Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Of all the literary forms, comedy has the shortest shelf life. Stuart Palmer’s, on the other hand, has outlived its creator, and thanks to International Polygonics Ltd., some of his finest books from the 1930s through 1950s, landmarks in the comic crime tradition, are back in print. Included in this new series is his first critical and commercial triumph, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931). It chronicles the life and times of “that meddlesome old battle axe,” Miss Hildegarde Withers, a spinster schoolteacher with a taste for fancy headgear. Later in his career, Palmer introduced a second character, Howie Rook, “an old newspaperman turned out to the pasture.” Rook, like Palmer, occasionally wrote true crime. Rivaling his most outrageous fiction, the story before you now takes you on a doomed voyage with Captain Walter Wanderwell, “a world traveler, adventurer and soldier of misfortune,” and his crew of madcap, but wholly incompetent, Argonauts. It goes to prove even real murder can be fun — when it’s in the right hands.

Once Aboard the Lugger

Curtain rises on a lonely, deserted dock on the Long Beach waterfront, where the rakish black schooner Carma has just been moored that afternoon. The date is December 6, 1932; the hour 9:30 of a dank and dripping evening. One feeble 20-watt bulb dangles overhead and there is a faint glow from a few lighted portholes of the gently-rocking old vessel, a former rum-runner with still a bit of stagger to her.

That is the setting of Act One. Enter the chorus, consisting of eight very pretty girls and seven handsome men, most of them in their early twenties. They are all living aboard the schooner, supposedly engaged in preparing for an adventure cruise to Tahiti and Samoa and the glamorous South Seas. It is nice casting. One girl is a bewitching authoress and poet from Atlanta, one a bob-haired student from Boston and Wellesley... there’s a cute, plump secretary from Manhattan, another poet, a painter, a dishwasher, a sailor or two (but not very salty) and an actress who had played Juliet in summer stock. And there is even a handsome young man with a heavy Oxford accent who claimed to be the son of a British peer — and was!

We might have a fanfare of martial music while the principals enter. In the top starring role is Captain Walter Wanderwell, leader of the expedition. He is a tall, handsome, stiffly-military chap who always wears boots and a self-designed uniform — a distinct Nordic type with cold blue eyes and a jutting chin, very much resembling Hairbreadth Harry. If you can’t remember that hero of the comics, then consider the Captain a combination of Fearless Fosdick and Superman with a dash of Clyde Beatty. He is a world-traveler, adventurer, and soldier of misfortune.

There is also, as heroine and leading woman, his wife Aloha Wanderwell. She is six feet and 140 pounds of blonde, curly-haired pulchritude, with a figure which has to make concessions to no stack of wheat-cakes, in spite of the fact that she almost always dressed in another of those home-designed, stiffly military uniforms. Aloha was — and for that matter is — a woman in whom I and the other newsmen assigned to the story took an obviously deep interest, and for whom we have a most healthy respect.

For further audience sympathy we have also the Wanderwells’ two children — Valerie, aged seven, and Nile who is pushing six, both members of the strange “crew.” Little Val was the nominal owner of the vessel, since her father was not an American citizen and thus could not own a ship under United States registry. She was no doubt the youngest shipowner in history.

And — to round out the cast — there is a slight, wavy-haired, good-looking young man in a gray cravanette raincoat. You can choose his role yourself — juvenile lead, very heavy villain... or comedy relief. He later stood trial for his life on the charge of having shot Captain Wanderwell through the back of the neck. Certain highlights of that memorable trial, presented here for the first time from my own records and with the amiable assistance of Judge Robert W. Kenny, who presided, are worth bringing up in this account.

Captain Wanderwell and his fifteen merry, madcap adventurers were all living aboard the Carma (the new name of the old rum-runner being Wanderwell’s own misspelling of Karma, the Buddhist word for Fate), although the rickety vessel had not been conditioned nor fully provisioned, and her sailing date for Tahiti and points south was, to say the least, highly indefinite. But they had no place else to live, since each had contributed all the loose cash he or she had toward the trip’s expenses. Wanderwell himself had somehow raised the considerable amount of $22,000 with which to buy the ship, although his last venture — in the wilds of South America — had been spectacularly unsuccessful. He had purchased the old rum-runner at a government auction of seized ships, and had managed to have her towed to her present berth.

So, with all their money — in most cases their life savings — invested in the common kitty, the would-be Argonauts lived on canned beans and waited for the great day. Captain Wanderwell was a natural-born leader, imbuing them with confidence, a brave and dashing figure — while he lasted.

Only recently, within the last year, he had led a similar group of starry-eyed explorers north from Buenos Aires through some of the most impassable jungles of South America, travelling by means of two specially-built, high-slung Ford trucks and stopping now and then to shoot movie film footage starring crocodiles, head-hunters, and of course the beautiful Aloha. She had shown herself in the film, of which more later, to be a crack shot with rifle or pistol, a real Amazon on the Amazon.

That particular expedition, as I have said, had wound up somewhat short of its announced goal of Beverly Hills, California, due to the fact that no motor cars had yet been built which could travel through those parts of South America where roads didn’t exist. Wanderwell and Aloha and their seventeen aides had finally worked their way to the Ecuador coast; they had taken passage on various tramp steamers and by the time they reached the Canal Zone had lost several people by the wayside and had also had a sort of mild mutiny among their staff. The trip had been a considerable disappointment and disillusionment to the members of the crew — the girls who had been promised roles in the picture found themselves fighting mosquitoes and snakes and doing chores around the camp or carrying lights and cameras for the photography which centered on Aloha and of course on Wanderwell himself.

