A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept.: Your Mideast Terrorist Bombing

July 24, 1946: Wreckage of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept: Your Officer-Involved Shooting of a Teenager

July 24, 1946: Anthonette Montenegro swings her purse at officers during a corner's inquest that determined that Deputy H.H. Hodges was justified in killing her 13-year-old son, Eugene, a burglary suspect.

Director Refuses to Censor 'In Cold Blood'; NL Wins All-Star Game

July 24, 1969: Richard Brooks turns down $1 million from CBS for TV broadcast of three films, including "In Cold Blood"  because the network wanted to cut the final hanging sequence of the film.

Blame it all on the weather. The all-star game in Washington was postponed a day by rain, sending President Nixon out of town and forcing the American League to change pitchers because its starter was in the dentist's chair. Nixon missed the game to greet the Apollo 11 astronauts splashing down in the Pacific. The Tigers' Denny McLain missed the start of the game after flying back to Detroit for a dental appointment. The National League won, 9-3 for its seventh consecutive victory. "McLain set an all-star record. He had nine teeth capped,"  The Times'  Ross Newhan wrote. AL Manager Mayo Smith, McLain's boss in Detroit, defended the dental adventure because an infection had developed. It should be noted that even in 1969, baseball players were very different from us regular folks. Newhan reported that once McLain got the OK to return to Detroit, his private pilot flew them home. Then when McLain was delayed the next day, his private secretary phoned Smith to tell him the pitcher was airborne. He was in uniform 15 minutes after the game started. --Keith Thursby

Nuestro Pueblo -- Gage Mansion

July 24, 1939: Gov. Henry T. Gage's home was such a well-known landmark that The Times rarely said where it was in writing about it during his term in office, from 1899 to 1903. The answer is yes, the Gage Mansion is still standing at 7000 E. Gage Ave. in Bell Gardens -- in a mobile home park.  View Larger Map

"The Mikado in Swing." Wonder what that was like. Fortunately, we can look it up in The Times' archives: Hm. "Elliot Carpenter, brilliant young Negro composer-arranger and a graduate of the Paris Conservatory of Music." Wonder what his story is. Stay tuned and maybe I'll dig something up.

Passengers Hurt in Streetcar Crash

July 24, 1899: Two streetcars collide on a single track and the crews argue over who is to blame. Most of the injuries are relatively minor. There were no broken bones, The Times says, but people were bruised and cut by glass from the broken windows. Notice that there's no emergency treatment for the injured, who were taken to a drugstore or helped by people living near the tracks. "Even the Chinaman was invited to come into a house nearby and have his head washed up and tied up," The Times says.

Man Killed in San Pedro Over Woman

July 24, 1889: Coroner Meredith yesterday went down to San Pedro, where he held an inquest on the body of Martin Winter, the mate of the schooner Jessie Minor, who was killed in a stabbing affray at that place Monday night.

