mutual understanding between them, cemented by time
The criminal's lawyers tried to do at least something until the last minute. In particular, they tried to get the execution canceled, citing the fact that the injection substance with which it would be carried out was obtained from an unknown source.
At the same time, Krich cannot be called an innocent victim of prosecutors and judges. In 1981, he actually dealt with another prisoner, and even earlier he confessed to 40 similar crimes. True, the investigation was able to prove his involvement in only five. And not everything is so smooth with them.
Creech grew up in a dysfunctional family
Thomas Eugene Creech was born September 9, 1950 in Hamilton, Ohio. Throughout his childhood, he observed constant quarrels between his parents. The matter ended in divorce, after which Creech remained with his father. A few years later, the seriously ill man died, and this happened in front of his son. The reasons are unknown, but Creech claimed that immediately after the incident he severely beat the nurse caring for the parent.
Then begins a period that is known only by rumors and from the words of the criminal himself. Investigators still cannot say with certainty what was true and what was fiction. It is believed that after his father left, Creech began to wander. In 1969, he was imprisoned for robbery without the use of a weapon, and two years later he was released on parole.
In 1973, he married 17-year-old Thomasina Lauren White, who, according to investigators, became an accomplice in at least one of his crimes.
Creech went with her to Portland, Oregon, and got a job as a caretaker at a church. Some time later, the body of 22-year-old William Joseph Dean was found in the room where he lived. Creech was later found guilty of this crime.
In a letter to KIVI-TV in 2019, Creech claimedthat in 1974, 11 criminals raped White and then threw her out of a fourth-floor window. After this, she “was left paralyzed and went crazy.” The maniac's wife actually committed suicide in a psychiatric clinic in Salem, Oregon. True, what caused this is unknown.
In the same 1974, he was accused of killing a certain Paul Schroeder in Tucson, Arizona. The court acquitted Creech. In November of the same year, he and his new girlfriend, 17-year-old Carol Spaulding, hitchhiked around his native Idaho. Thomas Arnold and John Bradford agreed to give the couple a lift. At some point, Creech pulled out a rifle and killed both of them. For a long time he did not admit his guilt, but later claimed that the men allegedly molested his companion.
While under investigation, Creech unexpectedly confessed to dozens of serious crimes.
In 1975, Creech suddenly announced that he was responsible for the lives of almost dozens of people, but not Arnold and Bradford. He claimed that 26 people did not survive their encounters with him. The remains of 11 of them were actually discovered. A former prosecutor in Ada County, Idaho, said cops “found a lot of skeletons” in a California mine that Creech pointed to.
Some of those he named were actually found where he showed. This was his defense in the case I was leading. He said, “Lord, I confessed to all this. If I had dealt with these too, I would have admitted it too.”
The trial of a strange criminal seriously worried the authorities. It was alleged that Creech was a member of the notorious Hells Angels biker group, whose members were allegedly planning to storm the court and free him. At the same time, information appeared that back in 1965 he became a Satanist and some of his crimes were allegedly sacrifices.
However, law enforcement officers are believed to have heard many of these confessions from Krich himself after they injected him with the so-called truth serum. Currently, readings given under the influence of such substances are not considered reliable. Many human rights activists suspect that Creech simply made up most of the stories about his bloody career under the influence of drugs.
In addition, as one of the detectives stated in 1975, Creech completely borrowed descriptions of bloody satanic rituals from an article in Playboy magazine
But what about the correctly indicated burials? How did he know about them? At the same time, less than half of his testimony turned out to be correct, and in one of the places where, as Creech said, the remains of almost a hundred people should have been located, a lone skeleton of a cow was dug up. Now investigators believe that the criminal had a real connection to nine cases, and personally dealt with only five victims.
Be that as it may, in 1975 Creech was sentenced to the gallows in the Arnold-Bradford case. Moreover, the jury needed several days of deliberations, since the circumstances of the crime were very confusing. In 1979, capital punishment was replaced by life imprisonment.
Creech kills another prisoner over trash
At the prison, Creech was assigned as a janitor. His conflict with 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, who was serving a sentence for theft, happened precisely because of this. The young man was partially paralyzed and allegedly littered a lot, and Creech had to clean up after him, which caused them to feud. According to one version, at some point Jensen attacked the enemy, armed with a sock stuffed with batteries. Creech took the homemade weapon and beat Jensen to death.
There was another version. Allegedly, other prisoners ordered Creech to kill Jensen because they did not like him. They deliberately gave the disabled man that very sock and provoked a conflict so that Creech could easily take it away and carry out his plan. And everything would look like self-defense.
The problem is that both of these versions were expressed by Creech himself in different years. Which one is real is unknown. In any case, Jensen died in 1981, and two years later Creech was again sentenced to death. Since then, he has been waiting almost 41 years for the sentence to be carried out. In total, he spent almost 50 years in prison. This is an Idaho state record.
Nobody knows how many crimes Creech actually committed.
Creech's strange reputation arose largely from the fact that no one can name the exact number of his crimes. He himself said at different times that there were from 26 to 42 of them. Officially it is believed that there were five of them, although four more may be involved.
After his sentence, Creech behaved very decently and earned the reputation of, if not an exemplary, then at least a very meek prisoner. Gradually, he became almost a living mascot of the Idaho maximum security prison. Many guards managed to come to work and spend decades before retirement, warmly communicating with him. He didn't cause any trouble.
I do not want to minimize his actions and the number of people who suffered from it. But the effect that this event will have on those who came into close contact with him cannot be neglected. Tom will be gone on Thursday. He will never return to his block. It's impossible not to feel any emotion about this
The sentence was to be carried out on the evening of February 28, Moscow time. However, they couldn’t. So, for now, the end to Creech’s story has not been put, and he will return to his block, as many prison officials wanted. However, it is unknown how long the elderly criminal will remain there.
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