Speaker 1: Hello, It is Ryan and I was on a flight
Speaker 1: the other day playing one of my favorite social spin
Speaker 1: slot games on chumpacasino dot com. I looked over at
Speaker 1: the person sitting next to me. How you know what
Speaker 1: they were doing? They were also playing Chumpa Casino coincidence,
Speaker 1: I think not everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumpa
Speaker 1: Casino's home to hundreds at casino style games. You can
Speaker 1: play for free anytime, anywhere, even at thirty thousand feet.
Speaker 1: So sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com to
Speaker 1: claim you're free. Welcome bonus, that's Chumbuck Casino dot com
Speaker 1: and live the Chumba Lite. Nopvers necessary dvoid where everyb
Speaker 1: I lost the terms and conditions eighteen plus.
Speaker 2: Judy was boring Hello, Then Judy discovered Chumbucasino dot com.
Speaker 3: It's my little escape.
Speaker 4: Now Judy's the life of the party.
Speaker 5: Oh baby Mama is bringing home the bacon.
Speaker 4: WHOA Take it easy, Judy.
Speaker 6: Jump.
Speaker 4: The Chumba life is for everybody.
Speaker 2: So go to Chumpacasino dot com and play over one
Speaker 2: hundred casino style games. Join today and play for free
Speaker 2: for your chance to redeem some serious prices.
Speaker 4: Jump Chumpacasino dot Com, Nobrid's necessary Boid.
Speaker 2: We're goingited to my eighteen plus terms and conditioned to
Speaker 2: plus what's for details.
Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them Gaesy Bundy Dahmer The Nightstalker VTK Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 7: journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 5: In nineteen thirty one, San Diego's idyllic image as a
Speaker 5: beach town with peaceful suburbs concealed a harrowing reality. A
Speaker 5: series of unsolved crimes targeting women, fueling fear and vulnerability.
Speaker 5: Monsters on the Loose tells the tragic and true story
Speaker 5: of three women murdered early that year, Virginia Brooks, Luis Tober,
Speaker 5: and Hazel Bradshaw. Local law enforcement, out of town, criminologists
Speaker 5: and investigators from what would become the FBI pursued hundreds
Speaker 5: of leads statewide. Newspapers covered every angle and clue, and
Speaker 5: sometimes played a role in the investigations. Yet the killers
Speaker 5: were never identified and brought to justice. In Monsters on
Speaker 5: the Loose, Award winning author and historian Richard L. Kerrico
Speaker 5: pieces fragments of evidence together for three cold cases, shetting
Speaker 5: light on a dark chapter in San Diego's history. More
Speaker 5: than ninety years after the murders, Karako emerges as an
Speaker 5: advocate for the victims, particulously reconstructing their stories immersed in
Speaker 5: dusty files, long forgotten oral histories, and newly discovered investigation records.
Speaker 5: His primary objective remains unwavering to seek justice for the
Speaker 5: three young women wid no witnesses to the crimes. The
Speaker 5: significance of circumstantial evidence and speculation, both then and now
Speaker 5: became paramount, and he may have even solved one of
Speaker 5: the murders. The book that were featuring this evening is
Speaker 5: Monsters on the Loose, The true story of three unsolved
Speaker 5: murders in Prohibition era San Diego, with my special guest,
Speaker 5: historian and author Richard L. Carico. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 5: and thank you very much for this interview. Richard L.
Speaker 3: Caraco, thank you glad to join you.
Speaker 5: You write that there were three dead women, one stabbed,
Speaker 5: one hanged, and one strangled murdered in San Diego within
Speaker 5: four months in nineteen thirty one. But they were not
Speaker 5: the only cases of murder and child kidnapping in San
Speaker 5: Diego that year. Like most major cities, San Diego had
Speaker 5: plenty of unsolved murders to examine. But you, as an
Speaker 5: archaeologist and historian, you picked these three murders Virginia Brooks,
Speaker 5: Louise Tuber, and Hazel Bradshaw to explore and write about
Speaker 5: for several reasons. Tell us about that exploration, and tell
Speaker 5: us about the several reasons why you chose these three
Speaker 5: murders in particular to write about in Monsters on the Loose.
Speaker 3: Thanks Dan, Well, Basically, I was doing research. This is
Speaker 3: how things go sometimes when one does research. I was
Speaker 3: doing research on Native Americans and some things that were
Speaker 3: happening mean to them in the nineteen thirties. This was
Speaker 3: like almost ten years ago. And at some point, as
Speaker 3: I was looking to old newspapers and at that time
Speaker 3: they were on microfilm, they hadn't all been digitized, I
Speaker 3: saw one of the murders pop up and I started
Speaker 3: looking into that particular murder, and it was Virginia, the
Speaker 3: little Girl, Virginia Brooks. And then I sort of got
Speaker 3: on this quest that maybe I'd write an article for
Speaker 3: a local newspaper or a magazine about the death of
Speaker 3: a child, a very young child of kidnapping, and one
Speaker 3: thing led to another, and suddenly I realized that in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty one, in a town that was pretty well
Speaker 3: known today at least to be pretty laid back and
Speaker 3: not a high crime rate, all of that, that there
Speaker 3: were at least at least nine unsolved murders of people
Speaker 3: under twenty five, and that San Diego was number two
Speaker 3: in the nation in suicides, and that there was an
Speaker 3: underbelly to San Diego that most people didn't think about.
Speaker 3: So then I got the idea for a book and
Speaker 3: started researching the night and Murders, and I paired it
Speaker 3: down to these three because they covered slightly different chronological
Speaker 3: age groups, if you will, with the little girl being
Speaker 3: eight or nine kidnapped, and then Louise Tolbert seventeen described
Speaker 3: as beautiful and wanted to run away from home and
Speaker 3: lived with a father who was, you know, nice guy,
Speaker 3: but pushing on her in her early teenage years, mid
Speaker 3: teenage years. And then Hazel, who was a little bit
Speaker 3: older twenty two, went out on a date and then
Speaker 3: found murdered later. So three different types of women, if
Speaker 3: you will, young women, pretty similar economic and the depression
Speaker 3: was going on, and different methods of being killed, and
Speaker 3: then the investigations took different tracks. Same people were involved
Speaker 3: in many cases at the Standugel police department and the sheriffs,
Speaker 3: but the studies ended up being different from the forensics
Speaker 3: and the evidence and the newspapers involved and all that.
Speaker 3: So you're right in your introduction that part of it
Speaker 3: was I just couldn't believe that we knew so little
Speaker 3: about these women, young women, and I did want to
Speaker 3: somewhat advocate for them, and also because it was one
Speaker 3: of my sub interests, get into how the newspapers of
Speaker 3: the time covered the cases, because you know, we're going
Speaker 3: through a period now where the media comes under a
Speaker 3: lot of criticisms from all different sides. And if you
Speaker 3: read the newspapers back in that time, al Capone was
Speaker 3: still alive, you know, and there was all this almost
Speaker 3: getting into gangsters as good people. So that was impetus
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 5: You also talk about the cozy relationship the press enjoy
Speaker 5: with the police and their belief You say that they
Speaker 5: almost thought they were part of the investigation.
Speaker 3: Correct, unlike today, where I'm sure some of that still
Speaker 3: goes on to some degree. But this is more like
Speaker 3: if you look at an old nineteen twenties nineteen thirties
Speaker 3: movies where the newspaper men with their little visors are
Speaker 3: sitting around a bar with smoke and cigars going on
Speaker 3: and shots of whiskey, and right next to him as
Speaker 3: a policeman, either in uniform or not, and they're routinely
Speaker 3: talking about cases and talking about women and talking about
Speaker 3: because prohibition was going on, talking about booze. So when
Speaker 3: I was growing up in San Diego downtown, there was
Speaker 3: a bar that is no longer there, but that bar,
Speaker 3: even when I was there in the late sixties mid sixties,
Speaker 3: was the hangout for the newspaper men whose office was
Speaker 3: within blocks of the police department, and they routinely met
Speaker 3: and drank together, smoked cigars together, went to the racetrack together.
Speaker 3: And so there was that side of the press. And
Speaker 3: then it was also the fact that as soon as
Speaker 3: a police call came in or the word got out
Speaker 3: that there was a victim or a murder happening or
Speaker 3: happened in many cases, the newspaper reporters got there right
Speaker 3: after or at the same time as the police officers,
Speaker 3: and oftentimes the crime scene wasn't cordoned off with the
Speaker 3: yellow tape that's so ubiquitous now in crime cases. And
Speaker 3: in some cases the newspaper people would actually pick up
Speaker 3: evidence and show it to the policeman or in one
Speaker 3: case actual they helped carry one of the bodies away.
Speaker 3: So a very different time.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 5: You talk about the newspapers at the time, tell us
Speaker 5: about the reporting and the headlines.
