A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Two more calls came from the killer on Monday, as Walker and Hope were “conferring and talking.” When Martha, the young Mexican maid, came back Monday evening, he said he and Hope were sharing his drink.

  By Tuesday morning, Walker felt “I could no longer stay with Hope and give her twenty-four-hour, day-to-day protection.” Just after he told her he had to leave, the killer phoned to say she could now go down to her mother’s, as long as she didn’t call anyone, not even about the Chips luncheon, which the caller knew all about.

  After he saw her down the hill, Walker said, “I then went my very merry way and proceeded to contact people who were—who were aware what to do and who could be helpful in this situation.” He arranged for someone to watch her mother’s house. When he called Hope there, “as a matter of concern and courtesy,” and heard her so excited and frightened, he drove to the house, met her mother and, later, her father.

  Walker didn’t like Van. “A very strange man”—in fact, “a complete ass,” who seemed more concerned about his ranch foreman than his daughter.

  Walker was pretty sure Hope would be arrested. “It’s not unusual for the authorities to arrest people,” Walker noted. “But I looked on this as probably a blessing in disguise, because I felt the safest place for Hope might be in a jail where no one had access to her.”

  When Walker left the house and called the police, he first got a recording, then a desk sergeant—“a rather unimaginative nincompoop” who didn’t know how to deal with the news of a murder and the request for a plainclothes unit. When the call was transferred, the next man was “about as uneducated and unhelpful as the first.” Walker got mad and said he’d call the FBI. Instead, he called the police up north, where again he got someone who couldn’t cope; Walker was so mad that when the operator said his three minutes were up, he told her to reverse the charges.

  When the police asked his name, he gave Van’s name, told them how to find the ranch and how to unlock the gate. Thirty-ought-six: like the rifle.

  Walker then explained why he’d stayed around: “I believe I owe a responsibility to Hope Masters.…

  “I did not know Hope Masters before that Saturday afternoon when I happened to first observe her looking out of the bathroom window with hair curlers in her hair, being passed off as a Beverly Hills socialite.

  “I think that if she was just a Beverly Hills socialite, I probably could turn my back on her and let her swim for herself. But she’s—she’s a very frightened young lady. A mother of three children. She certainly hasn’t had an easy life. She’s possibly made many mistakes, but one mistake she didn’t make: she didn’t have anything to do with the death of William T. Ashlock.

  “She had nothing to do with me. She didn’t know who I was. She is obviously caught up in a situation where she has a husband who wishes to harm her. While the authorities are perhaps slow to use various sources of information, I’m not as slow as that. I do have people at my access who can develop things.

  “I have found out, for one thing, that this was not the first attempt on Hope’s life. There was an earlier attempt in the fact that an unemployed civil engineer from either the Spokane or Portland area had been hired, or agreeable to—to kill Hope and also kill her two children. Or maybe it was her three children. It’s rather confusing when you start talking about these things to various people—who was to be killed and where it was to happen.

  “This unemployed civil engineer drove a rather old, light blue Rambler station wagon. He was tall; mustache. He was in the Los Angeles area posing as a millionaire, of all things.…

  “He went out, supposedly to kill Hope. He instead took the money that had been advanced to him on the premise that he was going to kill these people and wasted it on some nude dancers who work on the Sunset Strip, a Slavic dancer in the Classic Cat and a second dancer, a young redhead, in the Phone Booth. Over a very short period, the unemployed engineer wasted this money with these girls. He was staying in a rather rundown motel on Sunset Boulevard, down in the sleazy part of Sunset. He was staying in Room number 7, if my information is correct.

  “The people he had accepted the money from eventually visited him in the motel room.… He could not come up with the money, he could not satisfy the contract … he was therefore shot once and left in the room. The body has been discovered by the L.A. police. His blue Rambler is parked in a parking lot up on Sunset, adjacent to a place named Gazzari’s.”

