Original subtitles

In West Palm Beach, Florida in 1955,

there was one thing you could absolutely set your watch by,

and that was Judge Curtis Chillingworth's

8:00 A.M. arrival at the courthouse.

I worked for him for 15 years,

and I'd never, ever known him

to miss an appointment or be late to court.

So that morning, when 8:00 A.M. came and went,

and he hadn't arrived and he hadn't telephoned,

I wasn't just worried.

I was terrified.

Hello, sheriff?

West Palm Beach, Florida

back in the years after the war was a sleepy Southern town

compared to what it is today.

But even then, oceanfront land wasn't dirt-cheap,

so it was mostly people from the fancier side of the city

who could afford to keep little beach cottages.

And that's where the Judge and Marjorie

were supposed to be that morning,

at their bungalow just south of West Palm.

Hello? Judge Chillingworth?

Is anyone home?

The bedrooms, the beds were unmade.

They were a mess, as if somebody had gotten up and left them.

Judge Chillingworth's and Mrs. Chillingworth's clothes

were on chairs,

as if they had taken them off

and gotten in pajamas and went to bed.

And Judge Chillingworth's

wallet's on the bedside table with money in it.

Mrs. Chillingworth's purse is there with $40 in it,

so it wasn't a robbery.

Personal IDs, everything that they would take with them

on the most casual of trips...

A trip to the store, anything like that, is still there.

There's no indication whatsoever that they would've left.

There's no indication they took a walk on the beach,

or if they did take a walk on the beach, where are they?

Could they have gone for a swim?

But the bathing suits are there, as well.

Ryan, check the dining room.

Things look very neat.

The breakfast dishes are ready to be loaded up with food,

but there's no... they're not dirty.

And they don't know what to think.

Hi.

Ms. Chillingworth? Yes.

It's your parents, um...

No one's heard from them.

The kids, their own children,

who were at their other house in West Palm Beach,

have not heard from them.

Okay, and then they went home?

Yes, they... they said they were going home.

They went home. They left with their car.

And we're doing everything we can. Don't worry.

The Chillingworths had been at Mr. and Mrs. James Owens' house

the night before for a dinner party

to celebrate Judge Chillingworth's

32nd year on the bench.

And the party went on till about 10:00 or 10:30,

and he came home from there.

They set breakfast dishes out for the next day.

Can I take my best girl for a little spin

around the old dance floor?

This brings back memories!

People that knew the Chillingworths

glow when they talk about the couple.

The Judge and Mrs. Chillingworth

were one of those gold-plated couples.

They were perfect together.

They'd known each since they were children,

and got married right after the war.

She'd tease him and call him "punctilious,"

which is just a 50-cent word for fussy.

They were very close and loving,

and worked well together as a team.

And I think the Judge loved that Marjorie knew

he wasn't always as serious as he seemed.

Judge Chillingworth was one of only three judges.

Chillingworth wasn't just a judge.

He was almost local royalty.

His grandfather had been a mayor.

His father had been a city attorney and a big developer.

And in 1923, he was the youngest judge ever

in Florida history to be appointed to a circuit bench.

Judge Chillingworth was only 26 years old

when he reached that level of success,

but it wasn't just ambition or family history that drove him.

I think he was one of those men who genuinely loved the law.

Even so, he'd been on the bench a long time,

and recently he'd been talking about slowing down.

Their bedclothes are missing,

so they know that whatever happened to the Chillingworths

happened after they had decided to go to bed for the night.

Good night.

As they survey the area,

the sheriff's deputies walk outside

and they find one of the floodlights is broken.

Hey, sheriff.

You'd better come here and take a look at this.

So they start looking around...

And they find something else.

They find some blood.

And they found an empty spool of adhesive tape.

What do you think?

There was a stairway

leading from the beach house to the beach,

and they went down,

and they walked towards the beach to see what they could find.

They go down the stairs to the sand,

and there's more blood spatter.

Sheriff Kirk! Sheriff Kirk!