Matt Weinstock -- July 23, 1959

Song of the Islands Don't get him wrong, writer Don Quinn loves the Hawaiian Islands. But during his latest visit -- his 17th, by the way, from which he has just returned -- be became painfully aware of the natives' passionate regard for "The Wedding Song" or "Ke Kali Ne Au." It is played a dozen times an evening in some Honolulu night clubs and barroom jukeboxes, and has achieved the status of sacred music as if it were comparable to "Rock of Ages" or "Abide With Me." Anyone who dares talk while it is played is glared at or shushed.  It isn't a bad tune as such tunes go, but Don, an individualist, resents being brainwashed. And this is to alert our 50th state that he is working on a companion piece. Soon, when anyone gets weary of hearing "Ke Kali Ne Au" he will be able to put another dime in the slot and hear Don's tune, "The Divorce Song" or "Pei Ali Mo Ni Nau." :: ON THE LANGUAGE-MANGLING front, this is to report that Ivan Nemo's young nephew solemnly advised him the other day that the longest word in English now has 32 letters instead of the former 28. A crazy, familiar trend is responsible. The word isantidisestablishmentarianismwise. Let us all hold hands and jump off some convenient pier together. :: A FRIEND phoned a lady named Viola, who has been down with bronchitis, and asked if there were anything she could do to help. Could she bring anything over or do the cooking or the cleaning? No, Viola said, everything was taken care of. In a kind of frustrated afterthought the well-wisher asked, "Who's taking out your garbage?" :: NOSTALGIC NOTE Remember the good old days When odds were more than even That what went up would come down And not be a-leavin'?      -- BERTHA GRAY :: A PANEL OF jurors was summoned for duty for a civil case in federal court Tuesday, and Judge William M. Bryne questioned them as to their eligibility.  Had they heard or read about the case? Did they know any of the attorneys? A woman in the jury box raised her hand and said excitedly she believed the defense attorney was a long-lost cousin. Judge Byrne excused her and ordered a minute's recess while they embraced. And thus, reports Joe Drogichen, an alternate juror, Eloise Pattiz and Robert Sykes -- who hadn't seen each other for nearly 35 years -- were reunited. :: ON ANOTHER legal level, Russell S. Kolemaine the same day was in traffic court, charged with cutting too sharply in making a left turn at Vermont and Melrose Aves. Nothing unusual about that except that Kolemaine's job is making traffic exhibits for the LAPD for use in court cases and he'd prepared a graphic diagram of the factors involved in his own case. It purported to show that the motorcycle officer was too far away to see the white lines at the intersection. Kolemaine had gotten a youngster to stand where the officer had been and measured his eyeball level. The judge, unimpressed, found him guilty and fined him $10. :: AT RANDOM -- The business directory at Pacific Ocean Park reveals the following incorporated names: Up & Down Inc., which operates the roller coaster;Saltair Inc., which operates the Sea Tub; Deepest Deep, which plunges its customers into the depths; Hi-Lo Amusement, a diving bell outfit, and Up 'n Atom, Inc., which runs the PA system . . . With so many courtroom dramas showing up on TV, J. Robert Irons figures it's only a matter of time until one of them is titled, "Have Court, Will Gavel" . . . Frank Laro, who covers the beatnik beat, reports a new beachfront coffeehouse in Venice is named The Gas Chamber.

Paul V. Coates -- Confidential File, July 23, 1959

Confidential File All About Dedicated Citizen Sam On the final day of May, 1954, I had an appointment to meet a wiry little Italian immigrant by the name of Simon Rodia. Rodia, then 76 years old, was to appear on my television program, to explain why he had devoted 33 years of his life to the construction of some fantastic towers on a small piece of property he owned in the Watts section of Los Angeles. The reason he gave, on the rare occasions when he chose to speak, was: "All my life, I had in my mind to do something big. That's why I did it." He never, to my knowledge, elaborated very much on that statement. And I guess that -- except to a nosy reporter or a probing psychiatrist -- it was an adequate answer. For a few days preceding my scheduled KTTV interview with Rodia, camera crews from the studio went down to the old man's towers, at 1765 E 107th St. They shot pictures of the retired stone mason at work on his monument. They filmed him as he walked along a railroad track collecting bits of trash -- broken bottles, a chunk of tile, discarded wire and pieces of pipe. Rodia didn't particularly welcome the intrusion. Nor did he necessarily resent it. He just accepted it. When a cameraman asked him to climb his towers, the 76-year-old man complied, both willingly and agilely. Gradually, we -- the intruders -- seemed to win his confidence. He began talking about his project with a little more freedom. At one point he said his handwork -- the towers that stretched 100 feet into the sky, the arbors and fountains and bird baths -- were his tribute to the United States of America, his adopted home. He described the forepart of his bizarre compound as "Marco Polo's ship." He complained, without bitterness, that the city's Health Department had made him take the water out of the bird baths. And he bragged, with genuine pride, that every turret, every dome, every broken Seven-Up bottle and doll's arm, was cemented into place by him alone. Nobody helped Simon. Or Sam, as we called him then. "I wouldn't know how to tell them to help me," he would say. "What to tell them to do. "Sometimes," he would admit with a sigh, "I don't know what to do myself." On the night of the telecast, my assistant drove down to Rodia's towers to pick him up and bring him to the studio. Sam was ready, right on time. I met the pair at the studio gate. It was 10, maybe 15 minutes before air-time. I told Sam that the questions would be simple for him, that appearing on television was a lot easier work than climbing 100 feet into the air, balancing wet cement and pieces of tile. He seemed satisfied. Then, as we started into the studio, he fell a few paces behind. The next thing I knew, he was half a block away, running like a high school sprinter. We took off in pursuit, down Sunset Blvd. But Sam was too fast. We never found out why he ran. Or the complete story behind his inspiration to erect a fantasyland in his front yard. It was some time later that I tried to contact Sam again. Through a neighbor of his, I learned that he had given away his property -- his towers. He had "disowned" them -- refused even to talk about them. "Where is he now?" I asked. Sam, We Salute You "I guess he's dead," said the neighbor. "That's what he said he was going to do -- go off and die." That was the last I heard of him until this month, when the furor over whether Sam's towers were art, over whether they should be destroyed, began raging in City Hall. Sam's still alive. He's living in Martinez, Cal. But the strange little old man won't take any part in the controversy his art has caused. He doesn't care what they do with his life's work. Apparently, the only thing important to Sam Rodia is that he set out to build a bizarre shrine. And he did.

