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I first learned of this bizarre case from local crime writer Bob Calhoun.
It was a case of overkill. The man had been shot more than 15 times. He had been shot from the driver’s side of his car and then shot from the passenger’s side of the car and then had been dragged out of the car and shot some more. The sheriff told a reporter: “It could have been an enraged husband or boyfriend – or the killer could have been a woman. We don’t know. That’s what we have to find out now – but the killer had a terrible hatred for him.”
The sheriff was wrong. The truth was much worse.
On February 2, 1959, the body of August Norry, a 28-year-old landscape gardener, was found in a remote area of Daly City. A Korean War veteran and former dance instructor, Norry seemed to have no enemies. His father described him as “a clean, upstanding boy.” The Times reported that the sheriff believed “Norry was not faithful to his pregnant wife…” but the pure violence of his death seemed excessive in any case.
There were only two clues: a witness reported seeing a young blond woman speeding away from the scene in the victim’s car (later found abandoned) and the unusual make of the bullets used in the murder.
A search for purchasers of those bullets led to an unexpected suspect: Rosemarie “Penny” Bjorkland. The Times would describe her as an “18-year-old blond who killed a man to satisfy an ‘urge’ to find out if it would haunt her conscience.” She shot Norry, whom she barely knew, “and then calmly drove away in his blood-stained, bullet-shattered car.” She openly confessed to the crime during a lunch at a San Carlos eatery.
The sheriff wanted to know more of a motive. Penny stated: “I know the answer. I know why I did it. But I won’t talk about it.” Later, of course, she did talk about it: “I figured it could have been anybody…but it couldn’t have been anybody I know. It had to be a stranger.”
She was more than helpful to the authorities, even directing them to the exact sewer in San Francisco where she had thrown the gun.
She had no police record and had only one school violation: smuggling vodka into her high school.
She had little regard as to how the crime and following arrest would affect her family: “I guess this does affect (my parents), but that’s not my concern.” Later she would be even more vehement, telling the San Francisco Chronicle: “All I can think of is hatred toward my family. I’m just going to sit in court hating them.”
And to court, she did go. In the Redwood City courtroom, Judge Frank B. Blum said Penny “had the mental ability to premeditate the killing.” He sentenced her to life with the possibility of parole in seven short years.
Penny did indeed go to prison (for which she said she was “not happy”) but quickly convinced her jailers that she was insane and so she was shipped off to a secure mental facility. Once there she re-convinced the facility’s administrators that she had been faking her insanity, on the belief that if she was subsequently judged sane they would be forced to free her. It didn’t work that way.
But she did have one more trick up her sleeve. She vanished. She apparently was paroled after about seven years and, once freed, disappeared from history. She may have changed her name and lived a long life – she may be alive today and reading this.
But what is definitely known is that she killed a man as a theoretical experiment and thought she would get away with it.
