Robert Nixon

Robert Nixon (July 19, 1919June 16, 1939) was an American serial killer, born in the small town of Tallulah, Louisiana, who confessed to five murders and multiple assaults, including the Los Angeles "brick bat murders" of 1937. Depicted with racist imagery in the mainstream press after his arrest, he was given the nickname the "Brick Moron" as he killed his victims with bricks and was depicted as dimwitted. Convicted of murder, he was executed in Chicago in 1939. Nixon served, in part, as the basis of the character of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's 1940 social protest novel Native Son. Los Angeles murders On April 4, 1937, Edna A. Worden (age 48) and her 12-year-old daughter, Marguerite Estelle, a junior high school student, were murdered in their apartment in the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. Their bodies were discovered on Sunday, April 5, 1937, by the manager of their building, the Astoria Apartments, which was located next to the Angel's Flight stairs. Worden and her daughter were sexually assaulted and murdered with a brick that still had mortar attached to it. Los Angeles detectives linked the crime to the rape-murder of 20-year-old Rose Valdez, a young mother who was killed on March 2 as her baby slept in the same room in its crib.