The group broke up completely at Colon, and there a number of lawsuits against the Wanderwells were immediately instituted by members of the party. But the Captain and his fair bride managed to sail for Los Angeles before the suits came to trial. So now — after a few months of much-needed rest — Wanderwell was ready to take off again. His new volunteer crew had been recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and literary weeklies by offering any footloose adventurer the opportunity of having his or her investment (which might range from $400 to $2,000 apiece) repaid tenfold from the profits of the new voyage — profits from the sale of the adventure movies they expected to make, from picture postcards, from curios and strange shells to be collected — and also possibly from the discovery of millions in buried treasure in case they happened to put in at the fabled Cocos Island or any other historic pirate hangout.

It may seem to contemporary skeptics that the investors were making a rather poor gamble. But it must be remembered that in that sad year 1932 the nation was gripped tight in depression, with no jobs anywhere for anybody; strong, able men with college degrees were selling apples on street corners and it was a time when many young, imaginative persons yearned for any kind of escape from the hopeless doldrums of ordinary existence. Somewhere else — anywhere else! — was the cry.

The fifteen who had signed on as the volunteer, amateur crew of the Carma did not know that the ship had already been condemned as unseaworthy, that an experienced marine engineer and carpenter had both quit in disgust after a couple of days aboard, and that the aged vessel had taken two days to make a run of a few nautical miles from San Pedro to Long Beach, during which both of her auxiliaries had broken down completely and the moldering queen of the seas finally was ignominiously towed to her new berth.

Here the Argonauts awaited her, ready to take off for anywhere. So, fifteen youths and maidens plus the Wanderwell family of four crowded aboard the cranky old Carma which boasted only three cabins furnished with six double bunks and a few sofas. On the night when the fantastic comedy-tragedy really got under way, not all were aboard. The majority of the crew were out enjoying the dubious pleasures afforded by the Long Beach waterfront at the time — movies and speakeasies — and the fair Aloha had gone up to Los Angeles to visit her sister. The Captain was alone in his cabin aft; the remaining members of the crew were crowded in a cabin, amusing themselves after their wont, presumably listening to an accordion on which one of the boys had some facility and probably trying to harmonize the popular songs of the day — “Moonlight Bay” and “I’d Love to Call You My Sweetheart” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby...”. Or else they were taking turns reading aloud — Jurgen, perhaps, or the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. There was certainly a jug of dago red nearby, or a few bottles of home brew.

But it was testified later that at least two of the crew saw a face suddenly appear at one open porthole, and heard a husky “Germanic” voice ask for Wanderwell. The visitor was directed to the other cabin — some said he was even guided there by one of the boys, but there is considerable conflict in the testimony about this point. Some of the gay young people in the cabin claimed not to have heard or seen anybody. Yet a while later — either a few minutes or an hour or so, you can take your pick — there was the sound of a shot.

The little group of intrepid adventurers investigated, and found Captain Walter Wanderwell kneeling against a sofa in his cabin in utter darkness. He was dying, having been shot through the back of the neck, the bullet ranging downward and through his heart. Rushing out on the deck, they saw no sign of anybody — the fog had settled over them... where it was to remain.

After some delay, the situation was reported by telephone to the Long Beach police, who proceeded to take charge after their fashion — a fashion which we sincerely hope has changed with the years. It is understandable now why the local authorities found themselves somewhat out of their depth in dealing with a murder case of this type but even so, the investigation could well go down in history as a horrible example.

The boys from Long Beach headquarters had a fresh corpse on their hands, and immediately ruled out suicide since there was no gun around and since it was unlikely even to them that a man could shoot himself in the back at a range of four feet or more. Then the officers remembered about the paraffin test (since officially discarded by crime investigators as useless and confusing) and spent most of the rest of the night giving it to everyone aboard, with negative results everywhere. All got a clean bill of health, including Aloha Wanderwell herself who had been brought back from her sister’s apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood (about twenty minutes away by auto, or half an hour by street car or bus).

By next morning the Los Angeles police were in on the case after their fashion — aided and abetted by Carlton Williams, brilliant police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. It was immediately clear to all parties concerned that some old enemy of the Captain had done him in. According to police records, there was only one old enemy — a former member of his group, who had been jettisoned midway on the auto-boat jaunt upward through South America, and who later had the temerity to come to Los Angeles and ask for his money back, finally even appealing to the juvenile authorities and to the bunco squad at headquarters. This man’s description was printed in the Times — Carl Williams’s paper — and picked up by the other Los Angeles dailies, though for some reason his name was carefully withheld. And he was put on the police “Wanted” docket.

Meanwhile, down at Long Beach, there was much consternation and many alarums and excursions. The fifteen adventurers were coached, primed, questioned all night, and shown photographs of the wanted man. Some of them were placed under technical arrest for twenty-four hours. Even the two Wanderwell children were drawn into it. Rudely awakened from their bunk where they had been sleeping at the time of the killing, they were questioned to the point where they would (and did) swear to almost anything.

At the same time a parallel investigation was being made through regular Los Angeles police channels, during which it was discovered without too much difficulty that Captain Wanderwell had been in the custody of the Secret Service during the late war and had been interned for a while at the federal penitentiary at Atlanta as a German espionage agent. His real name was Valerian Johannes Riecynski, a Polish national; his military background and his captaincy were purely fictional. But he had been a world-traveler and, in fact, had skipped out of half a dozen ports without bothering to clear with the customs or the immigration authorities.

