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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 5: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 1: Good Evening nickname the most Beautiful Woman in Alaska. Thirty
Speaker 1: one year old Diane Wells was bruised and bloodied when
Speaker 1: she screamed for help in the early hours of October seventeenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three. Her husband, Cecil, a wealthy Fairbanks businessman,
Speaker 1: had been shot dead, and she claimed there were the
Speaker 1: victims of a brutal home invasion. Blonde, glamorous, and twenty
Speaker 1: years younger than Cecil, police were immediately suspicious of Diane's account,
Speaker 1: and the investigation soon turned toward her alleged lover, black
Speaker 1: musician Johnny Warren, who had left town the night of
Speaker 1: the murder. The scandal hit the pages of Newsweet Life,
Speaker 1: Jet In the Pulp detective magazines, and nearly seventy years later,
Speaker 1: journalist James T. Bartlett uncovers new evidence, including an unpublished memoir,
Speaker 1: unseen photographs, and re examines the FBI files. He tracks
Speaker 1: down and interviews the people close to Cecil, Diane Johnny,
Speaker 1: and the mysterious third suspect, dance instructor William Columbany, to
Speaker 1: reveal the stir of the most notorious and baffling murder
Speaker 1: in the history of Fairbanks. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 1: this evening is The Alaskan Blonde Sex Secrets and the
Speaker 1: Hollywood Story that Shocked America, with my special guest, journalist
Speaker 1: and author James T. Bartlett. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 1: thank you very much for this interview. James T.
Speaker 3: Bartlett, Thank you, Dan, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. What brought you to this story
Speaker 1: and why you decided to become involved.
Speaker 3: I'll give you the very short version. I work as
Speaker 3: a journalist. I live here in Los Angeles, but obviously
Speaker 3: I'm from England originally, and I had written a couple
Speaker 3: of guides to Los Angeles that featured true crime in them.
Speaker 3: They were sort of true crime guides to some famous
Speaker 3: buildings and restaurants and hotels and so forth. And this
Speaker 3: particular murder in Fairbanks was one of the crimes that
Speaker 3: I found out about while I was researching this book.
Speaker 3: It had a connection to the crime, and I wrote
Speaker 3: wrote the entry for the book, and I never really
Speaker 3: quite forgot about it, and I started to look into
Speaker 3: the story because, as some of the readers might see
Speaker 3: if they read the book, you know the pictures of
Speaker 3: Diane Well, she was so glamorous and it was such
Speaker 3: a fifties film noir story that I just assumed, after
Speaker 3: I'd read some of the newspaper reports, that there must
Speaker 3: be a book, and I thought, I want to read
Speaker 3: that book. I want to find out what happened. And
Speaker 3: then I found out there was no book, and then
Speaker 3: I found out there wasn't really anything other than the
Speaker 3: newspaper coverage at the time. But the newspaper coverage at
Speaker 3: the time was quite extensive all the way across America,
Speaker 3: in other countries as well, in the UK, in Australia,
Speaker 3: it got as far as that, and I realized that
Speaker 3: it was quite a sensational story from what was then
Speaker 3: a territory. Alaska was a territory then, it was not
Speaker 3: part of the US, and people really didn't know a
Speaker 3: lot about Alaska, myself included, and that just sent me
Speaker 3: off down a rabbit hole to try and find out
Speaker 3: what happened, not only with the murder, which was never solved,
Speaker 3: but also what happened to the people, even specifically the
Speaker 3: young son that Cecil and Diane Wells had. They had
Speaker 3: a young son who was, of course, you know, an
Speaker 3: orphan by the age of four, and I wanted to
Speaker 3: find out what happened to him, just purely, I guess
Speaker 3: out of curiosity, and because it was such a big story,
Speaker 3: I assumed there would be something somewhere about it, even
Speaker 3: though it was seventy years ago and there wasn't. And
Speaker 3: then the first contacts I managed to make through Google
Speaker 3: and through Facebook were with a couple of family members,
Speaker 3: And what I found out very quickly was that nearly
Speaker 3: all the family members who were involved that would be
Speaker 3: Settle's family. He'd been married four times previously, he had
Speaker 3: a number of children, and Diane, who had been married
Speaker 3: previously before, she also had two children as well from
Speaker 3: a previous marriage. And the Johnny Warren who you mentioned,
Speaker 3: who was charged alongside Diane with the murder, he had
Speaker 3: been married several times. I didn't know whether he had
Speaker 3: any children and so forth, and I did speak to
Speaker 3: some of them, and they all came back to me
Speaker 3: and said, we really don't know what happened. It was
Speaker 3: really sort of brushed under the carpet. We never really
Speaker 3: found out what happened. Even amongst the families. Privately, they
Speaker 3: really had no idea what had happened and felt that
Speaker 3: it had been just forgotten as a story. But of
Speaker 3: course it had had repercussions forever, because you know, the
Speaker 3: children were now grown up adults with grandchildren of their own,
Speaker 3: and they weren't able to tell their grandchildren much, you know,
Speaker 3: about their parents or or their grandparents, because it just
Speaker 3: wasn't simply talked about.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It was the nineteen fifties, and a lot of them
Speaker 3: just said, well, I think you know that my grandmother
Speaker 3: killed my grandfather.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: That was that was the limit of what some of
Speaker 3: them knew. And that just got me into the story
Speaker 3: to try and find out, initially for myself out of curiosity,
Speaker 3: but then more so for the family members as I
Speaker 3: talked to more and more to get some sort of
Speaker 3: idea of what might have happened and why.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to what you did find about this
Speaker 1: about this a list couple, as you refer to them,
Speaker 1: Cecil and Diane Wells, And you talk about Cecil mooor Wells,
Speaker 1: which was fifty years old at that time. Tell us
Speaker 1: about his ex marriages and his children, and his mistakes
Speaker 1: in real estate and other things. Tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about who Cecil Wells was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as he said, Wells. That was part of the
Speaker 3: thing that interested me, because he was a very important
Speaker 3: and influential person within the whole of Alaska, not just
Speaker 3: within Fairbanks. He was what they would call a pioneer
Speaker 3: in the early days of Alaska or territorial Alaska. He
Speaker 3: had been married, he'd been married four times before he
Speaker 3: met Diane, and Diane was very different to his previous
Speaker 3: four wives. She was very much younger, twenty years younger.
Speaker 3: She's very glamorous, and as pretty much everybody said to me,
Speaker 3: she was very much the trophy wife. It seemed to
Speaker 3: be very quick romance, a quick marriage. But he was
Speaker 3: extremely influential with an Anchorage and then further into Fairbanks.
Speaker 3: He had an enormous amount of contracts and associations with
Speaker 3: some of the major motor manufacturers, so it was general
Speaker 3: motors and Chevy. And this is not just cars, it
Speaker 3: would also be industrial machines and tractors. So he was
Speaker 3: a big player within that. He was also an investor,
Speaker 3: very much so within Fairbanks, which at the time was
Speaker 3: a small city. You know, it's a small city now,
Speaker 3: it was very small then. So he was involved in
Speaker 3: the very famous hot springs that they have in Fairbanks.
Speaker 3: He'd also invested in some of the first developments in Hawaii,
Speaker 3: an apartment building complex which still got built, still exists today.
Speaker 3: He was an investor in that. He was a big flagwayver. Locally,
Speaker 3: he was involved in the Chamber of Commerce. He flew
Speaker 3: a lot across Alaska because Alaska was trying to become
Speaker 3: a state, and that involved a lot of meetings over
Speaker 3: many years, and so he was enormously important and influential.
Speaker 3: So when he was shot in his bed in his house,
Speaker 3: that was a big scandal. It was a big crime,
Speaker 3: and there had been a couple of similar other crimes
Speaker 3: in Fairbanks in recent months, and it looked like crime
Speaker 3: was a real problem. Crime is always a problem anywhere
Speaker 3: in most cities, as we know, but when you have
Speaker 3: a territory that's trying to become a state. One of
Speaker 3: the things that they look to is law and order
Speaker 3: and crime. And if famous, wealthy businessmen are getting murdered
Speaker 3: in their beds or getting murdered by robbers in their houses,
Speaker 3: that doesn't look like that doesn't look particularly good.
Speaker 1: And so he was.
Speaker 3: His murder was a huge deal with in Alaska. I mean,
Speaker 3: the day after his murder, Anchorage Airport was opening, which
Speaker 3: is the biggest airport in Alaska, I think still, and
Speaker 3: it wasn't the front page news. His murder was the
Speaker 3: front page news in Anchorage. His murder was more important
Speaker 3: than the international airport opening.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about October seventeenth, nineteen fifty three, because you've
Speaker 1: talked about this murder. At seven point fifteen am, Diane
Speaker 1: is banging on a neighbor's door, Alice or a hood.
Speaker 1: What does she tell Alice and what is in the
Speaker 1: What is the condition of Diane according to Alice.
Speaker 3: She's yes, Diana is She's battered and bloody and brooched.
Speaker 3: She's definitely been something's happened to her, for sure. She's hysterical.
Speaker 3: She bangs on her neighbor's door, which is right opposite
Speaker 3: just in a corridor that this isn't in a housing.
Speaker 3: They lived in a building still there called the Northward Building.
Speaker 3: It's an eight story skyscraper they called it then it
Speaker 3: was it was was Anne still is one of the
Speaker 3: tallest buildings in the Fairbanks. He banged on her door
Speaker 3: and she says to the neighbor, call the police, says,
Speaker 3: what's been hurt. The police arrived very quickly. The police
Speaker 3: station isn't far like I said. It's a small city.
Speaker 3: This is within downtown. And she says, she tells the
Speaker 3: police that two men broke in late late at night,
Speaker 3: in the early hours. She woke up, woke up in bed.
Speaker 3: There were two men standing in the doorway. She tried
Speaker 3: to get out. One of them grabbed her, bashed her
Speaker 3: over the head. She unconscious. She heard some noises and
Speaker 3: when she woke up, Cecil had been shot in the bed.
Speaker 3: Money had been taken, jewelry had been taken. The house
Speaker 3: was the apartments there were two apartments, actually joined apartments.
Speaker 3: Was in a state and Cecil was dead. And that
Speaker 3: was when she ran for help.
