Nobody got their dinner


At noon, butcher William F. Mosher, 53, left his shop at 1703 East Washington Street and drove his horse-drawn rig, a sort of open carriage, home to 232 ½ Winston Street, to dine with his family. His wife and adult children were waiting for him to come to the table when they heard a loud rattle as of a malfunctioning wagon, and ran outside to find Mosher lying half a block away, his rig on top of his crushed chest. He died moments later.


Later still, his horse was found at Winston and Wall, and it was presumed that Mosher had removed the bridle and been about to feed the animal when it was unaccountably spooked and took off running, dragging its master beneath the deadly wheels. The body was taken to Bresee Brothers on Mortuary Row at 855 South Figueroa, with a coroner’s inquest to precede burial.
Bresee Brothers detail

Map detail from the 1909 city map compiled by Worthington Gates, Western Litho Co.

The Mystery Skull of Boyd Street

Walking in the alley behind the Sisters of Mercy building, where unfortunates were fed and housed, Fred Forsberg made a grim discovery: a partially mummified section of a human skull, with incongruously handsome, twirled moustaches above the former lips. The top of the skull had been neatly sawn off, suggesting the corpse had paid a visit to an anatomical laboratory.

Forsberg attempted to interest the police in his discovery, but to them it looked too old to be worth investigating. They did, however, deign to attach a note which read “ex-police reporter” and parked the relic in the station’s reporter’s room. And it was this prank which resulted in a few inches of column space in the Times the following day, and keeps alive the memory of this nameless posthumous denizen of SRO Land. Here’s to ya, fella, whoever you were.

The Bicycle Abstracter & Candy Fiend

Miss Lillian Wilson, a comely and seemingly respectable San Diego lass, was, alas, a maniacal gearhead. Her obsession and her downfall were other ladies’ bicycles, which she could not stop herself from hopping onto and riding off with…. and quickly selling them for much less than they were worth to SRO Land dealers who asked few questions. She needed the money, you see, for candy, wonderful, beguiling, intoxicating candy. It was the only thing more fascinating to her troubled mind than bicycles.

She was found out after she stole Miss Elizabeth Altenhofer’s bike from its spot on Hill near Sixth. Miss Altenhofer made a careful scrutiny of pawn and junk shops, finding nothing. Later, perhaps shopping for a replacement, she peered in the window of R.K. Holmes’ bicycle shop at 208 West Fifth and saw her very own bike within.

Detective Joseph Ritch was grilling Holmes on the appearance of the woman who’d sold him the hot wheel when he exclaimed “There she goes now!” And indeed, a young woman was gliding along Fifth towards Spring Street on yet another bicycle. Ritch dashed after her, and when she slowed to avoid people walking, he grabbed the girl and compelled her to come with him back to the shop. She came readily, denying any knowledge of the stolen bike or the shop, and was promptly identified.

The handsome Featherstone bike she was riding was, of course, someone else’s: Catalina Hotel resident Mrs. E. F. Sweezy’s. Confronted with serial numbers that matched a police report, and Holmes’ recognition, Lillian Wilson confessed that she had stolen both machines, selling Altenhofer’s about twenty minutes after taking it, and snatching Sweezy’s immediately after. Her South Main Street rooms were searched, and tool-bags from both bicycles found inside.

A third missing bicycle, belonging to Miss Mable Clapp and stolen from in front of her rooms at 614 South Main, was discovered in a shop on Broadway. The store owner well remembered seller Lillian Wilson, hailing from San Diego. All three machines had been taken within three hours on Saturday last.

Said cool Lillian, “I guess I’m in for it. You have got me, and I might as well tell you all about it. I’m not the crying kind. I’ll take my medicine.” She planned to plead guilty.

The bold girl was 20, and when not stealing, said she had been appearing as a flower girl in a play at the Burbank Theater. She had arrived but recently in Los Angeles, and was wanted for bicycle theft in her native San Diego, where she had worked as a book-keeper.

On September 23, she appeared in court, not so cocky anymore. Charged with two counts of theft, and represented by Hugh J. Crawford, Esq., she was somber in a white skirt, heliotrope shirt and waist and sailor hat. Crawford asked for a continuance, and it was noted that her parents were expected from San Diego.

