Spectacular Crimes of the 1940s

SPECTACULAR CRIMES OF THE 1940s

The Black Dahlia Case

The 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short is notable in that it garnered the greatest number of spurious confessions in California history Short, who had become known as the Black Dahlia for her propensity always to dress in black, was born in 1925 By the age of twenty-two she had achieved a reputation as an aspiring actress who would go to bed with anyone who could possibly offer her a part in a movie. On 15 January 1947 her naked body was found cut in half and eviscerated in a vacant lot in a Los Angeles suburb. On her thigh were carved the initials "BD," presumably for Black Dahlia. Her murder seemed to bring out the worst among the psychologically disturbed in the Los Angeles area. The police were overwhelmed with the number of people who confessed to the murder. However, at least two tantalizing leads developed. A letter writer sent Short's social security card, birth certificate, and address book (with one page missing) to the police but never followed up with a promised letter. Another and possibly the most promising confession involved a twenty-nine-year-old army corporal who seemed to possess many facts related to her death. He was later determined to be psychologically unbalanced and was eventually dismissed as a suspect.

The Lonely Hearts Killers

Martha Beck, along with her lover Raymond Fernandez, may have been responsible for twenty murders in the 1940s, although they were only charged and convicted in three. Beck and Fernandez were known as the Lonely Hearts Killers, as they teamed up to swindle lonely women who advertised for companionship in the "lonely hearts" sections of local newspapers. Although Beck and Fernandez seemed almost normal, the testimony at their trial showed them to be anything but. Fernandez proposed to Janet Fay, an Albany, New York, widow. Fay sold her house in Albany and traveled to Valley Stream, Long Island, to meet her fiancé Fernandez and his "sister" Beck. After gaining control of Fay's money, Beck and Fernandez beat her to death with a hammer. A few weeks later Beck and Fernandez killed Delphine Downing, a Grand Rapids, Michigan, widow. A few days after Downing was shot, Beck drowned Downing's twenty-month-old child in a bathtub. They buried the corpses in cement in the cellar and went to see a movie. Upon their return the police had arrived, having been tipped off by suspicious neighbors who had not seen Downing for some time. They were arrested and subsequently convicted for murder and sentenced to death. The Lonely Hearts Murders led to restrictions on these types of clubs, but little could be done to establish safeguards against murderous predators.

Caryl Chessman

Caryl Chessman was born in 1921 and was put to death in 1960. What occurred in the intervening years led to four books, one of which was a best-seller and was made into a movie. In January 1948 Chessman had been on parole for six weeks when he was arrested as a possible suspect in the Red Light Bandit attacks in Los Angeles. The attacks occurred in secluded areas—local lovers' lanes—where the bandit would rob victims. He tricked and confused them, using a flashing red light similar to that found on police cars. On several occasions he forced a female victim into his car, left the scene, and raped her. Although Chessman confessed to the crimes, he claimed that his confession had been tortured out of him by police. Nonetheless, Chessman was found guilty under the "Little Lindbergh" law of California, which made it a crime to kidnap someone and cause bodily harm to that person. Although he had not killed or held anyone for ransom, he was sentenced to death. Eight years of appeals followed, and eight scheduled dates of execution were postponed. During his legal fight he became famous, and millions of people wrote letters or signed petitions on his behalf. Included in the list of notable persons who opposed his death were the queen of Belgium, Norman Mailer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Robert Frost. On 2 May 1960 Chessman lost his fight. Although a stay of execution had been issued by federal judge Louis Goodman, his secretary, relaying the notice of the stay, misdialed the number to the prison. By the time she finally got through, the cyanide pellets had been dropped. Caryl Chessman was dead.

THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY I19441

In the critical World War II year of 1944 a huge "I Am an American Day" ceremony was held in Central Park, New York City, on 21 May. Many thousands of people were present, including many new citizens. The speaker was Learned Hand, whose long tenure on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had made him the best known judge who was not sitting on the Supreme Court. His brief address was so eloquent and so moving that the text immediately became the object of wide demand. It was quickly printed and reprinted and also put into anthologies. The impact was so great that Judge Hand was invited to address a similar gathering the next year. The address went as follows:

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds or other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

Source:

Learned Hand, The Spirt: of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand, collected by Irving Dilliard (New York: Knopf, 1952) .

Who Killed Carlo Tresca? The answer to that question is, most likely, the Mafia. Carlo Tresca was born the son of a wealthy landowning family in Sulmona, Italy, in 1879. By the middle of the 1890s, however, the family had lost its land and privileged status due to a series of bad investments and a poor economy. He was deeply disappointed by these events, and his disenchantment with the status quo led him to turn to anarchism as a political philosophy. He found employment as the editor of the Socialist Party newspaper in Italy but was forced to flee to America when his diatribes earned him too many enemies. It was in America that he eventually became well known as an anti-Communist and an anti-Fascist. In that role he used much of his energy to rage against Benito Mussolini in the Italian-language newspaper that he published, Il Martello. Mussolini had his name placed on a death list in 1931, but it was not until 1943 that the sentence was actually carried out. Vito Genovese, a leader of the New York Mafia, had been forced to leave the United States in the 1930s in order to escape a murder indictment. He managed to ingratiate himself with Mussolini and the Fascist cause. After Mussolini complained to him about Tresca's anti-Fascist activities in America, Genovese informed Mussolini that he would take care of the problem. On 11 January 1943, as Carlo Tresca crossed Fifteenth Street in New York with his friend, Giuseppe Calabi, they paused under a streetlamp. Another man stepped from the darkness and shot Tresca once in the back and once in the head, killing him instantly. For several years the crime was listed as an unsolved political assassination; however, it is now commonly believed that Vito Genovese ordered the killing to ingratiate himself further with Mussolini. It is believed that the hit was carried out by Carmine Galante (later a top Mafia leader who was himself killed in 1979).

