Help Wanted: The Macabre Death of Samuel Resnick

There are certain people who, for one reason or another, have a way of attracting people who are eager to murder them.  What makes the following case stand out is that exactly the opposite appears to have happened: A man was desperate to find someone willing to kill him, and he had a damned hard time achieving that goal.

Samuel Resnick was a jeweler in Albany, New York, for nearly thirty years until a heart condition forced his retirement in 1959, after which he and his wife Lillian retired to Phoenix, Arizona.  However, he still occasionally dealt in gemstones.  Life went quietly enough until the evening of March 1, 1962, when the 61-year-old Samuel told Lillian he was going for a walk.  That in itself was hardly unusual--evening strolls were a frequent part of his daily routine.  What was unusual is that he failed to return home.

Lillian and their 35-year-old son Martin immediately reported his disappearance to the police.  However, the mystery of Samuel’s whereabouts was not solved until March 4, when a horseback rider found his body on a little-used desert trail 10 miles outside of the city.  He had been beaten and then strangled with a rope.

The coroner estimated that Samuel died about four hours after leaving his home.  To most observers, the motive for his murder seemed obvious--his expensive diamond ring, a watch, his wallet, and a gemstone-studded Masonic ring were all missing from his body.  Neighbors told police that on the night Samuel disappeared, they had seen him talking to a couple of young men.  

The police, however, had reason to believe that something far more complicated--not to mention bizarre--than a mere robbery had happened.  A few months earlier, a man came to them with a startling story:  He had answered a “help wanted” ad that Samuel had placed in a local newspaper.  The man was appalled to learn that the job Resnick wanted him to do was to murder him.

Unfortunately, at the time the police shrugged off the man’s claims, but upon realizing that the jeweler had evidently found someone more cooperative, they began searching the advertisements in back copies of newspapers for possible suspects.  A 19-year-old named Clemmie Jackson caught their eye.  Clemmie was not around when police went to his home, but a search of the car belonging to his uncle turned up a length of rope identical to the one that had been used to strangle Samuel.  They also found a cluster of paper strips like ones found near Samuel’s body.  Clemmie’s brother, R.E. Jackson, told police the strips came from the paper shredding company where he worked.  R.E. claimed he knew nothing about the Resnick murder, and had no idea where his brother was.

On March 17, Clemmie was arrested in Crockett, Texas.  He readily--almost eagerly--told police his version of how Samuel Resnick came to die.  And what a story it was.  Clemmie had placed an advertisement in the papers looking for work.  On February 25, Samuel responded to the ad, telling Clemmie that if he was willing to kill him, the young man could have all the jewelry he was wearing, as well as any cash in his pockets.

I would like to think that if a stranger asked me to murder them, my response would be a polite “No, thank you,” and a quick rush to the nearest exit, but Clemmie was apparently a more accommodating and open-minded sort.  He gathered together a band of accomplices--his brother R.E., and three friends, Jesse Tillis, John Henry Lewis Jones, and Ernest Spurlock--and settled with Samuel that the big day would be March 1.  However, Clemmie said that at the last moment he had “chickened out” and allowed his confederates to do the deed without him.

When these men were arrested, they all confirmed Clemmie’s story, adding that they had agreed to the murder “because Mr. Sam had cancer and had only six months to live and wanted to leave his family some money.”  They went on to say that after meeting “Mr. Sam” at the prearranged spot in the desert, he coached them on how to strangle him, adding, “Do a good job.”  Two of them stood on each side of the jeweler and pulled the rope, but it quickly broke.

Samuel was beginning to get exasperated.  He told them, “Here, let me show you how.”  He doubled the rope for them and got on his knees.  The young men began feeling qualms about the whole enterprise, and tried to talk him out of proceeding, but Samuel was insistent.  “And this time, he helped, too.”  Once Samuel was dead, the confederates stripped his body of his jewelry and money, and then beat the corpse and turned his pockets inside out to make it look like a simple robbery.  

At first, police found their story unbelievable, and one can’t really blame them for that.  But then, yet another Phoenix man came forward, saying that Samuel had tried enlisting him as a hit man.  “I think those boys you’ve arrested are telling the truth,” he added.  Three other men, including Samuel’s barber, also told police that the late jeweler had tried talking them into murdering him.

Samuel’s widow and son, along with his physician and the doctor who had autopsied him, all denied that Samuel had cancer.  However, the medical examiner conceded that the jeweler was in very poor health, suffering from a grossly enlarged heart, an enlarged spleen, and a congested liver.  It seemed possible that Samuel might have preferred a quick end to his physical woes.  It was surmised that his reason for choosing murder over suicide was to enable his wife to get the “double indemnity” benefits from his $50,000 life insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London.

Whether Samuel really wanted to die or not, the law still forbade anyone from obliging him.  The five young men were all put on trial for first-degree murder.  In brief, the defense argued that the ultimate blame for Samuel’s death rested on the victim, while prosecutors insisted that--whatever the jeweler may have requested--the defendants were fully responsible.  

In the end, the jury decided that murder was murder, whether the victim had solicited it or not.  Clemmie, the one defendant who had not directly participated in the killing, was acquitted, while the other four were convicted, with the recommendation that they be sentenced to life imprisonment.

In a final irony, Lloyd’s found the circumstances of Samuel’s death to be just weird enough to justify them refusing to pay on his policy.  You might say that his passing was a tragically wasted effort on all sides.