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You are now listening to True Murder the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. San Francisco, a city founded in part by criminals, was once one of the most dangerous cities in America. It's barbary coast was called a unique fromminal district that was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but it possessed more glamour than any other area on the American continent. San Francisco Notorious brings back the glamorous, depravity and noir atmosphere that made it the premier location for murder thrillers
like the Maltese Falcon, Vertigo and Zodiac. This book contains more than twenty compelling tales of serial killers, deadly women, con men, masters of escape, and unsolved mysteries. San Franciscan criminals were as colorful as the city they inhabited. Take William Thornson, a murderous millionaire who hid the nation's largest private armory in his Specific Heights mansion. Then there's Isabella Martin, the murderous Queen of Grudges, who tried to poison an
entire town. Or Ethan McNabb and Lloyd Samsel, the yacht bandits who used a luxurious sloop as a getaway vehicle for their dozens of bank robberies. Most of these unusual cases are largely unknown and have never appeared in book form. Included our cases that are still mysteries today, including the mysterious tale of the Zodiac Killer, complete with a new
analysis and a startling new theory on the murder. The book that we're featuring this evening is Notorious San Francisco, True Tales of Crime, murder and Passion, with my special guest journalist and author Paul Drexler. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Paul Drexler, huh, yes, thank you very much.
It's nice to be here.
Thank you very much for joining us. And incredible collection this certainly is. Now. Tell our audience a little bit about your background and true crime and how you came to write Notorious San Francisco.
Oh, sure. I have been writing about true crime for a long time, and I came to San Francisco in nineteen eighty four, and through one of my pieces, I got to be good friends with Kevin Mullen, who was the ex Deputy police chief of San Francisco, and he wrote a number of books and he had been collecting these things for decades. Uh. We collaborated on a number of things. He probably knew more about San Francisco crime
than anyone else. And I have inherited his collection and his files, which has been a big help in terms of, you know, finding cases. And I've been doing a lot of interviewing of ex cops and things like that. So basically, the Bay Area has been my main area of focus. And it's a great uh, it's a great area to collect interesting crimes.
Right now, let's get right into the collection here with a story about Earl Nelson. And you talk about the background of Earl Nelson. He born and eight young twenty seven. Tell us about this as you write it. You talk about there couldn't be a more apt recipe for basically for disaster. You say he was born in eighteen ninety seven. Tell us about his mother and his father and his earliest upbringing.
Sure well, his mother died of syphilis when he was ten months old. A few months later, his father also died of the same disease, and you know, in terms of creating a serial killer or a psychopath, veneeral disease can definitely add to that. Then he lived with his grandmother and aunt, and they were very strict Pentecostal Christians and they were always, you know, railing about the evils of sex. And Earl was kind of a psychotic prodigy. He was expelled from primary school at the age of seven,
and he had this kind of strange behavior. He would talk to invisible people. He would quote Bible packet passive is about the Great Beast, and then he would also peek at his cousin Rachel, whilst het dressed. Now he developed. He wasn't the big man, but he had large hands and tremendous upper body strains. In fact, he could walk on his hand for blocks. Now, when he was ten, he was hit and dragged by a street car, which cracked his skull and put him in a coma. A
doctor didn't think he'd survived. And now that's another surprisingly high percentage of psychopaths have experienced serious head injuries as they were growing up. So he left school at fourteen. There are a number of manual jobs. He also acquired
veneerial disease in the brothels of the Barbara Coast. And by nineteen he had been in San Quentin, he'd been in the Navy, and he'd been in Napa State Mental Hospital and Napa State he kept escaping and then he'd go back to that estate, and finally the doctors there just threw up their hands. He hadn't improved at all, but they said, oh, he's better, and they just you know, let him go. And they said he was improved. And you know, he spent the rest of his life proving his doctor's wrong.
Right you write that. In nineteen twenty five they finally discharge him, saying he was, as you write, improved for lack of better a better prognosis, they said he was improved. Now in nineteen twenty six, February twentieth, a woman named Clara Newman is sixty years old. And you right as well that after he got out of this prison pardon me, out of the hospital, he married, you know, strangely enough, he married this woman that was fifty eight years old.
