FORGOTTEN CALIFORNIA MURDERS-David Kulczyk

author David Colchick. Welcome to the program. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. David Colchick.

He was raised in a lifestyle rivaled European royalty. He was a member of all the clubs you could be members of in San Francisco, the Yacht Club, Berlin, Game Country Club, Santa Cruz, golf and country club in the Bohemian Club. He was given a career as an executive in the family business. Retired at forty two, and because of the company he was involved in, him and his family got to travel anywhere in the world that they wanted to in luxury on their ships. He married the

woman he married. She was from a famous California rich family. She's a descendant of David Calton, who was not only was he a Native American murderer, but he was also the attorney for the Big Four railroad bear A Shunter, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker. So you're talking megabucks. So they had a son, you know, one kid. He had married him off in nineteen thirty. The idle rich retired at forty two, and

they had a state in Santa Cruz. And now where the area where their estate was is all houses and apartments and maybe a block from the ocean right in Santa Cruz. I mean, you couldn't be more in the middle of Santa Cruz than this place they called They called their place the cat the Cabins, and their other place they lived at was the penthouse of the Alexander Hamilton Hotel. In San Francisco. It's still there. So you know, these are you know, the richest people in San Francisco.

So this great guy, he was basically an alcoholic, lived his life in alcoholic days totally. When he had a heart condition, was in mal health that it was basically

from a lifetime babby drinking. So on September ninth, thinteen thirty three, Grace and his nurse, twenty eight year old Helen Helene Roberts, were walking through the extens of the state of the Cabins when his former nurse, forty three year old Frieda Willheima Augusta Wells, approached him and after a short discussion, she pulled out a thirty two caliber pistol and shot him in the chest. He made it to the door and slumped into the arms of his butler, who was a former guard of the Gazar of the

Tsar in Russia. He disarmed. The woman called the police. Wels was all woozy and she told the police that she had taken lumina, which is a mild narcotic, and she was taken to the hospital get her stomach pumped, and Grace was taken to the morgue. So she was fragile and quiet, and she said she only had her own reasons and he didn't do what he promised to do. Their family shows up and stuff, and you know, goes

to court. They're very properly represented by attorneys. One attorney came out from her hometown and outside of Philadelphia or outside of Pittsburgh, and they also hired a Santa Cruz former district attorney, Sandford Smith, as co counsel. So people right away, you know, we're interested in this case because it was you know, rich people and his former nurse shooting him. But they really got into it once it came into into court. And what happened was that she

told the story on the stand. She kept it to herself until the day she went understand to be pooreded. But on June seventh, nineteen thirty two, while she was Grace's personal nurse, she drove him or she accompanied him. They took the train from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.

The only people at their Santa Cruz manor was a gardener and possibly somebody else, and he basically slipped her and Mickey a vat rape drug in her drink in her wine over dinner, and she woke up the next morning desperately sick, and she had bruises on her body, and she realized that she had been raped, and she

was still too sick to get out of bed. So about nine o'clock in the morning, Grace entered the bedroom and she accused him of drugging and raping her, and he said it was true, and he laughed about it and told her she was a nurse and not to be able to take care of herself. She could not get out of bed the whole day, so she drove back. She got right back to San Francisco the next day, and after six weeks, she realized she was pregnant, and

she told Grace her condition. He said that he'd take care of her, but he never did, and as the weeks went by, she spoke to him. He suggested that she take a drug to abort the pregnancy. Yeah, so on August twenty first, she took the drug, and she lost over twenty five pounds and was weak and sick and wasn't able to work. She has Grace for money.