The case dragged along until late December, when Lillian Wilson (not her real name, it transpires) quietly pled not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and was acquitted. Her sister promptly fainted, as the girl thief announced that her intentions for the future were, simply, to be good.

A Rubbish King’s Last Stand

They called Hamayag Saroyan the rubbish king, and like any king, he was jealous of his subjects. When a restaurant canceled his hauling contract, King Hamayag left his Montebello castle and went to Main Street to stake out the place and learn what other potentate dared to pick up his trash.

His majesty, 64, stood watching from a parking lot next to the Jeffries Banknote Co. at 117 Winston Street, just one more set of eyes in the naked city. Then suddenly a man broke away from the crowd, brushed against Saroyan, and left him reeling. The old man cried out, and stumbled across the narrow street, then up the steps of a coffee shop at 128 Winston Street. He looked around at a room full of strangers and croaked, “Help me! I’m hurt. A Negro did it.” Then he fell, dead from two knife wounds in the heart, $49 in his pockets.

Witnesses saw a black man running east on Winston, and said he’d first taken off and neatly folded his bloody coat. Someone gave chase, but lost the fleeing man near 5th and Wall. A month later, J. H. Knox, wanted for a New Orleans stabbing, was picked up on suspicion when he left his Wall Street hotel room for a smoke. But witnesses didn’t think he was the regicide, so cops shipped him back to Louisiana to face justice there.

Hamyag Saroyan’s slaying would go unsolved, and authorities declined to use it as a reason to reopen their year-old grand jury investigation into allegations of a rubbish war between rival contractors.

Those 1955 public hearings, held by Mayor Norris Poulson, had spread some pretty stinky stuff around City Hall, including allegations that large garbage collection agencies were conspiring with dump owners and Teamsters to freeze out independent operators. Trash collectors had to join “the combine” (their local rubbish union plus the Teamsters’ union) or be forced out of business.

One such small fry was William C. Crowder, who picked up 1250 San Fernando Valley customers by offering attractive trash bins with a built-in deodorizer—housewives loved them. But dumps began refusing his loads after he objected to the local union demanding half of his customers as a tithe, and Crowder had to drive all over L.A. until he found a cooperative dump. Then there was Sadie Olive Frank, another Valley trash collector, who testified about harassment, vanishing bins, and sugar in her truck’s gas tank. But it wasn’t just sheeny men who had to toe the line: businesses that hired non-union trash haulers were threatened with picket lines.

Ultimately, Teamsters secretary-treasurer Frank Matula, called the “czar” of west coast trash, was sentenced to prison for his perjured testimony about the rubbish racket he headed. His pal Jimmy Hoffa gave him the going-to-jail present of naming him one of three international trustees of the union, a poke in the eye to the Feds. And Mayor Poulson, stunned by the magnitude of the fraud, ordered his staff to begin work on developing a municipal trash service, which would dump in city-owned ravines.

Muse on all this next time you’re about to complain about the size of your L.A. city trash collection bill.

Dr. and Mrs. White Are “At-Home” To Guests

Los Angeles in the 1890s was a city rife with vice. For every respectable young woman safe in her father’s mansion on Bunker Hill, there were uncounted hussies parked in the cribs of old Chinatown, providing comfort, company and contagion for a price.

It was no surprise that fraternizing with loose women could result in a venereal disease. Sporting men had paid the drippy price for centuries. Various preventatives and cures of dubious efficacy circulated by word of mouth, and in the coded advertisements that financed Colonel Otis’ empire. Afflicted, a man would submit to cures that could be worse than the disease, suspending disbelief as genial quacks dispensed toxic mercury, arsenic and irritating salves. A man could make a good living catering to the anxieties of men who visited prostitutes. Some of them weren’t even sick, though ironically, these fantasists were among the most difficult to cure.

