THE ALASKAN BLONDE-James T. Bartlett

victims of a brutal home invasion. Blonde, glamorous, and twenty years younger than Cecil, police were immediately suspicious of Diane's account, and the investigation soon turned toward her alleged lover, black musician Johnny Warren, who had left town the night of the murder. The scandal hit the pages of Newsweet Life, Jet In the Pulp detective magazines, and nearly seventy years later, journalist James T. Bartlett uncovers new evidence, including an unpublished memoir,

unseen photographs, and re examines the FBI files. He tracks down and interviews the people close to Cecil, Diane Johnny, and the mysterious third suspect, dance instructor William Columbany, to reveal the stir of the most notorious and baffling murder in the history of Fairbanks. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Alaskan Blonde Sex Secrets and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America, with my special guest, journalist and author James T. Bartlett. Welcome to the program, and

thank you very much for this interview. James T.

It had a connection to the crime, and I wrote wrote the entry for the book, and I never really quite forgot about it, and I started to look into the story because, as some of the readers might see if they read the book, you know the pictures of Diane Well, she was so glamorous and it was such a fifties film noir story that I just assumed, after I'd read some of the newspaper reports, that there must be a book, and I thought, I want to read

that book. I want to find out what happened. And then I found out there was no book, and then I found out there wasn't really anything other than the newspaper coverage at the time. But the newspaper coverage at the time was quite extensive all the way across America, in other countries as well, in the UK, in Australia, it got as far as that, and I realized that it was quite a sensational story from what was then

a territory. Alaska was a territory then, it was not part of the US, and people really didn't know a lot about Alaska, myself included, and that just sent me off down a rabbit hole to try and find out what happened, not only with the murder, which was never solved, but also what happened to the people, even specifically the

young son that Cecil and Diane Wells had. They had a young son who was, of course, you know, an orphan by the age of four, and I wanted to find out what happened to him, just purely, I guess out of curiosity, and because it was such a big story, I assumed there would be something somewhere about it, even

though it was seventy years ago and there wasn't. And then the first contacts I managed to make through Google and through Facebook were with a couple of family members, And what I found out very quickly was that nearly all the family members who were involved that would be Settle's family. He'd been married four times previously, he had a number of children, and Diane, who had been married previously before, she also had two children as well from

a previous marriage. And the Johnny Warren who you mentioned, who was charged alongside Diane with the murder, he had been married several times. I didn't know whether he had any children and so forth, and I did speak to some of them, and they all came back to me and said, we really don't know what happened. It was really sort of brushed under the carpet. We never really found out what happened. Even amongst the families. Privately, they really had no idea what had happened and felt that

it had been just forgotten as a story. But of course it had had repercussions forever, because you know, the children were now grown up adults with grandchildren of their own, and they weren't able to tell their grandchildren much, you know, about their parents or or their grandparents, because it just wasn't simply talked about.

She's very glamorous, and as pretty much everybody said to me, she was very much the trophy wife. It seemed to be very quick romance, a quick marriage. But he was extremely influential with an Anchorage and then further into Fairbanks. He had an enormous amount of contracts and associations with some of the major motor manufacturers, so it was general motors and Chevy. And this is not just cars, it would also be industrial machines and tractors. So he was

a big player within that. He was also an investor, very much so within Fairbanks, which at the time was a small city. You know, it's a small city now, it was very small then. So he was involved in the very famous hot springs that they have in Fairbanks. He'd also invested in some of the first developments in Hawaii, an apartment building complex which still got built, still exists today. He was an investor in that. He was a big flagwayver. Locally,

he was involved in the Chamber of Commerce. He flew a lot across Alaska because Alaska was trying to become a state, and that involved a lot of meetings over many years, and so he was enormously important and influential. So when he was shot in his bed in his house, that was a big scandal. It was a big crime, and there had been a couple of similar other crimes in Fairbanks in recent months, and it looked like crime

was a real problem. Crime is always a problem anywhere in most cities, as we know, but when you have a territory that's trying to become a state. One of the things that they look to is law and order and crime. And if famous, wealthy businessmen are getting murdered in their beds or getting murdered by robbers in their houses, that doesn't look like that doesn't look particularly good.

tallest buildings in the Fairbanks. He banged on her door and she says to the neighbor, call the police, says, what's been hurt. The police arrived very quickly. The police station isn't far like I said. It's a small city. This is within downtown. And she says, she tells the police that two men broke in late late at night, in the early hours. She woke up, woke up in bed. There were two men standing in the doorway. She tried to get out. One of them grabbed her, bashed her

over the head. She unconscious. She heard some noises and when she woke up, Cecil had been shot in the bed. Money had been taken, jewelry had been taken. The house was the apartments there were two apartments, actually joined apartments. Was in a state and Cecil was dead. And that was when she ran for help.

This was going to be a big case. It's a career case. And he talks to Diane and he talks about what's happening, and she gave a statement. She spoke to the newspapers, and it was reported several times that the previous evening she and Cecil had been out to see a movie. They'd gone out for drinks. Before they'd gone out to see a movie, they'd had a late dinner guest who was a friend of Cecil's, Herbert mansing.

She vomited. She vomited on either I guess in the toilet on her pajamas anyway, or her night dress, and took them off and changed into another into a set of pajamas, into a set of Cecil's pajamas. She said that happened during the night. And then there was the home invasion, which was she said it was two men. She couldn't tell anything about them. They were dressed in black, they had black gloves on, masks on. She couldn't tell

anything about them at all. So when she was being questioned the next day, she was told that Cecil was dead, but she didn't believe it. She kept insisting that he'd be taken to hospital, but the doctor came and immediately declared him dead. Tried to treat her told her that she needed to go to hospital. She went to hospital, and again this is the hospital is very close by, just across the river Gina. She was taken to hospital.

