The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open. Visit our snack bar for a fizzy beverage, a big bag of popcorn and a candy bar.
Tonight’s feature is This Gun for Hire, a 1942 film noir, directed by Frank Tuttle and based on the novel A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene. The film stars Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, Laird Cregar, and Alan Ladd.
Ilene and Owen Nolan struggled to get on with their lives in the wake of Stella’s disappearance. They moved to the San Diego area, but I imagine that every time the story of a missing or abused child made the news their hearts broke a little more.
Sherriff’s deputies and LAPD investigators continued to pull in every deviant who even looked cross-eyed at a child. They busted other child molesters, but they couldn’t seem to get a break in Stella’s case which grew colder with every passing day.
In December 1955, Sheriff’s deputies interrogated Robert Louis Kracker, 20, on suspicion of kidnapping a 3-year-old Baldwin Park girl, Cynthia Hardacre. Kracker had been visiting a cousin in the Hardacre neighborhood when Cynthia, apparently mistaking Robert for her father, dashed toward his automobile calling, “Wait, Daddy.” Kracker told the police
that: “When I saw her, something just came over me.”
Kracker was on parole and had a record, including sex offenses, going back to age 14! In 1949 he spent three months in Juvie and was subsequently committed to the State Hospital at Camarillo. In July of 1950, he was arrested in L.A. on suspicion of a sex offense, and in November, 1951 he was arrested on suspicion of burglary.
Robert was guilty of the attack on Cynthia, but he was not responsible for Stella’s abduction.
In August of 1961 the L.A. Times reported on five children who had mysteriously vanished in recent years; Stella’s name was among them.
On March 6, 1970 a 51-year-old Sylmar construction worker, Mack Ray Edwards, appeared at the LAPD’s Foothill Division station. He handed them a loaded handgun and then said the had kidnapped three Sylmar girls earlier that day.
Edwards, a native of Arkansas, was booked on suspicion of murder in the 1969 death of a 13-year-old Pacoima boy — one of the six cases he voluntarily discussed with detectives.
Edwards and an unnamed 15-year-old companion told the police that they’d entered the home of Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Cohen at 5 a.m., after the couple had left for work. The two stole a coin collection and other items from the house and then took the three Cohen children, Valerie (12); Cindy (13); and Jan (14) by car to Bouquet Canyon in Angeles National Forest north of Newhall.
Two of the girls escaped and the third was abandoned by Edwards and his accomplice — they told her they’d send a sheriff’s car to pick her up.
It was during his confession to police that he admitted to kidnapping, raping, and then murdering 8-year-old Stella Darlene Nolan in 1953. The girl was allegedly his first murder victim.
In mid-March 1970, the skeletal remains of Stella Darlene Nolan were unearthed by a highway crew who worked from directions given to them by her killer.
In addition to the slaying of Stella, Edwards admitted to murdering Gary Rocha, 16, in 1968, and Donald Allen Todd, 13, in 1960. He also admitted to three other murders of children but he wasn’t charged with them because their bodies couldn’t be found. Edwards was a heavy machine operator and often worked freeway construction sites, it simply wasn’t possible for the law to go around digging up Southern California freeways in an effort to unearth the other remains.
In Van Nuys Superior Court, Edwards entered a plea of guilty in three of the six slayings to which he had confessed. Sgt. George H. Rock was called to testify about Edwards’ voluntary admission that he was a child killer. All of the murders were horrible, but Stella’s was the worst. Edwards had taken her from Auction City in Norwalk to his Azusa home where he molested and then attempted to strangle her. After he thought Stella was dead, he threw her body over bridge. The following day he returned to the scene to bury his victim and found the little girl still alive. She had managed to drag herself about 100 feet. She was sitting up, dazed, when Edwards took out his pocketknife and stabbed her to death.
Edwards attempted to sell his surrender and confession as a guilty conscience. He said:
“I have a guilt complex. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep and it was beginning to affect my work. You know I’m a heavy equipment operator. That long grader I’m using now costs a lot of money — $200,000. I might wreck it. Or turn it over and hurt someone.”
