by Jim Newton
Warren hesitated at first. He was the chairman of the party, and accepting the leadership of the delegation risked antagonizing both Hoover and Merriam, a Republican ex-president and a sitting Republican governor. Moderate friends pressed him to do it anyway. “A number of us visited Warren and urged him to keep up the fight for an uninstructed delegation,” said Ed Shattuck, a longtime leader of the state party. “We felt that this was the way to clean house in the party.”57
Warren agreed, then faced the challenge of convincing voters that he was not merely fronting for Hoover, just as Merriam was for Hearst. Over lunch at the San Francisco Chronicle in the days leading up to the election, Warren advised Hoover to squelch those rumors by announcing that he had no intention of running. Hoover, Warren later remembered, “hit the ceiling. I have never seen anyone so sore.”58 Hoover never forgave Warren the impertinence.59 Soon after, Warren spoke out brashly against Hearst, charging in a radio address that a man who kept an official residence in New York in order to avoid paying California taxes should not be allowed to play a meaningful role in its politics. Hearst’s reaction is not recorded, but it is not difficult to imagine his rage.
Warren and the delegation he headed ran under the slogan “Are You Handcuffed by Hearst? And Muzzled by Merriam? Or Are You Independent, Progressive California Republicans?”60 Warren’s delegation won, and his victory marked a generational as well as an ideological transition. In just two years, Warren had defended Merriam against a serious challenge from his left by appealing to the voters’ nonpartisanship; now he had vanquished Merriam with a new variant of that theme—that “independent, Progressive” Republicanism was needed even within the Republican Party. Hoover and Merriam, leaders of California’s traditional conservative Republicans, were being consigned to the status of elder statesmen. Warren’s string of victories was growing longer.
Warren already enjoyed Knowland’s unqualified support, and his actions through 1934, 1935, and 1936 brought the Chandlers on board as well. Although he was never theirs—and though they would eventually bring their own champion, Richard Nixon, to the contest—for the present, Warren sufficed. He was tough, young, unblemished, and able to carry votes in a state dominated by Democrats. His handling of Hoover and Hearst proved he did not shrink before power. The Los Angeles Times became a supporter in those years, and would give him vital backing in Southern California for the rest of his state political career.
With his newspaper support lined up and his conservative base solid, all Warren needed was an opening. Given his background, the obvious next step was the California attorney general’s office, a job that would make use of Warren’s prosecutorial credentials but expand his reach beyond Alameda County. Warren had eyed the office for several years. Indeed, even as he had helped defeat Sinclair, Warren and his staff first drafted and then advocated passage of a set of amendments to the California Constitution to invigorate the office of the state attorney general. Until then, the attorney general had acted as lawyer for the government and little else. Under the amendments, the attorney general’s duties and office would be expanded and he would be turned into the foremost law-enforcement officer of the state, with the power to initiate investigations anywhere in California and with supervisory authority over the state’s police and sheriffs. The attorney general also would receive a raise to $11,000 a year. Warren stumped for the changes and took advantage of a spate of crime to convince voters to agree with him. A series of bank robberies tested law-enforcement coordination in the state, and then an appalling mob lynching of two men who had been arrested for the kidnapping of a young man named Brooke Hart helped persuade voters that local authorities could not handle certain types of violence. Convinced that new authority was needed at the state level, voters approved the Warren-backed changes in 1934, making the attorney general’s office into one that Warren might now like to hold.61
The office was good for Warren, and Warren was ready for the office, but impeding that path was U.S. Webb, the wizened incumbent attorney general who had been in office since 1902 and whose tenure was marked more by longevity than accomplishment. Warren knew better than to challenge Webb directly, but Warren did ask Webb to let him know should he ever prepare to retire.
