Nearly a hundred Angelenos assembled in the lobby of the Bella Union for the vigilante trial. A jury of twelve men, six Anglos and six Californios, returned a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death for both men. Francisco Carmello was turned over to Sheriff Barton. The executions took place the following morning before a large crowd made up predominantly of Californios and Sonoreños.
Both men spoke from the gallows. Neither expressed any remorse. Zabaleta played the victim, blaming the murders on Rivas. He had committed many crimes, he admitted, but nothing that justified the penalty of death, and he expressed anguish over the shame it brought on his family. Rivas condemned the bad luck that had brought him to such a miserable end. “Young men, consider my fate!” he exclaimed. “Never join with so-called friends if you plan to commit a crime!” The executioner then slipped canvas bags over the heads of the two men, stepped back and pulled a lever, releasing the trapdoor. The drop was too short, and both men struggled violently against the ropes as they strangled to death, the crowd watching in silent horror. The bodies were left suspended for an hour or more on the brow of the hill where, as one observer recalled, “everyone could see them swinging in the air until they were cut down for burial.”
The gallows speeches and the botched execution disquieted many, and over the next few days editors Lewis and Rojo of the Star heard plenty of criticism from Californios, who blamed Anglos for proceeding in too great haste. Rojo responded, reminding his readers that Californios had participated actively in the investigation and trial, which had been conducted in emulation of legal process. “Justice was the goal,” he concluded, “and justice was achieved.” Yet, as Lewis had warned the year before, the proceeding did nothing to strengthen the legal justice system. Zabaleta and Rivas were plainly guilty of murder. How much better it would have been had the law been able to take credit for their punishment. The next case would prove far more difficult.
LATE ONE NIGHT in the autumn of 1852, Ana Benites awoke to the sound of gunfire outside the San Gabriel home of Juan Ávila Rico, where she and her lover were sleeping. “Rico! Rico! Rico!” a man cried. One of her children opened the door to the house, and the man stumbled inside. “Madre,” the child cried out, “es general Bean.” Joshua H. Bean, major general of the California state militia, had been shot by an unknown assailant as he walked home following a performance of las maromas, a traveling tent show of acrobats, ropewalkers, and clowns. The ball tore into his chest, ripped through his right lung, and exited his upper back, a mortal wound. Bean spent the next twenty-four hours drifting in and out of consciousness before finally succumbing to the loss of blood.
A coroner’s inquest convened the following morning, Monday, November 8. General Bean was well-known and widely admired by Americans. “His death,” reported the Star, “has created a deep sensation in this community.” After Garra’s uprising Bean had relocated from San Diego to San Gabriel, opening a popular saloon in an old mission building. There were no witnesses to the shooting, at least none who came forward. As he was dying, Bean had mumbled the names of two men, but his meaning was unclear. One of them was ranchero Juan Pacifico Ontiveros, the other Ontiveros’s son-in-law, Felipe Reid. At the inquest both men testified that although they were in San Gabriel that evening to watch the maromas, they knew nothing of Bean’s murder. Don Pacifico, proprietor of a large rancho, was a man beyond reproach. Reid, the son of a Scots father and a Gabrieleño mother who worked as an account clerk for Abel Stearns, was widely considered a ne’er-do-well, but he provided what the Star called “a perfect alibi.” The coroner’s jury ruled that “the deceased, Gen. J. H. Bean, came to his death by a shot received from some person or persons unknown.”
That was a conclusion Bean’s American friends refused to accept, and constrained by neither due process nor social deference they took the matter into their own hands. A group of men led by Alexander Hope, chief of the volunteer patrol, questioned Don Pacifico again, and under intense interrogation he provided them with a list of names that led to the detention of several individuals, including Ana Benites. According to Antonio Coronel, Hope’s men subjected them to the third degree and “even applied torture,” which terrorized the small Californio community in San Gabriel. “The matter became so serious, Anglos and Californios alike were alarmed,” Coronel recalled, and “it was agreed, therefore, to name a committee to investigate and make the results public.” The hope was to prevent the formation of a lynch mob by organizing a more formal vigilance committee that included both Anglos and Californios. On Friday, November 26, the prisoners were transported to Los Angeles and turned over to this committee.