She could rest without him to worry about paying her bills and things and recover from the effects of this of this chemical abortion, and Grace claimed that he was near poverty and gave her nothing, so she'd used her own money, went to Santa Cruz and she stayed at a hotel that was behind his property, on his back gate, and she'd see him out in his property, and so she planned on shooting him, shooting herself in the head

if he refused to help her. And of course, when when it all happened, she ended up shooting him instead of shooting herself. Grace before he was shy. He told her that a child out of wedlock would ruin him and give me in it that she keeps promise to take care of the situation. So we have this did rich guy who who drugged and raped his personal nurse and then wouldn't help her with recovering from the abortion or anything, or you know, even wanting to to help

in any way. So so they go on with this trial. She exposes everything, and this is you know, you know, Santa Cruz is very close to Carmel and Monterey, you know where the rich have lived in California pretty much since it began. So you know, these people were the high edgelon of higher society. So they go out. The ten hours of deliberation, jury came back and found her

not guilty of murder. And the crowd, they said the Santa Criuz Sentinel said, feet pounded, hands clapped, and many cheered and whistled, and the foreman of the jury burst into tears and fell into the arms of freedom, and they both uncontrollably sobbed in each other's shoulders for two excuse me, two full minutes. So they were getting ready

to fly back to Pennsylvania. And as they were getting into the train to go to San Francisco to catch their plane back to Pittsburgh, Wells was secretly approached by one of the jury members and he told her that he had been wounded and Fanders during World War One, and it was none other than Frieda who had patched him up and tended his wounds. Well he waited to be transported to the front line. During World War One. She worked on the front lines as a nurse.

any corroboration whatsoever. It really was why she was set free because this was extraordinary circumstances where she had been such are to so many people, saved so many people's lives, and that was well documented. But just having two people so crucial to this trial having been indebted to her and saying so is an extraordinary you know, the story incredible.

Barbara married four times. Leah married six and she was involved in the bouse swapping scandal, and she had an affair with film comedian Buster Keaton, which broke up his marriage and her marriage, and she managed to survive an airplane crash in there, so they lived in she lived Barbara lived in Wiltshire neighborhood of Los Angeles, which is still very tony. It's a little south of Beverly Hills.

And about noon, well they were having their weekend party, was still going on Monday and you know, this was nineteen fifty four in La You know, the booze ran smoothly and no one got caught drunk driving. So about noon the Hollywood stuntman Phil Allam and his friend Andrew Aickerman showed up at Barber's house in their swimwear to take a dip in Barber's pool, and they pretty much had open house all weekend. So Alm was from Sweden.

He was a captain in the Swedish Army and became a citizen in nineteen forty four while serving in the us R. And he was in nineteen forty eighth Joan of Arc and he was in The Postman Always Rings twice. He's in quite a few movies. Even though he was Swedish. She had already lost his Swedish accent. He'd only been in the country like twenty years and he had no accent. While they're at that house, this Neely guy ed Neely.

He was a Texas oil man, cain of con artist, lived in California for decades, but he still had this brash East Texas accent, kind of like Foghorn Leghorned her tune character from from the fifties, and that So he was Leah's six husbands, and I believe it was his last. He was They were kind of giving each other crap about.

You know, they were all drunk for days, and Neely was giving him grief about being a Swede, and you know, they were raising each other, and you know, he's like, hey, at least I lost my accent and you used to have a stupid Texas drawl. And they started kneedling each other about horses, guns and Sweden and Texas and all made a dorog terry remark about Senator Joseph McCarthy, and that's when Neely got really mad, pulled out his gun and shot him twice with a nine millimeters Italian pistol.

So when the cops ride, they found out stretched out in the living room rug and the campus sisters and Ackerman were chatting and passing a bottle of vodka over his body. They arrested Neely and took on to the hospital, and days later, six almost a week later, almost in the hospital, he was recovering fine, and all of a sudden he just collapsed and died while he was walking around in the corridor. And they couldn't, you know, they

were like wow, what happened? He figured it was a blood clot to his brain, so they charged Neely with murder. The trial started in November third, nineteen fifty four, pretty quick actually, and you know, they got really good attorneys and kind of a lackluster prosecution if you asked me. But Neely admitted to shooting him, and and all was you know, awakened, could describe the whole thing to police that happened. But Neely said it was in self defense

