MONSTERS ON THE LOOSE-Richard Carrico

claim you're free. Welcome bonus, that's Chumbuck Casino dot com and live the Chumba Lite. Nopvers necessary dvoid where everyb I lost the terms and conditions eighteen plus.

of leads statewide. Newspapers covered every angle and clue, and sometimes played a role in the investigations. Yet the killers were never identified and brought to justice. In Monsters on the Loose, Award winning author and historian Richard L. Kerrico pieces fragments of evidence together for three cold cases, shetting

light on a dark chapter in San Diego's history. More than ninety years after the murders, Karako emerges as an advocate for the victims, particulously reconstructing their stories immersed in dusty files, long forgotten oral histories, and newly discovered investigation records. His primary objective remains unwavering to seek justice for the

three young women wid no witnesses to the crimes. The significance of circumstantial evidence and speculation, both then and now became paramount, and he may have even solved one of the murders. The book that were featuring this evening is Monsters on the Loose, The true story of three unsolved murders in Prohibition era San Diego, with my special guest, historian and author Richard L. Carico. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Richard L.

for several reasons. Tell us about that exploration, and tell us about the several reasons why you chose these three murders in particular to write about in Monsters on the Loose.

little Girl, Virginia Brooks. And then I sort of got on this quest that maybe I'd write an article for a local newspaper or a magazine about the death of a child, a very young child of kidnapping, and one thing led to another, and suddenly I realized that in nineteen thirty one, in a town that was pretty well known today at least to be pretty laid back and not a high crime rate, all of that, that there were at least at least nine unsolved murders of people

under twenty five, and that San Diego was number two in the nation in suicides, and that there was an underbelly to San Diego that most people didn't think about.

So then I got the idea for a book and started researching the night and Murders, and I paired it down to these three because they covered slightly different chronological age groups, if you will, with the little girl being eight or nine kidnapped, and then Louise Tolbert seventeen described as beautiful and wanted to run away from home and lived with a father who was, you know, nice guy, but pushing on her in her early teenage years, mid

teenage years. And then Hazel, who was a little bit older twenty two, went out on a date and then found murdered later. So three different types of women, if you will, young women, pretty similar economic and the depression was going on, and different methods of being killed, and

then the investigations took different tracks. Same people were involved in many cases at the Standugel police department and the sheriffs, but the studies ended up being different from the forensics and the evidence and the newspapers involved and all that.

So you're right in your introduction that part of it was I just couldn't believe that we knew so little about these women, young women, and I did want to somewhat advocate for them, and also because it was one of my sub interests, get into how the newspapers of the time covered the cases, because you know, we're going through a period now where the media comes under a

lot of criticisms from all different sides. And if you read the newspapers back in that time, al Capone was still alive, you know, and there was all this almost getting into gangsters as good people. So that was impetus for it.

because prohibition was going on, talking about booze. So when I was growing up in San Diego downtown, there was a bar that is no longer there, but that bar, even when I was there in the late sixties mid sixties, was the hangout for the newspaper men whose office was within blocks of the police department, and they routinely met and drank together, smoked cigars together, went to the racetrack together.

And so there was that side of the press. And then it was also the fact that as soon as a police call came in or the word got out that there was a victim or a murder happening or happened in many cases, the newspaper reporters got there right after or at the same time as the police officers, and oftentimes the crime scene wasn't cordoned off with the

yellow tape that's so ubiquitous now in crime cases. And in some cases the newspaper people would actually pick up evidence and show it to the policeman or in one case actual they helped carry one of the bodies away. So a very different time.

get the reader to buy the newspaper. Obviously to sell more advertising. So today newspapers are obviously fading away somewhat. Advertisings dropped off, but this was the heyday of newspapers and large numbers of people subscribed to them read them. You had newsboys on the corners in San Diego and New York and San Francisco hawky newspapers, and they would

of course yell out the headline. So part of that was as you read the article towards women more than men, obviously they would describe for instance, Luis, who was in fact quite beautiful at seventeen, but they would say well rounded.