A friend of hers walked over the bridge to meet her at the hospital and they basically took her statement at once. She had recovered in the hospital, and she said pretty much what I've said before. But there were certain things about the crime scene that we would certainly now think would possibly didn't add up so much. Like Cecil's wallet was outside on the street, which might make sense if you know it had been stolen, but it

was empty, It was right out on the street. There was like a sleeping cap you know that people used to wear. His a was there was outside, and it just seemed to be a little less than convincing from the beginning, mainly because, as I point out in the book, you know that they were on the eighth floor of the northward building, and usually burglars don't go to the top floor of a building to randomly try and get

into an apartment building. They're going to stay, usually on the ground floor, so that they can get away quickly.

For example, the police extensively questioned the neighbors, all the people on that floor, some of the people on the floor underneath, and as witness statements and winness gathering often does revealed some other things about the Wells settlment, Diane Wells, and about their life together, and what the neighbors had seen and heard, both on the night of the murder and also at other times, and that seemed to indicate that perhaps Cecil and Diane had had a bit of

a rocky marriage, perhaps that there had been reports and the neighbors told stories of rows, possibly more than rows happening, a lot of screaming, that their son, whose name was Mark, crying, they'd heard the soun crying a lot, and it just seemed to be that possibly Danforth and the other investigating officers. There was also a US Marshal Frank Worth, who became quite important for the story.

the side of the head from relatively close range. And they found another bullet later, which was a little problematic for the investigation because it was found, you know, in the bed, and you know, they should have found that initially, but they never managed to find and they tried. The actual case or the case file, the FBI file that I got ran up until nineteen sixty, late nineteen sixty, which is six seven years after the murder, and they

tried several times. They sent several guns that they found in Fairbanks. There was one that they found in the basement of the club. There was one of two that I don't know where they came from, but they were tested. There was another one that they found at length from somebody who they said had sold and bought a weapon, and it was possible that Johnny Warren, the black musician who was allegedly Diane Wells's lover, he may have owned

that gun. At the time they tested all these guns, all the guns came back as not being the one that matched the weapon, and they had enough evidence from the casings to be able to match the gun to the bullet, but they never found the gun.

especially in Fairbanks. You know, there was a very large military population, a lot of contractors, a lot of miners as well as there's still gold and mineral mining going on and various other heavy industries. So there were a lot of men in Fairbanks, a lot. Heavily outnumbered the female population, and that meant lots of bar and lots of drinking, and lots of entertainment, and usually at that time, and entertainment meant there was a live band, and so

Johnny Warren was one of these musicians. He got a lot of work, He played a lot of instruments, even sang as well. But Dan Forth, it was actually Dan Force, didn't get the call. It was actually Frank Worth, who was a US marshal. He got a call a tip off and I found out later during my research who was from. But he got an anonymous tip off, or at least the tip off wasn't mentioned as to who it was, saying that the police needed to look into

Dan Wells and maybe her connection to Johnny Warren. And then it emerged that Johnny had certainly been seen the night of the murder, you know, as a lot of other people had been, but he'd actually left town the night of the murder, and that was something that seemed to as I'm sure it would to anyone, certainly to Chief of Police Dan Forth, that seemed suspicious, and they put out a well, not an arrest on the wire, but be on the lookout for him and his car

because he had left Fairbanks that night and he was driving all the way down to Oakland in California, which is is a very long way. And I know we might think, well, why didn't he take the train, or you know, why didn't he fly? This is the nineteen fifties. Yet none of that was was an option. I mean, driving even wasn't the best option, but mainly the way to get around the Alaska and a lot of the

cases now is still to fly. So he drove down and they were looking for him straight away, but by the time that had gone out, he was already into Canada in a way, so that looked somewhat suspicious, But they had no proof that they had a relationship of

any kind. And that was the interesting thing specifically, or at least almost the most scandalous thing, was that the suggestion that you know, she was a married white woman married to a very influential white businessman, would be having an affair with a black man who was also married.

That was almost more of a scandal than the actual murder, and that was what the police especially were very keen to try and prove, to prove a connection between the two of them, and as indeed they did, or at lest they certainly felt they had enough, because just a couple of weeks after the murder, Diane and Johnny were both indicted for the murder of Cecil Wells, which sounds logical, but of course, as Diane's lawyer pointed out immediately, how can two people be indicted for one you know, for

a gunshot. You know, they both didn't have their fingers on the trigger. It was, but they were both indicted together, and as the story progressed, and as there then the arrest warrants went out. Johnny was actually he went voluntarily to the police in Oakland, where he was at his sister's house. It was an innocent trip. He'd actually gone

with several other people. It was just coincidental, and he spoke to the police at length and very much clearly confirmed that he and Diane Wells were in a relationship, had been in a relationship, and they had met a number of times at the apartment in the Northward building, also at another place called the Polaris Building, which is also still there or though it's about to be demolished in fair Banks. That was in the apartment of a

friend of Johnny's. He let them meet there. Now they obviously this was the nineteen fifties and they didn't use terms, but intimate relations was the term that was used. And there were also which I put some of them in the book, and they were in the FBI files and they were mentioned in court. There was also some letters that Diane had sent to Johnny, and you know, they showed that she was obviously very keen on him and was quite smitten. The question of whether it was reciprocated,

it didn't really seem to matter. The fact is that became more of the focus than almost the murder because dan Forth and the other investigating agencies, which were the Marshals and the territorial the territorial police, they began to see fairly clearly early on. They began to certainly move in the direction that this looks like most domestic murders,

one partner has killed the other. But in this case there were other possible theories as to whether it had actually been dan Wells who pulled the trigger or other people. And there were several other theories as to who might have pulled the trigger, and that was where the research comes in in the book because some of the theories they talk about in the FBI files, some of them

were not talked about. And when I managed to get hold of Frank Worth, the US Marshal, he had a private memoir that he'd written, I guess when he retired. His daughter sent it to me, and he'd written about some of his most memorable cases, and there was a page and a half on the cisel Wells murder and he put in his unpublished memoir, So this was his thoughts, you know, regardless of what he said publicly. He said that he thought that Johnny was not guilty of the murder.