and that almost was a real strong guy. He was well, he was a stuntman, so I'm sure he was in great shape and everything. But they decided that he died not from being shot, but from a celebral hemorrhage. And because they didn't the coroner didn't do examine his brain during the autopsy, they never would know. So Neely got off the hook because of that. It's a yeah, he got away with it. He was acquitted on November fifteenth, nineteen fifty four. That's like, there's another case where that

kind of happened. Where this one happened in in Fresno, California in nineteen sixty six, and this guy shot his ex wife and her boyfriend and he He was convicted of killing his wife, but not her boyfriend who he shot with the shotgun. He shot them both of shotguns, right, because he had died from catching hippotitis with a blood transfusion, And they said he didn't die from actually being shot. He died from catching hipatitis with the blood transfusion. He

still got put away for killing his wife. But I never heard of that happening before until these cases. Interesting where you know, it's like, all right, you shoot somebody and then they catch something in the hospital, so he technically didn't kill them, that's what they said. I think now you would get convicted of murder from that.

pretty good money. Arenda is I guess it always has been a very upper class place, just east of Oakland in San Francisco, just maybe fifteen miles from downtown San Francisco, or so. He was married for thirty three years, but he was a relentless womanizer and his wife, she claimed not know anything about his tom catting ways or anything. And so on November twenty fifth, nineteen fifty eight, they were relaxing in their separate bedrooms. Around nine o'clock, the

doorbell rang and Anderson answered the door. He overheard his wife overheard him say, you've got the wrong Roy Anderson, and she heard a gunshot and she found him laying in the doorway deady fired. Someone fired a twenty two caliber bullet through the screen door and directly into his heart and killed him. So they found a spun shell bullet went right through him. And they never did fi in the bullets maybe fell down a furnace vent or something like that after it came out of Anderson, but

they don't know. So while they were searching is belongings, they found a note in his suit jacket that he had worn that day and it said open in case of emergency. He just had contact numbers and stuff like that, you know, in case something happened to him. And then we found an identical envelope in his dresser drawer and he was just oddly that he was reading at his bedside a mystery novel called Two Deaths Must Die, So probably didn't know how quick that was going to happen.

So the police also found this little black book and it had cryptic interest entries in it. It covered over ten years of notes to one woman, and there were names of a dozen other women in the book, some without addresses or phone numbers and just dates for him to remember. The police checked down all these people and seven of the fifteen women lived in the same apartment

building in San Francisco, which is really odd. And you know, so the cops thought, oh, there's a you know, a jealous partner, you know, husband or something, or you know, it could be a just scrumbled debtor. They spoke to his business partner and he said that Anderson was nervous the day of his murder, and he confided in him that between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea, his only

solution was to go to Mexico. And he didn't really know what he meant about it, you know, he said, we're in a rough tumble business, full angry and to scrandle people with free tempers and rooting lives. And he goes, as far as I know, Roy had no enemies. We've

been punched in the mouth, but never shot at. Before the police were curious about this one guy named Lawrence Swnicki who had worked for him and had cast some checks that were for the company into his own private gambezzled basically, and they thought that he might have had something to do with it because they were filing They filed federal charges on him, but it turned out that he was living in Pennsylvania with his brother and he

was just waiting for his sentencing. So there was another employee, twenty five year old secretary Wreath Maxine Parks Bill Abertie, and police discovered that she and Anderson spent November twenty first through the twenty third at a holiday hotel in Reno, and he told She told the officers that she companied on many overnight trips to Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz

as well as Reno. They had a little more digging and they found out that Anderson was paying her rent at her apartment San Francisco, and she was also the beneficiary of a twenty five thousand dollars life insurance policy to Aamson. Yeah, so she admitted to the affair and said that Anderson told her that he was having an affair with someone for over ten years and was going to break up with her, and then he had two

other girlfriends and the same time. You know, his wife was unaware of any of this, so you know, they could not get anywhere in case they didn't. You know, there's too many, too many people involved in it. And some guy who some mystery people showed up in their town asking for them. As you know, nothing came of that or anything either. So you know, no one knows Sue killed Roy Anderson. It could have been an angry daughter, a jealous boyfriend or husband from one of his many lovers.

