Edward's Sudden Urge

In the summer of 1943, witnesses crammed themselves into the execution chamber of Sing Sing Prison, New York, preparing themselves to witness history. The stench and smoke of the prisoner who had already faced his execution by the electric chair still hung in the air around them; a sickening foreshadowing of what awaited for the young man being led to the chair that very moment.

His name was Edward Haight.

Edward Haight came into the world in 1925 in Stamford, Connecticut; the second out of four children born into a family rife with lawlessness and criminality. He alone, stood out as the outcast at the young and tender age of only sixteen for having a clean criminal record, but that was soon to change.

Born out of ashes and destruction, Edward’s life began anew in 1939, when his home was burned to the ground. Inside it still was his mother, Georgianna, who would tragically perish that night, leaving her children to the care of her estranged husband, Arnold.

Arnold himself had only just been paroled from prison when his children showed up at his doorstep, hungry and homeless. Arnold built them a two room house to live in, but neighbors would later describe it as “little more than a shack” - a stark depiction of the childhood that awaited them all.

Bored with a life of poverty, and not seeing the point in an education, Edward dropped out of school when he was only about sixteen years old and got a job mowing lawns in playgrounds and other governmental property.

By then Edward was even more of an outcast than he had been before. Girls in school found him odd and unattractive, citing his “weak chin, unruly black hair and his slovenly appearance.” Neighbors said he was dull and dim witted and recalled that he was taken to going around dressed as a cowboy with a hunting knife strapped to his waist, even at the age he was.

But as unassuming and harmless as that may seem, Edward himself was anything but. His lack of criminal record wasn’t from a lack of trying on his part and the victims of his crimes he had yet to be caught for always seemed to be women.

When he was only twelve, he tormented a teacher by hiding a snake in her desk. When he was only fourteen, he upped the stakes, this time subjecting his victim to a far more strenuous and dangerous kind of torture. He targeted one of his friend’s sisters and whisked her away in his car. Edward then bound the child and drove her down unpopulated, rural country roads to scare her. The girl was terrified and screamed for her life, so much so that she actually fainted and it was only then that Edward brought her back home.

That was it then. Edward had gotten a taste for what truly excited him and he knew that he needed more.

In 1936, on the streets of Bedford Village, a village close to the two-bedroom shack the Haights still lived in together, were plenty of young women going to work, running errands or even coming home from school like Helen and Margaret Lynch were.

And their story was already a tragic one. 

Their father was a salesman who worked long hours to support his family and he needed all the help he could get. He had four other mouths to feed; his ten-year-old daughter Anna, eight and seven year old Helen and Margaret and six-year-old Mary, and their father Patrick had to do it alone. Shortly after giving birth to Mary, Patrick’s wife was committed to the Grasslands Hospital for tuberculosis and she had already been there for about six years when tragedy struck their family again.

Patrick did what he could and his daughters, despite their young ages, knew and understood that. The youngest daughter Mary lived with relatives, but Anna, Helen and Margaret would spend their days in school before walking into Bedford to wait for Patrick to finish work and pick them up in his car to take them home.

This was the routine and the only change on the Lynch’s side of things that day was that the eldest daughter, ten-year-old Anna, hadn’t gone to school. That left eight-year-old Helen and seven-year-old Margaret on the side of the Bedford Village streets on September 14th, 1942; streets that had already been the subject to a lot of activity that day alone.

Sixteen-year-old Edward Haight was after his next fix of excitement. He’d already hotwired and stolen a neighbor’s car back in Stamford earlier that morning and now he was on the prowl. With him he had a length of rope that he was ready to use on his next victim.

He thought he’d found her when Edward forced another woman driving her car off the road. She’d just dropped her husband off at the station and was heading home when Edward approached her vehicle, rope in hand.

“What do you want?” she’d asked him.

“I want you,” Edward answered, but he’d had no way of knowing that the woman he’d chosen wasn’t alone.

It just so happened that his potential victim ran a kennel and in the passenger seat beside her was a giant boxer dog.

Edward eyed the dog and assessed the threat, and then he turned tail and went back to his own car.