This tentacles Undel Spinster. He had these unusual sexual desires or needs. She was not interested. He left that relationship. Now we get to February twenty sixth, the twentieth, nineteen twenty six Tell us what happens where this Earl Nelson is in that he's in a position to meet Clara Newman.
Sure well, there was a landlady named Clara Newman who was showing her attic apartment at her house, and he came in to look at the place. Now, two hours later, her nephew came back and found her strangled and violated body in the basement near the oil furnace. And also a few weeks later, the same thing happened to Laura, who was a sixty five year old landlady in San Jose, and both of the in both of the cases, the
women were sexually attacked after death. So Earl was an acophiliac and this was these were the these killing started what ended up being a nationwide panic, and he was at known as the Strangler at this point and by a few weeks later he killed his third person on Dolores Street in San Francisco, and they started to see the headlines whether they say that San Francisco police have had no one like him to contend with in the
whole history of the city. So he strangled another woman in Santa Barbara a few weeks later and took her jewelry, and you know, more descriptions of him surfaced. I mean, people saw him, but no one was really you know, looking carefully, and they knew that, you know, he was kind of average size. He had his watery blue eyes, a piercing stare, and what they called a ghastly smile on his face. And the newspapers call him the dark strangler or the dark fiend.
At this time, you write about a break in the case in August and again this yes here has gripped his community. And then they find a person named Philip Brown. They pick him up as a vagrant in Needles, California. What happens and why do they think this is a break in the case.
Well, they think it's a break in the case. And you know, it's really hard when the serial killer is killing people he doesn't know and just sort of appears and disappears. But they had a witness this time, this guy William Frainey, who was a fireman, and he identified as a strangler as that he saw him attack this woman, Missus Russell. It was a kind of unusual situation because he saw the attack on Missus Russell as he peeked
through a keyhole in the door. So to reproduce those conditions, they put Brown in a room and they had Frainey peer through the keyhole and that's how he identified Brown. And you know, Brown had a history of epilepsy and attacks. The police chief and district attorney were convinced they had the right guy, but the guy did not meet the physical characteristics. And then more and more they talked to him,
the more they wondered about his mental condition. As the days went on, his whole story unraveled and he was sent to a mental hospital. And you know, the search continued, and it became anyone who moved into town or had a dark complexion, was from another country, who was just unknown,
was automatically a suspect. A few weeks later in Santa Cruz, they arrested this stocky foreigner and they were the lynch mob was threatening him and told Martin Newman, who was the guy who was the nephew of the first woman killed came down and said, no, that's not the guy. So these continued. Nelson returned to San Francisco. He strangled this woman who had a house for sale, and he
left her naked body under the bed. The next day though, there was another woman, missus Murray, who was eight months pregnant, was approached by him, and there's something about him that put her at just made her nerve. So this is also, you know, a good thing to remember that if you have a bad feeling about someone, listen to it. So the whole time she was showing him through the house and he was asking all kinds of questions about its construction, but she stayed six to eight feet away from him.
And then finally he was going to leave, she turned to open the door and he attacked her, and she fought back. She raked her nails against his face and made it to the street. He fled, but she was able to give the police a very, you know, clear description of him. And you know, one of the reasons that he was asking all about the house. Part of his method of operating was he would start asking about the house so he could get the landlady downstairs away
from anyone else. You know, he'd ask about the furnace of this and that, and once he got her into the furnace room, that was it. That's when he'd kill her.
You right about and sorry, shoot me? So are you're writing about them? You read about the media being very confident once they had that description. Oh yeah, this woman that escaped his clutches.
The San Francisco Chronicle. Not one of their better predictions. They they said, description of strangler now complete arrest certain they were, let's say it was overly optimistic. It took about fifteen more bodies and a year and a half for this to happen. And then he started going east.
Where did he go? You talk about Oregon and Washington, Yeah, was the.
