Until someone else breaks his record, Paul Geidel currently holds the record for longest prison sentence served in the United States and was even put into the Guinness Book or World Records. Geidel was in prison for over 68 years and had to be convinced to leave — he was granted parole in 1974 but didn’t want to be released. Geidel, who was orphaned at age 7 and 17 years old at the time of his crime, murdered William Jackson, a resident of an apartment hotel that Geidel had briefly worked at. Naively, Geidel assumed that Jackson had a secret stash of money in his apartment and used chloroform to knock him out and kill him so Geidel could ransack Jackson’s home.
There are some conflicting stories over what exactly happened when Grigsby stabbed a man named James Brown to death in a saloon over a card game. Regardless of who instigated the fight that led to Brown’s death — Brown, who was white, reportedly hurled racial slurs at Grigsby, who is African American — Grigsby got a life sentence. In jail, Grigsby was a model prisoner and spent his time reading the Bible. Unfortunately, Grigsby spent a large part of his time in jail under psychiatric observation in a ward for the criminally insane despite never exhibiting signs of mental illness.
