DRILLER WAS A KILLER, & RAPIST
Dentist is convicted of drugging patient
On the mild spring morning of April 23, 1955, John Cowles, Jr. of the tony Lake of the Isles district of Minneapolis, was backing his car out of his garage. In the rear-view mirror, he spotted something that looked like a bundle of clothes dumped in the alley, between a fence and a lilac hedge.
The bundle turned out to be a pretty young woman in a red coat. Cowles called police immediately. He said he couldn’t tell if she was “sick or dead.”
The woman was dead, but it wasn’t obvious whether she had met her end through foul play or an accident. There/ were bruises and abrasions on the side of her face, and sand in her mouth and nostrils. An officer on the scene suggested she might have been running and fell, had a heart attack, or been thrown from a car.
Detectives found her driver’s license and birth certificate in her purse. They identified her as Mary Moonen, 21. Her husband, Matt, 24, was in the Army, away in Korea for the past year. The couple had a 9-month-old daughter.
Matt and Mary met when she was a high-school student in Thief River Falls, Minn., and were married in 1953. After he was drafted and sent overseas, Moonen moved to
Minneapolis to care for her ailing father.
During the autopsy, a forensic pathologist found bruises on her neck and that the small hyoid bone, was fractured. It’s the kind of injury that usually occurs through strangling or hanging.
Moonen’s death was ruled to be “asphyxia by manual strangulation.”
The pathologist also discovered that the victim was three and a half months pregnant and had sexual relations the night of her death.
Her purse contained another clue — a prescription written by a local physician, Dr. Glenn Petersen. Cops paid him a visit.
Petersen confirmed that Moonen was his patient. He also said that she had identified the father of her unborn child. He was a dapper, wellrespected Minneapolis dentist, Arnold Axilrod, 49, a married father of two children.
Moonen went to Axilrod for a toothache. During treatment, she told Petersen, he knocked her out with sleeping pills and raped her.
Three hours after her body was found, police had Axilrod under arrest.
Detective Capt. Eugene Bernath started his questioning by casually informing his suspect that Moonen was dead and that her corpse turned up in an alley, not far from the dentist’s home.
“Oh, was she?” Axilrod replied.
Axilrod admitted that he was aware of her accusations. A month before her death, she came to his office and said, “You know that pill you gave me? And now I’m pregnant.”
At first, Axilrod vehemently denied that he ever drugged or had sex with her. He was also adamant that he did not kill her.
But as the interrogation wore on, he changed his story.
He told police that she came to his office for some dental work that evening. Afterward, he took her for a drive. They started to quarrel, and he said she threatened to “expose me to the world.”
At that, he got “boiling mad,” so mad that he blacked out. When he came to, he said, Moonen was gone.
Bernath told him what the coroner found during the autopsy. “If you say she was strangled, it must have been me — there was nobody else there,” Axilrod said.
Detectives probing the case discovered that several of Axilrod’s patients told similar stories of his strange treatment protocols.
“Accused Dentist Drugged His Women Patients, Cops Charge,” was the headline of the Daily News on April 26, 1955.
Another one of his patients was Janice Newton, Moonen’s sister. She said that Axilrod gave her a pill during an afternoon appointment to treat impacted wisdom teeth. She woke up at about 11 p.m. on a couch in his office, and the dentist drove her home. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. At a later visit, she claimed he made a pass at her. Newton decided it was time to find a new dentist.
Several other patients, including a 16-year-old girl, said that he knocked them out.
Axilrod admitted that he had drugged his patients with a cocktail of sedatives, like Seconal and Anacin, that he concocted to help them relax while he worked on their teeth. “Some patients get pretty jumpy when you start to drill,” he said. Sometimes, the drugs left them unconscious for several hours. When they woke up, he took them home.
Prosecutors planned to use Newton as their star witness, but she died of an infection months before the trial started.
The prosecution based its case on the coroner’s findings and Axilrod’s vague confessions during the interrogation. His defense attorney attempted to cast doubt on the medical testimony, suggesting that Moonen might have died of everything from poisoning to a heart attack.
On Nov. 3, 1955, after a seven-week trial, the jury found Axilrod guilty of first-degree manslaughter, which carried a sentence of five to 20 years behind bars.
“I never wronged Mrs. Moonen in any way,” he murmured when he heard the verdict. “I did not kill her.” His wife, who stayed by his side through the trial, burst into tears.
By 1964, Axilrod was ill and was granted parole. He moved to Ohio, where he lived quietly, working in a dental lab until his death at age 67 in 1972.
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