Uncle John’s True Crime (16 page)

When he saw the kids throwing toilet paper in his yard, he jumped in his patrol vehicle and chased them with lights flashing and sirens blaring. When they finally stopped, he ordered the sophomores out of their truck
and held them at gunpoint until police arrived...and arrested
him
. A sobriety test showed that Petersen had a blood alcohol level of 0.22%, twice the legal limit. He was charged with drunk driving, 10 counts of assault with a weapon, and two counts of simple assault. If convicted on all counts, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $50,000 fine.

“Caught redhanded”—having blood on your hands—is a Scottish legal term that dates to 1432
.

“He deserves what he gets,” said one of the kids involved. “It’s kind of stupid that he’s an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, and he was doing two of the things he’s trying to prevent.”

Honoree:
Catherine Tarver, the mother of an accused murderer

Dubious Achievement:
Using a public restroom to influence the outcome of a trial

True Story:
In May 2003, Judge Walter McMillan ordered that Tarver be barred from Georgia’s Washington County Courthouse. Reason: A courthouse employee saw Tarver cracking open eggs and sprinkling chicken feathers, chicken blood, and what has been described as “voodoo powder” in the restroom. So Judge McMillan imposed a ban, telling her, “If I find any more eggs in this courthouse, you will face criminal charges.”

Sheriff Thomas Smith speculates that Tarver was trying to influence the outcome of the trial. “I think it’s a curse against the prosecution,” he told reporters. “There’s been four incidents of it in the courthouse bathroom where brown eggs have been busted. It always happened on the day of Brandon Tarver’s hearings.”

Tarver denies using voodoo. “I don’t even know what that is,” she claims.

Honoree:
Dr. Michael Warren, a South Carolina dermatologist

Dubious Achievement:
Turning his bathroom into an ICU—a peekaboo ICU

True Story:
When the staff restroom went out of order in 2002, Dr. Warren cheerfully allowed female employees to use his private restroom. But when months went by without Dr. Warren making an attempt to get the restroom fixed, his staff became suspicious. That’s when they found a hidden camera in the doctor’s bathroom. Dr. Warren admits that he installed the camera but claims that he did so “as a security measure, after cash and checks were stolen from his office.” (No word on what a thief would steal from the doctor’s bathroom.)

In WWII, US troops in Sicily thought jailed Mafiosi were political prisoners and freed them. (Oops.)

Every cultural legend has to start someplace, even if it’s from just a kernel of truth, expanded and embellished until it bears no resemblance to the original. Here’s the possible origin of Zorro, the “bold renegade” who “carved a Z with his blade.”

B
ACKGROUND

Pulp fiction writer Johnston McCulley created the swashbuckling character Zorro for a tale called “The Curse of Capistrano” that appeared in
All-Story Weekly
magazine in 1919. Literary historians believe McCulley based him on a number of characters, most of them fictional...and at least one real human being. It turns out that the story of the real man’s life was just as unusual—and probably every bit as embellished—as Zorro’s.

THE MAN

Not long after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, a young Mexican man named Joaquin Murrieta came to California with his wife, Rosa Feliz, and her brothers Claudio, Reyes, and Jesus. They hoped to strike it rich in the gold fields, but none of them did; the closest any of them got was when Claudio was arrested for stealing another miner’s gold.

In 1850 Claudio escaped from jail and led his brothers and Murrieta in what became one of the most violent bandit gangs ever to terrorize the California gold country. The group was known to raid isolated ranches, but they preferred to rob lone travelers and Chinese miners (they thought the Chinese were less likely to be armed than whites or Mexicans). The gang murdered most of its victims after robbing them, to ensure that there were no witnesses.

The law began to catch up with the gang in September 1851, when Claudio was killed in a shootout following a robbery in Monterey County. Murrieta happened to be in Los Angeles at the time, and when Claudio died he assumed control of the gang. Not long afterward the bandits made the mistake of killing Joshua Bean, a major general in the militia. Murrieta then compounded the error by abandoning Reyes to his fate—Reyes was arrested for Bean’s murder and hanged.