That doesn’t sound like a guilty conscience to me — it sounds exactly like the kind of profoundly stupid, self-serving statement a sociopath would make. There was no expression of remorse for his victims, his primary concern appears to have been the deleterious affect the brutal child killings were having on his work.
Edwards claimed to want a death sentence. Maybe he did — he attempted suicide twice during his trial. On March 30, 1970 he slashed a 14-inch cut across his stomach with a razor blade and on May 7, 1970 he took an overdose of tranquilizers The third time was the charm — he successfully hanged himself with a length of TV cord in his cell on California’s Death Row.
Edwards had always claimed six victims, never more; however, he is suspected in the murders of over 20 children between 1953 and 1970.
In 2006, a letter written by Edwards to his wife while he was on death row implicated him the 1957 disappearance of 8-year-old Tommy Bowman in the Arroyo Seco.
Ramona Price
In 2011, the Santa Barbara Police Department took four teams of cadaver dogs to an area near a Goleta freeway overpass that was under renovation, looking for the remains of Ramona Price, a 7-year-old girl who disappeared in August 1961 — Mack Ray Edwards worked in the area during that time. Ramona wasn’t found, but the search for other victims of Edwards continues.
EPILOGUE
A little over 40 years following Mack Ray Edwards’ suicide I stumbled across Stella Darlene Nolan’s photograph in a Los Angeles Police Daily Bulletin as I was archiving documents from 1953. Something about Stella pulled me in and when I couldn’t find a cancellation for her missing notice in a subsequent Bulletin I followed up, and that’s when I discovered her entire story.
I shared everything I’d uncovered with the L.A. Police Museum’s Executive Director and he telephoned a detective he knows at Foothill Division. She told him she couldn’t discuss details of the case with him because she was assigned to the cold case! She’s seeking to solve many more murders and disappearances for which Edwards may have been responsible. The detective asked if we would send her a copy of the Daily Bulletin featuring Stella because she didn’t have one — it was an incredible feeling to be able to provide a small piece of information in an on-going investigation — my first cold case!
The Daily Bulletins aren’t merely artifacts to be cataloged and filed away; the impact of crime on victims and their families reaches across time. History lives.
For the past 3 1/2 years I’ve been a volunteer archivist at the Los Angeles Police Museum. I find the work fascinating and rewarding, in fact given my passion for old paper (I have a vast collection of vintage cosmetics ephemera) and historic L.A. crime, it is the ideal place for me.
When I first met with the Executive Director of the LAPM, I wasn’t sure what projects they had or what they would want me to do. I told him about my personal collection and he said “I may have a project for you.” He sure did! He showed me the museum’s collection of Daily Bulletins and I was immediately hooked.
Many of the Daily Bulletins had been bound into volumes, while others were loose pages. The majority of the Bulletins, even those in bindings, were in fragile condition. They were printed on inexpensive paper and were handed out to each officer at the beginning of a shift; they were never meant to survive beyond a day or two and we wanted them to last forever.
Our first priority was to determine the best practice for preserving the Bulletins — they’re a valuable resource and we couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.
We we arranged a consultation with experts at the Getty and they recommended that we unbind the volumes and place the individual pages into archival sleeves.
I was particularly worried about the unbinding process. I’d never done anything like it before. With proper instruction and the right tools I have been able to unbind many years worth of Daily Bulletins. The future of the Bulletins is secure, and we’ll eventually have a searchable database which will allow us to further our own research as well as to share knowledge with historians, sociologists, criminologists and policy makers.
The Bulletins began in March of 1907 under Chief Edward Kerr, and provide a daily snapshot of the LAPD as well as of the City of Los Angeles over a period of 50 years.
In his 1913 holiday greeting, Chief C.E. Sebastian referred to the Daily Bulletin as the ‘Paper Policeman’, which suits them perfectly. The Bulletins didn’t just convey information about wanted criminals or stolen property; they contained notices of funerals, commendations, and policy and procedure updates.