It could have been one of his lovers or former lovers. Could have been a paid hit. It could have been his wife, could have been a case of mistaken identity, and according to San Francisco columnists San Francisco Examiner columnists Dan Frishman, there were one hundred and thirteen other William or Roy Anderson's in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google Play. That's Friends without the R Best Fiends Now, David, we were talking about another interesting story and called spare the rod. So let's talk about let's talk about that.

other since their kids. This is in Red Top in Madria County, in the San Joaquin Valley where everything has grown. You know, they were developed Baptists and they read the Bible every night to their five children. But they didn't always attend church because you know, he had to work. Gone Sundays quite often and stuff about thirteen miles west of chow Chillup. So on January seventh, Claude wasn't feeling well and he stayed home. Had a four year old Sandra.

His daughter started acting up and says sending of her room or something. Twenty seven year old Opal started beating her with a belt for five to ten minutes. So Claude was napping on the couch and woke up from all the noise and took over from where she let off. So he'd beat her with switches broken off on a tree in the front of the house, and when one switch broke wore out, he'd send Opal out for another one.

After a while, they were out of her reach and she couldn't grab them, so he used a leather strap and continued beating her. They beat her for forty five minutes. So when they were done beating her, they gave her a shower, and they had her a couple more times at the belt, and they put sab on her wounds and dressed her, and an hour later she just dropped dead, and they tried praying over her body and nothing happened,

so they walked over and called the police. Now this is in nineteen fifty eight, right who nine one one operators were trained, and they called the police and Napper told them to take her to a doctor, and by the time they got her to the doctor, she was already sire. He had riga mortis. They took her body to a funeral home for autopsy, and Claude and Nople

were arrested the rest of their kids. They had a three year old daughter and three sons who were five to two and eight months, and they were all put in the foster homes. The children were examined. They were all covered with bruises and cuts and various states of healing. The police were just sickened by what they saw. There were bloodstained, switches were broken, were laid all over the

house in their yard. So the people of Red Tree, which is really just I think now it's like a gas station, that's it, kind of intersection in between you know, tomato fields or whatever. The landlord, the guy oh the property, was so shocked and he had known them since they were both children, and after the police were done taking photos, he had the house burned and surrounding trees bulldozed over three days after the murder, right, so he raised the buildings.

So we turned the site to good clean farm dirt again. So I did. The coroner the autopsy was this guy named Znik Fluse, who was a former refugee from Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation. He said it was the most vicious thing he ever seen. He didn't see anything worse under the hitler regime, and they said they counted more than two hundred Weltz bruises and slashes on Sandra's body. Incredible, yeah,

just incredible. Claude and Nople were let out of jail to attend the funeral, but they were raining for murder later that day, and the trial was postponed multiple times. And uh, you know, the courtroom was packed, of course, and they showed the slides as the did child, and you know, it was very sickening colored slides of the little kid's body all bruised and battered and stuff. Said she was set over two hundred times. She died of

internal bleeding and shock. So my other kid, their oldest, their six year old son take the witness stand to testify against his parents, and he said that they switched Sandra because she messed at the breakfast table. Then he said father hit the sister with a belt, then switches again, then the belt again. So the Schindlers actually went up and testified, which was, you know, now pretty great thing.

Claude testified that he beat his daughter because he believed she was possessed by the devil, and that God commanded him to correct the children in that manner and he

would beat her until she would mind. He said, I was raised the same way with a rod and had whipping on my own by So his wife goes up there and she tells the court, first time I ever heard of a whooping hurt and a child, I didn't think it could kill it, and explained why she was beaten, and she said she was different from the other children. She had the mind of a twelve year old. So they were both convicted of second degree murder and we're

sent to five years to life. Opel fought the conviction, got a new trial, and she pled guilty and was resentenced to one of ten years and was paroled just within the year. Within six months, she went and lived with her sister in Telceella. Claude died in nineteen ninety seven and Opel died in two thousand and nine, and little Sandra would have been about sixty seven sixty seven years old, and she lived.

