Thrill Kill Jews

I like to let my ideas arrive organically and last night while I was doing some of my (For fun) genealogy research I came across the brother of a son of a cousin who was married to one of my ancestors named Jerome Liberman. For any of you that have ever been on "Ancestory.com" there is a section that brings up newspaper articles with the name of the person you are searching for. So when I looked in that section for Mr. Liberman I found about 60 articles from 1953-54 with his name in it. Turns out it was a different Jerome Liberman and this one was a young Jewish Brooklyn boy that along with 3 other teenagers had killed 2 "Hobos". As a matter of fact it was quite a case in the day and they were dubbed: "The Brooklyn Thrill Killers". I was of course surprised that I had never heard of them what with my background in both fringe Jews and noir murder cases. Of course the famous case is of the O.G. Jewish thrill Killers, Leopold and Loeb which has been done to death (Pun intended) so if you are not familiar with them then you can easily do the research on your own.

In 1999 there was even a movie about the Brooklyn Thrill Killers with that same name. I just found a clip on Youtube from the film. From the 2 minutes I watched it look like it was made by someone in high school but that is not the point..point is this was a big deal at the time and I bet Jews across the country were burying their heads in the sand. The same way blacks should have been with OJ.

Teenage killers identify victim. 1) Robert Trachtenberg (variant: Trakhtenberg); 2) Jack Koslow (variant: Kozlov); 3) Melvin Mittman; 4) Jerome Lieberman (variant: Liberman). Kneeling by the victim is Lt. Vance Barkinson. Photo 1954. [K]

Here is the tag line:

"IN 1954, IF YOU WANTED TO FIT IN YOU HAD TO KILL!" Based on a true story. Starring Evan Matthews, Natalio Polit, Steve Alderfer, and Dan Fogler (in his pre-Tony Award days).

Take a look:


I also pulled this article from Time :

Thrill Killers
Monday, Dec. 27, 1954

If a man has a very good reason (e.g., self-defense) for killing another, the law excuses him. If he has a clear but bad reason (e.g., avarice, jealousy), the law may take his life. If he has no clear reason for his act, the prosecution as well as the killer is in trouble. This was illustrated last week in the case of the Brooklyn thrill killers.
Last summer Brooklyn police arrested four youths and accused them of tossing a man in the East River to drown, beating another man to death, torturing several others (TIME, Aug. 30). The youths had not quarreled with their victims; they did not rob them. The sheer senselessness of the crimes made nationwide headlines.
That same quality made prosecution difficult.
The state brought first-degree murder charges in the case of the drowning victim. The prosecution let one boy turn state's evidence and the judge dismissed the indictment against another. Attorneys for the other two defendants challenged the sufficiency of the proof of premeditation. A Brooklyn jury last week found the two youths, aged 17 and 18, guilty of felony murder on the ground that the victim died during the commission of a kidnaping (he was dragged seven blocks to the river). With this verdict the jurors could—and did—recommend life imprisonment rather than the electric chair.