DEATH IN CALIFORNIA-David Kulczyk

business running. With stamps dot com, seamlessly connect with every major marketplace and shopping card if you sell online, schedule package pickups through the dashboard, and automatically see your cheapest and fastest shipping options from different carriers with rates up to eighty nine percent off USPS and UPS rates. And with the stamps dot Com mobile app, you can take care of mailing and shipping wherever you are, even on

the go. Make the same no brainer decision as over one million other business decision makers with stamps dot Com. Sign up at stamps dot Com with Code Program for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale, no long term commitments or contracts. That's Stamps dot Com Code Program.

claim your free welcome bonus. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com and live the Chumba Laine.

accidents that at one time shocked the West Coast. The stories of hangings, gun accidents, suicides, crashes, and overdoses of both the famous and obscure offer a bizarre, if sometimes perverse glimpse into the Golden State's strange past, including frightening murder tales like the rape, torture and child murder in the Ape Boy, a doctor slaughters his family and death in Davis House, the unsolved savage murder of an entire family in the Ketty Murders, and a young female psychopath

in Penny for Her Thoughts. The book that we are featuring this evening is Death in California The bizarre, freakish, and just curious ways people die in the Golden State with my special guest, journalist and author David Colchick. Welcome back to the program, and thank you for agreeing this interview. David Colchick, Hey, thanks for having me back. Thank you very much. It wasn't so long ago we spoke to and so thank you for pinch hitting today for this interview.

So thank you very much. Let's dive right into this. What I find fascinating with this retro crime here historic true crime is all the things I didn't know about strange true crime history. So we won't be talking about too many stories, but we'll feature about just like in the introduction, we'll feature about five or six stories or really give people an idea of what kind of book this is and some of the stories that are contained in But for our audience and I think for anybody

that might buy this book to find it fascinating. Your introduction and you talk about the headlines have always been that murder in California. But tell us about the state of before there was a really good reason to come to California. The people that were there first will say, in this country we call them Aboriginals or first nations. Talk about how for those first people, murder was pretty foreign concept to them and why.

they had villages about every couple miles. Actually, I lived right by one that used to be one of the largest ones in California. They even had restaurants. They found evidence that there were restaurants there, which I find just fascinating. But they did not murder each other, and if they did, it was it was a very big deal. They basically lived in harmony and traded and married up and down

the rivers into San Francisco Bay. They've found maybe one hundred and fifty miles inland seashells that were from the San Francisco Bay. So they had this wide ranging trading area. And then right around when Carson came through, they all caught small pox and measles and ninety percent of them died. So by the time the gold Rush happened, the Aborigines that lived here, it was kind of like Mad Max, where you know, they were just the stragglers, the survivors of a great disaster.

and that was everything to them. And a lot of times if they did, you know, let's say it was accidental and someone got murdered, then the village would work out a deal with the other village where it happened, because it never happened in the same village. There was never murders within their village. Ever, if they were goofing around with another tribe, they would they would have to the person that murdered would be forced to be their

servant at that village for whatever amount of years they arranged. Yeah, so once they did their certain sentence, that everything would be forgiven.

unlike how our society is. As somebody is a deviant of society, they're put in a prison, but within the prison then they have a community, we'll say, And once they get out of prison, or even before, there's certainly a division. But in that primitive we'll say society, unbelievably, murder was a very very rare thing. Now you talk about the re olympetus for people coming to California and for all the and for people over the centuries or over the decades coming to California, and tell us what

that reason is. And tell us about again about the headline about the murder in terms of murdering California and family members. Once these people had gone to California, they were looking at the newspapers. So tell us a little bit about that phenomena. Once California was a very popular place to go to.

covered by forests. I think that's a lot of things that people don't think of, how forest died this area is. You know, people come here, they always come here to change their lives, to have a new opportunity. We've had gold rushes, We've had land rushes, We've had multiple land rushes. You know, if there's a bubble that's going to start, it's going to start here. Any fad, it's going to start here in California. This is this is where everything

starts starts. And you know there's you can you can make a go at things in California if you if you really, you know, have a shot at it. You can you can really have a shot at at having something work out to your advantage living here.