The glamorous Wanderwell couple had also appeared on police records in Los Angeles in March 1925, charged with wearing United States Army uniforms without authorization. Actually, both Walter and Aloha (giving them the benefit of their assumed names) were only wearing their home-designed uniforms plus Army officers’ Sam Browne belts as part of the act. It was, however, an offense for which both paid the not inconsiderable fine of $200. It was also revealed at that time, 1925, that Aloha — who claimed that Wanderwell had picked her up in a French convent (place unnamed) and swept her off her heels at the age of seventeen, was traveling around with him as his sister. She was immediately, under the circumstances, made a ward of the Los Angeles juvenile court, but charges were naturally dropped when the dashing couple eloped to Riverside and were legally married. It is not a matter of record as to whether or not their two children were attendants.

It was a somewhat complicated case — for the investigating authorities of Long Beach and Los Angeles as well as for my associate Bill Moore, then police reporter of the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and for me as the visiting kibitzer who was supposed to supply “atmosphere” — as if the affair didn’t have enough and to spare of that commodity.

We were definitely hampered by the fact that by this time Carlton Williams, star reporter of the opposing paper, was working hand-in-glove with Detective-Lieutenant Filkas who was in charge of the Los Angeles aspects of the case. Witnesses were being brought up to the Times office, questioned and interviewed and photographed by the Times staff. We were handicapped. However, we did have a composite photograph made up, showing round-faced, Spanish-Irish, Bill Moore peering through the porthole of the Carma where the mysterious murderer was supposed to have been, and at least one of the witnesses obliged with a positive identification of it as being that of the mysterious Peeping Tom!

It was a time when few, if any, holds were barred. But the news leaked out that the entire investigation centered on one man, that man who had been a member of the earlier Wanderwell expedition. He and the Captain were supposed to have had a scene in the Wanderwells’ Wilshire Boulevard apartment, during which the ex-Argonaut had demanded his money back. And — even though the disillusioned voyager had but one friend with him while Wanderwell was flanked with two aides — the Captain had shattered a window and yelled for help.

Aloha had then dropped in, and smoothed things out. Wanderwell had promised to pay the money later, thus stalling off his angry antagonist — whom he outweighed by 60 pounds and towered over by five inches. All in all, Captain Wanderwell seems not to have shown up too well on that occasion. Of course, it hadn’t been rehearsed and he wasn’t as usual the director. However, he didn’t make good his promise. So, the man who had challenged him, flanked by several others of the indignant South American contingent, finally went to the police bunco-squad, where they got no help at all.

The story that this man told the officer on the bunco-squad was that he and his pretty young wife had joined the previous Wanderwell expedition in Buenos Aires; that they had contributed all their available funds and then had been stranded in Panama. He and his wife had been left strapped, then they had been forced to separate since she could get a subsistence job as an entertainer and B-girl in a Colon bar and he obviously could not. So, he alone had worked his way north to Los Angeles to try to retrieve all or part of the original investment from the self-styled “Captain.”

Early reports of the fracas in the Wilshire Boulevard apartment differed considerably. Aloha Wanderwell, who hadn’t been present for much of the time, said that her husband had been threatened, and that his coat and tie were disheveled. All others present said that there had been no threats but only a demand for an accounting of funds, and that twice the instigator of the interview had suggested that they call the police and have a showdown — something for which Wanderwell had no taste.

At any rate, the day after the murder the investigation speedily narrowed itself down to this one target, this mysterious man who had been a member of the previous group — although police records showed that he was anxious to work if at all through proper legal channels. Photographs of the missing man were produced and suddenly several people conveniently remembered that they had seen someone of that general description lurking around the Pacific and Orient docks — where the Carma was moored — at 6 P.M. the night of the murder. Others (or the same ones) testified that he had been noticed in the same vicinity at 11:30 P.M. that night, asking directions as to how to return to Los Angeles. Certainly such evidence, given to the grand jury and later to the court — if true — displays a surprising lack of enterprise on the part of the murderer, both before and after the crime. In five and a half hours the murderer of Captain Wanderwell should have been able to arrive, do the job, and disappear — without asking his way of anyone. And if he had been able to find his way to the dock where the Carma was moored, he certainly should have been able to find his way away from it... after the crime. None of this evidence made much sense, even to the police — though it was repeated at the trial.

But on Thursday December 8, acting on information received, as the old saying goes (which was actually Reporter Williams’s dope on the previous fracas between Wanderwell and the accused), Detective-Lieutenant Filkas of the Los Angeles police, backed up by the intrepid Carl Williams, swooped down on a house at 2045 Blake Street, near Riverside Drive and the Los Angeles River. The dismal little cottage was dark, empty, almost unfurnished, without heat or light save that of a candle.

As the detective and the newspaper reporter descended upon the place, a man emerged from the house with his hands in the air. So enters our major suspect, one William James (Curley) Guy. He had been in residence there, fortified by some oranges and delicatessen food, all the late newspapers and the aforesaid candle.

