The Burton Gang’s Last Job, Part 2

For two weeks Sheriff’s deputies surveilled the four key members of the Burton gang: Edward Burton; J.W. Gilkye, Louis Reese, aka “Big Dick” or “Lefty Louie”; and Kenneth Fleenor. The surveillance paid dividends. Deputies learned that the gang was planning one last job before leaving for Chicago. They were going to rob the cashier at the Union Ice Company at 650 South Alameda Street.

The Burton gang had pulled a number of jobs in Los Angeles and local law enforcement had had enough. Sheriff Traeger put Chief of Criminal Investigation A. L. Manning in charge of catching the bandits in the act.

deputies_burton gangAt 6 p.m. on August 10, 1922, deputies, armed with sawed-off shotguns, surrounded the ice company building. They stayed in the shadows waiting for the Burton gang to show up. It was a long wait. At 9:30 p.m. a car parked on the west side of Alameda. Several men exited the vehicle and climbed between the cars of a slow moving freight train. They approached the factory office.

Inside the office were E.R. Rathman, the night cashier and E.C. Bailey, one of the company’s drivers. Rathman was sitting at an adding machine and Bailey was asleep in a chair a few feet away. Also inside the office, in a side room, were more armed deputies.

One of the crooks stayed outside the building as a lookout. The other three men, all of them wearing white handkerchiefs over their faces, entered the office and pointed revolvers at Rathman. One of the gunmen said: “Stick up your hands.” Rathman did as he was told. With a pistol shoved up against the back of Rathman’s neck, he was commanded to “Get into that corner!” With his hands up, Rathman moved toward the corner. Another of the masked men looked at Rathman and said: “We don’t want to hurt you.” Was the gunman telling the truth? Rathman didn’t want to find out. When he was told to lie on his face on the floor he did so without complaint.

One of the armed men began to rifle the cash drawer and pulled out about $2,000 (approximately $30k in today’s dollars) in cash. It was then that four deputies, wielding sawed-off shotguns, rushed into the office and shouted for the bandits to put up their hands.

Burton, firing as he ran, made a beeline toward the exit He didn’t make it. One shot took out an eye and one side of his face was ripped away. He fell to the floor. He was alive–but just barely.

Louis Reese went out in a hail of gun fire. He ran toward the deputies who continued to fire. Hit multiple times, Louis reeled out of the door and onto the sidewalk where he collapsed and died.

Burton was transported to the County Hospital. Surgeons who examined the wounded bandit said that he was so grievously wounded that he could not live.hold up headline

Detectives examined the contents of Burton’s pockets for information that might lead them to other gang members. Burton had two one-way tickets to Chicago where he planned to resume his place in the city’s criminal underworld.  The cops were also interested in learning if Burton was in contact with any of his fellow gangsters. In particular, they hoped to find out if he knew anything about “Terrible” Tommy O’Connor.

terrible tommy crop

Terrible Tommy O’Connor

Rumor had it that Burton was tight with O’Connor, and O’Connor recently escaped from Chicago’s jail just days before he was scheduled to hang for the murder of a policeman. If Burton knew anything about O’Connor’s whereabouts the information accompanied him into the afterlife. Curiously, O’Connor was never recaptured and his date with the hangman remained on the books until the gallows were dismantled in the 1970s.

burton gang_gilkye mug_cropJ.C. Gilkye, the surviving member of the gang, gave Chief Investigator Manning an earful about the activities of the group. Gilkye said that not all of the gang’s attempted crimes were successful. Far from it. But even with the failures, they had done pretty well in Los Angeles — until their final job. Had the Burton gang been completely wiped out as law enforcement hoped? If they could locate Burton’s sweetheart maybe they’d know for sure.

NEXT TIME: The end of the Burton gang?

The L.A. River Torso Slaying, Part 3

A muddy river bank is the perfect place for a group of little boys to poke around searching for hidden treasures, and that’s exactly what William Pettibone, Ray Seegar, Floyd Waterstreet and Glen Druer were doing on May 18, 1929.

The boys were about 150 feet from the Florence Avenue Bridge in the city of Bell when they spotted what looked to them like a turtle’s shell, or maybe some peculiar prehistoric fish. One of the boys took a stick and poked it into an end of the bony structure and held it aloft for the others to gape at. It took a few minutes but the boys finally recognized their treasure for what it really was, a human skull.head key to crime

The boy with the head impaled on a stick ran up the roadway with his prize and showed it to a female motorist who was utterly horrified when she realized what the kid had. She managed to keep it together long enough to drive the boy to a public telephone where she called Bell’s Chief of Police.