Speaker 1: You talk about the evening before police asked her. This
Speaker 1: dan Forth, and you can introduce this ev dan Forth
Speaker 1: and the people that begin to speak to Diane, because
Speaker 1: that's the first account that they have tell us about
Speaker 1: what she said in terms of what happened in the
Speaker 1: evening before and who they were with.
Speaker 3: Yes, so they were obviously after the initial police officer arrived,
Speaker 3: the chief of police, who was ev dan Forth Everett,
Speaker 3: his name was. He was pretty new in the job.
Speaker 3: He was of course, came round to the apartment and
Speaker 3: was in charge of the investigation. So he's he's the
Speaker 3: Fairmanks Police department. It gets, like many murder cases do,
Speaker 3: it gets starts to involve a lot of agencies. And
Speaker 3: he knew straight away that this was this was a
Speaker 3: huge deal, you know Cecil, but everyone knew who he was.
Speaker 3: This was going to be a big case. It's a
Speaker 3: career case. And he talks to Diane and he talks
Speaker 3: about what's happening, and she gave a statement. She spoke
Speaker 3: to the newspapers, and it was reported several times that
Speaker 3: the previous evening she and Cecil had been out to
Speaker 3: see a movie. They'd gone out for drinks. Before they'd
Speaker 3: gone out to see a movie, they'd had a late
Speaker 3: dinner guest who was a friend of Cecil's, Herbert mansing.
Speaker 1: His name was.
Speaker 3: He'd have been a late dinner guest. He left at
Speaker 3: about eleven o'clock. And then she said that Cecil had
Speaker 3: gone to bed. She'd stayed up to read for a
Speaker 3: bit and then had gone to bed herself. One of
Speaker 3: the important things, without trying to get too much into
Speaker 3: the details, but it was considered evidence, was that she
Speaker 3: said during the night she felt ill, and she was sick.
Speaker 3: She vomited. She vomited on either I guess in the
Speaker 3: toilet on her pajamas anyway, or her night dress, and
Speaker 3: took them off and changed into another into a set
Speaker 3: of pajamas, into a set of Cecil's pajamas. She said
Speaker 3: that happened during the night. And then there was the
Speaker 3: home invasion, which was she said it was two men.
Speaker 3: She couldn't tell anything about them. They were dressed in black,
Speaker 3: they had black gloves on, masks on. She couldn't tell
Speaker 3: anything about them at all. So when she was being
Speaker 3: questioned the next day, she was told that Cecil was dead,
Speaker 3: but she didn't believe it. She kept insisting that he'd
Speaker 3: be taken to hospital, but the doctor came and immediately
Speaker 3: declared him dead. Tried to treat her told her that
Speaker 3: she needed to go to hospital. She went to hospital,
Speaker 3: and again this is the hospital is very close by,
Speaker 3: just across the river Gina. She was taken to hospital.
Speaker 3: A friend of hers walked over the bridge to meet
Speaker 3: her at the hospital and they basically took her statement
Speaker 3: at once. She had recovered in the hospital, and she
Speaker 3: said pretty much what I've said before. But there were
Speaker 3: certain things about the crime scene that we would certainly
Speaker 3: now think would possibly didn't add up so much. Like
Speaker 3: Cecil's wallet was outside on the street, which might make
Speaker 3: sense if you know it had been stolen, but it
Speaker 3: was empty, It was right out on the street. There
Speaker 3: was like a sleeping cap you know that people used
Speaker 3: to wear. His a was there was outside, and it
Speaker 3: just seemed to be a little less than convincing from
Speaker 3: the beginning, mainly because, as I point out in the book,
Speaker 3: you know that they were on the eighth floor of
Speaker 3: the northward building, and usually burglars don't go to the
Speaker 3: top floor of a building to randomly try and get
Speaker 3: into an apartment building. They're going to stay, usually on
Speaker 3: the ground floor, so that they can get away quickly.
Speaker 3: For example, the police extensively questioned the neighbors, all the
Speaker 3: people on that floor, some of the people on the
Speaker 3: floor underneath, and as witness statements and winness gathering often
Speaker 3: does revealed some other things about the Wells settlment, Diane Wells,
Speaker 3: and about their life together, and what the neighbors had
Speaker 3: seen and heard, both on the night of the murder
Speaker 3: and also at other times, and that seemed to indicate
Speaker 3: that perhaps Cecil and Diane had had a bit of
Speaker 3: a rocky marriage, perhaps that there had been reports and
Speaker 3: the neighbors told stories of rows, possibly more than rows happening,
Speaker 3: a lot of screaming, that their son, whose name was Mark, crying,
Speaker 3: they'd heard the soun crying a lot, and it just
Speaker 3: seemed to be that possibly Danforth and the other investigating officers.
Speaker 3: There was also a US Marshal Frank Worth, who became
Speaker 3: quite important for the story.
Speaker 1: Later.
Speaker 3: They searched for the weapon, they couldn't find it, although
Speaker 3: they found other guns in the apartment. You know, this
Speaker 3: was Alaska. It's very very common even now for people
Speaker 3: to have guns. That's not unusual, but they didn't require
Speaker 3: licensing or registering at the time. But they found a
Speaker 3: couple of guns in the apartment but not the gun
Speaker 3: that had fired the bullet that killed Cecil. When they
Speaker 3: took the body away, they were, you know, in Cecil
Speaker 3: in his head. It was a shot straight straight to
Speaker 3: the side of the head from relatively close range. And
Speaker 3: they found another bullet later, which was a little problematic
Speaker 3: for the investigation because it was found, you know, in
Speaker 3: the bed, and you know, they should have found that initially,
Speaker 3: but they never managed to find and they tried. The
Speaker 3: actual case or the case file, the FBI file that
Speaker 3: I got ran up until nineteen sixty, late nineteen sixty,
Speaker 3: which is six seven years after the murder, and they
Speaker 3: tried several times. They sent several guns that they found
Speaker 3: in Fairbanks. There was one that they found in the
Speaker 3: basement of the club. There was one of two that
Speaker 3: I don't know where they came from, but they were tested.
Speaker 3: There was another one that they found at length from
Speaker 3: somebody who they said had sold and bought a weapon,
Speaker 3: and it was possible that Johnny Warren, the black musician
Speaker 3: who was allegedly Diane Wells's lover, he may have owned
Speaker 3: that gun. At the time they tested all these guns,
Speaker 3: all the guns came back as not being the one
Speaker 3: that matched the weapon, and they had enough evidence from
Speaker 3: the casings to be able to match the gun to
Speaker 3: the bullet, but they never found the gun.
Speaker 1: You talk about this investigation by dan Forth, and he
Speaker 1: right off the hop does not believe Diyan's account whatsoever.
Speaker 1: So tell us how it is that they find out
Speaker 1: or hear about this Johnny Warren, And tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit more about Johnny Warren, and he's a musician,
Speaker 1: But tell us a little bit more about how what
Speaker 1: this relationship is supposed to entail and where they get
Speaker 1: this information from.
Speaker 3: Yes, Johnny Warren was born in Mississippi. He was the
Speaker 3: same agors down a little bit older, and he was
Speaker 3: a musician, a local musician, a really good musician. He
Speaker 3: was a career musician and gigge musician who tended to
Speaker 3: gig right up and down the west coast of the States,
Speaker 3: traveling a lot as a musician. But he spent a
Speaker 3: lot of time in Fairbanks and Alaska generally as a
Speaker 3: musician because like a lot of towns in Alaska at
Speaker 3: the time, especially there was a lot of money flying around,
Speaker 3: especially in Fairbanks. You know, there was a very large
Speaker 3: military population, a lot of contractors, a lot of miners
Speaker 3: as well as there's still gold and mineral mining going
Speaker 3: on and various other heavy industries. So there were a
Speaker 3: lot of men in Fairbanks, a lot. Heavily outnumbered the
Speaker 3: female population, and that meant lots of bar and lots
Speaker 3: of drinking, and lots of entertainment, and usually at that time,
Speaker 3: and entertainment meant there was a live band, and so
Speaker 3: Johnny Warren was one of these musicians. He got a
Speaker 3: lot of work, He played a lot of instruments, even
Speaker 3: sang as well. But Dan Forth, it was actually Dan Force,
Speaker 3: didn't get the call. It was actually Frank Worth, who
Speaker 3: was a US marshal. He got a call a tip
Speaker 3: off and I found out later during my research who
Speaker 3: was from. But he got an anonymous tip off, or
Speaker 3: at least the tip off wasn't mentioned as to who
Speaker 3: it was, saying that the police needed to look into
Speaker 3: Dan Wells and maybe her connection to Johnny Warren. And
Speaker 3: then it emerged that Johnny had certainly been seen the
Speaker 3: night of the murder, you know, as a lot of
Speaker 3: other people had been, but he'd actually left town the
Speaker 3: night of the murder, and that was something that seemed
Speaker 3: to as I'm sure it would to anyone, certainly to
Speaker 3: Chief of Police Dan Forth, that seemed suspicious, and they
Speaker 3: put out a well, not an arrest on the wire,
Speaker 3: but be on the lookout for him and his car
Speaker 3: because he had left Fairbanks that night and he was
Speaker 3: driving all the way down to Oakland in California, which
Speaker 3: is is a very long way. And I know we
Speaker 3: might think, well, why didn't he take the train, or
Speaker 3: you know, why didn't he fly? This is the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: Yet none of that was was an option. I mean,
Speaker 3: driving even wasn't the best option, but mainly the way
Speaker 3: to get around the Alaska and a lot of the
Speaker 3: cases now is still to fly. So he drove down
Speaker 3: and they were looking for him straight away, but by
Speaker 3: the time that had gone out, he was already into
Speaker 3: Canada in a way, so that looked somewhat suspicious, But
Speaker 3: they had no proof that they had a relationship of
Speaker 3: any kind. And that was the interesting thing specifically, or
Speaker 3: at least almost the most scandalous thing, was that the
Speaker 3: suggestion that you know, she was a married white woman
Speaker 3: married to a very influential white businessman, would be having
Speaker 3: an affair with a black man who was also married.