by a movie actress at the time. She had two brothers, one older, one slightly younger, and blanched. The mother was right out of a central casting for the stay at home in a house dress, vacuumine and cooking and going to the market virtually every day as people did, to go to the store and buy what they needed to cook, and was not terribly well educated. The mother wasn't. The father was a itinerant truck driver but also had been

a lumberman up in the northwest. Was described as gaunt and tall if you will, and Virginia routinely walked the roughly one point one or so miles to school five days a week, something you know, kind of unheard of out here in San Diego today generally and met a girlfriend on the way and they would walk to school and on the way home go buy the library and

pick up books. And three days before Valentine's Day nineteen thirty one, Virginia in her little dress with her red jacket and a book bag and lunch that included an orange and ten cents in her pocket, set out to go to school and disappeared.

was of Mexican extract, and walked with her. So they talked to Katie right away, and then they started interviewing people of the neighborhood well into the next day, obviously interviewing them. And the trouble with that is they got terribly conflicting. Some people saw her on one side of the street, some sawrow on the other. Some woman said she was pretty sure she saw her playing down in a canyon. We have these very deep canyons here in San Diego that I played in as a child. Other

people said, oh, she got in a roadster with this man. No, she got in a coop with a man and a woman. So you can sort of imagine the bewildering. The context that the police actually got after about two days. If he brought out a map and he brought out the people that allegedly she was with, it was all over

the place. So the only thing that it pinned down was a timeline because her brother had actually ridden by her on a bicycle and waved at her and laughed, you know, because he was riding his swim bike and she was walking and then she never showed up. So they started the investigation right away, talking to people, and there was no benefit of the doubt given to the fact that she was probably a runaway, as people might think today. She was gone and taken by someone.

both marine and sailor component here in San Diego. And so they went out and literally knocked on door every door, and they went there were a lot of abandoned houses because it was the depression. They went down in a few cellars that we have here. We don't have a lot of sellers. But they went down into basements and cellars, and then one of the women's clubs put club their people put on their work clothes, if you will, and

went through the canyons, looking through all the bushes. They actually enlisted the Navy pilots, and they flew over in their bid wing airplanes and got so low to the ground looking into the canyons and these valleys that they were actually scraping the brush with their wheels, according to some accounts, and so it was described at the time, and it probably was for several years the largest manhunt, if you will, or the largest investigation for a child

or for anyone in San Diego County history. And both newspapers, the morning paper, the Union, and the evening paper Tribune covered it in even extra additions, and they would find things they thought might have been where she was, or someone found part of a jacket that looked like her as in a canyon, and those were newsworthy, they were worth riding up. So quite the search for poor little Virginia.

your daughter, and very specific information about your daughter. John was a little discouraged by the police activities. The letter, of course said, don't notify the police. Just go do

it on your own. It'll be okay. And so he and a couple of buddies, because he didn't own an automobile, I had an old truck, drove one hundred and twenty thirty forty miles through the night, got out to court Side, found the postmaster when he was open the next morning, and of course the postmaster said, I have no idea what you're talking about. I haven't seen any little girl out here. I did read about in the newspaper. Gosh. I feel sorry for you, but there's nothing I can

do for you. And then John and his compatriots drove back to San Diego, and it appeared to the next newspaper, the next day's newspapers as a big headline back to the desert, worthless, blah blah blah. And of course the police were angry that John had done that on his own, because had it panned out a little bit better, how would that have played out? But that was part of

what her father did. Today, driving that distance in a nice air condition car wouldn't be a big deal, but in nineteen thirty one, driving one hundred and forty or so miles across the desert, the mountains and down the mountains was not something one did casually, if you will. So that was just one of many many dead ends happened to the father and to the police. She was reported to be in San Francisco, she was reported to

be in Yuma, Arizona. All over the place. So just about any especially man, single man, walking around with a young girl ten year old nine year old girl in any town in the West was suspect. So it was interesting times.

with his twenty two shooting at ten cans. But Shep or Blackie the dog went up to the lap bag and started sniffing at it. And the setting is the vegetation up there on that mesa is low grass, very low grass and some chaparral creosote cactusy stuff. So Moses walked over and in one instance he said the bag was partially opened and he could see the decomposing body of a child. In another interview, he said he took out his knife and cut the bag open to look inside,

so little discrepancies there. He's about half a mile from the major highway that later became three ninety five, running north and south. He ran out to the road with his dog and flagged down a truck driver who then drove into old town San Diego and called the police. Police came out with newspaper reporters and started the investigation, opened up the bags, and one of the police officers said, as soon as he saw the little red jacket and the dark hair, he knew that he'd found Virginia Brooks.

