At one time Pierce Brooks had been involved in the cases of ten separate residents of San Quentin’s Death Row, such were the kinds of Los Angeles murder cases assigned to him. Harvey Glatman was the only man he’d ever seen executed. He’d rationalized a hundred times to himself as to why he attended this execution, deciding it was so that he would be a better homicide detective because of it, that if he once saw a case all the way through to the last gasp of life, he would be that much surer and more thorough in his future investigations. He wondered if it weren’t merely the thing which drew most of the witnesses, a ghoulish curiosity. One thing was certain, it did in fact make him a fanatically thorough detective.
Then he thought of Harvey Glatman’s victims, the woman kidnapped and bound, then photographed by the murderer, and strangled slowly. He thought of Glatman, the diffident little man who was so afraid of heights he wouldn’t climb a ladder, who had a thousand dollars’ worth of pornographic pictures in his home, who adored pictures of women in black lingerie, bound in ropes and chains. Who would dash to his television set with his camera and shoot a picture of the screen whenever a movie would show a woman bound, and who, while still a small boy, was discovered in his room with a heavy cord tied from his penis to a dresser, leaning back, groaning in pain and ecstasy.
Pierce Brooks tried to think of Glatman’s victims, especially the pathetic lonelyhearts girl, and tried to remember the pictures Glatman had taken of them, tied and gagged, sure of their imminent strangulation, expressions on their faces ranging from hysteria to resignation, to absolute grief. But when they brought the killer into the gas chamber he didn’t seem to recognize Brooks or anyone else at the observation windows. He seemed dazed and oblivious to it all, submitted pliably when they strapped him in the chair. And as the observers, jelly-kneed, reached for the supportive handrails, the cyanide was released. Pierce Brooks was to tell his colleagues that condemned men don’t go peacefully to sleep in the gas chamber, as advertised. That on the contrary, Glatman died jerking, thrashing, gasping, strangled as piteously by the state as were his victims by him, though the motives were different. The punishment in his case had indeed fit the crime, and Pierce Brooks was indeed an even more diligent detective. But he never witnessed another execution.
“I’m still not against capital punishment,” he said later. “But I’ve gotta be real sure of my cases from now on. Way past any reasonable doubt.”
By 5:00 A.M. Pierce Brooks was in Bakersfield sitting across a table from a young man with a red-blond crew cut in a short-sleeved shirt. The young man’s husky voice was surprisingly steady. Other than for an occasional nervous touching of his eyelid, he seemed much like the other off-duty policemen still milling around the station.
“To recap what you’ve told me,” Brooks said, “it was the one you now know as Gregory Powell who hit your partner in the face with one shot after making the Lindbergh statement?”
“Yes.”
“And you think he fired an automatic?”
“Yes.”
“And when you ran you looked over your left shoulder and saw oblong flashes?”
“Yes.”
“And round flashes?”
“Yes.”
“The oblong flashes were going down into your partner who was on the ground?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“The round flashes were coming toward you?”
“Yes.”
“And they were simultaneously fired by two different men?”
“Yes.”
“And you think Powell was firing at you, not down into the ground. In other words the round flashes were his?”
“Yes.”
“Take a break and then we’ll go out to the onion field,” Pierce Brooks said, and he was more than excited now. It was as he hoped. Both suspects had shot the officer and this was important to Brooks, crucial in fact. For despite what the law said about principal defendants being equally responsible, he had been a policeman long enough to know that law as stated and law as applied are two different things. That despite the nature of the crime, the trigger man was almost always held more accountable than a passive partner. So he hoped very much that the evidence would put one of the murder weapons in the hands of Gregory Powell’s partner. By now, a Kern County autopsy surgeon had made a perfunctory check and told Brooks there was one shot in the dead man’s mouth and four in his chest, three of which had exited.
As soon as the sun rose, Pierce Brooks was in the onion field directing a ballistics expert to dust his brush lightly over the blood-stained earth where the blood began, before it tracked across the road to a ditch where a gas pipe lay.
On the second or third swipe with the brush the ballistics man recovered three .38 slugs which were later found to be from Ian Campbell’s own gun.
Karl Hettinger was back again in the onion field, but now he was showing the strain and exhaustion—shivering, smelling the tender dew-wet onions, remembering how it smelled last night when he stood here in the dark, arms upraised, and accidentally touched his partner’s hand. Pierce Brooks looked at him and said, “Somebody better drive Hettinger back to Hollywood.”
But it would be afternoon before the police department was through with him and he was at last in his bed thinking the night had ended. He was later to wonder if that night would ever end.
On Sunday morning the Ian Campbell home was filled with people. It was a modest tract home with a floor plan indistinguishable from the others in the neighborhood. It was not large enough to accommodate the numerous uniformed policemen, family friends, and curious acquaintances who had by now heard of the killing and rushed to Chatsworth. Since it was so close to payday there was not enough money for coffee and food for all the people until Hollywood Station sent a policeman with some.
Wayne Ferber was there, his close-set eyes sunken and black against his paleness.