The Bulletins sometimes had a sense of humor. In this Bulletin from April 1, 1907 there’s a LOOK OUTS notice:
“A real bear is lost, strayed or stolen from the Shrine Sircus (sic) at Fiesta Park. Look out for him and if found notify Leo Youngworth, U.S. Marshal and Chief Bear Tamer.”
I checked the historic LA Times and there was a circus in town that week, but I found no report of a runaway bear.
Dedication of the L.A. Aqueduct — November 5, 1913. [Photo courtesy of LAPL]
The November 3, 1913 Daily Bulletin listed the all of the officers who would form the Aqueduct Detail for the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
It was arguably the most significant event in the history of L.A., and the Bulletin shows that LAPD was present.
I’ve seen thousands of incredible Daily Bulletins, but the one that means the most to me personally is from June 1953, and that’s because I was peripherally involved in the cold case 56 years later.
But let me begin at the beginning — June 20, 1953. Ilene Nolan had reported the disappearance, and possible abduction, of her eight year old daughter, Stella Darlene. There was something about the little girl that caught my eye.
Usually a missing child will turn up in a day or two and the notice will be canceled in a subsequent Bulletin. I couldn’t find a cancellation for Stella, so I decided to dig deeper; and I couldn’t believe what I found.
Stella had disappeared from Auction City (in the Norwalk area) where her mother was employed as a clerk at a refreshment stand. Stella was a well behaved child and checked in every hour with her mom, so when she failed to turn up between 8 and 9 pm Mrs. Nolan knew that something was wrong.
A few days following Stella’s disappearance the little girl had still not returned home. Her parents, who lived in a trailer park at 16108 South Atlantic in Compton, were frantic with worry. Even Stella’s dog, Pal, was inconsolable. By day, the little dog wandered around the trailer whimpering, and at night he would howl and bay.
In desperation, Stella’s mom and dad revealed that they were not her birth parents and that even though they’d had custody of her since birth they had never legally adopted her!
Ilene told cops how she and her husband, Owen, had acquired custody of Stella. During the mid-1940s Ilene had worked with Marjorie Woods and Betty Jean Stalcup at the Pony Cafe in San Diego. Ilene had expressed her desire to have a child and so Betty Jean, who was pregnant, agreed to give her baby to Nolan a few days after the baby’s birth. Six days after the child was born Betty Jean tuned her over to Ilene.
The Nolans said they had often thought of adopting Stella Darlene and in 1950 they had even gone so far as to consult a San Diego lawyer. The attorney, however, had advised the couple to save possible sorrow and heartbreak by doing nothing!
The cops quickly located Betty Jean, Stella’s birthmother. She’d moved to Texas, married, and had a three year old girl. She was swiftly cleared of any involvement in Stella’s disappearance.
The newspapers reported that except for occasional fits of silent weeping, Ilene Nolan had maintained her composure. But she lost it when her cousin, Mrs. Kay Talley of San Diego, arrived at the trailer. Ilene collapsed and sobbed convulsively. Then she told of having a vision in which she saw Stella Darlene dead.
She said:
“I sat quiet for a few minutes trying to rest. I was thinking very hard about anything that might help us. Then across my eyes came a vision of Darlene’s little legs sticking out of a hole somewhere. She had red shoes on her feet. They were leather ones with big, thick crepe rubber soles.”
By early July, barely a month after she’d disappeared, Stella’s twenty year old married cousin, William R. Nolan, an unemployed hospital orderly, was jailed on a technical booking in Long Beach as a key suspect in the case. Nolan emphatically denied any connection with Stella Darlene’s disappearance. William was grilled for hours by detectives. The L.A. Sheriff’s Department dispatched several criminal laboratory technicians to check for possible blood stains in William’s bungalow court apartment and in the trunk of his 1949 convertible. The techs didn’t turn up a single clue. He told conflicting stories regarding his whereabouts on the night that Stella disappeared, but he was cleared.
