The Badge Read online

  Quietly, a rolling stakeout was established. The number of police cars assigned to the area was doubled, and they were ordered to keep moving in a constant, criss-cross patrol which sieved Westlake. Even the innocent-looking panel truck used by LAPD for motion picture sleuthing roamed the neighborhood.

  Each night, the truck was parked on a different street and from within two officers kept a weary watch through peepholes. But the prowler slipped through the rubber-tire net night after night; and by May, the continuing epidemic had Westlake terrorized.

  Women demanded that the police “do something,” and LAPD couldn’t tell them how hard it was working without also taking the fugitive into their confidence.

  From the new reports, another modus operandi check was run on the burglaries, and LAPD implored the electronic brain to think. Think. THINK. Yet Sergeant Joe Oakes of the Burglary Division, checking the results, could make only one unhappy deduction.

  “We may have another murder on our hands if we don’t get him,” he told fellow officers.

  Yet all LAPD could do was to increase the patrol. Some four thousand police man hours had been pitted against the will-o’-the-wisp burglar, and they hadn’t been enough. All LAPD could do was to spend more man hours—and wait.

  Now it was a night in May, a pleasant night very much like the premature spring Karil Graham had enjoyed so briefly in February of the year before. Bashor was on the prowl again, this time in the western end of Westlake where it merges into the Wilshire district. A neat five-room bungalow, the kind a lone woman might occupy, caught his eye.

  Inside, Mrs. Laura Lindsay, sixty-two, a brown-haired divorcee, was sleeping. Having for thirty years been a topflight legal secretary in Los Angeles, Mrs. Lindsay was a prudent woman. Before going to bed, she had, she was sure, locked all the doors and windows; but anyone could have made the same mistake of oversight that she did. Only tonight, Bashor was quietly circling the darkened house, ready to profit by it.

  Finding all the doors and windows secured, he was about to go away because he never could get up the nerve to force an entry. Then he spotted the outside woodbox which connected with the living room by an opening four feet wide and three feet high. Usually, the lid was locked, but this was Bashor’s lucky night. He crawled through the opening and into the house.

  Women, he knew, think in their peculiar way that it is safer to keep valuables nearby as they sleep. He made straight for the bedroom and hunted for Mrs. Lindsay’s purse. Maybe he was clumsy in his over-confidence, or maybe in the fifteen months since Karil, it was just the law of averages working against him. Mrs. Lindsay awoke.

  This time, for Bashor, there was no momentary freezing. As she started to rise, he was on her with a ball-peen hammer. It was a sickening, faster replay of Karil’s murder. The woman fell back, and tried to rise. He smashed her head, savagely, again and again.

  Then he stepped back, panting, and rested for a moment. For a second perhaps, Karil’s younger death mask flashed before his eyes. He took a pillow case and Mrs. Lindsay’s dressing gown and wrapped them around the head as he had shrouded Karil’s head with her pink nightgown.

  For some unaccountable reason, he picked up the body, carried it to a couch nearby and laid it there, the face down and hidden from his sight. He hurried from the house.

  By sunup, Bashor had on a complete change of clothes and was in a restaurant, eating a substantial breakfast. Woman killing didn’t bother him so much now. Beside him lay blood-stained clothing and shoes and a ball-peen hammer, all tied into a neat little package. But they could wait till dark, and meanwhile he would have another cup of coffee and then some rest.

  When Irving Walker, a prominent Los Angeles attorney, stopped by to give his secretary a lift to the office, her body was still warm. This time, the killer had only a few hours’ start on the police, but for all practical purposes, that didn’t seem to make any difference.

  The same frustrated, irritated group of specialists interrogated, pried, dusted, and popped flash bulbs, all in vain. LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division would have been a public laughing stock, except that the public was in no mood to laugh. This murder so like Karil’s frightened the whole city. Westlake’s terror was contagious; and neighborhoods Bashor had never even seen wanted twenty-four-hour protection.