Speaker 3: Sure it was. Anyone who's ever read about or seen
Speaker 3: a video or a documentary of the Limberg case, the
Speaker 3: baby that was kidnapped and killed. No, the newspapers of
Speaker 3: the time, If I was going to stick one word
Speaker 3: on it, it would be salacious. And it came out
Speaker 3: of you know, the Hearst newspapers sort of started that
Speaker 3: as a very popular thing up in San Francisco with
Speaker 3: The Examiner and other newspapers, and the object was to
Speaker 3: write big, bold, black headlines whatever the topic was, to
Speaker 3: get the reader to buy the newspaper. Obviously to sell
Speaker 3: more advertising. So today newspapers are obviously fading away somewhat.
Speaker 3: Advertisings dropped off, but this was the heyday of newspapers
Speaker 3: and large numbers of people subscribed to them read them.
Speaker 3: You had newsboys on the corners in San Diego and
Speaker 3: New York and San Francisco hawky newspapers, and they would
Speaker 3: of course yell out the headline. So part of that
Speaker 3: was as you read the article towards women more than men,
Speaker 3: obviously they would describe for instance, Luis, who was in
Speaker 3: fact quite beautiful at seventeen, but they would say well rounded.
Speaker 8: The luptuous, They would describe her dress, whereas at a
Speaker 8: male being killed, a man being killed would simply say
Speaker 8: a young attorney was found hang today they wouldn't describe
Speaker 8: him as hunky or you know, handsome or nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that was a big part of the story
Speaker 3: at the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's get to the first person, the first character
Speaker 5: in the story, and it's a ten year old Virginia
Speaker 5: Brooks born in nineteen twenty in Indianapolis, and this is
Speaker 5: February eleventh, nineteen thirty one. Faithful morning. Tell us a
Speaker 5: little bit about Virginia Brooks, who is she? And her
Speaker 5: parents Blanche and John. Tell us about life for Virginia
Speaker 5: Brooks before February eleventh, nineteen thirty one.
Speaker 3: It's almost as if it's a TV show. She was
Speaker 3: a really good student, loved to go to the library
Speaker 3: back when public libraries were you know, the venue for
Speaker 3: getting books, especially for marginalized people or less wealthy people.
Speaker 3: And this was during the depression, it had been going
Speaker 3: on for a year and a half. And she was
Speaker 3: dark haired, and she cut her hair in the style
Speaker 3: or her mom cut her hair in the style of
Speaker 3: sort of a pixie cut, which was made really popular
Speaker 3: by a movie actress at the time. She had two brothers,
Speaker 3: one older, one slightly younger, and blanched. The mother was
Speaker 3: right out of a central casting for the stay at
Speaker 3: home in a house dress, vacuumine and cooking and going
Speaker 3: to the market virtually every day as people did, to
Speaker 3: go to the store and buy what they needed to cook,
Speaker 3: and was not terribly well educated. The mother wasn't. The
Speaker 3: father was a itinerant truck driver but also had been
Speaker 3: a lumberman up in the northwest. Was described as gaunt
Speaker 3: and tall if you will, and Virginia routinely walked the
Speaker 3: roughly one point one or so miles to school five
Speaker 3: days a week, something you know, kind of unheard of
Speaker 3: out here in San Diego today generally and met a
Speaker 3: girlfriend on the way and they would walk to school
Speaker 3: and on the way home go buy the library and
Speaker 3: pick up books. And three days before Valentine's Day nineteen
Speaker 3: thirty one, Virginia in her little dress with her red
Speaker 3: jacket and a book bag and lunch that included an
Speaker 3: orange and ten cents in her pocket, set out to
Speaker 3: go to school and disappeared.
Speaker 5: She was supposed to meet her friend, you mention, Katie Luco,
Speaker 5: and they routinely would walk a certain distance when they met,
Speaker 5: and she waited for ten minutes and her friend didn't
Speaker 5: show up. Now there's accounts by people that saw her
Speaker 5: up to a certain point. How do the detectives in
Speaker 5: San Diego Sheriff Department, Blake Mason, how do they proceed well?
Speaker 3: Because she was so young, and because it was such
Speaker 3: a regular pattern, unlike today, perhaps unlike today, there was
Speaker 3: really not a big consideration that she was a runaway
Speaker 3: or she'd intentionally disappear, although that was mentioned so that evening.
Speaker 3: The police were notified the sheriff because it was actually
Speaker 3: in the unincorporated area, and immediately the police and the
Speaker 3: sheriff both of them went out and started interviewing people,
Speaker 3: and it was known that she normally met Katie, who
Speaker 3: was of Mexican extract, and walked with her. So they
Speaker 3: talked to Katie right away, and then they started interviewing
Speaker 3: people of the neighborhood well into the next day, obviously
Speaker 3: interviewing them. And the trouble with that is they got
Speaker 3: terribly conflicting. Some people saw her on one side of
Speaker 3: the street, some sawrow on the other. Some woman said
Speaker 3: she was pretty sure she saw her playing down in
Speaker 3: a canyon. We have these very deep canyons here in
Speaker 3: San Diego that I played in as a child. Other
Speaker 3: people said, oh, she got in a roadster with this man. No,
Speaker 3: she got in a coop with a man and a woman.
Speaker 3: So you can sort of imagine the bewildering. The context
Speaker 3: that the police actually got after about two days. If
Speaker 3: he brought out a map and he brought out the
Speaker 3: people that allegedly she was with, it was all over
Speaker 3: the place. So the only thing that it pinned down
Speaker 3: was a timeline because her brother had actually ridden by
Speaker 3: her on a bicycle and waved at her and laughed,
Speaker 3: you know, because he was riding his swim bike and
Speaker 3: she was walking and then she never showed up. So
Speaker 3: they started the investigation right away, talking to people, and
Speaker 3: there was no benefit of the doubt given to the
Speaker 3: fact that she was probably a runaway, as people might
Speaker 3: think today. She was gone and taken by someone.
Speaker 5: Now, you say, this was East San Diego at that
Speaker 5: time time was largely rural, So in this extensive search
Speaker 5: it included barns and garages and abandoned homes. Tell us
Speaker 5: about this very very extensive search.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in that way, it is somewhat like the Limberg kidnapping.
Speaker 3: I mean that was maybe obviously out of a house,
Speaker 3: but they were in a relatively rural area as well.
Speaker 3: So the police realizing it wasn't a big force and
Speaker 3: there was not a lot of crime, I mean statistically,
Speaker 3: they weren't set up in a way to do this
Speaker 3: kind of investigation. So they enlisted the aid of Boy Scouts,
Speaker 3: Women's clubs, military officers because we had a pretty large
Speaker 3: both marine and sailor component here in San Diego. And
Speaker 3: so they went out and literally knocked on door every door,
Speaker 3: and they went there were a lot of abandoned houses
Speaker 3: because it was the depression. They went down in a
Speaker 3: few cellars that we have here. We don't have a
Speaker 3: lot of sellers. But they went down into basements and cellars,
Speaker 3: and then one of the women's clubs put club their
Speaker 3: people put on their work clothes, if you will, and
Speaker 3: went through the canyons, looking through all the bushes. They
Speaker 3: actually enlisted the Navy pilots, and they flew over in
Speaker 3: their bid wing airplanes and got so low to the
Speaker 3: ground looking into the canyons and these valleys that they
Speaker 3: were actually scraping the brush with their wheels, according to
Speaker 3: some accounts, and so it was described at the time,
Speaker 3: and it probably was for several years the largest manhunt,
Speaker 3: if you will, or the largest investigation for a child
Speaker 3: or for anyone in San Diego County history. And both newspapers,
Speaker 3: the morning paper, the Union, and the evening paper Tribune
Speaker 3: covered it in even extra additions, and they would find
Speaker 3: things they thought might have been where she was, or
Speaker 3: someone found part of a jacket that looked like her
Speaker 3: as in a canyon, and those were newsworthy, they were
Speaker 3: worth riding up. So quite the search for poor little Virginia.
Speaker 5: In this police having the follow up any lead, for
Speaker 5: any possibility that it might lead to the abductor. February
Speaker 5: twenty six, John Brooks receives a cryptic letter. What does
Speaker 5: that letter instruct him to do? And what does he do?
Speaker 3: Well? He received this letter, and of course it wasn't
Speaker 3: Postmarke or well, it wasn't didn't have a new return
Speaker 3: address on it. And so here we are in San Diego,
Speaker 3: and Arizona is about one hundred and thirty miles one
Speaker 3: hundred and forty miles east of here, across the Colorado River.
Speaker 3: And this letter says, if you come out to court Side, Arizona,
Speaker 3: near quurt Side, Arizona, very small town out there, old
Speaker 3: mining town, go see the postmaster. He has information about
Speaker 3: your daughter, and very specific information about your daughter. John
Speaker 3: was a little discouraged by the police activities. The letter,
Speaker 3: of course said, don't notify the police. Just go do
Speaker 3: it on your own. It'll be okay. And so he
Speaker 3: and a couple of buddies, because he didn't own an automobile,
Speaker 3: I had an old truck, drove one hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: thirty forty miles through the night, got out to court Side,
Speaker 3: found the postmaster when he was open the next morning,
Speaker 3: and of course the postmaster said, I have no idea
Speaker 3: what you're talking about. I haven't seen any little girl
Speaker 3: out here. I did read about in the newspaper. Gosh.
