Help Wanted

The moonless night of March 1, 1962 was chill and silent in the Arizona desert.

The quiet was broken only by the sound of an aging Studebaker slowly making its way along Rose Garden Lane, a romantically misnamed country road north of Phoenix. The car stopped on a deserted stretch of flat hardpan, screened by a few cacti and greasewood shrubs, and its five occupants got out: four young Negroes and a short, once-paunchy white man in a brown suit that was now much too big. Samuel L. Resnick, 61, a retired jeweler, looked around and squashed a Marlboro into the sand. He had an appointment with death. He knew it.

One of the Negroes pulled an 18-ft. length of manila rope from the car and looped it in a single strand around Resnick's neck. The four took positions next to the doomed man--two on each side--and yanked the rope hard in opposite directions. The rope snapped, and Resnick fell backward to the ground. "Let me show you how to do it," he muttered. He tied the rope together in a neat knot, doubled it, and handed it to one of the young men. "Do a good job." he said, dropping to his knees. "Don't let me suffer."

On the second try, the anxious assassins pulled too soon--before the noose had fallen completely over Resnick's head. The rope caught the bridge of his nose, ripping the skin. Resnick pulled it down across his throat, and as the killers pulled once more, he emitted a short gasp. For more than three minutes, the young men heaved like draft horses before finally relaxing their grip on the rope. Resnick's body slumped face-down on the sand. Jackie Spurlock, 29, quickly removed two rings from the dead man's fingers, methodically went through his pockets. The haul: a two-carat diamond ring, two wedding rings, a stainless-steel watch, worn gold Masonic ring and key, two dimes and five pennies, with a total value of $3,440.25. The four climbed back into the car and drove away.

"He Wanted to Die." Three days later a horseman found the body. Maricopa County police easily collared the killers, for they had not gone unobserved on the night of the murder: a witness had seen Resnick and his companions in the Studebaker driving to their desert rendezvous. But the story the four men told seemed unbelievable. "He promised us $200 cash," said Spurlock. "He promised us all of his jewelry and $200 to do the job. When we searched the body, we got the jewels but found only two dimes and those five pennies. We did it because he wanted us to. and because we needed the money. He said he had an incurable cancer and wanted to die."

Under intensive questioning, separately and together, the four stuck to their story, down to the last macabre detail. The police were finally convinced that Resnick had indeed arranged his own death.

Anything Else. Brooklyn-born Sam Resnick was a jolly, roly-poly man, a prosperous retail jeweler. Through the years he parlayed his Newburgh, N.Y. shop into a chain of ten stores. He did a big business in West Point class rings, had a number of prominent friends (among the pictures on his bedroom wall were an autographed photo of Thomas E. Dewey, others of Averell Harriman and Carmine De Sapio). He lavished affection and money on his frail wife Lillian. (Says she: "I was his queen.") His blue Cadillac bore the license plates "S.L.R." In 1959 Sam developed a heart ailment, complicated by diabetes. He sold his busi ness and moved to Phoenix. Some time in the next two years he began to plan his appointment in Samarra. He scanned the classified ads in the Phoenix papers looking for one "will-do-anything" kind of situation-wanted ad. At least five unemployed men were approached by Resnick, and all refused to kill him. One reported his strange interview to the police but was unable to identify Resnick, and the matter was forgotten in the crackpot file. At last, late in February, Sam Resnick found his death warrant in an ad that read: "SERVICE Station Attendant or anything else. BR 6-3908."

Resnick called the number, found Clemmine Lee Jackson, 19, a soft-spoken Texas farm boy who had recently come to Phoenix to live with his older brother in a shantytown slum. Like the others, Jackson at first declined the invitation to be a murderer. But in the course of their two talks, Resnick discovered that Jackson passionately wanted to start a car-wash station of his own. The promised $200--enough to start his business, Sam pointed out--did the trick. Clemmie agreed, but absolutely refused to do the deed alone. He enlisted his brother and three other Negro youths to help him--and then, on the night of the murder, Clemmie backed out. The other four stuck together. Explained Spurlock later: "There was no two guys in the bunch who had the nerve to do it themselves."

Change of Plan. On the fatal night, Resnick ate a quiet supper and told his wife he was going out for a stroll. "He put on his coat and left, but without kissing me, which he usually did," Lillian Resnick recalls. A block from his home, Resnick spotted the Studebaker. The killers had told him they would stalk him in the street, shoot him in the back of the head, and collect their pay from his pockets.

But the plan went sour. "We didn't have no gun," said R. E. Jackson, Clemmie's brother, "and even if we did, we wouldn't none of us known how to use it." Alarmed, Resnick glanced around to see if any neighbors were looking, then quickly got into the car. Driving aimlessly around, the five men finally decided that Sam Resnick should die by garroting.

In the two weeks after the discovery of Resnick's body, the Maricopa County police traced the killers through the automobile, recovered the jewelry from the spot where R. E. Jackson had buried it, and slowly came to the conclusion that Resnick had died through his own machinations.

Why was Sam Resnick so eager to die? As of last week, that question remained unanswered. He had a personal-injury insurance policy with Lloyd's of London, which would pay $50,000 in the event of his death. But it was also payable for the loss of an eye or limb. "Why would he go that far," asked his son Martin Resnick, "when he could have arranged an accident to lose an eye or limb just as easily?" Even his story of being a cancer victim did not hold up. An autopsy disclosed that he was suffering from a heart infirmity, diabetes, and hardening arteries--and nothing more.

Both Mrs. Resnick and Spurlock were struck by the fact that Resnick seemed almost sprightly as he went to meet death.

"I watched him walking down the street with a cigarette in his hand," Lillian Resnick recalls. "So nonchalant. Never dreaming what the result would be, I saw him out of sight."

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