Editor John Lewis of the Star was enthusiastic about these developments. The prisoners, he wrote, belonged to “a gang of desperadoes . . . some one of whom, there is every reason to believe, was guilty of the murder.” In fact, not a shred of evidence linked any of the suspects to Bean’s death, but Lewis was nevertheless ready to begin their trial. “These persons will be tried by a people’s court and the guilty ones punished as they deserve,” he announced. “There can certainly be no objection to this mode of procedure, when we hear our very court officers acknowledge that the law is utterly incapable of bringing them to justice.” Lewis was deliberately dissembling. The problem was not the incapacity of the law, as he implied, but rather its insistence on evidence and proof. Lewis had come a long way since his expression of concern the year before, although a faint echo of his earlier caution reverberated in the final sentence of his editorial. “It is to be hoped,” he concluded, “that passion will not get the better of justice and judgment, but let everything be conducted in a manner worthy of an American community.”
The vigilance committee kept up the pressure. Ana Benites was held incommunicado for more than a week at the home of William Osburn, undersheriff of Los Angeles County and a prominent supporter of vigilantism. Osburn was married to a Mexican woman and fluent in Spanish, and eventually he persuaded Benites to talk. One of his sons later recalled that “father one night dressed her up in men’s clothes and took her to an acrobatic performance given in Nigger Alley,” and “while there she pointed out one of the gang,” a Sonoreño named Reyes Féliz, about fifteen years old. After several hours of interrogation, Féliz made a confession. “I belonged to the company of Joaquín Murieta,” he said, using a name that meant little to Angelenos at that moment but would soon become infamous. After committing a murder during a robbery near Stockton, the Murieta gang fled south to Los Angeles, a bounty hunter named Harry Love hot on their trail. Love caught up with one of the gang and shot him dead, but Murieta, Féliz, and several others found refuge in “Sonoratown,” the name Anglos applied to the predominantly Mexican neighborhood on the north side of the pueblo. Ana Benites knew about his past, Féliz said, because she was Murieta’s mistress and had been in bed with him the night of Bean’s murder. But in regard to that crime, he insisted, “I know nothing.”
Féliz acknowledged a murderous past, so the vigilantes convened what the Star called “a people’s court” at the Bella Union to consider his fate. Horace Bell attended and provided an eyewitness account. “The place was packed to suffocation, with a dense crowd outside,” he wrote, with “Old Horse-Face,” Abel Stearns, presiding. Féliz’s statement was read aloud, and afterward Stearns asked whether anyone wished to make a motion. According to Bell, “a ferocious looking gambler mounted a bench, and said: ‘I move that Reyes Féliz be taken to the hill and hanged by the neck until he be dead.’ ” Stearns gravely called for a vote, the crowd shouted its approval, “and Reyes Féliz was a doomed man.” The following day, November 30, Féliz was conducted to the gallows on Fort Moore Hill at noon, and before being “launched into eternity,” as the Star put it, he addressed a few words to the large crowd, advising the young men “never to put faith in woman!”
Cherchez la femme. Ana Benites made no attempt to deny her relationship with the outlaw Murieta, who had already returned north to begin a crime spree that would end in his death at the hands o
f bounty hunter Harry Love the following year. In fact, Benites was proud of her connection and the purchase it provided. After further examination by the vigilance committee she implicated yet another Sonoreño, a young man named Benito López. Knowing that she was intimate with Murieta, and hoping to get on her good side, López had given her some of the booty stolen from a couple he had murdered near Cahuenga Pass. Seized by the vigilantes, López confessed to the crime and led his captors to the scene, where they discovered the moldering bones of his victims. So much for López.
By this point Ana Benites’s credibility was soaring. What more did she know? After more interrogation she provided them with precisely what they wanted. Before he left town, she said, Murieta had confided that Bean’s murderer was a poor San Gabriel shoemaker by the name of Cipriano Sandoval. Shortly after leaving the performance of the maromas, Sandoval saw Bean assaulting an Indian woman in a dark alley, and outraged by this demonstration of Anglo arrogance, he pulled a pistol and shot Bean dead. Sandoval had previously denied any knowledge of the murder, but confronted with Benites’s accusation he changed his story. He had indeed heard the gunshots, he admitted, and then the sound of someone running. Suddenly a man crashed into him headlong. It was Felipe Reid. “I have just shot Bean,” Reid exclaimed. “Here is five dollars; take it, say nothing about it, and when you want more money come to me and get it.” The vigilantes questioned Reid again, but he vociferously denied Sandoval’s charge. They reinvestigated his alibi, and it held up. They concluded Sandoval was lying. Benites’s testimony against him was hearsay at best, evidence inadmissible in a court of law. But that was not where Sandoval’s fate would be decided. Some members of the committee, including Antonio Coronel, had qualms. But, said Coronel, “Dr. Hope was determined on revenge at all costs” and insisted that “Sandoval should be hanged.”
