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Speaker 8: Are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers
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Speaker 9: Evening, introducing the victims and perpetrators responsible for California's most
Speaker 9: notorious shootouts, lynchings, and assassinations. This account shows how homemade
Speaker 9: justice is never black and white in relating these histories.
Speaker 9: This discussion also analyzes how and why Hollywood storylines almost
Speaker 9: always follow the same skewed and unrealistic arc in which
Speaker 9: the bad guys abuse the good guys. The good guy
Speaker 9: takes the high road until the bad guy has gone
Speaker 9: too far and the good guy picks off the bad
Speaker 9: guys one by one in an increasingly dramatic fashion. The
Speaker 9: book that we are featuring this evening is California Justice, Shootouts,
Speaker 9: Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State, with my special guest,
Speaker 9: journalist and author David Kolchik. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 9: thank you for agreeing to this interview. David Kolchick, Thanks
Speaker 9: for having me on.
Speaker 7: It's great. I appreciate it.
Speaker 9: Thanks very much. We've got to dig right into this.
Speaker 9: I very much enjoyed your introduction. But before we get
Speaker 9: to what you wrote in the introduction, which I think
Speaker 9: is very very important, and we need to explain the
Speaker 9: state of the nation at that time, and especially what
Speaker 9: were the circumstances and surrounding California at that time. How
Speaker 9: did they treat the Native Americans, the what you call
Speaker 9: the Californios. So let's first first question, what brought you
Speaker 9: to this story? What give us your background or the
Speaker 9: reason why you decided to write this book about California Justice, lynchings,
Speaker 9: shootouts and assassinations in the Golden State.
Speaker 7: Well, I have a complete fascination and love for California.
Speaker 7: My wife is from California, and that's how I ended
Speaker 7: up here. Met in Seattle, and I never had any
Speaker 7: idea that I would ever live in California. It never
Speaker 7: occurred to me. So once I was here, I was
Speaker 7: just enthralled by the history that surrounds our state. And
Speaker 7: I worked as a process server. Well, I was writing
Speaker 7: this book, and I traveled all over northern California, and
Speaker 7: I got to through other books that I had, I
Speaker 7: got to see places where these things happened firsthand, and
Speaker 7: I thought, you know, there's a lot a big history
Speaker 7: of taking justice in your own hands in California. And
Speaker 7: this book goes all the way from you know, eighteen
Speaker 7: fifty until nineteen ninety eight or so. California just has
Speaker 7: this big history of vigilante justice, and I don't think
Speaker 7: that people knew about it.
Speaker 9: Okay, let's that's a good segue, because as you write
Speaker 9: in your introduction, you explained further that you said in between,
Speaker 9: and this was fascinating to me, you know, and pretty horrifying.
Speaker 9: Eighteen forty nine to nineteen fifty three, you say there
Speaker 9: were over two hundred lynchings, and so as you write
Speaker 9: in the beginning of California Justice, there have been thousands
Speaker 9: of books and movies made about persons taking the lawn
Speaker 9: to their own hands, as you mentioned, and you talk
Speaker 9: about that basic storyline. But to refute that storyline that
Speaker 9: we see in the movies and we've read in the books,
Speaker 9: tell us really what California was like at that time
Speaker 9: in the eighteen hundreds, and I alluded to it about
Speaker 9: how the Caucasians that were there were treating the Native
Speaker 9: Americans and the Mexicans. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 9: about the history in California in eighteen hundreds to set
Speaker 9: the stage so that the more fully understand some of
Speaker 9: this book California Justice.
Speaker 7: Well, California had the explosive population growth once the gold
Speaker 7: rush started in eighteen forty eight eighteen forty nine, and Sacramento,
Speaker 7: for instance, went from eleven Caucasians to twenty thousand in
Speaker 7: a matter of a few years. And when that happened,
Speaker 7: you know, these miners showed up and most of them
Speaker 7: were just just people ought to try something new, just
Speaker 7: to get a shot at it. A lot of people
Speaker 7: don't realize that when people came to California for the
Speaker 7: gold Rush, a lot of people ended up going back
Speaker 7: home after seven or eight years, were ten years or
Speaker 7: so they a lot of them just didn't stay. They
Speaker 7: came here, a lot of them came here and died.
Speaker 7: And back in those days, you know, people didn't carry
Speaker 7: ideas around and you know, Uncle Joe went out west
Speaker 7: and they never saw them again. You know, there was
Speaker 7: no police at all out here. And even today, you know,
Speaker 7: California is a massive state. We have over thirty mountain
Speaker 7: ranges in the state, you know, deserts, everything from I
Speaker 7: like to tell people that we have more red neckt
Speaker 7: than most people have people in their states because the
Speaker 7: state is just so massive. And at the same time,
Speaker 7: even today, you can drive down state highways in that
Speaker 7: see a car for a half hour. So even today
Speaker 7: it's still a fairly you know, extensive, extensive place. When
Speaker 7: people came to California the Gold rushy, the average age
Speaker 7: was twenty six years old, so basically it was like
Speaker 7: a giant frat party here. People. The water was bad,
Speaker 7: so people drank alcohol all the time. You know, an
Speaker 7: egg costs a dollar, which would be crazy now. Even
Speaker 7: a shovel costs fifty dollars, which you know you can
Speaker 7: go to home depot and pick up for fifteen bucks
Speaker 7: or something. You know, nowadays. So you know, without having
Speaker 7: grandma and neighbors and people knowing what they were doing,
Speaker 7: a lot of these people misbehaved terribly and they would
Speaker 7: take pot shots at Indians just for no reason, you know,
Speaker 7: they would just Actually when the gold miners first came
Speaker 7: out here, the Native Americans that lived in California were
Speaker 7: here for fifteen thousand years and they had a complete
Speaker 7: civilization set up along the rivers, and California split with
Speaker 7: the status lat or the San Joaquin River coming from
Speaker 7: the south to like the San Francisco Bay and the
Speaker 7: Sacramento River that flows north, and all these rivers flow
Speaker 7: from the mountains into it. The natives had villages about
Speaker 7: every two miles, maybe thirty to three hundred people. They
Speaker 7: all traded among each other, and their family bond was everything.
Speaker 7: If they had a fight with another village, they tried.
Speaker 7: They they did not hurt each other. They played coup
Speaker 7: on each other, and if somebody was injured or hurt,
Speaker 7: the other person's village would would make amends for it,
Speaker 7: even if it meant that the murderer had to work
Speaker 7: as a slave for that village for so many years
Speaker 7: or things. So everything was already civilized here when when
Speaker 7: the Spaniards came, and of course they were you know,
Speaker 7: backed by the Catholic Church and everything, and they always
Speaker 7: had priests with them, and they didn't realize that they
Speaker 7: were in the Garden of Eden. They were. They were
Speaker 7: all the natives are naked and they just eat food
Speaker 7: that's on the ground. It's like sounds like the Garden
Speaker 7: of Eden to me. Yes, So if you can imagine,
Speaker 7: is basically what happened to California to the Native Americans
Speaker 7: that lived there. They first were waked out by smallpox
Speaker 7: in around eighteen forty five or so when Fremont came
Speaker 7: out here. Within a year, nine of the natives died.
Speaker 7: It was just massive, massive death. Measles, smallpox, things like
Speaker 7: that just wiped them completely out. So by the time
Speaker 7: the gold Rush happened, you basically had a civilization like
Speaker 7: in the Mad Max movies, just stragglers from villages, people
Speaker 7: without their families anymore. And so when the gold Rush
Speaker 7: people came, you know, they saw the most pathetic people
Speaker 7: you can even imagine. They were all just you know,
Speaker 7: their families, their children, their wives, their husbands were all
Speaker 7: dead and so they you know, gravitated towards where the
Speaker 7: white civilization was, and that didn't work out very good
Speaker 7: most of the time.
Speaker 9: Now let's get to let's get to some of the
Speaker 9: examples that you have in the introduction as well. There
Speaker 9: just for example, you note in eighteen sixty three is
Speaker 9: one of the first stories that you note right in
Speaker 9: the introduction to demonstrate the point that you just made,
Speaker 9: and where they some ranchers discover their horses are gone.
Speaker 9: So tell us the process of taking justice into your
Speaker 9: own hands, law into your own hands in that story
Speaker 9: that you write in the introduction eighteen sixty three.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was up around Chico, which is about an
Speaker 7: hour north of Sacramento. That's right of Chico's College Child
Speaker 7: and so outside of Chico. In eighteen sixty three, this
Speaker 7: guy's horses disappeared, so they figured some Native Americans to come.
Speaker 7: The first Native Americans they came across, they lynched, and
Speaker 7: the next day of the horse verses came back to
Speaker 7: the barn. It turned out that they just went for
Speaker 7: a hike and they weren't stolen at all. In Yuba
Speaker 7: City until the late seventies, there was a bar there
Speaker 7: that had a photograph on their wall of a tree,
Speaker 7: a big live oak tree with like twenty bodies of
Speaker 7: Native Americans hanging by ropes for their necks on it
Speaker 7: like a Christmas tree. So it was bad. Most of
Speaker 7: the most of the men were dead. The women were
Speaker 7: made into prostitutes for the most part, and the children
Speaker 7: were made in the slaves farm labor. The funny thing is,
Speaker 7: I thought, this is funny is that when you know,
Speaker 7: all the miners came out here, they didn't bring women
Speaker 7: with them. There were very few women here, and the
Speaker 7: Native Americans thought that the white men were all gay,
Speaker 7: which I think is hilarious because they're like, where's women? Yeah,
Speaker 7: who travels without their family? So right, go ahead, Dusku
Speaker 7: County doing. In the eighteen seventies, they made a treaty
Speaker 7: with the naive Americans. They invited them from all over
Speaker 7: the place to come and have a feast, and they
Speaker 7: had a big barbecue and they made Indian bread for them,
Speaker 7: and they poisoned the Indian bread. And they figure up
Speaker 7: to ten thousand people may have died from poisoning or
Speaker 7: from getting gunned down afterwards.
