Frederick Charles Wood

Frederick Charles Wood (October 10, 1911 – March 21, 1963) was an American serial killer who killed five people across New York from 1926 to 1960, beginning at the age of 14. A habitual criminal who expressed no remorse for his crimes, Wood was sentenced to death and executed at Sing Sing Prison for his two final murders. He was the penultimate convict to be executed in New York, prior to the de facto abolition of capital punishment in the state.

Early life and first crimes Frederick Charles Wood was born in 1911, into a middle-class working family from Elmira, New York. While not much is known about his early childhood, Wood began engaging in petty crimes as he entered adolescence, but avoided repercussions for most of it. Later on in life, Wood claimed that he committed his first murder in 1926, aged 14, by poisoning his 20-year-old girlfriend Cynthia Mary Longo in Hornell.

Suspecting that she was dating another boy, he bought three cream puffs and laced them with arsenic, which he gave to Longo and two other friends. While the other two survived, she did not. The coroner erroneously diagnosed her cause of death as "dilation of the heart caused by excessive vomiting", listing her as 22 years old. At the time, the police's leading theory was that Robinson knew her killer, prompting them to largely ignore Wood as a potential suspect.

Lowman murder In February 1940, Wood was discharged and returned home to Elmira. In 1942, after perceiving that 42-year-old local carpenter and World War II veteran John E. Lowman had been pestering his girlfriend, Wood invited him to a rooming house in the city. After Lowman allegedly insulted his girlfriend, Wood, in a drunken rage, hit him on the head with a beer bottle. When Lowman fell, Wood stomped on his head and slashed him with his knife. Intent on dismembering the body and disposing of the remains in trash bags, Wood stuffed the body under a couch to keep it hidden.

The next day, he told his girlfriend about the murder, but did not show her the body. The day after that, Wood and his girlfriend told his father about the murder. This resulted in an argument between Wood and his father, which led to his mother calling the police and his arrest on a disorderly conduct charge. Wood pleaded guilty to the charge the following day and was sentenced to five days in the county jail. Just minutes after he was sentenced on the disorderly conduct charge, Wood's girlfriend discovered Lowman's body. The confession caused great outrage among the New York public and embarrassed the Parole Board, whose chairman, Russell G. Oswald, had to issue a statement declaring the decision to parole Wood "a mistake." Against the advice of his lawyers, Wood took the stand at his trial, readily declaring that he was sane when he committed his murders and he had loved killing. For the rest of the proceedings, he constantly cracked jokes and acted jovially, and when asked about his job status, he jokingly declared that he was a "wine sampler".

In the following years, Wood's execution was stayed on three occasions, as attorneys and civil liberties unions attempted to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of insanity. In spite of their attempts, Wood dismissed them all, saying that he welcomed death and pleaded for an opportunity to "ride the lightning". On March 21, 1963, he was brought to the execution chamber at Sing Sing, where he joked to the witnesses present, stating that "[he] has a speech to make an educational project. You will see the effect of electricity on Wood. Enjoy yourself."

Wood, still laughing, then sat down in the chair, brushing it off with his hand, smoking a cigarette and waiting patiently until they had finished the preparational procedure. As the hood was placed over his face, he was still smiling. Minutes later, he was electrocuted. Wood was the penultimate prisoner executed in the state before the death penalty was abolished altogether.