Category: Kim Cooper

April 25, 1947
Echo Park

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.

April 24, 1947
Santa Monica

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.

April 23, 1947
Echo Park

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.

April 22, 1947
Los Angeles

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.

April 21, 1947
Los Angeles

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.

April 20, 1947
Los Angeles

For as long as there’s been a highway into the hills, young lovers have gone up into Angeles National Forest on Saturday nights to be alone in the dark. Gerald Snow Welch brought his beloved Dolores Fewkes, 16-year-old Montebello High student, to the deserted Horse Flats picnic grounds. He also brought his .22 rifle.

What Welch swore was a suicide pact went awry when both shells he had brought proved necessary to extinguish the young lady’s existence. In fact, he had to beat her roundly with both stock and barrel of his gun to finish the job. Then he carried her body down the mountain to the cops, stated his “purpose in life had been completed,” and expressed impatience for the State to execute him.

From suicide watch in a padded Pasadena Police Station cell, Welch told officers that it was he who wished to die; Dolores had begged to join him. His depression could immediately be blamed on three miserable months spent in the Navy, which culminated in a medical discharge. In service, suffering “religious disillusionment,” Welch came to doubt the things he’d been told in Sunday school. He went to the library and read Plato, Schopenhauer and Emerson. In Schopenhauer, he found justification for suicide. Bu the roots of Welch’s troubles go back a decade, when the then-eight-year-old saw a neighbor, fleeing police after murdering her husband, blow her brains out in front of him.

Welch said he loved Miss Fewkes and longed to join her in heaven. For now, he appreciated the padded cell, a quiet place where he could be alone with his thoughts. And if the State declined to kill him, he would be happy to finish the job himself.

April 19, 1947
Washington, D.C.

Myron E. Gurnea, the F.B.I.’s Washington expert on matters of juvenile delinquency, released a statement today describing it as the nation’s biggest criminal problem.

Gurnea blames the rise in delinquency during the war years, when the stabilizing influence of fathers, mothers and older siblings was lost, as the former went to war and the latter into the factories. Those bad kids are now aged 17-21, and are being arrested in droves.

Pointing a finger at neglectful families who shirk their disciplinary responsibilities and expect government agencies to control their children, Gurnea notes that very few parents accompany their brats into traffic court. The answer may be to hold more parents financially responsible for their children’s crimes, a tact that is stymied by the growing number of broken homes.

Additionally, Gurnea sniffs at fears that returning soldiers are monsters “trained for crime,” stating that it was a big army, with criminals and ordinary people, but the criminals were already so disposed.

April 18, 1947
Los Angeles

Arriving at his home at 7143 Hollywood Blvd. tonight, James Utley, 43, tangled with Herbert Robertson, 45, who was lurking in the yard. Hearing gunfire, Utley’s wife and daughter called police. Utley’s is a name well known among crime crusaders, so Detective G.L. Smith went to the scene with patrol officers.

Utley refused to sign a complaint against Robertson, who he admitted had recently written him a letter demanding $500. Nevertheless, police arrested Robertson on suspicion of robbery. Robertson told officers that he was also a resident of 7143 Hollywood Blvd., although the address on his social security card read 1907 W. Sixth Street.

Utley claimed Robertson had pulled a revolver, which Utley deflected, causing the shot to go wild. Robertson countered that Utley had fired the shot. The gun was found in a car parked in the yard.

James Utley is best remembered for a shocking incident on August, 16, 1946, when two men followed him into popular Hollywood watering hole Lucey’s Restaurant (5444 Melrose Ave.) during the lunch rush. While one man held the other diners –among them Joel McCrea, Eddie Cantor, Stephen Crane and Joan Davis-at gunpoint, the other administered a thorough blackjacking to Utley. This was assumed by many diners to be a movie stunt. The assailants then fled through the crowd of autograph hunters outside the restaurant.

Utley, former operator of the bingo concession on Tony Cornero’s Lux gambling ship (and then under indictment for these activities), former investigator for politically ambitious Clifton’s Cafeteria owner Clifford E. Clinton, acquitted in 1939 on charges of extortion and bribery, convicted two years later of violating Federal Narcotics laws and sentenced to two years in prison, refused to identify his attackers, suggest any reason for the attack or in fact to make any statement at all.

April 17, 1947
Santa Monica

Mrs. Thomas Wright of 2425 29th St., Santa Monica, only intended a short trip by bus, but driver F.O. Rogers, 27, was loaded and wanted company. He compelled the lady to remain on his bus as he looped erratically through downtown Santa Monica and back to her home.

“It was the wildest ride I ever had!” said Mrs. Wright, once safely in the company of Officers Robert Chapman and Kenneth Aitken. A bottle of wine was found in driver Rogers’ possession, and investigation physician Dr. R. J. O’Donnell determined that he was intoxicated.

Pleading guilty before Judge Thurlow Taft of the Santa Monica Municipal Court (bail set at $250, probationary hearing scheduled for April 30), Rogers blamed his Mr. Toad-like behavior on “war nerves,” which had bedevilled him since suffering injury in the South Pacific with the Navy.