Speaker 3: That was almost more of a scandal than the actual murder,
Speaker 3: and that was what the police especially were very keen
Speaker 3: to try and prove, to prove a connection between the
Speaker 3: two of them, and as indeed they did, or at
Speaker 3: lest they certainly felt they had enough, because just a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks after the murder, Diane and Johnny were
Speaker 3: both indicted for the murder of Cecil Wells, which sounds logical,
Speaker 3: but of course, as Diane's lawyer pointed out immediately, how
Speaker 3: can two people be indicted for one you know, for
Speaker 3: a gunshot. You know, they both didn't have their fingers
Speaker 3: on the trigger. It was, but they were both indicted together,
Speaker 3: and as the story progressed, and as there then the
Speaker 3: arrest warrants went out. Johnny was actually he went voluntarily
Speaker 3: to the police in Oakland, where he was at his
Speaker 3: sister's house. It was an innocent trip. He'd actually gone
Speaker 3: with several other people. It was just coincidental, and he
Speaker 3: spoke to the police at length and very much clearly
Speaker 3: confirmed that he and Diane Wells were in a relationship,
Speaker 3: had been in a relationship, and they had met a
Speaker 3: number of times at the apartment in the Northward building,
Speaker 3: also at another place called the Polaris Building, which is
Speaker 3: also still there or though it's about to be demolished
Speaker 3: in fair Banks. That was in the apartment of a
Speaker 3: friend of Johnny's. He let them meet there. Now they
Speaker 3: obviously this was the nineteen fifties and they didn't use terms,
Speaker 3: but intimate relations was the term that was used. And
Speaker 3: there were also which I put some of them in
Speaker 3: the book, and they were in the FBI files and
Speaker 3: they were mentioned in court. There was also some letters
Speaker 3: that Diane had sent to Johnny, and you know, they
Speaker 3: showed that she was obviously very keen on him and
Speaker 3: was quite smitten. The question of whether it was reciprocated,
Speaker 3: it didn't really seem to matter. The fact is that
Speaker 3: became more of the focus than almost the murder because
Speaker 3: dan Forth and the other investigating agencies, which were the
Speaker 3: Marshals and the territorial the territorial police, they began to
Speaker 3: see fairly clearly early on. They began to certainly move
Speaker 3: in the direction that this looks like most domestic murders,
Speaker 3: one partner has killed the other. But in this case
Speaker 3: there were other possible theories as to whether it had
Speaker 3: actually been dan Wells who pulled the trigger or other people.
Speaker 3: And there were several other theories as to who might
Speaker 3: have pulled the trigger, and that was where the research
Speaker 3: comes in in the book because some of the theories
Speaker 3: they talk about in the FBI files, some of them
Speaker 3: were not talked about. And when I managed to get
Speaker 3: hold of Frank Worth, the US Marshal, he had a
Speaker 3: private memoir that he'd written, I guess when he retired.
Speaker 3: His daughter sent it to me, and he'd written about
Speaker 3: some of his most memorable cases, and there was a
Speaker 3: page and a half on the cisel Wells murder and
Speaker 3: he put in his unpublished memoir, So this was his thoughts,
Speaker 3: you know, regardless of what he said publicly. He said
Speaker 3: that he thought that Johnny was not guilty of the murder.
Speaker 3: He also suggested what he thought had happened to the gun,
Speaker 3: the murder weapon. But more more importantly and more interestingly,
Speaker 3: Frank Worth was the guy who was sent down to
Speaker 3: Oakland to bring Johnny Warren back to Fairbanks to face
Speaker 3: trial or at least to face you know, police and
Speaker 3: be charged. And there are pictures of him which I
Speaker 3: put in the book, of the two of them on
Speaker 3: you know, are coming out of the airport, and you know,
Speaker 3: Johnny Warren has his hands are cuffed and Frank Worth
Speaker 3: is walking alongside him. And there was one that his
Speaker 3: daughter sent me which was never published for obvious reasons,
Speaker 3: but the two of them are standing together and they're
Speaker 3: smiling and laughing, and the daughter told me that he
Speaker 3: said he thought Johnny Warren was a nice guy, that
Speaker 3: he actually got on very well with him. They shared
Speaker 3: an interest in music, and he said publicly, Frank Worth
Speaker 3: to the newspaper, men, I don't think Johnny Warren is
Speaker 3: the guilty man, which of course implies that he thinks
Speaker 3: Diane Wells is the guilty party, or maybe someone else.
Speaker 1: You talk about are we write about in your book
Speaker 1: about Diane couch surfing essentially after the murder, not having
Speaker 1: any income of her own, her and her son, and
Speaker 1: her son Markham was not in the home. It was
Speaker 1: actually a three floors down at her grandmother's home. Francis
Speaker 1: so did he did not witness any of this mayhem whatsoever.
Speaker 1: But Diane gives a key to her friend William Columbany.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: So tell us how police find out about this connection
Speaker 1: and what they make of this connection.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's absolutely right, Yes, Markham, which was actually his name,
Speaker 3: but everyone called him Mark. The Marquams were actually a
Speaker 3: very prominent family in Seattle in Washington, and he was
Speaker 3: named after that family that that was a family connection
Speaker 3: that went back, but everyone of course called him Mark. Yes.
Speaker 3: Luckily he wasn't there the night of the murder. He
Speaker 3: was staying with his grandmother a few floors down. But yes,
Speaker 3: after Diane was arrested, she found herself pretty much in
Speaker 3: dire straits. She had no money or income of her own.
Speaker 3: This being the nineteen fifties, you know, she didn't have
Speaker 3: a joint bank account, no credit cards, There was no
Speaker 3: eref for her to go to get money out to
Speaker 3: buy food and to live. So obviously couldn't go back
Speaker 3: to the apartment because that was a crime scene. So
Speaker 3: she ended up staying with some friends or count surfing
Speaker 3: and borrowing money and actually selling some of her possessions
Speaker 3: because she literally had no money. And one of her
Speaker 3: best friends, we would say the best male friend, was
Speaker 3: William Columbany, who was a dance instructor. He had it
Speaker 3: wouldn't be a ballroom dancing, but he in his apartment.
Speaker 3: He lived in the Northward building as well, the Northward
Speaker 3: building was the fashionable building in Fairbanks. He had come
Speaker 3: up from Anchorage about a year or two before, and
Speaker 3: he taught boreroom dancing lessons in his apartment, which Cecil
Speaker 3: and Diane took. They took dancing lessons from him, and
Speaker 3: I have some in the I show some of the
Speaker 3: ads that Columbuny placed in the local paper, and you
Speaker 3: know it's again it's the nineteen fifties, you know, or
Speaker 3: in dancing and the idea of going out dancing. It
Speaker 3: was a very big social thing. So they took lessons
Speaker 3: from him, and they became friends. And then it began
Speaker 3: to hang out socially, and Columbune became part of the
Speaker 3: Chamber of Commerce, which was Cecil was the chairman of.
Speaker 3: So they got to knew each other. They were neighbors
Speaker 3: and they were friends and they socialized together, and he
Speaker 3: stepped in and really helped out with Diane and with
Speaker 3: Mark that the boy, because he was only three, and
Speaker 3: really helped out and was really sort of he went
Speaker 3: back to the apartment got some clothes and things for
Speaker 3: her because she didn't want to helped with other friends.
Speaker 3: And he was certainly one of her best friends. Which,
Speaker 3: as you can imagine, over time, some people questioned and
Speaker 3: they wondered whether they were perhaps more than friends. William
Speaker 3: Columbny was the hardest to find a lot of information
Speaker 3: about because he was born in Guatemala, so his name
Speaker 3: was actual Gilliam Boris Columbny. That was his actual actual name,
Speaker 3: and he anglicized it when he came to the US.
Speaker 3: It was very difficult to find anything about him at
Speaker 3: all in terms of history wise, because he was, you know,
Speaker 3: in the papers for this period in relation to this,
Speaker 3: this murder, but almost at no other time. But I
Speaker 3: did manage to track down his daughter and granddaughter. Now,
Speaker 3: the granddaughter spoke. We spoke several times, and she knew
Speaker 3: absolutely nothing about her grandfather, absolutely nothing at all. Her
Speaker 3: mother would not talk about it, So that would be
Speaker 3: his you know, Columbani's daughter. She never talked about and
Speaker 3: would not talk about it. Got very upset whenever he
Speaker 3: was talked about. And I wondered why that was the case.
Speaker 3: Was that related to this murder, But it was actually
Speaker 3: related to William Columbani's past. It seems according to the
Speaker 3: Columbani family, that he'd been involved in a murder before,
Speaker 3: back in Guatemala. Now I proof of any of this
Speaker 3: at all. But the Columbany descendants said that he had
Speaker 3: stepped out on his wife, he was having an affair,
Speaker 3: and that the woman he was having an affair with
Speaker 3: killed his wife and then they ran away together. Now
Speaker 3: I couldn't prove it in any way, and the information
Speaker 3: I could get it seemed to be perhaps more a
Speaker 3: story related to them feeling that, you know, more metaphorically
Speaker 3: he killed the relationship and the family, rather than she
Speaker 3: was actually killed. But either way, the Columbui family who
Speaker 3: were around today knew absolutely nothing about any of his
Speaker 3: life after he left Guatemala in you know, back in
Speaker 3: the thirties or the forties, after this marriage ended in
Speaker 3: whichever way it ended, but he ended up as a
Speaker 3: lot of people do. Was many of these stories that
Speaker 3: have featured in the podcast and that we read about.
Speaker 3: People often go very long distances to try and start
Speaker 3: again with a new life and maybe a new name
Speaker 3: and a new identity. So within the US, it tends
Speaker 3: to be California as a very one. Sometimes it's Florida,
Speaker 3: you know, often it can be Alaska as well. People
Speaker 3: go a very very long way to try and start
Speaker 3: again and I think that's what William Columbani did. He
Speaker 3: went to Anchorage first, which was and is still by far,
Speaker 3: the biggest heavily populated town in Alaska. He opened a
Speaker 3: dance school there. He was married for about a year,
Speaker 3: and then he and his wife divorced. He sold the
Speaker 3: dance studio to her, and then he moved to Fairbanks, which,
Speaker 3: as I mentioned before, was it was a hop in town.
