On February 20, 1960, Glen B. Smith, a 27-year-old male of unspecified race/ethnicity, was fatally shot during a robbery at a gas station in Tucson, Arizona. Contemporary and modern summaries of the case describe an armed youth entering the station, carrying out a holdup and shooting Smith, then fleeing with approximately $104 taken from the business.
Smith’s death is recorded as a gun-homicide in Tucson on that date, and he is identified in victim registries as having been killed by gunfire in the course of that robbery.
The assailant was later identified as 17-year-old Dennis Manaford Whitney, a teenager from California who, by the time he reached Tucson, was already in the midst of a cross-country spree of robberies and murders. About a week earlier, on February 12, Whitney had robbed a gas station in Victorville, California, shooting attendant Jim Ryan to death and stealing a small amount of cash. He then traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where on February 20 he shot and killed two men, Ira Lee Hardison and Spencer Frazier, only hours apart, stealing Frazier’s car to continue his flight. When that stolen car broke down near Tucson, Whitney—still armed with a. 22-caliber pistol he used throughout the spree—“reverted to type” by carrying out yet another holdup at a gas station, this time ending in Smith’s death and the theft of roughly $104, before he moved on again. Later accounts of Whitney’s own statements quote him as saying that after his first killing he felt he might as well continue, that he was broke and intended to get money by robbery, and that he planned to kill multiple people as he moved across the country.
After leaving Tucson, Whitney used the money from the robbery and hitchhiking to travel east, reaching Miami, Florida, by February 24, 1960. There he continued the pattern of targeting filling stations: he murdered 21-year-old station operator Ken Mezzarno on February 28, then, the next day, killed another gas-station worker, Arthur Keeler, during a holdup that netted about $50. On March 2 he shot and wounded yet another attendant, Jack Beecher, who managed to escape and later gave police a description of the shooter as a young, red-haired teenager—details that matched Whitney. On March 4 Whitney abducted 62-year-old Virginia Selby from a parking lot and killed her at a secluded location; investigators noted that she appeared to have fought back, leaving scratches or gashes on his hands, which were visible later in booking and court photographs.
Beecher’s eyewitness account, together with physical evidence and Whitney’s growing status as a suspect in Selby’s murder, led Florida authorities to focus on him as the perpetrator of the Miami-area crimes. He was arrested on March 5, 1960, in Florida and, in ensuing interrogations and press conferences documented in period photographs, confessed to the killings in Florida and admitted to additional murders committed in California and Arizona, including the gas-station slaying of Glen B. Smith in Tucson. Subsequent legal records and summaries note that Whitney was ultimately charged in Florida with two murders—those of Arthur Keeler and Virginia Selby—and sentenced to death for Keeler’s killing on June 28, 1960; his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment after U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the death penalty, and he died in a Florida prison in 2005 after roughly 44 years of incarceration. In the available online material, Whitney is the only identified suspect in Smith’s death, and his own confession, together with the established timeline of his multi-state spree, is treated as resolving the question of who killed Glen B. Smith during that Tucson gas-station robbery in February 1960.
