Lester Brockelhurst

While spared a murder conviction, Felton faced additional federal charges for transporting the stolen car of one Lester’s victim across state lines, from Arkansas to Tennessee. She was found guilty, and after the judge harshly admonished the jury that had acquitted her of murder, he sentenced her to the maximum term allowed for the charge, five years in prison. After her release, she married in 1948 and had a son in Baltimore in 1949; he died at age 16 in an automobile accident. After that marriage ended, she married again and became the mother of eight more children, but that marriage, too, ended in the early 1960s. Bernice herself lived until age 88, passing away in 2007. She was buried at Rockford, Illinois.

Lester Warfel Brockelhurst, Jr. (1914 – March 18, 1938), known as The Crime Tourist, was an American spree killer who, together with his girlfriend Bernice Felton, killed at least three men in holdups during a six-week crime spree across multiple states in 1937. Found guilty of the final murder, Brockelhurst was executed at the Tucker Unit the following year.

On March 2, 1938, Brockelhurst's attorneys presented a petition, signed by two Little Rock doctors and more than 50 Galesburg residents, which claimed that Lester was mentally ill, and thus, ineligible for execution. Despite their last-ditch attempt, the Jefferson Circuit Court threw out the petition, thus confirming the death verdict for the final time. On March 18, Lester Brockelhurst was electrocuted at the Tucker Unit. Before being strapped to the chair, he gave a 12-minute statement, ending it with a rant about his affair with Bernice. His last words were reportedly the following:

Lester Jr. was born in Galesburg, Illinois, the first son of Mormon couple Lester Warfel Brockelhurst, Sr. and his wife Edyth (née DuPree). Another son, Karl, was born in 1930. Little is known about Lester's upbringing and early life, but after graduating from school, he took on a job as a teacher at a Sunday school in Galesburg. In 1935, he was arrested and convicted for armed robbery in Chicago, for which he served a two-year prison term at the Joliet Penitentiary. Brockelhurst was paroled in 1937 and went to Rockford, where he met 18-year-old Bernice Felton, who was also from Galesburg. The two quickly befriended and fell in love with each other, and on March 31 of that year, the couple embarked on a 18-state wide crime spree.