Speaker 9: Wow, amazing. Yeah, Now in this first first chapter you
Speaker 9: still have what we're talking about is the San Francisco
Speaker 9: Vigilante Committee of eighteen fifty one, and then again was
Speaker 9: another version in eighteen fifty six, and you call it
Speaker 9: a phantom government set up in place of the ultra
Speaker 9: corrupt officials official one that was all that allowed criminals
Speaker 9: at that time and politicians to commit all kinds of
Speaker 9: crimes including murder, robbery, and assault, basically with impunity. So
Speaker 9: these were known criminals. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 9: about the formation of the San Francisco Vigilante Committee. This
Speaker 9: is a fascinating story to start our interview.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the the you know, no one had ideas and
Speaker 7: no one could check what somebody was before they came
Speaker 7: to California. So all kinds of criminals and low lives
Speaker 7: came here too, and a lot of them were professional
Speaker 7: politicians back east. I hate to say Philadelphia, but you
Speaker 7: know it was the whole Philadelphia lawyer thing is where
Speaker 7: that comes from. A lot of sharp eats came here,
Speaker 7: and you know, San Francisco just exploded. It went from
Speaker 7: a village and the sand dunes to a massive city
Speaker 7: in just a mass matter a few years. And they
Speaker 7: pretty much did anything they wanted to, and they would
Speaker 7: be you know, if they got arrested, they'd be just
Speaker 7: turned around and released back into into general population. There
Speaker 7: was no consequences for them. They were untouchable. So they
Speaker 7: had In the eighteen fifty one case, a bunch of
Speaker 7: Australians managed to get to San Francisco and they were
Speaker 7: called the Sydney Hounds and they would just go into
Speaker 7: tent neighborhoods and you know, loot, rob, rape, kill whatever
Speaker 7: they wanted. And it got to the point where, you know,
Speaker 7: real upright citizens were starting to get robbed by these guys.
Speaker 7: And so that's how the first one was formed, just
Speaker 7: to chase these offees and any bad people out. He
Speaker 7: was hung people from polls and things. This is a warning.
Speaker 7: And the ships were all full leaving town. A lot
Speaker 7: of them ran out into the mountains too, to the
Speaker 7: gold Rush area. In eighteen fifty six, it was caused
Speaker 7: by there was even more of the corruption came back
Speaker 7: and King James of Williams, this guy had this really
Speaker 7: crazy name. He made it up because there were so
Speaker 7: many James williams Is everywhere. And he was the founder
Speaker 7: and editor of the San Francisco Bulletin. And he got
Speaker 7: shot by this city supervisor which is just incredible if
Speaker 7: you think about it. This guy named James P. Casey,
Speaker 7: and he was a fixer of elections and he won
Speaker 7: his seat and the Board of Supervisors with more votes
Speaker 7: than were registered voters. So King Williams, King Jeans of
Speaker 7: Williams was assassinated by this gambler Charles Cora. And oh no, wait,
Speaker 7: that guy shot this US marshal. So that's that's what started.
Speaker 7: It is that first this US marshal gets shot by
Speaker 7: guy and he gets released, and then the editor of
Speaker 7: the paper gets assassinated, and people just thought, well, this
Speaker 7: is too much. This is, you know, a US marshal
Speaker 7: and the editor of their major newspaper gets assassinated, and
Speaker 7: these guys are walking out in the street.
Speaker 9: Now we're talking about a membership too, which was amazing
Speaker 9: to me, was over three thousand volunteers in military formation.
Speaker 9: You write, marched to the jail and demanded the two
Speaker 9: prisoners to be given up to this second Committee of Vigilance,
Speaker 9: and then with the membership of eight thousand at that time,
Speaker 9: and so the sheriff gave him up. It was a
Speaker 9: hasty trial. So tell us, tell us what happened at
Speaker 9: this trial at this trial.
Speaker 7: They actually had a defense for it. They set it
Speaker 7: up just like any other court in America, because the
Speaker 7: court was so corrupt in San Francisco that they formed
Speaker 7: it just like it should be. And they well, you know,
Speaker 7: there was a lot of anger going on. There was
Speaker 7: the National Guard was sitting in a in a ship
Speaker 7: in the bay waiting to get orders to invade San Francisco,
Speaker 7: and they ended up they meet these this this gallows
Speaker 7: out of the building. It was a warehouse in San Francisco.
Speaker 7: They called it Fort Gunny Sacks because most of these
Speaker 7: men that were in San Francisco too, a lot of
Speaker 7: them were in the Mexican American War, and when the
Speaker 7: war it was over, they just you know, hey, California
Speaker 7: and there's gold in thatt. So we had a whole
Speaker 7: bunch of ex soldiers and they weren't about ready to
Speaker 7: get pushed around, and you know, they were all trained
Speaker 7: and everything. So they took this place and they made
Speaker 7: like a maze of sandbags to go around it so
Speaker 7: that you know, they couldn't get rushed. They had to
Speaker 7: kind of go through a zigzag through all the the
Speaker 7: sand bags and stuff, and it was totally secure. When
Speaker 7: they were done with the trial. They just basically pushed
Speaker 7: the guy out the window with a rope around his
Speaker 7: neck and died right out in front.
Speaker 9: And nobody was prosecuted for that. It was the end.
Speaker 9: They disbanded. You say, they disbanded this and gave back
Speaker 9: the officials there the responsibility for law and order, didn't they.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I write more about that in actually my
Speaker 7: latest book, Fruit Flakes and Nuts. I read about a
Speaker 7: couple of people that were part of that that their
Speaker 7: lives were even more bizarre afterwards. So because a lot
Speaker 7: of those people, like one of the guys ended up
Speaker 7: being the governor of Kansas or something, the founder of Denver,
Speaker 7: you know, these a lot of these people went on
Speaker 7: to be in government.
Speaker 9: It's incredible. There's incredible story as we turned the pages,
Speaker 9: as this story seems to have, as we'll talk about
Speaker 9: in another couple of stories in this interview, where has
Speaker 9: some modern parallels with the last escape with the two
Speaker 9: prisoners in New York State and with their accomplice, So
Speaker 9: very very interesting that one hundred and fifty years there
Speaker 9: are some parallels with modern day escapes and true crime
Speaker 9: in the same vein of the citizens taking over and
Speaker 9: a committee forming to bring to take on order into
Speaker 9: their own hands. The next story I thought, we're very
Speaker 9: fascinating was for what it really explores as the citizens
Speaker 9: of Little Lake strike back and Elijah Frost.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the supporters and the Coats.
Speaker 9: So it's a hat filled in McCoy's here of sorts
Speaker 9: with Elijah Frost and his family and the Coats, which
Speaker 9: are Union supporters. So tell us a little bit about
Speaker 9: this and before we talk about eighteen sixty seven October
Speaker 9: and election day in Mendocino County.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the Coat's family hang let me, okay, the Coats
Speaker 7: family were well, the Frost family were Confederate supporters and
Speaker 7: they came up from from Missouri and settled in Medicino County.
Speaker 7: At the same time there was the Frost family. They
Speaker 7: were equally homicidal and a huge family, and they used
Speaker 7: to just get into big fights usually especially during the
Speaker 7: Civil War, and they were always well armed and fighting
Speaker 7: and stuff. You can't even think about things like that
Speaker 7: and about California, you know, you think of like in
Speaker 7: the movies, the Wild West is always with the wagon
Speaker 7: trains and things like that, but much more things happen
Speaker 7: in California than pretty much everywhere else when it comes
Speaker 7: down to it. On October sixteenth, eighteen sixty seven, it
Speaker 7: was election day and the families were coming in. You know,
Speaker 7: people were coming in to vote, and you know a
Speaker 7: holiday back then, it should be now too, that'd be
Speaker 7: really great. They ended up getting into a fight. The
Speaker 7: Frost picked a fight with the Coats and it killed
Speaker 7: five members of the Coats family and one member of
Speaker 7: the Frost family was chatting at chess with double barrel shotgun.
Speaker 7: Three other people of that family were seriously wounded. So
Speaker 7: you know, that put a big chill on the family
Speaker 7: feud and things kind of cooled out from there. But
Speaker 7: Elijah for us, his father was one of the ones
Speaker 7: that were killed. He's named after his father, and he
Speaker 7: had to a.
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Speaker 7: Other brothers. They did nothing but get in the trouble.
Speaker 7: They were putting the custody of his older sister or something,
Speaker 7: and they basically just stole horses and just did any
Speaker 7: kind of petty crame.
Speaker 9: As he could.
Speaker 7: He was putting prison for stealing horses. And when he
Speaker 7: got out of prison, he had some friends that he
Speaker 7: met there and they came with him over to Little Lake.
Speaker 7: And this guy was Abajeon Gibson and Thomas McCracken, and
Speaker 7: so they would just you know, petty thievery break ins
Speaker 7: they were drunk all the time. They picked fights with people,
Speaker 7: shoot guns in the air, and people were getting tired
Speaker 7: of it. You know, it wasn't.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: People were They were well aware of the whole wild
Speaker 7: West thing, and what they wanted to do is make
Speaker 7: it a civilized place and people could have their families
Speaker 7: there and and get on with commerce. In eighteen seventy nine,
Speaker 7: those guys killed an entire flock of geese. They tied
Speaker 7: their heads on a rail fence, and whenever people would
Speaker 7: press charges against these guys, they would always threaten them,
Speaker 7: and so then people wouldn't testify and get released. And
Speaker 7: this time those guys were hot, and they would always
Speaker 7: jail these guys in hotels because they didn't have a
Speaker 7: lot of jails around. So while they were waiting for
Speaker 7: their hearing, they were threatening revenge anyone who would testify
Speaker 7: against them. And so on September fourth, they crowded people
Speaker 7: came over to the jail and took them out. Two
Speaker 7: of them were handcuffed together. They tied them around the
Speaker 7: neck with a noose and threw them off a bridge,
Speaker 7: left them there until the next day to make sure
Speaker 7: that everyone thought.