Speaker 3: There may not have been a lot of people there,
Speaker 3: but there was a lot of money and a lot
Speaker 3: of people that had time to spend it. You know,
Speaker 3: Fairbanks is in the interior of Alaska. There's not many
Speaker 3: places you can go from it to spend money. So
Speaker 3: people had a lot of money, and the only places
Speaker 3: to really go were local clubs and bars. So he
Speaker 3: started up a dance school, of which there were several
Speaker 3: within Fairbanks, and that's how he got to know Diane
Speaker 3: and and over the next six months after the murder,
Speaker 3: through the initial bail and then moving further on in
Speaker 3: the story, when Diane and Mark leave Alaska on bail
Speaker 3: and come down to Los Angeles, he follows soon after,
Speaker 3: so Columbany. He doesn't live with them, His mother lives
Speaker 3: down in Los Angeles, so he lived with his mother.
Speaker 3: His sister also lived in Los Angeles at the time,
Speaker 3: but he came down to Los Angeles as well and
Speaker 3: basically looked after Diane. He was her consort or her friend.
Speaker 3: He looked after Mark. He took Mark to school. You know,
Speaker 3: he was certainly at least to Mimo, and a very
Speaker 3: good friend. However, of course, other people thought, is there
Speaker 3: more to it than that? Is that is he more
Speaker 3: than a friend? Was he more than a friend?
Speaker 1: Was he involved in what happened in preparing for this trial?
Speaker 1: We have Ted Stevens, the district attorney, and you also
Speaker 1: have this ev dan Forth. What were some of these
Speaker 1: specific things that dan Forth was trying to put across
Speaker 1: in his theory and what happened as a result of
Speaker 1: the autopsy in terms of issues like time of death?
Speaker 1: Tell us what dan Forth felt were the strongest points
Speaker 1: in order to be able to prosecute them for the murder.
Speaker 3: Yes, that was one of the areas where the differing
Speaker 3: opinions amongst law enforcement really came into play here. Ted
Speaker 3: Stevens is a very or was a very very famous
Speaker 3: person in Alaskan history at the time. This was his
Speaker 3: first appointment straight out of university. I mean he'd only
Speaker 3: been practicing for six months when he got this job
Speaker 3: as a DA in Fairbanks. You know, obviously not the
Speaker 3: most glamorous location or appointment, but it was his starting
Speaker 3: career and he ended up being the longest standing. I
Speaker 3: think it's the senator or for Alaska. I mean, the
Speaker 3: airport in Anchorage is named after him. He became immenseally
Speaker 3: influential in his future career in politics generally, but at
Speaker 3: the time he was just a new lawyer and this
Speaker 3: was a big case as a DA. This is a
Speaker 3: huge case that he'd only just started the job. Down Forth,
Speaker 3: the chief of police had only just started the job
Speaker 3: as well, and so they both knew it was a
Speaker 3: big case. But they did seem to, as you say,
Speaker 3: after the autopsy, seemed to disagree about the time of death. Now,
Speaker 3: which seems odd for us to hear. When you know,
Speaker 3: when the person who performs the autopsy gives a time
Speaker 3: of death, you assume that they're the ones who are
Speaker 3: the most informed and well aware. But dan Forth and
Speaker 3: Stephens seemed to disagree. They seem to get it, As
Speaker 3: is the case with these things. It's only a few
Speaker 3: hours different. But if you take it that Diane regained
Speaker 3: consciousness like she said she did and immediately went for
Speaker 3: help at around seven o'clock in the morning. What time
Speaker 3: did they think the murder had happened? Was it two
Speaker 3: hours before, four hours before, five hours before. We know
Speaker 3: that they had had dinner with their friend late the
Speaker 3: night before, so some time between that time. So the
Speaker 3: autopsy even went into stomach contents and looking at what
Speaker 3: cecil had eaten and how much it had been digested,
Speaker 3: and how many hours that meant, and what that meant,
Speaker 3: how long since he'd been digested, since he gone to sleep,
Speaker 3: since he was killed, and so forth, and they rough
Speaker 3: they it was a three or four our period that
Speaker 3: they seemed to disagree about and doesn't seem a big
Speaker 3: thing in the scheme of things. But then you go
Speaker 3: through the photographs, because obviously the apartment was photographed, and
Speaker 3: as part of an example of how these small police
Speaker 3: forces in Alaska especially were very much underfunded, they got
Speaker 3: the local photographer to come in and take the photographs.
Speaker 3: So there was no photographer on staff for crime scene.
Speaker 3: They called the local portrait photographer, which was very standard,
Speaker 3: very not unusual at all. So he came in and
Speaker 3: took photographs of the apartment of the dead bodies. Some
Speaker 3: of the pictures are in the book. Took pictures of
Speaker 3: every room in the apartment, you know, for evidence, some
Speaker 3: pictures of evidence and so forth. And some of the
Speaker 3: things that were noticed in the photographs, for example, the
Speaker 3: curtains were open in the bedroom where where Cecil was murdered. Now,
Speaker 3: usually at nighttime people tend to close the curtains, or
Speaker 3: were the curtains open because someone needed a light to
Speaker 3: see perhaps if they needed to see what time of
Speaker 3: day was that. It can't have been in the middle
Speaker 3: of the night, So was it the early hours of
Speaker 3: the morning, in which case was that Cecil hope in
Speaker 3: the windows or was somebody looking out or somebody looking
Speaker 3: in and nobody saw or heard a gun shot through
Speaker 3: the window and didn't see through where the curtains were.
Speaker 3: But then the building their apartment within the building, the
Speaker 3: Northfolk buildings kind of a bit shaped like an H
Speaker 3: was on the inside of the h seed. You'd have
Speaker 3: had to have been walking past right at a certain
Speaker 3: angle to see a gun shot. You see a flashy
Speaker 3: if there was one. And so they started to disagree
Speaker 3: about that. The main disagreement they had, though, was who
Speaker 3: was in charge, because, again because without delving too far
Speaker 3: into the politics of it, Alaska was a territory, it
Speaker 3: wasn't a state, so federal crimes like murder tended to
Speaker 3: be handed over to the FBI, often depending what it was.
Speaker 3: Now this case, certainly because he was a very prominent figure,
Speaker 3: but that didn't necessarily happen so quickly, and Chief of
Speaker 3: Police Doanforth was pretty adamant. I am the chief of
Speaker 3: police here. This is a city crime. It's my city.
Speaker 3: It happened in this city. This is my crime. I'm
Speaker 3: leading the investigation. So you had him, you had Stevens,
Speaker 3: the DA, you had the state troopers as well, you
Speaker 3: had the FBI possibly slipping around already understandably, there were
Speaker 3: US marshals as well. A lot of people served a
Speaker 3: number of functions, and information started not necessarily to not
Speaker 3: get shared, but not disseminated quickly enough, and it started
Speaker 3: to get a bit squabbly, let's just say, which is
Speaker 3: very common even today with investigations. However, at the time,
Speaker 3: of course, they felt that they had a man that
Speaker 3: was potentially on the run. Johnny Warren. You know, had
Speaker 3: left town in a car. He was out of the state.
Speaker 3: He was in Canada. They didn't know where he got,
Speaker 3: so he'd gone. So then you had Dan Wells who
Speaker 3: was here, who was still in hospital. She was in
Speaker 3: hospital for a day or two after murder. And she
Speaker 3: had been clearly, clearly beaten. You know, she had two
Speaker 3: black eyes, she had cuts on her face, and you know,
Speaker 3: it wasn't just a minor tack, but she had been
Speaker 3: clearly attacked by somebody, which men potentially either their murderer
Speaker 3: was gone or there was a murderer who was still
Speaker 3: on the loose. And there had been a couple of
Speaker 3: other home invasion shootings and murders in Fairbanks in recent months,
Speaker 3: and people actually were scared. People got scared and were
Speaker 3: starting to wonder what's going on. The police aren't being effective,
Speaker 3: who's in charge, who's running this? And it started to
Speaker 3: get let's just say, there were a lot of squabbles
Speaker 3: going on, and they did start to focus on Diane
Speaker 3: and Johnny as their potential suspects, but again they didn't
Speaker 3: have a gun. They also needed to find out what
Speaker 3: the motive might be. You know, what would the motive
Speaker 3: be for her to do it, and was it possible
Speaker 3: that two men had broken in or was it somebody else?
Speaker 3: And those were all things that they had to consider,
Speaker 3: and they kind of looked at in the files as
Speaker 3: I discussed, like a lot of cases. It seemed pretty
Speaker 3: early on that they were fairly focused on Diane and Johnny,
Speaker 3: but Diane especially.
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Speaker 1: Now, James, you spoke about the momentum to take by
Speaker 1: Ted Stevens and the prosecution to take Johnny Warren and
Speaker 1: Diane Wells to court for the murder of Cecil Wells.
Speaker 1: So that trial is set for April nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: Tell us what happens with other information come in and
Speaker 1: we didn't talk about that. Chief Danforth is forced or
Speaker 1: encouraged to resign.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right. Within less six weeks of the murder,
Speaker 3: ev Danforth resigns as chief of police. It's the same day. Actually,
Speaker 3: the piece about the murder with photographs is in Newsweek
Speaker 3: because they covered the story in Life and Newsweek and
Speaker 3: yet with some photographs and talking about what had happened,
Speaker 3: which I managed to find those old magazines on eBay,
Speaker 3: and again it was it can't be emphasized. This was
Speaker 3: unusual to have a story from Alaska being featured in
Speaker 3: those magazines. And the pulp detected magazines, of course, of
Speaker 3: which there were dozens around at the time, did focus
Speaker 3: on lots of stories, lots of lurid crime stories with
Speaker 3: plenty of photographs, but this one was a little unusual
Speaker 3: from because it came from Alaska, which is not usually
Speaker 3: something they focused on. Yes, so on the thirtieth November,
Speaker 3: Dan was resigned. He gave a couple of interviews afterwards,
Speaker 3: saying that he felt he could have solved it. He
Speaker 3: felt he could even in the right direction. He felt
Speaker 3: that he was going to bring everything to justice and
Speaker 3: that he had done the right thing. But the city
Speaker 3: fathers or a city manager and the other law enforcement
Speaker 3: agencies were not so happy with what he was doing.