Speaker 3: I feel sorry for you, but there's nothing I can
Speaker 3: do for you. And then John and his compatriots drove
Speaker 3: back to San Diego, and it appeared to the next newspaper,
Speaker 3: the next day's newspapers as a big headline back to
Speaker 3: the desert, worthless, blah blah blah. And of course the
Speaker 3: police were angry that John had done that on his own,
Speaker 3: because had it panned out a little bit better, how
Speaker 3: would that have played out? But that was part of
Speaker 3: what her father did. Today, driving that distance in a
Speaker 3: nice air condition car wouldn't be a big deal, but
Speaker 3: in nineteen thirty one, driving one hundred and forty or
Speaker 3: so miles across the desert, the mountains and down the
Speaker 3: mountains was not something one did casually, if you will.
Speaker 3: So that was just one of many many dead ends
Speaker 3: happened to the father and to the police. She was
Speaker 3: reported to be in San Francisco, she was reported to
Speaker 3: be in Yuma, Arizona. All over the place. So just
Speaker 3: about any especially man, single man, walking around with a
Speaker 3: young girl ten year old nine year old girl in
Speaker 3: any town in the West was suspect. So it was
Speaker 3: interesting times.
Speaker 5: You're right about Nearly one month later, March tenth, the
Speaker 5: body of Virginia Brooks is found wrapped in burlap and
Speaker 5: there are headlines in the paper. Girl packed to pieces
Speaker 5: by fiend. Body is discovered by a sheepman at the
Speaker 5: at this Kerneye area. So tell us about the discovery
Speaker 5: of Virginia Brooks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Camp Kearney is actually called Kurney Mason, named after
Speaker 3: the soldier of the nineteen forties and fifties, eighteen fifties.
Speaker 3: Excuse me, that was out here, this sheepherder Moses and
Speaker 3: his dog and sometimes his dog in a newspaper is
Speaker 3: called Shep and sometimes he's called Blackie. That just part
Speaker 3: of the inconsistencies was out He first told investigators he
Speaker 3: was out walking around because he's a sheepherder. Later he
Speaker 3: said he was out there. He admitted he was out
Speaker 3: with his twenty two shooting at ten cans. But Shep
Speaker 3: or Blackie the dog went up to the lap bag
Speaker 3: and started sniffing at it. And the setting is the
Speaker 3: vegetation up there on that mesa is low grass, very
Speaker 3: low grass and some chaparral creosote cactusy stuff. So Moses
Speaker 3: walked over and in one instance he said the bag
Speaker 3: was partially opened and he could see the decomposing body
Speaker 3: of a child. In another interview, he said he took
Speaker 3: out his knife and cut the bag open to look inside,
Speaker 3: so little discrepancies there. He's about half a mile from
Speaker 3: the major highway that later became three ninety five, running
Speaker 3: north and south. He ran out to the road with
Speaker 3: his dog and flagged down a truck driver who then
Speaker 3: drove into old town San Diego and called the police.
Speaker 3: Police came out with newspaper reporters and started the investigation,
Speaker 3: opened up the bags, and one of the police officers said,
Speaker 3: as soon as he saw the little red jacket and
Speaker 3: the dark hair, he knew that he'd found Virginia Brooks.
Speaker 3: And so then the newspapers big banner headlines photographs of
Speaker 3: her being carried in a coffin basically to a hearst,
Speaker 3: and then the follow up investigation of what Moses had found,
Speaker 3: and it was determined Moses said, well, she wasn't out
Speaker 3: there a day or two ago, so this is not
Speaker 3: where she was killed. She was dumped here, and indeed
Speaker 3: the forensics indicated she had been half buried somewhere, and
Speaker 3: that was a big part of the investigation, was she
Speaker 3: still had soil clinging to parts of her body. The
Speaker 3: hacking part Dan was interesting because the newspapers really played
Speaker 3: that up. One of them even said, I think it
Speaker 3: was the Los Angeles paper that she'd been a viscerated,
Speaker 3: that this fiend had gone in and cut out her
Speaker 3: inerds and threw them away.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 3: And in fact it was more likely the bugs and
Speaker 3: the animals wherever she was buried. So very gruesome for
Speaker 3: the Times, Yep, you.
Speaker 5: Read about a couple of the officers detected Paul Hayes
Speaker 5: contributing to the headlines in the paper being salacious. Tell
Speaker 5: us a little bit about their behavior and what they
Speaker 5: said to the press.
Speaker 3: You definitely get the impression, not all of them, but
Speaker 3: many of the police officers and more the police and
Speaker 3: the sheriffs enjoyed the limelight. They liked being quoted in
Speaker 3: the newspaper, and they were constantly even in Virginia Brooks's case,
Speaker 3: where it's kind of hard to be salacious about a
Speaker 3: ten year old girl and yet kind of describing almost
Speaker 3: taken end up to the edge of describing that she'd
Speaker 3: been sexually molested, which she may or may not have been.
Speaker 3: The body didn't tell that story, but talking about, you know,
Speaker 3: the kind of person that would do this, and there
Speaker 3: are monsters out there doing this to little girls. But
Speaker 3: I'm going to find her, you know, and this case
Speaker 3: won't go unsolved. And clearly he knew that newspapers won
Speaker 3: certain quotes, so he was one of the first people
Speaker 3: who did, in fact talk about that her body had
Speaker 3: been hacked and decapitated, and she was not decapitated, had
Speaker 3: came loose from the the body basically, so he was
Speaker 3: playing to the press. He was going to retire that
Speaker 3: year or the next year, and I think he saw
Speaker 3: this as kind of his last hurrah to get into
Speaker 3: the newspapers and to be somebody. And unlike some of
Speaker 3: the police officers who are quoted, he seems dispassionate in ways,
Speaker 3: which I guess you could say is good. But it
Speaker 3: was more like what was important about this was the
Speaker 3: case and his work on the case, rather than the
Speaker 3: family or her brothers or the poor little girl herself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're right, that questionable deaths in San Diego required
Speaker 5: that the deceased body be given in an autopsy by
Speaker 5: the medical examiner or by the coroner, and based on
Speaker 5: the autopsy, an inquest panel or jury might be convened
Speaker 5: to gather further details on the person's death. Tell us
Speaker 5: about this coroner's inquest and the purpose of it and
Speaker 5: the reach of the coroner's inquest in terms of investigative ability.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it was an interesting time, and this was
Speaker 3: true across the board from many things. I mean, you
Speaker 3: did not have to go to the police academy to
Speaker 3: become a policemaneral sheriff, for instance. You signed up and
Speaker 3: if they thought you could do it, then oftentimes you
Speaker 3: got the job using political connections. In the case of
Speaker 3: the coroner, the corner did not have a lot of training.
Speaker 3: But the way the process would work is a body
Speaker 3: is found and then the police turn it over to
Speaker 3: the coroner's office to do an autopsy, and the coroner
Speaker 3: then he determines was their potential homicide, was that an
Speaker 3: accident In the case of a drowning, was there anything
Speaker 3: that led to the drowning, and if were no criminal
Speaker 3: activity that he decided upon a homicide. If you will,
Speaker 3: then pretty much the case was closed, he would send
Speaker 3: that off to the police department and the district attorney.
Speaker 3: They would review it and say no, no actionable necessity done.
Speaker 3: Sometimes that was used. It was alleged as a cover
Speaker 3: up for people who'd clearly been murdered or probably have
Speaker 3: been murdered, because the police and the sheriff didn't want
Speaker 3: yet another case on their hands, so it just went away.
Speaker 3: In this case and the other young women in the book,
Speaker 3: the coroner said, no, clearly this child was abducted and
Speaker 3: somebody needs to happen. So then he makes the recommendation
Speaker 3: that there'd be an inquest based on the autopsy, and
Speaker 3: at the end quest, the last people to see Virginia
Speaker 3: would be called, her parents would be called, the police
Speaker 3: officers who would be called, the person who discovered the body,
Speaker 3: Moses would be called, and it was almost like a
Speaker 3: little mini grand jury, and the people sitting on the
Speaker 3: inquest jury had been appointed and they would listen to
Speaker 3: all the information. Sometimes these inquest would be one hour,
Speaker 3: sometimes they'd be a day, and then based on that
Speaker 3: recommendation would be turned over for a criminal action and
Speaker 3: a grand jury would actually be convened if in fact
Speaker 3: they had any suspects, so a little different than today.
Speaker 5: Tell us about this oigner's in quest.