The only place that you might find footprints

that would be identifiable would be down where the sand was wet,

and they did find three sets going into the water.

They find some marks in the sand that indicate

a small boat came ashore

since the last tide change,

so that is one more thing that scares them.

One of the first things that they did is

they got a bunch of them together

to go down and help with the search.

It wasn't just the authorities at the house.

It was Chillingworths' friends.

I called Sheriff Kirk because I knew he wasn't just a lawman.

He was a friend, and he'd do anything to find the Judge.

Hello, Sheriff Kirk.

How long your birds been in the air?

They call, actually, the Palm Beach Air Force Base.

And the commander of the base and a local investigator

go up in a helicopter searching for them.

What have we heard from Coast Guard?

We haven't heard anything yet, sir.

The Coast Guard was searching for them, as well,

in case it was a swimming accident.

They got to go further out.

Tell them to increase their search to almost four miles.

They sent divers down,

and they really went quite far out with those divers.

All anyone wanted was a sign,

anything that could help us find them,

but one of the few little things the sheriff did have to go on,

well, we were scared to know what it meant.

So, they had blood samples

that they've taken from these blood spatters.

It's not like today,

where a blood spatter can give you

an enormous amount of information,

that a DNA test can match it directly to a person.

The only thing they can really tell at the time,

in 1955, is blood type,

and the blood type matches Mrs. Chillingworth.

Well, the next thing the investigators did was to say,

"Okay, maybe they did leave on a boat,"

but the cliché "needle in a haystack,"

really comes into play here,

although it was a needle in the ocean.

Even back then, a lot of people in Florida had boats,

so are you going to search every boat?

After all this massive search,

checking with other agencies,

having planes, boats in the water,

even after a couple of days, there is nothing

other than they believe

that they have been taken from the house.

They're thinking kidnapping.

Somebody has taken the Chillingworths.

They were gone, vanished, just like that,

and there was no trail to follow.

The only thing left was miles and miles of deep, blue sea.

It had been over a week

since Judge Chillingworth and his wife disappeared.

They left a dinner party in the Judge's honor,

drove back to their beach house,

and then, well, no one knew what.

Thank you for joining us today.

When the paper said that the police found

Mrs. Chillingworth's blood in the sand,

all of us at the courthouse, the secretaries, the clerks,

even Judge Peel and Judge White,

we were just desperate to know anything else

that could tell us what happened.

Friends, government entities,

even the state eventually put up large reward money in hopes

that somebody would have some information that would lead to

the Chillingworths being found alive or...

Knowing definitively whether they were dead or not.

The investigating officers rule was taken

by the abductors of Judge and Mrs. Chillingworth.

It's believed that the abductors

dragged the Chillingworths down these steps

and across the lawn.

That's the only story that's really being covered at length,

so there's no one in the area

that is not familiar with what's going on,

so anyone that might hear something can call in a tip.

I have a case here where a plumber and his wife

were both missing.

There were all kinds of questions

and people streaming in and out of the courthouse.

FBI agents from Miami even came up to talk to Sheriff Kirk,

because one of their cases...

well, it sounded a lot like what had happened to the Judge.

Just prior to the Chillingworths' disappearance

there was another disappearance, and it involved a couple.

Mr. Ferry was a plumber who was going to testify

in a tax trial against reputed mobster Albert Anastasia.

There's just enough similarity between the two crimes

to make the investigators looking for the Chillingworths

really take notice of the disappearance of the Ferrys

from North Miami Beach.

Both could have been connected to organized crime,

and might have even been connected to the same matter,

so suspicions were high that the two were related.

Well, that was just silly.

Anyone in town could've told you that the Judge, our Judge,

wasn't involved in any illegal activities,

so no one looked any farther down that path.

They didn't vanish into thin air,

so they must have disappeared for a reason.

Well, what was that reason?

Mr. Pickett, the court is aware

that you are abundantly familiar with this process.

And they start questioning,

"Okay, who might have wanted the judge dead?"