He also suggested what he thought had happened to the gun, the murder weapon. But more more importantly and more interestingly, Frank Worth was the guy who was sent down to Oakland to bring Johnny Warren back to Fairbanks to face trial or at least to face you know, police and be charged. And there are pictures of him which I put in the book, of the two of them on you know, are coming out of the airport, and you know, Johnny Warren has his hands are cuffed and Frank Worth

is walking alongside him. And there was one that his daughter sent me which was never published for obvious reasons, but the two of them are standing together and they're smiling and laughing, and the daughter told me that he said he thought Johnny Warren was a nice guy, that

he actually got on very well with him. They shared an interest in music, and he said publicly, Frank Worth to the newspaper, men, I don't think Johnny Warren is the guilty man, which of course implies that he thinks Diane Wells is the guilty party, or maybe someone else.

dire straits. She had no money or income of her own. This being the nineteen fifties, you know, she didn't have a joint bank account, no credit cards, There was no eref for her to go to get money out to buy food and to live. So obviously couldn't go back to the apartment because that was a crime scene. So she ended up staying with some friends or count surfing and borrowing money and actually selling some of her possessions

because she literally had no money. And one of her best friends, we would say the best male friend, was William Columbany, who was a dance instructor. He had it wouldn't be a ballroom dancing, but he in his apartment. He lived in the Northward building as well, the Northward building was the fashionable building in Fairbanks. He had come up from Anchorage about a year or two before, and he taught boreroom dancing lessons in his apartment, which Cecil

and Diane took. They took dancing lessons from him, and I have some in the I show some of the ads that Columbuny placed in the local paper, and you know it's again it's the nineteen fifties, you know, or in dancing and the idea of going out dancing. It was a very big social thing. So they took lessons from him, and they became friends. And then it began to hang out socially, and Columbune became part of the Chamber of Commerce, which was Cecil was the chairman of.

So they got to knew each other. They were neighbors and they were friends and they socialized together, and he stepped in and really helped out with Diane and with Mark that the boy, because he was only three, and really helped out and was really sort of he went back to the apartment got some clothes and things for her because she didn't want to helped with other friends. And he was certainly one of her best friends. Which, as you can imagine, over time, some people questioned and

they wondered whether they were perhaps more than friends. William Columbny was the hardest to find a lot of information about because he was born in Guatemala, so his name was actual Gilliam Boris Columbny. That was his actual actual name, and he anglicized it when he came to the US. It was very difficult to find anything about him at all in terms of history wise, because he was, you know, in the papers for this period in relation to this, this murder, but almost at no other time. But I

did manage to track down his daughter and granddaughter. Now, the granddaughter spoke. We spoke several times, and she knew absolutely nothing about her grandfather, absolutely nothing at all. Her mother would not talk about it, So that would be his you know, Columbani's daughter. She never talked about and would not talk about it. Got very upset whenever he was talked about. And I wondered why that was the case. Was that related to this murder, But it was actually

related to William Columbani's past. It seems according to the Columbani family, that he'd been involved in a murder before, back in Guatemala. Now I proof of any of this at all. But the Columbany descendants said that he had stepped out on his wife, he was having an affair, and that the woman he was having an affair with

killed his wife and then they ran away together. Now I couldn't prove it in any way, and the information I could get it seemed to be perhaps more a story related to them feeling that, you know, more metaphorically he killed the relationship and the family, rather than she

was actually killed. But either way, the Columbui family who were around today knew absolutely nothing about any of his life after he left Guatemala in you know, back in the thirties or the forties, after this marriage ended in whichever way it ended, but he ended up as a lot of people do. Was many of these stories that have featured in the podcast and that we read about. People often go very long distances to try and start again with a new life and maybe a new name

and a new identity. So within the US, it tends to be California as a very one. Sometimes it's Florida, you know, often it can be Alaska as well. People go a very very long way to try and start again and I think that's what William Columbani did. He went to Anchorage first, which was and is still by far, the biggest heavily populated town in Alaska. He opened a dance school there. He was married for about a year,

and then he and his wife divorced. He sold the dance studio to her, and then he moved to Fairbanks, which, as I mentioned before, was it was a hop in town. There may not have been a lot of people there, but there was a lot of money and a lot of people that had time to spend it. You know, Fairbanks is in the interior of Alaska. There's not many places you can go from it to spend money. So people had a lot of money, and the only places

to really go were local clubs and bars. So he started up a dance school, of which there were several within Fairbanks, and that's how he got to know Diane and and over the next six months after the murder, through the initial bail and then moving further on in the story, when Diane and Mark leave Alaska on bail and come down to Los Angeles, he follows soon after, so Columbany. He doesn't live with them, His mother lives down in Los Angeles, so he lived with his mother.

