"I Shouldn't Go On"

Stuart Allen was not the kind of teenager to attract either attention or popularity in St. Joseph (Mo.) Central High School. He was too selfconscious, too meticulously dressed, too fussily precise in his speech. His sophomore classmates thought of him simply as a grind with honor grades and a grind's liking for music, books and such unfashionable pastimes as mah-jongg.

But Stuart knew there was something else which set him apart from the others. He talked about it once to his father, the rector of Christ Episcopal Church. His father just laughed. One quiet afternoon last week, when Stuart was playing the church organ, he thought about it again.

He left the organ and went down to the undercroft where Sexton John Frank, 58, was working. He asked Frank for a hammer, a heavy one. Then he dropped some coins on the floor. He started to pick them up, pretended a 50-c- piece was missing.

When Frank bent over to help look for the half dollar, Stuart hit him over the head as hard as he could.

After the handle broke, Stuart kept hitting the motionless body with the broken shaft. In a little while he picked up an electric drill, plugged it into the socket and bored into the corpse: one hole in the neck, two in the abdomen. Stuart turned out the lights and went back upstairs. When his father returned from an errand, he went home with him for dinner.

"Very Nice Fellow." It was a week later, three days after his 16th birthday, when Stuart was called out of study hall at Central High. Politely he told the police what he had told his father before: that he had had an urge to kill someone. This time no one laughed. At police headquarters Stuart filled out a detailed confession, carefully initialed each page, corrected an error in his home address, signed his full name: Stuart Buckner Allen. Then police told Stuart something even he had not guessed about himself: he had been adopted by the Allens when he was a three-months-old child.

Later that afternoon he talked it all over with reporters. Thoughtfully, Stuart suggested he might be a little like Chicago's 17-year-old schizophrenic murderer William Heirens (TIME, July 29). Said he: "My theory is that I have been reading and thinking too much about the psychological, and that I have criminal tendencies."

Stuart wanted to make it perfectly clear that he had never disliked John Frank. "He was a very nice fellow," he said. But he had to admit that he didn't feel the least bit sorry. With an apologetic chuckle he confided: "I have no remorse at all. That's the bad part about it ... I shouldn't go on murdering people."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.