Speaker 3: He was quite aggressive and pushy, and it had become
Speaker 3: a big story. It had gone outside of his realm
Speaker 3: of just being a local crime. And there was a
Speaker 3: big push to get a result here, to get a
Speaker 3: conviction quickly, because again always in the background is, you know,
Speaker 3: Alaska's trying to be a state. And so when a
Speaker 3: story makes the national newspapers in the US about cisil Wells,
Speaker 3: who was essentially a politician from Alaska, being killed in
Speaker 3: his home and they haven't found out who's done it.
Speaker 3: And not only was the person who did it, you know,
Speaker 3: the young blonde wife, but she was having an affair
Speaker 3: with the black musician. It sounds like a film noir story,
Speaker 3: and that doesn't go down too well with those who
Speaker 3: might say clutched their pearls or feel that, you know,
Speaker 3: Alaska is a good functioning part of the US territories
Speaker 3: that they want to become a state. So the tip
Speaker 3: came in, they looked into Johnny went voluntarily with the police.
Speaker 3: What he told them pretty much made up the mind
Speaker 3: for everybody. The indictments, there was a grand jury. It
Speaker 3: was done in secret in Fairbanks. The arrest warrants are
Speaker 3: issued for both Johnny and Diane, by which time Diane
Speaker 3: had left Fairbanks. She had flown down to Seattle en
Speaker 3: route to la As anyone who's ever traveled up to
Speaker 3: Alaska knows, almost everything goes through Seattle, so you have
Speaker 3: to go through Seattle. There's very few places that are directed.
Speaker 3: But she was arrested off the plane at Seattle. She
Speaker 3: was carrying Mark in her arms. She was arrested at
Speaker 3: the airport and taken straight down into the local courts there,
Speaker 3: told ups happening, told what she'd been charged with, told
Speaker 3: that she was going to be extradited because again extradited
Speaker 3: because it was a territory not a state, so it
Speaker 3: was slightly different. And then she was put straight back
Speaker 3: on the plane. The next day, she and Mark they
Speaker 3: were allowed to go by themselves without a US marshal.
Speaker 3: So when they got back to Fairbanks again at the airport,
Speaker 3: then newspaper men were waiting and they took lots of pictures.
Speaker 3: There aren't an enormous amount of pictures of Diane Wells
Speaker 3: at that time. Her family, her eldest daughter managed to
Speaker 3: give me quite a few, and some of Cecil's family
Speaker 3: members managed to give me some pictures of Cecil and
Speaker 3: Diane on a holiday and so forth. So that's from
Speaker 3: that era, but the actual pictures from around the rest
Speaker 3: are the classic kind of film noir. She's blonde hair,
Speaker 3: she's got a fur coat on, and she's coming down
Speaker 3: off the plane, or she's standing up against the wall.
Speaker 3: You know. I picked a particularly striking image for the
Speaker 3: cover of the book where she's standing against the wall
Speaker 3: with her sort of arms around herself, and there are
Speaker 3: two newspaper men in front of her taking pictures, and
Speaker 3: she looks particularly harried. And this was the time when
Speaker 3: it was certainly becoming clear that this was taking a
Speaker 3: real toll, as it would do on anyone, that she
Speaker 3: was getting extremely upset and distressed and becoming very upset
Speaker 3: about what was going to happen to Mark, to her
Speaker 3: son especially, And as I found out later from her
Speaker 3: eldest daughter, she had had some issues in previous years.
Speaker 3: There'd been some postnatal depression, which it wasn't really known
Speaker 3: as back then. This is again in the forties and fifties,
Speaker 3: possibly even some mental health issues as well, and it
Speaker 3: began a downward spiral for her. I mean, it's going
Speaker 3: to be a bit of a you know, spoiler alert,
Speaker 3: but it began a bit of a downward spiral for her.
Speaker 3: So she was taken back to Fairbanks, she was charged,
Speaker 3: they set the date for the trial. The date for
Speaker 3: the trial was moved so many times for various reasons.
Speaker 3: But because the date had been set and she had
Speaker 3: the money, or rather Cecil's family the family lawyer, that
Speaker 3: she was out on bail, she could afford the five
Speaker 3: to ten grand that it cost cumulatively to be out
Speaker 3: on bail. Now again, I know, we think, well, how
Speaker 3: can you possibly get out on bail if you're charged
Speaker 3: with murder? And we know it can happen, right, and
Speaker 3: again this was territorial Alaska. Plus I'm sure they assumed
Speaker 3: what she going to do. She's not going to flee
Speaker 3: the country. You know, she doesn't have any money where
Speaker 3: she's going to go. So she immediately left Fairbanks with
Speaker 3: Mark and came down to Los Angeles, where she'd been
Speaker 3: actually before as a much younger woman, I learned, and
Speaker 3: I think she really came down to Los Angeles because
Speaker 3: she felt she could lose herself in the city. There
Speaker 3: was two million people in Los Angeles. You know, it's,
Speaker 3: of course it's a million times bigger today. But I
Speaker 3: really think she felt she could lose herself in Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: because in Fairbanks it was gossip, gossip central.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: You have to remember from the first time that you know,
Speaker 3: she and Cecil had arrived in town, people were like,
Speaker 3: who is this young trophy wife, you know, and that's
Speaker 3: what everybody said, and that's what everybody thought, you know,
Speaker 3: and that was that was the relationship they had. You know,
Speaker 3: Cecil bought lots of jewelry and furs and clothes, and
Speaker 3: she was the hostess, you know, with the mostess, as
Speaker 3: they say, and that was their relationship. And so she
Speaker 3: felt that she condemned, you know, pretty much condemned, certainly
Speaker 3: in the public eye. And you can imagine with Life
Speaker 3: and Newswig and the pulp magazines especially, you know, they
Speaker 3: absolutely went to town. You know, she was the perfect
Speaker 3: villain for this, you know, a young bond, you know,
Speaker 3: with everything to gain his million dollar fortune, which was
Speaker 3: talked about all the time. And Cecil was a wealthy
Speaker 3: man per se. He had lots of assets, and he
Speaker 3: had land and so forth. But of course, as is
Speaker 3: offer the case, she didn't get any of the money
Speaker 3: because she was the executor of his will. But of course,
Speaker 3: when she was arrested that was taken away from her.
Speaker 3: She wasn't allowed to do that, so she didn't get
Speaker 3: this enormous payoff that people thought she did get. You know,
Speaker 3: there was money put aside for Mark, you know, when
Speaker 3: he turned twenty one, but of course he was only three,
Speaker 3: so he wasn't going to get that money. For years.
Speaker 3: There was money put aside for him to live on
Speaker 3: and so forth in Cecil's will. But it wasn't like
Speaker 3: Dan suddenly had lots of money and got his fortune.
Speaker 3: So she moved down to Los Angeles and she stayed
Speaker 3: with a couple of friends of hers and Cecils who
Speaker 3: put her up for several months, and she came down
Speaker 3: and enrolled Mark in school, and William Columbuie came soon afterwards,
Speaker 3: and it seemed that for several months she seemed to
Speaker 3: be kind of getting on with life as much as
Speaker 3: she could. And then, as you said, the trial date
Speaker 3: was announced, and you know, they were saying, it's definitely happening,
Speaker 3: it's definitely happening. We're definitely going to trial in April,
Speaker 3: and that was two or three months away, was when
Speaker 3: they got the time. And I think that was possibly
Speaker 3: a moment when she started to really think about the
Speaker 3: future and be concerned and really think about what was
Speaker 3: at risk and what she thought might happen.
Speaker 1: What happens as a result, despite William Columbany helping her
Speaker 1: in every way he could and supporting her and sticking
Speaker 1: with her, they go out to a movie one night.
Speaker 1: She's staying at a hotel, at the Drake Hotel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: under an alias YOUE rate tell us what happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it was March the eighth, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: so less than a month before the trial. Dan was
Speaker 3: already taking medication for depression, for nerves as they called
Speaker 3: it in those days, and that would that's barbituus. So
Speaker 3: she was already taking medication. William Columbani and the friends
Speaker 3: that she was staying with, the couple, they had both
Speaker 3: been worried about her. They had actually taken pills off
Speaker 3: her when she seemed to be particularly unhappy, and they
Speaker 3: had been taking them off her and not letting her
Speaker 3: go out with the many more pills than she's allowed
Speaker 3: to take. But I would imagine that after several months
Speaker 3: staying with her two friends, maybe she wanted some more space,
Speaker 3: or maybe she felt she'd outstayed her welcome. She moved
Speaker 3: into a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. I walked past it
Speaker 3: last night. It's still there, the building. It's not a
Speaker 3: hotel anymore, but the building is still there. It's called
Speaker 3: the Drake Hotel. And she moved into a room there,
Speaker 3: and she moved in around about Valentine's Day. And there's
Speaker 3: a reason we know that she moved in around about
Speaker 3: Valentine's Day. So she moved into a room in the hotel. Now,
Speaker 3: there are a number of reasons she could have moved
Speaker 3: moved into a hotel herself. You know, I said, it
Speaker 3: could have been you know that you get more privacy.
Speaker 3: You also get you know, there's probably a phone line
Speaker 3: that you might be able to use. You might be
Speaker 3: able to receive calls, make calls with anyone over hearing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it could be a number of reasons either way.
Speaker 3: She was staying in the hotel and then on March
Speaker 3: the eighth, winning Columbuie, they went out to see a
Speaker 3: movie the evening screening and you know, he said, is
Speaker 3: everything all right? It was, you know, everything fine, She said,
Speaker 3: it it was all great, And unfortunately he took her
Speaker 3: back to the hotel and she She immediately checked out
Speaker 3: of the Drake Hotel and walked about three or four
Speaker 3: blocks down to Hollywood and Vine and turned her south.
Speaker 3: And again, the building is still there. It's called the
Speaker 3: Hollywood Plaza Hotel. And that was a very very fancy
Speaker 3: hotel back in the day, very famous. It's not a
Speaker 3: hotel anymore with the buildings still there. And she checked
Speaker 3: into a room there. And you can probably see where
Speaker 3: this is going, but she checked into a room there,
Speaker 3: and spoiler alert, I hope it's not going to ruin
Speaker 3: the book for anyone. But that night she took a
Speaker 3: large dose of her barbiturates. She left three notes in
Speaker 3: the Drake Hotel. Two of them were to William Canlumbdi.
