Cactus Heart

5

The cases were so old the files were kept in the city records warehouse over on Jefferson Street. At least, that’s what I hoped. I drove over, checked in with another civil servant at another desk, and, after some searching, went to work. I slipped the CD of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concert in my Walkman and spent the afternoon picking through records.

The physical memory of the case was located in dusty folders inside a single cardboard file box: papers that had once been the center of somebody’s work, but now sat dusty and neglected. Lindsey was a master of search engines, databases, spreadsheets and the Internet. But most records older than ten years were still on paper, microfiche and microfilm, and research was done the way I had learned it in college. Suited me fine. There was something almost mystical about the tactile search through old records for historical truth-the idea of touching the same piece of paper that was touched by the man or woman who lived the event. But, as Peralta said, maybe I was just strange.

The files were a mess, out of chronological order or their proper folder. It looked as if they had been tossed haphazardly into the box years ago and forgotten. The dust attested to that. I was sneezing and wishing I had taken a Sudafed. So I spent more than an hour sniffling, sneezing, and sorting the files into some kind of order. I separated them into piles: handwritten call logs from uniforms, typewritten accounts from the detectives, photostats of FBI forms, crumbling newspaper articles, fragments of court transcripts, a booking record with fading blue fingerprints, the judge’s execution order and black-and-white photos. Then I organized the reports chronologically-those with dates, at least. Ellington’s orchestra went smartly from “Take the A Train” through “Stardust” and “Ring Dem Bells.” The concert had been recorded in 1943, two years after the Yarnell kidnapping.

This was not like the case files of a modern police agency. There were no pre-printed incident reports for the beat cops to fill in, or any lab or forensics reports. Trace evidence beyond a detective’s sense of smell would have been a science fiction dream. I looked in vain for a chronology of the victims before the kidnapping. Even for a crime from 1941, this one seemed to have generated little paperwork, much less the kind of files that would go with what one newspaper labeled it: “Arizona’s Crime of the Century.” But my brief time back at the sheriff’s office had taught me how case files became misplaced, lost, and picked apart as time went on. The files were obviously incomplete. I made a note to check for files at the county courts and in historical archives. Then I got down to reading what I had.

On December 4, 1941, a radio car was called to the home of Hayden Yarnell. The officers were told that a kidnapping had occurred and they immediately summoned detectives. Yarnell’s twin grandsons, Woodrow and Andrew, had gone missing the previous Thursday, Thanksgiving. They were four years old and wearing matching cowboy outfits, but there was no mention of a pocket watch.

I skimmed through a detective’s report typed on a machine with a crooked r key, looking for a reason why it had taken the family so long to call police. The boys’ father, Morgan Yarnell, said he had put the twins to bed Thanksgiving night around eight o’clock. When his wife checked on them after midnight, they were gone. The grounds of the Yarnell house were searched, as were the adjoining citrus groves. At seven the next morning, Friday, November 28, Morgan Yarnell received a phone call from a man who claimed he had taken the boys. He demanded a hundred thousand dollars, deposited in a locker in Union Station. Morgan Yarnell complied, but the boys were never returned.

The reports yielded no good answer for the week’s delay. But several were signed by a detective named Joe Fisher. That was a name I had run across before. He was a legend in the Phoenix department, an investigator who had worked on all the big cases in the 1930s and 1940s. So it made sense he would pick up the Yarnell case. I unconsciously ran my fingers across the flimsy paper. Joe Fisher. This would require a trip to the Police Museum, to learn more about the man who came into the case with the impossible delay of a week.

At the bottom of one typewritten sheet, dated December 5, were the words “see officer’s observations” but I couldn’t find those pages. Damn.

Next I read the arrest report from the little border town of Douglas. It was dated December sixth. A Japanese fleet was taking its position to attack Pearl Harbor. Back in Arizona, a man named Jack Talbott was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in his Douglas hotel room. The cops found five hundred dollars on him in hundred-dollar bills, with serial numbers matching those in the bag that Morgan Yarnell had left at the train station. They also found what were described as “bloodstained children’s clothes.” A news clipping said the boys’ father identified the clothes as belonging to Woodrow and Andrew.

Next I picked through the photos to find a mug shot from the corrections department. It showed a thin, sharp-featured young man with dark hair. He had mocking, merry eyes, not the look of zombie-like disorientation common to many who face the booking camera, whatever the era.

Talbott wasn’t alone. A news story told of a young woman found with him, Frances Richie, age twenty-four. She was called his girlfriend, and charged as an accessory in the crime. She was pictured in a smart suit with a slouch fedora. Beneath the hat was a pretty face with delicate lips and large eyes. She didn’t look like Talbott’s type, but I had been wrong about that kind of thing before. After searching in vain for any police report on Richie, I set her photo next to his.

The trial transcripts and the newspaper accounts were unanimous in portraying Jack Talbott as everything that would horrify stolid Depression-era America: young, male, rootless, with a penchant for liquor, gambling, loose women, and the company of petty Phoenix hoodlums. Nowadays, he’d just be living an alternative lifestyle. He grew up in an orphanage back East and did time as a teenager for burglary. Then he hopped a freight train for the desert.

Talbott ended up doing odd jobs around the Yarnell house, sometimes filling in as chauffeur for the family. Meanwhile, he had gotten in over his head with gambling debts. To the county attorney, those things spelled opportunity and motive. In 1943, Talbott was executed at the state penitentiary in Florence. Richie received life in prison. Talbott’s last meal was a steak, which the authorities apparently fulfilled despite wartime rationing. He never confessed to the crime. He never told where the boys were buried.

The files contained no mention of the old building where we found the skeletons. Nor was there a report of a missing pocket watch. Most of all, I wondered: Why had this powerful family waited a week to call the cops?

I rubbed my eyes, nursed a paper cut, stood up and stretched, then sat back down to go through it all over again, this time making notes. By the time the clerk came by to tell me the warehouse was closing, I had several pages written and I was ready for a break. As Hawkins said, just a nine-to-five job.