It was October 5, 1889 when the eager ears of L.A.’s gossips cocked to take in information about a troubled pair, the unfortunate Mrs. Dr. Plato Marcus White and her errant mate, a doctor specializing in victims of love. The lady arrived from San Francisco after receiving a letter from her husband, who had she groused used her money to take offices at 31 North Main Street in March, and who had only allowed his wife brief visits in Los Angeles since. He always was “in quite a stew to get rid of her” and she came to believe he had another woman, if not women, in his life.

Whatever the circumstances of their estrangement, Dr. White sent the lady a letter saying he would not live with her again, and she fairly flew down the coast to confront him. She arrived on Saturday night, and not finding Plato in his office, went straight to the police and demanded they send out search parties. She was humored; Plato stayed lost. The lady then searched his office, and found two mash notes shoved under the door from one Minnie Westfield, of the Bumiller block on North Spring Street, site of a rooming house frequented by many noisy young ladies. Off went Mrs. White on a strumpet hunt, but she was directed to the wrong room, and retired to the doctor’s office to wait him out.

The good doctor was a valuable member of early Los Angeles society, offering as he did discrete and purportedly effective treatment against the many unfortunate after effects of youthful and aged debauchery. And further, he promised that his nostrums were less toxic than those of his peers. There would be no mercury, sandalwood oil or spicy cubebs for Dr. White’s patients.

In January 1890, operating out of rooms at No. 6 San Pedro Street (parlors 1 and 2), Dr. White placed the most explicit ad of his career, as an experiment which he did not repeat. For young men, he promised treatment for such “youthful follies… as Mental Debility, Depression of Spirits, Gloominess, Love of Solitude, Despondency, Timidity, Seminal Weakness in all its stages, Pimples on the face, Noises in the Head, Dimness of Vision, Palpitation of the Heart, Wakefulness, Weakness of the Back, Premature Decline, and many diseases which lead to insanity and death.” For the middle aged “who are afflicted with Syphilis – in all its horrible forms – a disease which, if neglected or improperly treated, curses the present and future generations—Ulcers. Sore Throat. Bone Pains. Specific Blood and Skin Troubles. Gonorrhoea, Gleet and Stricture; or who suffer from Nervous Debility, Exhausting Drains upon the Fountains of Life, Excesses, Premature Loss of Manhood, Impotency, or any private disease of Sexual or Urinary Organs should secure Dr. White’s services… an early call or a friendly letter may save future suffering and shame and add golden years to life.”

Ordinarily, such blatant language was not necessary. Men knew how to read the classified section, and well understood what was being offered when the headline read “Disorders of Men” and the small print promised “no mercury.”

Could Dr. White really offer a cure? The first true anti-syphilitic agent, Salvarsan, was not discovered until 1908. But centuries of experimentation had produced numerous substances that could alleviate symptoms and soothe worry. We don’t know if Dr. White was a quack or true healer. It may be enough that he provided that most effective nostrom: peace of mind.
 

But whatever the quality of his care, later in October the Times published further information on his marital maladies. Mrs. White was still camped out in the doctor’s Main Street office, but the “frisky” doc continued to elude her. But she could be appeased somewhat to know that he was thinking of her, having communicated with the San Francisco Examiner, which too had been reporting on his conjugal woes. For that paper, he delineated the circumstances of their San Bernardino courtship, when he had married the lady to keep her from making good on a suicide threat. He took issue with the Examiner’s apparent description of Her Vexedness as “a charming graduate of an eastern medical college” when she was rather a practitioner of “magnet healing” and further, a decrepit 45 years old.


As for the wife, she believed the material in the San Francisco paper was meant to trick her into rushing back to look for the doctor in that city, but she would not be fooled. She already knew that his mail went to a lawyer in the Phillips Block (above), and that a Spanish woman who wore goggles visited that office daily. She believed this mysterious figure was picking up the doctor’s mail, and after having her followed, knew this woman then took Temple Street to Beaudry and went south.