Speaker 3: One of them was thanking him for everything he'd done,
Speaker 3: asking him to look after Mark, and you know that
Speaker 3: she really appreciated him as a friend and so forth,
Speaker 3: which I thought was significant because it was it was
Speaker 3: not a loving letter. It was not someone that I
Speaker 3: felt someone that you were in love with or loved
Speaker 3: or had a sort of an emotion anything more than
Speaker 3: a friendship with. She left another letter addressed to two
Speaker 3: other friends, asking them to raise Mark as their own
Speaker 3: son and she wrote another one. Well that the last
Speaker 3: one was virtually incoherent, but it was kind of the
Speaker 3: one that everyone was waiting for with the sort of
Speaker 3: semi confession. Now you can read, I put, you know,
Speaker 3: pictures of the notes in the book, and you know,
Speaker 3: as hard as it is to imagine, they published them
Speaker 3: in the newspapers as well. I mean the the newspapers
Speaker 3: back in the day. Back then in the fifties, Los
Speaker 3: Angeles had a lot of newspapers and they were very competitive,
Speaker 3: and crime was a big seller, and they would show,
Speaker 3: you know, they would show dead bodies, and they would
Speaker 3: put suicide notes and stuff like that, things that we
Speaker 3: can't possibly imagine today, but they did then. So all
Speaker 3: the suicide notes were put in the paper for people
Speaker 3: to read. And the last one, it seems that she wrote,
Speaker 3: the one that she left at the Hollywood Plaza hotel
Speaker 3: in her room, sort of said along the lines of
Speaker 3: if Johnny's guilty, then I'm guilty. You know, if I'm
Speaker 3: guilty of anything, Cecil is dead, so I must kind
Speaker 3: of be guilty. It's not a clear confession, and you know,
Speaker 3: like I said, barely legible, but it certainly seems to
Speaker 3: show that if nothing else, she feels guilty for what happened.
Speaker 3: And she also made clear in one of the other
Speaker 3: suicide notes that she did not want Mark, her son,
Speaker 3: her and Cecil's son to go through the trial, to
Speaker 3: go through any of this. She felt she wanted to
Speaker 3: protect him, and unfortunately, she really thought that the best
Speaker 3: way to protect him would be for her to take
Speaker 3: an O the dose, and that's what happened. They the
Speaker 3: next day, believe it or not, as tragic as it sounds,
Speaker 3: as if you couldn't write it. But William Columbanie and
Speaker 3: the friend of that they'd been staying with, that Diana
Speaker 3: had been staying with, were worried. They had been worried
Speaker 3: the night before and they went round to the Drake
Speaker 3: Hotel just to check she was all right. In morning
Speaker 3: and of course they told her she'd gone and they
Speaker 3: arrived at the Hollywood Plaza hotel just as they were
Speaker 3: wheeling the body out. There's actually a picture in the
Speaker 3: La Times that I found. As I say, they would
Speaker 3: show the pictures, but there's you know, there's a low
Speaker 3: trolley and they're pulling a body out with a white
Speaker 3: sheet and there's a guy with his back to the camera,
Speaker 3: and that's William Columbany. So he got there just to
Speaker 3: find out, I mean, because they basically said, you know,
Speaker 3: do you know who this is? For him? And he
Speaker 3: was like, he didn't want to think it was her,
Speaker 3: but it was. So she committed suicide and that you
Speaker 3: would have thought would have been the end of it, really,
Speaker 3: but of course it led to a lot of other things.
Speaker 3: I mean, for instance, now Mark the Sun, who was
Speaker 3: still not yet four now was the entire heir to
Speaker 3: the estate, so there was then a bit of a
Speaker 3: custody battle over him. And I did speak to Mark
Speaker 3: just once. I did manage to find him and speak
Speaker 3: to him a little about what had happened. He was
Speaker 3: and again it's a bit of a spoiler alert, but
Speaker 3: I did speak to him briefly about it. It became
Speaker 3: clear that he had not had a happy life and
Speaker 3: that the death obviously of his father and his mother
Speaker 3: had deeply affected his life, and not for the good
Speaker 3: in any way whatsoever. And he initially seemed very keen
Speaker 3: to talk. He really seemed to want the story to
Speaker 3: come out. He felt that there was a big story
Speaker 3: to tell. But then he wrote me a letter said
Speaker 3: he just he couldn't do it, which I understood, and
Speaker 3: I haven't been in touch with him since I think
Speaker 3: he's somewhat in touch with his half sisters. I guess
Speaker 3: they'd be half sisters, Diane's children from a previous marriage.
Speaker 3: They were in touch a little bit, but I don't
Speaker 3: think a great deal. So I figured, like a lot
Speaker 3: of these things, I didn't I didn't have any I
Speaker 3: wasn't a member of the family, so I never felt
Speaker 3: it was my position to try and affect any sort
Speaker 3: of communication or reuniting that kind of thing. I really
Speaker 3: didn't think that was my business. I thought, if I
Speaker 3: write the book and put everything down that I found,
Speaker 3: the people who are interested can read it and find
Speaker 3: out what they want to find out. And I know
Speaker 3: that there are lots of things in this book that
Speaker 3: these family members, you know, Cecil's family, Diane's family, Johnny's family, comedies.
Speaker 3: I mean, I know there's things in there that they
Speaker 3: don't know about their relatives, and they're going to read
Speaker 3: it in here. And that was one of the most
Speaker 3: you know, that was one of the toughest things writing
Speaker 3: the book, was what would they think when they read it?
Speaker 3: Would they believe me? Would they think I was just
Speaker 3: making it up. Would they think that I got it wrong?
Speaker 3: Because you know, as you can imagine, you don't want
Speaker 3: to read that perhaps your mother was a killer who
Speaker 3: committed suicide. You know, you don't want to think that.
Speaker 3: You might think, well, it was somebody else. There were
Speaker 3: other theories about what happened to Cecil, which I'd talk
Speaker 3: about in the book. I devoted chapters at each one
Speaker 3: at the end, you know, because I go through chronologically
Speaker 3: what happened. You know, several people thought it was a
Speaker 3: hit man, it was related to organized crime, you know.
Speaker 3: Some people thought that it was Johnny. Some people thought
Speaker 3: that it was Johnny because he'd settled, had confronted him,
Speaker 3: or they'd been a row, or there'd been an argument.
Speaker 3: Some people thought that it was Columbity. Some people thought
Speaker 3: that it was Columbiti who had done it out of
Speaker 3: valor or jealousy or in the spur of the moment.
Speaker 3: Some people thought it was a robbery. You know, there
Speaker 3: were a number of people, and I talk about them
Speaker 3: in the book, who committed a lot of crimes locally
Speaker 3: and were armed, and there had been murders in house
Speaker 3: in home invasions. Some people really thought it was what
Speaker 3: she said, and she said all the way through, right
Speaker 3: to the end. She said it. Two men broke in
Speaker 3: and they shot him and they beat me up. So
Speaker 3: then you sort of move further on to what happens
Speaker 3: to Johnny, and he spends the next six years pretty much.
Speaker 3: He doesn't stay in Fairbanks. The last time I saw
Speaker 3: him in those probably I think was the late fifties.
Speaker 1: Let's use us as an opportunity to stop for a
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Speaker 1: Today, you talk about Johnny for the next seven years,
Speaker 1: despite Diane committing suicide, you would have thought that this
Speaker 1: was the end of this indictment and this cloud of
Speaker 1: suspicion over Johnny. How long does it take and what
Speaker 1: are the circumstances in which the these chargers are finally
Speaker 1: dismissed against him.
Speaker 3: Yes, you would have thought that was very much the
Speaker 3: end of it. There were a lot of I read
Speaker 3: quite some letters and some telegraph cables and things at
Speaker 3: the time after her suicide, where they were pretty much
Speaker 3: saying the case is over. You know, we really didn't
Speaker 3: have It was going to be a fifty to fifty
Speaker 3: deal in the end, and now we don't have her.
Speaker 3: And you know, she was the last one to see
Speaker 3: him alive. She was the witness. She had been there
Speaker 3: at the alleged breaking, you know, and she's gone. They'd
Speaker 3: never really been publicly, at least a real sort of
Speaker 3: sense that they really felt that Johnny was the evil
Speaker 3: man here, or that he was an equal villain. You know,
Speaker 3: she had been dismissed as you know, the grasping, you know,
Speaker 3: gold digging blonde who would of course killed her rich husband.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe he had not been the best husband,
Speaker 3: and it had been in a moment of passion, but
Speaker 3: still she'd done it him. You know, he was he
Speaker 3: wasn't the spurned lover. You know, this wasn't the great
Speaker 3: love of faarable ages. You know, they'd only met a
Speaker 3: couple of months before. But less to say, as I
Speaker 3: found out from the files, they kept investigating the case
Speaker 3: that it was active way up until after Alaska became
Speaker 3: a state in fifty nine, and I think that was
Speaker 3: probably what was really the end of it, because as
Speaker 3: I found out going through the archives and dealing with
Speaker 3: the archives, is there's a very big line and a
Speaker 3: big difference between territorial and state. You know, when you're
Speaker 3: trying to get, for example, you know, freedom of information
Speaker 3: requests and documents and stuff out of territorial record that
Speaker 3: can be difficult. State record absolutely first class. They've got
Speaker 3: everything ordered because they were a state, and I think
Speaker 3: they kind of drew a line under everything, and that
Speaker 3: included the Johnny Warren arrest and the indictment because it
Speaker 3: was still in the papers, in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner,
Speaker 3: which was the big paper in Fairbanks, and still is.
Speaker 3: They still mentioned it whenever there was a grand jury,
Speaker 3: which used to run and every year once a year
Speaker 3: for a few weeks in Fairbanks, because again it's not
Speaker 3: a huge court system. This is again this is in
Speaker 3: the fifties. It would always be mentioned and there's still
Speaker 3: the Johnny Warren case, you know, with the murder of
Speaker 3: Cecil Wills because it was still a huge deal because
Speaker 3: the suicide had been a big story as well. That
Speaker 3: was the one that had made it as far as Australia,
Speaker 3: you know, because now we had the tragedy of suicide,
Speaker 3: the tragedy of you know. Unfortunately they called him, you know,
Speaker 3: the poor little orphan boy, you know, the poor little
Speaker 3: millionaire boy. You know, he was the that was Mark.
