Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky

The "Mad Dog killings" were a spree of robberies and murders committed by serial killer Joseph Louis Taborsky and his partner-in-crime, Arthur Culombe, throughout Connecticut in 1950 and between 1956 and 1957. Authorities and newspapers dubbed the killings the "Mad Dog killings" due to the brutality of the murders committed; Taborsky himself was also often given the moniker "Mad Dog." Taborsky and Culombe robbed and murdered six people during the 1956–1957 spree. Taborsky and Culombe also robbed, shot, and beat a number of other victims who survived the "Mad Dog" crime spree. The murders led to Connecticut liquor stores implementing modified hours of operation, as Taborsky and Culombe frequently targeted liquor stores.

Following the murders, Taborsky and Culombe were both apprehended. Both were charged with just two of the murders, convicted, and sentenced to death, and Taborsky became the last person executed in Connecticut's electric chair, as well as the final person subjected to execution in Connecticut before a nationwide moratorium halted all executions in the United States. Until the lethal injection execution of serial killer Michael Bruce Ross in 2005, Taborsky's was the last execution in Connecticut in 45 years. Culombe's death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1970.

Taborsky's case generated particular interest and controversy due to him being one of very few people, and the only person in Connecticut's history, to be placed on death row on two separate occasions for two separate capital convictions. Prior to the "Mad Dog killings" spree, Taborsky had spent over four years on Connecticut's death row for the 1950 robbery and murder of Louis Wolfson. The main evidence against him in Wolfson's murder was from his brother Albert, who participated alongside Taborsky in Wolfson's robbery and murder and received a life sentence for his own involvement. After Albert suffered a mental breakdown in prison, Joseph Taborsky successfully appealed his conviction on the basis of his innocence, arguing that Albert's testimony was not reliable, so he was released from prison. While awaiting trial in the "Mad Dog killings," Taborsky confessed his guilt in Wolfson's murder as well.

Connecticut newspapers and historians posited that the "Mad Dog killings" played a significant role in popularizing and justifying the use of the death penalty in Connecticut, as well as in delaying any attempts to abolish capital punishment in the state, despite all other New England states trending towards abolition in the mid-20th century.

Background Perpetrators Joseph L. Taborsky was a native of Hartford, Connecticut, born on March 23, 1924 to two impoverished Lithuanian immigrants, and grew up in Hartford's North End as an eldest sibling with one brother and two sisters. His mother Mable was a devoutly religious homemaker, and his father, a door-to-door salesman who was largely absent from the family, was mentally disabled; Taborsky's father spent significant amounts of time in a state-run mental hospital and played a negligible role in raising Taborsky.

At the age of 5, Taborsky committed his first crime when he stole jewelry from a neighbor's house and gave it to his mother. Later, he escaped from a reformatory, and upon recapture, he was sentenced to serve an additional three to five years in custody. As a young adult, he was convicted of conducting a hold-up.

In the 1940s, as a result of an attempted escape from a different prison in Cheshire, Connecticut, he was sentenced to a period of imprisonment at the Wethersfield State Prison, during which he was tasked with cleaning Connecticut's death chamber in preparation for the triple execution of three convicted murderers in 1946. In 1948, he was sentenced to spend 18 months in prison for burglary, which he served across the country in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington. When Taborsky was not in prison, he worked as a laborer and a truck driver and engaged in various hobbies, including boxing. Culombe was a gun collector who was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on February 28, 1924. He was approximately the same age as Taborsky but operated at the mental level of a 9-year-old, as he had an intellectual disability that made him unable to read or tell time. Culombe had a young daughter at the time of the crime spree.

Taborsky met Culombe in 1948 while the two worked at a cargo despatch facility in East Hartford, Connecticut. Authorities believed Culombe's disability made him impressionable to Taborsky's influence.

The murder went unsolved for almost a year until Albert abruptly turned himself in to the police, confessing to the murder and naming Taborsky as his accomplice. Taborsky was arrested on January 19, 1951.

Taborsky's first stint on death row (1951–1955)

While Taborsky awaited execution in the Wolfson murder case, he steadfastly maintained his innocence. In July 1951, Albert experienced a mental breakdown, leading to his transfer into his prison's mental health unit; later, he was transferred from prison to the Norwich State Hospital.

"Mad Dog" killings (1956–1957)

Less than one year after his release from prison, Taborsky moved from Hartford to Brooklyn, New York, although he visited Hartford frequently to see his mother, who still lived there. Taborsky also married a woman who met him by sending him letters while he was on death row. Unhappy with his marriage and unable to find steady work, he soon resumed committing armed robberies in September 1956 and reunited with Culombe in Connecticut with the intent of committing additional crimes together in December 1956. In the robbery of Silas Deane Package Store in Rocky Hill on December 11, 1956, the two pistol-whipped Peter Barone, the store's owner, in the head and robbed his store of at least $100 USD.

Attempted murder of Nickola Leone (December 15, 1956) On December 15, 1956, approximately one hour prior to the murders of Edward Kurpiewski and Daniel Janowski, Taborsky and Culombe shot 67-year-old tailor Nickola Leone in the face in Leone's shop. The bullet lodged in Leone's neck. However, Leone survived the attack and later provided police with a description of his assailants, telling authorities the man who shot him wore a "red, polka dotted handkerchief over his face." Both murder victims were honored with a military burial, as both served in the United States Armed Forces.