A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept.: Your Theatre

July 23, 1945: Gee, what do you suppose happens in "Motel Wives?" July 26, 1945: Luckily, we don't have to guess. We can look it up.

Paroled Sex Killer Strikes Again, Gets Death Penalty for the Third Time

July 17, 1959: Darryl Thomas Kemp is linked to the killing of Marjorie Hipperson. He killed again a few months after being paroled in 1978.

The nylon stocking murder of nurse Marjorie Hipperson, one of the most sensational Los Angeles crimes of the 1950s, was taken out of its musty files and brought back to life last year for the prosecution of her slayer, an odd little man named Darryl Thomas Kemp who was paroled by the state of California in 1978 only to rape and kill again. The man sentenced to death last month in the 1978 killing of Armida Wiltsey bears little resemblance to the "pint-sized Canoga Park carpenter" of 23 who was arrested in 1959 on charges of kidnapping and raping a woman in Griffith Park while posing as a ranger. At 73, according to news reports, Kemp often dozes behind dark glasses and uses a wheelchair although some doctors say he is faking his mental and physical illnesses and is perfectly capable of walking. Kemp's story is a triumph of criminal forensics in which investigators working nearly 50 years apart used crime scene evidence to link him to two notorious unsolved killings. And for supporters of capital punishment, his life highlights the tragedy of failing to enforce the death penalty. :: Deep veins of contradiction run through Kemp's life. One of the women he raped in Griffith Park in 1959 said he pulled her out of her car by her hair and tore at her clothes like a wild man before choking her viciously. But to his family, he was just the opposite. "He was gentle," his wife, Maria, said. "Sometimes he would be kind of strange, but he was never violent.  He's not very big or strong and I can't believe he could commit any kind of violent attack on anyone." Born in 1936 in New Jersey, Kemp came to Los Angeles with his family in 1946 and his father got a job with a packing company. The second-oldest of four children, Kemp had a normal childhood, according to his parents, Thomas and Ida, and got good grades in school. His parents said his behavior changed radically in 1951, at the age of 16, when he was knocked unconscious while playing football. Kemp became moody and "strange," his father testified in 1959. A defense attorney in the 2008 murder trial said Kemp was dazed and disoriented for two weeks after the injury and didn't undress before taking showers, according to the Contra Costa Times.   After the injury, Kemp was arrested for the first time, on charges of stripping a car, and his  behavior problems evidently continued. Conflicting news accounts say he was seen by a psychiatrist either a month before -- or after --Hipperson was killed.  "Darryl is a sick boy -- much sicker than we ever realized," his parents said after his arrest in 1959, "and we want to see to it that he has the psychiatric treatment he needs." :: On July 9, 1957, the night she was killed, Marjorie Lucille Hipperson, 24, had just come home from a wedding shower at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital where she was a nurse and her fiance, Dr. Walter Deike, was an intern.  He was on duty and called away from the party, so Hipperson wrote him a note before she left: "Dear Walter: I hope you don't have too tough a night. Get a lot of sleep. I love you. Marjorie." When she didn't report for work the next day, Deike came by her apartment at 3737 Los Feliz Blvd. and found her strangled with a nylon and gagged with a washcloth held in place with another nylon. She had been tied at one point and obviously put up a fight with the killer. The landlady said Dieke came out of the apartment in a state of shock. "She's dead!" he shouted. Investigators found that in the previous six months half a dozen women living in apartment houses in the neighborhood had reported intruders and peeping Toms. In fact one of Hipperson's roommates reported that a young man had barged into the apartment and confronted her while she was lying on her bed. The roommate grabbed her purse off the nightstand and the man laughed and ran. After that, the roommates had moved out. Hipperson was planning to leave at the end of the month and had already disconnected the phone. Although she had chained the door, the killer had entered through a kitchen window she had left unlatched, police said. Investigators found numerous fingerprints and hand prints in the apartment, including two that were particularly interesting: One on the wall over the head of the bed and another near the kitchen window. In the next two years, police fingerprinted 180,000 men in hopes of matching one of them to the prints found in Hipperson's apartment, but none of them was the killer, The Times said. [That