Speaker 9: That was the goal was to lead those bodies there
Speaker 9: so that the next town could here tell that the
Speaker 9: justice had been done and not to mess with this
Speaker 9: little town if you were thinking about it or contemplating it,
Speaker 9: wasn't it.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And also they wanted the people to know that
Speaker 7: things are going to get a little better here because
Speaker 7: they weren't going to be putting up for this kind
Speaker 7: of stuff. But a lot in California were you know,
Speaker 7: it was demn right terrorism where people were just you know,
Speaker 7: threatened right there in the courtroom. You know, people have
Speaker 7: their own guns in the courtroom. They would pull out
Speaker 7: guns on each other and stuff. It's pretty amazing if
Speaker 7: you think about something like that happened now.
Speaker 9: Yeah, absolutely. Now. Another aspect of the state of the
Speaker 9: nation and also especially California is the railroad and the
Speaker 9: advent of the railroad and what the railroad meant for
Speaker 9: society and for commerce and the economy. So tell us
Speaker 9: about the sentiment towards the railroad and why before we
Speaker 9: talk about John Sontag and his accomplices in eighteen sixty seven.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Sontag was really something. He was a folk hero.
Speaker 7: The Southern Pacific Railroad ran California at one point a
Speaker 7: senator and the governor were part of the you know,
Speaker 7: the members of the Big Four of the businessmen that
Speaker 7: started it. You know, crazy if you think about it,
Speaker 7: you know, that would be yeah, it would be like
Speaker 7: if Bill Gates became governor of Washington State, you know,
Speaker 7: or or Mark Zuckelberg became governor or senator from California.
Speaker 7: You know, it's just unbelievable. But then, you know, back then,
Speaker 7: they just the railroad did anything they wanted. So they
Speaker 7: would renig on on agreements. Because the railroad got land
Speaker 7: on every side of the track for five square miles,
Speaker 7: and so they would they would sell the land and say,
Speaker 7: if you improve it for five years, you could buy
Speaker 7: it at the market price when you first came to
Speaker 7: your property. And of course the railroad renigged on that.
Speaker 7: They would. People would have beautiful farms and and uh,
Speaker 7: you know, crops and everything, orchard, and uh, the railroad
Speaker 7: would come and say, ah, we're not that's our land.
Speaker 7: We're going to take it from you. They also mean
Speaker 7: it's the rates freight rates. It was more expensive to
Speaker 7: ship something inside California on the railroads. That would be
Speaker 7: to send it all the way across country to Chicago.
Speaker 7: It was cheaper to send a product from Sacramento to
Speaker 7: Chicago than from Sacramento to Bakersfield, which is.
Speaker 10: In the in the and and the farmers new this, right,
Speaker 10: right they because the the CEOs of the Southern Pacific.
Speaker 7: Railroad were the governor and uh senators and you know
Speaker 7: all those things. Uh they were just they were they
Speaker 7: were heavily inside the government of California.
Speaker 9: Now, to demonstrate this that this story is John Sontag
Speaker 9: is working for Southern Pacific Railroad and while he's working,
Speaker 9: his ankle is crushed, and now he's hospitalized, but he's
Speaker 9: discharged before he's fully healed. And when he goes back
Speaker 9: to work, when he's forced back to work, he requests
Speaker 9: light duty, and subsequently he's fired. So now he has
Speaker 9: this lifelong grudge against the railroad, against Southern Pacific Railroad.
Speaker 9: And you just describe the sentiment in general for a
Speaker 9: lot of the farmers and the citizens that the railroad
Speaker 9: was exploitive to a lot of people. Now you talk
Speaker 9: about while he was recovering, Sontag met Chris Evans, and
Speaker 9: so tell us about the meeting of Chris Evans, and
Speaker 9: what kind of guy Chris Evans is and why he
Speaker 9: would have share any kind of sentiment that Sontag had.
Speaker 7: Well, it's kind of funny. Chris Evans was born in
Speaker 7: Canada and he was a lot older. He was nearly
Speaker 7: fifty years old, and he took up came out to
Speaker 7: California and they settled in San Joaquin. He ended up
Speaker 7: having families and stuff, and he had seven kids. But
Speaker 7: his homestead was taken away because they found out that
Speaker 7: the title was invalid from he bought the property from
Speaker 7: a guy who really didn't known it. That happened a
Speaker 7: lot too. That happened with Grizzly Adams who lost four
Speaker 7: or five different homesteads because he was just like, yep,
Speaker 7: I'll buy it, and then it turns out that the
Speaker 7: guy didn't even known it and sold it to him.
Speaker 7: So Evans, you know, he worked at a bank, he
Speaker 7: had a livery station in Modesto, worked land and stuff.
Speaker 7: But you know, he he, you know, they were all
Speaker 7: getting screwed by the river heads all the time. Around
Speaker 7: the at time there was the Muscle Souls massacre where
Speaker 7: some railroad guys that were Pinkerton detectives were meeting up
Speaker 7: with these farmers who were representing the other farmers in
Speaker 7: the area, and uh, they were basically bushwhacked. Five of
Speaker 7: them were murdered, and of course one one railroad guy
Speaker 7: was murdered, and so they had totally you know, flipped
Speaker 7: out on it. There's there's even books now that don't
Speaker 7: even get it right about about that whole massacre. So
Speaker 7: they said robbing trains, they were, they were, they were,
Speaker 7: they were tired of the railroads screwing around. They were
Speaker 7: pretty good at robbin trains. They actually they believed that
Speaker 7: they robbed a few, like in Wisconsin and Minnesota, kind
Speaker 7: of like practices before they came back to California to
Speaker 7: start robbing the banks.
Speaker 9: Now you said, these are really well done robberies, and
Speaker 9: they're using explosives as well. So tell us what would
Speaker 9: they need the explosives for. Tell us. The circumstances that
Speaker 9: they would use those explosives were on our four pardon me, uh,
Speaker 9: in their robbery on that train.
Speaker 7: Well, the money was in the railcar. It was in
Speaker 7: the mail car, and the mail car had it safe
Speaker 7: and there was always a guard in there. You could
Speaker 7: not get entry into the mail car from the other
Speaker 7: parts of the train. They had a door that was
Speaker 7: locked on the inside, and they would stop the train
Speaker 7: and if the person wouldn't open the door, they would
Speaker 7: put dynamite on it and blow the door up, basically
Speaker 7: blow up the whole car. They used that in the
Speaker 7: movie which Castie and the Sundance Kid. That was a
Speaker 7: thing that happened with Evanson Santak where they put too
Speaker 7: much dynamite on the car and just blew it to
Speaker 7: beds and the money was flying everywhere.
Speaker 9: But we're talking about sorry, go ahead, no, go ahead,
Speaker 9: we're talking about the money we're talking is like twenty
Speaker 9: thousand dollars.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they did pretty good. They would get out like,
Speaker 7: you know, five grand. You don't imagine how much money
Speaker 7: five grand was in the eighteen eighties. I mean, that's
Speaker 7: an amazing amount of money. So they would get that
Speaker 7: money and then they would lay low and go back
Speaker 7: to their farms and their families, and you know, a
Speaker 7: year later they'd go hit another one. They hit one
Speaker 7: in eighteen ninety. It was actually pretty close to where
Speaker 7: my publisher's building is. It's kind of funny, but hobo
Speaker 7: thought the train stopped and jumped off and they accidentally
Speaker 7: shot him, and they got twenty thousand out of that one.
Speaker 7: So now blood was spilled and the Southern Pacific was
Speaker 7: getting a lot more concerned.
Speaker 9: Yes, and so they again, that's interesting that they would
Speaker 9: lay that low to go back to their farms and
Speaker 9: assume this other life and then wait that long even
Speaker 9: though they'd made that much money. So very uncharacteristic of
Speaker 9: today's Steves. It sounds like they're getting a close call.
Speaker 9: So tell us about the close call. And so what
Speaker 9: is their response to the close call?
Speaker 7: Oh, their response to the the that close call.
Speaker 9: Well, eventually they you're talking about eighteen ninety one. So
Speaker 9: tell us what happens as they proceed with these I mean,
Speaker 9: I mean on their third one, is there a close
Speaker 9: call that necessitates them changing how they do things? Tell
Speaker 9: us how they go.
Speaker 7: Oh, yeah, they tried to blow up the express car
Speaker 7: the mail car, and the bombs were all duds, and
Speaker 7: the crewmen jumped out and start firing at him, and
Speaker 7: they had to run with getting anything, so they laid
Speaker 7: low again. They were you know, that's that's when they
Speaker 7: disappeared for a while and went out to the Midwest
Speaker 7: and shot and robbed some things. There's also a rumor
Speaker 7: that Jesse Jeans was involved with them, that he was
Speaker 7: out in California around that time. They can't really be
Speaker 7: verified for obvious reasons, but there's there's some truth to
Speaker 7: it that it could be possible. So they they got
Speaker 7: out of there after the big shootout with the with
Speaker 7: the railroad people because they had the Pinkerton's after them
Speaker 7: and everything, so that they left, Uh, they left town
Speaker 7: for about a good year or so.
Speaker 9: And but they return basically because a couple of them,
Speaker 9: two of them anyway want to come back, Evans and
Speaker 9: Santag one one, and maybe George doesn't want to come
Speaker 9: back once on Tag's brother, but two of them want
Speaker 9: to come back. And so they do come back to California.