And so then the newspapers big banner headlines photographs of her being carried in a coffin basically to a hearst, and then the follow up investigation of what Moses had found, and it was determined Moses said, well, she wasn't out there a day or two ago, so this is not where she was killed. She was dumped here, and indeed the forensics indicated she had been half buried somewhere, and that was a big part of the investigation, was she

still had soil clinging to parts of her body. The hacking part Dan was interesting because the newspapers really played that up. One of them even said, I think it was the Los Angeles paper that she'd been a viscerated, that this fiend had gone in and cut out her inerds and threw them away.

The body didn't tell that story, but talking about, you know, the kind of person that would do this, and there are monsters out there doing this to little girls. But I'm going to find her, you know, and this case won't go unsolved. And clearly he knew that newspapers won certain quotes, so he was one of the first people who did, in fact talk about that her body had been hacked and decapitated, and she was not decapitated, had came loose from the the body basically, so he was

playing to the press. He was going to retire that year or the next year, and I think he saw this as kind of his last hurrah to get into the newspapers and to be somebody. And unlike some of the police officers who are quoted, he seems dispassionate in ways, which I guess you could say is good. But it was more like what was important about this was the case and his work on the case, rather than the family or her brothers or the poor little girl herself.

But the way the process would work is a body is found and then the police turn it over to the coroner's office to do an autopsy, and the coroner then he determines was their potential homicide, was that an accident In the case of a drowning, was there anything that led to the drowning, and if were no criminal activity that he decided upon a homicide. If you will, then pretty much the case was closed, he would send that off to the police department and the district attorney.

They would review it and say no, no actionable necessity done. Sometimes that was used. It was alleged as a cover up for people who'd clearly been murdered or probably have been murdered, because the police and the sheriff didn't want yet another case on their hands, so it just went away. In this case and the other young women in the book, the coroner said, no, clearly this child was abducted and

somebody needs to happen. So then he makes the recommendation that there'd be an inquest based on the autopsy, and at the end quest, the last people to see Virginia would be called, her parents would be called, the police officers who would be called, the person who discovered the body, Moses would be called, and it was almost like a little mini grand jury, and the people sitting on the inquest jury had been appointed and they would listen to

all the information. Sometimes these inquest would be one hour, sometimes they'd be a day, and then based on that recommendation would be turned over for a criminal action and a grand jury would actually be convened if in fact they had any suspects, so a little different than today.

have any any suspects. And what was mainly drived out of this was you have to identify the body, so you know, and all the TV shows today and everything, whoever goes to the morgue and they roll out the slab and you look at it. In this case, it was actually a in a mortuary, a private mortuary, right, and mother Blanche still refused to believe this was her daughter.

And she's in a little coffin area and they slide back to the slat so she could look in, and her mom sees a chip tooth and the badly decomposed face of her daughter and goes, oh my god, it is my daughter. So it's a very dramatic and very touching scene again of course, the newspapers were right there describing every possible detail. So as a result of the inquest, then it gets kicked further and there was no resolution on exactly how she died because the body was in

such bad shape. They repeated the fact it looked like she'd been half buried and parts of her had decomposed differentially. There were leaves stuck to her dress that came out, so they tried to look forward. These tins of palm trees grow, and this is truly the beginning of the forensic part of it. Then she had three hairs clutched in one of her hands. It appears we could certainly

get into that. It appears that one of them might have been her own, but a couple were not her own, and started the forensic side of that investigation.

