On this day, March 13, in 1939, the trial began for Herman Petrillo, a leader of the Philadelphia Poison Ring.
The group was ultimately convicted of 70 murders.
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Herman Petrillo was an expert counterfeiter and his cousin Paul Petrillo ran an insurance scam business.
The Petrillos and another cousin also ran a matrimonial agency, to find new husbands for the widows of their victims.
The widows would take life insurance policies on their new spouses, and the ring members would take it upon themselves to kill these husbands and appropriate the insurance money. Nearly all the victims were killed with arsenic.
Herman and Paul Petrillo both were sentenced to death by electrocution in 1941.
— Scott McCabe
