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 CapistranoThe 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.
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MORE REAL POLICE BLOTTERS
“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.
QUEEN OF THE JAIL
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
PROLOGUE
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.
After a few months, Ed and Jack convinced Katherine that they were innocent and asked her to help them escape so they could live honest lives as coal miners in Canada. She agreed.
DARING ESCAPE
As luck would have it, Ed’s cell could be seen from Katherine’s bedroom window. The two designed a secret alphabet code with which Katherine could point to various body parts, representing different letters, and spell out messages about the warden’s movements. This allowed the Biddles to devise a plan. Then they had Katherine—at great risk to herself—smuggle in two saws and a revolver.
On Wednesday night, January 29, 1902, the boys cut through their cell bars. They apprehended three guards and locked them in a cell. As they were leaving the prison, they were met by a waiting Katherine, which was not a part of the plan. She was supposed to lay low and meet them in Canada a month later. But Katherine, mad with love, took a page out of the Biddles’ book and chloroformed her husband, then snuck away in the night. She didn’t want to be away from Ed Biddle.
The warden awoke to a nasty headache and an empty house. When he was told the Biddle Boys had escaped, he knew Katherine was involved and immediately put out an all-points-bulletin on the three of them.
ON THE RUN
Meanwhile, Ed agreed to let Katherine come along, much to the dismay of Jack, who thought she’d slow them down. But Ed was the boss. They stole a horse and a sleigh from a nearby farm and made it to Cooperstown, 38 miles north of Pittsburgh. They planned to have a quiet breakfast there and slip away unnoticed, but news of the breakout had beat them to the town. The Pennsylvania winter was harsh, and the three fugitives didn’t have any warm clothes. They were easily identified and the police were now hot on their trail. They stopped for lunch in Mount Chestnut, 54 miles from Pittsburgh, and Ed and Katherine consummated their relationship. Time, however, was running out.
Killed by cops in 1934: Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson.
FINAL SHOWDOWN
With their horse and sleigh, the Biddle Boys and Katherine Soffel left Mount Chestnut on the snowy afternoon of January 31, 1902. They had only traveled a few miles when a posse met them head-on at the crest of a hill. Ed stopped the sleigh, handed the reins to Katherine, and he and Jack jumped off, each with gun in hand. The sherriff ordered the two men to surrender. Ed told them to go to hell and opened fire. The lawmen responded with a hail of bullets.
When the shootout was over, Ed was shot twice, Jack 15 times, and Katherine—who had grabbed a gun and joined in the fray—was shot once by Ed after pleading for him to take her life. She didn’t want to live without him.
The three were taken to nearby Butler Hospital. Katherine’s wound was treatable; Ed and Jack were not so lucky. As they lay on their deathbeds, they told police varying accounts of what had happened. Ed claimed he’d never loved Katherine, that he just used her to help him escape. Katherine claimed that Ed was just saying that to protect her. Love letters he wrote her while still in prison backed her up, but only Ed knew for sure. He and Jack both died on the night of February 1, 1902.
POSTMORTEM
The Biddle Boys’ bodies were put on display at the Allegheny County Jail for two hours. More than 4,000 people came to see the famous bandits. Katherine served 20 months in prison and lived out the rest of her life in shame. She died a brokenhearted woman on August 30, 1909.
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“We wouldn’t have been captured if we hadn’t stuck to the woman.”
—Jack Biddle
1st known official autopsy: Julius Caesar’s. The coroner ruled that the second stab was the fatal one.
WHERE’S JIMMY?
One of the 20th century’s most notorious men disappeared nearly four decades ago...and hasn’t been heard from since.
THE MAN
Born in 1913, James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was president of the Teamsters Union from 1957 to ‘67. In that time, he turned it into America’s largest, richest, and most corrupt union—with overt connections to the Mafia. In a highly publicized 1967 trial, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and sent to federal prison. Four years later, he was released—on condition that he not hold union office until 1980.
But Hoffa didn’t stay inactive for long: In 1972 he filed a lawsuit to overturn the arrangement and began a campaign to return to power. By 1975, he’d gained enough support in the union to pose a threat to the leaders who’d replaced him...if his lawsuit succeeded.
THE MYSTERY
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa told his wife he was going to a Detroit restaurant for a meeting with two men—an eastern Teamster official and a Detroit mobster. Hoffa never returned. Police dug up fields, ripped up cement floors, and dredged rivers, but besides Hoffa’s car—which was discovered at the restaurant—no trace of him was ever found. The two men he was supposed to have met with both had alibis, and neither admitted to knowing anything about the meeting.
THE THEORY
Most experts, including the FBI, believe the Mafia had Hoffa killed. Why? The mob had switched allegiance to Hoffa’s successors while he was in prison and didn’t want him messing things up. Hoffa’s bodyguard, however, insists it was the government that killed the union boss. The reason? They were still trying to cover up the fact that they used the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro, and Hoffa knew too much.
He was officially declared dead seven years to the day after he disappeared. A tip in 2006 led police to dig up a Michigan field, but they found nothing. Hoffa’s fate remains unknown, but his legacy lives on: His son, James P. Hoffa, is currently in charge of the Teamster’s Union.
Most successful police dog: Trepp, a Florida golden retriever, has over 100 arrests to his credit.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
A few tales of dishonest people getting their comeupp
ance.
CULPRIT: Nigel Hardman, a.k.a. “Prince Razaq,” of Warton, England
GRAND SCHEME: After a number of civil servant jobs—mail sorter, meter reader, and accident insurance advisor—Hardman was ready for something different. His chance came after a 2002 car accident, when he applied for disability payments and housing assistance, claiming he was “too ill to work.” Now, with a supplemental income, Hardman started training to be a magician. After he recovered, he stuck with his act...but kept on receiving government payments. Donning a turban, long robes, curly-toed sandals, and the name “Prince Razaq,” he appeared on the British TV show The Big Breakfast (he escaped from a straight jacket while standing on a bed of nails), and his career took off. With newfound fame, Hardman started living in lavish style, even purchasing a 31-foot-long stretch limousine so he could, according to the Guardian, “drive stag and hen party guests around Blackpool.”
EXPOSED! British fraud investigators, it turned out, had also seen the talent show and soon learned that the man who was “too ill to work” was moonlighting as a death-defying daredevil who swallowed swords and tamed lions. In 2008 Hardman, 40, pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud—in all, he bilked £18,000 ($35,000) from the British benefits system. (He was also nearly bankrupt.)
OUTCOME: Hardman was tagged for six months, which means he can’t leave his home from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. If he does, the magistrate warned him, the court will come down on him “like a ton of bricks.”
CULPRIT: Martino Garibaldi, a 45-year-old shop owner from Montecalvo, Italy
GRAND SCHEME: Garibaldi’s wife (first name not released) thought her marriage was fine...until one day in 2007, when she discovered that all of her money—37,000 euros ($73,000)—was missing from her bank account. And Martino was missing, too. Did he run off? Was he kidnapped? Mrs. Garibaldi hired a private investigator to track down her husband, but the search yielded nothing. Her husband and her money were both gone.
Uncle John’s True Crime Page 12