Curley Guy, as we came to know him, was the adventurer who had dared to approach Wanderwell and ask for his money back. He was a native of Wales, an authentic flyer, navigator and ship’s officer: a slightly built man with clear-cut features, wavy hair, and a ready, apologetic smile. He said he had rented the abandoned house the morning after the murder, had stocked it with a few comestibles, and had then sat still and waited for the inevitable. When questioned by police and reporters at the Times offices — where he was taken instead of to the police station — he explained that he had gone into hiding because he knew he would be the primary suspect of the much-publicized murder, and didn’t want to involve his friends, the DeLarms, with whom he had been living.

Besides, Curley Guy was in no position to face investigation. In his attempt to establish American citizenship (to which he had no legal right whatsoever) he had been cutting numerous corners. A humble seaman-navigator aboard the palatial Vincent Astor yacht, he had jumped ship some months before when the vessel was docked near Los Angeles. Then, he had registered and voted at the recent elections — in order to make himself eligible for a pilot’s or a navigator’s license — then only granted to American citizens.

A grayish raincoat was found among his meager effects and the police then marked the case Closed. There were various identification parades, held both at the Times offices and at police headquarters, some without Guy being present. But several important witnesses identified his raincoat — which they had seen through a twelve-inch porthole on the Carma on a dark and foggy night, if at all. Guy was given the nitrate-paraffin test and passed it, but the police explained that too much time had elapsed and that in the meantime he might have washed his hands, or even at the time of the murder he might have worn gloves — though never did anybody in officialdom suggest that the same ruse might have been used by any other potential suspect.

The case, which had up until this time been largely centered in a newspaper office, finally came to preliminary hearing (Guy was booked December 13) and the comedy of errors got into full swing. Before a magistrate, the lovely Aloha Wanderwell, who had been very dry-eyed all this time, gave her testimony. She also smiled encouragingly at the prisoner all the while, which mightily confused the press who were properly trying to build her up as the bereaved widow. Also smiling and nodding to him was pretty Marian Smith, the girl from Atlanta who thought that she had seen somebody like him through the porthole on the fatal night, but wasn’t too sure...

What really flabbergasted the working press was the fact that after the hearing was over, the beauteous Aloha walked across the room and made a point of warmly shaking hands with the prisoner and whispering a few words to him. It was certainly evident at the time that there were no hard feelings anywhere. It made no sense to the boys on the Times — nor to us on the Herald-Express, the opposition paper, who naturally resented being caught off base. With the arrest of Curley Guy reporter Williams and his friend Lieutenant Filkas had scooped everybody in town. But the thing was just beginning...

The trial of William James (Curley) Guy opened February 3, 1933 in Long Beach, with Judge Robert W. Kenny (more recently Attorney General of the State of California and now a prominent attorney specializing in labor law and relations) presiding. At the request of the city editor of the Herald-Express, I was assigned to cover the highlights of the trial. This may have been because of, or in spite of, the fact that my early stories on the case had accented my belief that Curley Guy was innocent — at least of the crime for which he had been indicted. I had even gone so far as to begin one story with the famous Gallic cliché, “Cherchez la Femme!”

Weeks ahead of the trial our opposition paper, the Times, intimated that Curley Guy was guilty all over its front pages. The Herald-Express inclined toward the opposite viewpoint — not only because of my own hunch but because Bill Moore, their regular police-reporter, agreed that the case against Guy was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. The thing became a battle between two great rival newspapers, with no holds barred.

Meanwhile, the ceremonies attendant on the burial of Captain Walter Wanderwell — né Valerian Johannes Riecynski — had taken place with considerable fanfare; ceremonies from which the working press were excluded but which must have been something for the book. The body had been cheaply cremated in Long Beach, then taken back aboard the old schooner and in the midst of a rainstorm and a howling gale had been transported out to sea, with the full crew aboard. Since the Carma could not yet move under her own power of either sails or auxiliaries, she was lashed to a fishing vessel, aptly named the Sunshine 2nd, and ignominiously hauled out past the breakwater. The remains were wrapped in a flag — whether that of the United States, of his native Poland or something like his uniforms designed especially for the occasion is not recorded — and consigned to the deep. Then when it came time to play Taps it was found that no bugle was aboard! But by that time most of the disillusioned mourners were too seasick to care. On the way home the fifteen Argonauts got together and unanimously agreed to call off the projected tour to story-book islands of the South Seas.

Besides, most of them had been subpoenaed for the trial of Curley Guy and they wouldn’t have missed that for anything.

Judge Kenny, looking like an Alaskan billikin or an Oriental Buddha, dominated the proceedings. The Judge ruled with cautious fairness — though some of the newspapermen who lunched with him gathered that in his private opinion he felt rather sure that the trial was a dry run; there would be no victory for the State.

Representing the defense was Eugene McGann, a fine old Irish warhorse in the tradition of Fallon and Jerry Geisler, who operated from the beginning as if he knew that he had the world by the tail with a downhill drag. From whence came his fee — which must have been considerable — nobody knows. It is part of the record that Guy was down to his last ten dollars when arrested. Nor did our defendant pad his coffers by signing up with any one of the numerous newspapers and press services who would have gladly paid him plenty for his “life story” (to be ghost-written of course by some hack sob-sister) as has happened in so many other murder cases. Curley Guy played it close to his chest, but I said in print then and I still maintain that he played it like a man in a poker game who had two aces showing and one in the hole.

Buron Fitts, a prominent legal light at the time, was then District Attorney of Los Angeles, and his jurisdiction covered the scene of the crime. But at the last minute he decided to send in this third team, a couple of bright young men fresh out of law school. Bill Brayton and Clarence Hunt carried the case for the People, doing their level best with what they had — which wasn’t too much. There was a faint uncertainty about their courtroom manner — they went through their roles and read their lines in a manner which reminded me of the old story of Eugene Field as dramatic critic who said of Mr. Creston Clarke as King Lear that he “played the King as if he momentarily expected someone to play the Ace.”