Speaker 3: At this corner's inquest, it was very touchy. Some of
Speaker 3: the papers covered it pretty well, but they didn't have
Speaker 3: in this case, they didn't have any suspect. Because sometimes
Speaker 3: at the corner's inquest didn't testing enough in a case
Speaker 3: that we might cover here, they actually brought in a suspect,
Speaker 3: had him at the inquest. In this case they didn't
Speaker 3: have any any suspects. And what was mainly drived out
Speaker 3: of this was you have to identify the body, so
Speaker 3: you know, and all the TV shows today and everything,
Speaker 3: whoever goes to the morgue and they roll out the
Speaker 3: slab and you look at it. In this case, it
Speaker 3: was actually a in a mortuary, a private mortuary, right,
Speaker 3: and mother Blanche still refused to believe this was her daughter.
Speaker 3: And she's in a little coffin area and they slide
Speaker 3: back to the slat so she could look in, and
Speaker 3: her mom sees a chip tooth and the badly decomposed
Speaker 3: face of her daughter and goes, oh my god, it
Speaker 3: is my daughter. So it's a very dramatic and very
Speaker 3: touching scene again of course, the newspapers were right there
Speaker 3: describing every possible detail. So as a result of the inquest,
Speaker 3: then it gets kicked further and there was no resolution
Speaker 3: on exactly how she died because the body was in
Speaker 3: such bad shape. They repeated the fact it looked like
Speaker 3: she'd been half buried and parts of her had decomposed differentially.
Speaker 3: There were leaves stuck to her dress that came out,
Speaker 3: so they tried to look forward. These tins of palm
Speaker 3: trees grow, and this is truly the beginning of the
Speaker 3: forensic part of it. Then she had three hairs clutched
Speaker 3: in one of her hands. It appears we could certainly
Speaker 3: get into that. It appears that one of them might
Speaker 3: have been her own, but a couple were not her own,
Speaker 3: and started the forensic side of that investigation.
Speaker 5: How about the prospect that she was sexually assaulted? How
Speaker 5: did they deal with it at the inquest and how
Speaker 5: was it dealt with in the press?
Speaker 3: Well, in the vernacular of the press, and for that matter,
Speaker 3: even in an autopsy report, they rarely used the word
Speaker 3: rape or sexual. It was kind of understood at that
Speaker 3: time that if you talked about typically a female, but
Speaker 3: it could be a male, but typically a female who
Speaker 3: had been sexually assaulted or there was reason to believe
Speaker 3: that they had been sexually assaulted. They simply used the
Speaker 3: word assaulted viciously assaulted, versus if somebody had been beaten up,
Speaker 3: they said badly beaten or had trauma, those kinds of things.
Speaker 3: But the word assault used in the context of a
Speaker 3: female meant sexual in this case. It was alluded to.
Speaker 3: That was the underlying assumption, not just of the press
Speaker 3: and the police, but the public that if a little
Speaker 3: girl disappeared, then it must have been a fiend. It
Speaker 3: must have been a sexual pervert out there, and that's
Speaker 3: who we need to look for. So the autopsy could
Speaker 3: not define that, and I got copies of these materials.
Speaker 3: It simply left it wide open whether she had actually
Speaker 3: been sexually assaulted or not. But the press picked up
Speaker 3: on that will and took it to the next notch
Speaker 3: and said, well, of course she was sexually assaulted. They
Speaker 3: didn't use the word sexual because why else would you
Speaker 3: kidnap a little girl and in theory keep her for
Speaker 3: a day or two or three. Certainly the assumption was
Speaker 3: not she was kept somewhere for a month and then
Speaker 3: thrown out on the mesa because her body had been
Speaker 3: including decomposing in the ground, so it was always assumed
Speaker 3: that she was assaulted sexually.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the police are quite aggressive in you write, and
Speaker 5: questioning suspects, and they are known for eliciting confessions via
Speaker 5: the suspect techniques. Soon after, they claimed that they have
Speaker 5: three suspects. But tell us about the clearing of those
Speaker 5: three suspects relatively quickly too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure what the newspaper said, and it certainly would
Speaker 3: have been correct, is number one. They went out and
Speaker 3: rounded up all of the usual suspects and then there'd
Speaker 3: be a comma and it would say deviates and you know,
Speaker 3: perverts and all that. So they literally in this Sandigo
Speaker 3: area did it sort of a drag net, and if
Speaker 3: somebody had been arrested before on a sexual crime or
Speaker 3: was even suspected, they rounded him up and they you know,
Speaker 3: interrogated them with just like in the movies, with a
Speaker 3: rubber hose or with a set of brass knuckles wrapped
Speaker 3: up in cloth, pounded on. Some of these people kept
Speaker 3: them up all night, you know, the really bright light
Speaker 3: bulb in the stuffy dark room and all that. And
Speaker 3: one suspect was a gentleman who he was brought in
Speaker 3: simply because his neighbors turned him in because he had
Speaker 3: a bloody stump in his backyard, a tree stump in
Speaker 3: his backyard, and he had palm trees nearby that might
Speaker 3: have matched the palm leaves in her in Virginia's hand.
Speaker 3: So he was arrested. And as it turned out, gosh,
Speaker 3: my grandmother did this. In the same time period, he
Speaker 3: used to kill his own chickens and put him on
Speaker 3: the stump and cut their heads off, and so he said,
Speaker 3: that's not what happened out there. So he indeed was
Speaker 3: the main suspect at the time that went away. There
Speaker 3: was another gentleman who was a known deviate and had
Speaker 3: been rested for in fact, molesting another girl while this
Speaker 3: investigation was going on. But he could prove his whereabouts
Speaker 3: if he will well that morning, and he was punished
Speaker 3: for the other crime. And then there was also a
Speaker 3: couple of other There was a rich family here in town.
Speaker 3: Their son was known to like little girls for lack
Speaker 3: of a better word, and he was investigated, but not
Speaker 3: for very long. And that was kind of you know.
Speaker 3: The mother, Blanche said, I think he did it. I
Speaker 3: think that that little boy, that boy, he was a teenager,
Speaker 3: came out here and was snooping around. And I've seen
Speaker 3: him in the neighborhood and he doesn't believe in he
Speaker 3: doesn't belong in this neighborhood. We're poor folk out here.
Speaker 3: What's his boy doing out here? But probably because of
Speaker 3: family connections or he had a good alibi, he was
Speaker 3: released also, So after weeks and weeks of investigation, they
Speaker 3: were nowhere closer. They had tire tracks, they had the
Speaker 3: palm leaves, they had other forensic information, but they couldn't
Speaker 3: find a person to go with it.
Speaker 5: Let's usus as an opportunity to stop for a second
Speaker 5: and for these messages.
Speaker 6: Step into the world of power, loyalty and luck.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.
Speaker 6: With family, canoli's and spins mean everything.
Speaker 4: Now you want to get mixed up in the family.
Speaker 6: Business, Introducing the Godfather at Champagasino dot com. Test your
Speaker 6: luck in the shadowy world at the Godfather slot.
Speaker 4: Some day I will call upon you to do a
Speaker 4: service for me.
Speaker 6: Play the Godfather now at Champacasino dot com. Welcome to
Speaker 6: the Family vdW Group No.
Speaker 5: Perch is necessary if we were privited by loss he
Speaker 5: terms and conditions eighteen plus. Now, just to throw a
Speaker 5: monkey wrench into things, there is a person that writes
Speaker 5: a letter and one of those letters is put under
Speaker 5: the door of John brooks Is home. But also that
Speaker 5: these letters were put in other areas in public. This
Speaker 5: person wanted to get noticed, tell us about the doctor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the doctor, and it's you know, this does happen
Speaker 3: in these high profile cases, and this sorting was high
Speaker 3: profile for San Diego. There's always some looney person out
Speaker 3: there or somebody who either wants to draw attention to themselves,
Speaker 3: or if not to themselves, make something happen that they
Speaker 3: can read about it in the newspaper and know that
Speaker 3: it was them, they who caused this. So in this case,
Speaker 3: these letters that were written on typically on almost like
Speaker 3: brown paper bags back when such things existed, and printed
Speaker 3: clearly to try to hide the identity of the person
Speaker 3: writing it from the doctor, and the doctor basically told
Speaker 3: the family and other people he put them on a
Speaker 3: windshield of a car nearby. He slid one under a
Speaker 3: gas station nearby a door, and then the blanche in
Speaker 3: John Brooks family themselves and What he basically said was
Speaker 3: it was interesting. He wanted to stress that yes, he
Speaker 3: killed her, but he was not a pervert. He was
Speaker 3: not a pervert, he said, did kill her, but not
Speaker 3: a pervert, and that you'll never solve this because I'm
Speaker 3: smarter than you. You the police. So it was almost
Speaker 3: like Letters of the Zodiac, you know, many decades later,
Speaker 3: hunting the police and saying, hey, I'm smarter than you,
Speaker 3: and you'll you'll never catch me. As in those letters,
Speaker 3: he said, I'm going to kill again. I'm going to
Speaker 3: kill again. And so this just in a town that
Speaker 3: rarely locked its doors up at night and where children
Speaker 3: did roam around in canyons and did walk the mile
Speaker 3: a mile and a half to school. This town almost
Speaker 3: shut down, especially near East San Diego and then those neighborhoods,
Speaker 3: because this monster was out there and he said I'm
Speaker 3: going to hunt for other little girls, and the fear
Speaker 3: and the newspaper played that up, of course, So it
Speaker 3: was a bad time for the parents of San Diego.
