A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (21 page)

Had Clark really sought to bribe Girnau? It seems more likely that Girnau was taking a swipe at Clark because of Clark’s work on behalf of Clara Bow. But everybody jumped in with their opinion about the killings. The Reverend Bob Shuler swiftly devoted an entire issue of his magazine to the story. Shuler had Buron Fitts as a source, and Fitts was already busy trying to rewrite history—claiming that he’d known for months, even years, that Clark had been corrupted. “Fitts has reason to believe that Albert Marco was convicted in spite of Dave Clark not because of him,” Shuler wrote. “Fitts believes that Dave Clark is the fair-haired boy of the Guy McAfee gambling control and that he was running for the judgeship, as many men do all over the nation, so that the racket might have one more friend in court.”

Titled “The Strange Death of Charlie Crawford,” Shuler’s sixty-four-page pamphlet weaves together a sketchy telling of Crawford’s early career history in Seattle with a persuasive analysis of the struggle for power that led to his death. Buron Fitts was in no doubt that Clark had pulled the trigger. Shuler wrote:

Just what was the immediate cause he does not know. That Dave was getting over a jag might have entered in. That the three men consumed a bottle of whiskey during their conference, evidently Crawford and Clark getting the lion’s share, might partially explain. Crawford might have been putting the screws to Clark, to get at McAfee. They might have sent for Clark to put him on the spot. On the other hand, Clark might have gone to Crawford for some more campaign money and Spencer butted in just in time to provoke a couple of murders. Or Clark might have gone over to persuade Crawford to make up with McAfee after Monday’s quarrel. Or yet again, Clark may have been told by McAfee that Crawford was going to withdraw his support, muddy the waters and defeat him. In which case he might have gone over for a showdown.

Dave Clark, the man with a multitude of possible motives, was in a jail cell in the Hall of Justice. Without any great effort on his part, while there he gathered 67,000 votes in his run for the judgeship—not enough to secure the seat (the winner polled 71,000 votes) but an amazing showing. A then-current Times photograph shows him behind bars, looking suave and elegant in his shirtsleeves, sitting on the ground playing cards with a bunch of other prisoners, black and white, who look at him with a mixture of curiosity and almost hero-worship. He cut a remarkable figure. A Times editorial attacked not Clark’s nerve, but his refusal to come straight out and tell his story. This smacked of opportunism and determination to survive at all costs, the Times said, sounding an unreasonably high moral note. Clark was worried, even if he was too stoic and self-assured to show it. Writing on yellow scrap paper, the only material available to him, he sent a note to his wife: “Nancy, sweetheart: Believe in me.”

“I do believe in him,” Nancy told the
Examiner
. She’d recovered her composure. In the photograph that ran with the interview she stared into the camera with her chin resting on a leather-gloved hand, poised and pretty and defiant—once again her tough father’s daughter. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know who committed those awful murders. But it wasn’t David.” (She was the only one who called him that; everybody else knew him as “Dave.”) She’d never heard of any trouble between her husband and Crawford or Spencer. “He sometimes spoke of them, but just as he spoke of dozens of other people he knew.” Nancy took comfort from her husband’s brief message. She read it repeatedly, tucked it under her pillow, and lay down and went to sleep for the first time since his arrest.

“She’s a little brick,” Clark said. “She believes in me and that’s all I care about.” Clark rose at 6:30 A.M., breakfasted on coffee, toast, and oatmeal, and attended services conducted by the prison chaplain. Nancy started visiting him two or three times a day. “I can stand everything else so long as she doesn’t desert me, which I know she never will,” he said.

For Buron Fitts, Clark’s situation was more than an embarrassment. With his tendency to self-pity, Fitts took the matter as a personal attack. Furious, he withdrew every remark he’d made about the brilliance of Dave Clark. “There were three racketeers in that room,” he said, claiming to have firm evidence that Clark was acting for McAfee. “The murders were nothing more than the result of Crawford’s attempts to gain back power he lost two years ago. Racketeers met racketeers and there was murder.”

To lead his defense, Dave Clark turned to W. I. Gilbert, whom he already knew well from the Clara Bow trial. Now he got to know him even better. Gilbert had an easy manner and a wit that could be biting or genial. His memory was phenomenal and he had the great trial lawyer’s gift: in his examination of a witness, he never hammered a question without driving it all the way and getting an answer; and he never hammered unless he knew where the inquiry would lead. He was tough too; in Oklahoma, where he’d had his training, “to be dressed” meant to carry a gun. “I can see him slowly and deliberately walking along the railing of the jury box calling each man juror by his name as though he had known the juror a lifetime. The southern courtesy he showed the women jurors made the deepest impression on them,” recalled Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Haas. “No-one could anticipate his courtroom tactics. He often turned coups to his advantage.”

