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Robert NIXON
A.K.A.: "Brick Moron"
Classification: Serial homicide
Characteristics: Juvenile - Rape - Robbery
Number of victims: 5
Date of murders: 1936 - 1938
Date
of arrest:
May 29,
1938
Date of birth: 1920
Victims profile: Women
Method of murder:
Bludgeoning with bricks
Location: Illinois/California, USA
Status:
Executed by
electrocution in Illinois on June 15, 1939
Robert Nixon killed five women and
injured one other in Chicago and Los Angeles from 1936 to 1938.
His
claim to fame was his very basic but odd choice of murder weapon. Bricks.
Nixon was a career petty criminal that moved on to murder when he broke
into the Chicago home of Florence Castle on June 29, 1936, and looted
her house before bludgeoning her to death with his faithful brick.
In the Spring of 1937 he continued his slayings in L.A., claiming three
more lives, including a mother and daughter. He left one surviving
victim.
Nixon was arrested after returning to
Chicago and killing his fifth and final victim on May 28, 1938. He
confessed to the brick attacks and sentenced to death for the last Windy
City slaying. Nixon was electrocuted on June 15, 1939.
Brick slayer is likened to jungle beast
By Charles Leavelle - The Chicago Tribune
June 5, 1938
Beneath an alley fire escape policemen and detectives
stand three and four deep. From a fifth floor window others lean out and
call: "Let him come."
Handcuffs click. A slouchily dressed colored youth
detaches himself from the crowd of detectives and begins making his way
up the side of the building effortlessly. At the second floor, where the
fire escape begins, he poises himself lightly and swings over on to it.
"Look at him go," says a policeman. "Just like an ape."
By the time this has been said the youth has swung
himself over the sill and is in the fifth floor room where two years ago
he raped and murdered with a brick Mrs. Florence Thompson Castle. As
detectives watch he shows in pantomime how he committed the crime, one
of the five savage murders he has confessed.
Comes from Little
Town.
The Negro youth is Robert Nixon. He is 18 years old
and comes from a pretty little town in the old south -- Tallulah, La.
But there is nothing pretty about Robert Nixon. He has none of the charm
of speech or manner that is characteristic of so many southern darkies.
That charm is a mark of civilization, and so far as
manner and appearance go, civilization has left Nixon practically
untouched. His hunched shoulders and long, sinewy arms that dangle
almost to his knees; his out-thrust head and catlike tread all suggest
the animal.
He is very black-- almost pure Negro.
His physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species.
Robert Nixon
SEX:
M RACE: W TYPE: N MOTIVE: PC-nonspecific
MO: Victims bludgeoned with
bricks in their homes or hotel rooms.
DISPOSITION: Executed in Ill.,
June 1939.
Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia
of Modern Serial Killers - Hunting Humans