“I heard about it from Chrissie,” Wayne said. “She called and said, ‘I want to tell you before you hear it on the news. Ian’s been killed.’ Like that she said it. I couldn’t believe it. I knew it must’ve been a car wreck. When I heard about the murder I thought that’s impossible. It had to’ve been an act of God. Then I came to the house. All I could see were gray faces, blank stares. Adah, Art Petoyan. They didn’t believe it. Neither did I. Chrissie believed it. She said she knew it the moment the phone rang in the middle of the night. She was able to tell me what happened. No sobs. Tears never fell. She talked with me and then took care of the little girls. I thought about how Ian had always been my best friend and how he never needed a best friend. He was completely self-contained. And then all I could do was sit there and wonder if his set and straight mouth would look different in death.”
Art Petoyan was in the bedroom sedating Adah and muttering clichés: “I said things like, ‘God moves in mysterious ways,’ and all that crap which doesn’t explain anything. All that crap which I’d said before and which disgusted me, and yet as a doctor all you can do is hope they have some kind of faith, some kind of inner strength. But this poor girl just wasn’t like that unbelievable person in the other room. Chrissie Campbell was in there serving people. Serving them coffee and making sure the kids were okay, and God, I don’t know what else. And of all of us, the close ones, she was the only one in the house who was dry-eyed. I offered to sedate her, but she said she didn’t need it. And she didn’t!
“After that for many months I treated Adah for her emotional problems, if you want to call it treatment. Like a charlatan, I gave her vitamin-B-complex injections, but she didn’t know what they were and they served their purpose because she believed me when I said it would help her. I prescribed thorazine and talked to her when she needed me and finally she settled down into a kind of overwhelming loneliness. She didn’t want to go back with her mother, but finally she did go back to northern California.
“Adah was no Chrissie Campbell. She couldn’t raise those girls alone. I delivered them both. They were big beautiful babies. They looked just lik
e him.”
Among the people at the house were the inevitable newsmen to interview the widow, but when they discovered it would be impossible they turned to Chrissie for the words that could be made both poignant and quotable. The reporters covering the hard news had pretty well gotten the facts of the killing and the capture of Powell. So until the other killer was caught, the Campbell family was all they had.
One of the reporters had been told that Campbell’s mother was herself a widow who lived alone and that the officer had been an only child. So pencils were readied for a tearful litany of memories, prayers, maybe even a noble sentiment about a son not having died in vain, maybe even a comment on the ruthless senseless act of the killers. And of course a picture, if it could be arranged: a hanky pressed to a mother’s face, pitiable, grief-etched.
Instead, Chrissie appeared before them completely composed. They saw an attractive woman with an erect posture, to them middle aged, but actually past sixty. She said: “I’m Chrissie Campbell.”
“Do you have a comment you’d care to make at this time, Mrs. Campbell?” one reporter asked gently. “Something that our readers …”
Chrissie’s reply was buried in the middle of an article relating the events of the killing. The editor told the reporter that it had no value whatever as exploitation of grief or emotion or rage. When pressed as to why then he would boldface the remark and use it, he grinned and said: “It’s the most terse and sensible thing I’ve ever seen uttered by a victim of a tragedy. Not worth a nickel as news, but so goddamn true.”
Chrissie had merely said: “There’s no comment worth making. My boy is dead and anything anybody can say won’t change it.” Then she had smiled politely, turned, and gone back to help with the children.
Karl Hettinger’s house was full of waiting friends and family that Sunday, while Karl was still in Bakersfield. The story had been on television and radio by now, and they’d come from various parts of Los Angeles to be there. Among them was Bob Burke, Karl’s ex-roommate, who was still in uniform.
Helen was nervously pouring coffee for everyone and running to the door whenever she heard a car. Little of the tumble of conversation was to remain with her, with one exception.
It was Karl’s former roommate who said it. He was talking to several of Karl’s other friends.
He shook his head and said, “You can always do something. I just don’t see giving up your gun to some crook under any circumstances. And even after that, you can do something. Karl should’ve …”
And then he saw Helen stop on her way to the kitchen and stare at him. “No reflection on Karl,” he quickly added. “I’m not trying to judge anybody.”
Helen went on to the kitchen, but suddenly her hands went clammy. But she dismissed it from her mind, not knowing that Burke, Karl’s close friend, was only the first.
At noon that Sunday, Pierce Brooks was finished in the onion field and was facing another young man, just one year older than Karl Hettinger. Brooks, as always, watched carefully during the introduction. He saw flat blue eyes and a long neck and pale hollow cheeks. He saw hands which did not tremble when they met, and a jaw which remained firm. Pierce Brooks did not talk to Gregory Powell about the murder. Not a word. They drove him to Los Angeles speaking only when necessary. It wasn’t until that afternoon in the interrogation room of Homicide Division that Brooks broached the subject.
“Greg,” Brooks began, “would you tell us to the best of your recollection what happened last night, from the moment that the officers stopped you out in Hollywood? And start out first by telling us who you were with.”
“I was with Jimmy Youngblood in the 1946 Ford coupe …”
And after an hour of lies and truths and half truths Greg was excitedly relating the moment of death in the onion field very much as Pierce Brooks expected he would.
