On 17 January 1974, 44-year-old **male** accountant **Irvin Bernstein/Bornstein** flew from Miami to Nassau on business. Press reports variously described the 44-year-old **male** victim as hailing from Oceanside, New York, while others called him “an accountant from New Jersey.” No contemporary source recorded his ethnicity. He checked no luggage and accepted a lift from a friendly-seeming American teenager he met at the airport.
The driver was 19-year-old American drifter **Michaiah Shobek**. During the ride east of Nassau he produced a knife, made sexual overtures, and when the 44-year-old **male** victim tried to bolt from the car, Shobek chased him down and stabbed him repeatedly.
At dawn on 18 January the corpse of the 44-year-old **male** accountant lay on Yamacraw Beach—naked but for socks and shoes, riddled with stab wounds. A pen and sunglasses belonging to Shobek were beside the body; eight miles away, police recovered a bag containing Bernstein's papers and the suspect's Wisconsin driver's license, firmly linking killer and victim.
After fatally strangling a third tourist a week later, Shobek was arrested on 30 January 1974 and charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Prosecutors tried only the case of the 44-year-old **male** victim. In court Shobek recited poetry, claimed divine voices ordered him to slay “angels of Lucifer,” and mounted an insanity defense that failed to sway the jury.
In May 1974 a Supreme Court jury convicted Shobek of murdering the 44-year-old **male** accountant and imposed the mandatory death sentence. After a one-year stay obtained by his mother, all appeals collapsed; on 19 October 1976 he was hanged at Fox Hill Prison, the first American executed in the Bahamas in fifteen years.
