In the spring of 1927, a shadow of fear stretched over Tampa, Florida, culminating in a crime that would shatter a young family and horrify the city. Nettie Merrell, a local drink stand operator, lived with her husband, a carpenter named Herman “Looney” Merrell, and their children. Their home, at the corner of 1st Avenue and 31st Street, had been their residence for only six weeks before it became the scene of an unthinkable tragedy.
On the morning of May 27, 1927, the family’s 15-year-old son, Kenneth, returned home from a night spent with friends in St. Petersburg to a scene of unimaginable horror.
Inside the house, Kenneth discovered the bodies of his parents and three of his younger siblings. Herman, Nettie, their 11-year-old son Ralph, 5-year-old daughter Mildred, and their infant son, five-week-old Lester, had all been brutally murdered. Another young son, 8-year-old Hugh, was found physically unharmed but deeply traumatized; he had survived by falling under his bed during the attack, hidden from the killer's view. The weapon, an unusual railroad spike maul, was left behind in the front bedroom, a grim clue that initially led investigators to suspect the perpetrator might be a railroad worker.
The investigation into the Merrell family massacre quickly became part of a larger, more terrifying picture. For over a year, a series of brutal slayings had plagued Tampa, beginning in April 1926. In total, ten people had been murdered, including the Merrells. The day after the Merrell family was found, a Tampa Police lieutenant discovered a makeshift campsite in a lumber yard half a mile from their home. Scraps of a bread loaf, hand-rolled cigarette butts, and a newspaper detailing the murders lay on the ground. Nearby were three distinctively broken matches, matching others found at the crime scene.
Officers staked out the lumber yard and shortly after midnight, they arrested the man who had been sleeping there: Benjamin Franklin Levins, a 38-year-old itinerant laborer who had been living in Tampa for several years. In custody, Levins's behavior, including the way he broke a match, and a boot print matching one from the Merrell home, solidified investigators' suspicions. He initially blamed a friend, Leonard Thompson, for the murders, but his story soon changed. After being confronted with the bodies of his victims at the morgue, Levins confessed.
The motive for the slaughter was a chilling case of mistaken identity. Levins admitted he had intended to attack another family, the Ryles, who had previously lived in the house. Mr. Ryles had provided police with what turned out to be worthless information regarding an earlier set of murders—the Rowell family slayings—and, fearing for his family's safety, had moved them to the countryside. Levins, seeking revenge, returned to the house unaware that the Merrells now lived there. He only realized his catastrophic error after reading about the murders in the newspaper the following day.
Levins was ultimately connected to a string of killings that terrorized the area. He was the ex-husband of the first victim in the series, Emma Hilliard, who was killed in April 1926. He also confessed to the murders of the Rowell family. During his trial in July 1927, held in Orlando for his safety after a lynch mob of 2,000 people formed in Tampa, Levins changed his story again. He claimed he had killed Herman Merrell in self-defense during a break-in and that his associate, Thompson, had killed the rest of the family. The jury did not believe him, and he was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of the Merrell family. His accomplice, Leonard Thompson, was acquitted in a separate trial. On November 22, 1927, Benjamin Franklin Levins was executed in the electric chair, bringing an end to his reign of terror.
