Shortly after 7:00 on the morning of May 5, 1924, the fire alarm at the Rhode Island State Prison began wailing. Just minutes before, inmate Kenneth Haywood had exited a dry goods storage room with a fresh open gash on his head. A prison employee questioned him about the injury and Haywood answered that Augustus DeCosta, a fellow inmate, had struck him. The employee rushed down into the storage room where the attack had occurred and where a fire was now blazing.

Kenneth Haywood was serving a three-year sentence for stealing another person’s automobile. That morning he had gone into the storage room, located downstairs from the prison kitchen and dining room, to get some soap. There, he crossed paths with 24-year-old Augustus DeCosta. A former resident of Central Falls and one-time employee of Saylesville  Bleacharies in Providence, DeCosta was doing time for murder.

On March 23, 1919, DeCosta had been spending the day with his 24-year-old cousin Manuel Amada, both natives of the Cape Verde islands, at Amada’s home on Charles Street. The two men had gone out drinking together the previous night after DeCosta visited around 10:00 and they returned to their imbibing that morning. By noontime, a dance was in progress at the Amada home with DeCosta joyfully playing the violin.

Amada was married but his wife Phebe had left him about three months earlier and he was seemingly dancing his cares away with a 15-year-old girl named Mary Cabral. There in the sitting room, someone had left a revolver laying atop a side table the previous night. Growing silently irate at the sight of his cousin dancing with the lovely Cabral, DeCosta suddenly lay down his violin, picked up the gun and shot Amado through the right eye, the bullet lodging in his brain.

Leaving Amado lying dead on his back in the front room of the house, DeCosta took Cabral and left the property at about 1:00 that afternoon, returning to Central Falls. The moment they arrived there, the scared teenage girl jumped from the automobile and ran. That evening at about 7:00, she informed police of the shooting. DeCosta was arrested at his home about seven hours later. He fully admitted his role in the crime.

Found guilty of second-degree murder, DeCosta was five years into a 15-year sentence when the prison fire alarm was set off that summer day of 1924. The prison employee raced down the stairs to find the smoke so thick in the storage room that he couldn’t see anything. The fire was quickly extinguished and only then was it noticed that among the large stock of brooms which had been set aflame, was a charred body. It appeared that Haywood had gotten even but an investigation and autopsy showed that theory to be false.

Another prisoner had overheard DeCosta talking about how he was going to “get” Haywood and then end his own life. The medical examiner reported that both of DeCosta’s wrists had been cut before he apparently saturated his own clothing with kerosene and then struck a match. Haywood was able to shed all speculation of his being a murderer and finished serving out his sentence as a mere car thief.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.