by Tom Nolan
The meeting lasted ninety minutes. Millar insisted the chancellor approve a statement saying the university didn’t hold Linda responsible and wouldn’t punish her. The chancellor agreed to this—once Millar assured him that Linda wouldn’t be returning to Davis as a student. Millar handwrote the school’s “press release” himself: “Linda is not a runaway from college as we thought at first, and she will be welcomed back to the university without disciplinary action. Having knowledge of her medical condition, we are deeply concerned for her safety and anxious to have any word of her.” Later Millar had Pearce pen a detailed account of the meeting. “He was really considering suing the University of California for gross negligence,” Pearce said. “Oh, he was beside himself, beside himself. I remember him saying to me in low, tense, slow, enraged tones, ‘If Linda ends up bumped off, I will shake this university to its foundations.’ ”
Armed with his press release, Millar went to work getting coverage of the disappearance. He gave interviews on Sunday to half a dozen print reporters, including wire service reps. On Monday the story broke. The case of the missing coed made front-page headlines from Sacramento to Hollywood. Even New York papers picked it up: “Mystery Writer’s Toughest Case—Daughter Vanishes.”
Linda was described as a vulnerable, guilt-haunted girl who’d panicked when she didn’t get back on time. Millar told of the accident and his daughter’s emotional state; many stories quoted her Sacramento psychiatrist. All papers published a ghostly head shot of Linda in which she seemed to stare blankly into the uncertain future: She is 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighs 135 pounds, has medium length brown hair with an artificial reddish tinge and has dark hazel eyes. When last seen she was wearing a black sweater and black skirt and high-heeled, light-colored, plastic shoes and was carrying a white basket-type purse.
More information came in about Linda’s actions on Saturday night and Sunday morning. A Sacramento man who’d known Linda at Davis telephoned Lieutenant Gorman and told of being with her from 1 A.M. until 3 A.M. in a casino and then at a motel party. She was drinking heavily, angry at the men who’d brought her to Stateline, and asked this fellow to drive her to Davis; when he said no, she asked if he’d take her to Wyoming. When he said no again, she left to find some cowboys she’d seen at a gambling table; maybe they’d take her to Wyoming.
Another call tipped Gorman to the Sun and Sands Motel in Tahoe, where an employee described a girl fitting Linda’s description being with a party of three Salt Lake City insurance men until checkout time Sunday. The girl placed three phone calls from their room, including one to the Matson steamship line in San Francisco. Linda’s panicky urge to flee must have been escalating.
Millar theorized scenarios: she may have tried to hitchhike to Davis on Highway 50 or gotten on a free bus returning casino customers to the Bay Area. “She could be anyplace in the United States,” he told a reporter, “if she is still alive.”
The newspaper stories and photograph caused a deluge of calls to the Woodland sheriff’s office on Monday, June 8. People all over the country claimed to have seen Linda Millar. Many were cranks, but Monday afternoon, with Millar there, a Teletype message came into Gorman’s office from the Hollywood LAPD that looked like a real break. An employee at the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street claimed to have cashed a ten-dollar check for Linda on Friday. It was the first indication in nine days she was alive. Millar wept.
There were problems with this story: supposedly Linda showed a UCLA ID and a California driver’s license; Millar thought he’d destroyed her license under court order. But this was their only lead, and Millar would follow it. He made several calls: to a Sacramento lawyer, arranging to cover any and all checks Linda wrote; to friends in Santa Barbara, for help in LA; to an airline and to a Hollywood hotel. “You know,” he told Slayman of the Woodland paper (who wrote that Millar was “obviously fatigued by the more than five days and nights of personal investigation”), “there haven’t been many pleasant things about this past week, but I’ll never forget the sincere concern and help of so many strangers.” He especially praised Gorman.
