The Case of the Crime King

Chapter 2

9:32 a.m. We continued to question the victim. He rounded out the descriptions of the bandits, including color of hair and type of clothing.

Dehelvey said the two men had forced him to drive to the rear door of his supermarket, unlock it, and open the safe. They had taken more than three thousand dollars from the safe, had ignored a stack of checks. Through some peculiar oversight they had not emptied his wallet, which had contained some hundred and fifty dollars.

The suspects had then bound and gagged their victim with adhesive tape. They had not bothered to shut the rear door when they left. Dehelvey had inched his way out into the alley. He estimated it had taken him more than an hour to make that few feet, and by then he’d been too exhausted to attempt inching the several hundred feet to the street. He’d lain in the alley until nearly 8:00 a.m., when the two girls had driven through it and spotted him.

Frank said, “What’s the make and license number of your car?”

Dehelvey said, “That won’t do you any good.”

“What?” Frank asked.

“It’s still parked behind the store. They must have had their own car stashed near-by.”

That seemed to be all the victim could tell us. I turned to the two girls. I said, “May we have you ladies’ names now, please?”

“What for?” the blonde asked. “All we did was pick Mr. Dehelvey up, take him to a doctor, and then bring him here.”

“Like ’em anyway,” I said. I added, “You got some reason to conceal them?”

The girls looked at each other. Finally the brunette smiled, said, “Maybe it would be good publicity. Or should we call Max first?”

Frank asked, “Who’s Max?”

“Our agent,” the brunette said. “We never make a move without him. Not since the time we got ourselves arrested for going into a night club in bathing suits.”

James Dehelvey had started to fall asleep in his chair. Rousing himself, he stared at the brunette.

“In bathing suits!” he said.

“We thought it would be a cute publicity stunt. Max didn’t. He’d be furious if we got our names in the paper again without his O.K.”

“You’re actresses?” I asked.

“TV. We were headed for Casting when we saw Mr. Dehelvey.” She glanced at the wall clock. “We’re out of luck today. If there was anything listed for our types, it’s gone by now.”

I said, “Afraid we’ll have to have your names, ma’am. You’re witnesses.”

The blonde said enthusiastically, “Oh, will we have to appear in court?”

“Possibly,” I said. “We can’t guarantee you’ll be called.”

Her face fell. She said to the brunette, “At least we could get our names in the paper. Max couldn’t object. After all, it’s good publicity.”

The brunette said dubiously, “You know how he is when he doesn’t plan it.”

“Sure. But we can tell him the police forced us. Gave us the third degree.”

“You ladies are strictly volunteer witnesses,” Frank said firmly. “Don’t go around saying we forced you to do anything.”

Dehelvey said in a tired voice, “You through with me? Can I go home and get some sleep?”

I said, “Like you to look at some pictures first.” Then I turned back to the girls. “You ladies performed a fine civic duty by aiding this man. Nobody could possibly criticize you for it. Not even your agent. But we do have to have your names.”

The girls looked at each other again. Then the blonde shrugged, looked up at me and said, “I’m Sandra Joyce.”

Frank was writing this down when I asked, “Stage name?”

“Well, yes. You’re not going to put our real names in the paper, are you?”

“We want them for the record.”

The brunette said, “You’re not putting my real name in the paper.”

Sandra Joyce looked at her and giggled. The brunette frowned at her.

Sandra said to me, “It wouldn’t do us any good to have our real names in print. Nobody’d know who we were. Couldn’t the papers just say, ‘The witnesses gave their names as Sandra Joyce and Evelyn King’? That wouldn’t be exactly a lie.”

Frank wrote down the second name. I said patiently, “Usually the press uses the stage names of actors and actresses. If it was a big story, they might use both. But it will only be a mention.”

Both girls pouted a little at this. After a momentary hesitation the blonde, Sandra, said, “My real name is Janet Wilson.”

Frank cocked an eyebrow at her. I could almost read his mind. I was having the same thought: What was so wrong with the name Janet Wilson that she had to change it?