The doctor’s wife had many thoughts about the women in his life. Of Minnie Westfield, author of the semi-literate love notes, she mused “he’s dodging her, too. He must have not less than three women on the string here. The one who signs herself Westfield is named Minnie or Mary Green, and she used to be employed as a servant at the Winona, a boarding-house on Temple Street. I have seen here at the Doctor’s office, and I saw her passing up and down the street today looking up at the window, then she came and peeped into the hall and went away. There is another woman—a little woman—who came here the other day and inquired for the Doctor, and gave such a lame excuse, together with a fictitious address, that I am confident she is one of Dr. White’s victims also. I tell you, Dr. White is no gentleman!” If he would only come to her and be honest about his heart, she would give him up in a second. But, she warned, “if the Doctor don’t come to me and act like a man, I will follow him to the end of the earth.”
 
On October 26, 1889, the Times reported that Dr. White had come out of hiding and agreed to speak with his wife. Afterwards, he became convinced she was going to kill him, and asked police for protection. He then spent the night of October 24 in Evergreen Cemetery, sitting on his first wife’s grave and fingering a pistol, but he decided not to kill himself. Instead, he went back to his living wife, and announced that the two of them would be “at home” should any daring or morbidly curious friends wish to pay a visit.

In December 1889, the Whites’ marital miasma again reached public ears when Mrs. White, confined to a bed in her husband’s new offices at number 6 San Pedro Street, sent word to police that she had been deserted, was destitute and needed help. Soon a reporter from the Times was on hand to take down all the dirt.

Mrs. White told a tale of brutality, fraud and neglect. Her immediate problems began, she wheezed, when she drank a dram of wine from the decanter on Plato’s dresser, wine that he made no move to share. Immediately after, she was taken sick, her husband left, and now she believed she might starve because her throat was so sore. Sore throat or no, she rambled on about her husband’s medical expertise, in magnetic healing. Why, did you know the whole thing was a fraud? And that Plato loved another woman and had probably poisoned his spouse so he would be free to stray? Her plan, if he did not return with some money, was to formally charge him with desertion and see him behind bars.

In January 1890, Dr. White appeared in a police station seeking a chaperone for a meeting with his surly misses, but was informed that cops weren’t available to baby sit. And then, silence. We can only assume the Whites worked out their differences, for Mrs. White was unlikely to keep quiet otherwise.

Then someone, perhaps a disgruntled patient, must have reported Dr. White’s activities to the Health Department, for in July 1893 he was called to answer to their Board on discrepancies between the State certificate he had shown when registering in the city, and the type of medicine he was practicing. The only result of the hearing was that the State Board was to be notified about him. Later, reporters cleared from the room and the doctor’s wife was quizzed about her qualifications as a midwife, then allowed to leave.

Dr. White, sensing things were getting a little hot in the old pueblo, took a trip to Hawaii, returning in September to provide an interview about his adventures. The resulting puff piece, coming on the heels of so much prurient reporting, says much about the journalistic ethics of the early Los Angeles Times, and quite a bit about our friend White.

He was described, vaguely if not entirely inaccurately, as a “noted specialist of this city.” His report included a call for the United States to annex the islands (which he said most intelligent Hawaiian also desired), a claim that he had been welcomed by the medical professionals and received with honors by the Board of Health and quarantine station, his opinion that leprosy was incurable, and a litany of his purported credentials: graduation from the Medical College of Ohio (Cincinnati) and certificates from Indiana, New York and California.


Further, “he is the oldest and most firmly established specialist in Southern California, if not, indeed, the state. Dr. White treats exclusively nervous, special and chronic diseases. He has splendidly furnished and equipped office at No. 128 North Main Street, in the New McDonald Block. These offices contain all modern improvements and conveniences for the use of his patients, including electric lights, etc. He also possesses a splendid medical laboratory and many rare anatomical specimens… Dr. White’s patients are generally of the better class of citizens. His business is conducted in an open and above-board manner, and is, therefore, in striking contrast to that charlatan and carpet-bag lot of quacks who often make their advent into the community only to fleece and entrap the unwary. No sooner have they made their ‘stake,’ than they are found moving on to other places where their reputations are unknown.” We also learn that he does a booming trade practicing medicine by mail.