The People of the State of Florida

have found you guilty and proven the case.

He was one of only three judges in this huge area,

so there were a lot of cases where he ruled against people.

He sent people to jail.

During this time, you will make every legal effort

to return the money you have stolen

from the victims named in the state's complaint.

I was used to it, sitting in court,

seeing all those rulings,

but sometimes it would just be the look in someone's eye,

and I'd be worried about what they might want to do to the judge.

Judges have a particular type of threat

that surrounds them all the time,

and that is because judges have tremendous power.

They can sentence a person

to spend the rest of their life in jail.

They can take away people's homes.

They can take away people's land.

They can take away people's children.

And Judge Chillingworth was tough.

He wouldn't bend just because doing so might smooth the way,

and it wasn't just the lawbreakers.

He held everyone who came into his court

to the same high ideals, too.

If you give the court any further reason

to question your work,

I will have no alternative but to report you to the bar.

Who would've had a grudge against a judge?

The entire criminal world.

So, you have a tremendous list of suspects.

You would start, probably, with the most serious,

maybe even the most recent,

and then you'd have to wonder about their families.

Are their families involved in criminal activity?

And there was one family... two brothers, actually.

Well, the judge had a pretty tangled and strange history

with the Nelsons.

There was one individual, Charles Nelson,

whom the judge had sentenced to jail.

Charles Nelson's brother was a guy named Trapper Nelson,

and he lived up on a river

at the North End of Palm Beach County,

literally in the woods.

If it was a gator that needed skinning

or something that needed to be shot,

well, Trapper Nelson was the kind of man

that you would go to for those sorts of things.

Sheriff, what brings you all the way out here?

I want to talk to you about a few things.

What kind of things?

Well, when the Judge disappeared, your name came up.

Palm Beach County was a dichotomy of rich mansions

and stuffy gentry,

and, at the same time, almost wild-west desperados.

Trapper Nelson was one of those men

who was trying to get away from civilization.

Staked out deep into the Loxahatchee River Run,

and because I worked for Judge Chillingworth,

I knew that Trapper and the Judge

had some dealings in the past.

Keep going.

Both of them had been involved

with trying to buy the same land,

and almost competing for that same land.

Starting in the '30s,

with Chillingworth it was even earlier,

so he grew up in that atmosphere of,

"You buy land because it's going to be a good investment,

and you sell it later on and you make money, and you buy more land."

But Trapper Nelson was buying the land to preserve it.

He didn't want it developed.

Land disputes can be very personal.

They can get very emotional.

Anyone who was in that courtroom

when Trapper's brother was sentenced could of told you...

He didn't exactly go quietly.

Mr. Nelson,

The People of the State of Florida have found you guilty.

You shall be taken from this room

to the state farm at Raiford,

where you will serve a sentence at hard labor.

Just you wait, Judge. You're gonna pay for this!

You mark my words, I'm gonna kill you!

And it turns out,

Charles Nelson was also finally in a position

to make good on that threat.

Charles Nelson had done his prison time

and had recently gotten out within six months

of the disappearance of Judge Chillingworth.

In the week since the Judge and Marjorie had gone missing,

all we'd wanted was an answer.

And now there were two men, the Nelson brothers,

who looked like they both had reasons

to want to hurt the Judge.

When the police ultimately looked into

the relationship between Trapper and Judge Chillingworth,

they did not discover anything except a friendship.

Judge Chillingworth wasn't just a public figure.

He was a hometown West Palm boy, too,

and he had connections with all kinds of people here.

And Judge Chillingworth and Trapper

lived in totally different worlds,

yet the two managed to be friends,

which spoke to Judge Chillingworth's ability

to move fluidly through the community.

He was not a person who only associated with the upper crust.

Is Charlie here? Yeah.

They were asking Trapper, "Well, do you know where Charles was,

and what he did?"

Both of us were jacklightin' for gators in the marsh.

I keep a log book for Fish and Game.

I can show you the hides if you'd like.

And Trapper actually had an alibi for him.