  Then Sergeant A. R. McLaughlin, LAPD’s latent prints ace, found it. Inside and out, he had dusted the house, doors, jambs, locks, furniture, utensils, anything an intruder could conceivably have touched, and had come up with nothing. Finally, on the woodbox in the yard where a less painstaking man might easily have missed it, his dust brought up the fragmentary print of the heel of a palm. It was a rare discovery.

  Carefully, the print was taken to the crime lab. An analysis proved futile, and it was filed away; but now the police had something if they ever laid hands on a suspect.

  That night, Bashor followed form. Once again, he drove to Santa Monica and safely dropped his neat little bundle into the ocean off the far end of the pier. He decided that for the next week or so he would be wise to lay low.

  During the breather that Bashor gave them, LAPD’s men made Westlake into a giant booby trap. The rolling stakeout was again intensified. From other districts, plainclothesmen were drawn in on emergency basis to question all suspicious men found on the streets. In alleys and hallways, on dark corners, teams of police spied on after-midnight activity.

  In the hot panel truck, Officers D. C. Wesley and J. R. McCaslin were keeping a dull, uncomfortable peephole watch. This night, early in June, the truck was parked on a street of older apartment buildings, some of which were being torn down. There was no particular reason to think their man would walk down this street this night, but being good officers under orders, they watched, hour after hour, sourly meditating on a policeman’s life.

  An athletic-looking, blond young man passed the truck. He went into the vestibule of one of the apartment houses and carefully removed his shoes. Wesley and McCaslin still waited. Then they saw him train his flashlight on the names on the mailboxes.

  Guns in hand, the two officers slipped out of the truck and advanced on their quarry. He saw them and fled out to the street in panic. Wesley and McCaslin yelled to him to stop. He kept on, turning into an alley between two buildings that were being demolished. They fired.

  One shot caught their man in the left shoulder, and he stumbled. He recovered his balance and ran on, wildly looking for any escape route. Suddenly he veered into another narrow passageway between the buildings.

  As he ran, his shoeless right foot came down heavily on a nail sticking out from a board. He went down with a scream, and Wesley and McCaslin were on top of him. It was Bashor. An ambulance surgeon sewed him up, and he went to jail.

  When the detectives took over, they found they had a prisoner and that was about all. Bashor was mild enough, but he was too conwise to talk, or at least to tell the truth. Just tell enough, not too much, and make it sound like there isn’t any more.

  He had to talk some because the police gun stolen in Alhambra was found on him; and obviously he had broken his parole three ways from the middle by his suspicious actions, by carrying a gun, just by being out so late at night. Still, he tried to lie, reason, deny his way out of trouble.

  First, he said he would talk only to Tom Donovan, the husky sergeant in the Burglary Division who had helped convict Bashor years before. That seemed plausible because criminals often want to deal with the policemen they know. But it soon became plain that he was trying to con Donovan into believing him innocent.

  So the burglary sergeant got together with Sergeant Jack McCreadie, a homicide specialist for sixteen years. It was McCreadie who had taken the first phone call on Karil Graham’s murder; and he felt a personal, burning passion to wipe that case off the books.

  Bashor’s palm print matched the fragmentary print that had been picked off Laura Lindsay’s woodbox. If he had killed her, he had no doubt battered Karil Graham to death, too, since the mu
rders fitted the same pattern of savagery. But if Bashor wouldn’t admit the lesser crime of burglary, how could he be persuaded to confess two murders?

  Between them, Donovan and McCreadie decided, they would give their suspect a real, razzle-dazzle interrogation. First, Donovan would question him, and then McCreadie would suddenly take over. Always, the switch alarmed him.

  “What are you questioning me for?” he asked McCreadie time and again. “I’m here for burglary, not murder.”

  Tantalizingly, McCreadie wouldn’t quite come out and tell him. He didn’t even tell him about the palm print. That was being held for a psychological break-through at the right moment.

  For almost two days, the interrogation went on; and then the detectives got an unexpected assist from a civilian. From the showup, a woman singled him out as the intruder who had ransacked her apartment while she lay in bed, too terrified to scream.