that they had been sexually assaulted. They simply used the word assaulted viciously assaulted, versus if somebody had been beaten up, they said badly beaten or had trauma, those kinds of things. But the word assault used in the context of a female meant sexual in this case. It was alluded to. That was the underlying assumption, not just of the press and the police, but the public that if a little

girl disappeared, then it must have been a fiend. It must have been a sexual pervert out there, and that's who we need to look for. So the autopsy could not define that, and I got copies of these materials. It simply left it wide open whether she had actually been sexually assaulted or not. But the press picked up on that will and took it to the next notch

and said, well, of course she was sexually assaulted. They didn't use the word sexual because why else would you kidnap a little girl and in theory keep her for a day or two or three. Certainly the assumption was not she was kept somewhere for a month and then thrown out on the mesa because her body had been including decomposing in the ground, so it was always assumed that she was assaulted sexually.

perverts and all that. So they literally in this Sandigo area did it sort of a drag net, and if somebody had been arrested before on a sexual crime or was even suspected, they rounded him up and they you know, interrogated them with just like in the movies, with a rubber hose or with a set of brass knuckles wrapped up in cloth, pounded on. Some of these people kept them up all night, you know, the really bright light

bulb in the stuffy dark room and all that. And one suspect was a gentleman who he was brought in simply because his neighbors turned him in because he had a bloody stump in his backyard, a tree stump in his backyard, and he had palm trees nearby that might have matched the palm leaves in her in Virginia's hand. So he was arrested. And as it turned out, gosh,

my grandmother did this. In the same time period, he used to kill his own chickens and put him on the stump and cut their heads off, and so he said, that's not what happened out there. So he indeed was the main suspect at the time that went away. There was another gentleman who was a known deviate and had been rested for in fact, molesting another girl while this investigation was going on. But he could prove his whereabouts if he will well that morning, and he was punished

for the other crime. And then there was also a couple of other There was a rich family here in town. Their son was known to like little girls for lack of a better word, and he was investigated, but not for very long. And that was kind of you know. The mother, Blanche said, I think he did it. I think that that little boy, that boy, he was a teenager, came out here and was snooping around. And I've seen him in the neighborhood and he doesn't believe in he

doesn't belong in this neighborhood. We're poor folk out here. What's his boy doing out here? But probably because of family connections or he had a good alibi, he was released also, So after weeks and weeks of investigation, they were nowhere closer. They had tire tracks, they had the palm leaves, they had other forensic information, but they couldn't find a person to go with it.

it was them, they who caused this. So in this case, these letters that were written on typically on almost like brown paper bags back when such things existed, and printed clearly to try to hide the identity of the person writing it from the doctor, and the doctor basically told the family and other people he put them on a windshield of a car nearby. He slid one under a gas station nearby a door, and then the blanche in John Brooks family themselves and What he basically said was

it was interesting. He wanted to stress that yes, he killed her, but he was not a pervert. He was not a pervert, he said, did kill her, but not a pervert, and that you'll never solve this because I'm smarter than you. You the police. So it was almost like Letters of the Zodiac, you know, many decades later, hunting the police and saying, hey, I'm smarter than you, and you'll you'll never catch me. As in those letters, he said, I'm going to kill again. I'm going to

kill again. And so this just in a town that rarely locked its doors up at night and where children did roam around in canyons and did walk the mile a mile and a half to school. This town almost shut down, especially near East San Diego and then those neighborhoods, because this monster was out there and he said I'm going to hunt for other little girls, and the fear and the newspaper played that up, of course, So it was a bad time for the parents of San Diego.

But upon investigation, it turns out that it was a teenage boy and his chum who simply wanted to, as they said, be part of the case, be part of the case. So they were hauled in, they were interrogated. One of the boys, the doctor himself, actually was from a pretty good family and so I don't know that he was ever punished. I could ever find out any information that he was taken to court. But that was the end of of quote the doctor's rampage that everybody feared. You're right.

They sent reporters down on photographers, and it was I would say the funeral of the decade practically in San Diego. It was huge, And yeah, the newspaper had a really good photo of the little girls based you know, dressed in their little white dresses, her classmates, carrying her little coffin out towards the to be taken for burial, and a lot of people crying, and it was described as a very sad scene and with no closure, of course, so it was quite a deal.