Speaker 3: So they had kept talking about bringing it to trial,
Speaker 3: bringing Johnny to trial, bringing Johnny to trial, and it
Speaker 3: never happened. And then there's just a document in the
Speaker 3: FBA files that has the indictment and there's a big
Speaker 3: rubber stamp on it that says exonerated, and there's a
Speaker 3: short there's a short document that just says, you know,
Speaker 3: we're dropping the charges, the charges to be discontinued, the investigation,
Speaker 3: and that was it. And he was a free man.
Speaker 3: And I speculated in the book, how did you find out?
Speaker 3: You know, what did he think? And the only way
Speaker 3: I really found out was because he obviously he's no
Speaker 3: longer alive anymore, as almost all of the people who
Speaker 3: are involved at the time are no longer with us.
Speaker 3: But I did speak to Johnny Warren. He did have
Speaker 3: one child. He had a child very late in life.
Speaker 3: He was actually married five times as well, ironically, but
Speaker 3: his fifth wife was younger than him, and he had
Speaker 3: a child later in life. The child's younger than me
Speaker 3: by child. He's a man, obviously, but he's younger than me.
Speaker 3: And I met him. I managed to track him down,
Speaker 3: and I asked him about, you know, his father, and
Speaker 3: did his father ever talk about this? You know, why
Speaker 3: on earth would he? But did he ever mention, you
Speaker 3: know that back in the fifties, you know, I was
Speaker 3: involved in this big case in Fairbanks or anything like that.
Speaker 3: And of course his name is John as well. Of
Speaker 3: course john said no, he never mentioned it to me.
Speaker 3: He never mentioned it to my mother or And the
Speaker 3: only way they found out about it was when Johnny
Speaker 3: passed away. They were going going through his effects and
Speaker 3: his papers, and he had kept a copy of Life
Speaker 3: magazine which had the photographs and the story about the
Speaker 3: murder in it, which of course had pictures of him
Speaker 3: in it as well, you know, in handcuffs. And he
Speaker 3: kept that all his life and never said a word
Speaker 3: about it. So I wondered what he thought and whether
Speaker 3: he really was involved in any way and what happens.
Speaker 3: And again, that's what I talk about in the book
Speaker 3: is it's the last few chapters I look at the
Speaker 3: potential theories and see is it possible, is it feasible
Speaker 3: that William Calumbery was involved? Is it possible that Johnny
Speaker 3: Warren was involved? Was it a break in? Was it
Speaker 3: a random event? Was it a hit man? Was it
Speaker 3: related to organized crime? Because I had to look into that.
Speaker 3: You know, again, it's you know, a last territory of
Speaker 3: Alaska in the fifties in Fairbanks, you know, a town
Speaker 3: of you know, less than ten thousand people. How much
Speaker 3: money can there be? Well, the thing is, it doesn't
Speaker 3: matter if there's lots of bars and restaurants and hotels
Speaker 3: and lots of people around with lots of money to spend.
Speaker 3: I mean, in the thirties and forties and fifties, there
Speaker 3: was actually a I guess a red light district in
Speaker 3: Fairbanks that was all brothels, well maintained, well run, properly organized.
Speaker 3: That was for all the men who were there. And
Speaker 3: you know, it even had like a door where you
Speaker 3: could go in separately. You know, So there was money
Speaker 3: there and there was organized crime, you know, in Oregon
Speaker 3: and Seattle, And you know, it's not a big leap
Speaker 3: to think that it could have happened. And if Cecil
Speaker 3: had learned about it, he was a politically or cipically.
Speaker 1: Might have mad.
Speaker 3: He might have gone to the police. He might have
Speaker 3: gone to the police about it. So I look into
Speaker 3: that possible scenario. But in the end, you know, I
Speaker 3: come to the conclusion that I think is probably the
Speaker 3: most likely as to what happened on October seventeenth, nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty three.
Speaker 1: Are you right about what you believe happened? And you
Speaker 1: go back to Diane being beaten up, and it seems
Speaker 1: strange that somebody an assailant, a professional hit man as
Speaker 1: it looked like, or it was depicted as, would leave
Speaker 1: her as a witness. Yet she was not as in
Speaker 1: some cases it would be seen closer to recently, some
Speaker 1: of these people that claim to be a victim aren't
Speaker 1: very beat up. She was definitely beaten by someone. What
Speaker 1: is your idea about at least Diane's guilt in.
Speaker 3: This, Yeah, that's right, you're absolutely right. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: the thing. You see the pictures off her, and there's
Speaker 3: a couple of pictures in the book. You know, she
Speaker 3: looks like, you know, to do a sort of horrible
Speaker 3: She looks like, you know, the a panda. You know,
Speaker 3: she's got two black eyes. She looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: she's she's been heavily beaten in the face.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I mean we've all probably some of us have black
Speaker 3: eyes in the past. I think if you get punched
Speaker 3: right on the nose, you can get two black eyes.
Speaker 3: But two black eyes is usually unusual. Now, when she
Speaker 3: said she was attacked by one of the two men
Speaker 3: who broke in, she said that she was just hit
Speaker 3: by like a flower pot, which I mean there's actually
Speaker 3: you know, because they take pictures of the flower on stuff.
Speaker 3: And I'm talking like one of those small flower perts
Speaker 3: you might put a cactus in, not like a huge
Speaker 3: ones that you know that you have the large like
Speaker 3: a busy Lizzie or something. I'm talking about the small,
Speaker 3: little ones that you have a cactus in. And at
Speaker 3: the time ev Danforth, the chief of police, was like, well,
Speaker 3: I didn't see any dirt on the floor. I didn't
Speaker 3: see any dirt in her hair. I didn't see like
Speaker 3: the plant anywhere. You know, she was supposed to have
Speaker 3: been hit and this thing cracked on her head. Now, sure,
Speaker 3: a ceramic flower pot cracked on your head would certainly
Speaker 3: hurt and maybe cut you and give you a bump,
Speaker 3: maybe even knock you out. But to give two black
Speaker 3: eyes seemed unusual, seemed maybe not to add up so much.
Speaker 3: And as you said, if there were other people involved
Speaker 3: in this, if it was, if this was a hit,
Speaker 3: a professional hit, why would they have left her alive?
Speaker 3: If it was made to look like a professional hit,
Speaker 3: why didn't they tie her up, throw her in the
Speaker 3: closet and then kill Cecil so that you could genuinely say,
Speaker 3: help get me out of the closet. I didn't see anything.
Speaker 3: Two men came in, put a blindfold end through them
Speaker 3: in the closet. You could do the same thing. If
Speaker 3: it was a setup by her to have him murdered,
Speaker 3: which some people thought. You know that she arranged for
Speaker 3: Cessil to be killed. Why not do it better than
Speaker 3: that to make her to be absolutely clear of any guilt. So,
Speaker 3: you know, I guess it's only when And I'm like,
Speaker 3: I say, I think I'm probably the only person who's
Speaker 3: ever assembled everything you know to look at it this way,
Speaker 3: But just now with the benefit of hindsight. You know,
Speaker 3: you have to remember in the nineteen fifties that the
Speaker 3: term domestic abuse I didn't even exist. People didn't know
Speaker 3: what that was. I mean, it was a very different
Speaker 3: time where you know, giving a child of spanking was
Speaker 3: you know, seen as good parenting. You know. Also, you know,
Speaker 3: if her husband was to hit his wife, that was
Speaker 3: something between them that wasn't necessarily considered to be too
Speaker 3: much of a problem, you know, especially if there was
Speaker 3: alcohol involved, you know. And unfortunately it's the same today.
Speaker 3: You know, police today will go on domestic calls and
Speaker 3: we'll see that there's evidence of abuse, but if the
Speaker 3: wife doesn't say anything or the husband doesn't say anything
Speaker 3: of the child, they can't press charges. So that's it's
Speaker 3: not especially unusual to us. But you look back with
Speaker 3: some benefit of high sate, You look at the picture
Speaker 3: of her, You look at what the neighbors said who
Speaker 3: were canvas after the murder and were witnesses or gave
Speaker 3: witness statements. Several of them said, we hear shouting, we
Speaker 3: hear the sound of screaming, We hear what could be fighting,
Speaker 3: you know, we hear crying women, crying children, whatever was
Speaker 3: going on in there, you know, there was something a
Speaker 3: disagreement or two. And I also did speak to a
Speaker 3: couple of people who are still quite elderly now, who
Speaker 3: were around at the time, who were adults at the
Speaker 3: time and knew Cecil and Diane, and there were a
Speaker 3: couple of them that said to me, oh, yeah, he
Speaker 3: did he did hit her. Now, whether he was a
Speaker 3: serial abuser a serial violent man, I don't know, but
Speaker 3: there were definitely indications that he hit his wife. And
Speaker 3: a couple of people said to me, you know, if
Speaker 3: he'd had too much to drink, sometimes that was when
Speaker 3: it would come out. And as we know, looking back
Speaker 3: again at the report, they'd been out the night before,
Speaker 3: had several drinks because they checked because the Northwood building
Speaker 3: had a bar in the bottom, so they'd been into
Speaker 3: the bar within the building, then gone back up to
Speaker 3: the room. They'd had several drinks there. Then they had
Speaker 3: drinks in the apartment with their late guest who came
Speaker 3: to visit. Then he'd had another drink before going to bed,
Speaker 3: And it was really, it was really when I spoke
Speaker 3: to a friend of mine who he is a friend,
Speaker 3: he's a friend now. He used to work for the LAPD,
Speaker 3: and I sent him a couple of the crime scene
Speaker 3: photographs without any context at all, and I said, what
Speaker 3: do you make of this woman here? And he said
Speaker 3: to me, he asked, the circumstances much as similar as
Speaker 3: we've discussed. And he said, well, he said, you know,
Speaker 3: having had twenty third years as a policeman, he said,
Speaker 3: it was pretty apparent to me that she's she's an
Speaker 3: abused wife. She's been beaten up by her husband. She said,
Speaker 3: because I saw it many times in work when I
Speaker 3: was on patrol. And as we know again because we've
Speaker 3: heard it many times, sometimes it's the wife. Sometimes that
Speaker 3: the husband will say, two men broke in and killed
Speaker 3: X Y zed in certain name here. You know, you
Speaker 3: watch a lot of you know, the true crime documentaries
Speaker 3: in the podcast, and so often people say, this man
Speaker 3: broke in, this man just broke in and just shot me,
Speaker 3: or just shot my shot her shot me, and you
Speaker 3: know I survived, that she's dead. And that's what he said.