They went to our killing and killed a woman in the city, I'm sorry. And then he started going east. He killed a woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He killed a woman in Kansas City, and then the next day he killed and raped a woman and her eight month old son. Then he disappeared again, and by this time the press had come up with a new name for him, which was the gorilla killer, because he had very large hands and kind of his posture was kind of ape like,
and he was in all the newspapers. In fact, in Philadelphia, where he also struck, they featured a three page, you know, column entitled how to escape from the Strangler with photos, you know, instead of showing you what to do. Then he started going west. He went to Buffalo, killed someone, killed two women in destroyed, and he killed a woman
in Chicago. And by this time police were after him everywhere he you know, remember that pretty much every city he did this there would be this huge search of the entire a populace. But by this time it was getting pretty hot for him, so he decided to go into Canada when she did.
Now you write about June fifth, You write about June fifth, because this acceleration, his frenzy is killing frenzy. May thirtieth, June first, June third, now June fifth. He hitchhikes to Winnipeg, Canada, and as you're right, it's the third largest city in Canada at that time, gets a job as a construction laborer. What's his alias? And again, what does he do once he's in another country and on the run from the US officials.
Sure, he had a number of bailisas this one was Roger Wilson. And the other thing to remember is that he knew the Bible, and he posed, that's a very religious man. And in fact he told this woman, I want quiet surroundings where I can of reflect. A man with Christ in his heart need to worry about nothing else. She was very impressed. Missus August killed with his piety. But two days later, this fourteen year old girl who
was telling art artificial flowers on the street disappeared. The next day, Nelson went to another rooming house and he asked for a room. He said he didn't have any money, but that he'd do odd jobs to pay. Now. When her husband came back, she was missing. Emily was missing, the landlady, and a few hours later he discovered her body underneath their bed. And this was really when police
really started mobilizing. They realized that he was in the city and they knew more about him, so they they started checking every boarding house and when they reached Missus Hall, she described her tenant, Roger Wilson as a short, dark religious man, and they searched his room and found the decaying body of Lowell Cowan under his bed. So this really kind of exploded everything.
You talk about the national response in Canada to this, and the news of this broadcast throughout the country. But you write about that the strangler heads west to the capital of the neighboring province, which is Regina, and he rents a room from Missus Rowe. What does he do in Regina while authorities still think he's somewhere in Winnipeg and they're looking everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, so, I mean it's a big country, so he's moving around.
Well.
Missus Rowe had a nine year old daughter and the next morning he bought her an ice cream cone and he tried to lure her into going into the side street with him, and she made definitely the greatest decision of her life by refusing to do that. Obviously that did save her life. But by this time he had been tracked into Regina and searchers were pouring into the city. So he went back to Manitoba and he headed south.
They figured that he was going to head back to the United States and try to get a trained.
So he's sighted about forty miles north of the border by a constable. And you described that it's just a little small town and he's alerted that there's a stranger in town. What happens in this exchange between this constable and Earl Nelson.
Yeah, So this constable there was this guy, Constable Gray, of Killarney, which is a town of a thousand, very close to the border, and there was a train station in the town. So Constable Gray talked to this guy who gave his name as Virgil Wilson. He agreed to come to the police station, and he was so relaxed that Gray could hardly believe he was the wanted man. But Gray took away his belt, shoes, it socks and locked them in the cell and handcuffed him to the bars.
And then he went to the next room to get a phone and he called Inspector Smith was in Winnipeg, was heading was the overall head of the search. He called Wilson and he told him the name is Alias, and Wilson said, don't let him out of your sight. I'll be there tomorrow morning. And Inspector Smith assembled fifty police to go with him on a special train. So when Gray gets back, he found the cell door open
and handcuffed dangling from the bar. Nelson had picked the locks with a mail file that he found on the floor. So you know, the town was gripped by panic. Most of the women and children spent the night in a church, guarded by dozens of armed men. It was the five hundred men posse going from house to house. But he spent a peaceful night hidden in the loft of a farmist barn just a block from the police station. Incredible and yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
So the next morning you say that they had been staking out train stations because they felt that that's the way he would get back into the US. Where they correct and what happens at this train station the next morning?
Okay, Well, you know, he gets out of his hiding place and he makes a break for the train station and the train is pulling into town and a mob of people see him. They chase him, a guy grabbed him, but he broke free. The train doors opened and he ran in. Unfortunately for him, the train was the train commandeered by Inspector Smith. There were fifty police who poured out of the train and they engulfed him. They took him back on the train and headed back to Winnipeg.