So, they eliminated Charles Nelson, as well.

Weeks turned into months turned into years,

and this judge and his wife, these prominent people,

had just fallen off the face of the earth.

So finally, in order to settle the estate,

the family went and got them officially declared dead,

but, of course, there were no bodies.

The disappearance of a judge is huge.

It's huge in the '50s. It's huge in the '60s.

It's huge today.

Judges just don't disappear.

It scares people to the bone.

In 1955, when you had only three judges in this huge area

and one of them's been kidnapped or murdered,

along with his wife,

if somebody would do that, how safe am I?

After two years, there are still people in the community

who want to find who committed this crime,

but there's just literally nothing to go on.

It seems like somebody got away with it.

But, then it happened.

Something came up out of the ocean

that would lead us to the truth,

but right then, no one knew that's where it was headed.

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office finds a body in a canal

west of West Palm Beach.

The Sheriff's Bureau sends down an agent named Henry Lovern.

And I know what you're thinking,

but it wasn't the Judge.

It was just some nobody.

It was a body of a young man named Lew Gene Harvey,

from Jacksonville, Florida.

So, just stay with me, because believe it or not,

Lew Gene Harvey, that poor dead man in the canal,

was the first step down a windy path

to the truth about the Chillingworths.

Lew Gene Harvey's wife said that her husband

was having a business meeting, and he was nervous about it.

The wife, perhaps because that she knew that her husband

wasn't on his way to an Eagle Scout meeting,

she decided to write down the license plate

of the car that he had stepped into.

The investigators run the license plate,

and it comes back to a fellow named Floyd "Lucky" Holzapfel,

who they knew very well.

In 1955, in West Palm Beach,

Floyd Holzapfel... they called him "Lucky"...

was just about as bad a man as you could find.

"Lucky" Holzapfel is a crafty, dangerous thug.

His business is to bring in money through gambling,

through moonshining, through prostitution,

through loansharking.

Murder is just another facet of his business.

Lucky, Lucky.

Bobby, Bobby.

Bobby Lincoln was a partner of Floyd "Lucky" Holzapfel.

How's business?

Business is great. It's about to get better.

Let's go separate some fools from their dollars.

Lincoln was his liaison to the black neighborhoods.

You got to remember back then, everything was segregated.

A white man didn't go in

and run bolita games in the black neighborhoods.

Let's get this game started.

Bolita is a corruption of the Spanish word for "ticket,"

and it was literally the lottery,

just like they have lottery now,

except it wasn't run by the state.

It was illegal, and so it was run by gangsters and criminals.

Pow!

17!

These are two of the scariest, nastiest guys around.

Everybody out, out, out.

The police did everything they could to shut them down,

but they were always one step ahead.

And what's the best way to stay one step ahead of the law?

Why, to have a man on the inside, of course.

So, Detective Lovern needed his own man on the inside,

and that's when he came across Jim Yenzer,

a man who knew enough about Lucky's business

to have a guilty conscience and an urge to unburden himself.

And you know Lew Gene?

He's around.

Well, he's not around anymore.

You know anything about that?

Drinking with those guys,

I'm starting to hear about things that I don't want to know about.

What kind of things?

I can't say for sure,

and I don't really know anything at all,

but, look, Floyd, you know?

He might've said something about Judge Chillingworth.

What'd he say?

There's a hole in the bottom of the ocean

that nobody's found the bottom of yet.

And there you have it.

Henry Lovern thought he was investigating

a bootlegging murder,

and he stumbled onto the Chillingworth case,

just like that.

Now, Henry Lovern is focused on Lucky Holzapfel

and his connection to the Chillingworths disappearance.

It's amazing how things happen.

It was a full five years

since the Judge and Mrs. Chillingworth had vanished.

The police believed a local gangster named Lucky Holzapfel

was behind it,

and they'd managed to convince

one of his former associates to help them.

Hi.

We're going to need specifics on what happened that night,

all right? Yeah.

Yenzer is working with the authorities

to help trap Lucky Holzapfel.