The two were bright and able young men and they had a true bill presented by a picked grand jury. But I always felt that they realized that the facts of the Wanderwell killing were still obscured and deep beneath the surface. They did their best, but they had to sit in on a tough poker game with nothing better than two pairs.

And Curley Guy had an ace in the hole, as I wrote at the time and still maintain.

On the opening day of the trial at Long Beach, thanks to the fact that while I was a pro tern Herald-Express reporter I was allowed an interview with the prisoner in his cell, and later was permitted to walk with him and his aged, tobacco-chewing deputy sheriff several blocks through the busy streets of Long Beach to the courtroom. Guy was under no restraint; the old man wore a rusty .38 but certainly would never have used it in a crowd and probably hadn’t fired it in ten years or more anyway. It occurred to me at the time that Guy could easily have made a break for it anywhere along the way — the deputy in charge could have been pushed over with a nudge, and I for one would not have lifted a finger to stop the man, since I had already come to my own conclusions about who had actually shot Wanderwell — and who should be standing in the dock!

As we walked slowly along the streets, I tried to make the most of the time — tried to probe a little into the mind of the man accused of murder. As a mystery author, who had been brought for the first time into contact with the real thing, I thought that innocent or guilty, Curley Guy’s reactions would be story material. But he had little to say. He disposed of Wanderwell in a few well-chosen if unprintable phrases. The man had been only a twenty-one-carat phony, who had made his living out of taking bows for adventures he had never had — and of taking money from little people who were seduced by his talk. The bullet through the back of his neck had been too good for him, but Curley laughed at the suggestion that he himself had put it there.

My impression of Guy at the time was that he was a right little, tight little Welshman, who knew planes and the navigation of ships, who would — for all his slight stature and boyish profile — have been a bad man to push around. But I also felt that he would, under any pressure, be the sort of person who would only hit above the belt. I realized that he despised Captain Walter Wanderwell — but I could not believe that he would have shot Wanderwell or anyone else in the back, under any circumstances whatever.

I tried to turn the conversation toward the topic of the lovely lost Vera, the wife from whom he had separated in the Canal Zone some months ago, and whose loss was supposed — according to the findings of the grand jury, the Times, and the prosecution — to have inspired his murder of Wanderwell. Guy shrugged that off. They were stranded in the Canal Zone. Vera had a chance to become an entertainer in a cafe, a B-girl, maybe worse. So, she chose to remain there and eat regularly, while he worked his way north.

“Water over the bridge — or do Americans say ‘dam’?” queried Guy. More important to him at the moment was the question of whether or not, after the trial was over, he would be deported. He was determined to secure American citizenship, somehow or other.

I tried to explain to him that his situation was precarious, since he had been born in Wales and later had become a citizen of Australia. The only way he could legally enter the U.S.A. was on a quota, and this particular police record certainly would not help him with any of the immigration authorities.

About the trial and the Wanderwell murder itself, he would say very little. But I did discover the fact — which no detective had yet bothered to elicit — that Guy did not know that on the day of the murder the yacht Carma had been moved to new moorings at the P. and O. docks.

Which response could, of course, have been faked. Perhaps, as the prosecution argued on the first day of that memorable trial, Curley Guy had hated Captain Wanderwell so violently as a result of the failure of the South American expedition and the ensuing humiliation of himself and his wife, that he had first tried to get his money back and then had resorted to murder.

It made sense on paper, it made sense to the grand jury, and it sounded very likely as presented to the jury by Mr. Brayton and Mr. Hunt. Things looked not too good for Curley Guy during the first days of the trial, but he remained confident and unruffled.

Prominent in the courtroom during the trial was Aloha Wanderwell — and her sister, Margaret B. Hall — each done up in picturesque uniforms consisting of open silk shirts with loose Russian sleeves, dark, tight vests, breeches and shiny boots. The sister had never been on any of the expeditions, but she certainly went along with a gag. They were a striking couple. Aloha had her fair hair done up in tight ringlets under a tam-o-shanter cap and added considerably to the tone of the affair. Her innocent, little-girlish face, topping an Amazonic six-foot form, made a policeman next to me whisper that she looked like a .22 on a .45 frame. Everyone waited hopefully for the day when she would be called to testify, but the trial dragged on and on with interminable medical evidence that “proved” that Wanderwell had been shot at close range — that he had been shot from a distance outside the porthole — that the bullet had ranged here, there and everywhere...!

The course of the trial was then brightened by the announcement of Curley Guy to a lady reporter from still another Los Angeles newspaper that if freed he would gladly volunteer for a trip into the stratosphere with the famous Professor Auguste Picard, who was then out in Hollywood raising money for another of his balloon ascensions. There was no immediate comment from the Professor. It was the only statement Guy had to make to the press after my interview with him en route from the jail.

