Deceased/Not Found FL - Curtis, 58, & Marjorie Chillingworth, 56, W. Palm Beach, 1955 *3 guilty*

Although this case has been closed for many years, the victims' bodies were never found.

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Curtis Eugene Chillingworth
Missing since June 14, 1955 from West Palm Beach, West Palm Beach County, Florida
Classification: Endangered Missing
Vital Statistics
Date Of Birth: October 24, 1896
Age at Time of Disappearance: 58 years old
Distinguishing Characteristics: White male.
Clothing: A pair of men's pajamas and a pairs of slippers were missing from his house.

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Marjorie Croude McKinley Chillingworth
Missing since June 14, 1955 from West Palm Beach, West Palm Beach County, Florida
Classification: Endangered Missing

Vital Statistics
Date Of Birth: circa 1899
Age at Time of Disappearance: 56 years old
Distinguishing Characteristics: White female.
Clothing: A nightgown and a pairs of slippers were missing from her house.

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Circumstances of Disappearance

Judge Curtis Chillingworth was last seen with his wife Marjorie Chillingworth at a dinner in West Palm Beach, Florida on June 14, 1955. They left the dinner about 10 PM for their Manapalan home.

They had hired a carpenter to come the morning of June 15 to build a playground for the grandchildren. The carpenter arrived at 8 a.m. The door was open and the home was empty. Chillingworth didn't show up for a 10 a.m. hearing at the courthouse in West Palm Beach.

Police found a shattered porch light, drops of blood on the walkway to the beach, and two used spools of adhesive tape, one in the sand and one in the living room. Also found: dry swim suits, discounting the idea of accidental drowning during a morning swim. Money still in the judge's billfold and $40 still in Marjorie's pocketbook ruled out robbery. The keys were still in the ignition of Chillingworth's Plymouth.

And extensive search turned up no clues. In 1957, Curtis and Marjorie Chillingworth were declared dead.

Judge Joseph Peel was the city's only municipal judge. Peel was protecting bolita operators and moonshiners. In 1953, he represented both sides in a divorce. His superior, Chillingworth, gave him only a reprimand, with the warning that this was his last chance.

In June 1955, with Judge Chillingworth possibly about to end Peel's career over the non-divorce fiasco, Peel had been in a panic. Lucky Holzapfel, a carpenter's apprentice, a service station attendant and a bartender bought a skiff, and a second anchor. On the night of June 14, he and accomplice Bobby Lincoln went to Manalapan and landed on the beach behind the house around 1 a.m. Bobby Lincoln crouched in the bushes as Lucky knocked on the door. The judge answered in his pajamas. Lucky pulled a pistol from under his shirt and forced the Judge and his wife into the boat. After the boat drifted for about an hour, the couple were thrown overboard with lead weights strapped to their legs.

On December 12, Lucky pleaded guilty to both murders and was sent to Death Row. On March 30, 1961, Peel was found guilty of accessory to murder. He received two life sentences. The accomplice to the murder, Bobby Lincoln, finished his federal prison term in Michigan in 1962.

Investigators
If you have any information concerning this case, please contact:
Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office 561-688-3000

NCIC Number:
Please refer to this number when contacting any agency with information regarding this case.

Source Information:
Palm Beach Post
The Doe Network: Case File 2122DFFL and 2267DMFL

Links:

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/2267dmfl.html

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/2122dffl.html

Bumping up case

Here is an old one. Interesting plot but no final ending.

I thought this was interesting:

Attorney sentenced to 5 years for defrauding law clients
By Jane Musgrave, The Palm Beach Post
June 7, 2011

A lawyer who was raised by one of Palm Beach County's most respected attorneys but is the biological son of one of its most notorious murderers was sentenced on Tuesday to five years in prison for defrauding clients out of more than $600,000.

Without any show of emotion, A. Clark Cone, 56, pleaded guilty to grand theft and organized scheme to defraud. He was fingerprinted and taken into custody immediately.

Raised by the late Al Cone, who launched the careers of many prominent attorneys, A. Clark Cone was arrested in 2009, spurring a startling revelation. He is the biological son of Joe Peel, a once-respected attorney who was convicted of masterminding the 1955 drowning deaths of Judge Curtis Chillingworth and his wife.