  Besides the dead engineer, Walker said, a second person had been given the contract and “for some reason” didn’t complete the task. Originally, the contract had initiated in this area, but then it went to Chicago, “to a small chieftain of the juice industry, a person who loans out money for, you know, criminal activities.” Walker was reluctant to say more about this person, except that he’d been very helpful in giving Walker information; he seemed to know exactly what had happened at the ranch, and he didn’t even seem to mind that Hope hadn’t been killed, except he felt she was the only one who could possibly identify the trigger man who had been sent to the ranch.

  To assure Walker that he knew what had gone on, this man had given Walker some details, including the fact that the assailant bought a pair of rubber surgical gloves and a roll of adhesive tape, and a third item, in a drugstore in Porterville.

  Walker ended by offering to give a detailed statement on Hope’s behalf, preferably in Rhodesia, Algeria, Bulgaria, Albania, or Hong Kong, someplace that had no extradition treaty with the United States. He suggested Rhodesia, and he proposed a three-day meeting there, with Hope’s lawyers allowed to cross-examine Walker in a controlled situation, where his identity would be concealed from them. He suggested a villa.

  “I will do anything to help Hope. If it’s a question of her needing money, I will be willing to see that limited sums are provided. I can only say that I know that she’s not guilty of anything. If anything, I did more to keep her from notifying the authorities.”

  Walker took a parting shot at Van, citing “his immature rush” to involve the authorities, and at her lawyers, suggesting that only “a lazy legal staff” would not be familiar with certain forensic tests available, including a nuclear reaction test on human skin that could determine whether that person had fired a gun, or had been close to someone who’d fired a gun, as long as ninety days after a shooting.

  Speaking of guns, Walker thought that the murder of Ashlock and the murder of the civil engineer could be linked ballistically with a weapon that had been involved in a longshoreman’s death in New York and thereafter shipped to Chicago in a case lot.

  “If anyone wants to believe I’m guilty of the crime, that’s perfectly all right,” Walker said smoothly, even lightly. “I’m not too worried about being apprehended by the domestic authorities and therefore, if it serves Hope’s purpose to have me suspected of the crime, that makes me no difference, one way or the other.”

  The major surprise in Walker’s long narrative was his admission that he had been at the ranch on Saturday. In general, his account coincided with Hope’s—except, of course, on the identity of the villain. The people who listened to the tape were particularly interested in his extra statements, which turned out to be both right and wrong.

  He was right on the color of the car the dead engineer had been driving. Although the police Miscellaneous Crime Report listed a beige car, Richard Crane’s Rambler was not beige. It was blue. And it had been recovered in the parking lot by Gazzari’s.

  But Walker was wrong on the number of the motel room; the body was found in Room 8, not 7. And when he shrugged off the ability of “the domestic authorities,” he was also wrong.

  Gene Tinch took the tape to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, where it was transcribed and copied and passed around. Gene drove up to Tulare County with it, too, and delivered it to the sheriff’s office there.

  In Porterville, Gene found the drugstore Walker had cited—Cobb’s, across from Sears—and he talked with a clerk who remembered a stranger in the s
tore on Saturday, February 24, asking for surgical gloves. But the clerk who had actually handled the sale wasn’t in at the time. Gene Tinch relayed the information to the sheriff’s office.

  When Gene went back to the drugstore, the clerk who had sold the gloves—Juanita White—still wasn’t in, and the other clerk, Donna Brookman, said she’d been told by the sheriff’s men not to discuss the matter. On a third trip, Mrs. White was working, but she also declined comment.

  It wasn’t until much later that Hope’s people were able to learn what the clerks told the police. Donna Brookman said that on that Saturday, between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, she’d heard a man ask for “disposable gloves.” Juanita White, the only other clerk that day, showed him a pair of regular rubber gloves, fairly thick. “Not those,” Donna heard the customer say. “I want disposable ones, because I’m only going to use them one time.” When Mrs. White, with Donna’s help, found a pair of very thin gloves, surgical gloves, the man seemed satisfied. He bought a roll of adhesive tape, too.