His sister also lived in Los Angeles at the time, but he came down to Los Angeles as well and basically looked after Diane. He was her consort or her friend. He looked after Mark. He took Mark to school. You know, he was certainly at least to Mimo, and a very good friend. However, of course, other people thought, is there more to it than that? Is that is he more than a friend? Was he more than a friend?

think it's the senator or for Alaska. I mean, the airport in Anchorage is named after him. He became immenseally influential in his future career in politics generally, but at the time he was just a new lawyer and this was a big case as a DA. This is a huge case that he'd only just started the job. Down Forth, the chief of police had only just started the job as well, and so they both knew it was a big case. But they did seem to, as you say,

after the autopsy, seemed to disagree about the time of death. Now, which seems odd for us to hear. When you know, when the person who performs the autopsy gives a time of death, you assume that they're the ones who are the most informed and well aware. But dan Forth and Stephens seemed to disagree. They seem to get it, As is the case with these things. It's only a few hours different. But if you take it that Diane regained consciousness like she said she did and immediately went for

help at around seven o'clock in the morning. What time did they think the murder had happened? Was it two hours before, four hours before, five hours before. We know that they had had dinner with their friend late the

night before, so some time between that time. So the autopsy even went into stomach contents and looking at what cecil had eaten and how much it had been digested, and how many hours that meant, and what that meant, how long since he'd been digested, since he gone to sleep, since he was killed, and so forth, and they rough they it was a three or four our period that they seemed to disagree about and doesn't seem a big

thing in the scheme of things. But then you go through the photographs, because obviously the apartment was photographed, and as part of an example of how these small police forces in Alaska especially were very much underfunded, they got the local photographer to come in and take the photographs. So there was no photographer on staff for crime scene. They called the local portrait photographer, which was very standard, very not unusual at all. So he came in and

took photographs of the apartment of the dead bodies. Some of the pictures are in the book. Took pictures of every room in the apartment, you know, for evidence, some pictures of evidence and so forth. And some of the things that were noticed in the photographs, for example, the

curtains were open in the bedroom where where Cecil was murdered. Now, usually at nighttime people tend to close the curtains, or were the curtains open because someone needed a light to see perhaps if they needed to see what time of

day was that. It can't have been in the middle of the night, So was it the early hours of the morning, in which case was that Cecil hope in the windows or was somebody looking out or somebody looking in and nobody saw or heard a gun shot through the window and didn't see through where the curtains were. But then the building their apartment within the building, the Northfolk buildings kind of a bit shaped like an H

was on the inside of the h seed. You'd have had to have been walking past right at a certain angle to see a gun shot. You see a flashy if there was one. And so they started to disagree about that. The main disagreement they had, though, was who was in charge, because, again because without delving too far into the politics of it, Alaska was a territory, it wasn't a state, so federal crimes like murder tended to be handed over to the FBI, often depending what it was.

Now this case, certainly because he was a very prominent figure, but that didn't necessarily happen so quickly, and Chief of Police Doanforth was pretty adamant. I am the chief of police here. This is a city crime. It's my city. It happened in this city. This is my crime. I'm leading the investigation. So you had him, you had Stevens, the DA, you had the state troopers as well, you had the FBI possibly slipping around already understandably, there were

US marshals as well. A lot of people served a number of functions, and information started not necessarily to not get shared, but not disseminated quickly enough, and it started to get a bit squabbly, let's just say, which is very common even today with investigations. However, at the time, of course, they felt that they had a man that was potentially on the run. Johnny Warren. You know, had left town in a car. He was out of the state. He was in Canada. They didn't know where he got,

so he'd gone. So then you had Dan Wells who was here, who was still in hospital. She was in hospital for a day or two after murder. And she had been clearly, clearly beaten. You know, she had two black eyes, she had cuts on her face, and you know, it wasn't just a minor tack, but she had been clearly attacked by somebody, which men potentially either their murderer was gone or there was a murderer who was still

on the loose. And there had been a couple of other home invasion shootings and murders in Fairbanks in recent months, and people actually were scared. People got scared and were starting to wonder what's going on. The police aren't being effective, who's in charge, who's running this? And it started to get let's just say, there were a lot of squabbles going on, and they did start to focus on Diane and Johnny as their potential suspects, but again they didn't

have a gun. They also needed to find out what the motive might be. You know, what would the motive be for her to do it, and was it possible that two men had broken in or was it somebody else? And those were all things that they had to consider, and they kind of looked at in the files as I discussed, like a lot of cases. It seemed pretty early on that they were fairly focused on Diane and Johnny, but Diane especially.

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those magazines. And the pulp detected magazines, of course, of which there were dozens around at the time, did focus on lots of stories, lots of lurid crime stories with plenty of photographs, but this one was a little unusual from because it came from Alaska, which is not usually something they focused on. Yes, so on the thirtieth November, Dan was resigned. He gave a couple of interviews afterwards, saying that he felt he could have solved it. He

felt he could even in the right direction. He felt that he was going to bring everything to justice and that he had done the right thing. But the city fathers or a city manager and the other law enforcement agencies were not so happy with what he was doing. He was quite aggressive and pushy, and it had become a big story. It had gone outside of his realm

of just being a local crime. And there was a big push to get a result here, to get a conviction quickly, because again always in the background is, you know, Alaska's trying to be a state. And so when a story makes the national newspapers in the US about cisil Wells, who was essentially a politician from Alaska, being killed in his home and they haven't found out who's done it. And not only was the person who did it, you know, the young blonde wife, but she was having an affair

with the black musician. It sounds like a film noir story, and that doesn't go down too well with those who might say clutched their pearls or feel that, you know, Alaska is a good functioning part of the US territories that they want to become a state. So the tip came in, they looked into Johnny went voluntarily with the police. What he told them pretty much made up the mind for everybody. The indictments, there was a grand jury. It

was done in secret in Fairbanks. The arrest warrants are issued for both Johnny and Diane, by which time Diane had left Fairbanks. She had flown down to Seattle en route to la As anyone who's ever traveled up to Alaska knows, almost everything goes through Seattle, so you have to go through Seattle. There's very few places that are directed. But she was arrested off the plane at Seattle. She

was carrying Mark in her arms. She was arrested at the airport and taken straight down into the local courts there, told ups happening, told what she'd been charged with, told that she was going to be extradited because again extradited because it was a territory not a state, so it was slightly different. And then she was put straight back on the plane. The next day, she and Mark they were allowed to go by themselves without a US marshal.

