On the afternoon of May 13, 1937, New York State Trooper Joseph Hunt spotted a speeding Chevrolet with only one license plate in Dover Plains, N.Y. The motorcycle cop gave chase.
Hunt pulled them over and asked the freckle-faced driver for his license. As the youth fumbled, Hunt peered into the car. A young woman was in the passenger seat.
Then Hunt noticed a loaded revolver and dark stains on the upholstery.
“That’s blood,” he said. “Whose is it?”
“I killed a man down near Little Rock. We bummed a ride with him and shot him,” the driver said. “I put his body in the back seat and dumped it out along the road.”
In making what he thought was a routine traffic stop, Hunt had captured two dangerous fugitives — Lester Brockelhurst, 23, and Bernice Felton, 18 — wanted for a six-week robbery and murder spree, hitting 15 states.
Brockelhurst quickly offered police a 2,000-word confession, saying he shot three men and committed about two dozen robberies. Newspapers dubbed him the “Crime Tourist.”
And he said he did it all for love.
Lester, the son of a respectable businessman from Galesburg, Ill., was active in the Mormon church and a Sunday school teacher.
In 1934, he attended an event that changed his life, a church contest in Tri-Cities, Ill. Lester recited the Beatitudes in a public speaking competition.
There, he first laid eyes on Bernice, a Rockford high school honor student. She lived with her family about 150 miles from Galesburg, but that didn’t stop him from visiting as often as he could.
Lester, who worked for his dad then, asked for a raise to see Bernice more often. That sparked an argument, and his dad kicked him out of the house.
With no car or money, Lester hitchhiked to Chicago and held up a candy store. Police quickly nabbed him, and he was packed off to a reformatory.
“Bernice wrote me regularly each week, and her letters were all that made life bearable,” he said in a news wire interview shortly after his arrest. “I was as madly in love with her then as I am today.”
The Felton family took him in after his parole, and he tried to raise money so he and Bernice could marry. But he had trouble holding down jobs, so he decided to try to make a new start in Salt Lake City.
“I wanted Bernice to go with me,” he said. “She told me that she loved me and that she would go.”
First, they needed a car. So, on March 31, 1937, Lester bought a gun, walked to the shoulder of a road on the outskirts of Rockford, and stuck out his thumb.
J. Albin Theander, a local tailor, pulled over to offer the wholesome-looking stranger a ride, the last mistake he’d ever make. After a few miles, Lester pulled out his gun and shot him.
“I felt sorry for the guy, but what was I to do?” he later said in an interview. “I wanted his car, and I got it.”
He tossed the corpse on the side of the road and sped back to Rockford, where Bernice was waiting. With $40 from Theander’s wallet and $42 from Bernice’s savings, they set out to Salt Lake City. When they ran out of cash, Lester took little robbery road trips.
In Fort Worth on April 28, he shot café owner Jack Griffith, a passerby who had tried to help a woman that Lester was robbing.
“He looked awful funny lying there in the road crumpled up like a balloon with the gas out of it,” Lester mused later.
Griffith died in the hospital on May 5.
On that bloody excursion, he crashed Theander’s car into a pole and then ran from police. From then on, he and his gal were on foot.
On May 6, Victor A. Gates, a wealthy Arkansas landowner, picked up a pair of young hitchhikers near Little Rock.
Bernice sat up front. Lester, in the back seat, wasted no time. He held the gun against the driver’s neck and ordered him to stop. Gates put up a fight and ended up with a bullet in his head. Lester got behind the wheel, driving with the corpse in the backseat. He then dumped the body into a gully.
After meandering around Little Rock and Nashville, they headed north, aiming for Canada. Lester discarded the Arkansas plates in Philadelphia and swiped a Pennsylvania license plate from a parked car.
As they passed through Dover Plains, N.Y., Hunt stopped them for a traffic violation — a missing license plate.
Both lovebirds were tried in Arkansas for the murder of Victor Gates.
After a one-day trial, it took 22 minutes for the jury to decide Lester was guilty, which meant death in the electric chair.
“KILLER FAINTS AS JURY DOOMS HIM TO CHAIR,” screamed the Daily News headline on June 25, 1937. “Crime Tourist’s’ Girl Pal on Trial Today.”
At her trial, Lester insisted on taking the stand to tell how she participated in the crimes. The jury acquitted her in less than an hour and a half, despite “the attempt of Lester Brockelhurst, who slew three men for love of her, to drag her to the electric chair with him,” The News noted.
The Crime Tourist’s last words went on for 12 minutes at his March 18, 1938 execution. It was clear his passion for his one-time flame had cooled.
“I am guilty, and I am paying for my crime,” he said. “But Bernice is as guilty as I am. The only thing that brought me down was a slight love affair with a girl.”