Speaker 3: But upon investigation, it turns out that it was a
Speaker 3: teenage boy and his chum who simply wanted to, as
Speaker 3: they said, be part of the case, be part of
Speaker 3: the case. So they were hauled in, they were interrogated.
Speaker 3: One of the boys, the doctor himself, actually was from
Speaker 3: a pretty good family and so I don't know that
Speaker 3: he was ever punished. I could ever find out any
Speaker 3: information that he was taken to court. But that was
Speaker 3: the end of of quote the doctor's rampage that everybody feared.
Speaker 3: You're right.
Speaker 5: Finally about March twenty first, nineteen thirty one is the
Speaker 5: memorial and burial. There's four thousand people that attend, but
Speaker 5: there's only can only hold five hundred inside, and six
Speaker 5: of Virginia's classmates, all ten year olds, were the pall bearers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was a very touching scene. And for the
Speaker 3: population of San Diego at the time, that was a
Speaker 3: really large number. I mean, you're kind of looking at
Speaker 3: the same time period, maybe almost like Valentino's memorial service
Speaker 3: or something like that. And every paper, the Los Angeles papers,
Speaker 3: the San Francisco papers, actually sent people down. They didn't
Speaker 3: just do by teletype or by getting the article, and
Speaker 3: then you know derivative writing an article based on an article.
Speaker 3: They sent reporters down on photographers, and it was I
Speaker 3: would say the funeral of the decade practically in San Diego.
Speaker 3: It was huge, And yeah, the newspaper had a really
Speaker 3: good photo of the little girls based you know, dressed
Speaker 3: in their little white dresses, her classmates, carrying her little
Speaker 3: coffin out towards the to be taken for burial, and
Speaker 3: a lot of people crying, and it was described as
Speaker 3: a very sad scene and with no closure, of course,
Speaker 3: so it was quite a deal.
Speaker 5: You're right to add to San Diego's sadness and paranoia.
Speaker 5: By early May, the press and the police turned their
Speaker 5: attention to the gruesome murder of a seventeen year old
Speaker 5: Louisetober found hanging semi nude from an oak tree. Tell
Speaker 5: us about this discovery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's my favorite story in the book, if you will,
Speaker 3: and the favorite of all of nine nun solve murders
Speaker 3: in San Diego, simply because I became very attached to
Speaker 3: the story, and we can get into this a little bit.
Speaker 3: My path continued and continued and continued. So, yeah, one
Speaker 3: pretty nice May morning, this gentleman Thomas Martinez and his
Speaker 3: family are going to go out for a picnic on
Speaker 3: a Sunday morning, which especially back then, was a little
Speaker 3: more common when you didn't have their conditioning and television
Speaker 3: at home, and so he takes his family to a
Speaker 3: very very remote area that was used for picnicking, and
Speaker 3: it was kind of the lovers laying big oak trees,
Speaker 3: really beautiful Senegle River flows nearby, and he parked the
Speaker 3: car and left his wife and kids to get the
Speaker 3: picnic basket and the thermos bottle with juice and coffee
Speaker 3: in it, and he walks down to find an appropriate
Speaker 3: place for a picnic. And as he comes around one
Speaker 3: of the corners of the grove of oak trees, he
Speaker 3: sees this woman hanging from a tree with her feet
Speaker 3: just actually the heels of her feet scraping the ground,
Speaker 3: just barely touching the ground. And she's nude except for
Speaker 3: her silk stalkings actually imitation silk stalkings, and her shoes.
Speaker 3: And so he runs back to his wife and says, no,
Speaker 3: we can't. There's a terrible thing. We can't go there.
Speaker 3: So then he drives into the sheriff's office and alerts them.
Speaker 3: They come out again, newspaper reporters in tow and start
Speaker 3: the investigation of the terrible death of Luis. So that's
Speaker 3: how her body was discovered and it again she hadn't
Speaker 3: gone missing. She was seventeen years of age. She spent
Speaker 3: a fair amount of time out of the house on
Speaker 3: dates with a lot of different young men, very vivacious,
Speaker 3: went roller skating, went swimming, went up in airplanes with
Speaker 3: a friend of hers who was a pilot. So she
Speaker 3: was called what they called them, a modern girl. And
Speaker 3: what that meant was she was different than her older
Speaker 3: sisters or her mom. For instance, she smoked cigarettes, she
Speaker 3: stayed out late, She listened to the new big band
Speaker 3: music instead of the waltzes and the polkas and all
Speaker 3: that stuff. So suddenly you have a newspaper account, you know,
Speaker 3: new victim. And it started out the salacious of it.
Speaker 3: Dan was the voluptuous girl found hanging from a tree,
Speaker 3: the well rounded girl, you know, the modern girl found
Speaker 3: hanging from a tree. And that starts the story of
Speaker 3: Luis Talborough.
Speaker 5: You introduced this detective George H. Breerton. He assumes the
Speaker 5: position of deputy sheriff, and he had studied under renowned criminologist,
Speaker 5: You write, August Vohmer at the University of California at Berkeley.
Speaker 5: Tell us about their investigation and what they determined from
Speaker 5: the crime scene and specifically the rope that was hanging
Speaker 5: she was hanging from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a time when criminology was really new
Speaker 3: in the sense of we would think of criminology, and
Speaker 3: it was just really getting ahead of steam. And so
Speaker 3: he was brought down from up north and he had
Speaker 3: studied at UC Berkeley, and his thing was fingerprints were
Speaker 3: pretty well known, but he was really getting into fingerprinting.
Speaker 3: He was getting into the forensics of in this case,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, the rope, the tire tracks. Can we
Speaker 3: get tire tracks out of this and figure something out
Speaker 3: what really was the condition of the body? So okay,
Speaker 3: the corner says this, but what else can we find
Speaker 3: out about it? So he was like, you know, a
Speaker 3: mad dog trying to figure this thing out. And at
Speaker 3: first the newspapers kept playing up the rope, that hey,
Speaker 3: we can figure this out by the rope, because it's
Speaker 3: not a normal rope. It's not a common rope. It's
Speaker 3: a rope that's used typically by the navy or by
Speaker 3: the military. And also the way it was tied was
Speaker 3: in a way that would know men who tied up
Speaker 3: boats or men who worked on boats would know. So
Speaker 3: it somebody has to be something with the navy. And
Speaker 3: she was probably one hundred and fifteen pounds. So this
Speaker 3: rope was thrown over a limb the oak tree and
Speaker 3: then pulled, so you'd have to be strong enough to
Speaker 3: pull it up. So you're right, this rope. It was
Speaker 3: all about the rope initially, and they interviewed people. They
Speaker 3: thought they might have found the rope. Where did it
Speaker 3: come from? From a taxi driver who'd use one like
Speaker 3: that to yank somebody out of the mud, But in
Speaker 3: fact it wasn't that rope. And it went on and on,
Speaker 3: and then they moved away from the rope. They were
Speaker 3: looking at the tire tracks. Of course, they investigated everybody
Speaker 3: who had known her, but it's almost like parallel investigations.
Speaker 3: He was looking at the forensic side of it and
Speaker 3: the fact that she had dust on her shoes. Where
Speaker 3: did that red dust come from? What else can we
Speaker 3: get from the rope? Let's look at her. She had
Speaker 3: a diary with her. Can we pull fingerprints off of
Speaker 3: that diary? So he's looking at it in the very
Speaker 3: scientific way that we would today, certainly, whereas the police
Speaker 3: is more typically out there interviewing. And she had a
Speaker 3: lot all of her boyfriends, people who knew her, who
Speaker 3: saw her last You know, she was downtown working in
Speaker 3: a downtown five and dime store and got off at five,
Speaker 3: drew her last paycheck, said she was going to go
Speaker 3: to Chicago to see her grandparents and get out of
Speaker 3: San Diego because it was dead And the next time
Speaker 3: she's seen is hanging from this tree in what's now
Speaker 3: a park.
Speaker 4: You're right that.
Speaker 5: In nineteen thirty six, Breerton is working with criminologist Frank
Speaker 5: Gompert of Los Angeles and they hear of a serial
Speaker 5: killer with an alias interestingly called Slip and Fell, but
Speaker 5: his real name is Ralph Jerome von Braun. Tell us
Speaker 5: about this interrogation and its results.
Speaker 3: Yeah, von Braun was in fact a killer and had
Speaker 3: killed at least a couple of people, and today we
Speaker 3: would probably believe he was mentally deranged. But he had
Speaker 3: actually killed the ex wife of the governor of Nome, Alaska,
Speaker 3: had beaten her to death, and when he was arrested,
Speaker 3: he inferred that he had killed other people. And yes,
Speaker 3: when he was asked, they tended to ask more leading
Speaker 3: questions back then in the interrogations. When he was asked
Speaker 3: if he knew of the death of Luis. He said,
Speaker 3: oh absolutely. And so even five years later, four or
Speaker 3: five years later, the police and the criminologists were desperate
Speaker 3: to find this person because he had not been found yet.
