The Idiot

"Let's play at some game" suggested the actress.

"I know a new and most delightful game" added Ferdishenko.

"What is it?" asked the actress.

"Well, when we tried it we were a party of people, like this, for instance, and somebody proposed that each of us, without leaving his place at the table, should relate something about himself. It had to be something that he really and honestly considered the "very worst action he had ever committed in his life. But he was to be honest--that was the chief point. He wasn't to be allowed to lie" --Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Handsome young Dennis Wepman moved to Manhattan from his home in Florida in 1951 with plans to write a novel. Inspiration was lacking until a friend, Harlow Fraden, confided that he planned to poison his parents. To Wepman this sounded like fine material for a book. While Fraden tricked his parents into gulping cyanide-spiked champagne last August, Wepman lurked in the corridor, taking notes. They framed the murder as a suicide pact (TIME, Dec. 28).

For four months the deaths remained on record as suicide. Then, one night, Wepman and a literary-minded girl friend began playing the game suggested by Novelist Dostoevsky. Wepman told her about the murder. Horrified, she passed it on to the police.

Fraden was committed in February to the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminal insane, but psychiatrists reported that Wepman, although mentally ill, was not legally insane. Last week he was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Taken to Sing Sing, he asked for a typewriter. Perhaps he was ready to begin his novel.

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