So when they got back to Fairbanks again at the airport, then newspaper men were waiting and they took lots of pictures. There aren't an enormous amount of pictures of Diane Wells at that time. Her family, her eldest daughter managed to give me quite a few, and some of Cecil's family members managed to give me some pictures of Cecil and Diane on a holiday and so forth. So that's from that era, but the actual pictures from around the rest

are the classic kind of film noir. She's blonde hair, she's got a fur coat on, and she's coming down off the plane, or she's standing up against the wall. You know. I picked a particularly striking image for the cover of the book where she's standing against the wall with her sort of arms around herself, and there are two newspaper men in front of her taking pictures, and

she looks particularly harried. And this was the time when it was certainly becoming clear that this was taking a real toll, as it would do on anyone, that she was getting extremely upset and distressed and becoming very upset about what was going to happen to Mark, to her son especially, And as I found out later from her eldest daughter, she had had some issues in previous years. There'd been some postnatal depression, which it wasn't really known

as back then. This is again in the forties and fifties, possibly even some mental health issues as well, and it began a downward spiral for her. I mean, it's going to be a bit of a you know, spoiler alert, but it began a bit of a downward spiral for her. So she was taken back to Fairbanks, she was charged, they set the date for the trial. The date for the trial was moved so many times for various reasons.

But because the date had been set and she had the money, or rather Cecil's family the family lawyer, that she was out on bail, she could afford the five to ten grand that it cost cumulatively to be out on bail. Now again, I know, we think, well, how can you possibly get out on bail if you're charged with murder? And we know it can happen, right, and again this was territorial Alaska. Plus I'm sure they assumed what she going to do. She's not going to flee

the country. You know, she doesn't have any money where she's going to go. So she immediately left Fairbanks with Mark and came down to Los Angeles, where she'd been actually before as a much younger woman, I learned, and I think she really came down to Los Angeles because she felt she could lose herself in the city. There was two million people in Los Angeles. You know, it's,

of course it's a million times bigger today. But I really think she felt she could lose herself in Los Angeles, because in Fairbanks it was gossip, gossip central.

they say, and that was their relationship. And so she felt that she condemned, you know, pretty much condemned, certainly in the public eye. And you can imagine with Life and Newswig and the pulp magazines especially, you know, they absolutely went to town. You know, she was the perfect villain for this, you know, a young bond, you know, with everything to gain his million dollar fortune, which was talked about all the time. And Cecil was a wealthy man per se. He had lots of assets, and he

had land and so forth. But of course, as is offer the case, she didn't get any of the money because she was the executor of his will. But of course, when she was arrested that was taken away from her. She wasn't allowed to do that, so she didn't get this enormous payoff that people thought she did get. You know, there was money put aside for Mark, you know, when he turned twenty one, but of course he was only three, so he wasn't going to get that money. For years.

There was money put aside for him to live on and so forth in Cecil's will. But it wasn't like Dan suddenly had lots of money and got his fortune. So she moved down to Los Angeles and she stayed with a couple of friends of hers and Cecils who put her up for several months, and she came down and enrolled Mark in school, and William Columbuie came soon afterwards, and it seemed that for several months she seemed to be kind of getting on with life as much as

she could. And then, as you said, the trial date was announced, and you know, they were saying, it's definitely happening, it's definitely happening. We're definitely going to trial in April, and that was two or three months away, was when they got the time. And I think that was possibly a moment when she started to really think about the future and be concerned and really think about what was at risk and what she thought might happen.

been worried about her. They had actually taken pills off her when she seemed to be particularly unhappy, and they had been taking them off her and not letting her go out with the many more pills than she's allowed to take. But I would imagine that after several months staying with her two friends, maybe she wanted some more space, or maybe she felt she'd outstayed her welcome. She moved into a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. I walked past it last night. It's still there, the building. It's not a

hotel anymore, but the building is still there. It's called the Drake Hotel. And she moved into a room there, and she moved in around about Valentine's Day. And there's a reason we know that she moved in around about Valentine's Day. So she moved into a room in the hotel. Now, there are a number of reasons she could have moved moved into a hotel herself. You know, I said, it could have been you know that you get more privacy. You also get you know, there's probably a phone line

that you might be able to use. You might be able to receive calls, make calls with anyone over hearing. I mean, it could be a number of reasons either way. She was staying in the hotel and then on March the eighth, winning Columbuie, they went out to see a movie the evening screening and you know, he said, is

everything all right? It was, you know, everything fine, She said, it it was all great, And unfortunately he took her back to the hotel and she She immediately checked out of the Drake Hotel and walked about three or four blocks down to Hollywood and Vine and turned her south. And again, the building is still there. It's called the Hollywood Plaza Hotel. And that was a very very fancy hotel back in the day, very famous. It's not a hotel anymore with the buildings still there. And she checked

into a room there. And you can probably see where this is going, but she checked into a room there, and spoiler alert, I hope it's not going to ruin the book for anyone. But that night she took a large dose of her barbiturates. She left three notes in the Drake Hotel. Two of them were to William Canlumbdi.

One of them was thanking him for everything he'd done, asking him to look after Mark, and you know that she really appreciated him as a friend and so forth, which I thought was significant because it was it was not a loving letter. It was not someone that I felt someone that you were in love with or loved or had a sort of an emotion anything more than a friendship with. She left another letter addressed to two other friends, asking them to raise Mark as their own

son and she wrote another one. Well that the last one was virtually incoherent, but it was kind of the one that everyone was waiting for with the sort of semi confession. Now you can read, I put, you know, pictures of the notes in the book, and you know, as hard as it is to imagine, they published them in the newspapers as well. I mean the the newspapers

back in the day. Back then in the fifties, Los Angeles had a lot of newspapers and they were very competitive, and crime was a big seller, and they would show, you know, they would show dead bodies, and they would put suicide notes and stuff like that, things that we can't possibly imagine today, but they did then. So all the suicide notes were put in the paper for people

to read. And the last one, it seems that she wrote, the one that she left at the Hollywood Plaza hotel in her room, sort of said along the lines of if Johnny's guilty, then I'm guilty. You know, if I'm guilty of anything, Cecil is dead, so I must kind of be guilty. It's not a clear confession, and you know, like I said, barely legible, but it certainly seems to show that if nothing else, she feels guilty for what happened.