would be 246 men a day for two years, which doesn't seem likely, but that's what the paper said]. :: On July 17, 1959, an unidentified woman was driving along Mt. Hollywood near Vista del Valle Drive in Griffith Park when a man she assumed was a park ranger made her stop and told her: "Turn around, this road is closed." Suddenly, he jumped from his truck, pulled the woman out of her car by her hair and dragged her to some bushes, where he "tore at the woman's clothing like a madman," a detective said. He ripped off one of her silk stockings and tried to strangle her. When she fought back, he tried to tie her hands. She later testified that he said: "I am going to murder you like I did the Hipperson woman." The woman passed out and awakened when the man opened her eyelids "as if to see if I was dead," she said. The man rushed to his truck and tried to run her down but he was frightened away by another car. Four hours later, he was arrested after a chase by two LAPD motorcycle officers who had gotten a description of his truck. His prints matched one taken from wall over Hipperson's bed. The killer was identified as Darryl Thomas Kemp. :: From his first moment in court in July 1959, it was clear that Kemp was odd. The Times reported that he stood up four times during his arraignment and said; "I have to go home. My wife's waiting for me." Kemp was sullen when he entered the courtroom but quickly became "a sobbing young man apparently near hysteria ... staring ... frightened." The Times said: A thin quavering voice brought a shocked hush in Municipal Judge Louis Kaufman's court yesterday. The speaker was Darryl Thomas Kemp, facing arraignment for the brutal murder of nurse Marjorie Hipperson. "Will you let me go home?" he had asked with the direct simplicity of a child and almost in a child's voice. [Judge Louis Kaufmann] "addressed Kemp by name and the prisoner rose slowly to his feet to dumbfound the court with his request so completely out of step with the harsh reality of his presence in the courtroom. "Do you know why you are here?" asked Judge Kaufman. "Is she mad at me--my wife?" Kemp asked in the same querulous voice. Suddenly the prisoner fainted and slumped to the floor. On New Year's Eve, Kemp was convicted of murdering Hipperson. The jury found him sane and gave him the death penalty. He was sentenced to death in February 1960 and also received two consecutive prison terms on two counts of rape and one count of kidnapping involving two women he raped in Griffith Park. :: Once Kemp was in prison, his case unfolded in slow motion. In March 1960, while on death row, he slashed his wrists with a razor blade, requiring 30 stitches. A year later, the California Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence, set for June 21, 1961. Two days before Kemp's date with the gas chamber, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas granted a stay of execution and in September 1961, Kemp was found to be "presently insane," a distinction meaning that he was sane at the time of the killing but insane at the present moment. Kemp was sent to the California Medical Institution at Vacaville, where he was treated until December 1968, when he was transferred to Atascadero State Hospital. In February 1969, doctors said Kemp had regained his sanity, but before he could be returned to death row, the California Supreme Court was forced to reverse his sentence because of a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision on improperly excusing prospective jurors over their views on the death penalty. :: In May 1970, jury selection began to determine whether Kemp should once again be given the death penalty. By now, much of the evidence had been destroyed, several witnesses had died or disappeared and some of Kemp's statements were no longer admissible because of the Miranda rights, which had been introduced after he was convicted. Two months later, despite these challenges, Kemp, now 34, was again given the death penalty for killing Hipperson. Kemp spent two more years on death row. Then in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned California's death penalty. Kemp was among 102 men on death row who became eligible for parole when their sentences were converted to life in prison. He was paroled to Pleasant Hill, Calif., in July 1978 and began a relationship with a woman who had been writing to him while he was behind bars as part of a program at Diablo Valley College. ::   Armida Wiltsey, who was killed by Darryl Thomas Kemp in November 1978 while jogging. On Nov. 14, 1978, Armida Wiltsey, the 40-year-old wife of a Kaiser Steel executive, went jogging on a popular trail around the Lafayette Reservoir, off California 24 between Berkeley and Walnut Creek. A search for her began after she failed to pick up her 10-year-old son from school and a police dog found her body about 60 feet off the running path. She had been raped and strangled after putting up a terrific fight, judging by traces of the killer's blood found under her fingernails. According to the Contra Costa Times, investigators eventually decided that Wiltsey had probably been murdered by serial killer Phillip Hughes, a school janitor who was convicted in 1980 of killing three other women and is suspected in many other deaths. In 2000, as DNA testing became more sophisticated, the blood taken from beneath Wiltsey's fingernails was compared to a sample from Hughes with stunning results: He wasn't the killer. :: In the meantime, Kemp had moved to Austin, Texas, and in 1983, he broke into the home of six university students and raped and choked them, drawing a life sentence.  