So let's talk about the circumstances that the ape boy in Los Angeles Sheriff's department talking to a Canadian named Sandford Clark, an American consul in Vancouver. So tell us about the eight Boy.

this chapter for a couple of months. I just put it aside and worked on some other ones because I was getting too disturbed by it. This this guy SANDFORW. Clark. He came into the Los Angeles Sheriff's department and he told them about his cousin and.

that's Gordon Northcott. He was twenty one years old, and he claimed that his uncle was going to kill him if they ever let anyone know about what was going on. So the police department went out there with the Riverside Police and they just found like a horrible, horrible scene. They found bloodstained the stairs, blood was everywhere, cots, bloody axes, hatchet, they had hair on it. Just the most disgusting thing. And there were three recently consumed graves and.

what would happen. He would either lure the kids to the ranchs saying that there was a job or work, or he would just kidnap them, and his uncle Gordon would overpower room and tie them the cot and rape and torture them for as long as he felt like it, and then he would kill them. I was like stunned. I'm still kind of stunned at the story that such a thing could even happen, especially in nineteen twenty six.

did find out who that kid was. He said that that Clark was out hiding out at a miner's cabin in the Mint Valley, which I believe the Mint Valley is full of homes now. Back in nineteen twenty six, it was just desert, and he went and saw a miner. He had a friend that was a miner out there,

and Northcott killed the miner with his friend. And when they were looking for mineshaft to throw the guy in, they found this Hispanic boy hiding and so he took him back to his ranch and did his torture routine with him for a week, and they ended up shooting that boy and chopping off his head. That's when Stanford had to carry it out. So the police found it the body along the roadside near this town of Norcoe, and they couldn't identify him. They never did identify him.

One time there was a married couple came to work on the farm and Stanford or Gordon, was arguing with his mother. He was really babied by his mother. She was just dotted on and his family actually bought him the chicken ranch to keep him out of trouble, and they give him some kind of occupation because he was

such a odd ball. And so this couple were there and Gordon and his mother started arguing about them, and they did the right thing and just kind of, you know, quietly got in their car and took off, and he had already dug the two grapes for them.

of a out of a very very bizarre movie. So tell us about the capture of the boy.

I mean the fight Exedition Canada turned him over to Los Angeles police department. They run on a train only back down to Los Angeles and he totally talked about what he did the entire time, and he.

be worth it. My name would become known all over the world, which is so funny because I've never you know, and I've been digging into this murder stuff, you know, since nineteen eighty and I never heard of this guy until then. So he wasn't uh, you know, known like he was. But he he he would stick his jaw out while people were testifying against him. He'd make like

these big gestures. He I guess the funniest thing for me is he cross examined himself and he'd turn his head one way when he asked the question, and he turned his head the other way when he'd answer it in a different voice, that was I was just bizarre. And he brought up about his sister. You know, he had all these people they had to be brought out there from Canada and stuff and accuse the sister of being his mother and his father was also his grandfather,

but you know, had nothing to do with the case. Yeah, he asked his cousin how did she get a black eye? And how did she know that he gave her a black eye? And she answered, is you punched me in the eye with your fifth Yeah. He would talk to the reporters during breaks and things and saying it was just terrible. What did you think was the weirdest thing? Did I get that?

the face. The only time I've ever really seen that is the guy that killed all the people on the subway on the train, and he then was cross examining the he was defending himself and cross examining the victims and asking him absurd questions like that, and he was like, because I saw you.

They put him out a train with a cop to Los Angeles, and when Christine Collins saw so that's not my son, and the sheriff from the Los Angeles Police Department said, well, you may get used to them, you know, try him out for a while, you may get used to them. And when she came to the police department with his dental records and other evidence, they lacked her up in a Saint Asatum And that's right when the

case broke out. She was there for about four days when the whole thing opened up about Gordon.

they still did a trial out of him. And it's like the guys, obviously, you know, there was something obviously wrong with him, and he should be put into some kind of mental institution. It's a lot of a lot of times, you know, when people commit mass murders. Is like that women who in Florida who drowned her kids in the tub, and you know, they dragged around through

this whole court case. And when that happens to me in America, I always feel that the prosecutor is just trying to grandstand to run for a higher office later or something, because it's obvious that, you know, people are crazy when they commit such crimes, and you know, to drag them through the court system and spend all that money for that is just I believe, a waste of resources. And it also gives them publicity that you know they

either want or don't want. But yeah, it's uh, it's pretty obvious times when people are are insane, and Northcott was definitely one of them. He ended up getting executed for it too. I believe that if you would have just you know, plant insanity, he just he would have probably looked to be an old man.

crime and taking that and using it. But if you have a system where that's the way it's set up, then you will have those kinds of things, but there is still, bottom line, you do have more adherence to the victims, families and victims of God allay their needs and their wants, and a lot of that will be their wishes, and so some of that will be that a lot of people would think that we don't want to have any compassion for somebody that's capable of killing

eight or ten people, regardless, we don't want to talk about resources, so we're gonna we're going to somehow care about rehabilitating that person. But yet they fear, really bottom line fear, and this is what really runs the entire issue, is that people fear that those people may may be

released some day. So they I think if they had an assurance that they would never ever be released, and and and because they're never ever going to be released, there's a less you know, investment in terms of actual rehabilitation. They're not going to be placed on the street. So that's what you have. But I got to tell you you should just check out Canada sometime. And we have a gentleman named Vincent Lee just to show you the contrast.