My path continued and continued and continued. So, yeah, one pretty nice May morning, this gentleman Thomas Martinez and his family are going to go out for a picnic on a Sunday morning, which especially back then, was a little more common when you didn't have their conditioning and television at home, and so he takes his family to a very very remote area that was used for picnicking, and it was kind of the lovers laying big oak trees,

really beautiful Senegle River flows nearby, and he parked the car and left his wife and kids to get the picnic basket and the thermos bottle with juice and coffee in it, and he walks down to find an appropriate place for a picnic. And as he comes around one of the corners of the grove of oak trees, he sees this woman hanging from a tree with her feet just actually the heels of her feet scraping the ground,

just barely touching the ground. And she's nude except for her silk stalkings actually imitation silk stalkings, and her shoes. And so he runs back to his wife and says, no, we can't. There's a terrible thing. We can't go there. So then he drives into the sheriff's office and alerts them. They come out again, newspaper reporters in tow and start the investigation of the terrible death of Luis. So that's how her body was discovered and it again she hadn't

gone missing. She was seventeen years of age. She spent a fair amount of time out of the house on dates with a lot of different young men, very vivacious, went roller skating, went swimming, went up in airplanes with a friend of hers who was a pilot. So she was called what they called them, a modern girl. And what that meant was she was different than her older

sisters or her mom. For instance, she smoked cigarettes, she stayed out late, She listened to the new big band music instead of the waltzes and the polkas and all that stuff. So suddenly you have a newspaper account, you know, new victim. And it started out the salacious of it. Dan was the voluptuous girl found hanging from a tree, the well rounded girl, you know, the modern girl found hanging from a tree. And that starts the story of Luis Talborough.

what really was the condition of the body? So okay, the corner says this, but what else can we find out about it? So he was like, you know, a mad dog trying to figure this thing out. And at first the newspapers kept playing up the rope, that hey, we can figure this out by the rope, because it's not a normal rope. It's not a common rope. It's a rope that's used typically by the navy or by the military. And also the way it was tied was in a way that would know men who tied up

boats or men who worked on boats would know. So it somebody has to be something with the navy. And she was probably one hundred and fifteen pounds. So this rope was thrown over a limb the oak tree and then pulled, so you'd have to be strong enough to pull it up. So you're right, this rope. It was all about the rope initially, and they interviewed people. They thought they might have found the rope. Where did it

come from? From a taxi driver who'd use one like that to yank somebody out of the mud, But in fact it wasn't that rope. And it went on and on, and then they moved away from the rope. They were looking at the tire tracks. Of course, they investigated everybody who had known her, but it's almost like parallel investigations. He was looking at the forensic side of it and the fact that she had dust on her shoes. Where did that red dust come from? What else can we

get from the rope? Let's look at her. She had a diary with her. Can we pull fingerprints off of that diary? So he's looking at it in the very scientific way that we would today, certainly, whereas the police

is more typically out there interviewing. And she had a lot all of her boyfriends, people who knew her, who saw her last You know, she was downtown working in a downtown five and dime store and got off at five, drew her last paycheck, said she was going to go to Chicago to see her grandparents and get out of San Diego because it was dead And the next time she's seen is hanging from this tree in what's now a park.

oh absolutely. And so even five years later, four or five years later, the police and the criminologists were desperate to find this person because he had not been found yet. So he's still out there and maybe he's killing other people. So he was not the only one. Von Bram was not the only one. But there were men who were arrested through crimes who either they wanted their name in the newspaper, they wanted to be part of an investigation.

They wanted to make themselves bigger than they were in terms of their murder, because I assumed they were probably going to be executed anyhow. And so this went on for days and days. San Diego police went up and interviewed him, and it turned out to be a dead end that he was not in San Diego right at that time, although he said he was and other people had said he was. He wasn't that week in San Diego. He was off somewhere else. But that rually got played

up because it extended beyond San Diego. It was more of a San Francisco, Northern California angle, if you will. So those papers up there are the hearst papers, really played played that up, and you know the police would have if they could have, they would have penned on him to get done with this case and close the casebook and be finished up. But it didn't work out that way for them.

you're free welcome bonus. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com and Lived Chamberlain nover necessary drop wherever by lost in terms conditions eighteen plus.

