March 6th, 1963, started as an ordinary morning for Carol Ann Thompson. She hustled the family off to their day, then went upstairs and drew her daily bath, not knowing that a killer was lurking in the basement. His original instructions were to strike Carol in the back of the head, then carry her up the stairs and drown her in the bathtub. But after realizing the basement stairs squeaked, he decided to wait until she went up herself, then followed behind.
It did not go as planned. After striking Carol with a heavy piece of rubber tubing, the murderer tried to drown her, but she escaped. Then, when an attempt to shoot Mrs. Thompson with an old German pistol he was carrying failed, he beat her with the butt of the gun and stabbed her in the neck with a kitchen knife.
Believing she was dead, he went to wash up. Carol fled down the street to a neighbor's house. Sadly, she succumbed to her injuries a few hours later.
It didn't take long for the police to identify her husband, Tilmer Eugene Thompson, as a prime suspect. Crime scene evidence led them to Dick Anderson, a local criminal. Dick confessed that an ex-boxer named Norman Mastrian had paid him 3,0000 to kill Carol. Mastrian had been hired by Mr. Thompson, who wanted to cash in on his wife's million-dollar life insurance policy and be free to pursue another woman.
Tilmer Thompson was convicted of first-degree murder and spent almost 20 years in Stillwater Prison before being paroled in the early 1980s. Thompson married a second time before passing away in 2015, still proclaiming his innocence until the end.
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