L.A. Confidential Part 36
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was in love with rape victim Inez Soto.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley located, shot and killed Raymond Coates, Tyrone Jones and Leroy Fontaine, with--poetic justice--a shotgun.
Item: Sergeant Ed Exley was promoted (two whole ranks!!!) to captain a week later, a large reward for his justice-by-the-sword resolution of a case the LAPD needed to solve quicksville in order to ensure perpetuation of its (overblown?) reputation.
Item: _Captain_ Ed Exley (a rich kid with a substantial private trust fund left to him by his late mother) soon became very cozy with Inez Soto and bought her a house down the block from his apartment.
Item: we at _Whisper_ have it on very good authority that Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine, Tyrone Jones and the man who was sheltering them--Roland Navarette--were unarmed when hero Ed Exley gunned them down . . . and, now, nearly five years since the Nite Owl killings, the plot thickens again .
Now, _Whisper_ is the underdog of what the squaresyule press calls "Scandal Sheet Journalism." We're not the mighty _Hush-Hush_, we're based out of New York and our beat is primarily the East Coast. But we do have our L.A. sources, and among them is a crusading private eye who wishes to remain anonymous. This man has been obsessed with the Nite Owl case for years, has investigated it extensively and has come up with some startling revelations. This man, whom we shall call "Private Eye X," spoke to _Whisper_ correspondents and revealed the following: Private Eye eye-tem: during the Nite Owl investigation, two brothers, _Peter and Baxter Englekling_, printshop operators from San Bernardino, California, came forth and told authorities an account of how _Nite Owl victim Delbert "Duke" Cathcart_ approached them with a plan to print p.o.r.nographic material, then theorized that the Nite Owl killings were the result of intrigue within the p.o.r.nography underworld. The LAPD poohpoohed the brothers' theory in their haste to pin the crime on the Negroes, and now the Engleklings seem to have disappeared off the face of the globe .
Private Eye eye-tem: Mrs. Hilda Lefferts, mother of San Bernardino born and bred _Nite Owl victim Susan Nancy Lefferts_, told Private Eye X that immediately before the killings her daughter had a mysterious, unnamed boyfriend who greatly resembled Duke Cathcart, and she even heard him tell Susan Nancy: "Call me 'Duke.' Get used to the idea."!!! Mrs. Lefferts could not identifyr the man from privately h.o.a.rded mugshots that Private Eye X showed her. X then developed what we consider an x-cellent and x-citing theory!
X theory eye-tem: we think that mystery boyfriend X killed Duke Cathcart in an attempt to take over his p.o.r.nography business, impersonated Duke Cathcart and wound up at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop to do biz with the three men who perpetrated the slaughter. Susan Nancy sat nearby in order to watch her boyfriend wheel and deal. Private Eye X offers the following unimpeachable evidence as proof: Mrs. Lefferts said boyfriend X looked just like Duke Cathcart.
The body identified as Cathcart's was too decimated to correctly ID. The coroner's final identification was based on a _partial_ dental plate reconstruction crosschecked against Cathcart's prison dental records--yet other prison records listed Cathcart's height at 5'8", while the body discovered at the Nite Owl was 5' 9". All in all, unmistakable proof that an impersonator, not Duke Cathcart, was killed at the Nite Owl Coffee Shop . .
X-citing x-trapolations that we believe will lead to some x-tremely interesting revelations, x-asperate the trigger-happy Los Angeles Police Department and perhaps x-onerate the three Negroes falsely accused of the Nite Owl killings. We at _Whisper_ urge the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to x-hume the bodies of the Nite Owl victims; we x-coriate Captain Ed Exley for his cold-blooded murder of four societal victims and x-pressly pet.i.tion the LAPD: redeem your old wrongs in the name of justice! Reopen the Nite Owl case!!!
EXTRACT: San Francisco _Chronicle_, February 27:
GAITSVILLE SLAYINGS BAFFLE POLICE
Gaitsville, Calif., Feb. 27, 1958--A bizarre double murder has the citizens of Gaitsville, a small town sixty miles north of San Francisco, scared--and the Mann County Sheriff's baffled.
Two days ago, the bodies of Peter and Barter Englekling, 41 and 37, were discovered at their apartment next door to the printshop where they were employed as typesetters. The two brothers, in the words of Mann County Sheriff's Lieutenant Eugene Hatcher, were "shady characters with criminal connections." The lieutenant guardedly elaborated to Chronicle reporter George Woods.
"Both Engleklings had criminal records for narcotics offenses," Lieutenant Hatcher said. "Granted, they've been clean for a number of years, but they were still shady characters. For instance, they were working at the printing shop under a.s.sumed names. So far we have no clues, but we do think we're dealing with a torturefor-information scenario."
