Month: April 2005

Police are still trying to make sense of a last night’s mysterious car chase in Echo Park. It all started when Motorcycle Office Carl Ericson spotted a taxicab that has been suspiciously repainted blue. He gave chase, and the vehicle turned onto Echo Park Avenue, racing past the lake and south towards Beverly. In front of 512 Echo Park Ave., the cab collided with a car driven by Walter Cliburne, 35, of 1947 Preston Ave. Cliburne’s car ended up atop both the cab and a parked car. An ambulence was called, and the attendants directed their attention to the injured, still-unidentified cab driver. Suddenly he brought a vial of poison up to his mouth and made as to swallow. Attempts to wrest it away were fruitless, and the mystery man said, “I am going to die, so let me die.” He did, shortly afterwards, in the ambulence.

Lawrence Lipton couldn’t take it anymore. His wife, best-selling crime novelist Craig Rice, insisted he stay up with her until four or five every morning, while she talked, talked and talked. He couldn’t write his own books on two hours of sleep. “It made me ill,” he complained. She humiliated him in front of friends and servants, disrupting his attempts at conversation with a lordly, “Don’t pay any attention to him.” Despite their household staff, she insisted Lipton clean out the fireplaces. And as for having business conversations around her? Impossible. Lipton’s witness, Raymond J. Healy of Simon & Schuster told Judge Alfred E. Paonessa that Rice routinely told Lipton to “Shut up,” and seemed both personally and professionally jealous of her spouse.

Judge Paonessa granted the divorce decree, noting that under an agreement worked out by the parties, Miss Rice would retain ownership of the 15-room house at 351 23rd Street, Santa Monica, they would own their own copyrights, and maintain joint ownership of collarborative works. The couple were married at Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin on March 31, 1940, and separated last October 4.

Clara Anzis, 64, had decided to leave her husband Max, 79. He knew it, and was despondent, angry, lurking in the darkness of their kitchen like a wounded dog. Clara came to the door asking for her clothing. Max made a pretence of pushing it through a tiny opening.

“Don’t come in here, Clara!” But a lady needs a change of clothes when she’s leaving, even if it’s just to an empty apartment in the building they own together at 1225 Boston Street. She came in. Max fell on her with a huge pipe wrench. She got the wrench away from the old man and leaned out the window hollering. Her screams alerted their tenants, who found the pair in the kitchen, Clara bloodied and beaten, Max calmly cutting his throat with the bread knife. Tenant Charles N. Morris told Radio Officers D. K. Jones and F. Batelle that when he divested Anzis of this weapon, his landlord merely picked up the paring knife and continued his excavations.

Mr. Anzis, who is expected to recover, was taken to General Hospital’s prison ward where he was booked for suspicion of assault to commit murder. His wife was treated for three lacerations to her head, and for shock.

Deposed in the office of Attorney Paul Overtorf, newlywed Mrs. Dorothy Evelyn Burks Stoner, 25, denied the claims of cosmetics manufacturer Andrew Norman, 60, that she had relieved him of a $75,000 home and $25,000 in jewels by means of “female arts.” Why, she had been anxious to marry the gentleman, if he would only divorce his wife.

Mrs. Stoner painted a picture of a relationship that commenced in 1943 and continued until September 1946, when the pair went to Las Vegas to attend the wedding of mutual friends. Inflamed by the matrimonial urge, and wearing the seven-karat diamond engagement ring Norman had given her before a June visit to her family in Kansas, Miss Burks spent some evening hours unloading her woes into the friendly ears of C. Earl Stoner, automobile distributor and acquaintance, whom she encountered in a Las Vegas café. On their return to Los Angeles, Burks and Stoner continued the conversation, and two weeks later they were wed.

As for that house at 348 Homewood in Brentwood? A gift from Mr. Norman, made sometime between March and June, as scant compensation for a lass who was wasting her fertility on a stubborn old goat who wouldn’t give her the home and children she craved. Oh, sorry, I meant to say, “I loved him like a father,” as stated by Mrs. Stoner in deposition today.

Joseph Scarantino, 39, of 8845 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, suffered facial lacerations and possible broken ribs early today, when his car was dragged 450 feet by a Southern Pacific train at a grade crossing near his home. Scarantino, a painter, is missing one arm as the result of a similar accident some years ago.