The Alcatraz Prison Rebellion and Escape

On 2 May 1945 inmates at the Alcatraz federal prison in San Francisco Bay staged a riot and, securing weapons, fought a gun battle with prison guards in an effort to shoot their way out. Notable was the fact that for the first time in the history of Alcatraz, inmates were able to obtain firearms during their attempt to escape. The escape plan began to take shape when three inmates, Bernie Coy, Joseph "Dutch" Cretzer, and Miran "Buddy" Thompson, joined forces at Alcatraz. Coy had designed and built a bar spreader and had figured out a way to gain access to the prison armory. The three ringleaders and three other inmates staged an uprising in a cellblock and took nine guards as hostages. U.S. Marines were ordered to the island prison to reinforce the officers. On the second day of the riot, sporadic fighting continued between the guards and convicts. The inmate leaders attempted to negotiate a deal with prison officials, but this was rebuffed with a demand for total surrender. On the third day of the uprising, when it became apparent that the inmates would not prevail, Thompson ordered Cretzer to kill the hostages since they were the only ones who could identify Thompson as being involved in the escape attempt. Against Coy's orders not to kill any hostages, Cretzer shot all nine. During the last stages of the battle, Coy and Cretzer were killed. Secure in the belief that his involvement in the uprising would remain unknown, Thompson returned to his cell. Ironically, only one of the guards shot by Cretzer had actually been killed, and Thompson was later convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Thompson became the first person put to death in the California gas chamber on 3 December 1948.

The Lynching of Willie Earle

Willie Earle had the dubious distinction of being an example of not only one of the most vicious lynchings in American history but also being the subject of one of the most shameful examples of justice denied as well. Earle was taken into custody for questioning in the stabbing death of a taxi driver near Liberty, South Carolina. Although he was not charged with the murder, word spread of his arrest and a lynch mob, armed with guns and knives, broke into the Pickens County Jail and forced the jailer to turn Earle over to them. He was taken to Saluda Dam, "questioned," and forced to "confess" by the mob. Earle was then driven to Greenville County, where he was beaten, stabbed, and finally shot. During the lynching, the mob reportedly cut large chunks of flesh from his still-living body. The viciousness of the murder shocked the nation The FBI investigated and identified twenty-eight persons who were part of the mob, twenty-six of whom eventually confessed their involvement. Despite the confessions and a minimal defense, the all-white jury found all of the defendants not guilty.

Howard Unruh, Mass Murderer

On 5 September 1949 Howard Unruh entered the annals of American crime history as one of its most bizarre and vicious mass murderers. On that day he began his killing spree at 9:20 A.M. when he entered a shoe repair shop in Camden, New Jersey, and shot the proprietor Joe Pilkarchik to death with a 9-mm Luger. He then entered the barbershop next door and shot six-year-old Orvis Smith to death, followed immediately by shooting the barber who had been cutting the boy's hair. He then sought out druggist Maurice Cohen, killing him too before going back outside and indiscriminately shooting pedestrians, car drivers, and a three-year-old boy who was looking out a window. He only stopped when he ran out of ammunition and calmly returned to his home. In twelve minutes he had killed thirteen people. The police surrounded his house and exchanged gunfire with him. During the firefight an assistant editor from the Camden Courier-Post called the Unruh home and, much to his surprise, found him at the other end. The editor had a short conversation with Unruh during the gunfight and asked the murderer how many he had killed, to which Unruh reportedly replied, "I don't know yet. I haven't counted them, but it looks like a pretty good score." Shortly thereafter, tear gas forced him out of the house, whereupon he informed police, "I'm no psycho, I have a good mind." The authorities did not agree. He was judged insane and committed to a mental institution.

Terry Almodovar, Murderer

On 2 November 1942 the body of Louisa Almodovar was found on a hill in Central Park in New York City. The police immediately listed the husband, Terry Almodovar, as a possible suspect but did not discount the possibility that Louisa was killed by an unknown park criminal. Terry Almodovar seemed to have an airtight alibi. At the time of Louisa's death, her husband had been at a dance hall and had twenty-two girls who supported his story as having been there the whole time. At the time the science of forensics was rapidly progressing. The police delivered Terry's suit to the medical examiner, who made a spectrogram of the dirt from the trousers. The dirt matched that taken from the scene where the body was found. Terry still insisted that he had not been to Central Park on the night of the murder. The medical examiner, Dr. Alexander Gettler, also found grass spikelets in the cuff of Terry's pants, and these matched those found at the scene of the murder as well. Dr. Gettler turned for assistance to a botany professor at the City College of New York, Joseph Copeland Professor Copeland identified the spikelets as Pancium dicoth milleflorium, a rare species in the New York area. It only grew in one area of the city, the small hill where the murder had been committed. When informed of this Terry Almodovar suddenly remembered that he had gone through Central Park in September of 1942. Professor Copeland informed the authorities that the spikelets were at a stage of development that could not have occurred before 10 or 15 October but could certainly have been at that stage of blooming on 1 November, the night of the murder. On 9 March 1943 Terry Almodovar went to the electric chair…done in by a blade of grass.

Source:

Carl Sifakis, The Encyclopedia of American Crime (New York: Facts On File, 1982).