The story has already been told of Ray Schindler’s long and complicated labors in discovering what man raped and beat to death the little child in Asbury Park who vanished on her way home from school along a short straight road. Her hideous fate was all too soon discovered though it took nearly a year to find the guilty man and prove his guilt.
This is the story of a girl who walked out of school and disappeared as completely as a soap bubble that floats away. In this case all Ray’s toil and skill were unavailing. Paula Weldon was born and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. Ed McCullough, the Editor of the Stamford Advocate, who helped to finance the investigation, was responsible for enlisting Ray’s services.
She was eighteen years old and in her second year at Bennington College in Vermont. She also worked in the dining room. On December 1, 1946, a Sunday, Paula Weldon put on her old slacks and went for a walk, saying that she would be back in time for supper. She did not take her pocketbook.
She did not come back for supper. She did not come back that night. Anxiety gave way to alarm. Search was begun. Then the town police were called in. When they failed they called in the State Police. Next, the Connecticut State Police were asked to help. At last the F.B.I. joined the hunt on the chance that it was a case of kidnapping, in which field the F.B.I. has authority to act. Again and again the wooded mountains above Bennington were ransacked.
The girl’s family lived in Stamford, Connecticut, where the father worked for a large corporation. At last, after many months of hunting and wasting, the corporation asked Ray Schindler to help, and offered him a modest fee.
He spent far more time than he was paid for and far more money than he was paid. He used every scientific device and left no part of the mountains and the forests unsearched. So thorough was the combing of the terrain that they found another body, that of a man who had vanished months before. But there was no clue to Paula.
Ray was convinced that he had traced her several miles from the college. She had begged a ride on a small truck driven by a man of good reputation. The trouble here was that, though he described Paula perfectly, he insisted that the girl who rode with him to the city limits wore a brown jacket. Yet it was known that the jacket Paula wore was red.
This baffling contradiction was finally solved by a simple test suggested by Shelby Williams, Ray’s office manager. The truck driver’s vision was examined and it was found that he was color-blind. All red objects looked brown to him.
But this was the last success they had in the case. And this ends the story. No trace of the girl has ever been discovered. The story is told here only as a proof that failure always threatens the most zealous detective, and not even Schindler always succeeds.
25.
WHO WAS THE RED KILLER?
One of the ugliest features of life in our beloved America is the difficulty of convicting the most vicious criminals. A still uglier feature is the fact–that, despite the uncertainty and rarity of such punishments, now and then some perfectly innocent person is caught in the toils of circumstantial evidence and made to suffer for a crime he did not commit.
Instances have already been given of how Ray Schindler’s zeal for saving the innocent vies with his zest for overtaking the guilty.
One of the battles which most interested him was waged in cooperation with Erle Stanley Gardner, who is not merely a writer but an international institution. His millions of readers are really subscribers. They demand his work so regularly and so often that he is a periodical as well as a personality.
Erle Gardner has called Ray and his brother Walter “the leading detectives in this country.” He was reporting the de Marigny case when Ray was working on it and was greatly impressed by what he called Ray’s “uncanny ability.”
A busy lawyer before he became so superhumanly popular as a writer, Erle Gardner’s utmost endeavors were given to the defense of victims of the law. On one occasion he became so interested in the case of a man who had been sentenced to death for murder, and his investigations led him to intervene so successfully that every juror retracted his verdict, the Governor issued a pardon, and the condemned man went forth to lead a useful life.
At the full tide of his success as a story-maker, he wrote a letter to Governor Earl Warren of California pleading with him to postpone the execution of a man convicted of murder. The Governor had won his first successes as a prosecuting attorney, and advanced to the post of Attorney General of his State, thence to the governorship. He was so far convinced by Gardner’s arguments that he commuted this death sentence to a life sentence and declared himself open to persuasion of the man’s complete innocence on the presentation of proof.
This is a case where disproof of guilt is exceedingly difficult. All the detective work had to be done in reverse. Instead of moving from the mystery of a crime toward the discovery of the culprit and the proof of his guilt, he had to start with the conviction, work backwards and try to unravel the fabric of the proof; and so release the innocent.