Outlaw “Ma” Barker’s real name was Arizona Clark
.

THE END

Jesus, the youngest of the Feliz brothers, apparently never forgave Murrieta for Reyes’s death, because when the posse of state rangers caught up with him he willingly gave them the location of Murrieta’s hideout. On July 25, 1853, Murrieta died in a gun battle not far from where Interstate 5 now intersects Highway 33 outside of Coalinga, California. After Murrieta died, Jesus gave up his life of crime, moved to Bakersfield, and started a family. He lived to a ripe old age and died in 1910.

Murrieta was not as lucky. After he died in the shootout, the posse cut off his head and preserved it in a giant glass jar filled with brandy—there was a bounty on his head (so to speak), and in the days before fingerprinting and DNA evidence, posses had to be a little more creative in documenting that they’d gotten their man.

Murrieta’s brandied head made the rounds of the “$1-a-peek, crime-doesn’t-pay” lecture circuit for a few years; then it ended up as a feature attraction behind the bar of San Francisco’s Golden Nugget Saloon, where for the price of a drink you could sit at the bar and stare at the head for as long as you could stand the sight of it staring back at you. The head was still floating there in its jar on the morning of April 18, 1906, when it, the jar, and the saloon were all destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire.

THE LEGEND BEGINS

By then Murrieta’s image had already been completely remade into a Robin Hood-like figure who robbed from the rich, killed them, and gave to the poor. (His infamy as a killer was so well-established that a complete whitewash would not have been believable.) The makeover had begun less than a year after his death, when a newspaperman named John Rollin Ridge wrote
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit
. Ridge himself was on the lam for a murder he’d committed in Arkansas, which must have given him sympathy for his subject. He painted a picture of Murrieta as a good man at heart who embarked on his life of crime only after seeing his brother lynched and his wife gang-raped by a band of vicious gringos. Murrieta then got his revenge by killing every white man he met until he was finally hunted down and killed by a drunken, sadistic ranger who was only in it for a $5,000 bounty.

Amount of money that Patricia Cornwell spent analyzing evidence for her book
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed
: $6 million
.

Ridge’s book sold so well that five years later the
California Police Gazette
published an even more exaggerated version of the tale. That in turn led to new versions being published in France, Spain, and Chile, where a statue was erected in honor of Murrieta, who—in that version of the story, at least—was a native of Chile. These fictionalized accounts of Murrieta’s life gained even more credibility when a historian named Herbert Howe Bancroft fell for them and passed them along uncritically in one of his volumes on the American West. Now that a prominent historian had signed off on them as true, the tales were accepted as unvarnished fact by just about everyone. Joaquin Murrieta became a folk hero, one whose fame continues to this day. He has been the subject of a play by the Nobel Prize-winning author Pablo Neruda, and in 1976 he even became the inspiration for the Soviet Union’s first-ever rock opera,
The Star and Death of Joaquin Murietta, a Chilean Bandit Foully Murdered in California on 25 July 1853
.

HEAD COUNT

So was Joaquin Murrieta ever really captured and killed? Was that really his head floating in the jar behind the bar in the Golden Nugget Saloon? Even that detail has been called into question. According to one version of the story, the posse on Murrieta’s trail had only 90 days to catch the bandit and collect the reward. When the time was nearly up and they still hadn’t captured their man, the party murdered the first Mexican they came upon and put
his
head in the jar so that they could claim the reward. “It is well known that Joaquin Murrieta was not the person killed,” the editor of the San Francisco newspaper
Alta
wrote in August 1853. “The head recently exhibited in Stockton bears no resemblance to that individual, and this is positively asserted by those who have seen the real Murrieta and the spurious head.”

