Eastside Babylon

The Commerce trunk murder

House: 2616 Fidelia Ave — the southeast corner · dump lot: 1139 Jillson St, half a block west of Eastern, north side · Rosewood in 1951, now Commerce

On Saturday afternoon, 13 October 1951, while their two sons were at a matinee, John Kelley — 43, a painter and former musician — brought his arm around his wife Margaret’s face during a drunken argument and killed her by traumatic asphyxiation. He tried to revive her, panicked with the boys due home, and put her in a trunk. She stayed in that trunk in the bedroom through Saturday, Sunday and Monday. On Tuesday the children complained about the smell. Kelley borrowed a neighbour’s car, drove the trunk seven-tenths of a mile west, and then took his sons for a ride. He told his workmates Margaret had left him and told the boys she had gone east to nurse her ailing father. None of this happened in a place called Commerce: in 1951 this was Rosewood, unincorporated county land, and it would not become the City of Commerce until 1960.

Victor Keesey, who ran a trucking business beside the lot, found her on the Sunday. The Sheriff had no leads and the autopsy surgeon could not determine a cause of death. It was a tip from 72-year-old Hattie Bell McFarland — worried she had not seen Margaret about — that broke it: fingerprints matched a set Margaret had given years earlier applying for a silk mill job in Boston. Kelley confessed, sobbing: “We were always arguing about money… I never had a dollar in my pocket.” The neighbour whose car he borrowed for the dump was Betty Johnson — the woman Margaret had suspected of an affair with him. She was not surprised.

The house is still there — a 1,190 square foot tract house built in 1942, on the southeast corner. ⚠ Do not go looking for 2616 on a modern map: the street was renumbered when the City of Commerce incorporated in 1960, and 2616 Fidelia is the address as it stood in 1951. Two pins, and the drive between them measures two-thirds of a mile against the seven-tenths in Kim’s notes. The Kelleys rented, and their landlord’s house — a Queen Anne, older than every house around it — stood where a bank parking lot is now.

The homicidal maniac

Genchi’s liquor store, 5454 E. Washington Blvd, Commerce — incorporated nine years before this one

At about 10:45 on the night of Tuesday 16 January 1969, clerk David Munoz, 30, handed over the $3,000 kept on hand for cashing paychecks. The robber shot him between the eyes from a foot away with a .22. Manager Fred Genchi watched through a one-way mirror from the back room and thought he recognised a customer who had cashed checks there before. Twelve days later the same man walked into Dreskin’s Liquor on South Western, shot the owner in the neck and a customer in the head, and fired at a clerk who deflected the bullet with a metal chair. The next night he sat drinking coffee in Rosie’s Cafe until the other customers left, then shot the owners dead. By 30 January police had issued an all-points bulletin for a “homicidal maniac” who had killed five people, four of them in two days.

Robert Lee Duren Jr., a 32-year-old cement finisher, was taken a month later in a San Diego bar with a .22 Ruger he was barred from owning. Sentenced to death in October 1969; the California Supreme Court’s ruling converted it to life at San Quentin. Then the case turned: in Hamburg, a teenage pre-law student named Julia Cappenberg followed the constitutional argument, began writing to Duren, and exchanged nearly 200 letters in fourteen months. Flying to San Francisco, she was turned away — only friends of long standing could visit. With Black Panther attorney Fay Stender she sued on First, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment grounds, won a restraining order, and got six visits in before her vacation ended.

Five dead, and the thing that outlived the case was a correspondence about constitutional law.

Betty Hardaker

Karnes house, 121 S. Spruce St · Montebello City Park, Whittier at Taylor

On 19 February 1940 Richard Seeley, who lived on Taylor opposite the park, heard a child screaming at about one in the afternoon and did not investigate. At four o’clock Audrey Burris walked into the park restroom and found a small girl dead, her head crushed; the first theory was a hit-and-run with the body hidden. Three blocks east on Spruce Street, Etta Karnes came home at five and began looking for her missing five-year-old granddaughter Geraldine. At six a neighbour told her a body had been found in the park. Around midnight the child’s grandfather identified her at the County Morgue. The missing person was Geraldine’s 25-year-old mother Betty, estranged from her husband and living with her parents and her three small children.

Her confession, read out at the park, is why this stop is unbearable and why it matters: “I took Geraldine for a walk to the park about noon. I took her on the teeter-totter, then we went down to the pool and looked at the fish… I had a strange impulse to end it all for both of us. I didn’t want her to endure what I had gone through… I didn’t hate her. I loved her. I loved her… too much, I guess.” What followed was five years of a woman the system could neither hold nor help: released in February 1941 talking to reporters about a boyfriend in Denver and refusing every question about Geraldine; a custody fight; a barefoot flight from her parents’ house; an escape from a private sanitarium; a run for Texas; and in 1944, ninety days for throwing lysol in her ex-husband’s face — sent to the psychiatric ward, judged sane, released to stand trial.

