1950’s Gay College Student Killers: Harlow Fraden and Dennis Wepman

I am intrigued.

From Time magazine, December 28, 1953:

[quote] Until he killed his parents last summer, Harlow Fraden was unable to work out any really satisfactory way of shaping his environment to fit his ego and personality. He tried immersing himself in poetry, but his mother—whom he habitually described to friends as "that hateful paranoid"—would have none of it. After he graduated from New York University as a chemistry major last June, she plagued him to get a job "like other boys." Instead, Harlow—a tall, thin, languid youth with cropped red hair and heavy hornrimmed glasses—lounged about the family's Bronx apartment, owlishly reading verse. Eying him, his mother bawled the word: "Fairy!"

I’d say Mother had it coming

I never heard of them. How is that possible?

December 1953 Part 1

Until he killed his parents last summer, Harlow Fraden was unable to work out any really satisfactory way of shaping his environment to fit his ego and personality. He tried immersing himself in poetry, but his mother—whom he habitually described to friends as "that hateful paranoid"—would have none of it. After he graduated from New York University as a chemistry major last June, she plagued him to get a job "like other boys." Instead, Harlow—a tall, thin, languid youth with cropped red hair and heavy hornrimmed glasses—lounged about the family's Bronx apartment, owlishly reading verse. Eying him, his mother bawled the word: "Fairy!"

Harlow's father finally told him to "get the hell out of the house" and to stay out until he had made something of himself. In a way this worked out rather well—as the youth might have guessed it would. His parents had alternately berated and pampered him all his life. When he was small, his mother jeered at him as a "sissy"—and bribed other children to play with him. When he grew older, his parents bought an air conditioner for his bedroom, although they sweltered through summers without one themselves. When he set six fires in their apartment one night during his teens, they doggedly protected him from a suspicious fire marshal.

Having thrown him out, his anxious parents gave him $2,000 to make a start in life and sent him a liberal allowance. Harlow got a $215-a-month apartment on Manhattan's East End Avenue, and invited a dark, handsome young man friend named Dennis Wepman to live with him. But after a while, his parents cut the allowance in another attempt to force him to get a job.

"Who Are You?" That was pushing Harlow too far. and he decided that life would be much more attractive if his mother and father were out of the way. The elder Fradens lived simply and both worked—Mrs. Fraden as a $6,3OO-a-year teacher in the public schools, her husband, a physician, at a $6,800-a-year post in the city health department. But they had managed to set aside a considerable nest egg; counting insurance, savings, pension benefits and some jewelry, they were worth in the neighborhood of $96,000—dead. Harlow found it ridiculously easy to kill his parents.

After careful discussion of the matter with Roommate Wepman, a Miami attorney's son with vague literary pretensions, Chemist Fraden decided to use potassium cyanide as a terminal agent. One evening last August, he put a vial of the stuff in his pocket, got a bottle of champagne, called on his parents and joyously announced that he had got a job. He poured three glasses of wine, added cyanide to two of them, and asked his parents to join him in a toast to his future. They drank and toppled to the floor.

Part 2 December 28, 1953

Harlow hurried to the door and called Wepman in to witness his triumph. The elder Fraden, still conscious, looked up at the newcomer and asked, "Who are you?' Neither youth bothered to answer him. Harlow reached for the vial of cyanide, knelt carefully, and poured more poison into his father's mouth. The partners in crime stayed on for more than an hour to make sure the parents were dead. Then they put the third champagne glass into a paper sack, broke it, and departed, dropping the fragments into a sewer on their way. Two days later, Harlow came back to the apartment, found the bodies, called the police and wept hysterically at his parents' "suicides."

The Unfettered Life. After that, Harlow's life was improved. He bought a $4,000 Oldsmobile, made a deposit on an $18,000 Rolls-Royce, which he proposed to pick up later in London. He read poetry, ate well, and enjoyed the company of kindred spirits. His existence was not completely smooth: two Bronx detectives spent weeks tailing him, and on one occasion had the temerity to ask him if he had killed his parents. He replied that he was a gentleman; otherwise he would tell them what he thought of such a "dastardly" suggestion.

Neighbors in his apartment house complained at the noisy, late parties he gave for his men friends. He was evicted as an "undesirable tenant" after one of his guests tore a washbasin off the wall, loosing streams of water which did $15,000 damage to the building. Harlow moved airily to an expensive room at the St. Moritz hotel.

Last week, however. Harlow had cause for real annoyance. He had a falling-out with Roommate Wepman. who had expected a small fortune, but had got only $120 for his work as a murderer's apprentice. Wepman hit Harlow over the head with a blackjack, leaving a gash which took 18 stitches to close. Worse, Wepman suffered pangs of conscience, and blabbed the story of the crime to a girl. The girl told her doctor. The doctor sent her to the police. The police arrested the pair.

Wepman told the whole story. Harlow sat placidly by, reading from the Oxford Book of English Verse and icily ignored the whole undignified affair, although he looked up at one time and said coldly: "He speaks for himself, not for me." Harlow himself talked only after the police accused him of murdering for gain. Nothing, he announced indignantly, could have been further from the truth—he had killed his mother simply because he hated her and killed his father because he was under Mrs. Fraden's thumb.

