Recently in mystery Category

This from the Star-News: 

PASADENA -- An autopsy is scheduled to be performed today on a 2-year-old Pasadena boy found dead in his crib yesterday, county coroner's officials said this morning.

Some preliminary results could be available late this afternoon, officials said.

Police received a frantic call from the boy's mother saying the toddler was unresponsive. Paramedics rushed to the home in the 500 block of North Summit Avenue on Tuesday morning, but were unsuccessful in their attempts to revive the child, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Earlier this afternoon, a convoy including the LAPD Bomb Squad and several blacked out SUVs was spotted travelling at a high rate of speed east on the 10 Freeway toward Ontario.

WHITTIER - A woman was found dead in the back seat of a car early this morning, deputies said.

The grisly discovery was made about 2:20 a.m. in the 11700 block of Santa Gertrudes Avenue which is in the unincorporated county area of Whittier.

Sheriff's Sgt. Raul Gama said people passing by noticed a strange smell and saw the body in the back of the vehicle. He said it could be connected to a missing person's case out of Pico Rivera.

There were no details released on the missing person.

Sheriff's Homicide Bureau, which also handles missing persons, is investigating the case. Detectives couldn't be reached for comment this morning.

Coroner's officials haven't identified the body yet and haven't determined how long the body had been in the car before being discovered.

 Esquire ran the definitive Moe story on its Web site today. The tale, by Richard Shapiro, tells the story of Moe through the words of St. James and LaDonna Davis. It's a touching tale much of it familiar to residents of West Covina and the San Gabriel Valley.

Here's the final paragraph of the piece titled "St. James, LaDonna and Little Moe: The Worst Story I Ever Heard."

After all the years St. James and LaDonna shared with Moe and everything they've endured, how could he be gone forever? How could they not someday see their boy again?

The Los Angeles County Coroner is asking for the public's help identifying a body found in Sylmar last year.

The man's corpse was discovered on Oct. 13 on a hillside at Foothill Boulevard and Paxton Street near the overpass of the east-bound SR-118 freeway and the south-bound I-210 interchange, after a fire had been extinguished.  The fire was an extension of the Marek wildfire.  

He was white or Hispanic and 45 to 60 years old.  He stood about 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighed approximately 100 pounds.

He may have lived in a makeshift shelter in the area. A dog was found with him. The dog had a blue collar with "WOOF" in clear stones.  

Anyone with information can contact Investigator Daniel Machian at (323) 343-0754 or the Coroner Investigations Division at (323) 343-0714.

Reporter Ruby Gonzales put together an interesting piece about Sanford Clark for today's papers.

Clark, the nephew of Gordon Stewart Northcott, was ultimately sentencedto five years at Nelles for his role in the case that led to the deaths of Walter Collins, Lewis and Nelson Winslow, and an unidentified latino youth.

Here's the top of Ruby's story:

Jerry Clark, 17, was on his way to a hockey game when his father, Sanford, pulled the car over and revealed a shocking past.

When he was 15, Sanford Clark became the main witness against his uncle, Gordon Stewart Northcott, who kidnapped boys from the Southland in the 1920s then molested and killed them at a chicken ranch in Wineville.

Not only did his uncle rape and beat him, Clark told authorities he was made to help dispose of the bodies and, at gunpoint, ordered to shoot one of the boys.

"Sanford said he never planned to tell Jerry the story," said Anthony Flacco , who is writing a book about Clark and was at the Whittier Museum last week doing research.

But he said Clark was worried reporters working on an unrelated killing near their town would unearth his past. His concern was that his children would hear about it from others. His fear didn't materialize.

This story turned up in the Los Angeles Times and on the AP wire over the weekend apparently this guy has ties to the Hells Angels in Denmark.

LOS ANGELES - A Danish executive wanted in his home country in connection with an $85 million corporate-fraud scandal surrendered to police and was awaiting return to Denmark, authorities said.

Stein Bagger, chief executive of Copenhagen-based software company IT Factory, walked into a downtown Los Angeles police station Saturday and told officers he was an international fugitive.

 

The man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller and is at the center of a San Marino missing persons' mystery will have seized gold coins and cash returned to him to help pay for his defense in his parental kidnapping case, as the Associated Press reports below:

BOSTON -- The man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller will get back about half of the
gold coins and cash seized by authorities after he was arrested for allegedly kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter.
Prosecutors agreed Monday to turn over 160 gold coins -- worth about $140,000 -- and $6,480 in cash so he can pay for his defense. Prosecutors and the man's attorneys said the money came from a divorce settlement with his ex-wife.
He has pleaded not guilty to parental kidnapping.
Authorities say Rockefeller is actually German citizen Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who has
been labeled a "person of interest" in the 1985 disappearance of a San Marino couple.
"Clark Rockefeller" was charged with kidnapping his daughter, Reigh, during a supervised visit in Boston in July. He was arrested in early August in Baltimore, where Reigh was found unharmed. The girl was returned to his ex-wife, Sandra Boss, who lives in London.
During the hearing in Suffolk Superior Court on Monday, Assistant District Attorney David Deakin said prosecutors agreed to return half of the seized cash and coins because there was no evidence Gerhartsreiter obtained it illegally and he "has a right to pay for his defense."
The agreement allows Gerhartsreiter's defense to seek the return of the rest of the money at a later date.
In all, authorities had seized 321 gold coins and nearly $13,000 in cash when Gerhartsreiter was arrested in Baltimore. Deakin said that prosecutors consider the money to be evidence of
pre-meditation in the kidnapping and plan to mention it at Gerhartsreiter's trial.
Defense lawyer Tim Bradl said the Monday agreement also allows the defense to get the keys to his client's Baltimore condominium. Bradl said his client wants his attorneys to retrieve dolls in the condo and return them to his daughter.
The FBI said in August that it had matched fingerprints from Gerhartsreiter's immigration papers from the early 1980s to those taken from a wine glass he touched in July. He has insisted in interviews that his name is Clark Rockefeller and that he does not remember large chunks of his past.