or drink alcohol because prohibision wasn't in effect. And he dated different girls, a lot of different girls in fact, And for a while he was a suspect because he had been with Luis the night before on a Friday night Saturday night at a party, and they were known to be pretty close. But this developed partially later. At the time the newspaper simply said he had a good

alibi that he had been somewhere else that night. Well, so that's where the police left it at the time, and then how it looked like they left it at the time. And so in my initial draft of this book, he doesn't play much of a role. But I had an article printed as from a chapter of this book in a local newspaper called the reader, some newspaper magazine, and a gentleman called me a contact with me as a result of that article and said, hey, I knew people in your story and I'm doing the math on

that going. I don't see how that's possible. But he was in his nineties and he knew Cyrel Smith. Cyrell Smith, as an older man in his thirties, had been the aeronautics engineer that helped this guy Tom who called me, get his license and they hung out together. So Tom was seventeen and this guy was in his thirties. And one day as they're driving back towards the rural part of the county, Sara El Smith pulls off the road,

goes down a dirt road parks. They get out and he points to a big oak tree and he said, back in nineteen thirty one, a girl I was dating and was found hanged from that tree. And so then he starts telling the story of Luis and mentions that, oh, by the way, they said she was hanged, and that's true, but that's not how she died. She died from oral copulation. She died from asphyxiation. That's how she actually died and

gave some more details. So suddenly, when now I got this guy and he's telling me all this interesting stuff. So I called my friend who used to work with the medical examiner as the assistant, and I said, do you ever hear of cases of oral copulation for death? And she goes, oh, yeah, and with sex workers occasionally that does happen. So that put me into a little

different angle of things. And I called the older gentleman back Tom, and I said, what else can you tell me about your friend Sirell Well, he was arrested when he was seventy years old for having oral copulation with two young girls. Yeah, so he kind of bubbled up to the surface. And the Sheriff's department will not release the records to me, any of their records because it's considered an open case, and under California law they're exempt. They don't have to release records that are for an

open case. But one of the lieutenants in the cold case files would talk to me occasionally about it, and when I mentioned Cyrel Smith, she looked him up and found the notes and basically at the time he did look good for it, but they couldn't prove it in his alibi. By the way, he was by himself walking through Balboa Park. But he wrote to the top of my suspects list absolutely.

he knew the Tauber family. So when the police went to his house, they found all these nude photographs of young women, and they found several of Louise, and she was a year younger even she was sixteen. So they arrested him on a moral charge of obscene photographs. And then they said, and we think you probably killed her and his wife alibied him out. His wife says alibied him out and said, oh no, we were up at this cabin up in the mountains. And they ultimately let

him go on the murder case, if you will. He went to trial and was found guilty, but in jail for six months. While he was in jail, his wife left him divorced him. So I researched the family and found out that herman had a daughter, still alive in her nineties, living in Texas, another marriage, second marriage. I wrote her a letter and I said, hey, doing a history of a murder in the neighborhood that your father lived in back in the thirties before you were born.

Did he ever talk about it? It was a pretty big deal. And I didn't ask any leading questions. I simply said, you know, what did he have to say, if anything about it? And her name is Diane. And Diane wrote me a very nice letter back and said almost the opening line is, well, Professor Kerry Coo, you didn't mention it, but if you think my father killed that little girl, he probably did. And so that kind

of knocked my socks off. And so we conversed back and forth by email and by written letters for six months or so, and she said, the reason I think this is he sexually molested me from the time I was nine until I was seventeen. He beat my mother, and he said that all women were horrors and prick teasers, and she went on and on, which I get into a little bit more in the book. So he needs to say rose right up to the top. I did

ask her. I said, did your father ever have a case where your mom might have alibied him out for something? And she gave me an instance to where, yes, he'd been in a terrible bar fight, almost killed somebody in a neighboring county, came home when the sheriff came to talk to him, she alibied him out and I said, why would your mother do that? But he threatened to kill her, And I think that's what happened with Louise Talbor.