By February 1900, fourteen years after he hung out his L.A. shingle, Dr. White was advertising his practice as being exclusively for the benefit of male patients–and can you blame him? He also claimed to have no partners, and to no longer be found at No. 128 North Main, suggesting that perhaps his wife or some other person had usurped that august practice. Dr. White was now easily found at No. 114.


Perhaps his wife had revived the work with which she supported herself in San Francisco. White quickly moved back into the old offices, and changed his ads to read DR. WHITE & CO., but the writing was on the wall: his life was still chaotic.


As for the marriage? It limped along until April 1902, when Mrs. White (whose name we learn, only at this late date, was Florence L.), filed for a divorce from Plato. It was granted in May, and in November he filed for bankruptcy (with debts of $2051.60 and assets of $850.75), in part because he could or would not pay her $4 weekly support. Among his other debtors: most of the city’s newspapers, in whose classified columns he sought his patients. For nearly three years we hear no more of from Dr. White, who, however hard it was to live with her, seems to have owed his success to the aid of his helpmeet Florence.

And then, after dozens of ads touting his medical services, this final notice was placed in the Times on December 10, 1904:

Dr. White’s sad end was reported in the Southern California Practitioner:

He was soon forgotten, and other doctors took his place. We will see more of them In SRO Land, but a tender spot shall remain in our most tender places for our friend, weird Dr. White.

Image credits: ads and headlines from the historic Los Angeles Times via ProQuest, McDonald Block litho and Philips Block photograph from the USC Collection, McDonald Block photograph from the LAPL Collection.

A Small Miracle

No mother ever wants to open the door to find men waiting to tell her that her child has died. For Mrs. Darius G. Farrar, Sr. of Camden, Arkansas, the news came not long after Darius Jr.’s 18th birthday: he had been killed at Iwo Jima. It was three years later when they brought the body home, and plans were made to bury him at the National Cemetery in Fayetteville, that mama started wishing she had a picture of what her boy looked like when he went off to fight. He’d shipped out from Los Angeles, and had made a visit to crowded downtown Los Angeles where he’d had his portrait taken. But he had been in such a hurry, the studio had to send the prints on to him in Guam. And when a buddy mailed them home after Darius’ death, they were lost in the mail. Mrs. Farrar was resourceful. She wrote to Reverend E. Raymond Rolph of Long Beach and asked his help in finding the negative—from among all the dozens of photo studios in downtown Los Angeles, with their tens of thousands of photos of Marines. Pastor Rolph of Long Beach Pastor Rolph, a Baptist, was not chosen randomly. The servicemen of World War II and their families had no greater friend than this energetic soul, who was said to have sent more than 30,000 messages of encouragement or sympathy from 1942-52, officiated at more than a hundred military funerals, attended a thousand marriages (and performed a dozen), talked damaged men out of self-harm or harming others, welcomed a hundred babes named in his honor and somehow kept his thousands of pen pals straight through a convoluted filing system of his own devising. So when Mrs. Farrar asked for that figurative needle in SRO Land’s hay — “I have written to everyone I could think of. God knows how I have just wanted one good picture of Darius” — Pastor Rolph was not discouraged. He enlisted the aid of the Los Angeles Times, which gave the request a couple of column inches on page 11 of the April 2 edition, between stories warning of the dangers of socialized medicine and the tragedy of twin boys born by Caesarian to a dead mother in Illinois. And the photographic studio workers of Main and Broadway saw the story, and they went to their files. But not everyone has a filing system as precise, as well-kept, as Pastor Rolph. It was Winifred Thompson, manager of the Austin Studios at 707 South Broadway, who found the negative, in a brown envelope, in a box of trash. The kid was smiling fit to beat the band. She had prints struck, sent them on to Pastor Rolph, and he sealed them up with yet another letter to one more grieving mother. It was waiting for her when she came home from the burial. “From the depths of a true mother’s heart I want to thank you,” she wrote. Darius G. Farrar, 17, in downtown Los Angeles

Ancient Beasts Below

E.K. Green, commercial engineer, took time from his hobby of loudly criticizing City Engineer John Henry Dockweiler’s proposal to use fast-decaying wooden panels instead of iron or steel for the outflow sewer project to announce a fascinating discovery.

