My Road Trip with the Dead, Stop 12: Richard Gladden

Richard Gladden spent 36 years in prison paying for his wife’s carbon monoxide poisoning death, a crime he did not commit. Or so he said. 

​The night of February 1, 1932, the couple — Gladden, then 21, and Dolores, 20 — had wanted some alone time under the stars. So they went for a drive in their Whippet coupe and parked on the side of a gravel road east of Frankfort. To fend off the winter cold, Gladden kept the motor running and cranked up the heater. But before he knew it, they had both dozed off. When he awoke two hours later, the motor was dead. And so was Dolores. On the thinnest of evidence, the Clinton County sheriff locked up Gladden and charged him with her murder. Within three months, Gladden was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in the Indiana State Penitentiary.

Gladden maintained his innocence and worked relentlessly to get his sentence commuted. In 1966, Governor Roger Branigin granted Gladden’s parole. Curiously, early in Branigin’s legal career, he had been a colleague of the judge that tried Gladden’s case. Had the governor been influenced by that association? If he had, he never mentioned it. 
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Gladden lived a long time after he reclaimed his freedom. He died in 2007 at age 96 and is interred in Rest Haven Memorial Park in Lafayette. I visited him there on July 3, 2017. •
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Pictured are Richard Gladden, his wife Dolores, and his mother-in-law Dorothy Titsworth, who showed up unexpectedly during Gladden’s trial to testify that her dead daughter came to her during a dream to tell her mother that her husband had murdered her. It's unknown how much influence Titsworth's testimony had on the jury, but it found Gladden guilty of murder in the first degree, sentencing him to life in prison. It was his worst nightmare.
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Clinton County Prosecutor Millard Morrison, who successfully convinced the jury that Gladden was guilty of murder.

Judge Brenton Devol, who served as judge during Gladden’s trial.

Frank S. Pryor, who headed Gladden’s defense, but was not successful in proving his client’s innocence