The life of Claude Frizzel Bloodgood would make a fantastic hollywood script, complete with murder, intrigue, escape from prison, and …. chess.
As a player, he preferred offbeat openings such as the Grob, the Blackburne gambit, and the Nimzo-Larsen, and even authored books on those variations. He was sentenced to death in 1970 for strangling his stepmother in a fight about inheritance. While awaiting death, he played thousands of correspondance chess games simultaneously, with the state of Virginia picking up the postage tab.
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