William Fitzsimmons, a 64-year-old White man, was found dead inside his home in Eggertsville, New York, on January 12, 1969. He lived there with his wife, Pearl, and in the weeks leading up to the violence their only child, George Kearon Joseph Fitzsimmons, had been back under their roof again, bringing with him a reputation for intense moods and a fixation on karate that neighbors didn’t yet understand would become central to the tragedy.
That Sunday, a disagreement erupted over something as ordinary as going to church. The argument didn’t fade the way family disputes often do; it escalated until George snapped into a rage. In the attack that followed, William was struck repeatedly—described in later accounts as a brutal combination of bludgeoning and “karate” blows, with some versions specifying a souvenir tomahawk among the weapons used. Pearl was attacked as well, beaten until she, too, was dead, leaving the quiet home transformed into a crime scene no one in the neighborhood would discover until days later.
After the killings, George did not remain in Eggertsville. He took one of his father’s cars and fled, first slipping across state lines and stopping at a motel in Attleboro, Massachusetts. While the house sat unnaturally still, concerned neighbors eventually alerted authorities, and on January 21 the bodies were discovered. By then, police were hunting a suspect described as a karate expert, and a warrant was issued as the search widened beyond New York. George continued moving, at one point reaching Illinois and attempting to access money by contacting a Buffalo bank. Because the warrant had already circulated, the bank’s employees alerted law enforcement, and police tracked him down and arrested him. He was then extradited back to New York to face charges for the double killing.
Prosecutors pursued murder charges, and efforts by the defense to have the case treated as a lesser offense were rejected. The case ultimately went to trial in Erie County before a judge without a jury. At the end of the proceedings, the court found George Fitzsimmons not criminally responsible by reason of insanity and ordered him committed to state custody for psychiatric confinement at the Buffalo State Hospital under the mental health authorities of New York. That ruling resolved the immediate criminal case but left a bitter aftermath: because he was legally “innocent” in the eyes of the court, questions arose over whether he could still inherit from the parents he had killed.
Those questions spilled into Surrogate’s Court during litigation over the estates of William and Pearl Fitzsimmons. The court record described the parents as having been found dead in their home on January 12 and treated George as the sole heir, despite the allegations that he had assaulted them. Because the criminal court had determined he was insane at the time of the killings and therefore not legally culpable, the estate proceedings concluded he was not barred from inheriting under the principle that normally prevents someone from profiting from their own wrongdoing.
The story did not end with the courtroom doors closing in Erie County. After a comparatively short period in psychiatric custody, George was released, and later violence would follow him into Pennsylvania, where he killed elderly relatives with a hunting knife, was arrested again, and ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. In retrospect, William Fitzsimmons’ death in Eggertsville became the opening act in a longer, darker chain of events—one that began with a family argument, surged into sudden brutality, and then moved through arrest, a finding of insanity, and years of controversy over what justice could mean when the law declared the killer not responsible.
