Sixth Horror Story

One brisk October morning last year, in a parking lot at North Arlington, N. J., a policeman, mildly curious, wakened a pimply youth of 18 asleep at the wheel of a large sedan. The boy yawned, told the inquisitive policeman to look in the car's trunk. The good cop did so and shuddered. Wedged in the trunk was the mangled body of Dr. James G. Littlefield, 63, stuffed in the rear seat the body of his wife. The boy, Paul Dwyer of South Paris, Me., then told a strange and horrible story: that he had killed the old doctor for casting a slur on his girl, bundled him into the trunk of his own car and then taken his wife searching for him, killed Mrs. Littlefield when she grew suspicious, cruised through six States for three days with his gruesome cargo. After changing the details of this narrative four times, Paul Dwyer was convicted of murder, sent for life to Maine's State Prison at Thomaston. Last week Convict Dwyer was back in court with a sixth version of the murders, by far the strangest, most horrible.

The girl whom Paul Dwyer accused old Dr. Littlefield of slurring was blonde, pert Barbara Carroll, 17-year-old daughter of a South Paris deputy sheriff. Since Dwyer originally said he consulted the doctor about a venereal disease, this mention of Barbara Carroll was a slur indeed. Dwyer omitted her name from subsequent confessions, gave the murder motive as robbery. To friendly South Parisians, Barbara and her father, a respectable World War veteran and deacon, were characters almost as touching as Mrs. Jessie Dwyer, a simple nurse who had long struggled to keep her fatherless boy out of debt. But last May, 43-year-old Francis M. Carroll was arrested for incestuous relations with his daughter Barbara. At Thomaston, Paul Dwyer once more began to talk.

Last week, Barbara Carroll went to the South Paris courthouse to see her father, on trial for the murder of Dr. Littlefield.

The State's star witness against Defendant Carroll was Convict Dwyer, now 19, more pasty-faced than ever after eight months in a cell. On the basis of his sixth confession, a 17-page horror story told with flashes of incongruous drugstore wit, Special Assistant Attorney General Ralph M. Ingalls had reopened a closed case. The story: Barbara had told Dwyer of relations with her father to stop him from reproaching himself about her lost virginity; Dwyer taxed Carroll with it and the father threatened, bullied, finally accused him of making Barbara pregnant; when Dr. Littlefield, called in to examine the girl, learned of the incest, Carroll strangled the doctor, forced Dwyer to drive away with the body; during Dwyer's trial, Carroll had scared him into silence.

Called to the stand to substantiate his story, Convict Dwyer first collapsed. Next day he took the stand, cocky and glib. When defense lawyers asked him what had happened to Mrs. Littlefield, who was not mentioned in the Carroll indictment, young Dwyer replied that Carroll had strangled her with Dwyer's belt in a remote spot in the hills. "I turned my face away," said Paul Dwyer.

Liable to life imprisonment (Maine's maximum murder penalty) if convicted, Defendant Carroll sat calm, tight-lipped in court. His lawyers, presumably hoping to prove that Accuser Dwyer is a pathological liar, planned to call 62 witnesses. Among them: Barbara Carroll.

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