Speaker 9: And then they proceed to rob again, don't they.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And this time they grabbed a bunch of coins
Speaker 7: that turned out to be from Peru and were workless.
Speaker 7: And they didn't realize that until they got back to
Speaker 7: their height out where one of their farms was, you know,
Speaker 7: the Suntag's farm. So that was that was kind of
Speaker 7: like the smoking gun that brought the railroad people on them.
Speaker 7: They went to you know, they were questioning people everywhere,
Speaker 7: and nobody wanted to you know, they were folk heroes,
Speaker 7: you know, robbing the railroad. It was like when you know,
Speaker 7: Dyllinger was robbing banks, you know, for nineteen months. That's
Speaker 7: that's as long as Dillinger robbed banks. He robbed nineteen
Speaker 7: of them. And you know, people were happy. You know,
Speaker 7: my father told me everybody would cheer when they'd say
Speaker 7: on the radio that Dyllinger robbed another bank, and they
Speaker 7: were like, good for them, you know. So it was
Speaker 7: the same thing with Southern Pacific. People didn't want to
Speaker 7: talk and uh, you know it was they were finding
Speaker 7: they were getting stonewalled. So the sheriff went to Evans
Speaker 7: Ranch to uh to question them, and he's talking to
Speaker 7: his daughter, Eva, who was a real pistol. She went
Speaker 7: on after after the trial and things and wrote plays
Speaker 7: that they performed in San Francisco and she was she
Speaker 7: would portray herself and stuff and it's actually pretty humorous
Speaker 7: to raise money for their their legal fees. So they
Speaker 7: were talking. The sheriff was talking to Eva and she
Speaker 7: was saying he was not there, and uh, actually the
Speaker 7: one of the Santags was right behind the door and
Speaker 7: blasted them with a shotgun. They ran away, Uh, you know,
Speaker 7: the wounded officers ran away, and that night they came
Speaker 7: up with a posse and they were waiting. They they
Speaker 7: didn't know that at the Suntig and Evans already.
Speaker 10: Left and they.
Speaker 7: They they approached them, and well, actually they were there,
Speaker 7: but they were in an outbuilding. So they came up
Speaker 7: to the house, you know, just like they do now
Speaker 7: where they surround it and everything. But what they didn't
Speaker 7: know is that they were really in an outbuilding. So
Speaker 7: they had their backs to them and they had a
Speaker 7: big exchange of gunfire, killed a deputy sheriff and George
Speaker 7: Santa got captured there and he's sang like a canary
Speaker 7: about all the stuff they did, but they still had
Speaker 7: no idea where they were. What they would do is this,
Speaker 7: they were close to Secoia National Park and they would
Speaker 7: go hunting there and so they knew the area really well.
Speaker 7: There's tons of caves and things up there, and and
Speaker 7: the people in the area would bring supplies up to
Speaker 7: them and just leave them. They would just leave them
Speaker 7: knowing that they would find it. You know. It was
Speaker 7: just kind of like leaving an offering for heavens and Suntag,
Speaker 7: you know. So the cops all came over to Evans
Speaker 7: farm and they found the coin, so they knew the
Speaker 7: Peruvian coins, and they found bags of cash and stuff,
Speaker 7: so they knew that they were totally involved in the
Speaker 7: in the whole situation. They were hiding out in in
Speaker 7: Sequoia National Park. And if you ever go to Sequoia
Speaker 7: National Park now there's there's only one road in and
Speaker 7: one word out, it's still a real hassle to get to,
Speaker 7: so you can imagine these guys doing it with horses
Speaker 7: and stuff. They had a shootout again, had killed two
Speaker 7: more cops and and wounded another. So ten months later
Speaker 7: they were still hiding in Sequoia and living off the
Speaker 7: land and food that they had. They were watching their
Speaker 7: house all the time. They supposedly held up a stage
Speaker 7: coach that they thought that one of the Peekerton guys
Speaker 7: was on, and they didn't steal anything or anything. They
Speaker 7: just had everybody get out and they saw that that
Speaker 7: the guy from the railroad wasn't on and they just
Speaker 7: told them to go, so they were like looking out
Speaker 7: for him, just ready to assassinate. So yeah, they got
Speaker 7: they ambushed another posse. They were just unstoppable until they
Speaker 7: were eventually caught really badly.
Speaker 9: Now the now the what's interesting about this as well
Speaker 9: is that they're sentenced to life in prison. And then
Speaker 9: Evan's daughter comes into the story again and convinces this
Speaker 9: jailer named ed Morel to smuggle a gun and to
Speaker 9: help her father escape. So as Morel though very much
Speaker 9: like I said about I alluded to in the when
Speaker 9: we first spoke, was that very much like this recent
Speaker 9: New York State breakout with the two prisoners with the accomplice,
Speaker 9: is that this Morel is he gets rattled and he
Speaker 9: shoots the police chief. He shoots the chief of Police J. D. Morgan,
Speaker 9: and then he spooks all the horses, and so Evans
Speaker 9: isn't able to escape, and then you figure, okay, well
Speaker 9: now now he's caught. But then again they, as you
Speaker 9: write in your book, these two guys horse jack another
Speaker 9: team and then they disappear. So finally rob somebody else,
Speaker 9: and finally they get imprisoned, and then you go, well,
Speaker 9: well that'll be the end of them. Well no, they're
Speaker 9: actually both paroled. So tell us a little bit about
Speaker 9: what I just sort of skipped over there. Tell us
Speaker 9: a little bit about the details of what happens in
Speaker 9: this story that seems to never end well.
Speaker 7: They were they were finally ambushed at their cabin and
Speaker 7: uh it was just a cabin that was built by somebody,
Speaker 7: and uh they waited for them to come back and
Speaker 7: they had a big shootout. There's a famous picture of
Speaker 7: Sontag laying against a manure pile, just shot up and
Speaker 7: all the pictureton guys are standing around like he's a
Speaker 7: trophy f a shot, you know, a twenty buck deer
Speaker 7: or something.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 7: Evans crawled all the way like for miles. He Uh,
Speaker 7: he crawled uh to to another farm and he lost
Speaker 7: Armine and I Sontag ended up dying there in the
Speaker 7: in the jail after you know, in section set in
Speaker 7: and he was shot at a manure pile. So I
Speaker 7: don't think it was gonna be clean. The ad moral is.
Speaker 7: It's just amazing that Eva must have had a real
Speaker 7: turming way about her two uh to persuade this Admiraal
Speaker 7: guy who was just a waiter. Uh that the jail
Speaker 7: had this restaurant cater to the jail for food for
Speaker 7: the for the prisoners, and uh that she was able
Speaker 7: to talk him into a smuggling gun to her father
Speaker 7: and helping him jail break and then helping him wrap
Speaker 7: is just amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, And and you also talk about Detective Smith too,
Speaker 9: being very very creative and being on the the arch
Speaker 9: nemesis of of Evans and Sontag in terms of he
Speaker 9: creating a rumor and spreading that rumor that Evans daughter
Speaker 9: was dying of diphthery as youngest daughter, and so he
Speaker 9: he waited for them and and of course Evans fell
Speaker 9: for it and Sontag fell for it, and they we're
Speaker 9: both captured. So very very interesting. I wanted to just
Speaker 9: mention that we have to stop for a word from
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Speaker 9: nine eight zero three eight one two. When we last
Speaker 9: left off, David, we were talking about, of course, the
Speaker 9: fascinating tale against rage against the railroad. So let's now
Speaker 9: talk about the last It's a very short story, but
Speaker 9: I think it's important just to note the time and
Speaker 9: note this fascinating story considering the incredible time that it occurs.
Speaker 9: And so the last lynching in California, tell us when
Speaker 9: it was, and tell us a little bit about the
Speaker 9: man that was. His name is lost into history, but
Speaker 9: nineteen forty seven in California, tell us a little bit
Speaker 9: about this last lynching in California.
Speaker 7: Yeah. This story is to me is one of the
Speaker 7: most important things that I've ever written in all my books.
Speaker 7: And I would really like to get a cold case
Speaker 7: involved in this because some people are still alive that
Speaker 7: were involved. On January sixth, nineteen forty seven, these kids
Speaker 7: were coming back to their one room school from winter
Speaker 7: vacation or Christmas vacation. This in Siskio County. It's there's
Speaker 7: a lot of lynchings and things up in that area.
Speaker 7: These kids come to school and strung up in the
Speaker 7: telephone poll. Friends of school was about the African American
Speaker 7: man with a capskin wrapped around his shoulders and he
Speaker 7: had his full bullet holes. And there were eight grades
Speaker 7: that attended this. I had an eyewitness told me this story.
Speaker 7: He was just a kid when it happened, and you know,
Speaker 7: the kids are all shocked, and the teacher just pulled
Speaker 7: down the shades and cops came. My witness that saw this,
Speaker 7: he went to use the outhouse outside and come to
Speaker 7: a tall man wearing a cowboy hat, and he asked
Speaker 7: what happened. He said, this is what happens when you
Speaker 7: when you wrestle cattle. Supposedly, this guy was caught wrestling cattle.
Speaker 7: He had a calf, and he was tentatively identified as
Speaker 7: a butcher who lived in the town of Reed, which
Speaker 7: is just kind of up the highway now from High
Speaker 7: five now.
Speaker 9: But he.
Speaker 7: Was caught wrestling this and butchering this calf, and they
Speaker 7: I don't know if they shot him there and strung
Speaker 7: him up or they strung him up and shot him.
