“No, he isn’t. It’s the first time it’s happened.”
“When did you see him last?” inquired Maloney.
“Yesterday afternoon. He was out making calls and he came in before he knocked off.”
“Did he have any trouble that you know of?”
We asked the question carefully. Venneman’s employer’s face clouded at the words. “Well his face was scratched. He said...”
“His face scratched!” We could not help interrupting.
“Yes,” he continued. “Said he got into a fight with some chaps who almost hit him with their car at Delaware and Amherst streets.”
“Did he say what it was all about?”
“Nothing except that they had an argument and one of them dug at him with his nails when Lou tried to pull him out of the car.”
We had learned enough. A visit to Venneman’s house was not unproductive. His parents were worried because he had not been home the previous night. But where he was his parents did not know.
When a check of his haunts had been made without uncovering any trace of Venneman, we sat down to compile a list of everything we knew about him. He was an excellent athlete and once had tried out but failed to make the grade with the Cleveland Indians. His prowess as a pitcher had earned for him release on parole from Elmira reformatory. He had written to the head of a roofing concern which had a good semi-pro ball club and had asked for a job, drawing attention to his athletic ability. Given the job, he had been paroled, and had worked one day — enough to comply with the law so as to escape resentence for parole violation — then had quit.
A quick checkup revealed that Venneman was keeping company with a young woman whose home was on the West Side. She was employed in a restaurant in Tonawanda, a Buffalo suburb. Venneman was in the habit of calling for her when she finished work in the afternoon. We learned that the night of the murder he had called for her as usual and after dinner had taken her to a theater.
In questioning the young woman we came across an interesting fact. It was with regard to the scratches on his face. He had told her, she said, they were caused in a fight with some men in a car but he had said it happened at a different point than the one he had mentioned to his employer.
We had an ever-growing conviction that Venneman was the man we wanted.
But where was he? After leaving the theater he had been seen to glance at an early edition of a morning newspaper. Shortly afterward he had dropped from sight. That edition had announced that police were seeking a man with a scratched face in the Sokolowska killing.
A routine bit of checking gave us a lead as to what had happened to Venneman. Questioning a ticket agent who had been on duty in the railroad station the night Venneman disappeared we learned that a man answering his description had purchased a ticket for Pontiac, Michigan. The scratched face was the point which stood out in the ticket-seller’s mind and he readily identified a photo of Venneman.
Further questioning brought to light the fact Venneman had an uncle living on a farm in South Township near Pontiac. Maloney hopped a train for Michigan and early the next morning we received a wire. He had Venneman under arrest.
Venneman had been taken without trouble. Confronted with the evidence we had compiled, he confessed that he had shot Pauline during a burglary of the home. But he contended, the shooting was accidental. And then it was that we learned details of how he had burglarized homes when the householders were out. He simply telephoned first. If he got an answer he hung up. If he got no answer, he concluded that no one was home and proceeded to do a quick job of entering the place and stealing what money he could find.
“Where I made my mistake,” he said bitterly, “was when I telephoned this home. The phone was upstairs and when I got no answer I figured everybody was out. The back door was open and I walked in. The girl had been reading on a couch and was asleep. I ransacked the back part of the house and was ready to leave when she woke up and saw me.”
It was not hard to picture what had transpired next. The girl had screamed and tussled with Venneman, scratching his face. Fighting her off, he gave her a blow that sent her reeling. Her head hit the edge of a cabinet. She slumped unconscious to the floor.
Venneman said he carried her into the bathroom and washed off her face and head, accounting for the blood we had seen in the bowl. Then he took her into the bedroom in which we later found the body. But, said Venneman, in laying her down, the gun, which he was carrying under his coat, slipped out and discharged, the bullet piercing the girl’s body, killing her on the spot. Then, Venneman related, he fled from the house and decided to leave town when he saw newspaper accounts of the police search for a man with a scratched face.
Venneman said in answer to our queries about the death weapon that he had taken it out into a sparsely settled part of Kenmore, a suburb immediately to the north of Buffalo, where he tossed it away in marshy land. Donning rubber boots, Maloney, Sheehan and I spent several afternoons at the scene with the prisoner before I finally was fortunate enough to come across the revolver.
On April 5, Venneman was indicted on a charge of first degree murder. His trial was begun on June 14, and two days later, after the state had entered its evidence, Venneman was permitted to plead guilty to the reduced charge of second degree murder. On June 18, he was sentenced to from 20 years to life.
Erle Stanley Gardner
Over the years many of the most distinguished crime writers, of both fact and fiction, have attempted to crack the William Desmond Taylor case. Taylor was a big-time film director, and his 1922 murder remains one of Hollywood’s great unsolved mysteries. Some have implicated comedienne Mabel Normand, others have pointed the finger at Mary Miles Minter, a twenty-year-old rising starlet, or Taylor’s secretary, or Charlotte Shelby, Minter’s domineering mother. Enter Erle Stanley Gardner, an author uniquely suited to judiciously weigh the bizarre facts of this case. Gardner was a thriving attorney in Southern California for twenty years before embarking on a full-time literary career. His first stories appeared in Black Mask in 1923. The year 1932 saw the publication of his first Perry Mason book, The Case of the Velvet Claw, the beginning of a series that would become so big that by the time of his death in 1969, there were more than 100 million Mason books in print. If Gardner has never received the critical acclaim he deserves, it might in large measure be because of his books’ popularity. This is unfortunate. Not all but many, especially the early ones, were the perfect companion for bus or train, gripping, gritty, and action packed. Between novels, Gardner used to report on some of the most notorious murder cases of his day for the popular men’s adventure magazine True. That is where he published this account of the Taylor murder, and it remains to this day one of the finest and most even handed. His judgment? You’ll just have to keep reading to find out.
The Case of the Movie Murder
To those who are familiar with the psychology of Southern California, it will come as no surprise that when this section came to make its contribution to classic murder mysteries, it should bring forth a case which Hollywood itself could only label “super-colossal.”
The William Desmond Taylor case runs true to form throughout. Not only is the main thread of the plot so weird and bizarre as to challenge the credulity of the reader, but it is to be noted that it had its inception at a time when at least one of the witnesses described the weather as “unusual.”
On the night of February 1, 1922, William Desmond Taylor was seated in a rather modest, two-story, bungalow-court residence eating dinner. The hour was approximately 6:30.