At least one crank caller phoned the Nolans to tell them that their little girl was alive, but nothing came of the call. The police were frustrated by the lack of movement in the case.
In mid-October 1953, a fourteen year old boy was brought in for questioning — Norwalk Dep. Dist Atty. Adolph Alexander and Inspector Garner Brown stated that the boy held the key to the girl’s fate. While the fourteen year old was being questioned two of his acquaintances, William R. Hardy, twenty-two, and an unnamed seventeen year old, were facing lie detector tests in Pasadena.
The boys were proved to be liars, and one of them even made a false confession, however they were not killers.
During the remainder of 1953 various “hot” suspects were interrogated but none of them panned out.
On June 20, 1955, the second anniversary of her disappearance, the L.A. Times ran a follow-up story about Stella but it didn’t result in any further leads. The Sheriff’s detectives reluctantly stated that they believed Stella had been kidnapped and killed by a sexual psychopath.
Mrs. Nolan told reporters:
“We’ll never give up hope until we’re both dead.”
NEXT TIME: What happened to Stella Darlene Nolan?
The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open. Visit our snack bar for a fizzy beverage, a big bag of popcorn and a candy bar. Tonight’s feature is LURED, starring Lucille Ball, George Sanders, and Boris Karloff.
Wikipedia says: “Sandra Carpenter (Lucille Ball) is an American who came to London to perform in a show, but now is working as a taxi dancer. She is upset to find out that friend and fellow dancer Lucy Barnard (Tanis Chandler) is missing and believed to be the latest victim of the notorious “Poet Killer,” who lures victims with ads in the newspaper’s personal columns and sends poems to taunt the police.”
Since Lucille Ball is the star of the LURED, let’s begin the evening with a Tex Avery cartoon featuring another stunning red head, SWING SHIFT CINDERELLA.
Now, enjoy the feature!
It was nearly 3:00 a.m. on February 9, 1930 — a man was driving along Spring Street in Long Beach when he saw a crumpled form ahead of him in the middle of the road. He couldn’t make it out right away, the headlights on his old beater didn’t work. As he closed in on the shape he thought it was a dead dog and he planned to drag the poor thing out of the roadway, but when he pulled up and saw the savagely mutilated body of a woman he found a phone booth and called the cops.
At 3:10 a.m. on February 9, 1930, the Norwalk Sheriff’s Station received an anonymous call from a tipster who said that there was a dead female body on a lonely stretch of Spring Street, about one-half mile west of the Los Angeles County line.
Officers C. Vandervort and F. Beiler of the Signal Hill Police Department rolled to the scene where they found the body of a woman, approximately 33 years of age, 5′ 1″, 106 lbs., auburn hair, with her clothing in tatters. She was cold.
About three hours following the anonymous call Deputy Brewster of Sheriff’s Homicide arrived and took charge of the scene.
The only thing about the woman’s death that was immediately ascertainable was that she’d been horribly mutilated, but whether the wounds were pre- or post-mortem, the cops couldn’t tell. They weren’t even sure if she’d stumbled onto the road and been hit by a car, or if she’d been murdered and dumped. She had a bruise over her right eye near the temple, and the entire right side of her face, including her chin, was covered with abrasions. Her left arm had been ripped away from her body and was located, along with bits of flesh, 350 feet west of the corpse. On the victim’s left hand was a white gold and diamond wedding ring set. Smears of blood, made by car tires, were found on the right side of the highway.
Fortunately the dead woman’s handbag was discovered at the scene and the cops preliminarily ID’d her as Mrs. Billie Payne.
Brewster and his fellow investigator, Dep. Croushorn, quickly located Mr. Price E. Payne, from whom Billie had recently separated. Estranged spouses are always of interest to the police, and Payne was questioned at his Long Beach home only a few hours after the discovery of Billie’s body.