Before leaving Woodland, Millar drafted an impassioned message to Linda, which was printed and broadcast throughout California and Nevada on Tuesday:
Come home, dear, if you read this. You have nothing to fear from anybody. Everybody involved in this just wants to see you safe. The situation was misunderstood at first. But now the various authorities, college and otherwise, recognize that your apparent runaway was due to circumstances beyond your control. I cried with joy and relief when I learned you are alive. You’re the person we love most. Did you ever doubt it? You’re afraid; you must be afraid, or you’d have come home long since. Believe me, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We need your help, too. The best help you could give would be to call me at the Knickerbocker Hotel, or call Maggie at home. Faith can move mountains, you know, but most of the mountains you may feel you have to climb alone are mole hills under a magnifying glass and you’re not going to have to climb them alone. I am one hundred per cent for you and I wouldn’t trade you for any other daughter in the world.
Millar took a 7:10 P.M. Convair flight from Sacramento to Burbank, then a cab to the police station in Hollywood where Dick and Betty Lid waited. Lid had driven the Millars’ black Ford convertible from Santa Barbara, with Betty following in the Lids’ white Chevrolet. “I had to teach the next day,” Lid said. “We spent a few hours with him at the police station, staying as late as we could. I talked with the detectives a bit, although Betty and I hadn’t even met Linda.” Millar gave the police names of Southland acquaintances his daughter might contact, and the cops told him which Hollywood clubs drew young people: Cosmo Alley, the Lamp, Sancho Panza, Pandora’s Box (that one jumped out at him).
Millar stayed at the Hollywood Knickerbocker, one of the hotels Maggie’d lived in when she worked at Warners. Al Stump found him pacing the floor there when Stump showed up with two hundred dollars Millar had asked him to bring: “He was almost out of his mind, because people kept phoning and saying they’d seen Linda.” The check-cashing tale, Millar’s open letter to Linda, and his flight to LA kept “the mystery of the mystery writer’s daughter” statewide front-page news on Tuesday: “Missing Coed in LA,” “Hunted Girl in Hollywood,” “Dad’s Plea to Missing Girl.” The story was on every TV and radio news broadcast in southern California.
Hundreds of alleged sightings were reported all over LA. A bartender in a saloon on Western thought Linda Millar had been a weekend customer. Workers in a Santa Monica appliance store said they’d consoled a depressed young woman who looked like Linda. Someone at a Thrifty’s on North Vermont recalled a patron who might have been the Millar girl. Five staff members at the Santa Monica YWCA insisted she’d registered there under another name; Millar saw the application card and said it wasn’t her writing. “There were a lot of disappointments like that,” Stump said. “It was agonizing for Ken.”
Millar had gone a week without sleep. The Hollywood Citizen-News published an alarming front-page photo of him: unshaven, heavy-lidded, and ashen-faced, he looked near death. Still he pushed himself: coordinating with Hollywood police, consulting by phone with lawyer Jerry Geisler (who’d defended Lana Turner’s teenaged daughter for stabbing hoodlum Johnny Stompanato) about suing the LA Mirror for libel, giving more interviews. “I’m afraid she is trying to sink out of sight,” he told one reporter, “after a long, mounting emotional crisis in which she was not given assistance by anyone, probably including myself.”
Officers searched the Southland “from Santa Monica to Torrance” for Linda Millar, but the best lead remained the Vine Street check-cashing that had swung the search from Stateline to Hollywood. That market photographed all check customers. The Citizen-News arranged to examine a huge roll of film showing four thousand patrons. Millar and Stump waited while it was scrutinized. Linda wasn’t on it. The lead was false. There was no reason now to believe Linda had ever been in Hollywood—or was even ali
ve.
Stump stayed by the Knickerbocker telephone Tuesday afternoon while a devastated Millar went to TV station KTLA for one last attempt at reaching his daughter. Granting an LAPD request, Channel 5 was interrupting its regular programming (“Skipper Frank” ’s 4 P.M. cartoon show) for an appeal to be carried by special hookup over several California stations. After a brief introduction, Millar pleaded for Linda’s return.
