Reverend Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson (February 15, 1876 – May 21, 1912) was executed for the murder of his fiancée Avis Willard Linnell.

Richeson left home at age 13, moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, and worked at several jobs.

Throughout his life, he had a history of similar attacks many of which he attributed to nocturnal emissions and he was inordinately obsessive about his own sexuality.

As a student residing in Liberty, he became preacher at the Budd Park Baptist Church in Kansas City from 1901 to 1904.

The trustees wrote for his resignation after he allegedly proposed to three girls, ending what may have been his longest preaching tenure.

However, an officer of the college wrote Richeson's father that "Clarence had become deranged" and they could no longer keep him as a student.

Richeson took a pastorate at the Baptist Church in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod in June, 1908.

Richeson talked irrationally, raved incoherently and physically manifested an abnormal degree of strength.

In April 1910, he resigned his pastorate after two years in Hyannis having awakened considerable adverse feeling in the Church.

On May 20, 1910, the prominent Immanuel Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts, voted to call him as minister and he first preached there June 1, 1910.

One Sunday after delivering his sermon while a preacher at the Budd Park Baptist Church in Kansas City between the year 1901 and 1904, three girls approached him weeping, each claiming he had asked her to marry him.

He had assumed the position of pastor at a church in Hyannis, in June 1908 when he first met Avis Linnell.

A Hyannis newspaper, The Patriot, published the announcement of Richeson's engagement to Violet Edmands on March 13, 1911.

On 1 July he returned to Hyannis for the two months where he resumed intimacy with Avis who was home for the summer.

Miss Linnell left Hyannisport in September 1910 to study at the New England Conservatory of Music.

An uncle on his mother's side was committed, in 1883, to Western State Hospital, Staunton, Virginia, and died there in the violent-patient ward a year later.

At age three Richeson fell down the front steps, leaving a lifetime "knubble" on the back of his head.

The next morning he told Mrs. Edmands that Richeson "should be committed to an institution, not necessarily an insane hospital, and I strongly advised her to put him under the care of men well versed in mental diseases."

Nine years later in 1921, L. Vernon Briggs, M.D., Director of the Massachusetts Society for Mental Hygiene reviewed what was known of Clarence Richeson.

Based upon the Spencer, Czolgosz, Richeson cases and others Dr. Briggs proposed several broad ranging reforms for early recognition and management of the mentally ill before situations of this sort could arise.

It seemed to spring form the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown ambition to be somebody financially and socially."

"Fortune hunting became a disease" with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind of crime."

In 1912 Dr. Phillips gave an affidavit which is one of the most detailed insight into Richeson's health along with Dr. Briggs records from 1912.

"He complained of pains in his head, back, testes, and limbs; that he was dizzy, his memory was poor and he was unable to concentrate mentally.

Richeson had discovered a mild varicocele[5] which he obsessed over and "ascribed his wretched physical and mental state to it."

Mcgrath said, In this instance notice of the death was given to the Medical Examiner by a physician called into a students' boarding house because the girl had died suddenly.

The further discovery of a physical condition compatible with suicide strongly suggested this motive of death and only the care and diligence of the Medical Examiner Leary, who had charge of the case, led to a further investigation by the police resulting in the conviction of Richeson.

At four in the morning, December 20, Richeson partially emasculated himself in his cell with a sharp piece of metal.

Governor Foss denied Richeson's petition for clemency, May 16, stating that [His] family is heavily afflicted with insanity, that he himself is neurotic, a somnabulist, and a neurasthenic; that he is subject to extreme emotional disturbances, marked by loss of memory, .

The New York Times and Boston Globe ran extensive coverage on this murder and citations are used to complement and supplement Briggs's accounts.