In the summer of 1926, the city of Tampa, Florida, was gripped by a series of brutal slayings that terrified its residents. Among the victims was Charles Alexander, a 40-year-old male mechanic who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a tenant, rooming with the Rowell family in their home at 116 South Nebraska Avenue, living a quiet life that was about to come to a horrific end.
On the morning of June 28, 1926, a neighboring housewife sensed that
something was amiss at the Rowell residence. The usual signs of life were absent, an unnerving stillness having fallen over the home. Peering inside, she made a gruesome discovery that would haunt the community for years. Charles Alexander and three members of the family he lived with—94-year-old Caroline Rowell, her 45-year-old son Bee Dee, and his 16-year-old daughter Eva—had all been brutally murdered, hacked to death with an axe as they slept.
The massacre at the Rowell home was the second in a string of slayings that had begun two months earlier with the murder of a woman named Emma Hilliard. In the immediate aftermath of the Rowell murders, investigators were left with few leads and questioned multiple suspects, but no charges were filed. Rumors began to circulate that Bee Dee Rowell had told people he knew who the real killer of Emma Hilliard was and that an innocent man had been jailed for the crime. This led to speculation that the family, and their boarder, had been silenced.
It would take another year and another family massacre before the truth began to emerge. In May 1927, after the horrific murder of five members of the Merrell family, police arrested a 38-year-old itinerant worker named Benjamin Franklin Levins. Under questioning, Levins not only confessed to the Merrell murders but also admitted his guilt in the slaughter of the Rowell family and Charles Alexander.
Levins provided a chillingly simple motive for the crime. He told investigators that he had gotten into a fight with the family's tenant, Charles Alexander, over a woman. To ensure there would be no one to identify him, he then systematically killed everyone else in the house. In another version of his confession, he claimed he was angry with the Rowells for playing some kind of "dirty trick" on him. It also came to light that the first victim in the Tampa murder spree, Emma Hilliard, was Levins's ex-wife.
The news of Levins's confession spread like wildfire, and an angry mob of thousands descended on the county jail, demanding their own brand of justice. To ensure a fair trial, Levins was moved to Orlando. In July 1927, he was tried and convicted for five counts of first-degree murder, specifically for the deaths of the Merrell family. Though he confessed to the Rowell and Alexander murders, he was not tried for them. His defense claimed his confessions were coerced by police who threatened to return him to the lynch mob in Tampa.
Benjamin Franklin Levins was sentenced to death for his heinous crimes. On November 22, 1927, the man responsible for at least nine murders, including that of Charles Alexander, was executed in the electric chair at the state prison in Raiford. His reign of terror over Tampa was finally over, but the memory of the victims, including a mechanic who was simply rooming with a family, left a lasting scar on the city.