While Cone's wife left the courtroom in tears, one of his victims said he had no sympathy.

"We put all our trust in Mr. Cone," said Anthony DePrizio, who flew in from Boston to tell Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Rapp how Cone's dishonesty prolonged the agony of a Riviera Beach car accident that nearly cost his wife her life. Instead of helping him and his wife recover money they needed for her care, he stole it.

Cone's prison sentence offered DePrizio little comfort.

"I don't care if he serves one day. I just want my money," he said.

Although ordered to make restitution, Cone appears to have no means to repay his clients.

He has been disbarred, his $540,000 home is in foreclosure, and he was represented by a public defender.

He took a $500,000 settlement he negotiated for the DePrizios in 2005, prosecutors said. He kept $100,000 he received in 2006 to settle a lawsuit on behalf of a Miramar man who lost his wife in a plane crash. He also kept $38,940 awarded a Boca Raton woman he represented in a slip-and-fall case.

But the extent of his misdeeds are unknown. A paralegal who worked for him said many people, including a couple who claimed their son suffered neurological damage because he was misdiagnosed at two local medical centers, lost their ability to recover money because Cone failed to file court papers on time.

Further, an examiner for The Florida Bar, who audited Cone's books, reported that he didn't keep records to show whose money he kept in his trust accounts. It was clear that Cone used the accounts as a piggy bank, the examiner said.

John Tuckett, who was driving the car when DePrizio's wife was injured, said he belatedly discovered that Cone had gotten $4,000 from an insurance company by forging his and his wife's signatures. He said he never asked Cone to pursue the insurance company and didn't know he had done so until DePrizio started investigating.

The deceit was hurtful, Tuckett said. He had recommended that DePrizio hire Cone because Cone and his son were friends.

Many who knew about Cone's connection to perhaps the most shocking crime in county history voiced similar sentiments after his arrest.

His mother married Al Cone after Peel was convicted for hiring two thugs to kill Chillingworth and his wife. Peel feared Chillingworth was about to blow the whistle on his lucrative bolita and numbers racket and strip him of his ability to practice law.

Al Cone adopted Clark Cone and his sister.

"I'm going down a horrible memory lane," longtime resident Mimi Mirsky said shortly after Cone's arrest.

Old article but good that the history is being preserved.

Liz Doup Staff Writer
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL
2/5/2002
JUDGE & EXECUTIONER

Bloodstains on the beach house stairs. A half-used roll of masking tape near the ocean's edge. Two people missing. Forever.

Now, nearly 50 years after Palm Beach County Judge Curtis Chillingworth and wife Marjorie vanished without a trace, a California performance artist brings their story -- arguably the most infamous murders in the county -- to the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach.

"I grew up with that story," says Doug Cooney, a West Palm Beach native who wrote and will perform Eye for an Eye on Friday and Saturday. "For kids who grew up on the beach, it had nightmare status."

The Chillingworth murders back in 1955 led to a long, costly manhunt, rewards of more than $100,000 -- a fortune at the time -- and a shocking ending. It wasn't a bunch of criminal lowlifes who wanted the judge dead. It was another local judge, Joe Peel.

And the Chillingworths weren't just any couple who'd put down roots in Palm Beach County. Their name was embedded in local history.

Chillingworth's grandfather served as Dade County sheriff at the turn of the century, then as West Palm Beach mayor. Chillingworth's father was the first city attorney.

Today, the family name graces a road off Okeechobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach. (The name is still in the news. Late last month, C.E. Chillingworth, a former attorney and a nephew of the deceased judge, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for misappropriating escrow funds. He's appealing the decision.)

Cooney, a lawyer turned writer now living in Los Angeles, was born in West Palm Beach a year after the Chillingworth murders. His family's library held a book about it titled The Murder Trial of Judge Peel.

"Don't read it," his parents admonished when he was young. "The story is just too shocking."

Blood and tape

That story comes to life in two large boxes of papers housed at the Palm Beach County Historical Society.

The yellowed newspaper clippings and family memorabilia tell the story of Curtis Chillingworth, 58, a humorless, incorruptible Circuit Court judge with a wife who loved to garden and three grown daughters.

In contrast, Municipal Judge Joe Peel, 31, was handsome, charming, poised. And corrupt.