During the digging of a well for a laundry on Winston near Main, at around 45 feet beneath the street, his workers hit something peculiar in a bed of gravel. On further inquiry, the substance was revealed to be portions of some enormous elephant-like creature, obviously buried long ago. The bones appeared to belong to a tusked creature of about twenty feet in length. Ribs were found, and an enormous ball joint. But as the bones crumbled to the touch, the workmen merely tossed them aside, and continued their labor.

While we can find no reports of a long-dead mammoth haunting the silent nighttime streets of SRO Land, we will be nonetheless peering closely in shadows for any hint of spectral trunks and haunches.

Mr. Johnson’s Mickey Finns

George Brydon, resident of Sherman in the San Fernando Valley, was a prime rube, robbed twice before baring his shame to local police and newspaper readers. His sad tale began when he followed a man he knew as Johnson to a rooming house at 224 Winston, and shared two drinks with the acquaintance. Before long, he sank into the blackness of the drugged, and awoke much later, sans rings, watch and cash. Stumbling about seeking his lost goods, Brydon attracted the attention of friend Johnson, who returned with another man, and together they tied their victim’s hands with his own belt, forced him to swallow liquor, then administered a beating. Brydon again passed out, and awake to find he had now been relieved of his clothing, as well. Someone in a nearby room called for help, and after treatment at the Receiving Hospital, the unfortunate fellow borrowed a wrapper from a friendly cop and slunk home to sleep it off. If he came again to SRO Land, it didn’t make the papers.

The Case of the Missing Garter

When engaging a private detective, one seeks quick intelligence, discretion, the ability to negotiate all stratum of society with ease and elan. Based on an incident that occurred around noon on a Sunday in 1896, Joseph E. Gross is probably not your man. It seems the detective was standing with friends on the Southwest corner of Third and Spring, as a pair of fashionable ladies awaited the University Line red car trolley in the road. As one boarded, she gave a little wiggle of one foot and a tiny contraption fell onto the ground. Enjoying the spectacle of the wiggle, and wishing to be helpful and make a new acquaintance, Gross, snatched up the device and marched into the car, loudly calling to the lady who had lost it. He realized what he held about the same moment she did: a black garter with a silver buckle, which the dropper had intentionally allowed to fall rather than adjusting it in the street. “Yes, it’s mine, but you may have it,” stammered the embarrassed lass, and Mr. Gross jumped free from the car to allow Miss Saggy Stockings to roll on without him. Next stop: Humiliation!

SBM Skid Row Stabber Seeks Souls For Satan

The first known killer to prey almost exclusively on the down-and-outs on L.A.’s Skid Row was Vaughn Greenwood, that statistical anomaly: a black serial killer crossing the race line in his choice of victims. Greenwood’s spree spanned 1964-75 with two slayings followed by a ten-year gap, then a flurry of brutal attacks that earned him the memorable sobriquet Skid Row Slasher. He was only caught when he left the comfortable depths of the Nickel and hit Hollywood, where he tried to break into Burt Reynolds’ home and dropped an envelope with his name on it.

Between October 1978 and January 1979, the unfortunate denizens of Skid Row again were terrorized, this time by the activities of a Satanist who came out from Tennessee to harvest souls for his dark master. Victims were stabbed as they slept in doorways, in vacant lots or under bushes. This cruder monster was known as the Skid Row Stabber, and he too proved once caught to be a black man, whose indiscriminate victims included Chicanos and Native Americans.

On August 2, 1978, unemployed laborer and Skid Row habitué Bobby Joe Maxwell was arrested downtown for assault with a deadly weapon, and spent about two months in jail. It was shortly after his release that the killings began. On December 14, 1978, police spotted Maxwell standing over an intoxicated man sleeping on the sidewalk, searched him, and found a double-edged stainless steel, cork-handled knife. Maxwell was charged with carrying a concealed weapon, and jailed until January 18, 1979. His knife, which remained in police hands, was later said to be compatible with the wounds on all but two victims.

