Best of SI: A Fascinating Story of "Murph the Surf"

Jack Roland Murphy first gained infamy in the 1960’s for his surfing prowess but that quickly turned into a life of crime. In an attempt to make more money he began working with some bandits in South Florida.

As Terry Rae Frank slipped under the brackish water, her brain begged her body to breathe. Part of her skull had been split open, her abdomen slit. A wire, lashed around her neck and tethered to a concrete block, tugged the 23-year-old down to a silty creek bed. And still her nervous system commanded her lungs to heave in a spasmic search for oxygen. Agonal respiration, physicians call it. As in agony. A dying body’s desperate final act.

Frank and her friend Annelie Mohn, 21, had been motoring along South Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway when their heads were battered with an oar, Mohn’s body pierced by a bullet and their stomachs eviscerated with a blade so their corpses wouldn’t rise to the surface as they decomposed in Whiskey Creek, just south of Fort Lauderdale, where the mangrove thickets once concealed bootleggers.

Those two young women reached their gruesome end after absconding in November 1967 with nearly $500,000 worth of stocks and bonds (almost $4 million in 2020 dollars) stolen from the Los Angeles brokerage firm where they worked as secretaries. A few weeks later they hopped on a 22-foot sport boat alongside the hardened men with whom they had plotted to turn that paper into profit. But as they cruised in the sunshine the conversation soured, and one of the women threatened to expose the whole scheme if she didn’t get a larger cut. Seconds later, the bludgeoning began. Agonal breaths ensued.

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