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Chester Gillette

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Murderer

The Resume

    (August 9, 1883-March 30, 1908)
    Born in Montana
    Middle name was Ellsworth
    Murdered his pregnant girlfriend, Grace Brown, by drowning (July 11, 1906)
    Convicted of first-degree murder (December 4, 1906)
    Executed by electric chair (March 30, 1908)
    Basis for Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy'

Why he might be annoying:

    He was a shameless social climber.
    He worked at a New York dress factory and worked his way up to foreman (the fact that his uncle owned the business had absolutely nothing to do with it).
    He had an affair with a factory employee (Grace Brown) and knocked her up.
    When Brown tried to pressure him into marrying her, he took her out on a rowboat at Moose Lake while on vacation. She never came back.
    When Brown's body was found at the bottom of the lake the next day, police quickly tracked him down (he had hiked back from the lake with a suitcase without ever reporting her missing).
    During his murder trial, he tried to claim that Grace had committed suicide by jumping out of the boat after he refused to marry her.
    This despite the fact that her autopsy showed serious blows to the head from a blunt object (a tennis racket he had brought onto the boat was later found buried and was damaged as though it had physically been broken up against something).
    His attorneys made a last ditch effort to claim that he had panicked after the boat capsized and fled when he couldn't find Grace in the water, arguing it was a case of poor judgment and cowardice but not murder.
    The jury wasn't buying it and found him guilty after only a couple hours of deliberating.

Why he might not be annoying:

    As a child, he did missionary work for the Salvation Army.
    He was matinee idol handsome.
    While on trial, he sold pictures of himself and used the proceeds to have hotel caterers deliver meals to his cell.
    The diary he kept in prison was donated to the Hamilton College Library by one of his descendants, in addition to letters he sent from the jail, nearly 100 years after his execution.
    He inspired the bestselling 'American Tragedy' novel, but more importantly the 1951 film adaptation 'A Place in the Sun' in which the character loosely based on him was played by Montgomery Clift.

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 5 Votes: 60.0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 10 Votes: 60.0% Annoying