Price told Brewster and Croushorn that he had met Billie on the Pike at Long Beach, and after a week’s acquaintance he’d married her. Price had obviously never heard the adage: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” The only good news for Price was that his period of repentance turned out to be a mere twenty-eight days! Price told the deputies that following their whirlwind courtship and marriage they’d moved to San Francisco.
On the twenty-eighth day of their marriage Price arrived home to find Billie in bed with a taxi-driver by the name of Brown (I think there’s a blues song in there somewhere). The cuckold said that Billie and Brown were both so inebriated, and so involved in their sexual liaison, that they never heard him enter the room! Price packed up his clothes and left.
![The Pike - Long Beach [Photo courtesy LAPL]](http://derangedlacrimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/the-pike_00074674.jpg)
The Pike – Long Beach [Photo courtesy LAPL]
Price also told investigators that Billie had been cozy with a rum-runner by the name of Charlie Kelly, and that as far has he knew she had intended to make a trip to Los Angeles with Kelly. According to Price, Billie was well acquainted with several rum-runners up and down the California coast and he suggested to the police that his estranged wife may have been “taken for a ride”.
After a rigorous grilling, Price was cleared of any involvement in Billie’s death. The investigation continued.
One interesting clue surfaced; Fred Meyers, a reporter for the L.A. Times, said that he’d picked up a man’s handkerchief bearing the initial “H” at the scene of the crime — he’d actually gotten it at the McFadyen Funeral Parlor — he’d probably bribed an employee to get his hands on it. But the clue was a dead end.
As investigators delved deeper into Billie’s life they discovered that she’d had many acquaintances, most of whom seemed to want to party as hard and as often as Billie did.
The only person who was ever taken into custody for Billie’s death was her sister’s former husband, O.K. Kidd (I’m not fooling). Kidd had taken Billie out on the night of her death; they had intended to go to a dance but Kidd thought that Billie was too drunk to be much of a partner. Oh yeah she was swaying, but only in time to the music in her head. The couple got as far as the curb in front of the Blackstone Hotel before Kidd insisted that Billie have a seat and wait for him while he retrieved his car, which was parked a couple of blocks away.
About fifteen minutes later when Kidd returned to fetch Billie, she was gone. He looked for her at the Pike and a few other local hangouts before deciding that she must have bumped into someone she knew and simply taken off. He may have been annoyed, but he wasn’t worried; at least not until the following day when he found out that Billie had never made it back to her parent’s home. She’d been staying with her folks for the few months following her disastrous marriage to Price Payne.
![Flood lights are off and crowds are absent in this view of The Pike in Long Beach. In the background is the Blackstone Hotel and the Penny Arcade. A banner welcoming KWKW radio station is on a building, background, right, behind the "Batter Up" concession. Amusement rides are in the center. [Photo courtesy LAPL.]](http://derangedlacrimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pike_blackstone_00074687.jpg)
Flood lights are off and crowds are absent in this view of The Pike in Long Beach. In the background is the Blackstone Hotel and the Penny Arcade. A banner welcoming KWKW radio station is on a building, background, right, behind the “Batter Up” concession. Amusement rides are in the center. [Photo courtesy LAPL.]
Witnesses who had seen Billie in front of the Blackstone Hotel came forward. One of them, a sailor named Walter Madon, stated that he’d seen a woman answering Billie’s description collapsed in the street in front of the Blackstone. He said that she had been surrounded by onlookers and was extremely drunk.
A man approached Madon and asked if he’d give him a hand putting the nearly unconscious woman in a car. When Madon attempted to assist, another man pushed him away and told him to get lost. Madon told cops that the redhead was crying. She kept repeating “I don’t want to go.” Two men decanted Billie into a large blue car, possibly a Packard, while a third man waited in the driver’s seat. The car drove up to Ocean Avenue and vanished.
The clues and informants dried up — Deputies Brewster and Croushorn tried hard to catch a break in their investigation of Billie Payne’s brutal death, but they finally requested that the investigation be suspended, to be reopened if anything new developed. The case has been cold for 83 years.
