THE ICE BLONDE BARBARA GRAHAM

Preview from L. A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times
© John Gilmore 2005.   All rights reserved

It was a cold night in Burbank as sixty-three-year-old Mabel Monahan, a once-famous roller skater who had toured on the Orpheum circuit, was being beaten on the head with a gun. No one heard her cries. No one came to her rescue. She crumpled to the floor of her house and, in case she wasn't dead, was strangled with a strip of her own bed sheet. 

An auto accident years before had cut short the skater's career. She lived alone in semi-seclusion in a corner house in Burbank, a dozen miles from downtown L.A. 

Two days later, on the morning of March 11 under a full moon, gardener Mitchell Truesdale slowed his truck on the tree-lined street. He pulled into Mrs. Monahan's driveway, unloaded equipment from the truck, and mowed the front and side lawns.

After a while he went to the door to get the key from Mrs. Monahan so he could open the driveway gate and tend to the backyard. He rang the bell and waited. The door was ajar. He knocked hard because the elderly lady didn't hear well. "Mrs. Monahan?" he called. "It's Mitchell. I need the key to the back . . ." No answer. He called again.

A bulb and reflector burned from the front of the house, as did a floodlight in the rear, where the elderly lady's dog, a Labrador retriever, roamed restlessly near the back door. The gardener walked down the driveway and the dog came to the gate. Truesdale looked into the yard but did not see Mrs. Monahan. 

He returned to the front of the house and knocked again, the door edging open. "I could see inside the house," he says, "and it looked like a cyclone had hit the place. Right away it scared me. Furniture was turned over and dumped upside down, and the carpets had been pulled back. Drawers were emptied on the floor. Then I saw blood on the wall and the floor. I opened the door and went inside the house. 'Mrs. Monahan?' I called. There was blood on the furniture and on the rug. A trail of it went down the hall and I walked where it was, and then I saw what I believed was the lady, lying in the hall-across the hall, like lengthwise, her feet in the opened closet and her head, near the door to the hall bathroom, was covered with a pillowcase. Blood was on the pillowcase and her hands were tied behind her back-like with strips of the bed sheet somebody'd torn. There was blood on the den wall and the floor leading to the closet like she'd been dragged to where I found her. I knew it was Mrs. Monahan and she was dead. It was terrible. I got out of there and ran next door to the neighbor's house. I said, 'Somebody's killed Mrs. Monahan!' and called the police." 

Burbank officers cordoned off the house. Detectives E.J. Vandergrift and Harry Strickland examined the chain lock on the door. "Unbolted and undamaged," Vandergrift says. "The lady's blood was spattered everywhere. A lamp was burning beside an easy chair-a dark club chair with a cushion. A mystery book, The Purple Pony Murders, lay turned over, halved, on a small table next to the chair. The house had been ransacked, everything emptied and gone through. They'd even prowled through the breadbox and the stove. The service porch cupboards had been ransacked, and whatever they'd been looking for, it appeared they'd been desperate as hell to find it." 

The furnace vent in the floor had been pulled out, a vase emptied onto a living room chair. Sofa cushions were ripped and the closets rummaged through, the clothes strewn around the room. "Furniture had been moved," says Strickland, "pushed one way and then another. Someone had been there, left a couple footprints in a layer of dust, but we couldn't get a cast of those. We got photographs. Some waffle-weave sole on the shoe like a tennis or deck shoe. Latent prints were all over house, yet prints on the walls were unidentifiable, the finger surfaces smooth in some and mushy in others from whatever gloves had been worn. It appeared the killer had washed the blood from the gloves or his hands in the sink on the back porch, dripping water and blood." 

Detective Lieutenant Robert Covney, heading the investigation, examined the body of Mrs. Monahan. Rigor mortis had set in and passed. She'd been dead approximately two days. "Her head was covered over with a pillowcase," Covney says, "tied tightly around the throat with a strip of bed sheet, knotted then cut so the ends were on the floor. One end of the strip was behind the victim's head. When the pillowcase was removed, it was clear she had been beaten severely with a blunt instrument-a piece of metal pipe, some kind of blackjack, or a pistol."