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And they were both from the Bay area. So Hockey was from Oakland and Nelson was from Martinez, which is right outside of San Francisco. So they were hitchhiking and they had they had robbed a store earlier to get some money, and so they're hitchhiking up north and they got a lift from this guy named Robert Lowry. He was a salesman or something. He wasn't sure about these hitchhikers, especially when Nelson flashed a pistol when when Lowry asked

about the dangers of hitchhiking. So he ditched his passengers and Willow which is, you know, a little little field town, little farm pound and checked in a hotel for tonight. So those guys they stole Lowry's car. They saw there was a spare key in the glove box, so after they left, he went into the hotel. They just got car took off. He didn't even know for like six hours if the car was stolen. So Nelson drove. They drove up Highway ninety nine still there. It's like I

five and ninety nine. They kind of connect in some places, but for the most part they're separate highways still. So they were speeding through these little towns blue Gum and our tourists blow went through those towns one hundred miles an hour SI, sagging through the heavy traffic there was. There was a Sunday and there was an unusual amount of traffic on the freeway that day or on the highway today. These are just two lane roads with maybe

a lane in the middle to turn. So of course the scopsy is the diskuy and he cought name Officer Charles Smith, and it takes him a while before he catch us up with them because they're going one hundred miles an hour traffic. So he's he's behind him and this guy was he was a highway California Highway Patrol officer for about six years and it was an MP in the military before that, and he's an outstanding officer.

He pulls over these people, uh, these guys in front of Dixie Lee White's trailer house and she was just doing her ironing that evening and just kind of keeping an eye out on traffic because there were so many different kinds of cars and trucks going down. You know, it was just kind of something to do out there. And there's no TV or anything back then. So right in front of her house, the cop pulls over the car with the two men inside and the upster got

out and spoke to them. He had hartly step out of the car firstom went back to his car. He was suspicious that the car was stolen, but of course it wasn't reported yet because the car didn't know that it was stolen. So Smith walked back to the car with his ticket book and as he approached the driver's side Nelson was driving, and Nelson jumped out and shot Officer Smith four times with a twenty five caliber semi

automatic pistol. Smith staggered, turned around, fell to the ground, but using all his strength, Officer Smith lurched to the driver's say of the car before Nelson could put it in the gear to take off, and fired his service revolver and at the same time, Nelson managed to squeeze off one more shot, getting Smith in his shoulder, but Smith just let loose, just just pulled the trigger as much as he could and middlesecond before before Nelson's bullet

hit the officer. The officers blew out his brains like right there, uh I fired three more shots and the bullet hit Cockley in the left hand and then the left side of his head killed him too. Then Smith stumbled back between the two cars and fell on his face. That lady Dixie, she grabbed the phone and call the highway patrol, but they were already there. He had already, you know, called it in on the radio and stuff.

But just such a crazy, crazy shootout, leaving three people dead on the side of the highway.

relationship only lasted until December of sixty six. She was originally from Oklahoma, but lived in Fresno since she was a kid, and she had a son from a previous marriage that lived with her, so, you know, she had a job and stuff, and she dated, and you know, she was divorced from Henry, but Henry had a hard time that the marriage failed and they had little bickering things that happened where she accused her of smashing his windshield and trying to fry open the glove box, and

she showed up at his apartment once early in the morning and start arguing with him, and he ended up pushing her in the swimming pool. And the DA's off was back then, they said that the district attorney's offices not issue restraining orders and they were told that they were not acting like adults and could avoid any future conflict by just staying away from each other. This in nineteen sixty six, So so Henry was like thirty years old.