Speaker 3: It was such a common excuse that men and sometimes
Speaker 3: the women and sometimes men would say, you know, two
Speaker 3: men broke in, I don't know who they were, strangers
Speaker 3: broke in and beat me up and shot him. And
Speaker 3: so once you start to sort of tie those bits together.
Speaker 3: Plus there was there was even a call. And again
Speaker 3: it's somewhat speculation, but the witness accounts or the police
Speaker 3: report of the murder did mention that at one stage
Speaker 3: Diana had called the equivalent of CPS like Child Protective Services. Now,
Speaker 3: of course, that could have been, as I say in
Speaker 3: the book, that could have been about a million things.
Speaker 3: It could have been about all sorts of things. She
Speaker 3: could have had a friend there that she called to
Speaker 3: say hello. However, when you read some of the witness
Speaker 3: statements about how they had Mark crying and children crying
Speaker 3: and children shouting, you just wonder. And then it isn't
Speaker 3: too hard to go from a scenario there, as I
Speaker 3: do pretty much in the last chapter of the book,
Speaker 3: as to what might have happened late that evening. I'm
Speaker 3: at October sixteenth, going into the seventeenth. You know, they
Speaker 3: were out drinking, they've been out, they stayed up late,
Speaker 3: maybe they had around, maybe they didn't. She got up
Speaker 3: sometime during the night was sick on her pajamas, and
Speaker 3: that was always an important thing. As the police lost
Speaker 3: the pajamas or didn't gather them properly, and you got
Speaker 3: the set that she was wearing when in the morning,
Speaker 3: and they did have the analyze and they found that that,
Speaker 3: you know, the blood on the pajamas was hurts, you know,
Speaker 3: and so you think, well, how did her blood get
Speaker 3: on unless she'd really been beaten up or someone had
Speaker 3: attacked her, and so it did kind of line up,
Speaker 3: and then you just think, well maybe and I, like
Speaker 3: I said, I won't do the whole scenario, but I
Speaker 3: kind of did an imaginary scenarios what might have happened.
Speaker 3: And I think it was probably, ultimately, sadly, a story
Speaker 3: that we've heard a million times before, where an abused partner,
Speaker 3: whether it was the first time of a hundredth time,
Speaker 3: decided that, you know, they'd had enough and decided to
Speaker 3: do something about it. And maybe it was meant to be.
Speaker 3: I don't think it was a brutal, you know, lying
Speaker 3: in wait, premeditated thing. I don't think it was that.
Speaker 3: And I think probably she may have just wanted to
Speaker 3: scare him, or she may have wanted to hurt him
Speaker 3: but not kill him, you know, who knows. And I
Speaker 3: think what happened is she did that realized what she'd done,
Speaker 3: and then I think she made a couple of phone
Speaker 3: calls to friends, and I think possibly that friend included
Speaker 3: William Clumboy. He lived in the same building. They were
Speaker 3: very good friends, and I think more than likely he
Speaker 3: might have not she might have talked to him about
Speaker 3: the situation at home, you know, because a lot of
Speaker 3: the time people don't say anything that people know. There
Speaker 3: are a couple of other family friends that came around later,
Speaker 3: and they were interviewed by the police, you know, and
Speaker 3: clear that of having an involvement in the murder. But
Speaker 3: they were caught. They did come round later, and they
Speaker 3: were friends of Cecil and Diane, and they may well
Speaker 3: have known perhaps what had been happening, and they might
Speaker 3: have sat there and said, look, we'll try and sort
Speaker 3: this out. It's going to be okay. Well, we'll try
Speaker 3: and sort this out. And you know, things didn't go
Speaker 3: to plan, yes, but like I said, it could have
Speaker 3: been it could have been something completely different. But I
Speaker 3: in many ways, you know, there's only so much you
Speaker 3: can get out of the newspapers, but you look at
Speaker 3: the pictures and you see how and I that she was.
Speaker 3: She was definitely beaten up, and you know, I can't imagine,
Speaker 3: you know that Johnny Warren came round and, you know,
Speaker 3: in his passion beat her up. I can't imagine that.
Speaker 3: You know, William Calumbery came round and she said, you
Speaker 3: know I've shot my husband, you know, beat me up
Speaker 3: to make it look like it was a break in.
Speaker 3: You know, I just can't imagine that. You know, he
Speaker 3: would have like, okay, stand there and let he punched
Speaker 3: in the face a few times, you know, which someone
Speaker 3: said that was possible. You know that it was a setup,
Speaker 3: but you know it's usually you know, the Ockham's rays
Speaker 3: are the most obvious explanation. It is probably the most likely,
Speaker 3: and once you've eliminated all the others and you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's sadly, it's a scenario that we still see
Speaker 3: played out, you know, every day today. And that was
Speaker 3: that was really one of the things that interested me
Speaker 3: in the story right back at the beginning, was that
Speaker 3: I thought, if this happened today, even in the same place,
Speaker 3: with the same people and the same looking the same,
Speaker 3: with the same you know, skin color, and the same circumstances,
Speaker 3: it would be a big media sensation just in the
Speaker 3: same way because we would. We would we would look
Speaker 3: at Diane and we would say, oh, well, she's obviously
Speaker 3: the gold digging blonde. We would look at Johnny as that,
Speaker 3: you know, the jazz musician who left town. They go, well,
Speaker 3: he's obviously got something to do with it, you know,
Speaker 3: And you would have looked at the money and you'd
Speaker 3: have thought, oh, it was all about money. I bet
Speaker 3: it was the two of them, and that's an end
Speaker 3: to it. But today I think we would look a
Speaker 3: little bit differently and find out more about the relationship
Speaker 3: between Diane and Cecil and see if there were any
Speaker 3: contributing factors as well as external factors like mental health
Speaker 3: issues or you know, she could have been on tablets
Speaker 3: for depression for years as far as we knew, you know,
Speaker 3: living in Fairbanks. It wasn't really something I addressed so
Speaker 3: much earlier. But living in Fairbanks or in Alaska, you
Speaker 3: know it, that's a tough life. It's very, very different
Speaker 3: to anything else. So I can't pretend that I know
Speaker 3: you know how it is. But from while I gathered
Speaker 3: on my trip there, you know, Alaskan's often tend to
Speaker 3: consider themselves, you know, Alaskan's first they'n Americans, you know,
Speaker 3: they are they are literally separated from America, much like Hawaii.
Speaker 3: You know, they consider themselves to be separate and different,
Speaker 3: and you know, they're very self reliant, and it's a
Speaker 3: very it can be a very tough life, and you
Speaker 3: you may have to rely on your neighbors one day
Speaker 3: to save your life. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: things that are sorted out privately and go unset. But
Speaker 3: I think today we might have looked into that, but
Speaker 3: for someone who comes up there. And you know, Diane
Speaker 3: went up there and she was you know, twenty nine,
Speaker 3: twenty eight. You know, she went up there. She had
Speaker 3: she had two daughters from a previous marriage, who I
Speaker 3: have mentioned that she was a strange from them. She'd
Speaker 3: had a very difficult divorce from her first husband. She
Speaker 3: was a strange from her daughters. I think probably not
Speaker 3: by her doing, but she was a strange from her daughters.
Speaker 3: So she goes up to to Fairbanks, which is in
Speaker 3: the middle of Alaska, you know, and the weather conditions
Speaker 3: there can be very challenging, and life was very challenging there,
Speaker 3: and you know, it was a very very big change
Speaker 3: from living in Portland, where she was born in Seattle,
Speaker 3: where she'd spent a lot of her time. You know,
Speaker 3: it was a very different lifestyle, and it's a struggle.
Speaker 3: It's a struggle. I'm sure she struggled to settle in.
Speaker 3: And plus, you know, as people will see in the book,
Speaker 3: you know, she was exceptionally attractive woman. She would have
Speaker 3: got a lot of attention from the start. I mean
Speaker 3: even you know, that was the thing that both the
Speaker 3: men and the women that I interviewed all said, Oh,
Speaker 3: she was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She
Speaker 3: was the most beautiful woman in Fairbanks by miles.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: So I think she would have got a lot of attention,
Speaker 3: and that might have been tricky if you know, she'd
Speaker 3: have had a husband who is maybe jealous or possessive
Speaker 3: or you know, you know, Will realized that he was
Speaker 3: twenty years you know, older than her, and he might
Speaker 3: have not shared the same interests. You know, and she
Speaker 3: was you know, she was a homemaker like so many
Speaker 3: of so many women would have been at the time,
Speaker 3: and perhaps she felt she wanted a little more, but
Speaker 3: she was stuck in a little town and that could
Speaker 3: have had an effect. You know, the weather can affect
Speaker 3: people in Alaska. You know, there's months of endless sun
Speaker 3: and the months of dark. That's a medical condition. You know,
Speaker 3: people can be affected by that, and that may have
Speaker 3: all come into play.
Speaker 1: Yes, I want to thank you so much, James T.
Speaker 1: Bartlett for coming on and talking about your extraordinary The
Speaker 1: Alaskan Blonde Sex Secrets and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.
Speaker 1: For those that might want to find out more information
Speaker 1: about this, Is there a website for this book?
Speaker 3: Yes, of course. These days we're on social media. Pretty
Speaker 3: much everything is the Alaskan Blonde Blonde with an E.
Speaker 3: But the website is the Alaskan Blonde dot com, and
Speaker 3: then there's Facebook and Instagram and Twitter is Alaskan Blonde
Speaker 3: fifty three. But yes, it's all. There's a lot online
Speaker 3: and I'm going to put a lot more up because
Speaker 3: especially on the website, because so much I could get
Speaker 3: into the book, but there was really so much here
Speaker 3: and I hope I've scratched the surface in some way.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, thank you so much. The Alaskan Blonde Sex Secrets
Speaker 1: and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America. James T. Bartlett,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. You have a great evening. Good night,
Speaker 1: thank you,