EPILOGUE: Z MARKS THE SPOT

Seventy-five years after Murietta’s death, writer Johnston McCulley was working as a crime reporter for the
Police Gazette
. After World War I, he switched to pulp-fiction writing. An amateur history buff, he based many of his stories in old California, and was undoubtedly familiar with the legend of Murrieta. But in addition to Joaquin Murrieta, McCulley is believed to have drawn inspiration from
The Count of Monte Cristo
, by Alexandre Dumas (1844–45), and
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, by Baroness
Orczy (1905), both of which feature wealthy gentlemen who don disguises to fight evil.

McCulley created dozens of characters over the course of his career, and as was the case with so many of the others it is doubtful that he intended for Zorro to be more than a just one-story character. That all changed when United Artists, the film studio founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith, decided to base their first film, , on “The Curse of Capistrano
The Mark of Zorro
(1920)
.”
Why mess with success? McCulley happily went on to write more than 60 stories featuring Zorro, the most popular character he’d ever create.

Zorro, in turn, was one of the major inspirations for another character: Batman, who appeared in comics beginning in 1939. In the original version of the Batman story, Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered after leaving a movie theater. The movie they’d just seen:
The Mark of Zorro
.

*
*
*

“A caller reported that someone was on a porch yelling ‘Help!’ from a residence on Bank Street. Officers responded and learned the person was calling a cat named ‘Help.’”

“Dispatch received a report of a chicken pot pie running east on Main Street.”

“Suspicious people were reportedly doing something with flashlights by the side of North 5th Street. A deputy checked and found the people were not suspicious, but merely Canadian.”

“The Learning Center on Hanson Street reported a man across the way standing at his window for hours watching the center, making parents nervous. Police identified the subject as a cardboard cutout of Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

“Two students of unspecified gender told police they were assaulted in some way on their way home from an unspecified number of assailants, perhaps sustaining unspecified injuries or none at all, police didn’t say.”

The Kalashnikov AK-47 (and variants of it) has been used in more than 75 wars
.

From our Dustbin of History files: Here’s a true story of danger, seduction, betrayal, and a deadly escape
.

THE SETTING

Allegheny County Jail, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1901

THE CAST

Katherine Soffel

The warden’s beautiful wife

Ed Biddle

Famous outlaw

Jack Biddle

Ed’s accomplice and younger brother

Peter Soffel

The prison warden

P
ROLOGUE

Jack and Ed were “the Biddle Boys,” leaders of a gang of small-time outlaws who relied more on brains than brawn to carry out their nefarious crimes. Sometimes they used chloroform to render their potential victims unconscious; sometimes they used beautiful women as distractions. They carried guns, too...just in case.

On April 12, 1901, the gang was robbing a house next to a small grocery store in Mt. Washington, Pennsylvania. A female accomplice kept the grocer occupied while the boys searched the adjoining house, looking for a pile of cash. The distraction didn’t work, though—the grocer heard a noise and went to investigate. A struggle ensued, shots were fired, and the grocer ended up dead on his living-room floor. The Biddle brothers fled the scene and holed up in a safehouse, but the police soon caught up with them. After a violent shootout, the outlaws were arrested, but not before a policeman was killed. The trial was quick and the sentence severe: the Biddle Boys were to be hanged for their crimes on February 25, 1902.

SECRET LOVE AFFAIR

Peter and Katherine Soffel were in the midst of a divorce when the Biddles arrived at the Allegheny County Jail. Katherine, who had previously spent time in an asylum, showed no interest in her husband. Instead, she
spent most of her time visiting the prisoners, offering them spiritual advice and bringing them Bibles. For the inmates, Katherine Soffel was a welcome sight. They called her “Queen of the Jail.”

The first law on record, about 2100 B.C., was made to ban witchcraft
.

She first went to see the Biddles out of curiosity; their exploits throughout the Midwest had made them somewhat notorious. Ed’s charm and good looks soon won her over, though. She became infatuated and visited him more and more often, at least 25 times over the next few months, sneaking him food and books. The warden knew his wife had taken an interest in the outlaw but must not have realized just how keen an interest. He allowed her to keep visiting.