The Englekling brothers worked at Rapid Bob's Printing on East Verdugo Road in Gaitsville and lived in the apartment building next door. Their employer, Robert Dunkquist, 53, knew the pair as Pete and Bar Girard, and discovered their bodies on Tuesday morning. "Pete and Bar had worked for me for a year and they were as regular as clockwork. When they were late for work on Tuesday I knew something was up. Also, the shop had been ransacked and I wanted them to help me find the culprits."
The Englekling brothers, whose true ident.i.ties were revealed by a fingerprint teletype check, were shot to death, and Lieutenant Hatcher is certain the killer used a .38 revolver equipped with a silencer. "Our baffistics man found iron shavings embedded in the rounds we took out of the victims. This indicates a silencer and also indicates why the neighbors never reported any shots."
Lieutenant Hatcher would not reveal the status of his investigation, but he did state that all the standard investigatory approaches are being utilized. He stated that both victims were tortured prior to being shot, but would not describe the crime scene. "We want to keep that knowledge private," he said. "Sometimes publicityseeking lunatics confess to crimes like this, even though they didn't commit them. Keeping your facts private helps eliminate the guilty from the innocent."
Peter and Barter Englekling have no known living relatives, and their bodies are being held at the Gaitsville city coroner's office. Lieutenant Hatcher urged all parties who might have information concerning the homicides to contact the Mann County Sheriff's Department.
EXTRACT: San Francisco _Examiner_, March 1:
MURDER VICTIMS LINKED TO CELEBRATED LOS ANGELES CRIME
Peter and Barter Englekling, murder victims killed in Gaitsville, California, on February 25, were material wimesses in the famous Nite Owl murder case that occurred in Los Angeles in April 1953, Mann County Sheriff's Lieutenant Eugene Hatcher revealed today.
"We got an anonymous tip on it yesterday," Lieutenant Hatcher told the _Examiner_. "A man just called in the information, then hung up. We verified it with the D.A.'s Bureau down in L.A., and they said it was true. I don't think it has anything to do with our case, but I called the Los Angeles Police Department anyway and ran it by them. They gave me the brush-off, so I say the heck with them."
EXTRACT: L.A. _Daily News_, March 6:
NITE OWL REDIVIVUS--SHOCKING NEW REVELATIONS POINT TO INNOCENT MEN KILLED
This is an ugly story. The _Daily News_, frankly Los Angeles' only expose-oriented newspaper and the only Southland paper proud to call itself "muckraking," does not shy away from such stories. This story punctures the hero image of a man considered by many to be a perfect exemplar of law-and-order righteousness, and when heroes possess feet of clay, we at the _Daily News_ believe that it is our duty to expose their shortcomings to public scrutiny. The issues here are great, as notable as the crime that sp.a.w.ned them, so we are frankly sending up a muckraking hue and cry. That hue and cry: the infamous Nite Owl murder case--six people brutally robbed and shotgunned to death at a Hollywood coffee shop in April 1953--was solved incorrectly, at a great cost to justice. We want to see the case reopened and true justice achieved.
Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine and Tyrone Jones--do you recall those names? They were the three Negro youths, criminals and s.e.x offenders to be sure, who were railroaded by the Los Angeles Police Department. Arrested shortly after the Nite Owl murders, they offered a heffish alibi: they could not have committed the killings because they were engaged in the kidnap and gang rape of a young woman named Inez Soto. They abused Miss Soto at a deserted building in South Los Angeles, then confessed that they drove her around and "sold her out" to their friends for more s.e.xual abuse. They left Miss Soto with a man named Sylvester Fitch, and an LAPD officer shot and killed him while effecting the brave young woman's escape.
Miss Soto refused to cooperate with the police investigation, which at the time centered on the imperative of establishing where Coates, Jones and Fontaine were at the time of the Nite Owl killings. Were they with her and the other alleged rapists (none of whom, besides Fitch, were ever identified)? Did they have time to drive from South Los Angeles to Hollywood, commit the Nite Owl killings, then return to heap more abuse upon her? Was she conscious throughout the total sum of her degradation?
Unanswered questions--until now.
The police investigation spread into two forks: searching for evidence to corroborate Jones, Coates and Fontaine as the killers; searching for general evidence, standard police work based on the supposition that the three youths were guilty only of kidnap and rape, but not murder. Miss Soto still refused to cooperate. Both investigatory forks proved moot when Coates, Jones and Fontaine escaped from jail and were gunned down by our aforementioned hero: LAPD Sergeant Edmund Exley.