Clark knew he was in good hands: Gilbert had never had a client convicted and executed for murder. Backing up Gilbert would be Leonard Wilson, a friend of Clark’s and a former judge.

At his arraignment Clark was mobbed by reporters and a crowd eager to glimpse the suave and newly notorious figure. The murder complaint had been sworn out by Assistant D.A. Tom Menzies, an old friend of Clark’s. Llewellyn Moses, another friend, handled these formal proceedings for the prosecution. The presiding judge, William S. Baird, had known Clark since childhood and couldn’t meet his eye, while the court reporter, Sam Coulter, a classmate from USC, shook Clark’s hand and told him, “I know you’ll come out of this okay.”

Small wonder, then, that Fitts looked to an outside lawyer to take charge of the prosecution. “It’s just too difficult for anyone at present on my staff to handle this,” he said. He picked W. Joseph Ford, a veteran who, back in 1911, had been part of the team that prosecuted the McNamara brothers for dynamiting the Times building. Subsequently, Ford had squared up against the great Clarence Darrow in Darrow’s trial for bribery, and the two lawyers had grown to hate each other. Ford remained convinced that Darrow had been guilty. On leaving the D.A.’s office in 1914, Ford became a criminal defense lawyer, then the first dean of the law school at Loyola Marymount University. He was already an aging man but his integrity was beyond doubt, or at least as unimpugnable as anybody’s could be in L.A. at that time. He’d known Fitts for years, having been his senior officer in the National Guard. Ford wore his gray hair long. Round, thick-lensed glasses made his eyes look big and black. Plunging into his task, he moved into an office suite in the Hall of Justice. “I expect to go into every gangland and racketeering ramification of the case,” he told the Evening Herald. “It’s not just the blind prosecution of Clark, but the tracking down of whoever else was behind these cold-blooded killings.”

Ford summoned back all the witnesses, interviewing them personally. He learned that four days before the shootings Charlie Crawford had withdrawn $7,000 from one of his accounts—a massive sum of which only $500 had been accounted for. Had Clark stolen the rest, taken it from somewhere in the office, or from Crawford himself as Crawford lay dying? Clark was known to be strapped for cash. Here was another possible wrinkle. Those secret strongboxes and safes that had belonged to Crawford and Spencer were scattered all over town. Located and opened by the D.A.’s men, the boxes disclosed lots more money, but none of the hoped-for clues or dope about the underworld. June Taylor popped up, not in Los Angeles but across the bay from San Francisco, at San Quentin where, amazingly, she paid a visit to Albert Marco. The LAPD posted men at local railroad stations to look for Taylor, should she return to L.A.

Charlie Crawford lay in state. For a day continuous lines of men and women paid their respects, gazing at the faintly smiling face of the slaughtered boss through a pane of beveled glass set in the lid of a $15,000 silver and bronze casket, the most expensive available in L.A. The funeral service took place close by USC, at Briegleb’s spanking new St. Paul’s Presbyterian, the church built with Crawford’s money. More than 2,000 people assembled. Those who couldn’t get in jammed the sidewalks and streets outside. Crawford’s two little girls sent a single rose with the message, “For Daddy.” Guy McAfee sent a wreath that was six feet high and in the shape of a heart. “For my old friend—gone now!” said the note. Still, nobody came away with the idea that McAfee was very sorry. Boy Scouts in uniform occupied the front pew, marking Crawford’s many contributions to their troop. The choir, almost obscured by banks of flowers, sang two of Crawford’s favorite hymns—“Safe in the Arms of Jesus” and “Jesus Loves Even Me.”

At the center of this orgy of sanctimony was the stocky and grizzled figure of Briegleb himself, standing beside a furled American flag with a gold spike on the top and eulogizing in a voice choked by sobs. “I knew the real Charlie Crawford, not as the world knew him. He has gone from the land of life. And how he loved life. To be near him was to feel the radiance of living,” he said. “He has gone into the land of explanation, where all enigmas are made clear. He knows the answer to the question we are asking: ‘Why should this have happened?’”

Briegleb praised the good Crawford had done, the donations he’d made: the $25,000 to pay for the church; the famed $3,500 diamond ring, slipped on top of a card on which was written, “Use this for the children.”