So he had, you know, means motive opportunity. When I really dug deep into the alibi that his wife had provided for the night of the death of Louise, it broke down to they actually got home about nine thirty or ten, and the estimated time of death was around midnight, so he had two hours to potentially meet up with Louise, take her out there, maybe for a photo shoot, you know, in a nude out there, and something went wrong. So he's still right at the top of my list. And

the Sheriff's department still has some of the evidence. And this Lieutenant Lisa Brannon at the Sheriff's Department is pursuing both Virginia Brooks and the Louise Talber case, try to close out the cases. They still have some of the evidence. Ninety some years later.

application to join the Boy Scouts, but it's closed. It's Sunday, and they're sitting up on a wall, adobe wall, and this old Indian village had been part of an exposition out here years before, and one of the boys looks over the wall and sees what they thought was a mannequin for the store, and they just and they go to look at it, and then they realize it's not a mannequin. It's a dead girl. It's a Daniell, dead

young woman. So they run the several blocks to one of the boys' houses and they tell the mom and she at first is incredulous and goes, no, it probably was a mannequin or a dummy. No, mom, this was a dead girl. So she goes with them, walks, you know, puts her dress on, and walks down there, and indeed it is a dead girl. And so she then calls the police from a nearby payphone back when payphones existed, and calls the police and they come out, and now

the investigation starts. The third one in this case, in less than a couple of months of Hazel Bradshaw, who was about twenty two years old, and the police come right away, the newspaper reporters come right away. They photographed the heck out of the scene. There's blood on the ground and they can tell this by visual looking at her on the ground. She's been stabbed multiple times, more than five, more than ten, lots of times. And so that's that's the crime scene, and that's the beginning of

the investigation. Strangely enough, but maybe not for that time period. When they took the body away and they'd taken the photographs, they didn't coordinate off or lead leave somebody there to guard the crime scene. They were done with it, and so it made finding the weapon or getting other information later very very difficult.

or nine months, there were several unsolved murders. And so it was even a feature writer known at the time, and he did a little cartoon and a little article about it and said, oh, yeah, yet another one. These people down in San Diego wouldn't know how to close out a case if you know, their life depended on it. And they even cited Los Angeles Times if I did some police up in Los Angeles saying, yeah, very shoddy work. These people don't know what they're doing. They'll be lucky

if they can solve anything. So did San Diego papers have to write back, you know, and their editorials and everything. No, we're doing everything we can. And you know, this isn't Los Angeles. We do things a little differently down here. So there's just all this spillover in all these cases, but in the Hazel Bradshaw cases, this spillover of why can't San Diego get this right? We thought you were just a laid back kind of town who's killing your

young women. You know what's going on. They never used the word serial killer because it wasn't popular yet, but they did use the word mass murderer a couple of times that maybe one person is doing all these these murders, and you guys down south need to solve it. Yeah.

by foot. He lived downtown, she lived up out of town a little bit, and they went to not one but two movies two different movie houses at popcorn, had some chocolate bars, which came into the autopsy later, and then walked home at eleven o'clock at night. They left a movie theater downtown on a pretty warm evening, and this is unbelievable to most people today, but walked the more than five miles to her house, which they had

done before people saw them along the route. He says he got her home, saw her go in the house, and then he ran to the street car barely caught them twelve oh five streetcar five after midnight, went home. He turned himself in when he was told he was playing cards the morning of her death, that hey, this body had been found in the park and here's her name and all this stuff. He goes, oh my god, that's my girlfriend. So he ran down, turned himself in.

He was kept in jail. He probably was in fact beaten. He was threatened by the chief of police, and at the inquest to the autopsy and inquest, they actually brought him in as a suspect, as a boyfriend and the

last person who'd seen her alive. So he was there with the father, you know, for Hazel, and the police actually wanted him to wear the same clothes he had on because when he was arrested, because there was some blood inside of one of his pockets, and he was dishevelded and he hadn't shaved for several days, and the police wanted him, frankly, to look as bad as he

could to the inquest people. They allowed him to shave, they allowed him to clean his hair, but he wasn't wearing the same shirt, the same tie, the same jacket and the same pants as he walked into the police department in and that swayed some of the adjurors on the inquest that clearly this was the man, This was

the man. So at the inquest she had been stabbed eleven or twelve times, there was some dispute about that, with a two inch wide blade, double sided blade, not single sided, and stillabbed, probably initially standing up and then stabbed after she'd fallen on the ground. And there was no evidence of what they called at the time assault, meaning sexual assault. And so then it moved to trial. He was indicted and put on trial for the murder.