  Donna Brookman described the customer as being in his late thirties or early forties, approximately six feet tall, between 170 and 190 pounds, with dark brown, slightly thinning hair, wearing either a dark suit or a sports outfit. He had a professional appearance, Donna said. Both clerks said they remembered the customer because as long as they’d worked at Cobb’s, this was the first time anyone had asked for surgical gloves.

  When Gene Tinch went back to the drugstore, he was told Mrs. White was away on vacation, nobody knew where, nobody knew how long. Gene was infuriated, and the unease that had simmered between Hope’s people and the Tulare people quickly boiled into enmity.

  “The only way those turkeys over at the sheriff’s even knew about the surgical gloves was because I told ’em,” Gene fumed. “Then they went over and told the lady who sold the gloves not to talk to me, and to leave town.

  “We were cooperating with those guys one thousand percent, giving them information which they took, but they resented it, so they then told us to go to hell.”

  Besides being shut out at the pharmacy, Gene felt he himself was a quarry for the Tulare forces. Deputy D.A. James Heusdens had accused Gene of impersonating a police officer at a service station in the area where Gene had talked to an attendant, trying to trace Walker’s trail. Gene denied it, and showed Heusdens the card he’d shown at the gas station, which identified Gene as LAPD Retired. Heusdens was not convinced; Gene was not calmed down, especially when the D.A. then demanded to know why neither Hope nor Honey nor Van had pointed out Walker in the courtroom on the day of her bail hearing, when members of the court staff had later identified him from pictures. Gene insisted that Walker had not been present and that the handsome, well-dressed stranger must have been Hope’s stepbrother Michael. Again Heusdens was not persuaded, and the meeting ended in a shouting match. Altogether, relations between the Tulare men and the men whom Hope fondly called “my team” deteriorated so rapidly and so seriously that when Sheriff Bob Wiley offered to assign Gene a deputy to assist him, Gene turned it down. “I don’t want your help and I don’t need your help,” Gene snapped. “Just leave me alone.” By Friday, March 9, a full week after Hope’s release on bond, when everybody knew that Taylor was Walker, and everybody knew everybody knew, the atmosphere was so strained and suspicious that when Van gave another statement to Gene Parker and Jim Brown, at the Beverly Hills station, with Gene Tinch and Tom Breslin present, the man’s true identity was never mentioned. In his fourteen-page statement, Van referred to “Taylor” throughout.

  The fact that everybody knew made it harder. It seemed to get harder every time.

  “You were out today,” Walker said. “And there were two guys with a light tan car lurking around your house.”

  “They took me to Porterville,” Hope explained. “But they’d removed everything up there, like the fact that I’d thrown up. They removed absolutely everything.”

  “I tried to call you up there because I knew you were there, but they wouldn’t put a call through to that number,” Walker said.

  “It’s looking real bad for me at this point,” Hope said.

  “I’ve got a surprise,” Walker announced.

  “Another tape?”

  “No, better than that.”

  “Another item?”

  “Right. While you were in custody.”

  “Well, they’re just not buying it,” Hope said despondently. “They’re not buying anything. They think I’m some sort of a sex freak.”

  “That’s a bummer,” Walker said. “And she doesn’t even kiss till she brushes her teeth.”

  In Walker’s last phone call, on Saturday, March 10, he asked the question Hope had been expecting, and dreading, since Paul Luther came by. “Have they shown you any pictures?”

  Hope tried to evade the question. “They say they found drugs in the house, but we don’t have—”

  Walker cut in. “Have they shown you any pictures?”

  Hope tried again. “Ballistically—” she began.

  “Have they shown you any pictures?”

  “No,” Hope said in a low voice.

  “Then they don’t realize you don’t know who I am.”

  “I guess so,” Hope murmured. “Listen, take care of yourself. I don’t want you to get killed on account of me. I don’t want anybody to get killed on account of me, anymore!”

  “I’m okay,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll live.”

  “They have so many people stating that I’m a sex-crazed dope fiend,” Hope said despairingly. “We think it’s going to be a real long preliminary unless something develops in the meantime.”

  “I think something will develop,” Walker said.

