EYE FOR AN EYE

Exploring America's criminal justice system at its most extreme: Inflicting the Death Penalty

The True Crime of Irene Schroeder

During the early days of the Great Depression, one patrolman is killed and another seriously wounded while trying to prevent a trio of bandits who had robbed a department store in Western Pennsylvania from making a getaway. The surviving officer said it was not one of the two men who killed his partner, but the woman of the group, a young blonde, who was using her four-year-old son as a shield in the getaway. The child, recovered a few days later at his grandfather’s house, confirmed the story, and a nationwide manhunt ends in the desert mountains near Phoenix, Arizona, where the blond and her companions shoot it out with police for six hours, until they run out of ammunition.

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Music by Chuck Wiggins