“He said to me: ‘Next to my family, that ring means more to me than anything else. I want to give it to the church because it will be a real sacrifice,’” said Briegleb.

Later, Briegleb delivered a sermon on “The Crawford Tragedy’s Lessons and Revelations.” Again his church was packed, the congregation hanging on his words. Briegleb spoke of Crawford’s frequently expressed fear that he would be assassinated. Chicago gangsters had been trailing Crawford for days, plotting to kidnap him for a $150,000 ransom, Briegleb claimed. Beneath Briegleb’s feet, in the church basement, was the soundproofed room that was to house the radio station Charlie Crawford had paid for. Maybe Briegleb’s broadcasts could have indeed put him on a par with Bob Shuler, and Crawford back in charge of L.A. But the room would remain empty, never to be used.

23

They Can Hang You

A
ll trials are for one’s life,” said Oscar Wilde, and for Dave Clark this was literally true. Buron Fitts and W. Joseph Ford sought the death penalty when proceedings began at ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, August 3, 1930. “A milling mob fought deputy sheriffs for seats in the tiny courtroom,” wrote the Times. Squads of extra police and bailiffs were on duty to control the crowds. A temporary high-walled chamber had been erected outside the courtroom door, through which entrance was gained one by one. People greeted Clark from all sides as he entered the court with Nancy on his arm. They thumped him on the back and shook his hand, wishing him all the best while he spoke with them casually, appearing more confident and relaxed than he must have felt on the inside. But who knows? Dave Clark was ice-cool. He’d spent the weekend on Catalina Island as a guest of his friend Jimmy Jump, the millionaire sportsman. “A little relaxation before the battle,” he told reporters. He’d golfed, fished, and played tennis in between going over the details of his defense with his attorneys. As usual, he’d worked on his tan. He was groomed and ready, dressed in a suit of dark blue that, in the past, had brought him luck. “Today the columnesque young man with a rancher’s bronzed skin and a faro dealer’s frigid eyes will begin the battle of his life for a scant dozen votes,” wrote Gene Coughlin, returned from the adventures with Albert Einstein to his more usual beat of juicy murder and purple prose. In the years since the Marco trials, the tempestuous, hard-drinking Coughlin had fallen out with
News
owner Manchester Boddy and revolved through the doors of almost every other newsroom in town. But now Boddy, forgiving and smart, had hired Coughlin again, knowing that the Clark trial would be the perfect showcase for Coughlin’s writerly gifts. Coughlin knew Clark and pointed out Clark’s great advantage: “He was a prosecutor and he knows what to expect from the prosecution.”

However, he did not know what to expect from the judge. The presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court was William Doran, who had handled the Marco case, the Bow/DeVoe case, and numerous others that Clark had prosecuted. Obviously Doran couldn’t preside over this one. He gave the trial to an out-of-towner, Stanley Murray, who journeyed down to L.A. from Madera County in central California, close by Yosemite. Murray, the son of a pioneer settler, had grown up in the shadow of the Sierras and had earned his law degree in San Francisco; he’d worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad before returning to his roots in the country. Not much crime happened in Madera County, but in 1923 Murray had sentenced a murderer to hang, a robber who shot and killed a traffic cop—a typically modern crime intruding into the California wilderness. Murray was fifty years old, solid and reliable, an outsider with no special interests to protect. Dave Clark could expect no mercy or favors from him.

Most of the trial’s first day, and the second, was consumed by jury selection, a ritual whose importance is often ignored but had been emphasized by Earl Rogers and was well appreciated by Clark. Each time, before issuing a challenge on a prospective juror—for instance, a man who’d been a fellow churchman of Charlie Crawford—the defense attorneys W. I. Gilbert and Leonard Wilson deferred to their client, huddling with him and paying heed to his shrewdness. Clark knew who he wanted on the jury. He wanted women, and in this first key battle he emerged victorious. Women outnumbered men on the final panel seven to five.

Trials are self-contained, and like novels and films, they have themes. People v. DeVoe had been, at heart, about class and envy. People v. David Harris Clark would be about not only the violent deaths that had happened in a Hollywood office, but a sexual atmosphere that crackled through the courtroom. “Decked out in pure white and capped with a tiny blue turban from which her golden hair peeped at the forehead and neck Mrs. Nancy Clark occupied a front seat as the trial got under way and with wide open eyes examined the jury as they filed into the box,” said the Times.

“Let me stand by my husband and you can have all the pictures you want,” Nancy told photographers.