“… and Jimmy was standing out there, and I could hear him speaking to them, and I laid the gun down on the seat, and I walked around back to the car and I walked up to Jimmy and I was about maybe a foot and a half from him. I was going to ask him if he wanted me to drive, or if he was going to drive or what … and he fired, and the one policeman went down and the other started running and I hollered, ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ And he kept firing at this one that was running. I turned around and started running, and he started shooting at the officer on the ground again. I don’t know why. I ran about maybe forty to fifty feet, and I almost overtook the officer that was running. I dove off into the side because Jimmy was still shooting … and hell, I could hear the slugs hitting the ground. I was damned scared. I didn’t know whether he was shooting at me for running or at the officer, you know, and then he took off.”
Pierce Brooks sat and nodded occasionally and Greg looked at the chestnut brown around the hazel irises of the tired patient eyes of the detective.
“You mean when you got out of the car in the onion field you weren’t armed at all?”
“I was not armed at all,” Greg said evenly. “I was so damned scared.”
“Was the .32 ever fired that night?”
“Not that I know of, no,” Greg said, telling for that instant the whole truth as he knew it. “No, it was not. Definitely.”
But Brooks knew that it was.
Jimmy Smith’s feet were bloody and he was sitting in a bed of sagebrush by an irrigation ditch with his feet in the water, drinking the irrigation water from the whiskey bottle he’d saved. Jimmy slept all day, waking with a pounding heart when an occasional Sunday car passed down the lonely road.
Then Jimmy awoke, cold and shivering in the warm sunshine. He put on the socks, dry now, and began walking toward Highway 99 until he found a service station where he could wash and drink water. It was late afternoon and he was famished. He walked until the sun was down and then found a small well-lighted grocery market operated by two old women. He saw a newspaper stand but the Sunday morning paper was too late for the story. There was no murder headline and he was heartened. There was still time. It was just a matter of running. Running flat out. Where, he didn’t know yet. Just running.
Jimmy bought a quart of milk, some candy bars, cookies and cigarettes. He looked at the cars parked in front and discarded the idea to rob the women, realizing if he was to do that and steal a car, they would know he was still here in the Bakersfield area. As it was they might think he was in Fresno or San Francisco. He needed another day, a room to sleep in, a bath, one more night to think about it. He couldn’t afford to have them know where he was now, and he didn’t think they’d find the car just yet. He should have one more night before they found it and maybe he could steal another car by then.
With a belly full of candy, milk, and cookies, much the same diet he’d had as a child shoplifting the Fort Worth markets, Jimmy Smith hiked all the way in to Bakersfield, to Lakeview Avenue, to a place he knew called Mom’s Rooming House. Mom’s was near Virginia Avenue and Lakeview. It had a lighted multicolored star atop which said “Mom’s Rooming House and Dormitory.” It looked like a private, one-story stucco residence with a chain link fence around it. The neighborhood was black ghetto: shine stands, a pool hall, liquor stores, a bail bondsman, bars on both sides, lots of trash on the street, lots of street corner loiterers. To Jimmy Smith, it looked like sanctuary and peace.
On Sunday evening, an autopsy surgeon employed by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office was looking at the naked body on the stainless steel table in the glare of fluorescent light in a tiled room with rusty floor drains. On the forward end of the table was a hose. At the other end was a drainage tray. It was unusual to be doing an autopsy on Sunday evening but of course this was a very special case and would need to be done with great care, with no unnecessary mutilation of the head and face.
“File number 88883. The unembalmed body is that of a Caucasian male reported as 31 years of age, measuring 6′2″ in length, weighing 195 pounds, with brown hair, hazel eyes, and medium complexion. No scars, tattoos, or identifying marks are observe
d.”
The police officer from Detective Headquarters witnessing the autopsy digested the technical findings of the autopsy surgeon for police department superiors.
Number 1 slug enters upper lip, shatters upper center incisor teeth, continues through hard palate and through tongue, and lodges in third cervical vertebra. Is a Colt .38 cal. special.
Number 2 slug enters chest at a downward angle, goes through left lung and exits left lower back. Through and through wound. No slug recovered.
Number 3 enters chest at downward angle, parallel to number 2, goes through left lung, breaks rib, and stops just beneath skin of lower back. Is a .38 cal. Smith and Wesson 200 grain.
Number 4 slug enters left upper chest, goes through heart, diaphragm, liver, spleen, kidney, and nicks the aorta. Exits lower left back. Through and through.
Number 5 slug enters right center chest, through right lung, through left lobe of liver, right adrenal gland, and vena cava. Exits lower back. Through and through.
An examination of the vital organs of the deceased indicates he was in excellent physical condition prior to being shot.
A probe was placed in each wound and photos taken to show the trajectory of the slugs.
The trajectory indicates that the weapon used to inflict wounds number 2, 3, 4, and 5 was held 34 inches from the top of the victim’s head and 24 inches above his chest.
Autopsy surgeon states that wound number 1 would not be immediately fatal. However, either of wounds 2, 3, 4, or 5 would be instantly fatal.
The Onion Field Page 22