He was taking pills and drinking the excess. And on the day of this happened October seventeenth, nineteen sixty six, he figured he had drank forty screwdrivers, vodka, an orange juice, took some non narcotic pills and they had not eaten in the entire day. He called. He called Sharon, she was twenty nine, and she told him she had company. And so the guys you was seeing was this guy,

a forty year old businessman. He was in a Fresno on business only arrived a few hours before Henry came walking over to her house, went through the back door about ten thirty at night and shot this guy, Kenneth Quant, in the chest with a bolt action twelve gage shotgun. He has walked in through the back door right into the kitchen to shot him, and Sharon, who was clad in a red negligee, ran out of the house to the front door, and he gundered down the driveway to

blasshom a shotgun. The whole time her four year old son was sleeping in the bed. So this Quant guy. He was a large landowner in King's County and he sold out in nineteen sixty three, got like millions of dollars for his property. You know, there was oil property ever in King's County and stuff throughm Bakersfield. And he had moved to Chico in northern California and dabbled in real estate and was a gentleman farmer. And he was

married and had four kids. So a couple of weeks before the murder, Henry talked to Quant's wife by telephoned and threatened to kill Quants if he didn't stop. And Sharon right, So the police found the twelve gage was right in a neighbor's yard, and Anderson ran off the Sacramento and laid low for about a week until he

turned himself in with his brother helping him. So this Quant guy died in the hospital from hippotitis, and so I was talking about before he caught from a blood transfusion, and so Anderson was charged with their death, but it was dropped because Queen's death was from hippotitis and that from the Chagun flast. It was so weird. Yeah, So he tried to plead guilty by reason of insanity, and

they said that he knew what he was doing. They sentenced him to five years to life in prison, and he died in prison in nineteen seventy two.

the guy's mechanics said to drive it slowly. So and this is on a Sunday night, shortly before midnight, at the corner of twenty fourth in m Street, which is right right in midtown Sacramento. This guy named Elbert Pappy cut them off, causing McShane to swerve and like bump into the curb. They shouted out to each other and something like they claim, like where the hell did you get that stuff, implying he was drunk, and Pappy supposedly responded by calling them some bile names and invited him

to follow when they sped up. I don't know how that could happen if he was just driving by and like they almost collided. They didn't stop and talk, you know. So this machine guy, he drove after Pappy, driving down M Street the wrong way. It's a two ways street, and he was driving in the opposite lane to catch

up with him. So this Pappy guy, he was a house painter and he had promoted a dance that night with a friend, and it was like almost midnight, and he had the receipts from the dance and he had just dropped off his partner and he was driving to his house, which was like on L Street, when you know, he almost collided with the car, and he didn't think

about it. He just drove on and when he pulled up into the space in front of his house, the machine was fouling and pulled up behind him, and they jumped out of the car and like he Pappy saw like a guy running towards him that the car stopped, and he thought he was getting robbed. You know, he had the receipts from his dance and stuff. So he grabbed this anti theft device that was basically a pipe that he stuck in the spokes of the tired right.

Remember the club that you used to put on your shirt. Yeah, And he hit a beal the passenger over the head with it, right and left. The guy's wife ran up to him and he like shoved her. He didn't know what was going on, and he just wanted to get out of there, and they took him to the doctor. His friends to him a doctor to wrap his hat and put him in the hospital. He got an infection and he died. He was like a college educated bank teller.

He grew up across the street from the Sandford Mansion in Sacramento, which is like a state historical building now across the streets like office buildings and stuff now, but you know, that was a pretty exclusive neighborhood back then, so he had some connections and stuff. So they held this guy Patty without bail they got him to get the charge reduced to manslaughter and they got a bond

for it. They basically said, you know, they said that, oh, he endangered them, and but they wouldn't explain why they drove off after him, and and no one saw him striking the bial guy. There's a lot of people out you know, it's kind of funny because you read these articles and then it's like, uh's see some ice cream

shop was robbed at one in the morning. You know, these places stay like you know, it's because you know, for every article, for every chapter I write, there's two that I don't know that that just don't make the cut. So you know, it's just pretty weird. But yeah, Pappy's neighbor and friends and stuff all called up and said about how he was, you know, a great citizen and you know, contributed to the neighborhood and stuff. And he was acquitted and.