by Whit Burnett
her to the driveway?"
"I didn't! She--"
"Better talk now, Wilkinson. You're in bad trouble. The coroner's report hasn't come up yet, but it'll have the answers."
"No, I-"
"Why don't you make a statement? Tell us the truth. Tell us
now what we'll find out anyway, and we'll let you alone."
"I told you what happened! I gave you my statement! I
killed the dog, sure. Not her. She's a swell person. We talked.
She gave me a drink. I made pictures for her."
"Sure, sure. You run down her dog and then she asks you in
for a drink. Even bas you take snapshots of her. Where are
those pictures?"
"Home. At my place. ! developed the negatives as soon as I
got back, and before I went to bed I made the prints. They're
on tins now."
"Whaddaya mean, 'tins'?"
"Ferrotype tins. They're thin sheets of chrome-plated metal
you dry glossy prints on. Makes them shiny."
"Your studio is right where you live?"
"Yes."
The lieutenant lifted a telephone to his mouth, said, "Martinez," and put it down.
A large cop with a mustache came to the door. "Go to this
na Blond Dog • 209
address," the lieutenant said, showing him my card in the handkerchief. "You'll find a woman there. This Wilkinson's wife.
Ask her to show you where the picture tins are. Take the pictures off the tins and bring them back. Tell the woman we need them for evidence that might help her husband."
"They're not likely to be dry yet," I said. "Peel them off
easy, or they'll tear. If they don't come off easy, bring the tins
back with the prints on them."
"That's right," said the lieutenant.
The officer went out. I felt better. "She's in some of the pi�
tures herself," I said. "She couldn't be dead and in the pictures,
too. You'll see."
"Sure we'll see/' said the man in plain clothes. "And what
will that prove? Only that you were there. You couldn't have
made the pictures and then killed her, could you?"
They walked me across Spring Street, in handcuffs again, to
the Hall of Records building and put me in a cell of the county
jail. One of the cells a few doors up on my side housed a "wino"
who was singing the Marine Corps Hymn in a happy drunken
voice. "Shuddup !" my jailor told him on his way out.
There were other sounds. Night sounds from the street outside. The whirring of rubber tires. The rattle of a loose fender.
The distant laughter of a girl. Under me the iron cot squeaked.
Somone in a cell across the aisle snorted suddenly in his sleep.
From somewhere came the chirping of a bird (was it already
dawn?) . There was a fast muffled oppressive drum-beat. My
pulse; I trembled with cold, though it was a warm night.
"All right! Let's go!"
It was my jailer. Somehow I had fallen asleep. I shuffled out
the cell door and he followed half a step behind, holding my elbow the way a man helps a woman across a street. We walked down the corridor, turned a comer, and entered a long, narrow
room. It contained a few chairs, a table, a battered metal desk
and an overflow of cops.
Against the far wall was a bench, and set up on the bench,
leaning against the wall, were my tins. The prints were still
stuck to them. Three .1 8 x 22 tins with the white backs of four
8 by 1 0 prints showing on each of them.
'These the ones?" the plain clothes man asked me.
"Yes."
"Take them off."
'They don't seem to be dry yet," I said. "If-"
"Take them off!" said another cop. "This is a murder case."
I slid a fingernail under the corner of the first print. It peeled
off without much trouble. It was a long shot of the back of the
house taken from the swimming pool, one of the ones in which
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Nineteen Tales of Terror
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Lucy Warner wasn't posed. One of the cops took it from my
hand.
The second print stuck, but I pulled it off anyway, cracking
the emulsion but not tearing the print. It was a closeup of the
redwood front doorway, the one I had posed her in with her
shoulder against . . .
But Lucy Warner wasn't in the picture! On the threshold of
that open doorway stood the blond dog!
I wasn't able to take the rest of the prints off myself. The cops
took them off and laid them out on the table in front of me. I
lifted my head from the table and looked at the pictures. They
were my shots all right. I'd recognize my style of work anywhere. They were my pictures just the way I made them, except that in the four shots in which I know I posed Lucy Warner,
the dog stood instead. She was not in any of the pictures.
"All right, Wilkinson," said the plain-clothes man, ''you can
cut the bull now and start talking."
"I've told you everything."
''Why did you kill her?"
"I didn't kill her. I killed a dog. Just a dog!"
"How did you know she was alone?"
"I didn't even know she lived there. My car-"
"What did you crack her on the head with before you carried her to the driveway?"
"I didn't!"
"What do you know about that Black Dahlia murder last
winter?"
"Nothing! I-''
"Do you know where the Twelve Palms Motel is on Sunset?".
••No."
'That's where that high school girl was found last week.