In the same judicial system, same laws, but somehow they've evolved in common law to the point where we have the I'm pretty sure you're aware of the guy that killed and cannibalized the person on a Greyhound bus and seven years after that crime is released to a halfway house in Winnipeg, and the assurance is that a psychiatrist has seen him and assessed his risk as one percent, which I think is pathetically laughable.

control this. I find it hard to believe. And I think that Americans would find it very very hard to believe in nothing like this, Holmes, gentlemen being released in seven or fourteen or twenty one, that would be outraged, wouldn't there be?

so almost no cases whatsoever. But like I say, what's very interesting, I think, and I hope American audience is interested as well, because there's going to be more of these cases. In Canada. There was a case in Montreal that's being retried now, but I really looks like the only reason it's being retried is that the mother of the victims, the two children, is a cardiologist. It's a doctor, and what his defense was insanity, temporary insanity based on depression.

He murdered his two children, and he he did receive some time. He was held you know, of course murder trial. He was held in custody that would have went towards a sentence. They used the insanity defense and the depression. It worked. He was put in him in an institution for six months and released free.

It lived a very interesting contrast between the two.

She told me that when she was working for a PhD. She was working at Mendota as part of her program, and Ed Deane was there, and she said he was just the nicest, sweetest guy. You'd never know that he had done the horrible things that he did. But he was locked up forever. Whereas Dahmer, they weren't so so generous with him. But it might have been because it was a different time. You know, Dahmer was what in the early nineties and Ed Keane was in the sixties or the fifties.

I would say that I would agree with Douglas. And the only insane thing, the only insane thing that Dahmer did, is that he got unorganized. And unless you want to be super rigid with this unorganized, organized killer, he became unorganized. And the real traumatic event in Dahmer's life at that time that made him all squirrely and unorganized and careless.

even as they don't know what's up right. So even in your book, you have cases where people you know would have been killed, but they listened to a couple of people arguing and said, hey, let's get out of here. So yeah, well, let's talk Let's talk about the lady killer.

result of it. But when Kel, when the you know, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, that just changed everything, especially in California where you know, these small little country you know, grain elevator towns were turned into giant air Force bases or army bases, and you know the amount of people they had to come to California in order to work at the shipyards and the rail yards and everything that

they needed just exploded, especially in San Francisco. They had just a population explosion where overnight everything stayed open all night long, movie theaters, stores, because they were running ships twenty four to seven knocking out ships, especially not too far from where I live here, like in Malajo and all that area. Mare Island was there. The ships would come back to get fixed from battle damaged right in San Francisco, so they would go right through the city

and people would see it. Just all these African Americans from the South came up to work in the factories, and so all of a sudden they had this big influx of people of a very different culture, and you know, it's it was a big mixing bowl, big toss salad of different races and cultures and religions that was just thrown at California. It was like a big custard pie just thrown in the face of California. And the pretty much the government was pretty much you deal with it,

you know. So yeah, these these little tiny towns has turned into like, you know, rough and tumble cities. They still are too. Some of the roughest towns in California were built during the war for for housing and for all these people that came in of Lajoe, it's it's it's still pretty you know, it's like Northeast Bay and it's still pretty violent and poverty ridden. And what they did is they built like a hundred thousand houses in

one year. And those houses are still there. There's still they were built temporary in the first place, and they never tore them down and built proper structures. So very big slum and there's there's actually in Vallejo, people are told Matt to get off the freeway like to skik gas or anything like that. It's like you just drive straight through. I know, a bunch of stories about people that you know, stopped in Vallejo and the guy at the gas station said, what the hell are you doing here?

Get out of here, you die. You know, it was just a very tough place. And now it's when San Francisco had its big housing boom, like it's still going through now. All the poor people that lived in San Francisco, which basically was on Fillmore Fillmore Street in that area, they got priced right out of their homes and they all moved to the East Bay and mostly Vallejo. And you know, that's never a good situation when you have that many, you know, poor people moving to a place that's already poor.

as a clerk at a cigar store. And November twenty third, nineteen forty two, Santa Clair Sheriff's deputies discovered her fully clothed body beaten to death and her fingers and her jaw were broken and the back of her skull cracked and her face shoved in the mud of a plowed field near an intersection.

very expensive subdivision area. That whole area is not even close to being a muddy field. They checked her background and you know, everything kind of came out fine. She was just a you know, person living on around. Her ex husband was in the Army and he was out in the South Pacific, so they knew that he didn't do it, and her brother in law said that he was. She was dating a tall, dark and handsome lit Latino man named Frank.