The FDLE gets Yenzer to lure lucky to a hotel room.

What Lucky didn't know is that

the authorities were going to be in another room next door

with a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

If you were in the room with Yenzer,

you would have no indication that anything's being recorded.

Microphone could be hidden in a lamp

or at the edge of a painting,

but it's not like today where things can be done wirelessly

with little... this is a major operation.

They have wires running through the walls

to the next hotel room,

where there were several Florida Sheriff's Bureau agents

with giant recorders

that use the old 8-inch reel-to-reel tapes.

So, over the span of three days,

they knocked back a lot of liquor

and Lucky did a lot of talking,

and they used 30 reels of tape.

You know what I done for him?

Do you have any idea what I'd done for that man?

Who's he talking about?

You've done a lot, but I don't know specif...

you have no idea.

Not everything.

A lot of things nobody knows about.

You've said that to me before. I don't know what you mean.

I know it must be important.

Peel owes me.

Judge Peel?

So, Lucky was talking about a judge, all right,

but it wasn't Judge Chillingworth.

It was another judge in West Palm Beach...

Judge Joe Peel.

Judge Peel was a West Palm Beach boy.

He's been born in West Palm Beach.

He's served honorably in World War II.

Came back from overseas and went off to law school.

He was smooth.

He could talk you around.

He was a ladies man.

He was a man about town in many different ways.

Well, according to my judgment,

and the great State of Florida,

looks like you gentlemen have cleared all the hurdles,

and here is your bench warrant.

Judge Peel was a municipal judge who handled

simple search warrants that come through their arrest warrants,

minor, maybe traffic issues, things like that.

Thanks again, Judge.

You gentleman take it easy.

All right.

Lincoln, 6:00 today, you're gonna get yourself

two sheriff's deputies coming inquiring about your business.

Judge Peel would grant the warrant

for a raid of some sort, say on a gambling operation.

Then, before the police could execute the warrant,

Judge Peel would call ahead and warn the people.

Those people paid Judge Peel so they could get that phone call,

so they could be warned in advance.

Everybody out, out, out.

When Judge Peel was making those phone calls back in his chamber,

one of the people he was calling was Bobby Lincoln.

Lucky, Lincoln, and Peel were all into racketeering,

prostitution rings, bolita numbers.

They were doing it all.

And the closer Yenzer got to hearing Lucky's secret,

the closer he was to being a man who knew too much.

You don't even know

where that Judge would be without me.

I mean, I know there were things that we did...

Yeah. ...We worked on.

What kind of stuff have you done?

You remember, that Judge, Chillingworth,

and his wife that disappeared a couple years ago?

Lucky got pretty drunk and his lips got pretty loose,

and pretty soon they had the whole story.

Hours and hours passed,

and those men drank and rambled and ranted,

and they started all over again,

and finally, Lucky Holzapfel explained it all...

every awful, nasty step of the way.

All right. That's him.

Take a good look, gentlemen.

Days before the disappearance of the Chillingworths,

Judge Peel says to Lucky and Bobby,

"Boys, there's a man who's trying to ruin our business,

and we've got to kill him."

They didn't know Chillingworth at all.

Peel takes them over to his house,

and he points out what he looks like.

I want you to burn that face into your memories.

But Judge Peel had done a good job

hiding his dealings with the West Palm criminal world.

Furthermore, if Judge Chillingworth

knew anything about it, Peel would've already been in jail,

so it didn't make any sense.

Lucky went out and bought a skiff,

and he paid for it with cash from the bolita operation.

He had also bought a second anchor,

and they passed a bottle of whiskey between them...

And they chugged off from the marina

and headed down the ocean.

They were going to take the boat down to Manalapan

where they knew Chillingworth would be.

They were surprised that the wife was with him.

They thought only the Judge would be at the cottage.

That wasn't part of the deal. She wasn't supposed to be there.

Lucky was wearing a boat captain's hat and a blue shirt.

