The Case of the Crime King

Foreword

Everyone knows that “Dragnet” stories are taken from actual cases in the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. But because of the famous tag line “The names were changed to protect the innocent,” many people are unaware that the police officers appearing in the stories, with the exceptions of Lieutenant Joe Friday and Sergeant Frank Smith, Captain Peters, and Sergeants Art Haney and Tom Johnson, are real persons. Only the names of suspects, victims, and witnesses are changed.

The only major departure from fact in the typical “Dragnet” story is that Joe Friday and Frank Smith are substituted for the police team that actually handled the case. Obviously this fictional device is necessary to give the series continuity. But it creates an odd situation — the secondary-role officers who appear in the case get a measure of recognition in being identified by name, whereas the officers who enacted the primary roles in real life receive no mention at all. They become, in the story, Friday and Smith.

For dramatic reasons this is unavoidable. (What would a “Dragnet” story be without Joe Friday and Frank Smith?) Nevertheless it has always seemed to me unfair. So, in this foreword I want to give credit to the police officers who actually worked on this case.

This was a long, complicated case covering several years of activity. But for technical reasons the time element in the fictionalized version has been telescoped considerably. Three different teams of police officers handled various phases of the investigation. But in the book Lieutenant Friday and Sergeant Smith duplicate the work of all three teams.

The six officers whose exploits Joe Friday and Frank Smith re-enact in the following story are Sergeants Jack Crowley, Harry Killeby, Robert Perry, and J. P. Brady; Officers Dee Lightner and Stanford (Sam) McCaleb. All six, like Friday and Smith in the story, work the day watch out of Robbery Division.

I am indebted to these officers for the time they took to give me considerable background material about the case, much of which I could not have gotten from a mere study of impersonally written case records.

Grateful acknowledgment for their cooperation in helping me obtain material for this book is also made to Los Angeles Chief of Police W. H. Parker; Chief of Detectives Thad Brown; Captain Stanley Sheldon, Commander of the Public Information Division; Ray Pinker, Technical Director of the Criminalistics Laboratory; and the many other officers who gave of their time. The latter is too long a roster to list. It includes most of the Robbery Division, most of the Homicide Division, and individual officers scattered through a half dozen other divisions. It is only lack of space, not lack of appreciation, that precludes listing all their names.

Finally, and most important, acknowledgment is made to Jack Webb, the creator of “Dragnet.”

— Richard Deming