  With that as a lever, Donovan got Bashor to admit to sixty burglaries just in the Westlake area. Now was the time to put on the pressure. The second night he was in custody, it was McCreadie, not Donovan, who walked Bashor to the booking desk.

  Bashor looked puzzled, but said nothing. McCreadie told the booking officer that the charge was a “187” in the California Penal Code.

  “Is that burglary?” Bashor blurted.

  McCreadie looked his prisoner full in the face. “Murder,” he said evenly.

  “Murder! I’m in for burglary. I told Donovan everything. You trying to frame me for murder?”

  And then McCreadie played his trump with the delicate timing of a Culbertson. “I didn’t put your prints on that woodbox, kid,” he said softly.

  This was the break-through, and quickly McCreadie brought the ashen Bashor into an interrogation room to follow up the advantage. The razzle-dazzle had kept him under constant pressure trying to outguess his questioners; and now he had run out of guesses and evasive answers.

  Piecemeal, grudgingly, as though it hurt him, he began to talk about the two bludgeon deaths. Then the trickle of information became a raceway, and he talked fully and without remorse.

  “They’ve got nothing more to worry about…. It was something I had to do…. Part of the job…. The calculated risk.” Almost pleadingly, he told McCreadie about his fear of being imprisoned again. “I knew if I got caught, I’d have to go back. Finish my time, and then some. I didn’t want that!”

  Twenty minutes later, the stenographer reappeared with several sheets of closely typed onionskin paper.

  McCreadie placed them in front of the suspect.

  “Read it.”

  Bashor complied.

  “You’ve read the statement?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Initial each page. Both copies.”

  Bashor did so.

  “There’s been no promise of immunity or reward made to you in obtaining this confession?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been threatened in any manner?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said no.”

  “This statement was made freely and voluntarily by you?”

  Bashor answered in a firm voice: “Yes.”

  And in an equally firm hand, he wrote the words: Donald Keith Bashor.

  The Los Angeles County grand jury promptly indicted him on two counts of murder.

  Now the bludgeoner of two women, the man who had preyed so coolly on dozens of other lonely women, lost the last bit of his nerve. He wanted to plead guilty, and get it over with as quickly as possible. When his attorney insisted on entering a not guilty plea, Bashor balked at a jury trial and put his fate in the hands of a judge.

  He was convicted on both counts of first-degree murder and sent to Death Row in San Quentin, where he was executed in the gas chamber, October 11, 1957.

  Donald Keith Bashor was young and handsome and often had other people’s money to spend freely. In his twenty-eight years, he should have made friends who would grieve sincerely over his fate. Yet, in their investigation, the police found only one person who mourned. That was his little old landlady in Pasadena.

  As he had taken from other lonely women their purses or their lives, he robbed her of an innocent, pathetic illusion. She lost her only grandson.

  II

  The pamphlet given visitors to Los Angeles says the City Hall stands just about at the geographical center of the city. On a clear day, if you ride the elevator some 450 feet to the observation tower, you see a mass of concrete, granite, timber and just plain rock—one of the strangest, most picturesque and complicated police beats in the world.

  You look north fifteen miles to Mount Wilson in the Sierra Madres, west thirteen miles to Venice and the Pacific. To the northwest, Hollywood seems to huddle against the Santa Monica mountains, and twenty miles south lies the harbor, the biggest man-made port in the world. East and southeast stretch the city’s major industrial areas.

  Here is a sprawling, magnetic, fantastic city whose feet rest on the sand at sea level and whose shoulders proudly rise to a mountain almost a mile high. Along coastline, mountain pass and desert flatland, you can ride its twisting perimeter for 312 miles. North to south, there are forty-four miles in which to hide a body. East to west, twenty-five miles in which to rob, plunder, attack.

  And there are 454.749 square miles to break a cop’s back—and, sometimes, his heart.