And you know, there was a crowd that would very much have liked to Lynchion. But they did get back to Winnipeg and after some question he admitted that he was Earl Nelson.
You read about the extraordinary search for the Dark Strangler. You say it occupied more police in more cities than any other case in history. San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and then Winnipeg. What was his fate in nineteen twenty eight in Winnipeg, what was his Oh?
Well, they finally got him and he was hung in Winnipeg after killing about twenty three women, most of them landladies. So I would say after that, the land ladies all over the Western hemisphere were very grateful.
Absolutely absolutely. Now let's talk about another story from this collection, The Grandma from Hell and yeahs opened with this with the detective John Kaufman investigating the experiance of a Santa Rosa motel owner. Mildred Arnason tell us about John Kaufman's encounter with the Grandma from Hell, iyber Kroger.
Yeah, Yeah, iber Kroger was. I would call her a psychopaths psychopath. She was, you know, she looked very unsuspicious. She was sort of middle age, short very dowdy clothes, squint In and I. But she loved to talk. There's this cascading stream of words and sentences. She talked about a psychic, she's very into spiritualism. She talked about how good she was a business, and also her health. She was always thing wrong with her. At this time, she was talking about he was in a bus accident in
San Francisco and she was crippled. You know, So if you talk to her, you think, you know, here's this woman practically on her left legs, and she'd say these crazy things, but you know, you sort of think she was a harmless person. It's like, you know, the scariest movies, at least that I've seen, are the ones that move all of a sudden, everything's normal, and then the next minute, your uncle Tom, who seems like such a nice guy's
growing fangs, you know. And this was Iva Kroger. You know, she'd be very sweet, and then the next minute she's got a gun pointing at your heart and she's threatening your life, and you know that she means it. So Coffin talks to her. He was investigating the disappearance of a motel owner in Santa Rosa, and this woman, Mildred Armsen.
She was a real estate investor who owned this motor home called the Rose City Motorhome with her ex husband, and Mildredy was a Rosicrucians and she told her family that she was going to South America with another spiritualist named Ivy Long. So when Kaufman went to the motel, he found iv Along was running it, and she denied that she was ever going to accompany Mildred. She said that Mildred somewhere in South America, and you know, she
claimed to be a psychic. He was suspicious, but she showed the deed that transferred the motel and it was genuine. So there was nothing much to do at that time. But Mildred hadn't had a family of sisters and brothers, and they kept calling police and they kept they were very suspicious. They got a letter supposedly from Mildred that that appeared to them to be like a phony. And I've a her, Jay, who was Mildred's husband, disappeared a few months later, so and Iva had this wild story
about where he went. And they continued to investigate, but they really couldn't do much until I've had a dispute with a guy trying to collect an overdue bill. And this this really revealed a lot about here he was. He was a guy who sold water softening sistence, and she convinced him to loan her money, and finally he asked for his money back, and she took him on a wild goose chase to all the places where she said she had money, but whenever she got there, there
was some other reason. So finally he goes back to the motel and he did a very smart thing. He was with his wife, and he told his wife, wait about ten minutes and then come in and get me. So he goes into her office and she puts a gun from under the desk and points it at his heart, and she says, sign this receipt that says paint and full. And you know, if you don't, we'll carry you out of here feet first, and no one will ever know
what happened to you. At that point, his wife knocked at the door and he was able to get away, and police recalled, but she just disappeared. And they learned that I Belong was not her real name. Her real name was Iva Kroger, and she's been married three times. She had been a grifter, So that's that's who she was. And you know, she was just a real con artist.
She would tell people she had lakmis, she'd go and blind, she'd get you know, she'd get money for various things, and she was suing the bus company.
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You right about that. She was on the run from insurance and investigators and their creditors and so they were taking out racehorse tracks and astrologers to try to find her, and they finally tracked down her son in Fort Myers, Florida. What did her son tell police about his mother?
Yeah, this is a scary story. He said his mother came to him and she hadn't contacted him in years, and she said that she was a wealthy widow and she owned a motel in San Diego, and she offer her son a job at his motel, and then she said, well, you know, when I take your kids, who we're two boys, three and four, for a little overnight trip, and he agreed, and then she and the boys disappeared, and there's this nationwide search, and her husband had no idea where she went.