Clark knew very well his wife’s effect; one way or another, she meant votes. He understood, too, that perhaps the central question confronting the jury would be this: Could a man as plausible, upright, and attractive as he knew himself to be really have committed cold-blooded murder? Dave Clark, so suave and athletic, had never underestimated his own best qualities, and he played them well.

Prosecutor Joseph Ford also knew how to milk a court. “Look out for Uncle Joe Ford,” warned Gilbert. “He’s a crafty old codger.” Ford would play for time when he needed it, by complaining about his false teeth. He walked slowly with a pained stoop. The horn-rimmed glasses that jutted from his narrow, creased face gave him a disconcerting stare. A Catholic, he had ten children, and in prosecuting Clark played the role of the stern father, saddened by the necessity of bringing to task a gifted young man whose derailed life had caused tragedy. At the front of the court Ford put up a blackboard, on which he pinned a detailed plan of the maze-like interior of 6665 Sunset Boulevard. Wielding a schoolroom pointer, he made his opening statement, speaking in a measured voice and pausing to dramatize certain moments as he ushered the jury through the events of May 20. “There were two shots fired in that conference room of Crawford’s office,” he said. “The first shot was fired to kill Crawford. The second shot was fired to kill Spencer, the only living witness to the first murder.” Ford waggled the pointer. “Then Clark came out, with his characteristically jaunty manner, buttoning up his coat.”

“Clark, lolling in his chair at counsel table, chuckled at this reference to his erect carriage and his military walk,” wrote Gene Coughlin for the
News
, though Clark may have been grinning with relief. Ford was pinning the prosecution’s case on placing Clark in Crawford’s office and proving that nobody else could have fired the shots. After weeks of investigation, the D.A.’s office had no real clue about Clark’s motive. Blayney Matthews and Leslie White had failed to pin down the mystery blonde, whether she’d been June Taylor or June Taylor’s pal. “Guy McAfee and his underworld associates brought down the shutters,” White wrote. “But that woman vanished as if she was part of a trick by Houdini. The department searched everywhere, to no avail. We were frustrated.”

Fitts and Ford still didn’t know why Clark had been in that room. Their case, even at this early stage, was looking incomplete.

“We will not be able to show you the revolver used by David H. Clark because the defendant has never produced the weapon,” said Ford, and Gilbert jumped to his feet with the court in uproar. “Well, anyway,” continued Ford above the hubbub, “we have never seen the revolver.”

Gilbert, when it was his turn, spoke to the jury: “If it should be proved that there were four men in that room and that two of them were dead and one on trial here and the other missing, then would you give the benefit of doubt to the defendant?” he asked, hinting at a possible tactic that would invoke the presence of an unknown assailant, a fourth man.

Next day, the trial’s third day, Clark suffered setbacks. First, Judge Murray rescinded the bail that Gilbert had managed to secure for Clark. This meant Clark would be once again committed to jail when court adjourned. Murray then denied a key motion from Gilbert, a strenuously argued attempt to force the state to try the two shootings simultaneously. A fight about this had been ongoing for all the weeks during which Clark had been maintaining his uncanny sphinx-like silence. As the trial began, Ford had no idea whether or not Clark would testify in his own defense. He had no inkling what Clark’s defense might be. Therefore he and Fitts had been pressing for two separate trials: the first for Spencer’s killing, the next for Crawford’s. Thus, in the second, they’d be armed with full knowledge of Clark’s story, should he be acquitted in the first.

The Dave Clark trial would happen very differently if held today. But California legal procedure still had one foot in frontier times, and this is how it played out back then. Judge Murray took the prosecution’s side, settling that Dave Clark would be tried for his life not once, but twice. For crafty Joe Ford, this was a big victory, and for Clark a crushing blow. On hearing the decision, Nancy Clark bowed her head and wept. The nightmare wouldn’t be over anytime soon.

The trial transcripts and newspaper reports give a sense of how drama heightened and tightened as the case progressed. Surgeons described the autopsies they’d conducted, telling in detail how the bullets had wrecked the bodies of the two men, killing both. It was a big moment, when the grisly reality hit the court. Then Leslie White was called to the stand. “I was forced to forget how much I liked the man,” White later wrote, confirming that for everybody in the D.A.’s office this was a strange situation. Some, like Fitts, responded with anger; but White felt bewildered and sad. He avoided Clark’s eyes, testifying about the crime scene photographs he’d taken, images that were then shown to the jury.