Before Peel hatched the murder plot, he already was in trouble with Chillingworth, who'd reprimanded him publicly for unethically handling a divorce case.

But far worse, Peel took payoffs and sold protection to moonshine and bolita figures. Many thought Chillingworth was onto his game. For whatever reason, Peel decided Chillingworth had to die and hired two thugs to do the job.

Floyd "Lucky" Holzapfel, a West Palm Beach garage attendant, already had served time for bookmaking and armed robbery. Bobby Lincoln operated pool rooms in Riviera Beach and ran numbers and moonshine operations.

Their job, as they later testified: Kill the judge.

On the warm, moonless night of June 15, 1955, the judge and his wife returned to their beachfront home in Manalapan after dinner out. A knock awakened them.

Holzapfel stood outside, wearing a yachting cap, a pistol hidden from view.

"Are you Judge Chillingworth?" he asked.

"Yes, I am," Chillingworth answered.

Holzapfel drew a pistol and said it was a holdup. The men hadn't counted on killing Marjorie Chillingworth, but she was a witness. She had to die.

Chillingworth tried to bargain with Lincoln, offering him $200,000. "Boy, if you care for us now, you'll never have to work again."

But the men didn't bend and taped the Chillingworths' hands behind their backs. As they led the couple away, Marjorie Chillingworth screamed. Holzapfel smashed his pistol on her head, leaving blood on the stairway.

Still, nobody heard her. The closest neighbor was 700 yards down the beach.

The killers marched the couple to a beached boat they'd brought down from Riviera Beach, then headed toward the Gulf Stream. About two miles out, Holzapfel fastened 30-pound divers' belts around the couple, then pushed Marjorie Chillingworth into the calm Atlantic.

"Ladies first," he said, giving her a shove.

She quickly sank, leaving a small trail of bubbles.

Chillingworth followed. But the former Navy man was a strong swimmer, and Lincoln broke the stock of a shotgun over his head as he struggled to stay afloat. They pulled him up and added an anchor around his neck.

Then, he disappeared into the dark water, gone forever.

After the men returned to land, Holzapfel called Peel with this coded message: "The motor is fixed."

A long manhunt

When Chillingworth didn't come to work the next day, everyone knew there was trouble. But investigators had little to go on. Bloodstains on the steps. That roll of tape.

An intensive manhunt followed, which attracted national attention, an oddity for a town that didn't make major headlines in the '50s. But in spite of fruitless leads, the search continued.

"The ghost of Judge Chillingworth will not rest until his killers are shoveling coal in the fires of hell and damnation," declared prosecutor Phil O'Connell.

For five years, the case went unsolved until Holzapfel, fueled by alcohol, confessed and nailed Peel. Six years after the Chillingworths died, Peel was charged in their murder.

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Marvin Mounts, then a fledgling lawyer, remembers sitting in a packed courthouse, listening to Bobby Lincoln's testimony.

"It was so dramatic, you could hear a pin drop," says Mounts, who, for history's sake, saved Chillingworth's desk and chair, now safely stored in the Palm Beach County Courthouse. "Back then, we were a tight little community. Everybody knew the judge. All the lawyers knew each other."

During his 1961 trial, Peel was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ill with terminal cancer, he was paroled in 1982 and moved into the Jacksonville home of the flower girl from his first wedding. He died on July 2, after nine days of freedom.

A judge sent Holzapfel to Death Row in 1961, but his sentence was later commuted to life. He died in 1996 after spending 35 years in prison.

Bobby Lincoln, who was serving a three-year federal sentence on a moonshine conviction, received immunity for his testimony. After doing his time, he went free.

As much as O'Connell hated making the immunity deal, he had no choice. He needed Lincoln to prove the Chillingworths were murdered. Their bodies were never found.

Snip:
Cooney knows that Chillingworth is a venerable name to longtime residents who remember the family's story. And he knows the Chillingworths died with dignity, saving their last precious words for each other.

"I love you," Chillingworth told his wife on the boat.

"I love you, too," she answered.

Curtis and Marjorie Chillingworth, Murdered 1955
Bodies not recovered.

If they really were thrown into the sea then we will never know anything about them again, although there were some arrests, the real culprit never paid for his crime and only for being a hitman but the mind behind the murder was never tried or anything...
rest in peace

Curtis Eugene Chillingworth – The Charley Project