You know, one of the things about the book is I have a lot I talk about the addres us as the places where these crimes happened, and most of those places are still there, and most of the people who live in those places have no idea what happened
because so long ago. So the police were suspicious. They heard that she had hired someone to dig a hole in the basement of her house, and they got a search warrant and they began excavating the basement and they discovered the body of Major Arnsen, and next to him, they discovered the body of Mildred Arnsen, and that's when they arrested ralph On suspicious and murder, and then her grandchildren were found wandering in the streets in Oakland. She
just abandoned them. So there was an all points bulletin out for her. And there was a couple in San Diego, a couple of Jehovah's witnesses who met her, and they noticed her resemblance to the photographs in the newspapers about this case, and they told the FBI, who captured her.
When they do arrest her, despite all this evidence, despite the bodies buried in the home, and Ralph's insistence that he didn't know anything about this whatsoever, him being a much older seventeen years older than her, what did she say in response to these charges? What was her excuse?
Yeah, well, this is the thing you could never you know, she had an answer for everything. You know, she says, Oh, a blackmail was responsible somehow, you know, a black man that broke into the house and buried these two people. Obviously, it didn't it didn't convince the police. And you know, she and her husband were charged with murder and it you know, it's really hard to claim that you're innocent
when the bodies are burying your basement. So the defense was going with that she's not legally guilty because she's crazy. And she once told someone, if you act crazy, you can get away with anything because people will think you're eccentric. And that became her courtroom strategy. I mean, I don't know there's ever been such a crazy trial, you know, because normally, you know, the judges in charge and people talk when they're spoken to. She just said whatever she
wanted whenever she wanted. She interrupted, she argued with witnesses, she threw things, she sang, she fell asleep in the middle of the trial. She did all these crazy things to convince the jury that she was crazy.
You're right that in nineteen sixty six, the press she had some attention. In nineteen seventy one she got some attention again for writing poetry from prison. What about parole and nineteen seventy five, yeah.
Well, you know, she was originally sentenced to death and then it was changed to life imprisonment, and the judge said, I don't this person should never be released, but she was. You know, she is in prison. She convinces people that she's legally blind, she's you know, she writes poetry. She does all these things and to endear herself and after about fourteen years in nineteen seventy five, because of good behavior in the California sentencing laws, she was paroled. She
became a scientologist and took classes in sociology. She said that she wanted to be a nurse. That was always she used to pose as a nurse. That was her favorite dodge. So she goes to nursing school and she used to visit her brothers in Florida. Now in nineteen eighty six, she meets this nurse on a bus and she steals the nurse's identification and get the series of jobs in Florida.
She did have. Her criminal career did not end there as well. You talk about threats to her nephew's business partner as well.
Yeah, yeah, her nephew's her nephew's son drowned in a swimming pool, and I have a you know, she was uh psychotic really, and she blamed that the son's death on her nephew's business partner, you know, on the grounds that if he hadn't been to work, he would have prevented the death. And she called her husband's business card her her nephew's business partner, and threatened to kill him. And she said, if you don't believe me, check the records. I've killed before. So she even conned a cop into
giving her a lift. When the when the police finally realized who she was, she had already left the area and she was She was sighted in Santa Rosa years later, but no one. She really pretty much disappeared. Uh and they only found about her death. She died in Massachusetts in the year two thousand and they only found out about that after she died. So who knows what she did before she died, but she was quite an extraordinary criminal in person.
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saves you time and money when you're shopping online. Another incredible story in your collections of stories from San Francisco is one called Manhunt the Joe Tankle story and this is go back in time a little bit to September nineteen twenty three and a couple guys Joe Tanco twenty four years old in Floyd Hall twenty one tell us a little bit about their backgrounds and how they eventually meet up and then begin this incredible crime spree.
Sure, well, at this time they were robbers and they fatally shot the police chief of San Bruno and they were caught later when Tanker wrote a later to his brother in which he admitted to doing forty robberies into killing the police chief. Now, his brother, as a good citizen, gave this to the police, told police his life Floyd Tanko who threatened his brother's life. But they were very young guys and they pled guilty, so they weren't given
the death pendant. They received a life sentence instead.
