The Murder Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  The little group investigated, and found Captain Walter Wanderwell kneeling against a sofa in his cabin in utter darkness. He was dying, having been shot through the back of the neck, the bullet ranging downward and through his heart. Rushing out on the deck, they saw no sign of anybody.

  After some delay, the situation was reported by telephone to the Long Beach police, who proceeded to take charge after their fashion.

  The boys from Long Beach headquarters had a fresh corpse on their hands, and immediately ruled out suicide since there was no gun around and since it was unlikely even to them that a man could shoot himself in the back at a range of four feet or more. Then the officers remembered about the paraffin test and spent most of the night giving it to everyone aboard, with negative results. All got a clean bill of health, including Aloha Wanderwell herself who had been brought back from her sister’s apartment on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood (about twenty minutes away by auto, or half an hour by street car or bus).

  By next morning the Los Angeles police were in on the case after their fashion—aided and abetted by Carlton Williams, brilliant police reporter for the Los Angeles Times. It was immediately clear to all parties concerned that some old enemy of the Captain had done him in. According to police records, there was only one old enemy—a former member of his group, who had been jettisoned midway on the auto-boat jaunt upward through South America, and who later had the temerity to come to Los Angeles and ask for his money back. This man’s description was printed in the Times—Carl Williams’ paper—and picked up by the other Los Angeles dailies, though for some reason his name was carefully withheld. And he was put on the police “Wanted” docket.

  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.

  At the same time a parallel investigation was being made through regular Los Angeles police channels. It was discovered 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.

  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 travelling around with him as his sister. She was immediately made a ward of the Los Angeles juvenile court, but charges were dropped when the dashing couple eloped and were legally married. It is not a matter of record as to whether or not their two children were attendants.

  It was a case somewhat complicated—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”—

  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. 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 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. 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.

  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 possible 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.

  But on Thursday, December 8, 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.

  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 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.

  Besides, Curley Guy was in no position to face investigation. In his attempt to establish American citizenship he had been cutting numerous corners. A humble seaman-navigator aboard the palatial Vincent Astor yacht, he had jumped ship some months before when the vessel was docked near Los Angeles. Then, he had registered and voted at the recent elections in order to make himself eligible for a pilot’s or a navigator’s license—then only granted to American citizens.

  A grayish raincoat was found among his meager effects and the police then marked the case Closed. There were various identification parades, held both at the Times offices and at police headquarters, some without Guy being present. But several important witnesses identified his raincoat—which they had seen through a twelve-inch porthole on the Carma on a dark and foggy night. Guy was given the nitrate-paraffin test and passed it, but the police explained that too much time had elapsed and that in the meantime he might have washed his hands.

  The case, which had up until this time been largely centered in a newspaper o
ffice, finally came to preliminary hearing. Before a magistrate, the lovely Aloha Wanderwell, who had been very dry-eyed all this time, gave her testimony. She also smiled encouragingly at the prisoner all the while, which mightily confused the press. Also smiling and nodding to him was pretty Marian Smith, the girl from Atlanta who thought that she had seen somebody like him through the porthole.

  What really flabbergasted the working press was that after the hearing Aloha walked across the room and made a point of warmly shaking hands with the prisoner and whispering a few words to him. It was certainly evident at the time that there were no hard feelings, anywhere. It made no sense to the boys on the Times—nor to us on the Herald-Express, the opposition paper.

  The trial of William James (Curley) Guy opened February 3, 1933 in Long Beach, with Judge Robert W. Kenny (more recently Attorney General of the State of California and now a prominent attorney specializing in labor law and relations) presiding. At the request of the city editor of the Herald-Express, I was assigned to cover the highlights of the trial. This may have been because of, or in spite of, the fact that my early stories on the case had accented my belief that Curley Guy was innocent.

  Weeks ahead of the trial our opposition paper, the Times, intimated that Curley Guy was guilty. The Herald-Express inclined toward the opposite viewpoint—not only because of my own hunch but because Bill Moore, their regular police-reporter, agreed that the case against Guy was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. The thing became a battle between two great rival newspapers.

  Judge Kenny, looking like an Alaskan billikin or an Oriental Buddha, dominated the proceedings. The Judge ruled with cautious fairness—though some of the newspapermen who lunched with him gathered that in his private opinion he felt rather sure that the trial was a dry run; there would be no victory for the State.

  Representing the defense was Eugene McGann, a fine old Irish warhorse in the tradition of Fallon and Jerry Geisler, who operated from the beginning as if he knew that he had the world by the tail with a downhill drag.

  Buron Fitts, a prominent legal light at the time, was then District Attorney of Los Angeles, and his jurisdiction covered the scene of the crime. But at the last minute he decided to send in his third team, a couple of bright young men fresh out of law school. Bill Brayton and Clarence Hunt carried the case for the People, doing their level best with what they had—which wasn’t too much.

  The two were bright young men and they had a true bill presented by a picked grand jury. But I always felt that they realized that the facts of the killing were still obscured. They did their best, but they had to sit in on a tough poker game with nothing better than two pairs.

  And Curley Guy had an ace in the hole, as I wrote then and still maintain.

  On the opening day of the trial at Long Beach I was allowed an interview with the prisoner in his cell, and later was permitted to walk with him and his aged, tobacco-chewing deputy sheriff several blocks through the busy streets of Long Beach to the courtroom.