so he was kind of a hipster guy. They were out clubbing at some nightclub in San Jose, and I thought that was kind of odd because that's quite a distance. You know. They have that song do you know the way San Jose? And that's because it's it's hard to get to that town because there's like fifteen different freeways you have to change on and there's like no easy

way to get to San Jose. But they went there that night to this nightclub called the Hawaiian Gardens, and after she was murdered, her photo was in the newspaper and people at work there soday she was here with another couple and this guy they knew was Frank. Frank turned out to be a Filipino American from San Bruno and you know, worked as a pipe vetter, ship vetter or something like that.

it's like, wow, it's it's still there. But they found this woman there that was murder and they had they had thought, the police had thought that he was the guy that did it, but they could never prove it, and he'd always lawyer up. But it was to the

point where he used a really unusual gun. It was made from Germany, and it was some strange caliber and there was only six of them registered in the entire state of California, and one of the owners of the gun was his father, and his father reported at stolen a couple of months before that murder happened. His father ran like a pool haul tavern or something, so he always hired, you know, his father would hire a hot

shot attorney and he'd get him out. He would he got him out of it, and the cops are still like, I'm watching you, you know, for if you mess up, we're going to come back at you about it. So he had already murdered in nineteen thirty five, and here it was like to to seven years later he did it again.

have to get rid of her. His father also set up a line of somebody else making an excuse for his alibi, and his wife came in during the resets and she grabbed his attorney and just walked out. She didn't say a thing to him. He claimed that he had that she had a date with another guy the day died, and no one believed him he was his alibi was torn to shreds. He a fifteen day trial too,

which is actually pretty long for in those days. Yeah, he was ended up being sentenced to death and his wife died like just a few years later from pneumoniae or something, and he went to the guest chamber.

immigrants and stuff. They he ended up his son, Arthur, ended up moving to southern California lived in Temple City, which was it's like another town east of uh San Francisco, and he oh, jeez, you know that it was pretty close to where the Ape Boy was. And you know that the town that that the Ape Boy was living in is called Wineville and they ended up changing the name of the city because it was so it was the murder was so bad, they changed it to Mira Loma.

So let's get back on that one. It's like the criminal was so bad that the town where he lived changed the name of the town. But Edgar's was he was just a working, stiff guy and living in Temple City and there was all the you know that was going base. I think that's where they had tanks training and stuff out there. And now of course it's like golf,

you know, pretty pretty much all houses and stuff. So during the war, you know, people their their lives were tossed out, you know there there, you know, little towns are full of men and women that weren't from there, and you know everyone had anxiety from the war, my own parents.

sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck casino dot com.

was saying, like, you know, why not. You know, there were having a world war. You know, let's just break out the booze and have a ball. As the song goes the the edgar's his wife, what was her name there? Is Dorothy? Dorothy Dorothy Dorothy, Yeah, Dorothy, Okay, because I wrote this book like seven years ago too, so it's been a while. But Dorothy, she'd hang out at the bars and she'd have her little flings and things like that,

and it cause tension in the household. But you know, they argued and things like that, but you know, they stayed together. Who's to judge anyone's marriage. But on just January second, nineteen forty six, and by this time, you know, the war was over, but you know, things had to wind down. There were thousands and thousands of soldiers and sailors and airmen waiting at like in Oakland, at their train station. There were sixteen thousand people a day couldn't

get a train to leave town. So, you know, nineteen forty six was a pretty rough time. If you look at the headlines during that time too, there was lots of crime. There was lots of murders and rapes, and you know, you got all these these guys that just came back from risking their lives and were used to killing people and used to you know, they became semi animals. Well they're out there. But January second wasn't a good day for Dorothy. And they found her headless and handless,

torso in a canion. She was ramped in a blanket and tied with rope. And I was off the room of the World Highway, which is one of the greatest roads you can ever take. It's a western San Bernardino County, not far from Los Angeles. She had two bowl holes in her and she wasn't there for longer than forty eight hours. So her husband, Arthur, worked at the police department, the Sheriff's department in western Los Angeles County, and he went over to San Bernardino County to view the body.