When he came off camera, he was handed a message: telephone Mr. Stump at the Knickerbocker immediately. From there, Stump gave him an urgent instruction: call Maggie at home right away. Millar was put through to Santa Barbara, where Margaret and her sister had been taking turns keeping vigil by the telephone. A near-hysterical Maggie spoke with Ken. Millar scrawled on the back of a Channel 5 logsheet:
The Stag—a bar
Reno, Nevada
FA 39665
wants to come home
As he told it later, Millar reached Armand Girola and gave him the location, then phoned the Reno bar and talked to Linda until the Girolas got to her.
His relief was enormous, but the crisis wasn’t over. Earlier this day the Santa Barbara judge, because of Linda’s supposed presence in LA, ordered a bench warrant for her arrest—“for Linda’s own protection,” he insisted; it didn’t mean she’d be punished for violating parole. Millar didn’t buy that. There was a warrant out for Linda; if police found her, she’d be arrested. He wanted his daughter in a doctor’s care, not a jail cell.
Millar made plans with the Girolas, then enlisted Stump’s aid. He’d leave his Ford with Stump and sneak on a flight to Santa Barbara. If asked, Stump would say Millar went home for a family emergency.
Exiting the hotel room on his way out of town, Millar was surprised by a TV film crew. “They were standing in the corridor outside,” Stump said, “waiting to grab some footage as soon as he opened the door; that’s how they did it back then. Ken got a flash look at them, and he went out that door like a tiger; I’ve never seen anyone move so fast. He took this guy by the crotch and the front of the shirt and threw him down the hall, sent him crashing into all his equipment.” LA papers did what they could with Millar’s sudden departure (“Mystery Writer Disappears, Adds to Confusion Over Missing Girl”), but his secret held.
Linda spent a restless Tuesday night at the Girolas’ Reno home while her father flew to Santa Barbara and stayed out of sight. Five-thirty Wednesday morning Millar called Dick Lid from a pay phone on a street corner not far from Lid’s house in the San Roque area and asked if he’d drive him to pick up Linda.
“The answer of course is yes,” Lid recalled. “I pick him up on upper State Street—I don’t even know how he got there—and off we go in the Chevy. Ken was very very scared that the Highway Patrol would discover Linda in Nevada, or even in California, before we could return to Santa Barbara where there was a friendly probation officer to help her, and that she’d be incarcerated. I think that was the reason for the secrecy; it was as if I was being sworn not to reveal the event. We took back roads, at least they were to me. I remember Castaic, and changing roads to go into the desert; remember, there was no inland 101 at this point in time. I was driving our 1956 Chevy convertible, white, with continental rear; God I loved that car! I had no desert or semidesert experience—California was new to me—so I didn’t even know where I was, but I thought for sure the radiator would explode, or we’d boil over or blow a tire. I was surprised my Chevy took the beating so well, because I drove between eighty and ninety miles per hour the whole way.”
They reached Girola’s prearranged meeting place on the outskirts of Bishop, California, before noon. “It was at a park or a grove, or what in the Middle West we call a forest preserve,” said Lid. “The detective and Linda were already there. Ken and the detective talked for maybe five minutes, then Linda transferred to the backseat of my car, then Ken. They sat there and talked very quietly for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Then Ken says, ‘Let’s go.’ We were back in Santa Barbara around five-thirty or six P.M. I must have driven close to a thousand miles that day. I went into the house with the two of them, at Ken’s request; I think he didn’t know what to expect at the mother-daughter reunion. It became embarrassing, and I left.”
Linda and Maggie were both sedated under a doctor’s care; Thursday night Linda entered UCLA Medical Center for ten days’ psychiatric treatment. On Thursday, Millar met with reporters and said his daughter had suffered “some kind of psychic break”: “She doesn’t remember anything well for a period of a week or more. She has a rather dim memory of having been wandering around.” As he related it, Linda was in “deep depression” when she heard a description of herself on the radio and said, “That’s me.” Later she read a newspaper account of her disappearance, which caused her to call home. The problem now, Millar said, “is to convince her that authorities and the world in general are not against her.”