In 1937, the call came. The seventy-year-old Webb told Warren that he would not stand for reelection. Warren announced his candidacy on February 17, 1937: “[T]he future of our democracy depends on the quality of our local and state governments and on whether or not we have an honest, fearless and uniform enforcement of the law.”62 Backed by Republicans and their newspapers and unchallenged by united Democratic opposition, Warren appeared in the early months of the campaign to be coasting toward victory.
It was an exhilarating moment. Warren’s diligence had created a coveted office, and his attention to politics had made him the presumptive holder of it. Warren was forty-seven years old, the head of a large and healthy family. His youngest was still just a toddler, but college loomed for the Warren brood, and the pay hike—from $7,200 a year to $11,000 a year—boded well for the family’s future.
But before Warren could move to Sacramento to assume the spot that seemed destined to be his, he was jolted. On a Sunday morning in May 1938, Warren was speaking at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley to a Masonic gathering when he was handed a telegram. It informed him of a murder the night before in Bakersfield. The blood-soaked body had been found that morning at 9:10 A.M. The victim was Methias Warren.
Chapter 5
MURDER
Come quickly. Father needs you.
WILLIAM REED TELEGRAM TO EARL WARREN1
EARL WARREN HAD PLANNED an average day for Sunday, May 15, 1938, at least by the standards of a politician in the middle of his first campaign for statewide office. After addressing the Masters’ and Wardens’ Breakfast of the Masons at 8:30 A.M. in Berkeley, he was planning to take his son, Earl Jr., to a barbecue lunch at the Golden Gate Gun Club in West Alameda. Like much of his schedule in those days, Warren’s stops were partly social and partly political. They involved meeting old friends and sometimes even included family, but they also were chances to talk about crime in California and what he, if elected attorney general, intended to do about it.2
The breakfast was already under way when an aide pulled Warren aside and told him the news from Bakersfield. Methias Warren had been beaten with an iron pipe. The assailant had entered through the back door of Warren’s tiny childhood home on Niles Street. Methias had been sitting in a kitchen chair when the killer struck and cracked apart his skull. Initial police speculation suggested a left-handed killer swinging from behind. Later, investigators adopted a more provocative theory: that the blows were delivered by a killer face-to-face with the seventy-one-year-old man—implying that the victim knew his murderer. Once beaten and bleeding, Methias either dragged himself or was dragged across the room, from the area near his chair onto his bed, and the killer then rifled the house. Warren’s watch lay near the body, undiscovered or ignored by his assailant.3 Methias Warren died in his bed.4
William Reed, who worked for Methias, found the body when he came to call on his boss on Sunday morning regarding some business. A trail of blood led from the kitchen to the bedroom. Bloody handprints were on the doors and oven. Reed immediately called police and fired off the enigmatic telegram.5 Within minutes, Alameda’s district attorney had dispatched senior members of his staff to Bakersfield, one group by car, the other in a plane carrying Warren as well. Warren asked Oscar Jahnsen, the lead investigator for the Alameda County DA’s office, to monitor the unfolding inquiry; Nathan Miller, another trusted aide, went to act as Warren’s lawyer and to investigate the estate of Methias Warren. Warren’s actions were taken quickly, but those close to him could see how rattled he was. “I knew he was fighting to keep control of himself,” Jahnsen recalled.6
In the coming days, newspaper readers across California would learn details of Methias Warren’s murder and the intense police effort to find the killer or killers. It
was, after all, a sensational story—the father of a leading candidate for attorney general clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Many of California’s prison cells held men put there by Earl Warren. He had enemies, and the press jumped at the possibilities, along with their political ramifications. In that mountain of coverage, however, reporters would say next to nothing of how it was that Methias Warren came to be alone that Saturday night. Although the Bakersfield Californian noted that he lived by himself in the house, it did not ask why. The answer was that Methias Warren, always careful with money, had grown increasingly penurious as he aged. Isolation had turned to reclusiveness, as Warren retreated into his modest rental-property business. Gradually, he transformed his home into a ramshackle workshop. Spare furniture was piled into some rooms; the backyard teemed with plumbing fixtures, lumber, and other supplies. Even his eating habits changed, as he watched each penny. On the night of his murder, the dinner he left was a half-eaten grapefruit.