The outcome of the “trial” of Benito López and Cipriano Sandoval, held at the Bella Union on Sunday morning, December 5, was a foregone conclusion. Both were declared guilty and sentenced to death, with the execution scheduled for that same afternoon. As the vigilantes were finishing their work, a group of Americans arrived with an intoxicated Mexican named Juan Moran who they said had just killed one of his countrymen in an affray on Negro Alley. Since the people’s court was already in session, why not try him as well. “The proof in the case being perfectly clear,” opined the Star, “it was not deemed advisable to deliver him to the civil authorities, but to punish his offence summarily; and as the men Cipriano and López were to be executed in the afternoon, he was condemned to the same fate and at the same time.” Come one, come all! It was a confirmation of the ill-considered nature of the entire proceeding. Yet editor John Lewis of the Star reported it with a straight face.
That afternoon the condemned men made the long walk to the top of the hill, accompanied by Father Anacleto of the Plaza church. They mounted the gallows, were trussed and noosed, then given the opportunity to make a final statement. López acknowledged the justice of his punishment, and like Féliz the week before he cautioned the young men in the crowd to avoid “bad women.” Moran made what the Star called “a lengthy speech,” condemning the absence of due process and addressing his fellow Sonoreños in the crowd. “We made a mistake in coming to this country, amigos,” he said. “Go back, every one of you to Sonora and obey the laws, or you will soon be travelling this same road.” The cobbler Sandoval maintained his innocence but stoically accepted his fate. Providence had ordained that this would be the way he met his death, he said, and he was prepared to meet his maker. Undersheriff William B. Osburn, serving as executioner, carefully provided ropes of an appropriate length and adjusted the nooses correctly to avoid any mishaps. “Do your worst, you son of a bitch,” Moran said to him in Spanish. The condemned “met their fate with great calmness,” reported the Star, “and with a courage worthy of a better cause.”
Many Angelenos doubted Cipriano Sandoval’s guilt. Manuel Clemente Rojo, Lewis’s editorial colleague at the Star, was a member of the vigilance committee, but he opposed the verdict and condemned the “inhuman execution.” According to Benjamin Hayes, “none of the Californians ever believed that Sandoval was guilty.” Hayes later learned the truth from a number of Indian woman who lived near the mission. Joshua Bean and Felipe Reid, they told him, were involved with the same Gabrieleño woman. The night of his murder, Bean accosted her on the street and demanded she go home with him. When she refused, he grabbed her by her hair and began dragging her toward his adobe. Reid, hiding in the shadows, stepped forward and fired point-blank at Bean. Afterward the murderer spread plenty of money around in a successful effort to cover up the crime. Several years later, however, as Reid lay dying of smallpox, he called Hayes to his side and made a full confession.
Horace Bell was in the crowd when Sandoval, López, and Moran were executed. “Heavy clouds over-spread the sky,” he wrote, “as though an angel had in charity thrown its mantle over the scene to shut out the horrid spectacle from the face of heaven.” What he had witnessed, Bell thought, was a travesty of justice. “In the minds of unprejudiced persons at the time, the hanging of the poor village cobbler of San Gabriel was considered an unmitigated and deliberate murder.” Bell returned to his rooms that evening “pondering sadly and solemnly over the events of the day and could not refrain from thinking,” as he later wrote, “that humanity would have been greatly benefited, if about four-fifths of that mob had been disposed of in the same way as had been the hapless Mexicans who were hung.”