And they didn't, you know, let him. It didn't matter that he had, you know, credentials from Los Angeles County. It didn't matter. So he called his brother in law start pretending that she was missing, and you know, just played that part like, hey, where'd my wife go? You know, I better file missing person's report. And you know, he worked for the police department. I was just some kind

of clerk or something like that at a substation. But on December thirtieth, he had returned from his job as he worked the evening shift, and he found his wife with another man. The guy ran out of the house, ran down the street, and that's when they figured that's when he killed her. And he shot her with a three eighty and then proceeded to cut up her body in the bathtub, thought off her head and hands and feet,

and they were married for eighteen years. Too, wrapped her up and put her in the car and went up on the rim of the World Highway and dumped her in a canyon. And because he did it at night, he didn't realize that the body, you know, basically fell to where it landed on the side of the road. It wasn't that far off, So you know, it's almost in a way, it's almost cartoonist where he's like, okay, I'll just toss her up off this cliff. They'll never

find her. And then you know, she lands like on a road down farther down the cliff.

trunk and things. And yeah, he but once he once he passed it for some reason. He he admitted to the crime. He could have been could have been let go scott free for all we know, or it would have been very hard to convict him. But he said that he burned her head and hands in their incinerator, and they they didn't find anything, you know, any residue of her. And he had said that he had buried the ashes and stuff like that. So he said it was against the law to burn anything after noon in

the town that he lived in, in Temple. You know, like always, they always change their mind about the confession and stuff. But you know, there was blood in the car trunk that the police officer owned. They found blood in the trains. The three eighty bullet matched his gun. Yeah, they found a bone fragment in his gun, like between the magazine and the gun, like somehow it must have

fell out. He's cunning or up or something. But he got the gas Teamber two and in a matter of two years he was put to death or his grime.

the psychopathic, They existed a long time ago. So it's very fascinating to me because I guess I'm like a lot of people that think that it's a fairly newer phenomena, the serial killers and this type of violence, but from this book not so. So let's talk about Penny for her thoughts. And this is Daily Daily City, February first, nineteen fifty nine, a little bit more recent and twenty one year old gardner August Nori and tell us a little bit about August Nori and who he meets up with.

Tell us a little bit about that.

like twenty year old guy. He a former marine sharpshooter, was wounded in Korea, got education in gi Bill to study landscape architecture, and he worked at the Lake Meers Country Club, which is a very very fine place. So he had a job and all that. And he was married just for e only eighteen months, baby on the way, and you know, he was just a family guy. All these other stories written about all say that he was a man about town and nightcluber and all this stuff.

I even when I was doing the research and going through the paper, I really followed it through the San material Times, which was their local newspaper. They didn't say anything like that in the paper. I don't know how these other writers came up with that, but it's totally not true. And they found him just shot to pieces in the hills and San Bruno, just outside San Bruno is like you cross the street near in San Francisco. It's just one of those older suburbs there and they

found his body near Lover's Lane type area. But what had happened is that he was driving is Chrysler New Yorker, very nice car, especially during those days as well as cards can have expensive cards, like on the level of a Cadillac or something. And he saw this this girl, Penny board One, walking and they say that they had they were familiar with each other, and that's where all these like, uh, tomcat things come up. But his his widow says that he did that know her. He saw

her us walk in. He asked her if she wanted to ride, and she jumped in the car and start shooting this gun out the window, and uh, he was kind of like, hey, uh, you know what you're doing. You know, it's kind of dangerous. And back then, you know, people could just shoot guns out of the car windows. And they stopped and he was up there because he had a weekend job doing some guard landscaping work and he had a bunch of he had his trunk full of a bunch of just you know, recycle green waste

and then they just dumped it up there. So they drove. He drove with her and the hill was just above her house. I mean, it wasn't that far away from her either, And they stopped and she pulled out the gun and shot him eight times or yeah, six times. It was a revolver, and she reloaded three more times. She shot him eighteen times, and fourteen of the bullets went right completely through his body. And he was shot like three times in the head, three times in the neck, chest, stomach.

She shot him in each of his limbs too. So the cops when they found them, they were like, what the hell. You know, this must have been a crime of passion. Nobody shoots in that many people, you know, that many times, unless it's like a real vendetta. They found a kid who almost got hit by a nos car and he said there was like a blondhaired girl, young girl driving it, and it's like, what what the hell happened? You know? So they go over to Darlene, his wife. They go over to his house and they

questioned her like crazy. They questioned her family like crazy. Turns out that like her brother was San Francisco police officer. You know, they're his best friend. August Nory's best friend was his brother in law too, and you know, his idea of a fun night was to go to his inlaws house and watch the TV, you know, which was pretty rare back then, you know, and watch TV shows

and stuff. And so the police found that, you know, there's the guy was charming and handsome and stuff like that, and uh but you know, he there was no reason for anybody to kill him, especially to shoot him so many times. And the police, this whole case was just solved on just just detective footwork, you know. That's that's how they found anything, because they had no idea who would kill this guy. And after two and a half months, you know, the case started getting quiet and and Darlene

was getting hassled by the police a lot. And the cops found out that the bullets were like a target bullet and they were made in molds, and this company in New Jersey made them and sold them. And they narrowed it down to who bought them in San Francisco, you know, what store had in wholesale, and who sold