Last week a special unit of the ATF took over the investigation of the multi-million dollar Alhambra apartment fire.

This comes from an inter-office note, this morning:

Alhambra fire says they've wrapped up their investigation of last week's big fire and now know the cause, which they're releasing at 2 p.m. today.

From the mailbag:

Mr Girardot,

Just wanted to let you know that the fate of Christine Collins has been solved.  Collins is listed in the death index under Christin Collins.  This linked her name to a Kathleen Collins in the social security death index.  Collins indicated that this was an alias she used after the high profile trial.  The time period fits and I'm fairly certain it is her.  Collins died on 12/8/1964.  There is also an interesting back story.  At one point in time, she was staying with James C. Borton in 1930.  Borton took in Collins because he and her father were members of the Knights of Pythias.  She also spent sometime in Oakland Californa in the early 1930's, with friends they met when the family was in Hawaii.  At one point in time she took a telephone number under an assumed name as well. As it turns out, her sister, at  one point in time, was listed on a passenger manifest as visiting Hong Kong in 1930, in the midst of the events involving her son.  She is listed under race as Octoroon.  Even in my work as an Archivist, I have never come acrossed that term.  It's a guess, but I believe that Aimee Dunne was of Chinese Origin, which I also thought was an interesting note. 
 
I'm planning on taking the research further and write a book.  I've spent too much time learning about this family, so I need to justify it somehow!

Best,

Chris Garmire
Archivist
California State Archives

Clark Rockefeller has hired a new lead defense attorney, Jeffrey Denner, of Boston. The move came earlier this week and may have gone unnoticed if Denner hadn't asked for the FBI to return about $280 large in gold coins Rockefeller had in his possession when arrested.

That's not the only Rockefeller news.

Los Angeles County investigators are seeking access to Rockefeller's sealed divorce records in Suffolk County Probate Court. The Suffolk County DA has already taken a look at the papers, so it seems likely LA County will get their own look as well.

What might be in the papers in anyone's guess.  One theory floating around is that Rockefeller confessed to his wife that he wasn't Rockefeller -- and she made note of that in the proceedings.

That could go to a consciousness of guilt in a homicide prosecution. As in, why else would he change his name?

The obvious defense is that Rockefeller had already assumed several identities after coming to the country in the 1970s as German foreign exchange student Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

I think the proseution theory is a good one though. And I'm wondering if there may be something even more damaging, like a confession to Sandra Boss that he was Christopher Chichester and he once lived with a couple in San Marino that disappeared.

Whatever is in there, the cops and DAs office are being extremely closed-mouthed.

Here's a link to today's story on the case.

 

 

 

SHeriff's homicide detectives are seeking the divorce records of Clark Rockfeller, officials said Wednesday.

The detectives are hoping the papers will shed some light on their investigation into the disappearance of a San Marino couple from their home 23 years ago.

I'll have more on this later.

 

I've had several emails this weekend asking about the fate of Christine Collins' the real life woman played by Angelina Jolie in Clint Eastwood's "The Changeling."

Perhaps the best answer is on Roxanne Adam's blog, "Dispatch from the Third World of Los Angeles." Adams came across some records that indicate a Christine M. Collins died in 1996 in a tiny East Bay community. Here's a portion of the entry:

One Christine M. Collins, born on April 24th 1900, died in 1996 in Lafeyette, a city located in Contra Costa County, California; this is the only official public record I could find. Since her son was nine years old when he disappeared in 1928, it's entirely reasonable that she was born in 1901.

And the photo caption:

Walter Collins' mother, Mrs. Christine Collins, who confronted Gordon Northcott in jail concerning her son. "I did not kill Walter," he told her. "I believe you," she replied. Later, when Arthur Hutchens claimed to be her son and she did not accept him, she was sent to a psychopathic ward. She later filed suit against the police for this action.

BALDWIN PARK -- Few details were available Sunday afternoon regarding the shooting death of a young man early Saturday.
The victim, described by sheriff's officials only as a Latino man of about 18 to 20 years old, remained officially listed as a John Doe at the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, coroner's officials said.
He was found fatally shot about 4:25 a.m. in the 12800 block of Dalewood Street, Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Derrick Thompson said.
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene after police responded to a 9-1-1 call reporting a shooting, officials said.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau detectives investigating the death did not return phone calls seeking comment Saturday or Sunday.
The captain at the Los Angeles County Fire Department station that responded to the incident refused to give out any information.
Neighbors said the man died on the street or sidewalk in front of an apartment complex.
A woman who identified herself as Juana Pimetel said the victim was 23 years old and used to rent a room in her apartment.
She said she did not believe the victim was involved in gangs.
Neighbors added they believed the man was employed but were not sure where, and that he was a good man.