As Methias Warren squirreled away his cash, he left room for little else. His wife, Chrystal, had moved out during the late 1920s, settling in Oakland in an apartment near their daughter Ethel. By the time Methias was killed, he and his wife had been separated for more than a decade.7 The facts were painful to Warren—as well as a potential liability for a candidate whose public image centered in some measure on his sturdy family. For decades, he covered up the truth, telling biographer John Weaver that his mother was visiting Oakland at the time of the murder in order to undergo surgery for cataracts. Although that was partly true—Chrystal Warren did have the surgery—it concealed the less pleasant fact of his parents’ long separation. So committed was Warren to that version of events that he recorded it in his memoirs as well, long after it could have had political ramifications for him.8
Warren was aided in the protection of his secret by a press markedly more reticent than today’s to reveal embarrassing personal details about its public officials and by his own solid reputation among reporters. They liked him, and when the murder occurred, they treated Warren as a victim first and only after that as a story. Still, the murder of Methias Warren ricocheted through the state political campaign. Early speculation naturally focused on whether Methias might have been killed by someone trying to get even with his famous son. Speaking to reporters before leaving for Bakersfield, Warren discounted vengeance as a motive, even as he reminded voters of his long record protecting the public from criminals:
True, in the 13 or more years I have been a prosecutor, I have sent an average of 15 killers to death or to prison. I have sent countless other prisoners up, but I have never heard expressed toward me the threat of vengeance, either openly or indirectly. I have received no threatening letters. I know of no one who could have killed my father to strike at me.9
Arriving in his hometown, Warren was met by Jahnsen and the other members of his staff who had driven or flown to the scene. Warren and his retinue drove to his old home, and there he stepped inside, through the yard where his burro Jack had been tethered and where he had played with his dog, into the kitchen where he had done his homework and returned after hauling ice through the city’s sweltering summers, through the living room with the old Victrola and the books read so long ago. Now that same lot was covered in debris. The kitchen was drenched in the dirt-brown of dried blood. Police scoured the area for clues, while at police headquarters detectives questioned suspects. One, an out-of-work sixty-three-year-old laborer, Hulet Bell, had been arrested early Sunday morning for public drunkenness. As police took him into custody, Bell blurted out, “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him.”10 Since Warren’s murder had not been publicized at that point, police were questioning the now sober Bell in connection with the murder. Ernest Wearne, who lived in one of Warren’s rental homes, also was in police hands, said to have threatened Warren and a local judge after a drunk-driving conviction. He too was being questioned.11
In addition to Warren’s men, police arrived from Los Angeles to help with the investigation, and the FBI (after a period in which it was known as the Division of Investigation, the formal FBI was born in 1935) supplied assistance as well. Hoover wrote personally to Warren to express his condolences, and the Bureau would assist from offstage in the investigation for years.12
That day, Earl Warren surveyed the progress of the case, braced for the onslaught of coverage, and then retreated briefly to his hotel room. There, the events of the past twenty-four hours overtook him. Yes, his father had receded from the family in recent years, but Warren was suddenly immersed in the town of his youth, thrust back into the memories of childhood and growing up, of his father’s tutelage and care. That they had not been close in recent years only added to the tragedy—their separation was now permanent, their differences forever irreconcilable. Warren broke down and cried in front of the press.
A photographer took a picture. But Earl Warren’s popularity protected him from more than the exposure of his parents’ separation. When the bulb went off, the rest of the press corps turned on the photographer and demanded that he pull the film from his camera. “There was a concerted effort in that room by the rest of us to see that that picture would never be used,” said Ralph Kreiser, the police reporter for the Bakersfield Californian. “No picture appeared.”13
One witness to that strange scene was Bakersfield’s unconventional police chief, Robert Powers. An almost entirely self-educated man (he dropped out of school before reaching sixth grade), Powers was curious, witty, and quietly forceful. He described himself as “an extremely devious person.”14 He had been chief since 1933, and had little use for the wave of law-enforcement agents now descending on his department, offering their help solving the murder of Methias Warren. Powers affected graciousness but pushed back at those who would take over his investigation, including the well-meaning aides of Earl Warren.