Now you talk about them en route to San Quentin, they made their first escape attempt. Tell us about that first escape attempt and if that just waded them from pursuing escape again.
No, there was a sheriff saw what they were doing and stopped them. Now, you know escape artists are you know, it's they're very glamorous because they're doing things that are so difficult and being foiled did nothing to deter them. In fact, a year later, they picked a lock. This is in San Quentin, and they slid down the jute rope and while police and posse searched for them, they broke into a number of stores in Petalum and Hillsburg. They got food, guns, supplies, and then they went on
this wild crime spring. So they carjacked Santa Rosa rancher. On April fourteenth, they held up a Sacramento cab driver. They had a big shootout with Sacramento police. And then a few days later, while police were staking out the highways around Sacramento, they robbed this guy's store, killing him in the process, and police from the neighboring communities fluttered in, but they couldn't be found. They robbed a couple of
cab drivers. They kidnapped this guy and his four year old daughter and got into a gunfight with the police, and they severely wounded a police officer. And then they drove on to the car ran out of gas and they fled on foot and there was a massive man hunt. It was I think the largest man hunt in California history. A thousand armed men following them.
Wow. Now, what's the next thing they do in May? Involving a carjacking? Again? What do they carjack this time?
Well? This time, yeah, I mean, this time they carjacked a US mail truck in the town of gold Run and they made this drive down the mountain to its Sacramento and they got a flat tire and they abandoned the truck and they disappeared into the mountain area. Two hundred deputies surrounded the area. I mean, the police are going crazy because they have put so many resources. They
couldn't understand how these guys kept slipping through them. But Tank one Hall stole another car and they came back to Sacramento on May fourth.
There's a big reward to say, six thousand dollars at that time in the twenties. What do Hall and what do they decide to do? Hall in Tanco to avoid Well.
I decided, you know that they probably should split up. You know, the chances would be better they were single. And what happened to Hall was, you know, he was looking for a place to hide. He talked to a guy, an ex con he knew, and he was hiding in that CON's room. But the con turned him in to the police for the reward money. Tanco disappeared, and by this time they were just, you know, almost heroes. They
certainly were celebrities. And Hall was going on trial, got all this great press, you know, captured desperado sobs that mentioned of his family is one of the subheads, and they keep searching every rooming house in Sacramento. But Tanco goes to San Francisco. He carjacks, he kidnaps a guy in Golden Gate Park. The guy juves to North Beach and Tanko jumps out and disappears again. But meanwhile Hall
is indicted for the murder. For the murders, he's committed, He's convicted and sentenced to death, but the case is appealed and he gets a new trial, and somehow, in nineteen twenty six he's acquitted of the shooting of Nun.
Wow. Now you talk about the time David manhunt for Joe Tanco. Yeah, and you say he was living in Denver.
Yeah, he's living in Denver. He's got a girl friend there who doesn't know his real identity. He's telling her that he's a San Francisco businessman. And I suppose you could say that's true, only his business is robbing and murder. You know that fear. I mean, there's a whole headline about Canko invades, like one person invades the whole city.
But after living in Denver and doing all these criminal things, he decides to go back to San Francisco in October nineteen twenty six to see his other girlfriend who knows who he really is. And in November, on November thirteenth, there was this police sergeant Vernon van Maitre. He's got this order to arrest this guy, Willie de Bartlin with a Lucky landslide.
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This guy in as a gang had committed assault on a man and his wife and This is at thirteen seventy three in the Callish Discreet, which is still there. So he didn't, you know, expect a lot of trouble, but he brought along a few other cops to block the other EXIX in case they decided to make a run for it. So Maitre raises the window. He comes in. He tells the bartman, you know, hands up, the building is around it. Come up with your hands out, and
department stands up and says I can't. He's got me covered, and as Van Matro, the cop, enters the room, he gets shot by Joe Tanko, who has been hiding in the apartment, and Tanko runs up the stairs. As he comes up the stairs, he comes face to face with Detective Sergeant Rooney, who asks him to surrendered. I wouldn't have done that, but anyway, he asks him to surrender. Tanko's fires, he hits Rooney in the stomach, but Rooney
fires back five times and he kills Tanko instantly. And when the news of the shooting got out, there were huge crowds and twenty thousand people visited the Carner's office to view Tanco's corpse.
