Adolescence
At 13,
Corso stole a toaster and sold it at a junk shop. He used the proceeds to buy a tie, and dressed up to see the
film The Song of Bernadette, about the mystical appearance of the
Virgin Mary to
Bernadette Soubirous at
Lourdes. Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely, to find his mother. Instead, on returning from the movie, police were searching for him and he was arrested for
petty larceny and incarcerated in
the Tombs, New York’s infamous jail. Corso, just 13, was celled next to an adult criminally insane murderer who had stabbed his wife repeatedly with a screwdriver. The exposure left Corso traumatized. Neither Corso’s stepmother nor his paternal grandmother would post his $50 bail. With his own mother missing and unable to make his bail, he remained in the Tombs.
In 1944 during a New York blizzard, Corso broke into his tutor’s office for warmth, and fell asleep on a desk. He slept through the blizzard and was arrested for breaking and entering and booked into the Tombs a second time, with adults. Terrified of other inmates, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of
Bellevue Hospital Center and later released. Corso was again arrested in 1946 at 17, for stealing a used suit worth less than $50. He was tried, without legal representation, as a "Youthful Multiple Offender", which could receive penalties commensurate with adult offenders, and sentenced to 3 years in
Clinton Correctional Facility, New York State’s maximum-security prison. Clinton, located in deep forest near the Canadian Border, was reserved for New York’s most hardened criminals and was the main location of New York’s executions by
electric chair.