Still the trial dragged on, with days spent on the testimony of Guy’s friend Eddie DeLarm (owner of a plane which had been making mysterious trips to Mexico), of Eddie’s wife and of his two teen-age daughters — all of whom swore that Guy was in his room in their Glendale house at the time of the crime. Considerable time was spent on the boy-friends of the cute little DeLarm girls, who had or had not been sitting around in the living room playing jazz records on the fatal evening, and had or hadn’t seen Guy about the house. The jury had a field day, making trips to look at the schooner Carma (where one juror shocked the court and panicked the newspapermen by making Rabelaisian suggestions concerning the way in which fifteen crew members and four Wanderwells must have utilized the limited sleeping arrangements of the ship) and to the original slip where the Carma had been tied, and even to the shack where Curley Guy had gone into hiding the morning after the murder.

DeLarm, not the most co-operative of witnesses, testified that most of his original statements to the police had been obtained under duress. He cited a night when he and his wife had had their home invaded by Lieutenant Filkas and reporter Williams — without warrant — during which time they had taken it for granted that Williams was an officer and not just a Times reporter on a field day. The DeLarms had been bounced around a bit and felt reasonably annoyed. Some of the witnesses who had testified to seeing Curley Guy’s face in the porthole just before the murder — after having been prompted by glimpses of his photograph or looks at his raincoat — hedged on their testimony. It was also brought out that DeLarm’s car, the only vehicle to which Guy had ready access, had stood in DeLarm’s driveway all the time during the evening of the murder.

Although the case for the prosecution began to go all to pieces, it had a momentary life when a trimotored plane registered in the name of DeLarm was nabbed at Corona Airport, near San Diego, and found to hold 500 gallons of alcohol illegally imported from below the border. DeLarm insisted that he had sold the plane to somebody else a few days ago, but he was undoubtedly making a living running a shoe-string air transport and Curley Guy — a pilot and navigator — worked for him and lived with him. Perhaps we here have an indication of the one basic secret which Guy was really anxious to hide. The serious student of the case could certainly keep that fact in mind. All this happened in the days of prohibition, when an enterprising man with an airplane could make $4,- or $5,000 by importing a load of schnapps from south of the border. There were also numerous Chinese who waited in Mexican cities, ready to pay almost anything for an entree into the U.S.A. All this is not to speak of the traffic in drugs which went on and still goes on between Tijuana and points north. At any rate, DeLarm and his friend and associate, Curley Guy, had been making twice-weekly flights across the border for some months. The record does not show that they delivered any cargoes of Mexican serapes or huarachos.

Like most newspapermen assigned to the trial, I got awfully bored with it finally, and went around the corner to a nearby Long Beach burlesque theater which offered as its main attraction a double bill consisting of the personal appearance of the luscious Aloha Wanderwell together with the first showing of the film her late husband had made in South America, The River of Death. The show, at the time of my attendance, was a sell-out, with standing room only. I must admit that Aloha was a considerable disappointment, since she only appeared briefly and in a tight military uniform not designed to do justice to her junoesque charms. Aloha recited in flat midwestern accents a short introduction to the film, then gave its narration. The picture itself was definitely in the home-movie category, not too professionally directed or photographed. There were interminable scenes of the fair Aloha hemmed in by cannibalistic head-hunters and head-shrinkers who mugged happily for the camera; there were scenes of her knocking off predatory crocodiles and jungle cats with her trusty rifle and pistol. But the picture dragged. Before the second reel had run off some of the cash customers in the back rows were shouting “Take it off, take it off...” in the old burlesque tradition, and making wolf-whistles at the lady on stage.

Aloha, obviously somewhat at loss — a Trilby without her Svengali — didn’t take the hint from the audience. When the “show” ended, a number of newsmen who had been in the audience went around outside and down the alley, and waylaid Aloha as she left the stage door, trying vainly for an interview, have vainly for an interview. One reporter remembered that she claimed to have been a French orphan of mysterious and noble lineage who had been discovered by the late Captain Wanderwell in a convent somewhere in southern France and, in my hearing, spoke to her in her native language, whereupon Aloha said “Huh?” We all concluded that her particular convent must have been one in which for some reason only English was spoken.

Two blocks away from the burlesque theater the trial still dragged on and on, becoming less and less newsworthy. And then, in the middle of a dull afternoon, with almost no reporters at hand, the prosecution suddenly called Aloha Wanderwell to the stand. She was, of course, the most interesting, exciting, glamorous figure in the entire case — she was front-page stuff. But everybody thought she would be held in reserve for another day or so, and her appearance in the witness chair at that time was a surprise.

Her testimony, delivered in a faint, cautious voice, was nothing unexpected. She told of the scene in the Wilshire Boulevard apartment house when Curley Guy and his friend and employer DeLarm had come visiting Wanderwell, who had been flanked by two associates but still had felt it necessary to smash a window and holler for help.

From her own separate apartment next door she had heard the appeal and come running, whereupon she smoothed things over between the five men and got Guy and DeLarm to leave after her harried husband had promised to square the financial thing at a restaurant that night — a place where he and Aloha were making a personal appearance. It is not recorded that he ever kept the date.

The witness was perhaps a little disappointing to the two bright young assistant district attorneys, for her testimony — while it matched what she had said at the preliminary hearing and before the grand jury — was not too strong against the prisoner at the bar. But all the same, that was a tense half hour in the courtroom — an hour which I am sorry to have missed. But all was not yet lost.

His Honor, Judge Kenny, had been a newspaper reporter before he took up the study of law and rose to his present eminence. Realizing that Aloha’s testimony was the high spot of the trial, a most newsworthy moment indeed, and also realizing that her appearance at this hour would give a big break to the morning newspapers and leave the afternoon sheets out in the cold, he reverted to type. Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman. His Honor quietly and firmly exercised his judicial prerogative and recessed the session for ten minutes on the grounds that he had to make a long distance telephone call.