Wow, now you get back to Hall being acquitted at the second trial or a pardon me, he has that second trial. So what happens amazingly at this second trial and why.
Yeah, well you'd think, okay, this is it, but he is acquitted in the second trial. They decide not to retry humph because he's already serving a life sentence for the first murder. Right, So for the next ten years in the nineteen thirties, he tries to escape every few years and he's caught, but gradually is we'll get to nineteen fifty six. Now this is thirty years after the robbers and killings. He's finally let out of prison on parole. And you know these he had a lot of charisma,
and that's often true these guys. So he gets out of jail and amazingly enough, this guy Hall, who killed the police chief, killed an other guy, shot, committed a hundred robberies, armed robberies. He gets a full parton in nineteen seventy two, with the help of the lobbyist who fell under his charm and was Ronald Reagan who gave
him the pardon. I'm sure Reagan knew, you know, didn't know really his background, but you know, he went to this this place called the Brass Rail, which is a hangout the lobbyists, and he gets to know everyone and within an hour and everyone really likes him, and very young, he gets a full partner and dies, you know, without a record.
Quite extraordinary, incredible. You talked about too, that incredible the exchange where he goes to that brass Rail for an hour and charms these people enough to get incredibly a full pardon from Governor Ronald Reagan. Incredible.
Yeah, it's yeah, I wonder what he said, but you know, there CoP's a great storytellers and so a criminals, so I'm sure he had great presence. He's a good looking guy, and you know, I think he just wowed them and they were I think they found him so interesting and really didn't think about what he had done or it was so long ago. You know, this is like a different person facing him. But whatever he said, it certainly worked.
M HM. Tell us a little bit about Ethan McNabb and Lloyd Samsel, the yacht Bandits, and what was it about this story that was so remarkable for you to include in this. Tell us a little bit about this pair.
Sure, McNabb and Lloyd Samsel. They were two of the most extraordinary men that i've a criminal that have ever read about it, because they were brilliant, they were talented. They could do you know, they were expert sailors, they were expert riders. They could pretty much do anything. They could even make a gun out of spare parts. But there are these two guys who would never go straight. They liked that life. They liked the craziness that went
along with them. In fact, Ethan McNabb at the age of nine, he was living in Deadwood, South Dakota, and he was already playing hooky. He was living in a cave. He was, you know, committing little burglaries, you know. At the age of nine, he gets sent to the reform school and he and Samsel meet in nineteen twenty two when they're both sent to San Quentin for a number of bank rubberies, and they decide to partner up when they get out, which is about nineteen twenty six. And
they are very good at what they do. They are bank robbers, and they bought a yacht with some of there they robbed well over one hundred banks and they bought a yacht with some of the money. They made and then they pretended to be these wealthy yachtsmen and they knew how to sail the yacht and they would take thee out to a city, rob the bank, get back on the yacht, sail down to Pacific. They rob banks from Vancouver to San Diego.
What was what was part of the lure or part of me the charm of these two people. Once the media caught wind of this entire this duo's adventures, well.
They were they were very suave, they were great dressers. It was well, you know, Lloyd Samcil had something. He had real charisma because one of the people he robbed, This is around nineteen twenty two. In fact, the president of the bank that he robbed that he personally held a gun to, wrote to Samsel's father and said, well, I don't think, you know, I don't think he's really a criminal. He seems like, you know, if he gets
a break, I'm sure he'll go straight. And you know that takes a lot of charisma to to get someone on your side who you've pointed a gun at. So they definitely had something, and they were also very very smart, and they immediately you know, decided to escape. They were not going to stay in jail. And Lloyd Samsel came up with one of the most amazing plans that I have ever heard of, as what he did was he
designed a hiding space. It was about eight by ten feet that had food, water, even had a battery powered flashlight. And his idea was that they were going to hide in the prison. And then they figured, okay, the you know, the guards are going to search like crazy for a few days. Then they'll figure, okay, these guys got out of prison, and they were looking everywhere else for them, and then kind of when the heats off a little bit, they will get out of their hiding place and escape.