The newspapers ran Geraldine’s photograph under the headline ‘TOO GOOD TO LIVE’ — her mother’s own words from the confession, printed over the child’s face. Two pins, three blocks apart: the house she walked from, and the restroom she walked to. ⭐ The man crouched beside her in the photograph is Dr J. Paul De River, the Los Angeles Police Department’s psychiatrist — the same De River who, nine years later, would have Leslie Dillon handcuffed to a radiator at a resort in Banning over the Black Dahlia case, and lose his job for it.

The Hansen radio shop murders

5619 E. Beverly Blvd, East Los Angeles

On 16 May 1948 a neighbour behind the building smelled acrid smoke and asked the landlady what was in the incinerator. Mrs Stephens opened it and poked the flames with a hoe, and saw human heads and hands wrapped in paper, smouldering. The storefront was a radio repair shop run by Ralph “Ray” Dirksen, 36, who lived upstairs with his wife Olva — Rocky — 30. Two adult heads were in the fire. There was no sign of their small son, Sparky. A witness told police he had watched the Dirksens’ employee of three years, Robert Hansen, 24, lighting the fire at nine that morning and bringing boxes down to it in a little red wagon. The landlady remembered taking him grapefruit juice because he looked so hot, and that he had been unusually polite.

Hansen confessed at once, and then kept changing what he confessed to. First: he had woken to find Ray attacking Olva with a hammer, shot Ray defending her, watched Rocky die, then cut off their heads and hands with surgical tools, burned them, and drove the bodies out toward Newhall. Then: he had shot Ray in his sleep and Rocky when she screamed. He never gave a reason. Sparky was found safe in Compton with a woman Hansen had paid $5 to watch him. Ray’s mother came down from Portland, asked Hansen what had happened, and got only sobs. “There are some things that a man is entitled to take to his grave… There is nothing I can do now but forgive this lad. He needs mercy. All I want now is the child.” Tried without a jury, found sane, sentenced to life. He never said why.

Kim’s staging note, kept: introduce the Dirksens before arriving — Ray obsessed with credit, and the couple in the black car who would drive him anywhere. The photograph is the first ever published of Ray and Rocky, obtained by the Associated Press from Dirksen relatives in Montana: “Tragic death was far from thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Dirksen here.”

The Cartoon Bandits

5366 Whittier Blvd

On 4 July 1941 two men with a sawn-off shotgun robbed a cafe on Glendale Boulevard, taking $67.50 from the register and $35 from the customers. One of those customers was Carson Citron, who had worked as a cartoonist at the New York World’s Fair. The moment they left, he grabbed a paper bag and drew both of them from memory. Police reproduced the sketches and circulated them, and the pair became the Cartoon Bandits through a spree of robberies, car thefts and kidnappings from Los Angeles to Oakland and back. A young couple carjacked in Oakland and left tied up in a Stockton cemetery reported one of their captors saying: “We’ve got to scram out of here now, but we’re coming back and get that cartoonist!”

The drawings produced the names — Edward Walker, 23, and Carl Westover, 21, both paroled — and both were taken in San Diego that August. They admitted staking out Citron’s house meaning to beat him, and changing their minds when they saw police cars outside; then four fast daytime robberies before leaving town, this liquor store among them, where they took $46. Asked in court about perjury, Westover mused: “Well, I committed so many stick-ups I can’t remember them all, and won’t be able to serve out all my time anyhow!” Eleven robberies, two kidnappings, five to life.

A man drew two faces on a paper bag and it worked — and the drawings are still here. The newspaper caption reads “HOLDUP MEN CAUGHT ON PAPER — Among the victims of a cafe holdup was Garson Citron, cartoonist. He made these sketches of bandits.” (Kim’s notes give his name as Carson.)

The Phantom Gunman

E. Olympic Blvd at S. Atlantic Blvd

At about 10:30 on the night of 29 August 1951, Nina Bice — 25, divorced, mother of three toddlers — was drinking coffee at the Scrivner chili dog stand when a .22 rifle bullet struck her behind the right ear. The man beside her thought it was a firecracker until she slumped over. Over the next eight months five more women and girls were shot and wounded by the man the papers named the Phantom Gunman. Evan Charles Thomas, a 29-year-old railroad switchman, was arrested on 16 April 1952 and said: “I’m glad it’s over, it’s been bothering me.” He insisted he had not meant to kill her — he had aimed at her coffee cup — and it was his own admission that he knew he was a poor shot that helped convict him.

He was glad to drive sheriffs around his own shootings: the phone booth where a young mother was shot in the back calling a doctor for her sick child and walked home thinking she had been stung by a bee; the window he fired through the night before Nina died; the ten-year-old shot in the arm reading a book while waiting for the school bus; the woman shot while gardening; the woman shot while ironing on Boxing Day, who walked to a neighbour for help. And finally his own neighbour’s house, where he had spent the evening drinking beer and watching television, left, and five minutes later put a bullet over his hostess’s head — then telephoned to ask if she was all right, came back, and pestered investigators with questions until they turned to him.

The photograph is the stand itself, at night, with Thomas showing detectives how he did it — the alley he hid in, the shot, the drive around the block to watch the excitement. A psychiatrist found him sane and reported that his overwhelming emotion before, during and after every shooting was abject terror.