This fact has never previously been made public, but with Bob Kenny’s permission I can now let out the secret that his call was to the office of the Herald-Express (the Los Angeles newspaper on which he had once years ago been a cub-reporter) and that he gave the city editor of his old paper enough of the story on Aloha’s testimony so that instead of being scooped, we had an exclusive front-page story. I doubt if there had ever been in recorded history another major murder case in which the presiding judge has sneaked back into his chambers and phoned in a red-hot story to a friendly newspaper.

Not, of course, to intimate that Judge Kenny wasn’t impeccably fair in his handling of the Wanderwell murder trial. Most of his rulings, as the transcript shows, were in favor of the People. Messrs Bray ton and Hunt had a certain amount of evidence, mainly circumstantial, on their side. They had a lot of law. But they were still, in the opinion of most of the newspapermen covering the trial, trying to convict a nice young man of murder when he was actually only guilty of jumping ship, illegal entry into the U.S.A., possible smuggling activities via DeLarm’s plane and of having tried in a childish fashion to hide out when he learned that an avowed enemy of his had been killed.

The case finally went to the jury, after a good bit of heart-rending oratory from Counsellor McGann and a dry, factual summing-up from the prosecution, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Before 6 the twelve good men and true were back — with the expected verdict of Not Guilty. It is, as Judge Kenny points out, one of the few cases in history where a jury has failed to stay out long enough to get an extra dinner at the expense of the public. It was a verdict which surprised nobody who had followed the course of the trial, and one which I think was concurred with by His Honor and by the press and public.

Which brings us inevitably to the gaps in the story; faces us with the certain question of who actually did put a .38 bullet through Captain Walter Wanderwell’s back? Your guess may be as good as mine. I am not able to answer that question, any more than can the police even at this late date — though I have reason to think that some of the boys down at Homicide have come to the same conclusion as have I. Of course the investigating officers muffed the thing completely; they set their sights on one suspect and never bothered to look anywhere else.

There were some interesting questions which I raised at the time, and still raise.

Was it likely that Curley Guy, a two-fisted forthright aviator and navigator, even with a grievance against Captain Wanderwell, would have shot the man in the back over a matter of a few hundred dollars? To me, from a psychological standpoint, it seems out of character. Guy had already faced Wanderwell and had scared the much bigger and heavier heroic adventurer into spasms — and into smashing a window and calling for help.

Then too, what were the reassuring words that the fair Aloha whispered to Curley Guy at the time of the preliminary hearing, and why did she and certain other members of the group smile and nod at him in such a fraternal manner that afternoon?

Then too, Wanderwell was found to have been killed by a bullet from a .38 pistol. No evidence was ever brought forward to show that Curley Guy ever owned or possessed such a weapon, or any other gun. He was a young man who, in my considered opinion, would have resorted to his fists in any argument. But the evidence does show that Wanderwell did have — in addition to a surprisingly heavy stock of rifles and carbines aboard the vessel — a .38 pistol. It disappeared about the time of the murder. Where did it go?

And why was he found dying in the dark? The murderer, knowing that people were in the next cabin, waited on the scene for an extra second to turn out the light. Why?

At the time the jury and the press made an inspection of the Carma, we discovered that in the cabin where Wanderwell died, concealed by a rag, there was a hatch leading down into the hold and the bilges, easily raised from above or below. From the hold there were half a dozen other hatches opening into the cabins, the mess-hall, and out on deck. It is within the bounds of possibility that someone who hated Wanderwell and who knew the ins and outs of the schooner could have crept through the hold, raised the hatch, and shot the man, then escaped the way he came.

One cannot sensibly accept the theory that Wanderwell was killed by a visitor who showed his face at the porthole to at least four people. Wanderwell was a nervous, jittery character in spite of his imposing presence — he would never have turned his back on Curley Guy or any other of his numerous enemies. Yet he had obviously turned his back and had been leaning over backwards at the moment he was shot — the bullet entered his neck and ranged down to the heart. Was he, perhaps — at the request of someone he knew and trusted — engaged in reaching up toward his collection of scrap-books on a high shelf in his cabin when the shot was fired?

Various other interesting theories have been put forward by writers interested in the case. It has been seriously suggested that Wanderwell, realizing that he had sunk $22,000 in a useless hulk of a vessel and that he was at the end of his rope, had taken his own life with his .38 pistol but changing the suicide into the semblance of murder by previously tying the gun to a weight and dangling the weight out of the porthole, so that when in death he released his grip the gun would disappear forever into the muddy bottom of the harbor. This ingenious theory still does not explain why he should have shot himself in the back at such an angle, but one cannot say it was absolutely impossible. There are records in the medico-legal textbooks of men who have shot themselves three times through the head, who have stabbed and then shot themselves — and from seemingly impossible angles.

It has also been seriously suggested that one of the Wanderwell children, inspired by seeing movies of Bill Hart or Jack Holt or some other tough two-gun shooting hero of the time, had come upon their father’s loaded pistol and had pulled the trigger at the wrong time and place, causing an accidental death which was hastily hushed up by the crew members. Such things have happened, but in the light of the extensive grilling given the Wanderwell children it seems unlikely that they could have kept their lips sealed.

