Month: May 2006

Fleenor Talks

May 21, 1907
Los AngelesIn a jailhouse interview before he was taken to San Quentin, James G. Fleenor, the barefoot burglar, set the record straight on his escapes, his relationship with a white woman and how he began a life of crime.

It had been rumored that Fleenor returned to Los Angeles after escaping from a San Francisco jail because of his relationship with Mrs. B.J. Byres of 1669 Tennessee St. He insisted that he hopped the first freight train leaving the yard and discovered later that it was going to Los Angeles.

Fleenor, who used a real estate business as a front for his burglaries, said that she was one of only three customers who continued paying on her property after he was sent to jail.

A Fine Metz He’s In

May 19, 1907
Los Angeles

John B. Metz seems like just another suicide–the 44-year-old Deputy County Assessor was a well-dressed, well-trusted official-about-town who would often brood about how he would never marry because some girl had once jilted him. So when his body was found by the landlady at 514 South Wall Street, hanging out of bed with foam on his lips, self-administered poison was thought to be the death-dealing culprit.

Or could the positioning of his corpse be signs of a struggle? And what of the various recent sums of money, now missing, not properly turned into the Assessor’s office? Yesterday, before his after-work bout of heavy drinking (including, perhaps, a carbolic of some sort) Metz failed to turn in $120 ($2,637 USD 2006) which remains missing to-day.

Metz was removed to Bresee Brothers Undertaking at 855 South Figueroa; they will perform an autopsy as to aid the inquest.

Mullen in Bad Plight


May 18, 1907
Los Angeles

William Mullen, a black strikebreaker for the Pioneer Truck Company, was delivering a shipment of lumber when he realized that he had lost some of his load and retraced his route to look for it.

At the Southern Pacific railroad crossing at Alameda and 2nd streets, Mullen noticed some lumber leaning against a shack belonging to a railroad flagman named Caulfield, who was presumably white. Mullen asked Caulfield if there was more of his lumber inside the shack and Caulfield said no.

Mullen challenged Caulfield, knocked him to the ground and began kicking him when Patrick Connelly, a union teamster for the Water Department and also presumably white, intervened, although it

Divorce Denied

May 17, 1907
Los Angeles

1907, as now, was full of drunken suicidal maniacs in the thrall of homicidal rage.  True, there are some differences now as opposed to then:  opium was a lot easier to get.  Divorces, less so.

H. A. Lyon, 70, met a 26-year-old Swedish girl by the name of Alva and, after knowing her a scant two weeks, married her.  She went on to burn all the pictures of his first wife, and all the letters he had kept.  Then Alva began to burn all of his incoming mail, especially those missives from his children; she consigned their pictures to the flames as well.  Moreover, she forbade him to go to church.  These troubles brought on two heart attacks which H. A. survived, and which convinced him he’d had enough.  

He therefore went before Judge Monroe to confess his mistake (Alva was not present, having gone on a short trip back to Sweden and only returned to the States as far as New York).  

Unfortunately for our hero, the Judge intoned from the bench:  “They couldn’t live together and she left him.  Apparently he was very glad to have her go, and gave her the money to take her away.  A divorce cannot be granted in this case, under the law, and I’m very glad it can’t be.”