CALIFORNIOS JOINED Alexander Hope’s volunteer patrol and took part in the vigilance committees that tried and executed Zabaleta and Rivas. But Hope’s zeal in the investigation of Bean’s murder alienated many of them. In the summer of 1853, several months after the executions, Hope and his officers reorganized the volunteer patrol as a mounted cavalry company, which they named the Los Angeles Rangers. Hope applied to the state government for recognition of his company as an arm of the California militia, which was granted, providing state subsidies for the purchase of arms and equipment. The Rangers held their first muster at the El Dorado Saloon near the Plaza, a place noted as a “white man’s rendezvous,” where Californios and Mexicans were not welcome. Reorganizing the force was necessary, argued the Star, because Los Angeles was faced with “peculiar obstacles” in the maintenance of law and order, namely “the habitual concealment of offenders and the repugnance to give information to the authorities of which a large class of our population is justly accused.” That veiled criticism of the Spanish-speaking majority was made clearer in the list of officers and members published by the Star. It included not a single Hispanic name.
The conflict between Americans and Californios on questions of law and order, simmering since the Lugo case of 1851, arose once again in October 1853, when the Rangers arrested a gang of Californios suspected of horse theft and murder. The gang had been tracked to Los Angeles by the sheriff of San Luis Obispo County, some two hundred miles north, and he requested the assistance of the Rangers. Horace Bell, who like most young Anglos in town had joined the group, participated in the capture of the suspects at their encampment in a cornfield outside of town, an engagement Bell described enthusiastically as “one of the most exciting pleasures that it is possible to conceive. . . . The pop, pop, pop of the revolvers, the answering yell and hurrah of the intercepting Rangers, the defiant carajo! of the robbers, and the crashing of the breaking cornstalks.” Bell and the others captured three men and a young woman, “as pretty a little brunette as ever excited the lustful desires of a Mormon missionary,” according to Bell. The suspects were brought into town, where a public meeting was convened to consider their fate. No thought was given to turning them over to Sheriff Barton.
The first sign of trouble came when Andrés Pico declined to serve as the meeting’s chairman. He was replaced by the ever available Abel Stearns. At the encampment the Rangers had found a caballada, the horses displaying a variety of brands, as well as a cache of silks and other
dry goods, presumably stolen from a peddler reported murdered during a highway robbery. Stearns selected a jury of six men to examine the evidence and render a judgment. After deliberating for a few minutes, they returned with a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death. Stearns called for discussion, and it was quickly moved and seconded that the sentence be approved and the three men and one woman be hanged the following morning.
But it immediately became clear that most of the Californios in attendance were opposed. Manuel Clemente Rojo mounted a table in the front of the room and gave a speech attacking the practice of vigilantism. This meeting, he declared, constituted an illegal assembly. Matters of guilt and innocence were the exclusive province of the legally constituted courts, not irregular combinations of vindictive and excited men. Several Americans attempted to shout him down, but Rojo refused to be silenced. The law, he declared, existed for the good of the whole community. If Angelenos abandoned the law, the result would be anarchy. Several Americans rushed forward and tried to push Rojo out of the room, but Californios challenged them and Rojo held his position, declaring he would not be “choked off.” The crimes of which these individuals were accused had taken place in another county, he said, and that was where they should be tried. At that moment Rojo was joined by his law partner, Isaac S. K. Ogier, who had just been appointed U.S. attorney for the southern district of California. He agreed with Rojo, Ogier said, and was unalterably opposed to lynch law. With that declaration, Anglo solidarity in the face of Californio objection crumbled. Stearns called for a vote, and the motion to support the jury’s decision was defeated by a wide margin. Ogier moved that the prisoners be sent to San Luis Obispo for trial. His motion was seconded and passed. The prisoners were dispatched on the next steamer.
Rojo devoted nearly the entirety of La Estrella that week to a detailed summary of the meeting as well as a passionate editorial. He was appalled by the conduct of the Americans. “The bad feeling, even hatred, was palpable,” he wrote, and the meeting “appeared to us like a battlefield.” The Anglos had armed themselves with revolvers in an obvious attempt to intimidate the Californios, who refused to be scared off. “If an attempt had been made to subject the prisoners to la ley de linch,” Rojo wrote, “there would have been a disastrous scene.” He recalled the events of the previous year. “We cannot forget the lynching of Cipriano Sandoval. . . . His death, ordered by a barbarous people who watched him die on the scaffold, was a lesson to us.” At these so-called “people’s courts,” he wrote, it was too easy to “commit an injustice like the one that, in our judgment, was committed against the hapless Sandoval.” Lynch law was not the solution to the problem of crime and violence in Los Angeles.
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