Strickland's first guess was that the weapon could have been a hammer. He says, "But we didn't find a hammer or any other tool that might've served as a weapon. The house had been frantically searched and the woman murdered without apparent signs of a sexual attack. The apparent motive was robbery."

In one bedroom closet the detectives found a number of ladies' handbags and purses. Several pieces of luggage had been opened and thrown aside, but the officers discovered a purse hanging from one clothes hook that had apparently been overlooked by the killer. Inside the purse was five hundred in cash, and in another purse they found jewelry that would be valued at approximately $10,000.

Another detective, Roger Bailey, says, "The press dismissed the robbery motive immediately when we found the cash and jewelry, though we didn't dismiss it since the killer had no doubt simply missed what we turned up. Unfortunately, the crime lab couldn't turn up any prints or other physical evidence, and it was impossible to tell if the killer had left empty-handed or had in fact found what he'd been looking for. There wasn't a single print we found that didn't belong in the house, so initially we had nothing." 

Mrs. Monahan's body was taken to the Los Angeles County coroner's office where Dr. Frederick Newbarr, chief autopsy surgeon, set the time of death at Monday evening, March 9. The victim had died of asphyxiation, he said, due to strangulation and cranial hemorrhage. The head, Newbarr said, was covered with numerous wounds that had crushed the woman's skull in two places, as well as lacerations and abrasions, any of which could have otherwise caused her death. One semicircular mark over the right eyebrow indicated she could have been struck with a hammer, although one had not been found. Her false teeth were unbroken.

The autopsy disclosed no evidence of sexual assault or finger marks on the victim's throat or neck. "She was strangled," Newbarr said, "not with a person's hands but with some sort of soft material, possibly cloth," such as a loop of muslin-the bed sheet material that had been knotted around her neck and then later cut.

Records revealed that the county hospital reported an anonymous call around ten o'clock on the evening of March 9, asking for an ambulance to be sent to a Parkside address. The caller had failed to specify Burbank, and the ambulance driver was unable to find such an address in Los Angeles. 

Mrs. Monahan's daughter, Iris Sowder, had been married to Luther "Tutor" Scherer, well-known in L.A. gambling activities. Scherer left L.A. to operator a Las Vegas casino, the Pioneer Club, opened ten years earlier with a partner, Chuck Addison, calling themselves the California Gamblers.

Tutor and Iris Sowder divorced on friendly terms, Iris receiving a generous settlement, part of which was the Parkside house. Iris then went to New York as an actress, remarried, and gave the house to her widowed mother.

Lieutenant Covney contacted Iris and her husband, who immediately announced the offer of a $5,000 reward for the apprehension of Mabel Monahan's killer.

It was learned that Mrs. Monahan and her former son-in-law, Scherer, had remained friends after his divorce from Iris. He often stayed at her house while on business in L.A. Once when he was ill with a liver ailment, Mrs. Monahan attended him.
Police discovered over a thousand shares of stock in the Frontier Club, in Mrs. Monahan's safety deposit box in a Toluca Lake bank, where she also kept the deed to the house, her daughter's divorce papers, and a dog's pedigree.

Detective Strickland says, "Those stocks wouldn't have done anyone any good if they'd stolen them. The killer was looking for valuables, and despite him overlooking some cash and a considerable stash of jewelry, the motive was robbery. Plain and simple."

Covney located Tutor Scherer, who refused a meeting with police in Las Vegas, saying it wouldn't look good, but agreed to meet at a hotel in Palm Springs. The ex-son-in-law could suggest no possible enemies that might have had a reason to harm Mrs. Monahan. He'd been very friendly with her, he said, often talking to her, and always making a point of visiting her when he was in L.A. 

His whereabouts on the night of the murder were confirmed, and while Scherer was not regarded as a suspect, his connections with the "criminal element" in L.A. were discussed in detail. He offered a list of names of past associates and volunteered to assist the detectives in any way, even suggesting financing a private investigation.