Strangled. Remember it now?"
"No! Nol"
"How did you get the dog to stand still for his pictureT'
"I didn't photograph the dog. I photographed Lucy Warner."
"Why did you kill her? How did you do it?"
"I didn't do it!"
"How did you kill her?"
The State of California threw the book at me. There had
been a series of unsolved murders in Los Angeles and the
officeholders were hot on giving the newspapers a conviction
to play with for a change. The state charged murder in the first
degree and demanded the death penalty. In California it's the
gas chamber.
I had no money to defend myself. But the judge appointed
The Blond Do1 • 2 1 1
an aggressive young lawyer who I thought (ought hard and well
for me. Main thing was, he believed in me.
Not that he ever exactly accepted my understanding of what
happened that afternoon in Laurel Canyon. But I know he
never felt me guilty of any crime. His first advice was that I
plead temporary insanity, and he brought a psychiatrist to my
cell to talk things over. We finally decided, on the basis of the
psychiatrist's report, to enter a simple plea of not guilty.
The county district attorney was merciless. Plaster casts of
alleged tire marks on the woman's body were entered in evidence, along with matching marks from the almost bald tires on my Essex. There were fingerprints from the purple goblets
-both of them-and from my business card, the ceramic
water pitcher, and the knob of the kitchen door. My prints, not
hers.
The ex-husband of the actress testified. He was a handsome
man wearing a black armband. The reason for their recent divorce, be said, was her insistence on living alone for occasional periods of several
days at a time. She had once told him that to her the lens of a studio camera was the eye of fifty
million people. After exposing herself to it during the shooting
of each picture, she had said, she needed at least a week of complete solitude to regain her feeling of privacy.
The gardener testified in detail how he had found the body of
the woman, with the dog nuzzling it and raising his snout to the
sky in mournful whines.
The district attorney confronted me with the gardener and
asked if I recognized him.
"No," I said.
"How did you know he was expected that afternoon? Did
you wait outside on the highway and watch him discover the
·
body?"
"No, I . . . she, she told me he was coming."
"That's all. Thank you."
The district attorney even had the blond dog brought to the
courtroom. He led the dog on leash up to me as I sat on the
witness chair.
"Is this the dog you say you killed?" he asked.
"It looks just like him," I said.
When I put out my hand the dog came to me. I was surprised
at the unpleasant muttering that came from the packed courtroom when I patted the dog and fondled his ears.
"What is the dog's name?" asked the prosecutor.
'The name of the dog I killed was Prince Igor."
When I said the name the dog barked. A soft, friendly bark.
There was a rumble of unpleasant murmuring from the specta-
212
Nineteen Tales
•
at Terror
tors, who crowded every seat in the courtroom. The judge
rapped his gavel.
"How do you know his name?"
"She told me. Lucy Warner said his name when-"
"Witness dismissed. Thank you."
My lawyer did the best he could against this chain of circumstantial evidence. He began by admitting that my car had struck down the actress in her driveway. He even admitted that
the evidence seemed to show my car had backed and advanced
over the body after it had been struck down.
But he affirmed, eloquently, I thought, that the state had
failed to establish any motive for murder, and that all the evidence the state offered to prove murder was entirely circumstantial. He told the jury that what had happened was plainly an accident. A simple case of involuntary homicide.
My lawyer got an expert mechanic to drive my Essex along
the same Laurel Canyon route I had taken that day. On the
stand, the mechanic testified that, though he filled my car's radiator full of water before he began the trip, the water pump leak was so bad that the car began to steam before he reached
the actress' driveway.
How I knew the dog's name, and how I knew the gardener
was expected that afternoon, were two more problems for my
lawyer. He had told the jury I never spoke to the woman, that
the accident happened as I first drove into the grounds.
A movie magazine came to my rescue on this. The lawyer
and my wife, Maria, rummaged through the pile of magazines
lying about my studio, and came up with a copy of Modern
Screen published just a month before the actress died. If she
did die.
This magazine had a color photograph of the actress and the
blond dog on iis cover. Inside was an interview with the actress
in which the dog Prince Igor was mentioned by name. The
story also reported that since her divorce the actress had been
living in her "Hollywood home" (no address given) entirely
alone. Her only servant, th..e article said, was a gardenerhandyman who lived nearby and came over every afternoon to work, to run errands and to feed the dog when she was working
at the studio.
I decided right after my arrest that my only hope was to tell
nothing but the truth. During questioning by the police, and on
the stand during trial, I never once lied or withheld information. So when my lawyer showed me this copy of Modern Screen and asked if I'd read it, I told him truthfully I couldn't
remember having read it. Since the magazine had been in my
studio for a month, as he and Maria assured me it had, I agreed
The Blond Dog
2 1 3
•
it was possible I had paged through it. But I could not honestly
say (and did not) that I remembered reading it.