The brunette said in a low voice, “I’m Myrtle Kaltwasser.”

Frank didn’t cock an eyebrow at her. He just wrote the name down. Then he asked for their addresses and wrote those down, too.

There was nothing more the girls could give us. They offered to wait around until we were through with James Dehelvey and then drive him home, but we told them we’d see that he got home. After a final admonition from the blonde to give their stage names to the press, they left.

10:01 a.m. The victim stated that he was on the verge of collapse and was more interested in sleep than in catching the suspects. We explained that it had already been ten hours since the robbery, and every extra hour gave the suspects that much more chance to get away with it. However, we didn’t want to be unreasonable. As it would take us a little time to run the suspects’ descriptions and MO through the Stat’s Office, and then run whatever names Stat’s turned through R & I, we arranged for him to get an hour’s nap while we were doing this. We put him in the room off the officers’ locker room, in the basement, which has a couple of cots in it.

The Stat’s Office maintains a file of punch cards on every criminal who has been under Los Angeles jurisdiction. These cards are only 3½ inches by 7½ inches, but enough information can be coded on them to fill a file folder.

We gave the descriptions and MO of the suspects to a girl on duty in the Stat’s Office. The speed and efficiency of the punch-card-machine workers have always fascinated me. I watched over the girl’s shoulder as she checked a mimeographed list of code numbers and jotted down the numbers she selected.

In addition to routine information, such as the DR number, date and location of occurrence, there are twelve categories of information coded on the cards. Each of these categories is broken down into specific items, and each item has an individual code number.

For example, from just her mimeographed list of “trademarks” the girl jotted down nine code numbers based on the scanty information we had been able to give her. Quicker than it takes to tell it, she selected 015, 025, 033, 035, 042, 081, 088, 095, and 157. Watching the code sheet over her shoulder, I saw that these numbers represented “Bound victim with tape,” “Forces victim into car,” “Victim parking car or leaving parking place,” “Chain store,” “Familiar with victim’s habits,” “Kidnap,” “Makes victim drive suspect,” “Makes victim open safe,” and “Threatens victim if he reports robbery.”

After selecting other code numbers from a list detailing bandits’ descriptions, the girl rose and went into the file room. There all the code numbers she had selected would be keyed into an electronic sorting machine, which would automatically pick out from the thousands of cards on file the ones of suspects on record with similar descriptions and MO’s. We didn’t follow her in to watch this process, as both of us had seen it many times.

In less than fifteen minutes the girl was back with a typed list of thirty-six possibles.

Out in the hall Frank and I looked over the list together. Neither of us recognized any of the names.

“Next stop, the Golden Horseshoe,” Frank said.

The Golden Horseshoe is R & I. It’s a huge room with shelves on three sides, in the shape of a U. All criminal “packages” are filed here. Every person within Los Angeles jurisdiction who has a criminal record has his individual manila envelope. These are stacked upright, like books, on the shelves. The yellow color of the envelopes gives the shelves a golden cast. Somebody dubbed the place the “Golden Horseshoe,” and the name stuck.

Packages can’t be taken from the room. In the area between the shelves there are tables at which officers can examine the packages they are interested in. Frank took eighteen of them and I took eighteen.

Within fifteen minutes we had reduced the possibles to six. The rest were all dead, serving time, definitely known to be elsewhere than Los Angeles, or too far from the victim’s descriptions of his assailants.

11:16 a.m. We had James Dehelvey brought back to the squad room to look at mugg shots. He was still sleepy-eyed but refreshed enough from his hour’s nap to cooperate. He said he was sure none of the six men whose pictures we showed him was one of his assailants.

For another hour the victim looked through the mugg books. He was unable to pick out either suspect.

Frank and I drove the victim home. We took Sergeant McLaughlin from Latent Prints along with us and stopped at the supermarket en route to check the scene of the crime with the victim.

The safe and other places in the rear of the store that might have been touched by the suspects were dusted for latent prints. None were found that did not belong either to the victim or to store employees.

The victim’s car, still parked in the alley, was also checked. No prints were found other than those of James Dehelvey.