Speaker 3: So he's still out there and maybe he's killing other people.
Speaker 3: So he was not the only one. Von Bram was
Speaker 3: not the only one. But there were men who were
Speaker 3: arrested through crimes who either they wanted their name in
Speaker 3: the newspaper, they wanted to be part of an investigation.
Speaker 3: They wanted to make themselves bigger than they were in
Speaker 3: terms of their murder, because I assumed they were probably
Speaker 3: going to be executed anyhow. And so this went on
Speaker 3: for days and days. San Diego police went up and
Speaker 3: interviewed him, and it turned out to be a dead
Speaker 3: end that he was not in San Diego right at
Speaker 3: that time, although he said he was and other people
Speaker 3: had said he was. He wasn't that week in San Diego.
Speaker 3: He was off somewhere else. But that rually got played
Speaker 3: up because it extended beyond San Diego. It was more
Speaker 3: of a San Francisco, Northern California angle, if you will.
Speaker 3: So those papers up there are the hearst papers, really
Speaker 3: played played that up, and you know the police would
Speaker 3: have if they could have, they would have penned on
Speaker 3: him to get done with this case and close the
Speaker 3: casebook and be finished up. But it didn't work out
Speaker 3: that way for them.
Speaker 5: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop for a
Speaker 5: second to hear these messages.
Speaker 1: Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight
Speaker 1: the other day playing one of my favorite social spin
Speaker 1: slot games on chumbacasino dot com. I looked over the
Speaker 1: person sitting next to me, and you know what they
Speaker 1: were doing. They were also playing Chumpa Casino. Coincidence, I
Speaker 1: think not everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumpa Casino's
Speaker 1: home to hundreds at casino style games. You can play
Speaker 1: for free anytime anywhere, even at thirty thousand feet. So
Speaker 1: sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com to claim
Speaker 1: you're free welcome bonus. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com and
Speaker 1: Lived Chamberlain nover necessary drop wherever by lost in terms
Speaker 1: conditions eighteen plus.
Speaker 5: Now tell us about this suspect, Cyril Smith. Then, interestingly,
Speaker 5: why he becomes a suspect?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, like all good detective work or Frank the
Speaker 3: good archaeological work, which was my background. He was a
Speaker 3: nineteen year old, handsome young man. He had gone to
Speaker 3: school with Luis for maybe a year, that is, he
Speaker 3: was a couple of years ahead of her, and he
Speaker 3: got his pilot's license at nineteen and he was a
Speaker 3: big follower of Lindburg and so at nineteen years of age,
Speaker 3: he was flying people down to Tikuana who wanted to
Speaker 3: go down to the racetrack or go down and gamble
Speaker 3: or drink alcohol because prohibision wasn't in effect. And he
Speaker 3: dated different girls, a lot of different girls in fact,
Speaker 3: And for a while he was a suspect because he
Speaker 3: had been with Luis the night before on a Friday
Speaker 3: night Saturday night at a party, and they were known
Speaker 3: to be pretty close. But this developed partially later. At
Speaker 3: the time the newspaper simply said he had a good
Speaker 3: alibi that he had been somewhere else that night. Well,
Speaker 3: so that's where the police left it at the time,
Speaker 3: and then how it looked like they left it at
Speaker 3: the time. And so in my initial draft of this book,
Speaker 3: he doesn't play much of a role. But I had
Speaker 3: an article printed as from a chapter of this book
Speaker 3: in a local newspaper called the reader, some newspaper magazine,
Speaker 3: and a gentleman called me a contact with me as
Speaker 3: a result of that article and said, hey, I knew
Speaker 3: people in your story and I'm doing the math on
Speaker 3: that going. I don't see how that's possible. But he
Speaker 3: was in his nineties and he knew Cyrel Smith. Cyrell Smith,
Speaker 3: as an older man in his thirties, had been the
Speaker 3: aeronautics engineer that helped this guy Tom who called me,
Speaker 3: get his license and they hung out together. So Tom
Speaker 3: was seventeen and this guy was in his thirties. And
Speaker 3: one day as they're driving back towards the rural part
Speaker 3: of the county, Sara El Smith pulls off the road,
Speaker 3: goes down a dirt road parks. They get out and
Speaker 3: he points to a big oak tree and he said,
Speaker 3: back in nineteen thirty one, a girl I was dating
Speaker 3: and was found hanged from that tree. And so then
Speaker 3: he starts telling the story of Luis and mentions that, oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, they said she was hanged, and that's true,
Speaker 3: but that's not how she died. She died from oral copulation.
Speaker 3: She died from asphyxiation. That's how she actually died and
Speaker 3: gave some more details. So suddenly, when now I got
Speaker 3: this guy and he's telling me all this interesting stuff.
Speaker 3: So I called my friend who used to work with
Speaker 3: the medical examiner as the assistant, and I said, do
Speaker 3: you ever hear of cases of oral copulation for death?
Speaker 3: And she goes, oh, yeah, and with sex workers occasionally
Speaker 3: that does happen. So that put me into a little
Speaker 3: different angle of things. And I called the older gentleman
Speaker 3: back Tom, and I said, what else can you tell
Speaker 3: me about your friend Sirell Well, he was arrested when
Speaker 3: he was seventy years old for having oral copulation with
Speaker 3: two young girls. Yeah, so he kind of bubbled up
Speaker 3: to the surface. And the Sheriff's department will not release
Speaker 3: the records to me, any of their records because it's
Speaker 3: considered an open case, and under California law they're exempt.
Speaker 3: They don't have to release records that are for an
Speaker 3: open case. But one of the lieutenants in the cold
Speaker 3: case files would talk to me occasionally about it, and
Speaker 3: when I mentioned Cyrel Smith, she looked him up and
Speaker 3: found the notes and basically at the time he did
Speaker 3: look good for it, but they couldn't prove it in
Speaker 3: his alibi. By the way, he was by himself walking
Speaker 3: through Balboa Park. But he wrote to the top of
Speaker 3: my suspects list absolutely.
Speaker 5: Now, when you speak about rising to the top of
Speaker 5: your suspect list, tell us about how Herman Nuby becomes
Speaker 5: a definite person of interest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he still is. I would not stake my
Speaker 3: life nor years Dan on which one of these two
Speaker 3: gentlemen it might have been. I'm pretty sure it was
Speaker 3: one of them, and I suppose Newbies might still be
Speaker 3: my favorite. So Herman Nuby was a retired Navy officer
Speaker 3: in his forties and lived a few blocks from Louise,
Speaker 3: and he was an amateur photographer and he take photographs
Speaker 3: of young women, beautiful young women, and then paint from them.
Speaker 3: And he was investigated because he was a neighbor and
Speaker 3: he knew the Tauber family. So when the police went
Speaker 3: to his house, they found all these nude photographs of
Speaker 3: young women, and they found several of Louise, and she
Speaker 3: was a year younger even she was sixteen. So they
Speaker 3: arrested him on a moral charge of obscene photographs. And
Speaker 3: then they said, and we think you probably killed her
Speaker 3: and his wife alibied him out. His wife says alibied
Speaker 3: him out and said, oh no, we were up at
Speaker 3: this cabin up in the mountains. And they ultimately let
Speaker 3: him go on the murder case, if you will. He
Speaker 3: went to trial and was found guilty, but in jail
Speaker 3: for six months. While he was in jail, his wife
Speaker 3: left him divorced him. So I researched the family and
Speaker 3: found out that herman had a daughter, still alive in
Speaker 3: her nineties, living in Texas, another marriage, second marriage. I
Speaker 3: wrote her a letter and I said, hey, doing a
Speaker 3: history of a murder in the neighborhood that your father
Speaker 3: lived in back in the thirties before you were born.
Speaker 3: Did he ever talk about it? It was a pretty
Speaker 3: big deal. And I didn't ask any leading questions. I
Speaker 3: simply said, you know, what did he have to say,
Speaker 3: if anything about it? And her name is Diane. And
Speaker 3: Diane wrote me a very nice letter back and said
Speaker 3: almost the opening line is, well, Professor Kerry Coo, you
Speaker 3: didn't mention it, but if you think my father killed
Speaker 3: that little girl, he probably did. And so that kind
Speaker 3: of knocked my socks off. And so we conversed back
Speaker 3: and forth by email and by written letters for six
Speaker 3: months or so, and she said, the reason I think
Speaker 3: this is he sexually molested me from the time I
Speaker 3: was nine until I was seventeen. He beat my mother,
Speaker 3: and he said that all women were horrors and prick teasers,
Speaker 3: and she went on and on, which I get into
Speaker 3: a little bit more in the book. So he needs
Speaker 3: to say rose right up to the top. I did
Speaker 3: ask her. I said, did your father ever have a
Speaker 3: case where your mom might have alibied him out for something?