The two-month break in the killings suggested to police that the assailant might have been incarcerated, and after a search of local jail records, Maxwell was placed under surveillance. He was arrested on April 4, 1979, and his case went to trial in late 1983.

bobby joe maxwell LA Times photo

bobby joe maxwell on trial LA Times photo

The victims of the three month spree were all attacked close to the Historic Core. They were:

1) Jessie Martinez, 50. Killed October 23, 1978 near Fifth and Wall; charges against Maxwell for this single case were dismissed for insufficient evidence.

2) Jose Cortez, 32. Killed October 28, 1978 in an alley in the 300 block of East 3rd Street.

3) Bruce Emmett Drake, 46. Killed October 30, 1978, 600 block of South Kohler Street.

4) J.P. Henderson, 65. Killed November 4, 1978, on a sidewalk in the 500 block of West 7th Street.

5) David Martin Jones, 39. Killed November 9, 1978 on a Central Library walkway, 630 West 5th Street.

6) Francisco Perez Rodriguez, 57. Killed November 11, 1978 in a parking lot at 416 South Main.

7) Frank Floyd Reed, 36. Killed November 12, 1978 in a parking area at 237 East Fifth Street.

8) Augustine E. Luna, 49. Killed November 12, 1978 behind 448 South Main.

9) Jimmy White Buffalo, 34. Killed November 17, 1978 in a parking lot at 320 South Main.

10) Ricardo Seja, 26. Survived a knifing on November 19, 1978 at Main and 3rd.

11) Jose Ramirez, 27. Survived a knifing on November 19, 1978 at Main and 3rd.

12) Frank Garcia, 45. Killed November 23, 1978, Thanksgiving Day, on a City Hall Plaza bench opposite Parker Center police headquarters. Maxwell’s palm print was found on the bench.

13) Luis Alvarez, 26. Killed January 21, 1979 at 415 Harlem Place.

Convicted on two of ten counts of murder in 1984 and sentenced to life without parole, Bobby Joe Maxwell’s fate was partially sealed on the basis of handwriting evidence. It seems a cardboard scrap labeled “Satan” placed beside one victim matched an inscription in a Greyhound Station bathroom stall that read “My name is Luther. I kill winos to put them out of their misery.” An eyewitness to the killing of David Martin Jones at the library also testified to hearing the slayer declare “I’m Luther, I’m the peacemaker.” Luther was, apparently, Maxwell’s nickname for “Lucifer.” Both texts were matched by handwriting experts to Maxwell’s letters and journals, found in his South Los Angeles apartment.

bobby joe maxwell bruce greenwood handwriting samples LA Times photo

The trial had some interesting elements, with the judge charging Maxwell’s lawyers with conflict of interest for accepting the book rights to their client’s life story in lieu of fees, since an acquittal would make any book about the case worthless; the State Supreme Court ruled this was an acceptable exchange. Later, they introduced into the penalty phase testimony from retired San Quentin warden Lawrence E. Wilson and former guards about the physical effects of death by gas and a case in which a Death Row inmate was freed after the real killer confessed, and it is likely that this information discouraged jurors from a death sentence.

bobby joe maxwell warden lawrence e wilson and gas chamber LA Times photo

Maxwell’s victims were lost souls in life and in death. But their killer has not fared much better. Today, Maxwell’s murderous nickname has been forgotten, and in the serial killer memorabilia market, where a signed letter with a crummy tracing of a dove will run you about 12 bucks, he is known by Vaughn Greenwood’s Skid Row Slasher moniker. Last we checked, nobody was buying.

bobby joe maxwell dove art

Photos and clippings from the Los Angeles Times. Dove drawing from murderauction.com.

Note that our mapping program does not permit thirteen locations for a single blog post, so we have only linked to three crime scenes. No disrespect is intended towards any other victim.

update, January 9, 2012: The United States Supreme Court has has let stand a 9th Court of Appeals ruling that overturned two murder convictions in this case, due to the tainted testimony of deceased jailhouse snitch Sidney Storch.

update, August 8, 2018: As Bobby Joe Maxwell lies near death in a coma just miles from Skid Row, all charges against him have been dropped. The Skid Row Stabber is now a cold case.