them and who they were sold to. So these guys, you know, after like ten weeks, finally traced it down to this kid, this twenty three year old guy, and they you know, squeezed them a bed I guess and found out that the gun or the bullets that he had given some to Penny Boordlin. Now Penny had stolen the gun from a friend's house. She knew that her friend's father had a gun in some you know, china cabinet or something, and she managed to steal it and she went out and shot it a few times with

a friend before that. So when the cops came to Borgland's house and her family home and she only lived they were three blocks from the city limits of San Francisco, and she just premun said, you know, they got there before she got home from work, and they you know, she was She's cute, you know, full figure girl, wore the pudo's skirts and freckles, and she had strawberry blond hair and a ponytail and just you know, in nineteen

fifty nine girl city girl. And they found she let them search a room and they found, like use paper clippings of the murders and things like that, and they brought her in for questioning and she ended up admitting what she did, and she said that she had always wanted to kill somebody and she just had this urge for about a year and a half. She said, it was almost a sexual urge to kill somebody for several years.

And you know, this is just a normal girl. You know, she worked, She graduatedrom high school and got a job as a clerk in some business in San Francisco and stuff. And I found weird is that I would have been interested if they found any existentialist books in her collection or anything, because you know, this sounds like it's right out of Elbert Komun's The Stranger, you know, where she just kills somebody to see what it does. But these things that she said is that it's just shocking. She said,

I felt better her mentally after she shot him. I felt like a great burden was lifted off me. I have no bad memories about it. I always wanted to see if I could do something like this and not have it bothered me. And you know, the police, you know, these these career police detectives were just stugged.

like a bad kid. Some people say that she had once brought a knife to school to show everybody, and personally, I didn't think that was that big of a deal because you know, I'm an older person and stuff.

what I got. You know, at least in those days or up to my time in the mid seventies, you know, that wasn't unusual for somebody to do. Kenny didn't. She said she knew that her parents were upset, and she said, that's really too bad. It's not really her concern. They had all the others come in.

them within an hour. I found their daughter who, she told me, and she actually she lives like in maybe seventy eighty miles from here, not too far away, north of the Bay Area. And I just called her out of blue and she answered, and she said that she was almost thirty years old before she found out that her stepfather wasn't her father and that and she didn't even know about what happened to her real father, so

it was a big shock to her. And and not long after that, I said, well, here's my number if your mother would like to talk for this deadly woman thing, you know, it'd be nice. You know, I certainly didn't want to bother her. She you know, her horrible memories to bring up. And out of the blue she called me a couple of days later, and I'd never broke out in a cold sweat faster in my life. Yeah, I mean, I answered her with yes, ma'am and no ma'am's. And she told me the story how it was for her,

and Peggy was let go. She wasn't even told, she wasn't even told when when she was sentenced and things like that. They just they just ignored her. You know, you think she's the widow of this, And yeah, she's she's a grandmother now and probably great girl mother, and uh yeah, she lived. She never talked about it for thirty years or so until that happened, and she told me that I was the only person that ever got

it right. I still had some mistakes, but she said that I'm the only person that actually, you know, got most of it right. So that made me feel really good. Yeah, it was. It was really stunning, say the least. When I was don't to call my wife looked at me, she was like, what happened? It was like that bad. She thought some family member died or something. While I

was a flight and covered with that. I was like because I just did not expect her to even not only call me, but she did take part of that that episode. Not too long ago, I found Penny boardin and she didn't return any of my inquiries, but I found it was like a Ventura County newspaper clipping and she was helping out at a senior citizens' home and she was dancing with somebody in this picture and it said Penny Borglin, volunteer at Ventura whatever blah blah blah

dances with a patient. I was like, what, But she obviously doesn't want to talk about it, and I thought it'd be weird that she didn't change your name.

in the mountains. So it used to be a resort where train would take people from San Francisco and they would stop there, and you know, it got run down after a while because of cars and people were able to go on their own without the trade. And it is way out there. I still haven't even been out in that area. I've lived in California for fifteen years. I've been all over it, sty haven't been out there. It's it's in the in kind of the foothills of

the Sierra Nevadas. So you know, they were renting out the cabins the people to live there because you know, the tourist season, the tourists just didn't come out there anymore, so they were living there. And this is just so strange. Her son and a friend of his and they're just teenagers, and they were goofing around at the end of a Friday night and then they thought, we'll go to this other town, see if there's a party, a town called Quincy,

which actually another very horrible crime happened there. Later, they hitchhiked down there and went to you know, a cagger party out in the woods, and you know, had a couple of beers and so they smoked some weed and then they hitchhiked back. They're to uh Keddy and you know in that area. The cops. The cops know everybody, you know, that's it's not many people live there, and so they go to uh they come back home, and then the next day the police find this horrible crime scene.