On February 22, 1932 a bizarre incident took the life of another Billie Payne (no relation to the party girl). This story appeared in the Los Angeles Times:
NOTE: Many thanks to my fellow crime historian, Mike Fratantoni, for introducing me to this story.
The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open. Visit our snack bar for a fizzy beverage and a big bag of popcorn.
Tonight’s feature is DANGER SIGNAL, starring Faye Emerson and Zachary Scott.
Here is an excerpt from Turner Classic Movies describing DANGER SIGNAL:
“When Alice Turner is found dead in her room, her landlady is stunned to learn that the man with whom Alice has been living is not her husband. Although Alice’s death is ruled a suicide, Thomas Turner, her real husband, is convinced that she was murdered. Meanwhile, Ronnie Marsh, as the other man now calls himself, moves to another town and rents a room from Hilda Fenchurch, a stenographer, and her mother.”
ENJOY THE MOVIE!
THANK YOU FOR VISITING THE DERANGED L.A. CRIMES THEATER!
While researching the THUGS WITH SPOONS post I became curious about Det. Sgt. Ned Lovretovich’s career. I figured that if two bad guys had hated him enough to try to stab with him sharpened spoons in a courtroom, he must have been a pretty good cop.
I still haven’t discovered too much about Ned’s personal life. He appears to have been born in the Los Angeles area in 1910, but I don’t know when he became a member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. I’m continuing to dig.
Meanwhile, I’ve managed to find a couple more cases to which Lovretovich was assigned, and that made the news. This next case caught my eye because of the headline: KILLED WIFE IN HIS SLEEP, HUSBAND ADMITS TO POLICE: CARRIED BODY IN CAR FOR 19 HOURS, HE SAYS
Drinking sprees don’t end well. It’s a fact. If you’re lucky you awaken with a headache that makes you wish that you were dead; if you’re unlucky, like Gerald Mosher was, you awaken from a stupor and discover that your wife is dead and that you strangled her.
Forty-eight year old Gerald, an oil field worker, and his wife of five months, thirty-eight year old Ina, had been drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol in a bar at 12473 San Fernando Road in Sylmar. When the bar closed the couple made their way to a friend’s apartment conveniently located a lurch and a stumble away at the rear of the bar.
The recent bride suddenly told her husband that she wanted to leave (it’s not clear if she meant she wanted out of the marriage, or just out of the friend’s apartment). In any case, Gerald tried to restrain Ina but fell asleep right in the middle of trying to hold on to her. When he regained consciousness some time later he discovered that his wife was dead.
Rather than report Ina’s death, Gerald carried her body out to his car and propped it up next to him on the seat. He then proceeded to drive around with her corpse for nineteen hours!
I wonder if Gerald tried to force Ida’s body into an upright position in the car, or if he just allowed her to slump over. Either way, I picture Gerald, maudlin, on the raw edge of sobriety but wishing he was still smashed, apologizing to Ida’s corpse. Something like: “Baby, I’m sorry — I didn’t mean it.”
Whether he had meant to kill Ina or not, and whether he was asleep when he killed her, as he’d later claim, or simply in a drunken blackout, he sat beside Ina’s dead body for nineteen hours worth of aimless crusing around Southern California until he got the brain storm to take her out to the Mojave Desert for burial.
Gerald changed his mind about interring Ina in the desert; he lost his nerve. But he laid some of her lingerie, shoes, and a purse containing identification papers to rest in a lonely stretch of land at Acton between Palmdale and Saugus.
While he was digging did he get that prickly feeling at the back of his neck that people often get when they know they’re being observed? He should have. Mrs. Martha Schulze, a seventy-three year old resident of Acton, was scanning the land around her home with her binoculars when she saw someone dig a hole, cover up some objects, and then drive away abandoning a new shovel. Even if Martha hadn’t been suspicious of a stranger digging near her property, she thought it odd that anyone would leave behind a perfectly good shovel. She called the police.
