Pamela Everett - Little Shoes: The Sensational Depression-Era Murders That Became My Family’s Secret

Copyright 2018 by Pamela Everett

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3130-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3131-8

Printed in the United States of America

For my aunts

Marie and Madeline.

Forever in my heart.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Reno, Nevada
Summer, 1978

I WAS FIFTEEN years old when I did what countless teenage girls had done before me. I lied and said I was spending the night with a friend and instead, I went to my boyfriends house.

My dad found out and showed up at the boyfriends front door. When I saw him standing there, it was like time stopped. He had to be furious.

But he wasnt angry. It was strange, almost like he was sad and a little shaken. I was fine and my boyfriend and I were just watching TV, but it was as if my dad was seeing something else, some scene visible only to him. He said he was there to take me home. We drove the entire way in silence. I wanted to die.

Back home, he sat me down at the kitchen table. I noticed he was trembling a little. Id never seen him like that. He turned to ritual to steady himself, lighting a cigarette and dangling it from the corner of his mouth as he flipped shut the metal top on his old lighter and methodically put it back in his pants pocket. He positioned the ashtray just so, took a quick drag, and set the cigarette in its slot, tip up so it would burn evenly. Id seen it a million times.

Then he started in a low, quiet voice. His sentences were short and measured.

You cant lie to me. You cant tell me youre one place and go somewhere else. You cant ever make me search for you like I did tonight.

Hed barely finished when I erupted with teen outrage that he was making a federal caseone of his favorite phrasesout of nothing. I cried, You never let me do anything! My friends get to do so many things I can never do. I have to be home so early and I cant go anywhere. I just wanted to get out of the house for once! Why wont you ever let me do anything?!

He didnt look at me. He picked up his cigarette and tapped it lightly against the ashtray. He was taking careful breaths, looking down, watching the smoke curl up from the table. The silence seemed to go on forever. I was so angry.

And then I realized that he was trying not to cry.

When parents divorce and a teenage girl stays with her dad, father and daughter will experience countless awkward moments. But this was unimaginable, watching my big bear of a dad choking back tears. He was insanely strict and we didnt always get along, but I loved him, and since the divorce, wed grown very close. In the first months after my mom moved out, I felt like he was all I had. He felt that way, too. Ill never forget seeing him like that, and Ill never forget what he said next.

I lost two sisters and I cant lose my daughter.

He was really fighting the tears now. Oh God, I felt so ashamed for causing all this. I dropped my defenses and tried to think of something, anything to say.

What, Dad?

They found themthey found their pairs of little shoes lined up in a row.

And then he broke down.

Dad?

Before I could go to him or ask another question, he shook his head, gathered himself, and went to his bedroom. He closed the door behind him and I knew he couldnt talk about it, whatever it was, anymore or probably ever. And I would never be courageous enough to ask him. Instead, I asked my mom about it a few weeks later by phone. She hesitated, but finally said yes, he lostthere was that word againtwo sisters but hes never been able to talk about it. She knew very little, just the basics. She told me to leave it alone. I did.

My dad died ten years later having never mentioned his sisters or those little shoes again. But I never forgot that night at the kitchen table and many years later I finally started digging. I had to go back in time nearly eighty years, into another world and a crime that changed my family forever. Im an attorney and a criminal justice professor, and before my legal career, I was a broadcast journalist who covered the crime and criminal court beat. I drew on those experiences to slip back into police headquarters, the courtrooms, and the press conferences of the day and piece together the events of the summer of 1937.

I also had to get back inside a little house in Inglewood, California, and into the hearts and minds of the people who lived through those terrible events, to maybe understand how they endured.

And most difficult, I had to get to know the accused killerhis life, his alleged crime, his ride through the criminal justice system, and his execution.

What I found amazed me. A notorious triple murder case that made news from coast to coast; a case that challenged law enforcement while bringing them together in an unprecedented cooperation of effort; a case that led to one of the earliest recorded criminal profiles and to the first sex offender registration law that became the model for such laws in most states today; a case thatat least through my eyes as a volunteer for the California Innocence Projectraises serious questions about whether the State of California convicted and executed the wrong man.

And finally, I found a hidden and defining chapter in my familys history with details about a grandfather I never met, secrets in the heart of a grandmother I thought I knew, the lost childhoods of aunts and uncles, and the impact on a father whose life was forever changed and who then changed mine.

This is my story.

This is my familys story.

THE PARK

Centinela ParkInglewood, California
Saturday, June 26, 1937

ALL THE NEWSPAPER stories begin the same, in the same place, with a scene thats unthinkable today. Three little girls playing alone in a park in Los Angeles. The two sistersmy aunts Melba Marie and Madeline Everettwere just nine and seven years old. Their playmate Jeanette Stephens was eight. They were all wearing summer dresses. I still cringe every time I think about them there.

But it was 1937, a seemingly simpler and safer time, and the park was filled with people. The school year had ended only a few weeks earlier and the summer was fresh and new, stretching out forever in everyones minds. Kids were everywhere, at the baseball diamond, the popcorn stand, the picnic areas, and the community pool that sparkled aqua blue in the California sunshine. Centinela Park was a beautiful centerpiece of people and scenery in the quiet little bedroom community of Inglewood.

The park was also an oasis of inexpensive entertainment and escape during those hungry Depression-era years. Los Angeles County was especially hard hitthe worst in the state. Some seventy thousand people came pouring into Southern California just that year, most of them from the hopeless dust bowl areas and all of them desperately looking for work. California was the promised land. And a little town like Inglewood with a park like Centinela, its lush lawn and trees, its pool and picnic tables, was almost dreamlike. That Saturday morning in late June was one of those especially magical days.