“And finally, the white, strained faces of the women bereaved gave a lasting touch of stark, aching tragedy to the picture,” wrote Gene Coughlin for the
News
, describing how first Frankie Spencer and then Ella Crawford took the stand, identifying their respective husbands from White’s pictures, and stating that both men had been unarmed on the day of their deaths.

Charlie Crawford had owned five guns, all duly laid out on the evidence table, but his widow Ella swore that he’d been carrying none of them.

“How do you know he wasn’t armed?” Ford asked.

“He hugged me when he left home,” Ella Crawford said. “He always did and if he’d been wearing a revolver I would have felt it.”

It was an emotional moment, and for Joseph Ford effective, introducing a gentle side of Charlie Crawford and the love he’d felt for his family. Frankie Spencer, though grief-stricken, came off sounding worldly and hardboiled. “I’ve had some pretty hard knocks boys,” she told reporters, “and I don’t want you to take my picture now that Herb is dead.” Frankie, it was clear, had full knowledge of the dangers of her husband’s professional and political involvements. Ella Crawford struck a different figure. “Widows reeds rustled through Judge Stanley Murray’s courtroom and swept all light informality from the case,” wrote the irrepressible Coughlin. “Last night the debonair defendant went to sleep with the full realization that he is on trial for MURDER.”

A prosecutor can take nothing for granted. A trial is supposed to start as if from nothing, in terms of the information given the jury about the alleged crime. Big cases, of course, can’t work that way because of media coverage; but that’s the theory. Ford had to show that two men had died, describe who those men were, and establish how they died, and when and where they died. After four days he’d done all that, and his focus began to narrow. He sought to show that Dave Clark had been with them in that small inner office. In his testimony George Crawford put Clark at 6665 Sunset Boulevard. Lucille Fisher, decked out with all the care and glamor that Clara Bow had brought to her courtroom appearances, did the same. Fisher wore a low-cut, short-sleeved suit with soft gauntlet gloves that stretched up her bare arms. She was “blond and willowy, Crawford’s voluptuous private secretary and human repository for the political and underworld secrets of the ‘Lone Gray Wolf,’” wrote Coughlin, smacking his chops. Fisher’s lips were rouged, her hair freshly done, but her nerves showed. She flubbed her lines at first but finally put Clark in the office, alone with Crawford and Spencer up to the moment the shots were fired.

Then it was Mildred Rohrback’s turn; she, too, was a wow. “Dressed in a two-piece sports dress of rose crepe, trimmed with beige and with a bolero jacket that matched her dress, the witness was a cynosure of all eyes as she took the stand, her testimony having been anticipated as a high spot in the trial,” wrote the Times.

Rohrback said: “I heard two shots and then a man groaned. I ran to the front porch and the first thing I noticed was blood spots. Then I noticed a man walking along the path that leads from Mr. Crawford’s office.”

“Did you get a good opportunity to look at him?” asked Ford.

“He was tall and dark, but his face was pale and calm.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“He’s sitting right there,” Rohrback said, pointing at Clark while the court gasped. “It was the defendant.”

She described how she’d gone back into Crawford’s office, and had seen Crawford, bleeding, on the floor but leaning back against his chair, sprawled and semi-conscious, with a cigar still clutched between two fingers of his right hand.

None of this was good for Clark, though Gilbert had successfully filibustered so that Rohrback’s persuasive testimony was delivered first thing one morning rather than at the conclusion of the previous day, as Ford had hoped. Then it would have had maximum effect, giving the jury a chance to sleep on what she’d said. Such nuances, Gilbert knew from experience, might prove decisive.

Ford called Leslie White to the stand once more. This time White testified about ballistics, another area of his expertise. He told the court that the bullet shot at Crawford had passed straight through his body. White himself had dug out the bullet from the splintered plaster of a wall at 6665 Sunset Boulevard. On the bullet were traces of a special kind of grease used by Colt, indicating that it had been the first fired from a brand new revolver. Attached to the bullet, when it came out of the wall, had been a small piece of fabric, part of Crawford’s shirt. Ford introduced the rest of the shirt as evidence, giving it to the jury to handle.

White was no more comfortable than he’d been before. He didn’t like Ford’s melodramatic stunt with the shirt, and stole a glance in Dave Clark’s direction. “Dave was expressionless, calm and cool,” he wrote. “He’d always been difficult to read. In court, at that moment, he was brave, and even harder to understand. Was he guilty? I wanted him to be innocent, but I didn’t know. I couldn’t help but remember the times when I’d seen him as a prosecutor, hectoring and working a defendant. Now Joe Ford did the same to him.”