And she also made clear in one of the other suicide notes that she did not want Mark, her son, her and Cecil's son to go through the trial, to go through any of this. She felt she wanted to protect him, and unfortunately, she really thought that the best way to protect him would be for her to take an O the dose, and that's what happened. They the next day, believe it or not, as tragic as it sounds,

as if you couldn't write it. But William Columbanie and the friend of that they'd been staying with, that Diana had been staying with, were worried. They had been worried the night before and they went round to the Drake Hotel just to check she was all right. In morning and of course they told her she'd gone and they arrived at the Hollywood Plaza hotel just as they were wheeling the body out. There's actually a picture in the

La Times that I found. As I say, they would show the pictures, but there's you know, there's a low trolley and they're pulling a body out with a white sheet and there's a guy with his back to the camera, and that's William Columbany. So he got there just to find out, I mean, because they basically said, you know, do you know who this is? For him? And he was like, he didn't want to think it was her,

but it was. So she committed suicide and that you would have thought would have been the end of it, really, but of course it led to a lot of other things. I mean, for instance, now Mark the Sun, who was still not yet four now was the entire heir to the estate, so there was then a bit of a custody battle over him. And I did speak to Mark just once. I did manage to find him and speak to him a little about what had happened. He was and again it's a bit of a spoiler alert, but

I did speak to him briefly about it. It became clear that he had not had a happy life and that the death obviously of his father and his mother had deeply affected his life, and not for the good in any way whatsoever. And he initially seemed very keen to talk. He really seemed to want the story to come out. He felt that there was a big story to tell. But then he wrote me a letter said he just he couldn't do it, which I understood, and I haven't been in touch with him since I think

he's somewhat in touch with his half sisters. I guess they'd be half sisters, Diane's children from a previous marriage. They were in touch a little bit, but I don't think a great deal. So I figured, like a lot of these things, I didn't I didn't have any I wasn't a member of the family, so I never felt it was my position to try and affect any sort of communication or reuniting that kind of thing. I really

didn't think that was my business. I thought, if I write the book and put everything down that I found, the people who are interested can read it and find out what they want to find out. And I know that there are lots of things in this book that these family members, you know, Cecil's family, Diane's family, Johnny's family, comedies. I mean, I know there's things in there that they don't know about their relatives, and they're going to read

it in here. And that was one of the most you know, that was one of the toughest things writing the book, was what would they think when they read it? Would they believe me? Would they think I was just making it up. Would they think that I got it wrong? Because you know, as you can imagine, you don't want to read that perhaps your mother was a killer who committed suicide. You know, you don't want to think that.

You might think, well, it was somebody else. There were other theories about what happened to Cecil, which I'd talk about in the book. I devoted chapters at each one at the end, you know, because I go through chronologically what happened. You know, several people thought it was a hit man, it was related to organized crime, you know.

Some people thought that it was Johnny. Some people thought that it was Johnny because he'd settled, had confronted him, or they'd been a row, or there'd been an argument. Some people thought that it was Columbity. Some people thought that it was Columbiti who had done it out of valor or jealousy or in the spur of the moment.

Some people thought it was a robbery. You know, there were a number of people, and I talk about them in the book, who committed a lot of crimes locally and were armed, and there had been murders in house in home invasions. Some people really thought it was what she said, and she said all the way through, right to the end. She said it. Two men broke in

and they shot him and they beat me up. So then you sort of move further on to what happens to Johnny, and he spends the next six years pretty much. He doesn't stay in Fairbanks. The last time I saw him in those probably I think was the late fifties.

at the alleged breaking, you know, and she's gone. They'd never really been publicly, at least a real sort of sense that they really felt that Johnny was the evil man here, or that he was an equal villain. You know, she had been dismissed as you know, the grasping, you know, gold digging blonde who would of course killed her rich husband. You know, maybe he had not been the best husband, and it had been in a moment of passion, but still she'd done it him. You know, he was he

wasn't the spurned lover. You know, this wasn't the great love of faarable ages. You know, they'd only met a couple of months before. But less to say, as I found out from the files, they kept investigating the case that it was active way up until after Alaska became a state in fifty nine, and I think that was probably what was really the end of it, because as I found out going through the archives and dealing with the archives, is there's a very big line and a

big difference between territorial and state. You know, when you're trying to get, for example, you know, freedom of information requests and documents and stuff out of territorial record that

can be difficult. State record absolutely first class. They've got everything ordered because they were a state, and I think they kind of drew a line under everything, and that included the Johnny Warren arrest and the indictment because it was still in the papers, in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, which was the big paper in Fairbanks, and still is.

They still mentioned it whenever there was a grand jury, which used to run and every year once a year for a few weeks in Fairbanks, because again it's not a huge court system. This is again this is in the fifties. It would always be mentioned and there's still the Johnny Warren case, you know, with the murder of Cecil Wills because it was still a huge deal because

the suicide had been a big story as well. That was the one that had made it as far as Australia, you know, because now we had the tragedy of suicide, the tragedy of you know. Unfortunately they called him, you know, the poor little orphan boy, you know, the poor little millionaire boy. You know, he was the that was Mark. So they had kept talking about bringing it to trial, bringing Johnny to trial, bringing Johnny to trial, and it

never happened. And then there's just a document in the FBA files that has the indictment and there's a big rubber stamp on it that says exonerated, and there's a short there's a short document that just says, you know, we're dropping the charges, the charges to be discontinued, the investigation, and that was it. And he was a free man. And I speculated in the book, how did you find out?

