A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (22 page)

The trial obsessed and perplexed L.A. People flocked to buy new editions of the papers as they hit the streets and argued openly about whether or not Clark had murdered the two men. A local radio station put out dramatized reenactments of the trial as though they were real, thrilling and confusing listeners in the same way that Orson Welles would with his 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of War of the Worlds. Judge Murray ordered a stop to the broadcasts, whereupon the radio sponsors asked to put microphones in the courtroom so they could air the actual events. Murray nixed that too. “Description of the Clark murder trial,” wrote Harry Carr in his Times column “The Lancer,” ridiculing the fever to which the city gleefully submitted: “Miss Tweety-tum wore baby blue adorned with pink spots … Mrs. Clark kissed her husband twice, the last shot landing under the ear … A mysterious woman in black winked at the District Attorney and took two digestive tablets … Eldridge Pulp, the well-known author, says that this is serious and Los Angeles had better watch out …”

Meanwhile, as the trial’s first week went on, E. L. Doheny, acquitted but in disgrace, had a stroke and was said to be close to death. The violinist Jascha Heifetz gave a concert at the Hollywood Bowl to benefit unemployed musicians. A Los Angeles mother, unable to feed her family of eleven, tried to gas herself. Another woman threw her baby from the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena and then jumped herself. A man shot himself in the head as he leaped from the same bridge, making doubly sure of his death. A plumber, his business failing, placed the muzzle of a shotgun beneath his heart and pulled the trigger. In Oklahoma, the oil fields were declared under martial law by a state government striking at magnate Harry Sinclair, Doheny’s fellow-indictee in Teapot Dome. In Washington, the Wickersham Commission (a federal inquiry into the functioning, indeed the feasibility, of law enforcement during Prohibition) was attacking police brutality, the “third degree” that appeared to be endemic in cells and squad rooms across the nation, notably in Los Angeles. Earthquakes shook Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Nova Scotia. America’s tectonic plates were shifting.

24

Telling It All

B
y midway through the trial’s second week, Joseph Ford had laid out an unbreakable chain of evidence showing that only Dave Clark could have killed the two men. Ford hadn’t shown why and hadn’t tried to. He’d failed to produce a motive and he’d failed to produce a murder weapon. But he’d proved beyond doubt that Clark had been in a room with two living men and had left behind two dead ones. This hadn’t happened by magic. The onus now passed to the defense.

“I’m going to tell it all,” Dave Clark told the press when court adjourned on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 12, 1931. Maybe we all have a fantasy of setting the world right about our actions and our characters, but for a defendant to take the stand in his or her own defense is rarely a good idea. Defense lawyers encourage the move only as a last resort. In the history of criminal law many famous defendants have secured acquittal without taking the risk of exposing themselves to a prosecutor’s merciless attack: O. J. Simpson, for instance, and Madeleine Smith, the seductive Scottish angel of arsenic, to name but two.

“The actual happenings within the little room where the lives of two men were snuffed out may never be known,” wrote Bob Shuler. “It is not to be believed that Clark will tell the truth about these happenings. It is his task to save his own life. He is an astute lawyer and will know exactly what to tell and what not to tell.”

Shuler made a nerve-shredding task sound simple, but people of L.A. knew better and anticipated great theater. The news that Dave Clark was about to go public went into the papers and out over the airwaves. The next morning a crowd of more than 3,000 flocked to the Hall of Justice, milling in the streets outside, galloping through the corridors, fighting each other and the fifty bailiffs who tried to keep order. Buron Fitts was knocked to the ground in the rush. Reporters and cameramen and Joseph Ford himself fought through the scrum. An exiled Russian general, Theodor Lodijensky, had been hoping to attend another trial, that of His Imperial Highness Michael Romanoff, aka Harry Gerguson, the Brooklyn-born con man. Years later Romanoff would become a famed Hollywood restaurateur and friend to the stars. In the early months of 1931 he had swept through L.A., showering bad checks like confetti before being arrested. But now, on the morning of his trial, Romanoff had skipped town, and the puzzled Lodijensky was swept along with the mob that tried to break down the barricades outside Judge Murray’s court. The mayhem continued inside, as the Times made vivid: “Every available seat was taken, including many makeshift chairs. Others sat on the floor. The aisles of the courtroom were clogged. Lawyers, motion-picture celebrities, wealthy businessmen and society women sat squeezed in the smallest space they could wedge into. Outside the courtroom the din was terrific, and all the doors and windows had to be closed so that testimony could be heard.”

Clark wore his lucky dark blue suit and a blue and white dotted silk tie. After several days in jail he’d lost some of his tan. He was nervous but left his seat with swift strides when his name was called. It was a warm and sultry summer day, with the temperature rising into the eighties. A chandelier, hanging from the courtroom ceiling, swung to and fro in the breeze made by spinning fans.

Gilbert asked: “What is your name?” “David Harris Clark.” “How old are you?”