Speaker 3: And she gave me an instance to where, yes, he'd
Speaker 3: been in a terrible bar fight, almost killed somebody in
Speaker 3: a neighboring county, came home when the sheriff came to
Speaker 3: talk to him, she alibied him out and I said,
Speaker 3: why would your mother do that? But he threatened to
Speaker 3: kill her, And I think that's what happened with Louise Talbor.
Speaker 3: So he had, you know, means motive opportunity. When I
Speaker 3: really dug deep into the alibi that his wife had
Speaker 3: provided for the night of the death of Louise, it
Speaker 3: broke down to they actually got home about nine thirty
Speaker 3: or ten, and the estimated time of death was around midnight,
Speaker 3: so he had two hours to potentially meet up with Louise,
Speaker 3: take her out there, maybe for a photo shoot, you know,
Speaker 3: in a nude out there, and something went wrong. So
Speaker 3: he's still right at the top of my list. And
Speaker 3: the Sheriff's department still has some of the evidence. And
Speaker 3: this Lieutenant Lisa Brannon at the Sheriff's Department is pursuing
Speaker 3: both Virginia Brooks and the Louise Talber case, try to
Speaker 3: close out the cases. They still have some of the evidence.
Speaker 3: Ninety some years later.
Speaker 5: Well, you're right, motive means opportunity, but unindicted. Let's get
Speaker 5: to this other incredible story. May nineteen thirty one, boy
Speaker 5: Scout headquarters. There's an abandoned village, sort of a fake
Speaker 5: Indian village. Two boys, a nine year old Richard and
Speaker 5: Jess's friend, ten year old Spot, a fully clothed girl.
Speaker 5: At first heard this before they think it might be
Speaker 5: a mannequin. Tell us about this crime scene.
Speaker 3: Yeah again. You know, it's nineteen thirty one and on
Speaker 3: a Sunday morning or whenever, these boys have been down
Speaker 3: playing in the canyons and you know, doing whatever kids
Speaker 3: did back then, throwing rocks and chasing frogs around. Probably
Speaker 3: and they come up to the Boy Scout headquarters, which
Speaker 3: is up on a mesa top, and what they want
Speaker 3: to do is go in and try to get an
Speaker 3: application to join the Boy Scouts, but it's closed. It's Sunday,
Speaker 3: and they're sitting up on a wall, adobe wall, and
Speaker 3: this old Indian village had been part of an exposition
Speaker 3: out here years before, and one of the boys looks
Speaker 3: over the wall and sees what they thought was a
Speaker 3: mannequin for the store, and they just and they go
Speaker 3: to look at it, and then they realize it's not
Speaker 3: a mannequin. It's a dead girl. It's a Daniell, dead
Speaker 3: young woman. So they run the several blocks to one
Speaker 3: of the boys' houses and they tell the mom and
Speaker 3: she at first is incredulous and goes, no, it probably
Speaker 3: was a mannequin or a dummy. No, mom, this was
Speaker 3: a dead girl. So she goes with them, walks, you know,
Speaker 3: puts her dress on, and walks down there, and indeed
Speaker 3: it is a dead girl. And so she then calls
Speaker 3: the police from a nearby payphone back when payphones existed,
Speaker 3: and calls the police and they come out, and now
Speaker 3: the investigation starts. The third one in this case, in
Speaker 3: less than a couple of months of Hazel Bradshaw, who
Speaker 3: was about twenty two years old, and the police come
Speaker 3: right away, the newspaper reporters come right away. They photographed
Speaker 3: the heck out of the scene. There's blood on the
Speaker 3: ground and they can tell this by visual looking at
Speaker 3: her on the ground. She's been stabbed multiple times, more
Speaker 3: than five, more than ten, lots of times. And so
Speaker 3: that's that's the crime scene, and that's the beginning of
Speaker 3: the investigation. Strangely enough, but maybe not for that time period.
Speaker 3: When they took the body away and they'd taken the photographs,
Speaker 3: they didn't coordinate off or lead leave somebody there to
Speaker 3: guard the crime scene. They were done with it, and
Speaker 3: so it made finding the weapon or getting other information
Speaker 3: later very very difficult.
Speaker 5: What was the newspaper response in Los Angeles of the
Speaker 5: lease in San Diego.
Speaker 3: Well, Los Angeles and San Diego, baseball aside, have always
Speaker 3: had a competition going on, but it's a one sided
Speaker 3: competition in some way. Los Angeles has always been more populous,
Speaker 3: you know, had more museums, blah blah blah. But the
Speaker 3: newspapers up there really were very scathing towards the police
Speaker 3: department down here and the newspapers down here, but very
Speaker 3: scathing about Oh yeah, here's another one. They already knew that.
Speaker 3: In the last Los Angeles did in the last six
Speaker 3: or nine months, there were several unsolved murders. And so
Speaker 3: it was even a feature writer known at the time,
Speaker 3: and he did a little cartoon and a little article
Speaker 3: about it and said, oh, yeah, yet another one. These
Speaker 3: people down in San Diego wouldn't know how to close
Speaker 3: out a case if you know, their life depended on it.
Speaker 3: And they even cited Los Angeles Times if I did
Speaker 3: some police up in Los Angeles saying, yeah, very shoddy work.
Speaker 3: These people don't know what they're doing. They'll be lucky
Speaker 3: if they can solve anything. So did San Diego papers
Speaker 3: have to write back, you know, and their editorials and everything. No,
Speaker 3: we're doing everything we can. And you know, this isn't
Speaker 3: Los Angeles. We do things a little differently down here.
Speaker 3: So there's just all this spillover in all these cases,
Speaker 3: but in the Hazel Bradshaw cases, this spillover of why
Speaker 3: can't San Diego get this right? We thought you were
Speaker 3: just a laid back kind of town who's killing your
Speaker 3: young women. You know what's going on. They never used
Speaker 3: the word serial killer because it wasn't popular yet, but
Speaker 3: they did use the word mass murderer a couple of
Speaker 3: times that maybe one person is doing all these these murders,
Speaker 3: and you guys down south need to solve it. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Now what they do is they focus on this likely suspect,
Speaker 5: Moss Garrison, and who he is is Louise's date the
Speaker 5: night of her death. So there is at the crime scene,
Speaker 5: there's evidence that she fought her attacker, and so it
Speaker 5: makes a lot of sense that they might first focus
Speaker 5: on Moss Garrison. But tell us about this that it
Speaker 5: leads to this coroner's inquest once again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Moss had been her boyfriend for quite a while,
Speaker 3: often and he was older. She was twenty two and
Speaker 3: he was in his mid thirties, been married before. He
Speaker 3: was a southern guy described the newspaper made a big
Speaker 3: deal out of the little the look Hughes small short
Speaker 3: as the little Southern boy, little Southern guy. And they
Speaker 3: had gone downtown San Diego. He picked up at work
Speaker 3: by foot. He lived downtown, she lived up out of
Speaker 3: town a little bit, and they went to not one
Speaker 3: but two movies two different movie houses at popcorn, had
Speaker 3: some chocolate bars, which came into the autopsy later, and
Speaker 3: then walked home at eleven o'clock at night. They left
Speaker 3: a movie theater downtown on a pretty warm evening, and
Speaker 3: this is unbelievable to most people today, but walked the
Speaker 3: more than five miles to her house, which they had
Speaker 3: done before people saw them along the route. He says
Speaker 3: he got her home, saw her go in the house,
Speaker 3: and then he ran to the street car barely caught
Speaker 3: them twelve oh five streetcar five after midnight, went home.
Speaker 3: He turned himself in when he was told he was
Speaker 3: playing cards the morning of her death, that hey, this
Speaker 3: body had been found in the park and here's her
Speaker 3: name and all this stuff. He goes, oh my god,
Speaker 3: that's my girlfriend. So he ran down, turned himself in.
Speaker 3: He was kept in jail. He probably was in fact beaten.
Speaker 3: He was threatened by the chief of police, and at
Speaker 3: the inquest to the autopsy and inquest, they actually brought
Speaker 3: him in as a suspect, as a boyfriend and the
Speaker 3: last person who'd seen her alive. So he was there
Speaker 3: with the father, you know, for Hazel, and the police
Speaker 3: actually wanted him to wear the same clothes he had
Speaker 3: on because when he was arrested, because there was some
Speaker 3: blood inside of one of his pockets, and he was
Speaker 3: dishevelded and he hadn't shaved for several days, and the
Speaker 3: police wanted him, frankly, to look as bad as he
Speaker 3: could to the inquest people. They allowed him to shave,
Speaker 3: they allowed him to clean his hair, but he wasn't
Speaker 3: wearing the same shirt, the same tie, the same jacket
Speaker 3: and the same pants as he walked into the police
Speaker 3: department in and that swayed some of the adjurors on
Speaker 3: the inquest that clearly this was the man, This was
Speaker 3: the man. So at the inquest she had been stabbed
Speaker 3: eleven or twelve times, there was some dispute about that,
Speaker 3: with a two inch wide blade, double sided blade, not
Speaker 3: single sided, and stillabbed, probably initially standing up and then
Speaker 3: stabbed after she'd fallen on the ground. And there was
Speaker 3: no evidence of what they called at the time assault,
Speaker 3: meaning sexual assault. And so then it moved to trial.