Speaker 7: But it was reported in two different papers that etn
Speaker 7: The Gazette and Western Sentinel. They were weekly papers in
Speaker 7: that area in Siskine County. They wrote about what happened,
Speaker 7: but all the copies disappeared from the library and from
Speaker 7: the papers itself, so it's never been Actually, no one
Speaker 7: really knew about it until I wrote about this and
Speaker 7: I found it by that there was it was kind
Speaker 7: of like it could have happened. And then I did
Speaker 7: some research and I found the guy that actually was there,
Speaker 7: and he's a retired Marine major, I do believe. But
Speaker 7: so this was a straight out cover up to The
Speaker 7: guy that they killed was probably a veteran of the war.
Speaker 7: They killed him, they got away with it, and they
Speaker 7: cut down the body. No one knows what happened to it.
Speaker 7: It was in nineteen forty seven. There's a really good
Speaker 7: chance somebody who's in there was maybe eighteen or twenty
Speaker 7: years old, and they're still around there in their seventies.
Speaker 7: And I was contacted by a radio production crew that
Speaker 7: was they were out of the Bay Area and they
Speaker 7: went up there to check out the story, and they
Speaker 7: got harassed. To this day, they were chased out, and
Speaker 7: I was told that some equipment was even destroyed, some
Speaker 7: of the recording equipments. So they're still teuching about that
Speaker 7: up there in Callahan.
Speaker 9: Well it's nineteen forty seven, and I think everybody, I
Speaker 9: mean nobody can be that foolish to not have somebody
Speaker 9: in that small town that has the wherewithal to understand
Speaker 9: the ramifications of this story coming out eighteen forty seven,
Speaker 9: it's embarrassing. But the nineteen forty seven, So yeah, what's
Speaker 9: interesting too is that And what we haven't I really
Speaker 9: have mentioned that this book is chalk full of all
Speaker 9: kinds of stories. So we're just talking about we're just
Speaker 9: featuring a few of the stories because we can't go
Speaker 9: through all of them. The one thing that's prevalent through
Speaker 9: all the stories is that there is a downright, outright
Speaker 9: pardon me, conspiracy in these towns with these vigilante committees,
Speaker 9: whereas no one ever comes forward, So either there's silence
Speaker 9: from but they're silenced effectively. And I found that odd,
Speaker 9: given that you know from true crime itself that there
Speaker 9: seems to be always somebody that eventually will open up
Speaker 9: their mouth. But which is interesting about this is officially
Speaker 9: how many stories that are through this, throughout this entire
Speaker 9: book where people did conspire to keep their mouth shut forever.
Speaker 7: Yeah, almost in every single one of these cases, especially
Speaker 7: where it was a lynching. Yeah, people knew and they
Speaker 7: kept quiet about it. You know, you have to realize
Speaker 7: that even now those small towns in California, there's still
Speaker 7: small towns and everyone knows each other, everyone knows their business,
Speaker 7: and there's the code of the Old West that is
Speaker 7: still strong here in California, where you don't ask too
Speaker 7: many questions and you can never ask a guy how
Speaker 7: many cattle he has, you know, you know, don't ask
Speaker 7: too many questions. It's not a good thing that happens
Speaker 7: up in the up in the dry hills actually where
Speaker 7: we're having the big fires right now, because there's you know,
Speaker 7: a lot of illegal marijuana cultivation up there in meth labs,
Speaker 7: and people know about it, but no one says anything
Speaker 7: because that's just the code of the West out there.
Speaker 5: Right now.
Speaker 9: I wanted to ask this question too, because you do
Speaker 9: have a theme that goes through this book obviously that
Speaker 9: you've decided to write about. Again, not every single crime,
Speaker 9: not every single murder. You would it would be like
Speaker 9: you say, the size of a huge telephone book, and
Speaker 9: that would mean just be scratching the surface. But what
Speaker 9: is it about that about assassination? Because we're going to
Speaker 9: talk about now about Sir Hans, Sir hann and the
Speaker 9: assassination of Robert Kennedy. Why is it that you have
Speaker 9: included lynchings and from eighteen sixty and what is it
Speaker 9: that connects this assassination we'll say, of Robert Kennedy, and
Speaker 9: we'll also talk about assassination of Harvey Mill and others
Speaker 9: in San Francisco. So tell us what it is about
Speaker 9: this assassination or the assassination of prominent figures that's in
Speaker 9: the theme of this book, which includes lynchings and stuff
Speaker 9: that happened one hundred and seventy years ago.
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's a total thing about It's been taking justice
Speaker 7: into their own hands with Sir hanser Hand. I seriously
Speaker 7: don't believe that Sir hanser Han actually murdered Robert Kennedy.
Speaker 7: There's to so many, so many errors in the whole
Speaker 7: case that you know, and plus their handser Hand was
Speaker 7: an apolitical person. He was kind of a Gomer Pile
Speaker 7: type character. You know, he got kicked in the head
Speaker 7: by a horse, and uh, you know, he just wasn't
Speaker 7: out there. He wasn't somebody who would even foul politics,
Speaker 7: let alone have enough any kind of gumption to as
Speaker 7: fascinate one. And before Robert Kennedy was shot, people saw
Speaker 7: a woman in a polka dot dress talking to Sir
Speaker 7: Hans or Hand, who was just a bus boy and
Speaker 7: at the Ambassador Hotel, she was talking to him, and
Speaker 7: then supposedly he went and shot him. But you know,
Speaker 7: it doesn't it doesn't really add up. He uh he
Speaker 7: he had no reason too to shoot Robert Kennedy, but
Speaker 7: a lot of other people did.
Speaker 9: Now tell us you've got to go backwards now that
Speaker 9: you've opened up this, you know, open up this Pandora's
Speaker 9: box here. So let's talk about as you do in
Speaker 9: your book about the political climate in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 9: the circumstances that brought Robert Kennedy to the position that
Speaker 9: he was about to endeavor to. And so tell us
Speaker 9: what happens involving Sir hanster Hamm. But tell us before that,
Speaker 9: the political climate and the circumstances that Robert Kennedy found
Speaker 9: himself in.
Speaker 7: Well, I was ten years old when this happened, So
Speaker 7: I was young enough to or old enough to be
Speaker 7: aware of what happened. I was actually, you know, in
Speaker 7: the house when my parents were watching, you know, when
Speaker 7: he got shot and stuff. So it was like hotly cow.
Speaker 7: But you know, nineteen sixty eight was you know, there
Speaker 7: was a very turbulent time politics, and we were in Vietnam.
Speaker 7: Actually my brother was in Vietnam exactly at that time,
Speaker 7: you know, just some hick guy from a small town
Speaker 7: in Michigan. There were like seven people in this town
Speaker 7: of five hundred people that got sent to Vietnam, which
Speaker 7: is uh, you know that that affects people. And Johnson
Speaker 7: decided not to run for reelection, and Nixon was in
Speaker 7: there and Kennedy, you know, he was the attorney general
Speaker 7: when his brother was president, and he made a lot
Speaker 7: of enemies, especially with organized crime and the unions and things,
Speaker 7: and you know, people America was really split. It was
Speaker 7: even the Democratic Party was divided. But something about Kennedy
Speaker 7: just inspired people and they felt there was a hope,
Speaker 7: you know, partially just because of his brother and partially
Speaker 7: because he Bobby came. He was a very earnest man,
Speaker 7: and you know, he was on the side of the people,
Speaker 7: and of course when that happens, there's usually always some
Speaker 7: kind of trouble or some people that want to stop
Speaker 7: that kind of thing.
Speaker 9: Now, he was in light of his brother, the president,
Speaker 9: being assassinated. Robert Kennedy, as you write in your book,
Speaker 9: really didn't have didn't have a security force that seemed
Speaker 9: to take the assassination of his brother into consideration, or
Speaker 9: will say, the possibility of him being assassinated as a possibility.
Speaker 9: So tell us a little bit about who was on
Speaker 9: the security staff, but basically what type of security really had.
Speaker 7: He basically had no security at all. Actually, after his assassination,
Speaker 7: that's when the Secret Service was decided that they were
Speaker 7: going to protect all people running for president with the
Speaker 7: Secret Service. He had writer George Plimpton, he had a
Speaker 7: football player Rosie career, a couple other big guys, but
Speaker 7: basically that's all he had was just as uh, big
Speaker 7: football friends and big writer friends, and and there was
Speaker 7: no other security around. So whoever that they knew that
Speaker 7: the security was light, they found.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 7: It was like a total hoax that there was a
Speaker 7: door gm They had extra bullet holes in it. They
Speaker 7: were different caliber. And the assistant police chief back then
Speaker 7: was Darryl Gates, who was the Los Angeles police chief
Speaker 7: during the Rodney King riots. He was in charge of
Speaker 7: all of all the evidence. The gun for the door
Speaker 7: frame was dissemboled. It was supposed to be for texts
Speaker 7: for tests and X rays, and they said it wasn't important.
Speaker 7: They've destroyed it. So there were there were more bullets
Speaker 7: shot than could have been in the pistol that Uh,
Speaker 7: Sir hanser Hand used.
Speaker 9: Robert Kennedy had had expressed his war against organized crime,
Speaker 9: and as you write, you don't talk about that, but
Speaker 9: you make the connection in terms of that when sir
Speaker 9: her Hand, Sir hann is unlikely a political person, again,
Speaker 9: connected to nothing that would seem to indicate anything like this.
Speaker 9: When he shot Robert Kennedy was right behind the ear
Speaker 9: and you talk about that, and I've read that reference
Speaker 9: before in you know, in a typical mafioso execution style,
Speaker 9: wasn't it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And with the same caliber of gun too when
Speaker 7: when him into hit. You know, you always see in
Speaker 7: the movie they have a giant gun that like rattles windows.
Speaker 7: But basically they use small caliber pistols and they just
Speaker 7: use you behind the ear because no one pays that
Speaker 7: much attention to a pop. That's a little louder than
Speaker 7: a plastic bag being broken. But you know, you hear
Speaker 7: a great big pistol go off, you know, forty five Uh,
Speaker 7: people are gonna look around when you hear a pop.