“Thirty-three.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

“You were born here?”

“Yes, I was born in Los Angeles.”

Gilbert stood at a distance, encouraging Clark to speak up so the jury could hear him. They’d rehearsed this moment, and Clark had been planning for it ever since he left 6665 Sunset Boulevard on that fatal afternoon. He’d had months to prepare. First, Gilbert led Clark through the story of his relationship with Herbert Spencer. “I met him first about the latter part of January or the first part of February this year,” Clark said. He explained how, soon after launching his campaign for the judgeship, he’d run into Spencer in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel. They’d talked politics, of course, and Clark had angled for Spencer’s support. Some weeks later, though, Spencer had ordered Clark to stop running his campaign on an anti-vice angle. “Cut it out,” Spencer had said, and started to make threats.

“He said that one night, and soon, I’d pull into my driveway and someone would be waiting and I’d never get out of my car,” Clark told the court. He’d been frightened, and had tried to borrow a gun. Failing in that, he’d gone to the sporting goods store and bought a .38 caliber Colt revolver and some bullets.

Here, sensationally, Gilbert produced the Colt and introduced it as evidence, together with four bullets and two empty shell cases. This was the weapon that Joseph Ford had been demanding to see the previous week.

“Where did you go after you bought the gun?” Gilbert asked.

“To my office in the Petroleum Securities building, and I stayed there until about five-thirty or six o’clock, then I went to Venice and checked into a hotel.”

“And did you stay there all night?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why, Mr. Clark, didn’t you go home?”

“I was afraid to.”

Was it possible to believe that the tall and strapping Clark had been so frightened by Herbert Spencer that he’d fled to a hotel and stayed there all night without telling anybody? That was his story. “As he talked, Clark gripped his hands in a prayer-like clasp and the knuckles stood out white and trembling,” wrote Gene Coughlin in the
News
. “He looked neither to the right, where his wife, Nancy, sat huddled in a chair at counsel table, nor to the left where the jury seemed curiously apathetic to the drama of the occasion. His eyes remained fixed on the portly figure of attorney Gilbert, who is a general physical replica of the slain Crawford.”

Gilbert asked what Clark did the next day, after he left the Venice hotel.

“I returned to the city and called Mr. Crawford and made an appointment with him for three o’clock,” Clark said.

“When you went in, what occurred?”

“I asked Mr. Crawford if he had any information about the threats which had been made against me, and he said he’d been working on that all week and that he thought it would turn out all right. He said it was lucky I came to him, because of serious consequences for me if I hadn’t.”

“What else?”

“I thanked him because I thought it was fine of him and I asked him about Mr. Briegleb’s support.”

Clark’s manner was calm and unruffled, his gaze candid as he came to the crux of his tale. He proceeded to paint a picture of Charlie Crawford as a big politico and fixer. Crawford had bragged that he would control the next grand jury and the D.A.’s office was powerless to stop him. He’d shown Clark sample blue and pink ballot papers which Lucille Fisher would send out and would be worth 100,000 votes. He’d said, “I’m going to run things as they’ve never been run before.”

It was at this point in the meeting that Herbert Spencer had arrived, Clark said. And soon after, Crawford had made his proposal, naming the price Clark would have to pay in order to be elected judge.

“Then Crawford turned to me and said, ‘Listen, I’ve done a lot for you and now you have to do something for us. I want you to take Dick Steckel down to a certain place in Santa Monica and I’ll give you the details in a couple of days,’” Clark said.

Dick Steckel, Clark’s friend, was still chief of the LAPD; but he’d hold the job for only a few more months before another mayor came in, with another police commission, and the pistol champion and red-baiting J. Edgar Davis was brought back.

Clark went on, “Well, I had been leaning up against the table in the room and I stood up and I faced Crawford and I said, ‘You want me to frame my best friend, you damned dirty dog, you low-down skunk. You were just indicted for framing Councilman Jacobson. Now you get me out here and want me to frame my friend Dick Steckel. You join the church and throw a diamond ring on the plate and now this is what you propose. I’m going to go out and get on the platform and preach to the world everything that’s happened in this room.’ Then Crawford turned to me and said ’No——can talk to me like that.’ At the same time he pulled a gun out of his belt.”

Gilbert: “Which hand did he have it in?”

“In his right hand.”

“Did you hear the statement of the young lady the other day about the cigar being in Crawford’s hand? Did he have any cigar? Was he smoking?”

“I didn’t see any cigar. He whipped out the gun and turns it on me and I grabbed his right hand with my left hand and held the gun parallel between us.”

Gilbert, the wily and experienced litigator, got Clark down from the stand. He retrieved Clark’s revolver, the Colt, Exhibit 84, from the evidence table, and handed it to him. He seized Exhibit 3, one of Crawford’s guns, a Colt automatic, and gave it to Leonard Wilson.