Nevertheless, my lawyer introduced the magazine in evidence the next day. Under his questioning I said again that I did not remember reading it, though I might have. I do read the
movie magazines occasionally, mostly to study the current work
of the studio still photographers.
The jury men and women ( there were six of each) took the
magazine with them that night to the hotel where they were
quartered during the trial. The magazine may have done me
some good. I don't know.
But the heart of my defense was the testimony of the psychiatrist my lawyer had first brought to my cell when he was advising that I plead temporary insanity. The psychiatrist spent altogether perhaps forty hours talking with me before the trial.
"Doctor Nicholson," my lawyer asked on the stand (Abner
S. Nicholson, of Berkeley Medical ) , "please give your opinion
as to the sanity of the defendant."
"It is my considered opinion that this man is rational and of
at least normal intelligence," the psychiatrist said. "I found in
his mind one limited area of a psychopathological pattern. But
I would say, medically speakin&, that on the whole his is the
mind of a sane man. From the viewpoint of law, it is a mind
capable of distinguishing right from wrong."
"Would you ex.plain, doctor, just what you mean by a limited
area of psychopathological pattern?" my lawyer asked. "How
is it possible for a mind to be sane, both medically and legally,
and still to exhibit abnormality?"
"In cases of true medical and legal insanity," the doctor replied, "the mind is afflicted with a basic pathology, some mania, delusion, anxiety, or obsession. This aberration is present in
such a compulsive force that it channels the patient's over-all
behavior into a pattern we know as madness.
"But such is not the case with the mind of Grant Wilkinson.
The limited area of psychopathological pattern to which I referred is truly limited in Mr. Wilkinson's mind. It is compartmented off from the main stream of his consciousness. I found no clinical evidence that this aberration has contaminated his
mind as a whole. It is, I repeat, a sane mind."
"Doctor Nicholson," my lawyer asked, "could you make a
little clearer the difference between a true insanity and the
limited aberration of which you speak?"
"I shall try. The basic distinction is perhaps one of origin, of
cause. Your true manias and dementias have their roots deep
in the patient's personal life. They go back in many cases to mal-
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Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
adjusted childhoods, unhappy homes, and basic sex disturbances.
"But there are other patterns of pathological behavior that
are not so deep-rooted in poor childhood adjustments. Normal
and sane minds are perfectly liable to reveal sudden pathologic
symptoms as the result, for instance, of severe trauma of either
a physical or an emotional nature. The most commonly known
psychopathology of this
sort is amnesia, or loss of memory.
Amnesia can be caused by a blow on the head, by a sudden
emotional shock, even by the high fever of malaria.
"No, I do not imply that Mr. Wilkinson is suffering from a
simple amnesia. I do, however, testify that the limited aberration I found in Mr. Wilkinson's mind is of a riature somewhat akin to amnesia. I do testify that its cause is also similarnamely, a sudden accumulation of emotional shock."
My lawyer again: "Perhaps it would be easier for you to explain this, doctor, if you gave us your theory of just what happened, physically and in the defendant's mind, that afternoon in Laurel Canyon."
"I shall try," said the psychiatrist. "First of all, it is apparent
to all of us here that a woman has died. The evidence shows,
and the attorney for the defense admits, that she died under the
wheels of the defendant's automobile. Yet the defendant himself affirms that such was not the case. He says his car struck down a dog.
"I am convinced that what Mr. Wilkinson has told us is, for
him, the truth. I am convinced that Mr. Wilkinson wholly believes in his own mind that his car struck down the dog and not the woman. This, then, is Mr. Wilkinson's idee fixe, his fixed
delusion, the limited area of psychopathological pattern of
which I speak.
"Now let us consider what might have happened that fatal
day. Suppose the defendant did tum into the driveway for the
reason that his automobile was in urgent need of water. Let us
further suppose that the deceased woman was at that moment
walking down the driveway with her back to the oncoming
automobile. It might well have been that she did not hear the
automobile's approach, for it was coasting out of gear at the
time. And Wilkinson might well not have observed her. Perhaps
his eyes were at that moment fixed on the water temperature
gauge on the-"
"Your honor!" The district attorney was on his feet. "Your
honor, I object to this line of questioning by counsel for the
defense. Supposition and deduction from the evidence is the
duty of the jury. Its practice by a witness is clearly improper.
This witness is competent only to give medical testimony."
My attorney made a good reply : "Your honor, a man's life
Tile Blond Dog • 21 5
depends upon our establishing here the truth of what happened
