Like most newspapermen assigned to the trial, I got awfully bored with it finally, and went around the corner to a nearby Long Beach burlesque theater which offered as its main attraction a double bill consisting of the personal appearance of the luscious Aloha Wanderwell together with the first showing of the film her late husband had made in South America, The River of Death. The show, at the time of my attendance, was a sell-out, with standing room only. I must admit that Aloha was a considerable disappointment, since she only appeared briefly and in a tight military uniform not designed to do justice to her junoesque charms. Aloha recited in flat midwestern accents a short introduction to the film, then gave its narration. The picture itself was definitely in the home-movie category, not too professionally directed or photographed. There were interminable scenes of the fair Aloha hemmed in by cannibalistic head-hunters and head-shrinkers who mugged happily for the camera; there were scenes of her knocking off predatory crocodiles and jungle cats with her trusty rifle and pistol. But the picture dragged. Before the second reel had run off some of the cash customers in the back rows were shouting “Take it off, take it off...” in the old burlesque tradition, and making wolf-whistles at the lady on stage.
Aloha, obviously somewhat at loss — a Trilby without her Svengali — didn’t take the hint from the audience. When the “show” ended, a number of newsmen who had been in the audience went around outside and down the alley, and waylaid Aloha as she left the stage door, trying vainly for an interview, have vainly for an interview. One reporter remembered that she claimed to have been a French orphan of mysterious and noble lineage who had been discovered by the late Captain Wanderwell in a convent somewhere in southern France and, in my hearing, spoke to her in her native language, whereupon Aloha said “Huh?” We all concluded that her particular convent must have been one in which for some reason only English was spoken.
Two blocks away from the burlesque theater the trial still dragged on and on, becoming less and less newsworthy. And then, in the middle of a dull afternoon, with almost no reporters at hand, the prosecution suddenly called Aloha Wanderwell to the stand. She was, of course, the most interesting, exciting, glamorous figure in the entire case — she was front-page stuff. But everybody thought she would be held in reserve for another day or so, and her appearance in the witness chair at that time was a surprise.
Her testimony, delivered in a faint, cautious voice, was nothing unexpected. She told of the scene in the Wilshire Boulevard apartment house when Curley Guy and his friend and employer DeLarm had come visiting Wanderwell, who had been flanked by two associates but still had felt it necessary to smash a window and holler for help.
From her own separate apartment next door she had heard the appeal and come running, whereupon she smoothed things over between the five men and got Guy and DeLarm to leave after her harried husband had promised to square the financial thing at a restaurant that night — a place where he and Aloha were making a personal appearance. It is not recorded that he ever kept the date.
The witness was perhaps a little disappointing to the two bright young assistant district attorneys, for her testimony — while it matched what she had said at the preliminary hearing and before the grand jury — was not too strong against the prisoner at the bar. But all the same, that was a tense half hour in the courtroom — an hour which I am sorry to have missed. But all was not yet lost.
His Honor, Judge Kenny, had been a newspaper reporter before he took up the study of law and rose to his present eminence. Realizing that Aloha’s testimony was the high spot of the trial, a most newsworthy moment indeed, and also realizing that her appearance at this hour would give a big break to the morning newspapers and leave the afternoon sheets out in the cold, he reverted to type. Once a newspaperman, always a newspaperman. His Honor quietly and firmly exercised his judicial prerogative and recessed the session for ten minutes on the grounds that he had to make a long distance telephone call.
This fact has never previously been made public, but with Bob Kenny’s permission I can now let out the secret that his call was to the office of the Herald-Express (the Los Angeles newspaper on which he had once years ago been a cub-reporter) and that he gave the city editor of his old paper enough of the story on Aloha’s testimony so that instead of being scooped, we had an exclusive front-page story. I doubt if there had ever been in recorded history another major murder case in which the presiding judge has sneaked back into his chambers and phoned in a red-hot story to a friendly newspaper.
Not, of course, to intimate that Judge Kenny wasn’t impeccably fair in his handling of the Wanderwell murder trial. Most of his rulings, as the transcript shows, were in favor of the People. Messrs Bray ton and Hunt had a certain amount of evidence, mainly circumstantial, on their side. They had a lot of law. But they were still, in the opinion of most of the newspapermen covering the trial, trying to convict a nice young man of murder when he was actually only guilty of jumping ship, illegal entry into the U.S.A., possible smuggling activities via DeLarm’s plane and of having tried in a childish fashion to hide out when he learned that an avowed enemy of his had been killed.
The case finally went to the jury, after a good bit of heart-rending oratory from Counsellor McGann and a dry, factual summing-up from the prosecution, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Before 6 the twelve good men and true were back — with the expected verdict of Not Guilty. It is, as Judge Kenny points out, one of the few cases in history where a jury has failed to stay out long enough to get an extra dinner at the expense of the public. It was a verdict which surprised nobody who had followed the course of the trial, and one which I think was concurred with by His Honor and by the press and public.
Which brings us inevitably to the gaps in the story; faces us with the certain question of who actually did put a .38 bullet through Captain Walter Wanderwell’s back? Your guess may be as good as mine. I am not able to answer that question, any more than can the police even at this late date — though I have reason to think that some of the boys down at Homicide have come to the same conclusion as have I. Of course the investigating officers muffed the thing completely; they set their sights on one suspect and never bothered to look anywhere else.
There were some interesting questions which I raised at the time, and still raise.
Was it likely that Curley Guy, a two-fisted forthright aviator and navigator, even with a grievance against Captain Wanderwell, would have shot the man in the back over a matter of a few hundred dollars? To me, from a psychological standpoint, it seems out of character. Guy had already faced Wanderwell and had scared the much bigger and heavier heroic adventurer into spasms — and into smashing a window and calling for help.
Then too, what were the reassuring words that the fair Aloha whispered to Curley Guy at the time of the preliminary hearing, and why did she and certain other members of the group smile and nod at him in such a fraternal manner that afternoon?
Then too, Wanderwell was found to have been killed by a bullet from a .38 pistol. No evidence was ever brought forward to show that Curley Guy ever owned or possessed such a weapon, or any other gun. He was a young man who, in my considered opinion, would have resorted to his fists in any argument. But the evidence does show that Wanderwell did have — in addition to a surprisingly heavy stock of rifles and carbines aboard the vessel — a .38 pistol. It disappeared about the time of the murder. Where did it go?