An hour after the murders, a bus driver discovered Janowski's daughter in her father's abandoned car; Taborsky and Culombe decided to leave her unharmed because they determined she was too young to implicate them. Police later found that the robbers left $133 in the cash register.

Days after the murders of Kurpiewski and Janowski, Governor Abraham Ribicoff offered a $3,000 award for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators, in conjunction with a $2,000 reward posted earlier by New Britain's mayor Joseph Morelli and a $25 reward from a local dry cleaning and laundry service. The Connecticut State Police also entered the investigation around December 19. Also following the double murders of Kurpiewski and Janowski, Connecticut State Police organized a special force of investigators tasked specifically with working on the "Mad Dog" murders. Initially, they hired 12 officers to work on the case, but just before January 1957, they hired nine additional police officers to aid with the investigation. The leader of the special force was Lieutenant Sam Rome.

After Cohn's murder, East Hartford Mayor John Torpey posted a $1,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Cohn's killers.

Capture and confessions Based on the evidence Adinolfi provided investigators, police arrested Taborsky and Culombe "on a hunch" on February 23, 1957, and charged the two with breach of the peace pending the results of a full investigation into the murder spree. Investigators initially suspected Taborsky and Culombe were responsible for "one or two" murders in New York as well. Authorities deliberately housed the two separately, with Taborsky placed in the Hartford County jail and Culombe housed in Hartford's police barracks. On February 27, Culombe confessed to participating in eight holdups and six murders. Culombe led investigators to the murder weapon the two used to kill Kurpiewski and Janowski, which police raked out of a shallow pond. In Culombe's initial confession, he stated Taborsky fired all the fatal shots and that he only participated in pistol-whipping several victims and driving the pair's getaway cars. Police stated that Culombe possessed an "uncanny memory of details" when confessing to the crimes and gave investigators a "tour" to the various crime scenes and locations where he and Taborsky had abandoned weapons. Later, Taborsky stated that he liked shooting his victims in the head because he was under the erroneous belief that gunshot wounds to the head would strip bullets of identifying ballistics evidence.

After both Taborsky and Culombe issued their confessions, a 46-year-old pawn broker from Hartford was arrested and charged with selling Culombe seven pistols, at least three of which were used during the murder spree. At the time, Taborsky and Culombe's murder trial was the longest in Connecticut's history, with jury selection taking five weeks and other trial proceedings taking an additional five weeks.

Culombe continued to fight his death sentence and escalated his appeals to the federal level, thus postponing his execution date the week before he was scheduled to die with Taborsky. Culombe was officially re-sentenced to life imprisonment on June 30, 1961.

Impact and aftermath

In 1969, Culombe petitioned unsuccessfully for courts to apply four years and four months of time served to his life sentence so his parole eligibility date would occur sooner.

Newspapers described the killings as having a "chilling effect" on Connecticut's citizens. As a direct result of the Mad Dog killings, Connecticut's liquor stores implemented modified hours of operation, closing at 9:00 p.m. rather than their previous closing time of 11:00 p.m.

The Mad Dog killings had a significant effect on Connecticut's death penalty, which was waning in popularity shortly before the spree took place. Prior to the murders, from late 1954 to March 1955, the Hartford Courant published an editorial series calling for an end to capital punishment within the state. Also in 1955, less than two years prior to the spree, Governor Ribicoff stated his opposition to the death penalty and called for its abolition, announcing his intent to sign legislation to abolish capital punishment in Connecticut if the state legislature would pass such a bill, which they ultimately declined to do before the Mad Dog killing spree began. On February 18, 1957, shortly before the arrests of Taborsky and Culombe, Governor Ribicoff announced his support for the death penalty in their case, while the Hartford Courant published a follow-up editorial, dated February 19, 1957, in which they too reversed their previous position: "Capital punishment is not a deterrent. It is not a punishment. But in certain situations, it is like putting out a fire, or killing a mad dog." Louis Wolfson's widow, who moved her family out of Connecticut after her husband's murder, criticized death penalty abolitionists after the killers' arrests, stating, "How does it feel to know that you and others like you helped a man commit more murders when you could have stopped him after the first?" State representative and probate judge Charles Henchel, who opposed capital punishment, wrote in early 1957 that the murder spree created "a wave of emotionalism that precludes successes for those who want capital punishment abolished." In 2023, a writer for Connecticut Magazine posited the state might have abolished the death penalty sooner if not for the killing spree.

In 2021, one of Lieutenant Samuel Rome's relatives donated Taborsky's confession tapes to the Connecticut State Police Museum. The museum's president, Jerry Longo, responded, "Reading that [Samuel] Rome obtained a confession from someone is a hell of a lot different than listening to a tape of a confession of a murder. It isn't something you can quantify unless you hear it – how cold [Taborsky] was."

Victims Killed: Edward Kurpiewski, 30 (December 15, 1956) Daniel Janowski, 30 (December 15, 1956) Samuel H. Cohn, 65 (December 26, 1956) Mr. Bernard Speyer, 48 (January 5, 1957) Mrs. Ruth Speyer, 45 (January 5, 1957) John M. Rosenthal, 69 (January 26, 1957)Survived:'''

Jack Rosen (December 4, 1956) Peter Barone (December 11, 1956) Nickola Leone, 67 (December 15, 1956) Arthur Vinton, 64 (December 21, 1956) Mrs. Arthur Vinton, 62 (December 21, 1956) Lorry, 3 (December 21, 1956) Frank Adinolfi, 44 (January 6, 1957)