And to add to their odds, they bribed a couple of the prison officials to let them out. But they were double cross by these prison officials, and after nine days, the prison officials led you know, the warden to where they were. Of course, they never said they had been brought. They said, oh, we just discovered this, and they were just in time because they were almost dead from lack
of air. But they were still there and they were you know, of course beaten and putting solitary for a long time, but that did not stop them After that, they there was a plot that they had to someone to smug a lot of guns, and finally, after about three attempts, the warden decided to separate them and they sent McNabb to San Quentin and Samsell estate in Fulsom.
Now that but that didn't stop them from trying to escape separately.
Did it, No, it didn't. In fact, they the first It was Samsol in the machine shop. I don't know how he did it, but he actually manufactured a working
firearm and ammunition. I don't know if he made the ammunition and where he got it, but he did definitely made two working firearms, and he and this other guy decided, you know, to escape, and they had this plan to lure the warden into the building where they told him, and the warden felt that something was wrong and he refused to come in and he surrounded the place and when they were about to be captured, Samson's partners just
shot himself, killed himself with the weapon that they had manufactured. Now, a year after that, McNabb did exactly the same thing. He had actually more guys. He made a gun, made a number of guns. He had about ten people involved in the break and while he was doing the break, he accidentally shot and killed a prisoner, and this was also foiled. They was a foggy night and they were carrying this ladder and he was dressed in the guard's uniform, but the guard up in the tower didn't believe him,
and they were captured. And because of there was a law that if you are involved in an escape and someone dies, it's a capital offense, right, and he was sentenced to death. But in his last week he wrote he wrote a book that he gave to his lawyer and very cool character. And you know he he read a poem before his executed and that was that's how he went. Lloyd lived on for years after that.
M you say that and they write that he you write. The night before his execution, Samsel talked to reporters and they said, they say, I've led a wasted life, but I have a son. He's six foot three and one hundred and seventy pounds, he's married, got two kids, he's in the service. So I have left something good. And he turned to the nearly one hundred witnesses. What did he do at that execution? That was interesting?
He winked, you know, they had style if nothing else, and you know, they were quite extraordinary people. He there's a lot more than he did. He managed to get out of the road when he was on during the war and visit his girlfriend. But yeah, they had a lot of guts and they had a lot of style. But they both were executed by the state. He and Carol Chessman actually running the death row at that time.
They certainly didn't.
Sure the will.
It's incredible you write too about the skill sets of both of these people. And again when we mentioned earlier about how some people theorized well that if they would have just had some opportunities, they would have led a life on an alternative to their criminal life. But as it chose in this case, they had quite a bit of skill set. And despite that, Yeah, yeah, and.
This guy Willie Sutton, who was very famous bank robber and escape artists, said that, you know, I was never more alive than when I was robbing a bank. I loved everything about it. And even even if he got a big a few weeks later he'd start casing the next one. It was a thrill, you know that they were that they were after and there was no way that they were going to uh stay law abiding. It wasn't didn't give them enough kicks.
MH. I want to thank you Paul for coming on and talking about Notorious San Francisco True Tales of crime, murder and passion. Uh. Do you have a website that people might take a look at their Facebook page? Tell us about that.
Yes, there's a website. It's called Crook's Tour. And then my book has a website, it's called San Francisco Notorious. You can get it on Amazon. And I actually do occasional crime tours of San Francisco, so you can check the website for any future ones.
Also, just want to ask you about the fantastic trading cards.
Oh yeah, well I've I've created these trading cards. I figured it would be you know, nice to have cards like you know, like baseball cards, but also to do the stats. So, for example, I have a guy named Chicken Divine who looking at his police record, he was arrested seventy nine times in five years. Wow. And I figured out how many times he was arrested, how many times he was convicted, you know, and came out with
a criming average and all of that. They're in this These cards are half of the cards are people who I write about in the book. There's a total of ten, and you definitely learn about a lot of interesting people. And I would say I think three or four of them are women. So San Francisco has a great tradition also women murderers. We're of course very proud of that. Also, yes, yes.
Absolutely, Again I want to thank thank you very much Paul Drexler for coming on and talking about notorious San Francisco true Tales of crime, murder and passion. You have a great Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Okay, thank you, good night here