Meanwhile, down at Long Beach, there was much consternation and many alarums and excursions. The fifteen adventurers were coached, primed, questioned all night, and shown photographs of the wanted man. Some of them were placed under technical arrest for twenty-four hours. Even the two Wanderwell children were drawn into it. Rudely awakened from their bunk where they had been sleeping at the time of the killing, they were questioned to the point where they would (and did) swear to almost anything.
At the same time a parallel investigation was being made through regular Los Angeles police channels, during which it was discovered without too much difficulty that Captain Wanderwell had been in the custody of the Secret Service during the late war and had been interned for a while at the federal penitentiary at Atlanta as a German espionage agent. His real name was Valerian Johannes Riecynski, a Polish national; his military background and his captaincy were purely fictional. But he had been a world-traveler and, in fact, had skipped out of half a dozen ports without bothering to clear with the customs or the immigration authorities.
The glamorous Wanderwell couple had also appeared on police records in Los Angeles in March 1925, charged with wearing United States Army uniforms without authorization. Actually, both Walter and Aloha (giving them the benefit of their assumed names) were only wearing their home-designed uniforms plus Army officers’ Sam Browne belts as part of the act. It was, however, an offense for which both paid the not inconsiderable fine of $200. It was also revealed at that time, 1925, that Aloha — who claimed that Wanderwell had picked her up in a French convent (place unnamed) and swept her off her heels at the age of seventeen, was traveling around with him as his sister. She was immediately, under the circumstances, made a ward of the Los Angeles juvenile court, but charges were naturally dropped when the dashing couple eloped to Riverside and were legally married. It is not a matter of record as to whether or not their two children were attendants.
It was a somewhat complicated case — for the investigating authorities of Long Beach and Los Angeles as well as for my associate Bill Moore, then police reporter of the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and for me as the visiting kibitzer who was supposed to supply “atmosphere” — as if the affair didn’t have enough and to spare of that commodity.
We were definitely hampered by the fact that by this time Carlton Williams, star reporter of the opposing paper, was working hand-in-glove with Detective-Lieutenant Filkas who was in charge of the Los Angeles aspects of the case. Witnesses were being brought up to the Times office, questioned and interviewed and photographed by the Times staff. We were handicapped. However, we did have a composite photograph made up, showing round-faced, Spanish-Irish, Bill Moore peering through the porthole of the Carma where the mysterious murderer was supposed to have been, and at least one of the witnesses obliged with a positive identification of it as being that of the mysterious Peeping Tom!
It was a time when few, if any, holds were barred. But the news leaked out that the entire investigation centered on one man, that man who had been a member of the earlier Wanderwell expedition. He and the Captain were supposed to have had a scene in the Wanderwells’ Wilshire Boulevard apartment, during which the ex-Argonaut had demanded his money back. And — even though the disillusioned voyager had but one friend with him while Wanderwell was flanked with two aides — the Captain had shattered a window and yelled for help.
Aloha had then dropped in, and smoothed things out. Wanderwell had promised to pay the money later, thus stalling off his angry antagonist — whom he outweighed by 60 pounds and towered over by five inches. All in all, Captain Wanderwell seems not to have shown up too well on that occasion. Of course, it hadn’t been rehearsed and he wasn’t as usual the director. However, he didn’t make good his promise. So, the man who had challenged him, flanked by several others of the indignant South American contingent, finally went to the police bunco-squad, where they got no help at all.
The story that this man told the officer on the bunco-squad was that he and his pretty young wife had joined the previous Wanderwell expedition in Buenos Aires; that they had contributed all their available funds and then had been stranded in Panama. He and his wife had been left strapped, then they had been forced to separate since she could get a subsistence job as an entertainer and B-girl in a Colon bar and he obviously could not. So, he alone had worked his way north to Los Angeles to try to retrieve all or part of the original investment from the self-styled “Captain.”
Early reports of the fracas in the Wilshire Boulevard apartment differed considerably. Aloha Wanderwell, who hadn’t been present for much of the time, said that her husband had been threatened, and that his coat and tie were disheveled. All others present said that there had been no threats but only a demand for an accounting of funds, and that twice the instigator of the interview had suggested that they call the police and have a showdown — something for which Wanderwell had no taste.
At any rate, the day after the murder the investigation speedily narrowed itself down to this one target, this mysterious man who had been a member of the previous group — although police records showed that he was anxious to work if at all through proper legal channels. Photographs of the missing man were produced and suddenly several people conveniently remembered that they had seen someone of that general description lurking around the Pacific and Orient docks — where the Carma was moored — at 6 P.M. the night of the murder. Others (or the same ones) testified that he had been noticed in the same vicinity at 11:30 P.M. that night, asking directions as to how to return to Los Angeles. Certainly such evidence, given to the grand jury and later to the court — if true — displays a surprising lack of enterprise on the part of the murderer, both before and after the crime. In five and a half hours the murderer of Captain Wanderwell should have been able to arrive, do the job, and disappear — without asking his way of anyone. And if he had been able to find his way to the dock where the Carma was moored, he certainly should have been able to find his way away from it... after the crime. None of this evidence made much sense, even to the police — though it was repeated at the trial.
But on Thursday December 8, acting on information received, as the old saying goes (which was actually Reporter Williams’s dope on the previous fracas between Wanderwell and the accused), Detective-Lieutenant Filkas of the Los Angeles police, backed up by the intrepid Carl Williams, swooped down on a house at 2045 Blake Street, near Riverside Drive and the Los Angeles River. The dismal little cottage was dark, empty, almost unfurnished, without heat or light save that of a candle.
As the detective and the newspaper reporter descended upon the place, a man emerged from the house with his hands in the air. So enters our major suspect, one William James (Curley) Guy. He had been in residence there, fortified by some oranges and delicatessen food, all the late newspapers and the aforesaid candle.
Curley Guy, as we came to know him, was the adventurer who had dared to approach Wanderwell and ask for his money back. He was a native of Wales, an authentic flyer, navigator and ship’s officer: a slightly built man with clear-cut features, wavy hair, and a ready, apologetic smile. He said he had rented the abandoned house the morning after the murder, had stocked it with a few comestibles, and had then sat still and waited for the inevitable. When questioned by police and reporters at the Times offices — where he was taken instead of to the police station — he explained that he had gone into hiding because he knew he would be the primary suspect of the much-publicized murder, and didn’t want to involve his friends, the DeLarms, with whom he had been living.