Photo courtesy of LAPL Valley Times Collection. Photograph caption reads: “Det. Sgt. Pat Poe, left, questions Gerald Mosher, 48, oilman accused of strangling his wife in Sylmar motel
Sgt. Ned Lovretovich was assigned to the case – it wasn’t a complex investigation. The items that Martha had observed being buried were soon identified by Mary Jane Shields, Ina’s married daughter, as belonging to her mother. Not long after her personal belongs were ID’d, Ina’s body was discovered — it had been dumped along a private road about one-half mile south of San Fernando Road off Balboa Blvd near the San Fernando Reservoir.
Sheriff’s figured that Mosher had some explaining to do – the hunt for Gerald was on.
Sgts. Ned Lovretovich and J.G. Lawton had a hunch that Mosher wouldn’t run far, and they were right. As they were cruising an area of Sylmar known to be frequented by Gerald they spotted his car parked at a motel and found him inside.
When asked by Ned and his partner what the hell had happened — why had he strangled Ina, Gerald replied:
“I guess I lost my head.”
Mosher insisted that he’d strangled Ina in his sleep, but asleep or in a drunken stupor the charge against him was manslaughter.
Gerald Mosher was found guilty and then sentenced by Superior Judge Clement D. Nye to from one to ten years in the State Penitentiary.
I found nothing to indicate when Gerald was released from prison — although if he behaved himself he likely didn’t do more than a few years.
The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open. Visit our snack bar for a fizzy beverage, a big bag of popcorn and a candy bar. Tonight’s feature is BROTHER ORCHID, starring Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sothern, Donald Crisp, and Allen Jenkins.
From Wikipedia: Crime boss Little John Sarto (Edward G. Robinson) retires suddenly, giving leadership of his gang to Jack Buck (Humphrey Bogart), while he leaves for a tour of Europe to acquire “class”. However, Sarto is repeatedly swindled and finally loses all his money.
He decides to return home and take back his gang, as if nothing has changed after five years, but Buck has him thrown out of his office. The only ones who remain loyal to Sarto are his girlfriend Flo Addams (Ann Sothern) and Willie “the Knife” Corson (Allen Jenkins). Sarto raises a new gang and starts encroaching on Buck’s territory.
THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931)
“Why you, I oughta…”
Tough guy talk and a shiv concealed in a shoe, shirt, or somewhere truly unsavory (where the sun don’t shine) may be gangster film cliches, but those moments are based on truth. The bad guy patter has become more profanity laced over the decades, but criminals are true to type whether they’re celluloid or flesh and blood. Hoods hold grudges and pay-back is a point of pride.
On May 12, 1958, in Department 42 of the Hall of Justice, two punks from East L.A. were on trial for a murder committed during the course of a robbery. Fifty-one year old Jose Castellanos, a local groceryman, had been shot to death by twenty-three year old Gregory Valenzuela. Castellanos and his wife were in their store at 435 S. McDonnell Avenue when two would-be robbers came in and demanded money. Castellanos leaped for a counter and pulled out his own gun to fend off the crooks; he managed to fire a round before being mortally wounded. Mrs. Castellanos watched in horror as her husband died.
![Gregory Valenzuela [Photo courtesy USC Digital Archive]](http://derangedlacrimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/valenzuela.jpg)
Gregory Valenzuela [Photo courtesy USC Digital Archive]
Sheriff’s Detective Sgts. N.L. Peterson and Ned Lovretovich rolled to the scene of the shooting and began their investigation. Valenzuela was ID’d by Castellanos’ widow, and within a couple of days he was located hiding with four other young men in an empty house behind the home of a friend, Joseph Lozano.
Valenzuela told officers that he and an unnamed accomplice decided “to hit” the Castellanos’ grocery store.
It’s possible that Valenzuela and his accomplice were members of White Fence (aka WF), one of the oldest street gangs in East Los Angeles. Even though the gang claims it goes back to 1911, it didn’t emerge until the 1930s when it began as a male sports team associated with the La Purisima Church. The WF name supposedly derives from a white picket fence that surrounded the church. The moniker makes the gang sound benign; but nothing could be further from the truth.