The entire family was butchered and beaten to death and tied with electrical cord and duct tape. They were all beaten to a pulp, multiple stab wounds. They used. Whoever did this used you know, household articles that were just there already, a steak knife, butcher knives, you know, hammers and stuff like that. Blades were broken in them and stuff, and they killed their mother. They was having these kids were having to sleep over there too, and so she

had some neighbor kids there. They didn't hear anything. Her daughter was out of sleepover and she came back home and she found her mom. She found the two friends, John and Dana, beaten to death. The kids that were the younger kids that were staying over were fine near in the back room, but one of their daughters was missing, thirteen year old Tina. So this house is just covered

in blood. This is a you know, tranquil place. And the cops came and I don't know if the cops did a bad job, you know, had they should have called the state police in to help, but you know it was a horrible crime. And you know, these two kids slipped food at a toddler and two adolescent kids and see anything that happened. It's never been solved. There's been over four thousand hours of investigation. There's been a lot of speculation. They have no idea what had happened.

They eventually found Tina's body by a out in the Mountain's feather Falls in Butte County, which would be another couple hundred miles away. They found her body in nineteen eighty four. Does their scoutler means sixty miles north of Ketty. It's never been solved. A few years ago they tore down the cabin because there are so many sightseers and

lookie loose going over there. I personally have a friend of mine who has this website, the Countess Despair, and it's always about all things murder, and she went there and did a whole photo thing on it. They've never caught. They don't know. They said it could have been a hobo jumping out the train, but it also could have been the kids. The boys might have been hitchhiking and person that picked them up the kid said, Hey, come on over at our house or something like that, and

that's what he happened. But somebody just totally went berserk in this small town. There's a guy who's been making videos about it for quite a few years, and when I had a website, he used to comment on it quite often. I've talked to other people and they said that he had become so obsessed about it that, you know, a lot of people don't even talk to him anymore because it's like the only thing you can talk about is trying to solve this case. Never solved it.

And again, unsolved really really does drive people mental. If it's never mind, we never understand the psychopathic, the killer's mind, but we really don't understand when we don't even apprehend the person's or persons. So very incredible tale. And I and yeah, incredible unsolved case. You did mention in that story as well that there was all kinds of finger pointing, and but there also was talk of satanism. Was there

any ritualistic evidence? Was there any evidence of ritualistic murder or that was there anything like that that you found?

find this case. They tore down the house.

couldn't come up with anything. Yeah.

their you know, especially by their own mother. And I just thought, oh, being that just you know what a horrible thing, especially if your mother killed your father or something. You know, how could you deal with that? You're like an instant orphan.

despite this PTSD, this trauma, this depression. You know, yet somehow us I think by a lot of people don't shed a tear for killers and rapists and pedophile They just don't because too much time has to be spent. I think just makes sense that you would shed a tear or less perverbably you would be more concerned about the victim and the victims' families and those impacted by these perpetrators.

belt and beat me. And they were like, oh my god.

There's no way anybody's going to convince me, and certainly not a team of self serving psychiatrists or want to be psychologists that somehow we have something in common with these people. Oh, we all have the capacity to kill.

there's there's not that. So I don't think I think people have to rethink this, despite I don't have degrees behind my name, but I think that there I could assemble a lot of evidence to prove my case in that we don't all have the capacity to kill. And what's unique about killers and rapists and pedophiles is their capacity to do crimes that are clearly outlawed by society, not frowned upon, outlawed. Everyone knows the line, yep, and everyone knows what it is. And these people, these losers,

want to transgress for whatever reason. I can't figure them out. I'm sure they couldn't figure them out, and I'm sure a psychiatrist in an hour or two or two years can't figure them out either. But that capacity to kill, that capacity to go over that line over and over and over again, is not a mental illness that we should excuse or we should think that we have something in common with These people are I think any true

crime writer would agree these people are unique. These killers are unique and should not be I mean, certainly there's murders that seem more understandable, regardless I don't think the vast majority of people have the ability to kill impulsively, kill as a product of rage, but then sit down and calculate the dismostmer and disposal of that body and then their cover story. That is unique, and I think

that should be reserved for these kinds of people. And there's nothing that reading hundreds of true crime books has told me otherwise that these people are truly unique. And there's just degrees of evil, as Michael Stone has said on his program, you know, just different degrees. That's my idea anyway.

go around killing people either. Dozens of friends. I have one friend right now, he's like getting his PhD at like age fifty seven, and he was like kicked out of his house when he was like fourteen, lived down the streets an arbor. You know, it was an alcoholic and drug addict and all this stuff, you know, and now he's you know, getting like a medical degree. You know, when well this that China logic was it would be, oh, well he should have been like a serial killer.