Speaker 3: He was indicted and put on trial for the murder.
Speaker 5: The Moss Garrison was tell us about that trial and
Speaker 5: does he testify in his own defense?
Speaker 3: He does and it was every decade seems to have
Speaker 3: the trial of the century down here in San Diego.
Speaker 3: In nineteen thirty one, that was the trial of the
Speaker 3: century because you know, there was a romantic thing about it. Guys,
Speaker 3: we finally get to solve one of our murder cases.
Speaker 3: And I think that's why it went to trial. The
Speaker 3: district attorney the chief of police worked hand in hand
Speaker 3: and it was held in the old courtroom downtown and
Speaker 3: you had to get a ticket to come in to
Speaker 3: be part of the audience to watch the trial. And
Speaker 3: there were actually a couple times they had to clear
Speaker 3: the courthouse because there were too many people trying to
Speaker 3: see this trial. And the newspapers covered it, including Los
Speaker 3: Angeles and San Francisco and newspapers, so all this evidence
Speaker 3: was brought forth. He admitted, you know that, yeah, he'd
Speaker 3: been out with her, of course, And partially it came
Speaker 3: down to what was the color of the tie that
Speaker 3: he was wearing that night, because the streetcar conductor and
Speaker 3: some other people said it was one collar, and yet
Speaker 3: there was no blood on that tie. In his closet.
Speaker 3: He'd cut himself. He worked in the kitchen of a
Speaker 3: place of restaurant, basically, and he'd cut himself a couple
Speaker 3: days before. The prosecutor said, no, that's not from days before,
Speaker 3: that's from stabbing for Hazel to death. But his poker
Speaker 3: buddy said, oh no, three days before the killing. He
Speaker 3: had bandages on his hands and all of that. So
Speaker 3: he did and people did it a little bit more
Speaker 3: back then. His attorney, who was a very good attorney,
Speaker 3: put him on the stand, and he was a pretty
Speaker 3: sympathetic witness if you will, said he loved her, No
Speaker 3: way would he have ever stabbed her to death. She
Speaker 3: had been seeing some other people and maybe it was
Speaker 3: one of those folks. Some neighbors of Hasel said, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: this is where he gets into the kind of victimology,
Speaker 3: blaming the victim. Some of the neighbors said, oh yeah, well,
Speaker 3: we used to see her out in cars late at night.
Speaker 3: She would go somewhere with men at midnight at one
Speaker 3: o'clock and drive away with them, and you know, some
Speaker 3: of the old biddies of the neighborhood really stressed that.
Speaker 3: The defense said, well, yeah, he dropped her off and
Speaker 3: they were done with that date. And then she apparently
Speaker 3: had some other rendezvous with somebody else and that's who
Speaker 3: killed her. So trial went on and on and on,
Speaker 3: and then the jury deliberated less than an hour before
Speaker 3: they gave their verdict.
Speaker 5: And the verdict was unanimously what the.
Speaker 3: Verdict was, unanimously not guilty. And in fact, in interviews
Speaker 3: afterwards with the newspaper, the jury foreman said, we don't
Speaker 3: even know, we don't even know why he was ever
Speaker 3: put on trial. And they said, of course, this little
Speaker 3: gentle southern man could not have done that. He was
Speaker 3: in love with her. Meanwhile, the killer still out there,
Speaker 3: maybe it's the killer of other women as well. The
Speaker 3: captain of the jury actually said, well, I don't think
Speaker 3: I don't think it was even an American person. I
Speaker 3: think probably a foreign person killed her, because only foreign
Speaker 3: people kill women with knives. So there was a little
Speaker 3: bit racial or ethnic undertones to do this this case,
Speaker 3: if you will. But they felt, the jury felt that
Speaker 3: she that he had taken in her home. It all
Speaker 3: made sense. He had time to get back to the
Speaker 3: streetcar on time, he wasn't covered in blood anywhere. People
Speaker 3: had seen them along the route. And so sadly, the
Speaker 3: DA and the police chief and the major detectives on
Speaker 3: the case, I had to put their tales between their
Speaker 3: legs and go on. They were asked by the press
Speaker 3: a day later, so who are you looking into now?
Speaker 3: And they said, We're not looking into anyone. This case
Speaker 3: is over, essentially, so three unsolved murders.
Speaker 5: Before I let you go, you do write somewhat in
Speaker 5: your afterward, tell us about what you have to say
Speaker 5: about the idea of suspects still in your mind or
Speaker 5: the three murders. Tell us about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this was coming in. It's an afterward, but it
Speaker 3: was also an afterthought because part of what I did
Speaker 3: and doing the research for this, especially toward the end,
Speaker 3: I had the manuscript pretty well along at a publisher
Speaker 3: that was interested, actually a couple of publishers, and I
Speaker 3: decided to go visit all these scenes. And I had
Speaker 3: some time off during the summer from teaching, and so
Speaker 3: I walked that route from downtown San Diego up to
Speaker 3: Hazel's house and I made it in less than an hour,
Speaker 3: and so they could have. I went to the movie
Speaker 3: theaters that were still around that Luise Talber had gone
Speaker 3: too with her friends, and I walked places and so
Speaker 3: that helped. Then I also realized I grew up here
Speaker 3: in San Diego. I had walked the very same streets
Speaker 3: that Hazel and Bread and Moss had walked down in
Speaker 3: nineteen thirty one, and that I had gone the same
Speaker 3: high school as Louise, because it's still there and it's
Speaker 3: an old the oldest high school, and Virginia Brooks walking
Speaker 3: out on Euclid Avenue. I used to deliver newspapers out
Speaker 3: there when I was fourteen thirteen. So there was this
Speaker 3: almost crescendo of smells and sounds and the streets themselves,
Speaker 3: some of which had not changed a lot, and I
Speaker 3: felt very vested in it. The man who wrote The
Speaker 3: Man from the Train Murder mystery about an axe murderer,
Speaker 3: he said he got very emotionally vested, and they felt
Speaker 3: very personal towards these killers or towards the victims. And
Speaker 3: that's how I felt. And so part of what I
Speaker 3: did then was I went back into the manuscript and
Speaker 3: tried to bring the young women a little bit more
Speaker 3: back to life, make them more than just victims, or
Speaker 3: more than just a body on a more slab, or
Speaker 3: someone you know, being carried by your classmates to your
Speaker 3: gravesite practically, because it became very personal. What I also
Speaker 3: thought is well, back in the day when you pulled
Speaker 3: into a gas station and gas was twenty cents or
Speaker 3: thirty cents a gallon, the guy pumping the gas there
Speaker 3: in my neighborhood in East San Diego could have been
Speaker 3: the killer.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: The guy running the street could have been the killer, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so I could have been walking assuming they didn't
Speaker 3: leave the area, they were still with us. And I
Speaker 3: do believe it was three different people. So somewhere, you know,
Speaker 3: back in the late fifties early sixties, when I was
Speaker 3: walking around, for all I know, the guy I bought
Speaker 3: a cigar from killed Louise.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 5: I want to thank you very much Richard L. Carrico
Speaker 5: for coming on and talking about your book Monsters on
Speaker 5: the Loose, true story of three unsolved murders in Prohibition
Speaker 5: era San Diego. Thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 5: For those that might want to take another look, tell
Speaker 5: us about where they might look, specifically Wild Blue Press.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Wild Blue Press is the publisher. They've published
Speaker 3: another book, a true crime murderer in San Diego that
Speaker 3: was not solved. The earlier. You can go to it's available.
Speaker 3: The book is now on Amazon, both soft and Hardbound
Speaker 3: and Barnes and Noble, and I have my own website
Speaker 3: especially for those of you in the southern California area
Speaker 3: called past Shadows dot net, asked Shadows dot net, and
Speaker 3: it lists the places I'll be doing book signings and
Speaker 3: presentations on this. I've actually been invited by the Sheriff's
Speaker 3: Department interesting enough to come and give them a presentation.
Speaker 3: So the book just launched a couple of days ago,
Speaker 3: and I'm getting some good reviews from different folks. And
Speaker 3: I think you know, when Dan and I were talking
Speaker 3: before this this podcast itself, he enjoyed reading it and
Speaker 3: thought it was pretty well researched and had a good
Speaker 3: story to it. So I'm glad to get this story
Speaker 3: out for these these three young women. And I'm going
Speaker 3: to go to the park that actually Luise Talber was
Speaker 3: found hanged in. I'm going to that park in a
Speaker 3: couple of weeks and giving a presentation there, probably less
Speaker 3: than three hundred yards from the Oak corow Forers he
Speaker 3: was found hanged. So I really thank you Dan.
Speaker 5: Richard L. Carico. Monsters on the Loose The True story
Speaker 5: of three unsolved murders and prohibition eras San Diego, thank
Speaker 5: you so much for this interview and have a great evening.
Speaker 3: Thank you, and good night.