The two youths were put in a detention cell prior to being charged with murder. "We're going to the electric chair," Wepman bawled at other prisoners. "Where are you going?" Harlow ignored him. Harlow was reading Dryden.

Jews.

If anyone is curious, Fraden died in a mental hospital in 1960– overdose. Wepman was paroled in 1968.

I think Ryan Murphy’s going to need to go with casting against reality to get this made. Perhaps Jacob Elordi and Nico Greetham?

This is a pretty good article.

Whoops, sorry, that was the paywalled link, here's the archive:

I read Whisper His Sin years ago and liked it a lot. I tried looking for more info on this murder and couldn't find much. Thanks, OP

[quote]I’d say Mother had it coming

r2 I'd say the guy was an adult and should've moved out of his parent's house. The mother had good reason to be angry.

She was a homophobe

Per the NY Daily News article, he was in his own apartment, his parents were paying for it but complaining because he wasn't looking for a job to make his own money.

It also mentions that she had abused him in childhood and at one point he started a bunch of fires in the house when he was a little kid, apparently in response to the abuse.

Moral of the story is to never have an accomplice when you do all the heavy lifting

Was he spared prison/execution and sent to Bellevue?

I'd like to propose a toast... to Muuuurrrrder!

He laid on his ass and read verse while sponging off of his folks. He wouldn’t work. He wanted to party and have orgies.

[quote] He laid on his ass and read verse while sponging off of his folks. He wouldn’t work. He wanted to party and have orgies.

r17 Thank you. And then the psycho killed two people.

[quote]Wepman told the whole story. Harlow sat placidly by, reading from the Oxford Book of English Verse and icily ignored the whole undignified affair, although he looked up at one time and said coldly: "He speaks for himself, not for me."

MARY!

Fraden went on to found DL!

Wepman was really cute! Too bad he was an accessory to murder.

Fraden had a chaotic childhood. It's almost as if his parents TRIED to raise an awful person. By vascillating between the abuse and spoiling him (out of guilt? Trying to encourage him in life?), he was bound to be fucked up.

That said, it obviously doesn't excuse his crimes. Thanks OP. I'd never heard of this story before, and it's perfectly suited for DL discussion.

Goals!

[quote] I’d say Mother had it coming

Oh, right! It's always the mother's fault with you people, isn't it!

Just ignore them, Patsy.

Buck never would have killed anybody.

Never heard of this before...thanks, OP.

It would be interesting to know what happened to Wepman after he was paroled...he could still be alive somewhere, maybe under an assumed name. DL sleuths?

Reminds me a little of Leopold and Loeb

R21, I didn't see any abuse in the descriptions of his childhood. I just saw normal parents trying to get a ne'er do well son off his ass to get a job. The amounts of money referenced (his allowances, his rent) in the early 1950s were large sums of money for that time. As noted upthread, Fraden was committed to a psychiatric hospital after being found insane in 1954. He committed suicide years later.

Wepman became a writer. He has many books listed online.

He tried to retract his guilty plea in 1967 but his appeal was denied. I googled Harlow Fraden's name and got the case which is listed as Herman Wepman.

Also this was interesting from a 1954 article:

Handsome young Dennis Wepman moved to Manhattan from his home in Florida in 1951 with plans to write a novel. Inspiration was lacking until a friend, Harlow Fraden, confided that he planned to poison his parents. To Wepman this sounded like fine material for a book. While Fraden tricked his parents into gulping cyanide-spiked champagne last August, Wepman lurked in the corridor, taking notes. They framed the murder as a suicide pact.

For four months the deaths remained on record as suicide. Then, one night, Wepman and a literary-minded girl friend began playing the game suggested by Novelist Dostoevsky. Wepman told her about the murder. Horrified, she passed it on to the police.

Fraden was committed in February to the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminal insane, but psychiatrists reported that Wepman, although mentally ill, was not legally insane. Last week he was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Taken to Sing Sing, he asked for a typewriter. Perhaps he was ready to begin his novel.

Bump

It’s very interesting that one of these guys became a writer too. In the OP I alluded to the similarity of the real life teen lesbian murderers that Heavenly Creatures was based on, and one of those killers also became a writer, and a well known one who wrote historical murder mysteries and detective fiction.

So, basically, almost simultaneously, at opposite ends of the globe you have these two sets of young homosexual lovers commit parricide thinking they’ve planned it perfectly and getting caught. The press sensationalized the cases, so they were well known. I’m surprised this didn’t feed into more homophobia about these deviant same sex relationships provoking parent murder and that being attached to Gay people as another label?

Thanks for crowd sourcing information on this, as a few of you’ve said, how have we not heard of this before?

Multiply the money amounts mentioned in the articles above by ten to get their approximate values today.

Loeb and Lepold were prettier. (Loeb at least.)

Harlow seems to be such an unusual name to begin with, but yet two Gay murders have had that name. The other being the pornstar/escort Harlow Cuadra who was one of the pair of Gay lovers who murdered the pornographer to get access to film with Brent Corrigan. That was quite the salacious murder mystery as well. That Harlow was very hot though, and plenty of his porn is still out their for the watching, the camera really loved him. It’s all depicted in the movie King Cobra, and while Keegan Allen is exceptionally hot, he looked nothing like Harlow.

R27 = Sherlock Holmes dumber sister