Town note
Harrington was named for the Honorable Samuel Maxwell Harrington, a former chancellor of the state.
about 0:06:20The story
Byard Smith, 68, and his wife Alberta, 69, were retired and living on Social Security in a modest two-storey house in Harrington, Delaware, in 1979.
On February 6th, 1979, the two men drank heavily. Needing money and food, they armed themselves with a bayonet, a paring knife and a shotgun, buried the shotgun in the snow outside and walked to the Smiths' house. About midnight they knocked and said their grandmother had had a stroke and wandered off into the neighbourhood. The Smiths let them in.
Byard had 79 stab wounds and Alberta 66; the wounds came from two different blades and were concentrated on the head, neck, throat and chest, with defensive wounds on their hands.
At eight in the morning on February 7th, in a heavy snowstorm, Arthur Smith, the Smiths' 35-year-old son who lived across the street, noticed his father's car was missing and went over. At Pilling Street his grandmother let the police search. They found frozen food in brown paper bags in his room, the stolen television with its antenna cable cut, the fan in a closet and, in the kitchen, a bayonet covered in dried blood.
He failed a polygraph and gave a tape statement, then, after Detective Chaffinch had him brought back to Troop 5 instead of the Sussex Correctional Institution, gave a second statement admitting that he stabbed Alberta as she begged them to stop because he feared she would report them.
The gallows were dismantled in 2003.