Speaker 7: People aren't going to turn around too much. It could
Speaker 7: just be a balloon or something. I don't think that
Speaker 7: that labor or mafia killed him. I'm putting my money
Speaker 7: more on like CIA or some other kind of secret
Speaker 7: organization that's within America at that time. But he had
Speaker 7: no shortage of enemies, that's for sure. What do you
Speaker 7: talk about is for two that Nixon was running against him,
Speaker 7: and so is George Wallace. So yeah, there's they met
Speaker 7: very likable people.
Speaker 9: You know, you talk about Sir Han, Sir Han when
Speaker 9: he is grabbed by someone one of the security in
Speaker 9: the audience. He's still you say, he's freakishly strong, is
Speaker 9: able to get another couple of shots off into Robert
Speaker 9: Kennedy and also a couple other people as well, and
Speaker 9: they're these four huge security guys are having a hard
Speaker 9: time with this guy. So tell us a little bit
Speaker 9: more about this battle, because that was something that I
Speaker 9: hadn't read very much at all about that actual altercation
Speaker 9: on that day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you know, Sir hansor Han was just this little guy.
Speaker 7: He actually wanted to be a jockey at one point,
Speaker 7: that's how tiny he was. But after he you know,
Speaker 7: he he fired his good you know, Rosie Greer, who
Speaker 7: is one of the biggest football players of the time,
Speaker 7: just a math of man. You know, he had a
Speaker 7: hard time pulling him down. There were four guys on him,
Speaker 7: and he kept on firing. He hit Kennedy two more
Speaker 7: times after he was being pinned down. However, those two
Speaker 7: shots could have came from somewhere else too. Didn't necessarily
Speaker 7: mean that he might have fired a gun, but it
Speaker 7: doesn't mean that there wasn't somebody else firing gun at
Speaker 7: the same time. As a small caliber like that, with
Speaker 7: all the noise going on, the commotion, trays falling, carts
Speaker 7: getting knocked over, people screaming.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and what did they Was there any determination that
Speaker 9: Sir Hans, Sir Hanna had any mental issues? Was that
Speaker 9: ever considered as a defense and was there any was
Speaker 9: there any talk of that?
Speaker 7: Well, yeah, they said he was temporary insane, but they
Speaker 7: didn't care. They just roaded him in for a first
Speaker 7: degree murder, five degree five councils, a fault of the
Speaker 7: deadly weapon. I when I was promoting this book, I
Speaker 7: went to Bakersfield, of all places, and you know, I'll,
Speaker 7: I'll go to this bookstore. And I get there and
Speaker 7: there was a group of retired prison guards. They had
Speaker 7: their own little book club. And when I walked in,
Speaker 7: like twenty of these guys that were in her sixties
Speaker 7: were like approached me as soon as they walked in,
Speaker 7: holding my books. And several of them worked at where
Speaker 7: the Cochraine were. Sir hanser Hand is living out the
Speaker 7: rest of his life, and they told me a few
Speaker 7: funny things about him.
Speaker 9: He was.
Speaker 7: They said that he was a total whiner, you know,
Speaker 7: not a tough guy at all.
Speaker 9: He was just like this, this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, big complainer, unlike you know, Charlie Manson, and you
Speaker 7: know all the other criminals that they have in there,
Speaker 7: and here's this guy's supposed to, you know, have assassinated
Speaker 7: a guy running for president, this famous family, and he
Speaker 7: is the most uncriminal person in the prison.
Speaker 9: What I always found interesting given that Robert John Kennedy's
Speaker 9: assassination and then again this seemingly lax security and lots
Speaker 9: of people, like you say, with motive to kill him,
Speaker 9: and then the suspicious motiveless criminal to basically have done it.
Speaker 9: And again, as you write in here too, there are
Speaker 9: some interesting things where evidence is sort of lost or misplaced,
Speaker 9: sort of at least at least giving notion to some
Speaker 9: of those conspiracy theories. But it seems that this is
Speaker 9: one of those conspiracy theories that really hasn't had that
Speaker 9: really didn't have that much traction I think in the public.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the media, things were different then. I mean,
Speaker 7: if you can imagine, you know, if we had the
Speaker 7: media you know that we have now everyone has a camera.
Speaker 7: Now everyone has a camera, and you know, you think
Speaker 7: about nineteen sixty eight, even a video camera weighed fifty
Speaker 7: pounds back then you know, we're clumsy and everyone saw
Speaker 7: you coming. You have to have a big rack of
Speaker 7: lights to light up everything. And you know nowadays, well
Speaker 7: just here's like one thing is that I've had some
Speaker 7: older relatives tell me about how bad crime is and things,
Speaker 7: and I'm saying, no crime has actually gotten better. The
Speaker 7: cops have gotten more professional in most cases, we hope,
Speaker 7: but you know, they are more educated. Back in the
Speaker 7: old days, it was like, you know, Billy Bob just
Speaker 7: came back from the army and you know he ain't
Speaker 7: got no job, you know, and they'd say, okay, here
Speaker 7: here's a billy club and a gun and a badge.
Speaker 7: You're a cop. And you know now when a child
Speaker 7: gets killed in Florida, we find out about it all
Speaker 7: the way across the country in a matter of hours,
Speaker 7: and it's a you know, they'll have a whole trial
Speaker 7: on cable TV when it's really just a local story.
Speaker 7: So you hear about all these things now that used
Speaker 7: to be local stories that are blown up into big,
Speaker 7: major nationwide stories. Is is it a good thing? I
Speaker 7: don't know. Is it a bad thing? I don't think
Speaker 7: it could ever be a bad thing. If you know,
Speaker 7: people see how our justice system works, even if it
Speaker 7: fails or they think it fails. You know, sometimes there's
Speaker 7: a criminal that gets found not guilty and people are mad,
Speaker 7: but it's like they were found not guilty. You know,
Speaker 7: what are you going to say that's they were found
Speaker 7: not guilty. You can't just because public opinion says that
Speaker 7: this person did it. That's just not the way our
Speaker 7: system works.
Speaker 9: Well, you have to you have to let Casey Anthony
Speaker 9: know about that Vieuse Sheppard as she can't get out
Speaker 9: of her own house for the rest of her life.
Speaker 7: So yeah, you know, I mean, that's that's the perfect case.
Speaker 7: It's you know, even ten fifteen years ago, it would
Speaker 7: have been you know, on page twenty three on section
Speaker 7: B of the paper. You know, no one would have
Speaker 7: you know, even remembered her name. But now things are
Speaker 7: a lot different. You know, I can think, you know,
Speaker 7: just where I live right here in Sacramento, I live
Speaker 7: really close to the American River. Well, during the Grove
Speaker 7: Rush days, that was basically not only were there ship
Speaker 7: steamboats going up and down the river, but on both
Speaker 7: sides of the river there were you know, a mile
Speaker 7: wide road that wagons and freight and things and stage
Speaker 7: coaches were shipped out to you know, the the gold
Speaker 7: mines out there, so basically where I live was a
Speaker 7: super highway on it two years ago.
Speaker 9: Well, let's talk about warfare at city Hall, because this
Speaker 9: is one of those cases that I'm familiar with. But again,
Speaker 9: thanks to you, you've uncovered some facts and tied it
Speaker 9: into one of these stories that's very very compelling to everyone,
Speaker 9: especially Americans, and that's Jonestown. So incredibly, we have this
Speaker 9: story that illustrates very clearly a lot of things that
Speaker 9: and that's why it's near the end of the book
Speaker 9: as well, but very very important story in what it
Speaker 9: demonstrates and illustrates very clearly and all the connections it
Speaker 9: has to in these other stories like Jonestown, which is
Speaker 9: a story very much onto itself. So let's talk about
Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy six, George Moscone and he is the
Speaker 9: mayor of San Francisco, and he's fifty seven years old,
Speaker 9: so tell us or pardon me, forty seven years old.
Speaker 9: So tell us a little bit more about the situation
Speaker 9: with George Moscone as as the mayor of San Francisco.
Speaker 7: Yeah, San Francisco, they always wanted to be high falutin
Speaker 7: and they liked their blue bloods, and Moscone was anything.
Speaker 7: But his father was a milkman, you know, owned his
Speaker 7: mom worked at a liquor store on weekends and stuff.
Speaker 7: His father actually went mad, was put in the mental hospital.
Speaker 7: And he's a good Catholic boy, and you know, worked
Speaker 7: his way through school, became an attorney, you know, worked
Speaker 7: his way up the ladder. Because you know, San Francisco,
Speaker 7: they don't vote for the mayor. They vote for city
Speaker 7: council people they call city supervisors, and then the city
Speaker 7: supervisors vote for the person who's going to be the mayor.
Speaker 7: So it kind of goes different different than it does
Speaker 7: in a lot of other towns. When Moscone came up,
Speaker 7: and at the same time, Harvey Milk, who owned a
Speaker 7: camera shop in the Castro district, he openly gay man
Speaker 7: back then, and even in San Francisco has had time.