With Hughes eliminated as a suspect by DNA testing, Contra Costa County Sheriff's Detective Roxane Gruenheid took up the long-unsolved Wiltsey case. In reading the records, she noticed that investigators had interviewed Darryl Thomas Kemp, a paroled sex killer, two weeks after the Wiltsey murder following his arrest in Walnut Creek as a peeping Tom. A girlfriend, his former prison pen pal, had provided an alibi for him at the time Wiltsey was killed, but as a precaution, investigators took samples of Kemp's hair. Although the hair samples had been retained for more than 20 years, they had degraded too much for DNA testing. A Texas judge ordered Kemp to give a blood sample for testing. He matched. :: Darryl Thomas Kemp in a 1978 booking photo. In October 2008, five years after he was linked to the crime, Kemp went on trial in Contra Costa County in Wiltsey's killing. He was now 72 years old and according to news reports, he wore dark glasses, used a hearing device and dozed in his wheelchair during most of the trial. Psychiatrists were divided on Kemp's mental evaluations. Defense experts said he had brain damage while conceding that other analysts said he was faking his mental and physical problems. Several of Kemp's victims testified, including one of the women he raped in Texas in 1983 and a woman he raped in Griffith Park in 1959. Prosecutor Mark Peterson told jurors of the Hipperson killing, but was not allowed to add that Kemp had been given the death penalty twice in that case. During the trial, Kemp's lawyers mounted a defense that skirted the charges. They said Kemp was guilty of sodomy rather than rape, that he choked Wiltsey to get control of her and didn't mean to kill her, and that the distance she was found from the jogging path wasn't enough to constitute kidnapping.   The jury quickly rejected the defense arguments and after two hours' deliberations, convicted Kemp on Dec. 3, 2008, of first-degree murder. Later that month they gave him the death penalty and in June, at the age of 73, Darryl Thomas Kemp was sentenced to die -- for the third time. :: Without going too far into armchair psychology, it seems Kemp selected a particular kind of victim. Rather than preying on those engaged in high-risk behavior such as streetwalking or picking up men in bars, Kemp chose wholesome, middle-class women who did nothing more dangerous than leaving a window unlatched, like Hipperson , or venturing into rugged terrain like Griffith Park or Lafayette Reservoir. Based on fragmentary evidence in the public record, none of his victims was a woman who could be expected to come to a bad end. And in one other tragic parallel, the deaths of Hipperson and Wiltsey were absolutely devastating to the men they left behind. Deike, who found Hipperson's body, married another woman, but he drowned in Mendocino Bay five years after the killing and many speculate that it was a suicide. During Kemp's sentencing, jurors wept as Wiltsey's husband, Boyd, testified: "I was just devastated ... and that stayed with me day and night for years," according to the Contra Costa Times. "It made me realize how valuable the things you have are because when you lose them you really know -- I really know how much I loved Armida. I probably didn't show her enough and I regret that." :: After he was sentenced to death last month, Kemp raised his head and opened his eyes, having hunched down in his wheelchair during the trial, according to the Contra Costa Times. He asked his attorneys: "Is that it?" Epilogue: Kemp was questioned in 1959 about the killings of Ruth Goldsmith, Barbara Jepson and Esther Greenwald, but the results were never reported. Defense attorneys in his 2008 trial said he raped about 11 women.

Photo Helps Catch Horse Thief

July 23, 1899: A horse thief is caught by deputies using a photograph showing him and the victim, a former friend.

Rape, Molestation Case Reveals 'Depths of Depravity'

July 23, 1889: Siegel the Hatter has flannel shirts!

July 23, 1889: The marriage of James Edgecomb and the ensuing trial, below.

But the story gets better... 



Aug. 3, 1889: "Depths of Depravity" -- now there's a headline that says: "Read me."