In my own opinion the true solution would have come, if at all, from a close study of the situation on board the schooner Carma. With no less than eight exceptionally attractive young women aboard, with Captain Wanderwell a handsome, dashing figure right out of a movie serial or a radio soap-opera, there could have been conflicts and frictions, romances and jealousies and broken hearts and revenges unguessed at by the thumb-fingered authorities. The Wanderwells were not close at the time — Aloha had months before made her own apartment next door to her husband’s in the place on Wilshire. And she had had no compunctions about leaving him on the ship, with all the pretty crew members, while she went up to Los Angeles to stay with her sister. Was it not within the realm of possibility that Wanderwell had tired of the pretty blond wife he had married (under the shadow of the State’s shotgun) and was carrying on with one or more of his charming feminine Argonauts? Could not that have led to disastrous results?

It is of course within the bounds of possibility that Curley Guy, or some other outraged and vengeful former voyager, did come down to the P. and O. docks that night, did appear at the Carma s porthole, and ask for Wanderwell. If so, that person may not have come armed, and may not have fired the shot. It seems, from this perspective, unlikely that a would-be killer would show himself so openly to the group in the social hall, even through a porthole — or that he would be seen some hours after the murder wandering around the waterfront area, asking his way back to Los Angeles.

These questions will never be answered now. The Los Angeles police force — and particularly its homicide squad — have in recent years been completely torn down and rebuilt, with even a Marine general brought in at one time to make some order out of the chaos. Many of the old-timers still remain in uniform, however, and at least two of them have admitted to me, off the record, that they have finally come to the conclusion that Wanderwell wasn’t killed by Curley at all, but by—

Guy himself, when released, put up a stout fight to resist being transported back to Australia — the boy wanted most desperately a chance to become an American citizen. The odds were against him, though he even paid a call on Judge Kenny, then living in a big beach-house at Malibu, and asked the jurist’s help. Kenny was friendly but dubious, and finally lent the young man a pair of trunks and took him out for a swim in the ocean. At the same time, as a guest of Judge Kenny’s next door neighbors, the district attorney of Los Angeles, Mr. Buron Fitts, was also swimming. Kenny held his breath, but Mr. District Attorney didn’t recognize the defendant his assistants had just failed to send to the gallows, and Curley Guy didn’t recognize the D.A., so everybody splashed around and had a wonderful time.

While changing back into his clothes, Curley Guy made a last appeal to the Judge. Couldn’t something be done to square off his American citizenship? After all, he had voted Democrat at the last election...

The comments of Judge Kenny at this admission that a citizen of the Commonwealth of Australia had voted in an American presidential election are not recorded. But the young man kept in touch with the judge through letters and postcards, even after he was deported. He popped up a few years later, as a fighter pilot for Haile Selassie in Abyssinia, against the far superior odds of Mussolini’s air legions. He reported in again at the beginning of World War Two — he had a job ferrying Hudson bombers from the U.S.A. to Britain. On his fifth trip he got into trouble off Newfoundland, and had only time to radio back “Ditching, tanks all empty, cheerio” before he went down into the cold bitter waves of the North Atlantic — not a bad end for a true soldier of fortune, who actually did many of the things and had many of the adventures to which the late Captain Wanderwell pretended.

But most of the questions are still unanswered. Carlton Williams, now a graying veteran newspaperman and still on the staff of the Times, remembers the Wanderwell case perfectly. He has just now stated to me that in his opinion there was never any doubt about the murder at all; Curley Guy pulled the trigger and that was that, and besides, Wanderwell probably had it coming to him. Mr. Williams had said to me that nobody who had been with him and Lieutenant Filkas at the time of the arrest of Guy in the house on Blake Street could have had any possible doubt about his guilt, there were certain statements and admissions made then which indicated the truth. It may be so — even on the track of a front-page story, reporter Williams would not tamper with the truth as he saw it.

But it is also important to remember that a man may be an enemy of society in a small way and not in a big way. A man may have something to hide — when confronted with the police and the press — and yet not be guilty of the major crime of which he is accused. Curley Guy had been cutting corners all over the lot since he jumped ship — there were half a dozen possible charges against him. He knew that he had had a fracas with Wanderwell, that he was in the country illegally, and that he had been piloting DeLarm’s plane on certain flights over the American-Mexican border... bearing cargo not to be officially scrutinized. He had a lot to cover up, if not a murder.

Anyway, Curley Guy is dead. When his plane crashed into the sea, the story of the murder on board the schooner Carma was effectively ended. Long before that, however, the fifteen Argonauts had left for home — most of them hitchhiking. But they had had their hour, their little crowded hour. One of them, Lord Edward Montagu, the noblest born of the little group, returned to England by invitation of the American immigration authorities, and he was heard of only a few years later when he was reportedly hauled into magistrate’s court on the charge of trying to peddle American hot-dogs outside the gates of his father’s palatial, 400-acre estate. Later, so I have heard, he came into the title and now is presumably sitting in the House of Lords and voting Conservative.

For some time after the trial the fair Aloha haunted the Hollywood casting offices, offering her talents and late husband’s film (River of Death); both commodities had a very limited appeal. After a few weeks she disappeared — perhaps she retired to that incredible French convent where only English is spoken. But it is certain that the newspapermen, the judge, lawyers, police and court attendants who came into contact with Aloha will long remember her tall icy loveliness.

As for the schooner Carma, a few weeks after the end of the Wanderwell trial she was officially condemned as hopelessly unseaworthy and was towed out to sea and sunk. Her secrets are now and for all time secure in Davy Jones’s locker.