[ http://www.handselecta.com]
By 1957, when Castellanos was murdered, White Fence was one of the most powerful and violent gangs in the the area with criminal enterprises ranging from auto theft to murder. Over the years WF hasn’t vanished, it has thrived. It now has members in Las Vegas, El Paso, Florida, and Guatemala.
It was diligent police work by detectives Peterson and Lovretovich that resulted in the ID of Valenzuela’s accomplice — twenty-three year old Augustine Acosta. As killers will do, Acosta and Valenzuela developed a grudge against the cops who had arrested them, especially Sgt. Ned Lovretovich — and they were determined to get him.
Det. Sgt. Ned Lovretovich [Photo courtesy USC Digital Photo Archive]
On May 12, 1958, following the afternoon recess, as the defendants Valenzuela and Acosta were being led back into the courtroom by the bailiff they suddenly broke away and attacked Det. Sgt. Ned Lovretovich with sharpened metal spoons — shivs! Lovretovich was not seriously injured, he received a stab wound to his right shoulder and an abrasion on his cheek. Valenzuela and Acosta were subdued by force and taken away.
When questioned Gregory Valenzuela characterized the courtroom stabbing incident as “Just a misunderstanding”. He claimed not to recall much of what had happened and said that he didn’t know why he’d jumped Lovretovich; later he would say that the motive was that the detective was framing him. Classic.
Acosta’s interview was considerably more colorful than Valenzuela’s had been. When he was asked if he’d care to tell the investigators what happened in the courtroom, Acosta replied:
“No. Fuck everybody. I don’t give a shit.”
Where did Acosta get the spoon he’d sharpened into a shiv?
“It’s for you to find out. You’re the law, not me.”
Acosta gave the same motive for the attack on Lovretovich as Valenzuela had:
“Because the punk knows I’m not guilty and is railroading me.”
During the course of the questioning, Acosta unequivocally stated his reason for attacking the detective:
“…I meant to kill the motherfucker.”
The interview ended when Acosta expressed his desire to return to his cell:
“Let me go back to the tank…”
Gregory Huerta Acosta and Augustine Acosta were found guilty of first degree murder in the death of Jose Castellanos and sentenced to life in state prison. The two also plead guilty to assault w/intent to commit murder and injury to a county employee for the attack on Lovretovich — they received sentences to run concurrently with their life terms.
I have no idea if or when Valenzuela and Acosta were released from prison. Det. Sgt. Lovretovich not only survived the attack on him, he lived to be 90 years old.
NOTE: Many thanks to Mike Fratantoni for sharing this deranged tale with me.
The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open. Visit our snack bar for a fizzy beverage and a big bag of popcorn. Tonight’s feature is THE BIG COMBO, starring Cornel Wilde, Richard Conte, Richard Donlevy, and Jean Wallace.
Here is an excerpt from Turner Classic Movies describing THE BIG COMBO:
The Big Combo is a rather unique entry for its genre due to its frank sexuality, extreme sadism and John Alton’s stunning black and white cinematography that places the story in a world of shadows, spotlights and claustrophobic lighting schemes.
At the center of the story is Lt. Diamond (Cornel Wilde), a cynical cop who has become obsessed with arresting Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), the head of a powerful crime syndicate who has cleverly eluded the authorities for years. Diamond’s motivation, however, is clearly driven by his attraction to Brown’s blonde mistress, Susan (Jean Wallace, the wife of Cornel Wilde), a former socialite and once promising pianist whose relationship with Brown is a mixture of sexual dependency and masochism. Aiding Brown in his operation is Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), a defeated rival who now serves as his second-in-command, and a pair of hit men, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman), who are inseparable, bound together by their blood lust.
ENJOY THE MOVIE!
THANK YOU FOR VISITING THE DERANGED L.A. CRIMES THEATER!