Speaker 7: The police used to raid gay bars there and basically
Speaker 7: like to steal everybody's wallet and beat up people and
Speaker 7: get a few drinks on the house and leave. Happened
Speaker 7: a lot, and so there was tension growing among the
Speaker 7: gay population there. San Francisco became a mecca for alternative
Speaker 7: lifestyles because that's where the navy bases were in the
Speaker 7: army basis, And so if you were caught doing something
Speaker 7: and you were getting get dishonorably discharged, you would be
Speaker 7: discharged in San Francisco. And so instead of moving back
Speaker 7: home to you know, Thunder Bay, Wisconsin or something, you know,
Speaker 7: and try to explain to your family why you were
Speaker 7: dishonorably discharged, they would just stay in San Francisco. Right, So,
Speaker 7: you know, it used to be you know, now it's
Speaker 7: not a you know, it used to be a rough town,
Speaker 7: but now it's you know, a millionaire's paradise. So yeah,
Speaker 7: But the year that that they were all elected were
Speaker 7: Moscone and Harvey Milk and Dan White. It was because
Speaker 7: they decided instead of having a large supervisors where you
Speaker 7: just get a big pool of people and you vote
Speaker 7: for it and the top sixteen people get in, they
Speaker 7: decided to have it in the districts so that there'd
Speaker 7: be a representative of certain neighborhoods or certain parts of town.
Speaker 7: And so that's how Harvey Milk and Dan White got
Speaker 7: in to into office.
Speaker 9: Now, tell us about Dan White. You say, he's all
Speaker 9: American fellow from you know, Irish background, working class, a
Speaker 9: former Marine sergeant. You said he was a Vietnam vet
Speaker 9: who apparently later admitted that he had never fired his
Speaker 9: weapon at anyone the entire time he was in Vietnam.
Speaker 9: So tell us a little bit more about Dan White
Speaker 9: and what develops between Harvey Milk and Dan White as supervisors.
Speaker 7: Well, Dan White was kind of pushed into the position
Speaker 7: to run for the city supervisor. He he was, you know,
Speaker 7: just backed up by by the powers that be to
Speaker 7: Uh to represent the part of the city of the
Speaker 7: South Side Valley Excelsior is real nice neighborhood. Now I
Speaker 7: can't get a house for less than a million dollars there. So,
Speaker 7: you know, they thought that Mosconi and Uh and Milk
Speaker 7: were too liberal. H they weren't pushing the city, pro downtown,
Speaker 7: pro business power base was disappearing.
Speaker 2: So but.
Speaker 7: Dan White was was a fireman, and this has come
Speaker 7: out just recently is that he was actually homosexual, and
Speaker 7: he had a very self hate problem because he couldn't
Speaker 7: admit to what he was and so instead he took
Speaker 7: his anger out against gays. That way, they only made
Speaker 7: like ten thousand dollars a year. So Harvey Milk had
Speaker 7: his own store and employees and things. But Dan White
Speaker 7: ended up selling like a big He had a big
Speaker 7: potato stand over at Fisherman's Wharf that he was set
Speaker 7: up in. Uh. But White didn't know how to play
Speaker 7: politics at all, and he, you know, he would actually
Speaker 7: take people at their word and stuff. And he once
Speaker 7: pitched an idea about having a board of supervisor's softball
Speaker 7: team and everyone laughed at him and stuff. He just
Speaker 7: didn't think that he would be able to to get
Speaker 7: anything done as a city council person. And he was,
Speaker 7: you know, going broke basically. You know, he had a
Speaker 7: family to support and he was just getting pressure from
Speaker 7: everybody on how to do his job. And he just
Speaker 7: wasn't cut out for politics. So he put in his
Speaker 7: resignation and then changed his mind about it and he
Speaker 7: went to Moscone. He actually snuck in the city Hall
Speaker 7: because he was so well known. He knocked down a
Speaker 7: window on the first floor and like there was a
Speaker 7: janitor's area, addressing room, locker room or something, and he said, oh, hey,
Speaker 7: I got my I D and he just crawled in
Speaker 7: through the window and that's how he got into city
Speaker 7: Hall with his gun, and he went to talk to Moscone,
Speaker 7: and Moscone said that he was not going to accept
Speaker 7: him to come back, and he shot him several times
Speaker 7: right in the face.
Speaker 9: And then what did he proceed to do from there.
Speaker 7: Well, then he walked over to Harvey Milk's office and
Speaker 7: shot him too, killed him right there. He went to
Speaker 7: leave and he bumped into Dianne Feinstein, who is our senator.
Speaker 7: Now she's a senior senator. She was just ready to
Speaker 7: quit politics completely when her return was done as a
Speaker 7: city supervisor. And she saw she saw Dan White walking
Speaker 7: down the hallway and she said hi to him, and
Speaker 7: he just walked by. She didn't know that he had
Speaker 7: just killed the mayor and Harvey White or Harvey Milk.
Speaker 7: So when he was caught, he was caught fairly quick.
Speaker 7: Everyone knew he did it, and the police, you know,
Speaker 7: gave him a nice cell and they waited on him,
Speaker 7: got the meals out of restaurants and stuff like that,
Speaker 7: and yeah, it was he was like protected by the
Speaker 7: police department.
Speaker 9: The police were very very unhappy with Harvey Milk, and
Speaker 9: that's why they gave their support to White afterward after
Speaker 9: the murder, and basically and that they were showing their
Speaker 9: symphonies for White and against Milk and Moscone with their
Speaker 9: policy that they were about.
Speaker 7: To enact, right, yeah, yeah, And you know San Francisco,
Speaker 7: you know, like I said, the cops were very they
Speaker 7: were all dirty, Harry, you know, back up into even
Speaker 7: up until the eighties. I have a friend whose father
Speaker 7: was a motorcycle patrolman in San Francisco. It's been dead
Speaker 7: for a long time now, but she told me that
Speaker 7: she was riding the bus home from Catholic school and
Speaker 7: she was in her Catholic school girl out and some
Speaker 7: kid on the bus started hassling her and beat her up,
Speaker 7: and she told her father, and he got off on
Speaker 7: the motorcycle, called some buddies and they never saw that
Speaker 7: kid again. It disappeared. So that's the kind of San
Speaker 7: Francisco you were dealing with. So when White had his trial,
Speaker 7: he ended up getting like seven years. It's just just ridiculous.
Speaker 7: And they caused a riot in San Francisco that they
Speaker 7: actually use a lot of the photos for it for
Speaker 7: stock photos of riots, because they burned police cars and
Speaker 7: tipped over things. Diane Feinstein stepped outside of the city
Speaker 7: Hall to tell everybody, you know, to calm down and
Speaker 7: someone hit her in the head with like a rock,
Speaker 7: and there's still clips of that around. She just disappears
Speaker 7: among you know, she's standing there in front of the microphone.
Speaker 7: There's all these cops and everything around her, and you
Speaker 7: see this rock hitter and she just goes down. So
Speaker 7: she ended up becoming the mayor almost by default. He
Speaker 7: was ready to go back and get out of politics completely,
Speaker 7: and now she's a US senator for twenty something years.
Speaker 7: What we didn't talk about, we we didn't talk about.
Speaker 9: Sorry, we didn't talk about his defense, which was the
Speaker 9: infamous twinkie defense that he had eaten in his dunk
Speaker 9: food and was on a sugar high, and it wasn't
Speaker 9: absurd defense, but they did trott it out in court.
Speaker 9: What was the really the gist of the nature of
Speaker 9: the anger that the crowd had in that riot and
Speaker 9: who constituted the vast majority of those people that were rioting, Oh,
Speaker 9: it was.
Speaker 7: The gay population of San Francisco came out along with
Speaker 7: a lot of punk rockers and former hippies and just
Speaker 7: basically people that were very angry. They wanted to see
Speaker 7: changes happen in San Francisco. You know, you always see
Speaker 7: that when somebody does something horrible and they're very connected
Speaker 7: and then they get, you know, a lap on the wrist.
Speaker 7: This was a total slap on the wrist. There are
Speaker 7: things that happened when that riot happened. Cops went into
Speaker 7: the Castro and totally trashed out a bunch of gay
Speaker 7: bars and beat everybody with clubs, just like they it
Speaker 7: was a police riot. So while there's this riot happening
Speaker 7: up uptown, another team of cops went in just took
Speaker 7: it on themselves, put tape over their badges, and just
Speaker 7: started club and everyone they saw. Because the riot happened
Speaker 7: just as you know, people were upset, they were standing
Speaker 7: outside and then they were like, well, you know, they
Speaker 7: saw more and more people. They started heading towards City Hall.
Speaker 7: Before they knew it, they had thousands and thousands of
Speaker 7: people coming up towards City Hall.
Speaker 9: And in the end, Harvey Milk really does become sort
Speaker 9: of a beacon for the movement of representing sort of
Speaker 9: oppression that it's at its work as well, because of
Speaker 9: he was so connected and so active in that gay
Speaker 9: community and then he was killed. So wasn't it wasn't
Speaker 9: he seen as that sort of martyr for this cause.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he definitely was a martyr to that cause because
Speaker 7: you know, he was a funny guy. He was also
Speaker 7: pretty cranky. You know, he wasn't like mister nice guy.
Speaker 7: He was, you know, a wise guy, you know, New
Speaker 7: York first generation American, and he you know, he was
Speaker 7: He was one of the first people to go out
Speaker 7: there and say, hey, you know, it's none of your
Speaker 7: business what we do.
Speaker 9: What was the inevitable fate of Dan White? What became
Speaker 9: of him?
Speaker 7: Well, he got out of prison. He did not do
Speaker 7: that much of his time. He was paroled in nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty four, so he only did about six years after probation. Sinzeiner,
Speaker 7: the mayor, it said, don't come back to San Francisco.
Speaker 7: It's his hometown. There was no other place he ever lived.
Speaker 7: He was a total total San Francisco boy, you know,
Speaker 7: as much as Joe Demaggio or somebody you know. And
Speaker 7: he did come back to his old neighborhood. And he
Speaker 7: ended up committing suicide only about a year after he
Speaker 7: got out of prison, almost right after he got off
Speaker 7: his probation. He tied the house is his ghast pipe
Speaker 7: and guessed himself.
Speaker 9: Yeah, incredible, incredible, story, and tell us now about the
Speaker 9: Jonestown connection because it's not so tenuous, But tell us
Speaker 9: the connection with Jonestown because it's one of the stories
Speaker 9: again is very very compelling in American history.