Based on the names supplied by Scherer, as well as those in the Burbank police files, the detectives launched an around-the-clock hunt for information. Jackie Kramer, a former associate of Scherer, told Covney, "It's no secret-the rumors that've circulated that Tutor had a safe in that house and every time he'd come to town he'd be toting a wad of cash. I heard it more than once, that he'd stash the dough in a safe at the old lady's. I've heard that guys've got to talking and it's no secret, the rumors, you know, that you could crack that safe. They'd said Tutor wasn't going to gripe, because the stash represents what he'd skimmed out of Vegas-which I do not believe for a second."

Strickland said, "That's the answer. That's the motive. The fact that there's no safe in the house doesn't water down the picture." The detective could envision a hardened hood battering an old lady to get at a safe full of floating money.

The $5,000 reward offered by Iris Sowder brought several informants to the Burbank police. "They had to be eliminated one by one," says Strickland, "but then we hit a jackpot. This small-time crook called Chief by some, and Indian by others, though he wasn't a Chief or an Indian, claimed he had 'definite information to share.'"

Burbank Police Chief Rex Andrews listened as the Indian sketched a tale from almost a year and half earlier. "I was involved in a conversation with four other guys," he said, "and the topic was a plan to rob that house while the old lady was visiting her daughter in the east somewhere. The caper never came off like we were talking about it, but I genuinely believe one or more of these guys might've been involved in what's happened. They talked about needing someone to crack a particular kind of safe that was supposed to be in a wall of a den or bedroom." Indian said they had talked about a guy named Solly David, and another one, Baxter Shorter, known as a smart safe blower. "Shorter's an ex-con from Quentin," Indian said. "He's done stretches for hitting downtown hotels."

 Another name was Willie Upshaw, who had operated gambling in L.A. and worked for the city's prize hood, Mickey Cohen, then doing time for income tax evasion.

Solly David was picked up for questioning but cleared. Willie Upshaw was out of town but quickly located by Covney and Strickland. Upshaw swore he'd gone straight, was running a legitimate business, and was well-fixed for scratch. He said, "Yeah, I remember talking with a bunch of guys and someone brought up the Monahan house, but nothing came of that scheme." When asked about Baxter Shorter, Upshaw said, "I remember his name and like discussing capers and 'what's new' sort of thing. But I backed out because it had to do with Vegas and how much could be raked off before you got caught with your dick in the soup."

Upshaw had heard the rumors were of "about two hundred grand from gambling skim. But I got pinched a few days before these guys started planning the job, if in fact it ever came to an actual plan. Chewing the fat. I would've backed out anyway, because I didn't think there was any cash like that around an old lady's house. It was a sucker play. By that I mean nobody had anything concrete to back it up, so what you had was a sucker's pitch."

Next on the list was Baxter Shorter. Burbank detectives had no trouble finding Shorter. "A couple of L.A. cops took us to where Shorter lived," says Strickland. "An old apartment building downtown called the Lancaster Residential Apartments, and the L.A. boys said Shorter had a part-owner interest in the place. Shorter said he'd accompany us back to Burbank, along with his wife-neither of them had a choice, actually, and from the very start of the interview he said he knew nothing. He'd never heard of the Monahan house in Burbank. He couldn't even remember having been in Burbank for years. He said, 'Oh, this is gotta be my first time here in a long while.' He said he knew nothing about a gabfest with Willie Upshaw or anyone else concerning a house and an old lady, and he knew nothing about any Vegas connections. He said he didn't even know Upshaw-heard of him, yeah, but that was it. Shorter's wife kept butting in and saying, 'That's right-Bax has gone straight. He doesn't get in any jams . . .'

"Baxter was a worm, a kind of character with 'liar' written all over his face. He had a sheet a mile long and he'd been in and out of jail like through a revolving door. He reached a point in our conversation where he flatly refused to answer any more questions without a lawyer. He accused us of trying to frame him and we said we weren't trying to pin anything on him, just wanting to get the facts straight. Since we had nothing to hold him on, we let him go. The fact was we had zero, period." 

L.A. DESPAIR: A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times  
is available NOW on AMAZON

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