The crime was a hateful one, and the victim of it a young girl who was outraged and slain. Gardner in his version of the atrocity went so far as to say that his careful study of the adduced evidence convinced him that it was not sufficient for a conviction. He believed that the actual murderer had not yet been found, and in this opinion he had the complete support of Ray Schindler.
Very briefly told, this is the story of the crime: On August 18,1943, three sisters, Barbara, Willa Mae, and Jackie Hamilton were swimming in the Feather River in northern California. They lived with their father, mother, and another sister in a camp close by. When she had finished her swim, Jackie went to a boathouse on the bank, changed from the old dress she wore for a bathing suit into other clothes and returned to the home camp two hundred yards away. She left her sister Willa Mae in the water. A little later Jackie, who was only thirteen years old, took a soft drink, then left the camp and walked toward the river to wash her feet. When she did not return, a search was made and her raped and battered little body was found in a clearing further down the river.
A young sheepherder, Guino Fillipelli, had sat under a tree on the opposite bank and watched the sisters while they swam. He testified that he had seen a red-headed man walking up and down the river bank, brandishing a stick all the while the girls were swimming. The sisters saw the man, too, and Willa Mae saw him there after Jackie had left the water.
Later, according to the sheepherder, when Jackie reappeared from the house and walked toward the river, the red-headed man came out of the willows and the bushes and attacked her. The sheepherder saw her fall.
Now it so happened that there was a red-headed man named William Marvin Lindley living in a boathouse not far away. He had been living in his boathouse before the Hamiltons built their camp there. He had done odd jobs for the people living thereabout and they spoke well of him as quiet and likeable, though not an intellectual giant.
So “Red” Lindley was arrested by the officers who were summoned. They took the sheepherde’s word for it that Lindley was the murderer, though they made no effort to take fingernail scrapings from the dead girl or make any of the other routine investigations.
Erle Gardner says that the witnesses summoned “tell the most amazingly contradictory stories I have ever encountered in a murder case. These contradictions are so numerous that they seem to have attracted little attention.”
That latter sentence reads like a sort of Irish bull, but the matters overlooked really strike the later student as almost the most conspicuous features of the case.
Because of his vast popularity, Gardner is accustomed to receiving so many appeals to intervene on behalf of convicted persons that he hardly has time to read the letters. But his secretaries drew his attention to letters from Lindley’s lawyer, Al Matthews, and these impelled Gardner to send for and to study for several evenings the full transcript of the testimony. The contradictions and oversights appalled him.
For one thing, he discovered that there was another redhead
ed man in the case and he had duped a friend into providing him with an alibi that was a deception. He had appeared with his face bearing such scratches as a frantic girl might have inflicted on an assailant. Shortly after the hour of the crime he had appeared in a store and was so nervous and excited that he could not pick up the change from the bill he had laid on the counter. His comments on the crime later had so offended his fellow-workers that they had stopped speaking to him.
He was not arrested.
But Lindley was arrested and eventually convicted, though the dead girl’s father testified that he himself was with Red Lindley until about five minutes before Jackie reached the camp after she finished swimming. Another man named Owens had confirmed this testimony. He and Jackie’s father and Lindley had been out in an automobile for an hour.
But, as Gardner points out, the red-headed man was in the willows all the time the girls were swimming and so he could not have been Lindley. As Gardner puts it:
“Obviously, the testimony in the record itself, instead of proving the defendant guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, proves him innocent beyond all reasonable doubt.”
The man who was convicted had been with the girl’s father and another man until five minutes before the murder of the girl, though the red-headed man in the willows had been there continuously for at least half an hour, watching the young girls splashing about the water in the clinging old dresses they used for bathing suits. And that was the man who attacked Jackie in view of the man who was herding sheep near by. Thus, as Gardner emphasizes, the very man who described the murder, “the most biased, bitter witness in the entire case gives the defendant an ironclad alibi.”
The other man was never arrested. So far as the evidence shows, he was never even sought for.
The police pounced on the nearest red-head they found and he was convicted. Thus far the case reminds one of the Asbury Park rape and murder of a little girl. In that case a drunken ex-convict Negro was discovered near the scene of the crime, and he would undoubtedly have been executed if Ray Schindler had not been called in by two men who doubted the air-tight conclusiveness of the evidence against the Negro. Only by the most complicated detective work was it possible to save the bewildered Negro by eliciting a confession from the young German gardener who really killed the girl and was willing to let the innocent Negro die. The Negro had a bad name. He was an ex-convict.