The warrant for her arrest was withdrawn after the Millars posted a twenty-five-hundred-dollar cash bail (mostly borrowed from friends). The judge ordered a probation department investigation into her disappearance, in the course of which Linda handwrote a statement (never publicly released) setting forth events as she recalled them:
I do know I tried my hardest to get back to Davis on time and I know I had every intention of returning. I was pretty upset. . . and I was panicky. I never even thought of phoning in. If I had been thinking clearly I would have.
Sometime during the evening I met someone who I think gave me some silver dollars. . . . The next memory I have is of being in someone’s car—an elderly man’s. I might have asked him to take me to Davis but I don’t remember. But we ended up somewhere along the lake in his cabin which was very isolated. I think I was hysterical but I’m not sure. I think I remember being terribly afraid to return to Davis but this was after I’d failed to get a ride back. I must have lost my head after being stranded. I didn’t mean to run away I’m sure of that.
When we got to his cabin he tried to make love to me but I refused and he didn’t press the issue. The next day he said I could use his cabin for a while while he went away on business. I don’t know how long I was there—probably 4 to 6 days. It seemed as if I were in a dream or a nightmare there. I didn’t know quite what I was doing there, nor do I remember thinking about home, parents, or friends or school. I was afraid to leave the cabin, because I kept thinking things were coming in after me. . . . I knew I had to get out of the cabin. . . . I walked to a store and asked the proprietor for a ride to state line. Why I didn’t ask for a ride to Sacramento I don’t know. . . . I’m not sure how this was all arranged but he did take me to Carson City. I don’t think I was there long before someone with dark hair took me to Reno. I remember wandering around Reno a lot—in and out of places. . . . I remember the click click of slot machines and hundreds of people.
It must have been when I first entered Reno that I met a blond young man. I was probably desperate for a place to sleep so I let him take me to his hotel room. He tried to make love to me that night but I refused to let him. I had a bad case of hysteria. I guess it was the next day that I let him make love to me. My resistance must have been down or I wouldn’t have. Afterwards he left me and never came back. I stayed in that room for maybe two days without leaving, without eating.
When I’d almost lost all my strength I knew I had to eat something or I’d be very sick. I remember buying a meal somewhere, and wandering around Reno for a while, and meeting a nice old man. I can’t remember what I told him but he knew I was alone without money or friends. He bought me a room in his hotel. I think he fixed up an arrangement of some sort with the landlord whom he knew. It seemed as if I were there for a very long time but I think it was just for a few days. One night I heard my description over the radio and it didn’t seem real. But after I heard it I think I got very upset and told this man my name and that I was missing. I always knew who I was and that I was gone but it didn’t really seem real to me until I heard my description.
&n
bsp; The next day when he brought me food he brought a newspaper and I saw a picture of me on the front page as well as headlines. All of a sudden my mind cleared and it hit me: what was I doing alone in a room in Reno. The first thing I thought of doing was running to the nearest police station and turning myself in, but the man thought that wouldn’t be a good idea. He even offered to buy my plane ticket home but I thought it would be better to notify my parents immediately, tell them I was all right, and ask them how I should come home.
So I got to the nearest telephone which was at the back of a bar and phoned my mother. I told her I’d stay there until she found out what to do from my father. So I sat there until my father phoned me and told me to wait there until a private detective and his wife picked me up. . . .
It’s hard for me to write this and I keep getting confused as to some of the things that happened. . . . But I do know I didn’t do anything wrong while I was gone. Oh and I wasn’t in Los Angeles. There would have been something about it I would have remembered if I had.
The probation people didn’t press Linda further, nor did the judge at the brief hearing in which he gave her a suspended sentence and extended and modified her probation, allowing her to discontinue college, live in Los Angeles, work as an aide at a Santa Monica hospital, and get psychiatric treatment at UCLA. It’s possible to believe Millar helped his daughter with her story, as he may have coached her with her accident account. Lid said, “I personally don’t believe Linda called home. Girola found her, or his wife did, in Reno; they initially placed the call, then Linda talked to Ken or Maggie or both.” Her seeing a newspaper with an account of her disappearance is strikingly similar to an incident in The Barbarous Coast. Yet things may have happened exactly as the court was told, in ironic counterpoint to the Millars’ fiction.