Frederick Sess, a 78-year-old white male from Astoria, Queens, was found dead inside the small “little house” he shared with his roommate, John Rescigno, after what investigators determined was a violent late-June attack that left Sess with multiple skull fractures. The bodies were discovered on July 4, 1960, and the scene immediately suggested something brutal had happened behind the closed doors of that quiet home.
According to the account later laid out in court, the trouble began on June 30, 1960, when a paroled convict named Frederick Charles Wood crossed paths with Rescigno in Manhattan while panhandling. Wood would later say he sized Rescigno up as an easy mark—someone drinking heavily, talking like he had money—and let himself be invited back to Astoria, already turning the evening into a plan for robbery.
Inside the darkened home, alcohol and opportunism curdled into murder. Wood’s statement described waiting for an opening, then striking Rescigno with a bottle and using jagged glass to slash his throat, before searching his clothes and taking a small amount of cash. Then, hearing movement in the next room, Wood turned on Sess—first using a heavy coal shovel, then beating him further with a chair until he was satisfied Sess could not recover. Before leaving, Wood wrote two taunting notes and left them in the kitchen, one of them mock-blessing the Parole Board and another dripping with feigned regret about “these two murders.”
Wood became the prime—and ultimately the only—suspect, not because of a drawn-out manhunt but because of what happened once police had him in custody. The appellate record states he was taken into custody on July 5; during transport and questioning, his explanations for an injury shifted until he admitted it came from glass fragments while striking Rescigno. He then confessed to killing both Rescigno and Sess on June 30, giving a detailed, signed account that prosecutors would later use at trial.
The case moved from horror to courtroom certainty. Wood was charged with, and ultimately convicted of, two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death; his defense centered on insanity, but the conviction and sentence were upheld through appeal. In the end, the story of Frederick Sess’s death became inseparable from the man who killed him—a parolee who not only admitted the killings, but turned the aftermath into theater, leaving written sneers behind at the very system that had let him out.