Chief Smith and Motor Officer Steele met the woman and the group of boys near the river where the skull had been found. The woman who had driven the boy to the telephone booth wanted no part of the notoriety attached to the grim find and she declined to give her name to Chief Smith and then quickly and quietly fled.

One of Smith’s officers notified Captain Bright who, accompanied by Deputies Allen, Brewster and Gompert, drove out to the scene hoping that since the head had been found the limbs might be in the vicinity. While deputies searched the area a crowd of several thousand curious on-lookers turned up, just as they’d done when the torso had washed up on the river bank.hammer death

High profile murder cases draw not only spectators but a fair number of crackpots and people with private agendas, like Morris Singer.  Singer, a grocer at 424 North Fremont Street, was found guilty of criminal libel and outraging public decency. Singer had written a letter to authorities stating that the torso murder had been committed at 2057 Oxford Street, the home of Dr. Gustav Meiss. Singer had recently lost a lawsuit to Dr. Meiss and was seeking revenge by accusing him of the atrocious murder.

The initial autopsy of the torso had not yielded anything which could be used to identify the deceased. But the head, even though it was not very well preserved, still had a number of extant teeth which made identification possible if not assured. Photographs and drawings of the teeth were published in local newspapers and widely distributed to dentists in the hope that one of them would recognize his own work.

dental quest torsoForensic odontology had been used successfully a few times in criminal cases as far back as the Salem Witch Trials. In 1692 Reverend George Burroughs was accused of witchcraft and conspiring with the Devil. Bite marks on the alleged victims were compared to the Reverend’s teeth and as a result he was convicted and hanged.

Ansil Robinson was accused of murdering his mistress in 1870. Investigators found five bite marks on her arm and apparently matched them to the defendant, but the evidence failed to convince a jury and Robinson was acquitted.

Solid detective work is one aspect of successfully resolving a criminal case, and science is another.

Just three days prior to the discovery of a woman’s torso in the L.A. River, the Los Angeles Times had reported on a new innovation in scientific crime detection–a portable laboratory.  Sheriff Traeger announced that a portable laboratory had been constructed and would be used by the homicide squad. All deputies were instructed in crime scene preservation, which was virtually a non-existent practice at that time. Instead of tramping through a scene and contaminating it, deputies were told to guard the scene until the homicide detail could arrive. Among the equipment in the portable lab were a set of plates for the chemical analysis of hair.lasd portable lab

The portable lab was a game changer locally for LASD, but the construction of a complete lab in the basement of the Hall of Justice would set a national precedent. The proposed facility would be “the first of its kind to be installed in a sheriff’s office in the United States.” It would be used exclusively by the Sheriff’s homicide detail and outfitted with equipment for “blood analyses, fingerprint comparisons, hair and skin tests and other scientific work in criminal investigations.”

Captain Bright requested that Frank Gompert, who had formerly been attached to the county chemist’s department, be given the title of “criminal technician” and put in charge of running the new high-tech lab.

It appears that Gompert’s first assignment was the torso murder.

00036680_gompert lab

Photo shows Federal prohibition agents of Southern California, attending school to learn the latest methods of enforcement. View shows the class in session with F.B. Gompert, criminological technician at left, giving blackboard lesson. The pupils learn the sciene of shadowing, the art of raiding, the technique of preparing evidence, courtroom psychology, the mathematics of figuring the amount of liquor in seized containers and the chemistry of liquor analysis. Photo dated: October 7, 1930. [Photo courtesy LAPL]

Given that they only had the torso and the partially decomposed skull to examine, the experts needed to accomplish the scientific equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Amazingly, they did just that. They were able to glean a remarkable amount of information from a minimum amount of physical evidence.

The head was first matched to the torso, and was a perfect fit.  Then the cause of death had to be determined.  It was concluded that the woman had died instantly of blunt force trauma, likely a hammer blow. There was a crushed spot on the skull that, when measured, fit best with a carpenter’s hammer. .

Sheriff’s homicide investigators postulated that due to the nature of the fatal injury the woman, whose age had been revised upward to from 40 to 60 years, had been killed in a family squabble. Murder committed in a family could explain why no report had been made for a missing woman fitting the description of the victim.

Captain Bright pulled his detectives off the search for missing girls under the age of 20 and instead he assigned half of the available men to follow-up on missing women over 40. The other half were assigned to assist in locating the dentist responsible for, or familiar with, the dentition in the found skull.

Bright had faith in his detectives and in his crime lab.  He was convinced that an identification of the victim was imminent.

He was right.

NEXT TIME:  The victim of the torso slaying is identified and so are a few possible perpetrators.