  Gene Parker and Jim Brown were in Bob Swalwell’s room, sipping brandy and Cokes with their Saturday night reading material, the fifty-one-page transcript of Walker’s second tape.

  Brown had spoken earlier with Fran Ashlock. She told him she’d received two department store billings for purchases made with Bill’s charge cards on Monday, February 26, the Monday after he was murdered. The bill from Robinson’s came to $518.70, and from Bullock’s, $446.24.

  Brown and Parker were just thinking they might knock it off early, get some sleep, when the phone rang.

  “Ken Pollock. There’s a man registered as Taylor Wright at the Howard Johnson’s on Vineland in North Hollywood.”

  “When?” Swalwell asked quickly.

  “Nine thirty-five last night.”

  “When it was their turn, they sent in eighteen professionals, armed to the teeth,” Hope complained later. “When it was my turn, I was supposed to have brought him in by myself, unarmed, with three children.”

  “That’s him,” the manager said, looking at the mugshot. Jim Brown always thought the really interesting thing was the name of the manager: Fillmore Pajean Crank.

  The Mayfair squad reached North Hollywood in twenty minutes, but the L.A. men were there before that. “He’s not in his room, but all his clothes are,” Sergeant Reiner said. Swalwell smiled broadly.

  Fillmore Crank described the car the man was driving and gave the police the run of his motel, including rooms on the sixth floor, one next to 609—Walker’s room—and one across the hall. A broadcast went out to all LAPD units and all LASO units:

  Subject Walker driving Thunderbird brown and gold California 139GFK

  No units are to stop this vehicle Let Walker proceed to his room if possible

  Call in location and time and then rear off

  The professionals fanned out over the hotel, in the parking lot, in the sixth floor rooms. Brown and Parker sat in the bar, by the window, staring through a slit in the draperies, looking out into the parking lot. The bar was closed, dark, still, freezing cold.

  “Hey, Parker.”

  “What?”

  “Can you tell me what we’re doin’ here? Who do we think we are, Kojak?”

  Two o’clock. Three o’clock. Four. Occasionally a car would pull into th
e motel lot; both men ached with tension.

  “Hey, Brown.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know we could get killed in this thing?”

  A silence.

  “I know it.”

  The sky faded from black to metal, then rose, orange, yellow. Parker squinted in the brightness. At eight o’clock, the L.A. men changed shifts. Swalwell and the Tulare men stayed.

  Positions were rotated, with some talk of calling it off. Walker must have smelled the trap; he wasn’t coming back. Swalwell shook his head. He thought of the clothes—good clothes—in 609. More than that, he had a growl in his gut. “He’s coming back,” Swalwell said.

  Brown and Parker moved up to the sixth floor. Gene eyed the wall-to-wall carpet appreciatively. “Man, that does look good,” Gene said, stretching out on his back on the floor. “You snored like a monkey,” Brown told him later. At 10:25 A.M., the walkie-talkies crackled, and both men were instantly on their feet.

  Aliano and Meyer, LAPD, were transmitting:

  “Subject coming in.… He is parking the vehicle.… He is out.… He is locking the vehicle.… He’s coming in!”

  Walker put his key in the door of 609, and the hall came alive. “Freeze!” Swalwell yelled. Walker was pushed into the room, up against a wall. Brown and Parker had him by one arm, Swalwell and Ken Pollock by the other, lifting him off the floor.

  “Where is your gun?” Swalwell rasped.

  “In my waist. In my waist!”

  Swalwell jerked the gun from Walker’s waistband and thrust his own gun into Walker’s face, almost up his nose. Just for a moment, Parker thought Swalwell was going to pull the trigger; in that moment—a second or two—he saw pure terror in Walker’s eyes.

  Then Swalwell drew back, and Walker seemed to realize they were the police. Walker smiled.

  Swalwell threw Walker’s .38, a Colt Cobra Special, blue-black, on the bed. Parker and Brown and Pollock brought him down from his dangling position; Swalwell snapped on the handcuffs and pushed him into a chair. Gene Parker stood over Walker, in the chair, and read him his constitutional rights and the charge, PC 187: homicide, no bail.