Seeing that one of Gilbert’s famous courtroom coups was about to be foisted upon him, Joe Ford jumped to his feet to object. He’d called witnesses and spent considerable time trying to show that Crawford had been unarmed on the day of the shooting. Judge Murray overruled, saying that Clark must be allowed to give his version, and the reenactment went ahead on the floor of the court, as Gilbert had been hoping, with Clark taking his own part and Wilson and Gilbert playing Crawford and Spencer respectively.

“The minute that gun came out I grabbed Crawford’s wrist,” Clark said, and now he took Leonard Wilson’s wrist, struggling with him, showing how he’d tried to hold Crawford’s gun away from his body. “With his left hand he caught me by the throat and said: ‘Get him, Herb.’ I pulled out my gun and I shot Crawford right in there.”

Pointing with the barrel of the Colt, Clark indicated a spot in Leonard Wilson’s belly. “And then I saw Spencer come across the room. He was leaning over, and I pointed my gun at him and shot him.”

A gasp went around the courtroom. There was a split second of silence then bailiffs called for order as pandemonium threatened to break loose. Once order was reestablished, the only sound was that of Nancy Clark sobbing convulsively, crying for the first time since the trial began, her cheeks running with tears she didn’t bother to wipe away. The other three hundred spectators, jammed into a space provided for 125, sat breathlessly and on the edge of their seats. “Juror No. 4 fanned himself complacently, his eyes wandering over the high ceiling of the room. Juror No. 5 probed a molar with his thumb and gave it a tentative tug,” wrote Gene Coughlin, capturing another angle from the movie of the trial he seemed to be shooting at his typewriter.

Gilbert asked Clark to place Wilson’s hand where Spencer’s had been.

“He was moving in my direction. It seemed to me that he was stooped over, closing in, like this …”

“All right. Place your hand there.”

“Up here.” Clark pointed to his own chest. “I don’t know the exact place.”

“He had his thumb—well, you heard the description of the wound, didn’t you?” said Gilbert, leading Clark to be as precise as possible so his testimony would jibe with the known fact that the top of Spencer’s index finger on his right hand had been ripped off by the bullet.

“What happened then?” asked Gilbert.

“The minute I fired Spencer went out the side door onto the porch. I walked to the door to see where he was. I saw some blood spots and I knew I hit him. I took my gun, put it in my belt, and I left.”

Now the world knew—Gilbert’s “fourth man” theory had only been a feint. The plan all along had been that Clark would plead self-defense. A problem here, in terms of his credibility, concerned what had happened after the gunplay. Why, if the shootings had been justified, had he fled and driven around town and holed up in a hotel and gone walkabout? Gilbert swiftly led Clark through a telling of this, including the story of what had happened to his gun. Before finally turning himself in at the Hall of Justice, Clark had wrapped the Colt in newspaper and hidden it in bushes on a vacant lot off Pico Boulevard. It didn’t seem like the action of an innocent man.

Clark told his story in less than two hours. Then he had to withstand more than nine hours of cross-examination, an interrogation that would span three courtroom days. Ford quickly hinted that gambling boss Guy McAfee had been behind Clark’s run for the judgeship. He established that Clark had enjoyed “champagne dinners” with McAfee and that Clark had known Charlie Crawford far better than Clark had wished to admit at first. Ford had learned of Clark’s visits to Crawford’s house, and to Crawford’s office, during the period before the final Julian Pete charges against Crawford were dropped.

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Clark, last October didn’t you go out there to arrange with Crawford that you would get the charge against him dismissed, for the sum of $50,000?” asked Ford, an allegation that drew a laugh and a rueful smile from Clark and brought Gilbert soaring from his seat like an angry bird.

Ford asserted that Clark, far from “defying the underworld,” had been seduced by it, had become a part of it—a pawn and a player in gangland politics—and that he’d been at Crawford’s office on the day of the slayings not because he’d been threatened, but because he’d been sent there by McAfee to help fix “the magazine beef” that McAfee had with The Critic of Critics.

“I’m not vindictive but I want to see justice done. Frankly I don’t believe Dave Clark’s story,” said Frankie Spencer, who appeared in court again in her widow’s weeds and wearing more black eyeliner than the vamp actress Theda Bara. She looked goth and had perhaps gone a little mad, though she merely echoed what many felt. “I know that my husband never made any threats against him,” Frankie Spencer said. “The story just doesn’t ring true. That’s all.”

“Through the minds of women in the courtroom ran this question: ‘Justifiable or not justifiable—would I be afraid to be alone with Dave Clark?’” wrote Eleanor Barnes of the
Daily News
, catching the trial’s strange sexual tingle. “Courtroom fans scrutinizing the defendant closely wondered whether those sharp grey eyes could soften. Does the taking of another man’s life do things to a man psychologically? Nancy Clark—if she wanted to—could record any changes in her husband’s demeanor since May 20.”