The next time, he went for a sixteen-year-old girl, walking down one of the rural roads that led into town. At least five times he stopped the car and tried to lure the girl inside. Each time she either refused or flat out ignored him, just like she did when he attempted to entice her into a conversation by asking which way Bedford was. The girl kept her cool and her head down and once she’d reached the populated streets of Bedford Village, Edward gave up the chase.

A fifteen-year-old girl recounted a similar experience with Edward that day, but no one could have ever foreseen what would happen once Edward did have his victims firmly within his grasp.

It was six o’clock that evening and Patrick Lynch was running late. Ten-year-old Anna Lynch was at home, leaving Helen and Margaret to wait for their father on the side of the streets.

He would miss them by only a few short moments.

In that time, witnesses saw Helen and Margaret getting into a car with a young man in the driver’s seat. No one, except for their killer, would ever see them get back out.

Once Edward had them, he bound and gagged the two girls before driving them out into a secluded area. By his own admission, Edward then tried and, fortunately, failed, to rape seven-year-old Margaret. The child fought back and struggled. Edward retaliated by mutilating her with his knife and then strangling her until she lost consciousness. He then bundled her back into the car with her sister and drove to a nearby bridge.

There, Edward attempted to throw Margaret into a shallow stream, but he missed. Little Margaret hit the pavement instead and Edward decided that he was actually far from finished. 

“I wanted to do some cutting,” he later said.

Edward  drove back into town and bought some razor blades. He used them to mutilate Margaret even more before driving back to the bridge and this time, Margaret hit the water.

That left eight-year-old Helen alone in Edward’s car. Edward drove her out to another remote location when he reportedly raped her. Upset and annoyed that the little girl was crying, Edward then threw her onto the road, kicked her around until she laid the way he wanted her to, and then he drove over her head several times with his car.

Satisfied with his work, Edward then put Helen back in his car, drove her to another bridge and dumped her in a creek near the Kensico Reservoir.

Edward was then seen at a diner in Stamford. There, he was heard bragging to the waiter about stealing the car he was in and lying about getting into a police chase. He seemed happy enough, content even, and riding high, although any sane person around him could never have guessed why.

Back in Bedford Village, Patrick was on the side of the street, listening to witnesses describing his daughters getting into another car only moments before he’d arrived. He immediately knew that something was wrong and reported them as missing to the police.

Margaret was found the following day when other children stumbled upon her remains at the creek.

Her discovery led to a search that spanned eight states and within twelve hours, a detective was on the way out to a two-room shack in Stamford. Witnesses at the diner from the night before had given a description of Edward, his behaviour and the type of car they’d seen him driving; the same type of car that witnesses had spotted the two Lynch girls getting into the day before.

The detective had very little to work with, but it turned out that he didn’t need much. As soon as Edward was brought in for questioning, he confessed to everything. He reenacted the murders and then told the investigators that he’d killed Helen and Margaret because other women had rejected him and he’d felt what he described as a “sudden urge” come over him.

Edward took the authorities to the sites and was there to witness a tragic and chilling scene. As onlookers called and jeered, both demanding and threatening that Edward be killed on the spot, Helen’s body was pulled out of the water.

A medical examiner later testified that he had found no signs of sexual assault on either of their bodies, but that was about the end of any good news he had to bring. He determined that the cause of death had been drowning for both girls, meaning that they had still been alive when their bodies had hit the water.

At trial, the prosecution made it clear that they would be seeking the death penalty. Edward’s defense did their best to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, but the prosecution argued that the killings had been planned and calculated. 

The jury agreed and found Edward guilty; a charge that came with an automatic and mandatory death sentence.

Just as he had been during his interviews with the police, Edward remained calm and collected during his trial and only made a slight twitching movement in his face when he was sentenced to death.

He maintained that stoic facade as he was led to the execution chamber on July 8th, 1943, shortly after the inmate before him had been executed. “I was a fool,” he told prison workers before going in. “I guess this is my last day, and I am only 17.”

Four minutes after Edward Haight had sat down in the electric chair in Sing Sing Prison, two things happened. First; Edward was pronounced dead and second, he entered the history books as the youngest person to ever be executed by electric chair in New York.