Karmendi, Matthew: 1936

Roy Lockard was Blair County’s first child-killer to be sentenced to death and to have the sentence carried out.  Lockard was a WPA worker who became romantically involved with a married woman, Margaret Karmendi, born December 5, 1903.  She was described in accounts of the time as being a blonde, attractive housewife.  She and her husband, Matthew Karmendi, born August 14, 1900, had a son, Matthew, Junior, who answered to the nickname of Sonny.
According to newspaper accounts of the time, Lockard met Margaret and Sonny at the railroad station that fatal day.  During their walk from the station, Margaret said that something had to be done about Sonny, and quickly.  Sonny was tattling about their trips to the movies to his father.  Apparently the murder plot was hatched on the walk.  Waiting for a car to pass them, Margaret picked up and held her son in her arms while Roy Lockard savagely beat the toddler to death with a railroad spike on April 22, 1936.  At their second trial, Mrs. Karmendi changed her story a bit, saying that Lockard “stood Sonny on the road and took a railroad spike and hit Sonny once over the head, then picked him up and hit him again.”
The murderous couple then flagged down a passing truck and asked to be taken to the hospital.  There, they claimed that Sonny had been struck by the door handle of a passing car.  The death was at first thought, therefore, to be a hit and run.
By early the next morning, both Margaret and Roy were in police custody, each accusing the other of having delivered the fatal blow.
The two were charged with the crime on April 27th.
The victim’s father, Matthew Karmendi, was a silk mill worker, but he managed to gather enough money to pay an attorney to assist the prosecution of his wife and her lover.  Although the insanity defense was attempted, it was not successful.  Roy Lockard then testified as a surprise witness for Mrs. Karmendi and took the blame.  He said his initial statement to police, that they both had struck the baby, was only half-true.  Defense Attorney Frank Reiser called Lockard “a fiend in human flesh, the perpetrator of the most heinous crime ever committed in Blair county or the state.”  Matthew Karmendi sat with his head bowed, staring at the floor while John Eliot, the Prothonatery, read the verdict of guilty of first-degree murder on June 20, 1936.
The sentence for both was death in the electric chair.  Mrs. Karmendi slumped in her chair and covered face with a handkerchief as the verdict was read.  She was led out of the courtroom by Sheriff George Wolf without showing any further emotion.  Her attorney, Frank Warfel, said he would ask for a new trial.
Karmendi appealed, and on January 23, 1937, her sentence of death was confirmed.  She appealed again.  A third trial, was ordered on November 12, 1937, the Supreme Court reversed her conviction and ordered the case to be heard in Cambria County.   In December of 1937, the plump, nervous mother escaped the chair when her conviction was reduced to second-degree murder.  The jury took four ballots to reach their decision.  One of the jurors participated from a cot, having suffered a heart attack during the proceedings.
Karmendi, pale from her time in prison but still attractive, stood with her hands tightly clasped before Judge John McCann.  She was sentenced on December 16, 1937 to ten to twenty years in the state prison, with credit from April 25, 1936 on.   She wept as she left the courtroom.  She was apparently was released on April 10, 1947.
Meanwhile, the long road to the justice began on behalf of young Sonny.  Carrying out the execution was a long and torturous road; Lockard’s execution date was stayed no fewer than fifteen times, fourteen times by Governor George Earle, and once by Governor Arthur James.  Governor Earle actually appeared before the pardon board in person to plead for Lockard’s life on the grounds that he was not responsible for his actions.  The press noted that Lockard was “mentally deficient,” and Earle left office still refusing to sign the death order.  A board of alienists, as psychiatrists were called, had examined Lockard, and described him as a middle grade moron, but not psychotic.  Today, we would say he had mild to moderate mental retardation.  Lockard garnered nicknames in the press of the day; the crime was the “spike slaying,” and he was the “tattle tale slayer.”
On the fifteenth occasion, February 25, 1939, Lockard proclaimed that “the Lord told me” that he would saved from the chair.  He must have misunderstood the message, for there would be no sixteenth escape.  Lockard got the word of his impending death while playing baseball, and after receiving the inforamtion, asked if he could rejoin the game.  Being taken to death row at Rockview, and the way he asked the sheriff, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the sheriff had to come back and take me back to my old cell?”  Governor James refused to intervene again, ordering the execution to proceed as scheduled.
His family visited him on March 26.  Lockard told his family farewell, but had bitter words about Karmendi.  He complained, “If I have to go to hell, it just won’t be justice.  She got off with a few years in prison, but I have to pay with my life.”
Shortly after midnight, on March 27, 1939, he walked silently into the death chamber at Rockview State Penitentiary.  His face turned white, as the chaplain read the 25th Psalm.  Lockard did not repeat the Psalm, nor the prayer, made no last statement and left no letters.   At 12:32 a.m., current was passed through his body for two and one-quarter minutes.  The prison doctor, W.J. Schwartz, pronounced him dead.  His family had stayed to pray and cry outside of death row, and they made arrangements to have his body returned to Altoona for a private burial.
?Questionable:  Age does not seem to fit: (Margaret Karmendi died in Altoona in March of 1972.  She had outlived her husband, Matthew, who had died in July of 1967.)