  As we walked slowly along the streets, I tried to make the most of the time—tried to probe a little into the mind of the man accused of murder. But he had little to say. He disposed of Wanderwell in a few well-chosen if unprintable phrases. The man had been only a twenty-one-carat phony, who had made his living out of taking bows for adventures he had never had—and out of taking money from little people who were seduced by his talk. The bullet through the back of his neck had been too good for him, but Curley laughed at the suggestion that he himself had put it there.

  My impression of Guy at the time was that he was a right little, tight little Welshman, who knew planes and the navigation of ships, who would—for all his slight stature and boyish profile—have been a bad man to push around. But I also felt that he would, under any pressure, be the sort of person who would only hit above the belt. He despised Captain Walter Wanderwell—but I could not believe that he would have shot him in the back.

  I tried to turn the conversation toward the topic of the lovely lost Vera, the wife from whom he had separated in the Canal Zone some months ago, and whose loss was supposed to have inspired his murder of Wanderwell. Guy shrugged that off. They were stranded in the Canal Zone. Vera had a chance to become an entertainer in a cafe, a B-girl, maybe worse. So, she chose to remain there and eat regularly, while he worked his way north.

  “Water over the bridge—or do Americans say ‘dam’?” queried Guy. More important to him was the question of whether or not, after the trial, he would be deported. He was determined to secure American citizenship.

  I tried to explain to him that his situation was precarious, since he had been born in Wales and later had become a citizen of Australia. The only way he could legally enter the U. S. A. was on a quota, and this particular police record would not help him with any of the immigration authorities.

  About the trial and the Wanderwell murder itself, he would say very little. But I did discover the fact that Guy did not know that on the day of the murder the yacht Carma had been moved to new moorings at the P. and O. docks. Which response could, of course, have been faked. It sounded very likely as presented to the jury by Mr. Brayton and Mr. Hunt. Things looked not too good for Curley Guy during the first days of the trial, but he remained confident and unruffled.

  Prominent in the courtroom during the trial was Aloha Wanderwell—and her sister, Margaret B. Hall—each done up in picturesque uniforms consisting of open silk shirts with loose Russian sleeves, dark, tight vests, breeches and shiny boots. The sister had never been on any of the expeditions, but she certainly went along with a gag. They were a striking couple. Aloha had her fair hair done up in tight ringlets under a tam-o-shanter cap and added considerably to the tone of the affair. Everyone waited hopefully for the day when she would be called to testify, but the trial dragged on and on with medical evidence that “proved” that Wanderwell had been shot at close range—that he had been shot from outside the porthole—that the bullet had ranged here, there and everywhere…!

  Still the trial dragged on, with days spent on the testimony of Guy’s friend Eddie DeLarm (owner of a plane which had been making mysterious trips to Mexico), of Eddie’s wife and of his two teen-age daughters—all of whom swore that Guy was in his room in their Glendale house at the time of the crime. The jury had a field day, making trips to look at the schooner Carma (where one juror shocked the court and panicked the newspapermen by making Rabelaisian suggestions concerning the way in which fifteen crew members and four Wanderwells must have utilized the limited sleeping arrangements of the ship) and to the original slip where the Carma had been tied, and even to the shack where Curley Guy had gone into hiding the morning after the murder.

  DeLarm, not the most co-operative of witnesses, testified that most of his original statements to the police had been obtained under duress. He cited a night when he and his wife had had their home invaded by Lieutenant Filkas and reporter Williams—without warrant—during which time they had taken it for granted that Williams was an officer and not just a Times reporter. Some of the witnesses who had testified to seeing Curley Guy’s face in the porthole just before the murder—after having been prompted by glimpses of his photograph or looks at his raincoat—hedged on their testimony. It was also brought out that DeLarm’s car, the only vehicle to which Guy had ready access, had stood in DeLarm’s driveway all the time during the evening of the murder.

  Although the case for the prosecution began to go all to pieces, it had a momentary lift when a tri-motored plane registered in the name of DeLarm was nabbed at Corona Airport, near San Diego, and found to hold 500 gallons of alcohol illegally imported from below the border. DeLarm insisted that he had sold the plane to somebody else a few days ago, but he was undoubtedly making a living running a shoe-string air transport and Curley Guy—a pilot and navigator—worked for him and lived with him. Perhaps we here have an indication of the secret which Guy was anxious to hide. The serious student of the case should certainly keep that fact in mind. All this happ
ened in the days of prohibition, when an enterprising man with an airplane could make $4,- or $5,000 by importing a load of schnapps from south of the border. There were also numerous Chinese who waited in Mexican cities, ready to pay almost anything for an entree into the U. S. A. Not to speak of the traffic in drugs which went on and still goes on between Tijuana and points north. At any rate, DeLarm and his friend and associate, Curley Guy, had been making twice-weekly flights across the border for some months. The record does not show that they delivered any cargoes of Mexican serapes or huaraches.

  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 made in South America, The River of Death. The show was a sellout, 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. There were interminable scenes of Aloha hemmed in by headhunters and head-shrinkers who mugged happily for the camera; there were scenes of her knocking off crocodiles and jungle cats with her 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.