be part of the audience to watch the trial. And there were actually a couple times they had to clear the courthouse because there were too many people trying to see this trial. And the newspapers covered it, including Los Angeles and San Francisco and newspapers, so all this evidence

was brought forth. He admitted, you know that, yeah, he'd been out with her, of course, And partially it came down to what was the color of the tie that he was wearing that night, because the streetcar conductor and some other people said it was one collar, and yet there was no blood on that tie. In his closet. He'd cut himself. He worked in the kitchen of a place of restaurant, basically, and he'd cut himself a couple days before. The prosecutor said, no, that's not from days before,

that's from stabbing for Hazel to death. But his poker buddy said, oh no, three days before the killing. He had bandages on his hands and all of that. So he did and people did it a little bit more back then. His attorney, who was a very good attorney, put him on the stand, and he was a pretty sympathetic witness if you will, said he loved her, No way would he have ever stabbed her to death. She had been seeing some other people and maybe it was

one of those folks. Some neighbors of Hasel said, oh yeah, this is where he gets into the kind of victimology, blaming the victim. Some of the neighbors said, oh yeah, well, we used to see her out in cars late at night. She would go somewhere with men at midnight at one o'clock and drive away with them, and you know, some of the old biddies of the neighborhood really stressed that. The defense said, well, yeah, he dropped her off and

they were done with that date. And then she apparently had some other rendezvous with somebody else and that's who killed her. So trial went on and on and on, and then the jury deliberated less than an hour before they gave their verdict.

I don't think it was even an American person. I think probably a foreign person killed her, because only foreign people kill women with knives. So there was a little bit racial or ethnic undertones to do this this case, if you will. But they felt, the jury felt that she that he had taken in her home. It all made sense. He had time to get back to the streetcar on time, he wasn't covered in blood anywhere. People

had seen them along the route. And so sadly, the DA and the police chief and the major detectives on the case, I had to put their tales between their legs and go on. They were asked by the press a day later, so who are you looking into now? And they said, We're not looking into anyone. This case is over, essentially, so three unsolved murders.

and so they could have. I went to the movie theaters that were still around that Luise Talber had gone too with her friends, and I walked places and so that helped. Then I also realized I grew up here in San Diego. I had walked the very same streets that Hazel and Bread and Moss had walked down in nineteen thirty one, and that I had gone the same high school as Louise, because it's still there and it's an old the oldest high school, and Virginia Brooks walking

out on Euclid Avenue. I used to deliver newspapers out there when I was fourteen thirteen. So there was this almost crescendo of smells and sounds and the streets themselves, some of which had not changed a lot, and I felt very vested in it. The man who wrote The Man from the Train Murder mystery about an axe murderer, he said he got very emotionally vested, and they felt very personal towards these killers or towards the victims. And

that's how I felt. And so part of what I did then was I went back into the manuscript and tried to bring the young women a little bit more back to life, make them more than just victims, or more than just a body on a more slab, or someone you know, being carried by your classmates to your

gravesite practically, because it became very personal. What I also thought is well, back in the day when you pulled into a gas station and gas was twenty cents or thirty cents a gallon, the guy pumping the gas there in my neighborhood in East San Diego could have been the killer.

presentations on this. I've actually been invited by the Sheriff's Department interesting enough to come and give them a presentation. So the book just launched a couple of days ago, and I'm getting some good reviews from different folks. And I think you know, when Dan and I were talking before this this podcast itself, he enjoyed reading it and thought it was pretty well researched and had a good story to it. So I'm glad to get this story

out for these these three young women. And I'm going to go to the park that actually Luise Talber was found hanged in. I'm going to that park in a couple of weeks and giving a presentation there, probably less than three hundred yards from the Oak corow Forers he was found hanged. So I really thank you Dan.