So Lindley had a previous conviction against him, but there was nothing in his record to indicate a tendency toward sex-crime.
Lindley is accused of having confessed twice that he had murdered the little girl. But one of those who testified to the confession had himself been convicted of a crime and the details of the alleged confession are in conflict with the facts known about the murder. Such alleged confessions are suspicious, as Gardner notes, when reported by prisoners, since they often pretend to have heard such confessions in order to win release from jail themselves.
The second alleged confession was merely a vague admission said to have been made to the sheriff who was taking Lindley to San Quentin after his conviction and sentence.
There is another curious twist to the case. After his arrest and before his trial, the court appointed psychiatrists to examine Lindley and they reported him insane. He was put away in a state hospital for a year, then adjudged sane and put on trial.
Yet, as Erle Gardner insists arjd as the evidence stands, the murderer “could not possibly have been the defendant . . . it proves irrefutably that William Lindley is innocent . . . that he was convicted on false testimony.”
After Gardner had made his expert summing up of the case, three members of the California Supreme Court expressed “grave doubt” as to Lindley’s guilt. On their recommendation Governor Warren stayed his execution and gave him commutation to a life sentence. But, if Lindley was innocent and his trial bungled, a life-sentence is only a lesser outrage than a death-sentence.
If it had not been for the unselfish devotion to justice, the painstaking analysis of the evidence and the eloquent ardent intervention of Erie Stanley Gardner on behalf of a total stranger, “Red” Lindley would now be dead. Ray Schindler’s enormous experience and his minute study of the case led him to join his friend Gardner in a determined effort to save Lindley from the living death of lifelong incarceration. Neither of these men asked for other remuneration than such ease of conscience as can come from devotion to the cause of sacred justice.
We are all apt to grow as impatient as Hamlet did with “the law’s delay.” We are apt to denounce the endless difficulties placed in the way of convicting criminals on the assumption that they are innocent till proven guilty. Yet now and then a case arises like this of Red Lindley where, by some complex conspiracy of events, a man of the most apparent innocence is railroaded to prison or to execution, and must rely for his rescue on the rare chance intervention of some stranger who happens to take an interest and the rarer chance that he will persevere till the rescue is complete.
It was William Lindley’s fate to suffer the last injustices, to endure the bewilderment not only of being accused of a murder he could not have committed, but of being convicted and being sentenced to death for it. Then came commutation to life-long imprisonment. No wonder his overwrought mind gave way and he went insane. He is still kept behind prison walls, and there seems to be no hope of his recovering either his intellect or his liberty.
From the martyrdom of this humble soul has risen an institution of high nobility. It is called The Court of Last Resort. It was founded by Erle Stanley Gardner with the splendid cooperation of Harry Steeger, who has given it wide public recognition and encouragement in Argosy Magazine.
The beautiful purpose of this Court Beyond Courts is to look into the histories, of persons convicted of murders and sentenced to life terms in spite of their innocence. Of course, numberless guilty people protest their innocence to the last; but there are others whom circumstances have conspired against with merciless success.
Erle Gardner and Ray Schindler have travelled thousands of miles, spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars investigating such cases, interviewing persons, and, when convinced of innocence, appealing to the authorities to release the victims of twisted evidence.
They have had success in three cases already. Clarence Boggie was “pardoned” after thirteen years of false imprisonment and seven months of the hardest work on the part of Gardner and Schindler. William Keys was released after eleven months of toil on the part of The Court of Last Resort. He had spent fifteen years of confinement in a penitentiary. Louis Gross, after seventeen years imprisonment, has been promised a new trial.
Two brothers, John H. and Coke T. Brite, are still hoping for the success of their strange friends of the Court. And there are twelve other convicts whose life sentences are under investigation by the tireless Samaritans of the Court.
This may well be the note on which to end this study of the life and works of Ray Schindler. The cases selected from his long and infinitely varied career have shown something of his problems and the methods that a great detective uses for their solution. They show also how important it is for a detective to have not only a head but a heart also.
The Complete Detective Page 30