Powers’s resistance to interference did not translate into hostility toward Warren, however. Indeed, like the reporters covering the case, Powers wanted to protect the district attorney, whom he knew from conferences and supported in his bid for attorney general.15 His initial impulse, on arriving at the scene of the crime, was to consider whether the image of Methias Warren’s disheveled home would hurt Earl Warren’s candidacy, as reporters would question why a well-off son would let his father sink to such depths. Only after Powers discovered that Methias Warren was in fact reasonably well off and lived that way because he chose to did Powers’s concern for Earl Warren subside.16 And Powers’s admiration only grew as he witnessed the esteem that others held for Warren. When the press corps convinced the photographer to destroy his picture of the grieving district attorney, Powers cocked an eyebrow. “It’s a very strange thing that a man like him, as good a man as he was,” Powers recalled, “could get so much genuine affection from a bunch of bastards.”17
In the days that followed, Powers’s staff and Warren’s would come to see the murder differently. Powers, who took personal control of the investigation and assigned more than two dozen officers and civilians to it, believed a transient had committed the crime—that a passing vagabond spied Methias Warren counting the receipts from his rental properties and sneaked up from behind the house. As he approached, Powers believed, the assailant grabbed a section of pipe from the cluttered backyard and stole inside the house, which had been left open in Bakersfield’s gathering summer heat. The killer, according to Powers’s theory, bashed in Warren’s head, then rifled through his papers, scattering unimportant documents and pulling out cash.
Jahnsen, Warren’s lead investigator, arrived at a different conclusion. Jahnsen strongly believed that Methias Warren knew his killer and that the motive was more complicated than robbery. Jahnsen reached that conviction first from his belief that forensic evidence showed Warren was facing the assailant when struck. His conclusion seemed bolstered, Jahnsen believed, by evidence that Warren would have been too weak from the injury to drag himself into bed and that his assailant thus helped place him there. Under th
at theory, the killer hit Warren, then helped him to bed, where he died. The murderer, Jahnsen believed, covered the body with a sheet.
Kindness to the dying Warren did not square with a transient killing. They suggested a friend, and Jahnsen was convinced that they pointed to a man named Ed Regan, who helped Warren manage his Bakersfield rental properties.18 Jahnsen took a bead on Regan at Methias’s funeral. There, with family and reporters present, Regan swooned with grief. He fell to the ground, but seemed, to Jahnsen anyway, to take care not to hurt himself. The newspapers reported him as having fainted; Jahnsen thought he’d faked it. In addition, some of Warren’s papers were missing, and a small pile of them appeared to have been burned not far from Regan’s house. Nathan Miller, hunting through Methias Warren’s extensive financial records, looked for irregularities and poured over Regan’s documents as well, searching for an unpaid loan or other transaction that might have given him a motive to kill his business partner and friend. Nothing turned up. Trying to increase pressure on Regan, Jahnsen asked him to provide fingerprint samples, ostensibly to eliminate any of those in the house that might match his, since Regan had reason to be there. Jahnsen’s real motive, however, was to sweat Regan, to see how he reacted to the pressure of being a suspect. At first, Regan and his wife objected. Then he agreed, but broke into what seemed a nervous sweat. Jahnsen was convinced he had nailed Regan and that he was on the verge of confessing. Just at that moment, however, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies, who were assisting in the investigation, interrupted and began badgering him. Regan was confused, and Jahnsen halted the interrogation, convinced that even if Regan confessed, it would not stand up in court. Jahnsen forever believed the one chance of solving the crime had slipped away.19