College man, World War II hero, son of the ill.u.s.trious Preston Exley, Ed Exley used the Nite Owl case as a springboard for his ruthless personal ambition. He was promoted to captain at age 31 and as of this writing will soon become an inspector--at 36, the youngest in LAPD history. He is mentioned as a potential Republican office-seeker almost as often as his construction-king father. A few persistent rumors surround him: that the men killed were unarmed, that D.A. Ellis Loew dreamed up the Nite Owl confession that Coates, Jones and Fontaine allegedly made before they escaped. What is not generally known is that Ed Exley was in love with Inez Soto and condoned her lack of cooperation during the investigation, later bought her a house and has been intimately involved with her for close to five years.
And now, two recent developments have blown the Nite Owl case wide open.
Back in 1953, two men, brothers, came forward as material wimesses with information on the Nite Owl killings. Those men, Peter and Baxter Englekling, a.s.serted that a p.o.r.nography plot was at the base of the coffee shop ma.s.sacre, per a scheme devised by one of the victims: ex-convict Delbert "Duke" Cathcart. The LAPD chose to ignore this information. Then, almost five years later, Peter and Baxter Englekling were viciously murdered in the small upstate town of Gaitsville. Those kiffings, which took place on February 25, are unsolved with a complete absence of clues. But a long-unanswered question was about to be answered.
At San Quentin Penitentiary, a Negro prisoner named Otis John Shot-tell read a San Francisco newspaper account of the Englekling brothers' killings, an account which mentioned their tenuous connection to the Nite Owl case. The article got Otis John Shortell thinking. He requested an audience with the a.s.sistant warden and made a startling confession.
Otis John Shortell, in prison on an acc.u.mulation of grand-theft auto convictions and franldy desiring a sentence reduction as a reward for his cooperation, confessed that he was one of the men Coates, Fontaine and Jones "sold" Inez Soto to. He was with Miss Soto and the three youths between the hours of 2:30 and 5:00 on the morning of the Nite Owl killings, _during the entire murder time frame_. He told the warden that he never came forward to exonerate the three for fear of rape charges being filed against him. He further stated that Coates had a large quant.i.ty of narcotics in his car and that that was the reason he never relinquished its location to the police. Shortell cited a recent conversion to Pentecostal Christianity as his reason for finally making his confession, but prison authorities were dubious. Shortell pet.i.tioned for an in-cell lie detector test to prove his veracity and was given a total of four polygraph examinations. He pa.s.sed all four tests conclusively. Shortell's attorney, Morris Waxman, has sent notarized copies of the polygraph examiner's reports to the _Daily News_ and the LAPD. We have advanced this article. What will the LAPD do?
We decry the injustice of shotgun justice. We decry the motives of triggerman Ed Exley. We openly challenge the Los Angeles Police Department to reopen the Nite Owl Murder Case.
EXTRACT: L.A. _Times_, March 11:
NITE OWL HUE AND CRY BUILDING
A welter of unrelated events and a fire fanned by a series of articles in the Los Angeles _Daily News_ are pressuring the Los Angeles Police Department to reopen the 1953 Nite Owl murder case investigation.
LAPD Chief William H. Parker called the controversy "a powder keg with a wet fuse. It's all a bunch of baloney. The testimony of a degenerate criminal and an unrelated double murder do not const.i.tute a reason to reopen a case successfully solved five years ago. I stood by Captain Ed Exley's actions in 1953 and I stand by them now."
Chief Parker's references allude to the February 25 murders of Peter and Baxter Englekling, material witnesses to the original Nite Owl investigation, and the recent testimony of San Quentin inmate Otis John Shortell, who claimed to be with the three formerly accused killers during the time frame of the Nite Owl murders. Citing Shot-tell's in-prison lie detector tests, his attorney Morris Waxman stated, "Polygraphs don't lie. Otis is a religious man who carries a great burden of guilt for not coming forth to exonerate innocent men five years ago, and now he wants to see justice done. He has given three dead victims a lie detector validated alibi and now he wants to see the real killers punished. I will not cease publicizing this matter until the LAPD agrees to do their duty and reopen the case."
Richard Tunstell, city editor of the Los Angeles _Daily News_, echoed that sentiment. "We've got our teeth sunk into something important. We're not going to let go."
BANNERS
L.A. _Daily News_, March 14:
J'ACCUSE--LAPD IN NITE OWL COVER-UP
L.A. _Daily News_, March 15:
OPEN LETTER TO TRIGGERMAN EXLEY
L.A. _Times_, March 16:
CONVICT'S LAWYER PEt.i.tIONS STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR NITE OWL CASE REOPENING
L.A. _Herald-Express_, March 17:
PARKER TO THE PRESS: NITE OWL A DEAD ISSUE
L.A. _Daily News_, March 19:
CITIZENS DEMAND JUSTICE--PICKETS STALK THE LAPD