investigation whatsoever. And the mother so and yet the mother was the person that adopted him into his family, and from the person that couldn't take care of him, these people took care of him. So what I say is that I think that the mitigating factors, the talk, the allegations of abuse, at least in the cases that I know of, they don't have to be substantiated whatsoever. So

are they real evidence of anything? And so what would I say If I was charged and alleged to have done something, then I would give the most viable excuse I could possibly give to my lawyer, and he would trot it out in that courtroom. Yet it doesn't seem

to make any sense. There's a correlation between sexual abuse and then that person becoming an abuser a rapist, when if you looked at the thousands and millions of women who are raped, there is not one scintilla of evidence that those women, even a small minority, go on to be rapists or sexual abusers. So again again, then what you what can you conclude? Well, it's only men, And then it becomes now we all get included, all men because we have some testosterone or genetic So it's genetic,

but so so Hitler. So so now we wall up Germany because it's genetic. Right, Gazism is genetic, you know, so organic brain disease. After the fact, they go, yeah, well he did fall in his head. I you know, I'm fifty six years old. I know all my friends fell on their heads too.

There is that carnage, and as your books point out, once upon a time, how we dealt with this was just a rope a rope and a quick trial, and that was how justice was done. So we've come a long way. I don't believe in the death penalty, but I do believe in people taking responsibility, and I don't I do not appreciate the move towards the normalization of murder. It is never normal and should not be treated as well.

They're likely not to reoffend. If we base that in every bit of law, then no one would ever go and no one would ever stay because that would that's not the barometer it is. It should be at least safety and ensuring safety.

you see Davis, and he worked his way up. He was in his forties. Me had worked as way up, mopping floors and working his way to getting his PhD. And he ended up becoming a professor. He worked on on.

all of his kids. And yeah, it was just just horrible, you know. He h. He killed his three children, and one of them was a young teenage boy who was coming home from a dance. And you know, that's just like, I'm the same age as that kid was. I remember, you know, going to those school dances in nineteen seventy

two and stuff. And he came home about eleven thirty and he bashed his head and when he came in, he dragged all the bodies upstairs and master bedroom, laid him faith up, and then poured gasoline all over the house and burned it up. And I went to that place. It still exists. It was just sold about maybe five years ago. And when I was writing this book, I came across that story. First, I stopped in my car

and went out there to take a look. The house was completely burnt down in big oak trees around it were still burnt and scorched, and the stables, the barns that were all there. I found evidence of some graduates, students who had squatted there there with their books and notes and other stuff. They thought that was kind of funny,

But yeah, it was this beautiful place. And now they're going to they're going to keep the barn and a couple other of the outbuildings that were in good shape, and they're going to build like a green community subdivision there. But the owners, it was his wife's mother, and her family ended up getting the title to the estate and they just left it as it was for all those years, and they ended up once the mother died, her surviving kids sold the place for a lot of money, actually

five million dollars. But when I went there, there was still you know, post hitched the horse up to, you know, and just like there was still evidence of like their family that lived there old twice, you know, in sheds and things like that. And it was just one of the most eerie places I've ever been. And then while I was going through all these like buildings that were falling down, I realized I didn't tell anybody I was

going here. I didn't even I didn't even tell my wife because it was just like, oh, I gotta go check it out. You Davis is twenty miles away, and I was like, oh god, I could like fall through on of these floors here and they'll find me like six years from now, you know. But I think that possibly the reason why the professor just wigged out was that he was around DDT and all these other chemicals that he did with his experiments interesting could have poisoned poisoned him or just made them nuts.

story with me. I always appreciate that I had in in the California Justice Book, I wrote about the break brothers who had shot a bunch of police officers and were underrun and uh, I've had relatives of his write me and and say you know, yeah, they were they were bad guys. And other ones would say not. And and one guy accused me the saying that they were actually innocent and blah blah blah. And I wrote back the guy, I said, if they were actually innocent, I

would have written about it. It would have made a better story, you know. I mean, it's not my job to to to make history the way I wanted to. That's not I don't know if any historian that would ever uh not put in information that he found why or she found while they were ready. You know, after it's done sometimes you find out things. But when you're when you're rating it, you look for you know, you

want to find out, could these guys been innocent? You know, that's a better story, you know, the way of setting history straight. There There was nothing I saw that made those guys seem menicent at all.

that's what these people. And you have an inner book as well. Some of these guys are so brave, but then they're crying and at when they're going into the gas you know, they're reluctantly being dragged into the gas chamber after they were people torturing kids. So it's incredible ever changes that the cowardice of some of these people, uh so very it's fascinating. So I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about your

equally interesting and fascinating book, Death in California. I want to thank you very much, David Kolchik for coming on once again. Thank you, have a great evening.