Lincoln was hiding in the bushes

when the Chillingworths heard the pounding on the door.

Yes?

Excuse me, sir. Sorry to disturb you.

My boat broke down.

I was wondering if I could come in and use your phone.

Well, where did you dock the boat?

Is there anybody else in the house?

He wasn't doing a very good job with the story,

so finally he just pulled out a gun and he said to the Judge,

"This is a stick-up."

Except it wasn't a stick-up.

Bobby, get the light.

Bobby Lincoln smashes the porch light.

He didn't want anybody to see what's going on.

They wrap their hands with adhesive tape,

and that's, of course, where the empty spool shows up.

Help!

Holzapfel hits her, and that's what caused the blood spatter.

It was Peel who came up with this great idea

of dumping them in the ocean, 'cause he figured

no body, no conviction.

The boat was out in the open ocean for almost an hour.

And by then the Chillingworths must have known

how this was going to end.

So they weighed them down with weights.

Judge Chillingworth says, "Honey, I love you."

Marjorie says, "I love you, too."

And now, you throw in the Judge,

and he's strong enough to kick up, even with the weight,

and come up out of water,

so they're forced to strike him with the butt of a shotgun.

It's that image of the Chillingworths

sinking through the waters of the Atlantic

that haunt Lincoln and Lucky Holzapfel

the rest of their lives.

Hello, America!

Peel had arranged to be watching

"The $64,000 Question," the game show,

so he would have an alibi.

They call Judge Peel,

and they say, simply, "The motor is fixed."

Now Peel knows his problems with Judge Chillingworth are over.

And under it all,

the reason it all happened was a tiny case,

and it had nothing to do with gangsters.

If you give the court any further reason

to question your work,

I will have no alternative but to report you to the bar

and recommend that you are no longer allowed

to practice law in this state.

It wasn't Peel's dealings with those criminals and low-lifes.

Judge Chillingworth had caught Peel

doing something much worse in his eyes...

shoddy work as a lawyer.

The old man had reprimanded Peel the first time in 1953,

two years before the Judge's disappearance.

Is my meaning clear, sir?

Yes, Judge.

Two years later, Peel's handling a divorce for a woman,

and he appears to be too lazy to file the final paperwork,

and she ends up remarrying and finds out she's a bigamist,

so she files a complaint.

Peel had done it again.

He was about to appear before Judge Chillingworth

for his second breach of ethics.

Judge Chillingworth was going to have a hearing.

It might've been the end of Peel's legal career and judgeship.

If Judge Chillingworth were to disbar Judge Peel,

he would lose his ability to run his money-making operation.

You know, he drives a Cadillac,

he makes sure his wife has the best clothes,

and he's got a standard of living

that is higher than it should be.

And the amazing thing was, it was right there

on Judge Chillingworth's calendar all along.

The date of the hearing was June 15, 1955,

which, of course, is the day Judge Chillingworth disappeared.

Blood running out of him,

as he sunk back down into the ocean.

This is one of the first times

where an undercover conversation

is used to elicit and record a confession.

This is the police! Open the door!

You are under arrest. Whoa, whoa...

You have the right to remain silent.

Holzapfel is arrested and then ultimately charged,

along with Bobby Lincoln...

And Peel, for the murder

of Judge Chillingworth and his wife.

When I was a kid, Joe Peel was like the boogeyman.

Someone comes into your house

and grabs you and throws you in the ocean.

There's nothing that would scare you worse.

On June 14th,

the day before Judge Chillingworth and his wife

were taken from their home in Manalapan,

the Judge had written a draft of his resignation letter

to the governor of Florida.

He felt it was time to start a new period in his life.

He and his wife wanted to spend more time together.

To me, that is so sad.

It's a different time now.

We're so used to the Judge Peels of the world,

men serving their own interests, lying, and cheating,

that it's hard to remember

that it used to be men like Judge Chillingworth

that we hoped for, and expected.

So, I guess we can say that time marches on and we make progress,

but I know I wish we could have some things back.

I wish some things had never changed.