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Cold-Blooded Conman
True West
|July 2018
Greedy Louis Eytinge made Arizona Territory shudder over his psychopathic crimes.
Perhaps the most cold-blooded conman early Arizona ever knew, Louis Eytinge suffered from tuberculosis and had two months to live.
He should’ve died unknown, another bankrupt soul in a rugged land struggling to emerge from its frontier past.
Yet upon entering Yuma Territorial Prison in 1907, a place where, Ohio papers claimed, “weaklings died and the strong men went mad,” prisoner No. 2608 made a remarkable comeback.
By 1922, he was celebrated nationwide.
He ended up in prison after a picnic with boarding house roommate John Leicht resulted in the barber’s decomposing body being found in the desert, along with chloral hydrate, chloroform and an “E”-embroidered handkerchief. Louis reportedly laced Leicht’s whiskey with chloral hydrate (knockout drops) and held a chloroform-soaked hanky over his face to steal his money.
This story is from the July 2018 edition of True West.
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