Speaker 7: Oh well you know about that, George, your your listeners
Speaker 7: know about Georgetown. Do they have you had?
Speaker 9: Well, I'm just saying the connection that they have. We're
Speaker 9: not going to go through the Jonestown itself, just a
Speaker 9: connection that they have with San Francisco and the city
Speaker 9: itself and some of the players here.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, Jim Jones, he you know, he had the
Speaker 7: People's Temple and uh it was the original one was
Speaker 7: right across the street from the Fillmore Auditorium. There's a
Speaker 7: post office there now, but before that was his church
Speaker 7: and he uh you know, he he fed people and
Speaker 7: and uh clothed people and did those kind of Christian things.
Speaker 7: Mayor Mosconi uh put him on a where was that
Speaker 7: he he put him on a committee for housing or
Speaker 7: something now San Francisco's housing authority. He had no idea
Speaker 7: what was going to happen, and uh that that just happened.
Speaker 7: The whole People's Temple mass suicide or mass murder happened
Speaker 7: just before all. This happened just just a few weeks
Speaker 7: before Moscone was killed. So yeah, you know there's uh,
Speaker 7: there's the old line that comedians never tell jokes about
Speaker 7: that about the People's Temple because the punchline is too long.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well I don't wanna.
Speaker 9: I don't want to laugh at because we always have
Speaker 9: victims and have been criticized, so and I really don't.
Speaker 9: But yeah, what I wanted to what I wanted to
Speaker 9: say with the Jonestown as well, is that, uh, the
Speaker 9: incredible story is that on Yeah, Harvey Milk, I guess
Speaker 9: mistakenly obviously was very supportive of Jim Jones even when
Speaker 9: there was criticism, and same as if I'm correct, not correct,
Speaker 9: is that Moscone was the same where they he had Jones.
Speaker 9: The Jim Jones had duped these guys as well into
Speaker 9: believing that he was some benevol and soul and had
Speaker 9: some good ideas and so very very tragic story and
Speaker 9: quite the connection as well to two amazing stories, you know,
Speaker 9: with Maddy Milk masconey.
Speaker 7: And you have to Matt, you have to remember that
Speaker 7: the People's Temple that they they brought a lot of
Speaker 7: voters in you know, for for Mascone and and for white.
Speaker 7: You know people would you know, take whatever advice Jones
Speaker 7: gave him about it, but he would produce the voters.
Speaker 7: When it came time for election day, he made sure
Speaker 7: that his people went and voted. And that's important, especially
Speaker 7: you know, in a city the size of San Francisco,
Speaker 7: which is like nine by seven miles. It's actually very
Speaker 7: small city in area m.
Speaker 9: Now, before we wrap up, David, I wanted to ask
Speaker 9: you what was the overall I mean, if you can't
Speaker 9: come up with one snap conclusion, but what was overall
Speaker 9: doing this project? What was your conclusion after all of this.
Speaker 9: I'm sure you went in with some preconceptions and then
Speaker 9: you came out with, as all authors do, with a
Speaker 9: different picture, at least a lot more informed picture. So
Speaker 9: tell us what you discovered after all of this that
Speaker 9: might have been profound.
Speaker 7: I think that what I discovered most about this. And
Speaker 7: you know, this book came out seven years ago. It
Speaker 7: was you know, my first one. It was kind of
Speaker 7: my baby.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 7: I had written a lot of articles and things like that,
Speaker 7: but this was my first shot as a book. And
Speaker 7: I guess what surprised me the most is that everyone
Speaker 7: who who took justice in their own hands believed that
Speaker 7: they were right. And that to me is is it's
Speaker 7: pretty powerful things. You know. We all have our ethics
Speaker 7: and things that we were taught by, our culture, where
Speaker 7: we lived, our parents, are whatever, the things that influence you.
Speaker 7: But there is like right and wrong, and pretty much
Speaker 7: everybody knows that what is right and what is wrong.
Speaker 7: Sometimes when just like the terrorists family that lived up
Speaker 7: and look Out in nineteen oh one, or like in
Speaker 7: Little Lake too, the people had to take matters into
Speaker 7: their own hands or else they would have to live
Speaker 7: with terrorism. And people think of terrorism as a modern
Speaker 7: day thing. But when you're in a town that's fifty
Speaker 7: miles in any direction to another town and you can
Speaker 7: only get around by horseback, sometimes you have to make
Speaker 7: those decisions. Sometimes they were right a lot of times.
Speaker 7: Most of the time they were wrong. Lake. They were
Speaker 7: probably right for doing that look Out. They were probably
Speaker 7: right in Yukaya when they hung forward they had four
Speaker 7: murderers in their jail at one time in eighteen ninety eight,
Speaker 7: eighteen ninety five. The people were like, you know, here's
Speaker 7: this little town twelve thousand people, you know, county the
Speaker 7: size of Rhode Island, and you know, what are they
Speaker 7: going to do. They have four murderers in their little
Speaker 7: jail and none of them were from there, none of
Speaker 7: them had roots there. They got rid of them. They
Speaker 7: believe they are right and they were never caught, but
Speaker 7: they always anybody that's involved in any kind of situation
Speaker 7: like this, they're going to think of that for the
Speaker 7: rest of their life. It's going to that whole thing
Speaker 7: is going to be burned into their memory. They'll never
Speaker 7: forget it. They'll never forget the smells, the sight, the
Speaker 7: last words of the people that they took justice in
Speaker 7: their own hands about that was something that they are
Speaker 7: all going to have to live with for the rest
Speaker 7: of their lives. In the case in Santa Rosa, where
Speaker 7: these gangsters shot a bunch of cops, they were lynched
Speaker 7: and afterwards, actually while I was writing this book, came
Speaker 7: out that this one old man said, I was eighteen
Speaker 7: years old when that happened, and I was in on it,
Speaker 7: and he spun this whole story. I put it in
Speaker 7: a book, but really, you know, if he was an
Speaker 7: eighteen year old kid, he was just there backup muscle
Speaker 7: and show he didn't have anything to do with how
Speaker 7: they were what they were doing. And you know, but evidently,
Speaker 7: you know, he died of an old man and he
Speaker 7: never forgot the lynching of those three gangsters.
Speaker 9: What's interesting, too, is that we hadn't mentioned this. It
Speaker 9: seems like a good percentage of the stories in this
Speaker 9: book where there were lynchings that the people took the
Speaker 9: effort to wear masks, didn't they.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, and everyone pretty much knew who all these
Speaker 7: people were. I mean, you know, you're hearing with these
Speaker 7: small villages basically, and you know they were your uncle,
Speaker 7: they were your father, they were your brother, they were
Speaker 7: your neighbors. And like I said before, no one's gonna,
Speaker 7: you know, be ostracized by their community because they turned
Speaker 7: in somebody who was basically in a VI's a anti
Speaker 7: justice that they couldn't fix any other way.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Wow, Yeah, it's a fascinating book. California Justice, Shootouts, lynchings
Speaker 9: and assassinations in the Golden State. I want to thank
Speaker 9: you very much for coming on and talking about this
Speaker 9: book for those that might want to look at other
Speaker 9: work you Like you say, this is your first true
Speaker 9: crime book. You have tell me tell our audience how
Speaker 9: many true crime books you have and how they might
Speaker 9: contact you if you're interested in If you have a
Speaker 9: website or a Facebook, tell us about how people might
Speaker 9: contact you.
Speaker 7: So yeah, I'm on Facebook. I have a Death in
Speaker 7: California site on Facebook. All my books are available on Amazon,
Speaker 7: and of course they can always be ordered online, you know,
Speaker 7: good Reads or anything like that. My second book is
Speaker 7: Death in California, The bizarre, freakish, and curious Ways people
Speaker 7: die in the Golden State. There's plenty of murders and
Speaker 7: things in that one too, but there's also a lot
Speaker 7: of freak accidents and airplane crashes and things like that.
Speaker 7: After California Justice came out, publisher thought they might want
Speaker 7: to lighten up a little bit. But I managed to
Speaker 7: sneak into Death in California. And my latest book is
Speaker 7: California's Fruit Flakes and Nuts, and it's about California crazy crackpots, creeps, centrics,
Speaker 7: stupid criminals. It's kind of my thing right now is
Speaker 7: very stupid crimes. In Fruit Flakes and Nuts, I kind
Speaker 7: of focus on people who lived pretty much a normal
Speaker 7: life and then had one bad day.
Speaker 9: So yeah, I've read a little bit of it already
Speaker 9: with a session musician named Jim Gordon. I believe that
Speaker 9: it's again fascinating to tale about how he If you
Speaker 9: are listening to radio today, if you're listening to classic
Speaker 9: rock radio today, you're probably hearing him every day play
Speaker 9: the drums. He was on twenty nine records in one
Speaker 9: year alone and went on to be one of the
Speaker 9: most popular session drummers. So he's probably on something that
Speaker 9: you're going to listen to every day in, day in,
Speaker 9: day out. So very very interesting book. But I want
Speaker 9: to thank you for coming on and talking about the
Speaker 9: most murderous of the three books that you have, which
Speaker 9: is California Justus and a fascinating story about lynchings and assassinations,
Speaker 9: all kinds of stories of all kinds of stories I've
Speaker 9: never heard of. And also just an amazing time in
Speaker 9: history again when you just when you think you know
Speaker 9: a lot about history, comes along this book. So thank
Speaker 9: you very much, and then you have a great evening.
Speaker 9: Thank you very much for this interview, Thank you.
Speaker 7: Very much for having me on the shows. A very
Speaker 7: because of the honor and a pleasure.
Speaker 9: Thank you very much, David. You have a great night.
Speaker 9: Good night