Herald and news., January 24, 1960, Page 32, Image 32

Family Weekly
January 24, 1960
THE STRANGE
CASE OF
CARYL
CHESSMAN
BY EVAN McLEOD WYLIE
"Be on the lookout for a male . . . swarthy com
plexion . . . possibly Italian . . . five-feet-four to
five-ten . . , 150-170 pounds . . . thin to medium
build . . . dark brown hair . . . crooked teeth . . .
narrow nose with slight tump on the bridge of nose
. . . armed with .45 automatic . , . uses small pen
type flashlight . . . believed driving '47 club coupi
...a red spotlight has been seen on side of car..."
IT was A few minutes before 8 p.m. Jan. 23, 1947,
a chilly, fog-shrouded night in Los Angeles, Calif.
For weeks, a "Red Light Bandit," impersonating a
policeman in a car with a flashing red spotlight,
had been terrorizing lovers-lane couples parked
on the dark winding canyon roads that overlook
Pasadena's famed Rose Bowl and the glittering
lights of Hollywood.
Sometimes, after he had examined the couples'
wallets, he flourished a .45 automatic, pocketed
their money, and departed. Other times he affixed
a mask over his face, forced the girl to accompany
him in his car, and brutally assaulted her. Only the
night before, he had held a terrified 17-year-old
girl captive for three hours. Now, as police cars
combed the canyons and hills above Hollywood,
their radios blared forth the bandit's description.
In Car 35, nosing slowly through the congested
streets of downtown Hollywood, police officers
James Reardon and Robert May suddenly spotted
a Ford coupe matching the description of the ban
dit's car and signaled it to pull over. Instead, the
Ford was off like a shot. As Reardon tramped hard
on the accelerator, May, fumbling for his gun,
flicked a dashboard button and flashed a radio mes
sage: "We are in pursuit of a Ford '47 coupe head
ing south on Vermont Avenue at very high speed."
Within a few moments, a dozen police cars con
verged on Vermont Avenue to cut off the coupe.
Zigzagging wildly through heavy traffic at 80
miles per hour, bullets from May's gun smashing
into its rear window, the Ford charged recklessly
Family Wtrktv. January 24, I960
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through one road block and was about to evade
another with a tire-screeching U turn when a
broadside ram from Reardon brought it to a halt
Their prisoner was a 27 -year-old man named Caryl
Chessman.
By the next morning, Hollywood police had accu
mulated enough evidence to link Chessman directly
to the crimes of the Red Light Bandit. The Ford
coupe had been stolen in Pasadena one month be
fore about the same time that the Red Light Bandit
had begun to prey on the lovers-lane couples. In its
glove compartment was found a pen-type flashlight
On the ground near the car was a .45 automatic.
Except for his height (six feet) and lack of an
Italian accent, Chessman fitted the description of
the bandit Many of the victims identified him.
Within 48 hours, police announced that they had
obtained Chessman's oral confession and that
the case was solved. But, brought to trial a few
weeks later, Chessman denied emphatically that
he was the Red Light Bandit He insisted he was
the victim of coincidence, mistaken identity, and
a police frame-up, that detectives had tricked and
beaten him into confessing the crimes.
Cocky and self-confident, he spurned the offer
of a court-appointed attorney and undertook to de
fend himself. After hearing the evidence and the
witnesses against him, however, a jury of 11 women
and one man found Chessman guilty of robbery and
kidnaping and invoked California's seldom-used
"Little Lindbergh" kidnaping law to fix the penalty
of death in San Quentin's gas chamber.
On July 3, 1948, Caryl Chessman was taken to San
Quentin and placed in Cell 2455 on death row. No
one had evinced the slightest interest or sympathy
in his case. His execution appeared inevitable and
imminent The case, which had rated only a few
paragraphs in the newspapers, appeared closed.
But one of Chessman's favorite sayings is, "When
it gets too tough for everyone else, it's just right
V r
for me." Filing a steady stream of legal appeals,
writs, briefs, and petitions, he dodged and twisted
his way through the courts. Each time the net
seemed drawn tightly about him, he found a legal
loophole in it to delay his execution.
At first Chessman framed his writs and petitions
in longhand on yellow pads. Later, permitted a type
writer, he turned an empty cell on death row into
a law office. Working with tremendous energy and
a single-minded concentration, he spent 18 hours
a day fighting his case.
Instead of being put to death that summer of
1948, Chessman has remained alive in Cell 2455
while the U. S. fought the Korean War, went to the
polls three times to elect a President, and advanced
into the Space Age. He has seen nearly 100 other
condemned men and one woman marched or car
ried to the green gas chamber on the floor below,
watched others disintegrate into babbling insanity
by the nightmarish despair of death row.
The judge who sentenced him to death is dead.
Witnesses who testified against him have scattered.
One is confined to a mental institution. The law
under which he was sentenced to death has been
changed to eliminate the death penalty. All pris
oners affected by it have been awarded clemency
save Chessman who, still alive 12 years later, has
become the world's most famous doomed convict
When not busy with his fiery legal petitions,
Chessman began to write. Soon he was vividly
chronicling the horrors of death row and arguing
as brilliantly against the shortcomings of the prison
system and capital punishment as any expert penol
ogist His autobiography, "Cell 2455, Death Row,"
became a best seller and has been published in 14
languages. Despite a decree by the California prison
director that he could write no more, he has gone
to extreme lengths to complete two more books,
one written completely on carbon paper, and smug
gle them out of San Quentin.