You know, what did he think? And the only way I really found out was because he obviously he's no longer alive anymore, as almost all of the people who are involved at the time are no longer with us. But I did speak to Johnny Warren. He did have one child. He had a child very late in life. He was actually married five times as well, ironically, but his fifth wife was younger than him, and he had a child later in life. The child's younger than me

by child. He's a man, obviously, but he's younger than me. And I met him. I managed to track him down, and I asked him about, you know, his father, and did his father ever talk about this? You know, why on earth would he? But did he ever mention, you know that back in the fifties, you know, I was involved in this big case in Fairbanks or anything like that. And of course his name is John as well. Of course john said no, he never mentioned it to me.

He never mentioned it to my mother or And the only way they found out about it was when Johnny passed away. They were going going through his effects and his papers, and he had kept a copy of Life magazine which had the photographs and the story about the murder in it, which of course had pictures of him in it as well, you know, in handcuffs. And he kept that all his life and never said a word about it. So I wondered what he thought and whether he really was involved in any way and what happens.

And again, that's what I talk about in the book is it's the last few chapters I look at the potential theories and see is it possible, is it feasible that William Calumbery was involved? Is it possible that Johnny Warren was involved? Was it a break in? Was it a random event? Was it a hit man? Was it related to organized crime? Because I had to look into that. You know, again, it's you know, a last territory of Alaska in the fifties in Fairbanks, you know, a town

of you know, less than ten thousand people. How much money can there be? Well, the thing is, it doesn't matter if there's lots of bars and restaurants and hotels and lots of people around with lots of money to spend. I mean, in the thirties and forties and fifties, there was actually a I guess a red light district in Fairbanks that was all brothels, well maintained, well run, properly organized. That was for all the men who were there. And you know, it even had like a door where you

could go in separately. You know, So there was money there and there was organized crime, you know, in Oregon and Seattle, And you know, it's not a big leap to think that it could have happened. And if Cecil had learned about it, he was a politically or cipically.

And I'm talking like one of those small flower perts you might put a cactus in, not like a huge ones that you know that you have the large like a busy Lizzie or something. I'm talking about the small, little ones that you have a cactus in. And at the time ev Danforth, the chief of police, was like, well, I didn't see any dirt on the floor. I didn't see any dirt in her hair. I didn't see like the plant anywhere. You know, she was supposed to have

been hit and this thing cracked on her head. Now, sure, a ceramic flower pot cracked on your head would certainly hurt and maybe cut you and give you a bump, maybe even knock you out. But to give two black eyes seemed unusual, seemed maybe not to add up so much. And as you said, if there were other people involved in this, if it was, if this was a hit, a professional hit, why would they have left her alive?

If it was made to look like a professional hit, why didn't they tie her up, throw her in the closet and then kill Cecil so that you could genuinely say, help get me out of the closet. I didn't see anything. Two men came in, put a blindfold end through them in the closet. You could do the same thing. If it was a setup by her to have him murdered, which some people thought. You know that she arranged for Cessil to be killed. Why not do it better than

that to make her to be absolutely clear of any guilt. So, you know, I guess it's only when And I'm like, I say, I think I'm probably the only person who's ever assembled everything you know to look at it this way, But just now with the benefit of hindsight. You know, you have to remember in the nineteen fifties that the term domestic abuse I didn't even exist. People didn't know what that was. I mean, it was a very different time where you know, giving a child of spanking was

you know, seen as good parenting. You know. Also, you know, if her husband was to hit his wife, that was something between them that wasn't necessarily considered to be too much of a problem, you know, especially if there was alcohol involved, you know. And unfortunately it's the same today. You know, police today will go on domestic calls and we'll see that there's evidence of abuse, but if the wife doesn't say anything or the husband doesn't say anything

of the child, they can't press charges. So that's it's not especially unusual to us. But you look back with some benefit of high sate, You look at the picture of her, You look at what the neighbors said who were canvas after the murder and were witnesses or gave witness statements. Several of them said, we hear shouting, we hear the sound of screaming, We hear what could be fighting, you know, we hear crying women, crying children, whatever was going on in there, you know, there was something a

disagreement or two. And I also did speak to a couple of people who are still quite elderly now, who were around at the time, who were adults at the time and knew Cecil and Diane, and there were a couple of them that said to me, oh, yeah, he did he did hit her. Now, whether he was a serial abuser a serial violent man, I don't know, but there were definitely indications that he hit his wife. And a couple of people said to me, you know, if he'd had too much to drink, sometimes that was when

it would come out. And as we know, looking back again at the report, they'd been out the night before, had several drinks because they checked because the Northwood building had a bar in the bottom, so they'd been into the bar within the building, then gone back up to the room. They'd had several drinks there. Then they had drinks in the apartment with their late guest who came

to visit. Then he'd had another drink before going to bed, And it was really, it was really when I spoke to a friend of mine who he is a friend, he's a friend now. He used to work for the LAPD, and I sent him a couple of the crime scene photographs without any context at all, and I said, what do you make of this woman here? And he said to me, he asked, the circumstances much as similar as

we've discussed. And he said, well, he said, you know, having had twenty third years as a policeman, he said, it was pretty apparent to me that she's she's an abused wife. She's been beaten up by her husband. She said, because I saw it many times in work when I was on patrol. And as we know again because we've heard it many times, sometimes it's the wife. Sometimes that the husband will say, two men broke in and killed

X Y zed in certain name here. You know, you watch a lot of you know, the true crime documentaries in the podcast, and so often people say, this man broke in, this man just broke in and just shot me, or just shot my shot her shot me, and you know I survived, that she's dead. And that's what he said. It was such a common excuse that men and sometimes the women and sometimes men would say, you know, two men broke in, I don't know who they were, strangers

broke in and beat me up and shot him. And so once you start to sort of tie those bits together. Plus there was there was even a call. And again it's somewhat speculation, but the witness accounts or the police report of the murder did mention that at one stage Diana had called the equivalent of CPS like Child Protective Services. Now, of course, that could have been, as I say in the book, that could have been about a million things.