  Once a sleepy pueblo, now crowding the top in U.S. population, Los Angeles has attracted all manner of men, vice, and crime. Among its 2,500,000 inhabitants, the daily collision of good and bad, hunter and victim, passes reckoning. While the homicide detective is investigating a rape near the beach, the robbery detective is busy with a supermarket stickup in the San Fernando Valley.

  And in between, in the score of individual communities, in any of the one million dwellings, no one knows—no one can know—what other evil is being planned, or already taking place.

  Once Los Angeles was the capital of glamour, and then the movie studios began to disperse and sometimes disappear. Then the aircraft plant, the rubber factory, and the automobile assembly line elbowed in. Once the Mexicans and Chinese flooded the city, but the pioneer from back East, today as well as one hundred years ago, has staked his claim here, too.

  Since no influence vanishes entirely, there is a residue of elegant sin and two-bit robberies, fantan and poker, calculated crime and impetuous knifing. The Angeleno will travel half a day to spend thirty minutes admiring desert flowers or lunching in a native sycamore grove. In his unpredictable way, he also will step across the line and commit a crime that is as grotesque as anything that comes out of Place Pigalle.

  Against the danger, the police in the largest incorporated city in the United States have a dozen geographical enforcement divisions and dozens of specialists in every crime from bunco to murder. But unlike most federal police agencies, which are charged with enforcing specific laws, LAPD must be a housekeeper of all crime.

  While the beach rape and the supermarket stickup are under investigation, traffic must flow freely during rush hour; and if a child strays from home, the patrolman on the beat takes time out to return him. Most of the work is far from spectacular, and often the spectacular is not successful.

  For every individual, mostly Angelenos, who remembers LAPD’s triumph in Karil Graham’s murder, there are a thousand who remember another Los Angeles woman killing: The Black Dahlia murder. That is, so to speak, the other side of the shield.

  III

  She was a lazy girl and irresponsible; and, when she chose to work, she drifted obscurely from one menial job to another, in New England, south to Florida, westward to the Coast.

  No matter how they die, most drifters leave nothing behind, and many of the 25,000 graves dug yearly in Los Angeles are marked by blank stones, for their occupants didn’t even leave a name. Yet today, more than a decade after her strange and awful death, this girl remains hauntingly, pathetically alive to many persons.

/>   To the sociologist, she is the typical, unfortunate depression child who matured too suddenly in her teens into the easy money, easy living, easy loving of wartime America. To the criminologist, though the case is almost too melodramatic in its twists, her tortured, severed body is an eerie blend of Poe and Freud. To millions of plain Americans, fascinated by the combined savagery and cool intellect that went into her murder, she is “The Black Dahlia.”

  The other side of the shield.

  Right from the first erroneous report to the police at 10:35 a.m. that gray mid-January day in 1947, the investigation was askew through no fault of the police. In the days, months, years of sleuthing that followed, it never quite got back into balance, again through no fault of the detectives. More than any other crime, murder is sometimes like that.

  In the University section, along a dreary, weedy block without a house on either side, a housewife was walking to the store with her five-year-old daughter, scolding her a little because she wanted to play in the dew-wet lots.

  Halfway up the block, the mother stopped in horror at something she saw in one of the lots. “What’s that?” the child asked. The mother didn’t answer. Grabbing her hand, she ran with her to the nearest neighbor’s house to call the police.

  And the first, wrong alarm went out: “Man down, 39th and Norton.”

  Within ten minutes, about 10:45 a.m., the first patrol car had reached the scene. Quickly a team of detectives from Central Division, a full crew from the Crime Lab, newspaper legmen, and photographers followed. The street was blocked off to keep back the curious, and the investigation got underway.

  Sergeant Finis Arthur Brown of the Homicide Division, who was going to live with this ugly thing for months and years, hadn’t yet arrived.

  At 9 a.m. that day, he had been in court to testify in another case. After that, he went to Sixth and Rampart Streets to check out a dead-body report. An elderly man had died of natural causes, but Brown followed through with routine questioning of the rooming house operator.