Over the years, Chessman's fantastic struggle
OLE
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for survival has attracted the attention of psy
chologists, criminologists, penologists, and the pub
lic at large. Lawyers have undertaken his defense.
Petitions to spare his life have been signed by mil
lions in Sweden, Brazil, Japan, India, and other
countries. Many prominent Americans, including
TV's Steve Allen, producer Walter Wanger, Elea
nor Roosevelt, novelist Aldous Huxley, psychiatrist
Dr. Karl Menninger, as well as priests, rabbis,
and ministers, have joined in pleas that he be
awarded clemency or a new trial. Recently, Osser
vatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, editorial
ized: "Nobody can deny that anyone who has to
wait 11 years for the gas chamber has expiated his
guilt, no matter how grave."
Today, after 12 years of heated controversy and
thousands of pages of legal documents, two ques
tions still loom unanswered.
Was Chessman really the Red Light Bandit?
He has offered innumerable times to take a lie
detector test, drawn attention to the fact that, while
admittedly guilty of scores of robberies, he had
never before been convicted or even accused of a
sex crime.
While practically conceding that the Ford coupe
he was driving when captured was the car used
by the Red Light Bandit, Chessman has insisted
that two criminal cronies who used the car were
guilty of the crimes. He asserts he has told one of
his lawyers in confidence "the name, identity, and
part of the story of the Red Light Bandit; the main
one and a clown who was mixed up with him and
also with me in a different deal." He also says that,
though they are friends outside of prison, he has
placed the names of these men "together with cer
tain affidavits and police records" in a package to
be made public some 50 years from now.
The second unanswered question is:
Did he guilty or innocent receive a fair trial?
All of Chessman's protestations would not have
With the specter of the gas chamber
hanging over him, two questions
remain unanswered: Was he really
the Red Light Bandit?
And, guilty or innocent,
did he receive a fair trial?
delayed his execution a single day if he hadn't
seized on a loophole in the state's case against him
and hammered away at it until he has convinced
some newspapermen, lawyers, and even judges that
his constitutional rights were violated.
By a freakish circumstance, the court stenogra
pher who kept the daily shorthand record of the
trial died suddenly just two days before Chessman
was sentenced to death. Later, to obtain the full
transcript of the trial, the dead stenographer's notes
written in a peculiar, almost undecipherable form
of shorthand were completed by another court
stenographer who, it was later disclosed, was a rela
tive of the prosecuting attorney.
Moreover, this stenographer, selected by the
prosecuting attorney, conferred privately and at
length with the witnesses against Chessman to re
construct their testimony before translating the
notes. Neither Chessman nor any legal representa
tive of his was invited to these meetings.
Later, the shorthand notes were stored by still
another relative of the same prosecuting attorney
in a garage, then in a private safe-deposit vault,
so that Chessman and his attorneys were unable
to examine them until nearly eight years after his
trial. Chessman's claims of prejudice and error in
this handling of the trial record have formed the
basis of most of his appeals. Last month the U. S.
Supreme Court rejected Chessman's latest petition,
and the state of California promptly set Feb. 19 as
his eighth and perhaps final execution date.
Is there any real key to the strange story of Caryl
Chessman?
Yes, say some experts. Long before the Red Light
Bandit case, Chessman already was one of the most
reckless, hardened, and incorrigible criminals at
large in California. Born in Michigan, the only child
of parents of modest means, Chessman suffered an
attack of encephalitis at 10, which he claims changed
him from a happy, creative youngster into a brood
ing, temperamental problem child. At 12, he began
Son Quentin gas chamber may end Chessman's ordeal.
stealing bread and milk off neighbors' doorsteps.
At 14, he was stealing cars and breaking into gas
stations and candy stores. At 16, he was in reform
school. At 18, he was the swaggering, bragging
leader of a gang of boy bandits. At 20, in 1940, he
was sent to San Quentin for robbery.
Belying characterizations of Chessman as a
"criminal genius" is the fact that all his thefts and
robberies were so poorly planned and haphazardly
executed that from 1940 until 1948 he was seldom
out from behind bars for more than six weeks at
a time. Altogether, he has spent nearly two-thirds
of his lifetime in prison.
Yet, within prison, Chessman always switched
roles. As a model prisoner, he displayed such
marked intelligence, enthusiasm, and dedicated en
ergy that he was assigned to clerical and educa
tional posts. He taught English, shorthand, and typ
ing, and developed his own method for teaching
illiterate convicts to read. Nonetheless, in San
Quentin and other prisons in the early 1940s, psy
chiatrists who studied Chessman concluded that he
was a dangerous psychopathic personality who
could not be trusted to adjust to normal life.
As his long legal struggle approaches a climax,
Caryl Chessman, pain-racked by an ulcer, warped
by years in death row, shows signs of nearing ex
haustion. Some newspapermen, who over the years
have become closely acquainted with him, say he
is "about burned out" and that his will to fight any
longer is waning. Chessman himself has scorned
his lawyers' attempts to have his sentence com
muted to life imprisonment, declaring that if he
cannot prove his innocence he would rather die.
If incorrigible Caryl Chessman was not guilty
of the Red Light Bandit crimes, it is ironic that,
from Cell 2455, he may have contributed more to
society's understanding of its problem children than
he ever would have as a free man or long since
put to death in the gas chamber.
Family Weekly, January 24, 1$60 7