It could have been about all sorts of things. She could have had a friend there that she called to say hello. However, when you read some of the witness statements about how they had Mark crying and children crying and children shouting, you just wonder. And then it isn't too hard to go from a scenario there, as I do pretty much in the last chapter of the book, as to what might have happened late that evening. I'm

at October sixteenth, going into the seventeenth. You know, they were out drinking, they've been out, they stayed up late, maybe they had around, maybe they didn't. She got up sometime during the night was sick on her pajamas, and

that was always an important thing. As the police lost the pajamas or didn't gather them properly, and you got the set that she was wearing when in the morning, and they did have the analyze and they found that that, you know, the blood on the pajamas was hurts, you know, and so you think, well, how did her blood get on unless she'd really been beaten up or someone had attacked her, and so it did kind of line up, and then you just think, well maybe and I, like

I said, I won't do the whole scenario, but I kind of did an imaginary scenarios what might have happened. And I think it was probably, ultimately, sadly, a story that we've heard a million times before, where an abused partner, whether it was the first time of a hundredth time, decided that, you know, they'd had enough and decided to do something about it. And maybe it was meant to be. I don't think it was a brutal, you know, lying in wait, premeditated thing. I don't think it was that.

And I think probably she may have just wanted to scare him, or she may have wanted to hurt him but not kill him, you know, who knows. And I think what happened is she did that realized what she'd done, and then I think she made a couple of phone calls to friends, and I think possibly that friend included

William Clumboy. He lived in the same building. They were very good friends, and I think more than likely he might have not she might have talked to him about the situation at home, you know, because a lot of the time people don't say anything that people know. There are a couple of other family friends that came around later, and they were interviewed by the police, you know, and clear that of having an involvement in the murder. But

they were caught. They did come round later, and they were friends of Cecil and Diane, and they may well have known perhaps what had been happening, and they might have sat there and said, look, we'll try and sort this out. It's going to be okay. Well, we'll try and sort this out. And you know, things didn't go to plan, yes, but like I said, it could have

been it could have been something completely different. But I in many ways, you know, there's only so much you can get out of the newspapers, but you look at the pictures and you see how and I that she was. She was definitely beaten up, and you know, I can't imagine, you know that Johnny Warren came round and, you know, in his passion beat her up. I can't imagine that.

You know, William Calumbery came round and she said, you know I've shot my husband, you know, beat me up to make it look like it was a break in. You know, I just can't imagine that. You know, he would have like, okay, stand there and let he punched in the face a few times, you know, which someone said that was possible. You know that it was a setup, but you know it's usually you know, the Ockham's rays

are the most obvious explanation. It is probably the most likely, and once you've eliminated all the others and you know, it's it's sadly, it's a scenario that we still see

played out, you know, every day today. And that was that was really one of the things that interested me in the story right back at the beginning, was that I thought, if this happened today, even in the same place, with the same people and the same looking the same, with the same you know, skin color, and the same circumstances, it would be a big media sensation just in the same way because we would. We would we would look at Diane and we would say, oh, well, she's obviously

the gold digging blonde. We would look at Johnny as that, you know, the jazz musician who left town. They go, well, he's obviously got something to do with it, you know, And you would have looked at the money and you'd have thought, oh, it was all about money. I bet it was the two of them, and that's an end

to it. But today I think we would look a little bit differently and find out more about the relationship between Diane and Cecil and see if there were any contributing factors as well as external factors like mental health issues or you know, she could have been on tablets for depression for years as far as we knew, you know, living in Fairbanks. It wasn't really something I addressed so much earlier. But living in Fairbanks or in Alaska, you

know it, that's a tough life. It's very, very different to anything else. So I can't pretend that I know you know how it is. But from while I gathered on my trip there, you know, Alaskan's often tend to consider themselves, you know, Alaskan's first they'n Americans, you know, they are they are literally separated from America, much like Hawaii.

You know, they consider themselves to be separate and different, and you know, they're very self reliant, and it's a very it can be a very tough life, and you you may have to rely on your neighbors one day to save your life. You know, there's a lot of things that are sorted out privately and go unset. But I think today we might have looked into that, but for someone who comes up there. And you know, Diane went up there and she was you know, twenty nine,

twenty eight. You know, she went up there. She had she had two daughters from a previous marriage, who I have mentioned that she was a strange from them. She'd had a very difficult divorce from her first husband. She was a strange from her daughters. I think probably not by her doing, but she was a strange from her daughters.

So she goes up to to Fairbanks, which is in the middle of Alaska, you know, and the weather conditions there can be very challenging, and life was very challenging there, and you know, it was a very very big change from living in Portland, where she was born in Seattle, where she'd spent a lot of her time. You know, it was a very different lifestyle, and it's a struggle. It's a struggle. I'm sure she struggled to settle in. And plus, you know, as people will see in the book,

you know, she was exceptionally attractive woman. She would have got a lot of attention from the start. I mean even you know, that was the thing that both the men and the women that I interviewed all said, Oh, she was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She was the most beautiful woman in Fairbanks by miles.

have had an effect. You know, the weather can affect people in Alaska. You know, there's months of endless sun and the months of dark. That's a medical condition. You know, people can be affected by that, and that may have all come into play.