A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (23 page)

Nancy herself was showing the strain. Lines stood out around her eyes, though she remained defiant: “I still believe in him,” she said. “Dave wouldn’t murder two men in cold blood.”

A remarkable
Daily News
photograph shows Nancy standing outside a cell in county jail, seen in half-profile, wearing a black cloche hat and black gloves with a purse tucked under the short sleeve of her dress. She gazes into the eyes of her husband who stands barely a foot away, his fists gripping the iron bars that separate them. The right half of Clark’s face is in shadow, but we see that he returns the intensity of Nancy’s look. They have eyes only for each other. This immensely powerful photograph looks unposed, like a snapshot or a still from a movie. The voyeuristic snatching of such intimate action was, in 1931, still relatively new, even in the Los Angeles press. This wasn’t because of any previous scruple, but because newspaper photography had recently been revolutionized by the arrival of the lightweight Speed Graphic, a version of the camera that would be standard for decades due to swifter shutter speed, faster film, and a flashgun attachment that was much easier to use. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, would make this camera famous through the 1930s and 1940s, capturing action-packed images of people and the streets and what violence did. In this picture of Dave and Nancy, we see the beginning of the age of tabloid noir.

Nancy was in court every minute of every day of the trial. She grew tense if Dave hesitated, relaxed if he answered well. She twisted in her chair as though every one of Joe Ford’s questions was hurled at her. During one lunch break she was standing in the corridor of the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice waiting for the elevator, when an older woman she’d never seen before pressed a note into her hand. “Mr. Clark,” the note began. “Watch out for a man, rather stout with a light suit, straw hat. He carries a gun. You will understand.” By this time the Clarks had been subjected to many death threats, and there was the possibility that the note was the stunt of a reporter, fishing for the next lead. Remembering what had happened to Motley Flint, however, Nancy was worried. She passed the note to Gilbert, who showed it to Judge Murray. Thereafter bailiffs searched everybody, further delaying and entangling the process of gaining entry to the courtroom.

Ford kept hammering away with his questions. He got Clark down from the witness box and handed him his revolver and made him tell the story of the shootings again and again, trying to break him down. “Is it not a fact,” Ford asked, “that after you had shot Crawford and Spencer you rushed to Crawford’s desk and searched it with the idea in mind that you would find there a revolver and that you intended to fire a couple of shots and then claim self-defense?”

Over the roar of Gilbert’s objections, but before Judge Murray could rule, Clark denied that he ever rifled the desk and denied that he’d searched anywhere for a weapon.

“Did you even look at Crawford after you shot him?” Ford asked.

“I don’t know if I did or not,” Clark said. As the cross-examination entered its third day, he told reporters, “I can stand it as long as Joe Ford can,” though the struggle for his life left him pale and haggard. Each night, back in his cell, he studied the trial transcript, which was now approaching 542,000 words and 2,000 pages in length. “I know that Joe Ford can almost make white look like black but I feel that a careful analysis of the testimony will show that he hasn’t caused me to change my testimony on any material point,” he said, cool-headed and analytical, a remark that testifies to the chilling powers of his lawyerly judgment. He was under incomprehensible pressure but his self-control wasn’t about to crack. He understood that the trial was all about how he projected his personality. He was convincing and didn’t overplay his hand. He knew how to work the court without appearing to work it. People, especially women, didn’t want to believe that he was guilty.

“Judging from the panting anxiety of all the women I know for the acquittal of David H. Clark, I think he is wasting time on the law,” wrote Harry Carr in his Times column. “He ought to go into the movies. He is slightly John-Barrymoreish at that. To flappers of all ages it doesn’t seem to matter so much what you have done as what you look like.”

Joe Ford returned to the attack, going for Clark’s jugular one more time. “As you went past the office, after the shooting, did you see Mr. Spencer?” he asked.

“Yes, out in front—I thought he was still alive,” said Clark.

“But you went past him—even if you did think he was armed?”

“Yes.”

“You weren’t afraid of Spencer then, is that it?”

Clark paused a moment before replying. “I don’t know, Mr. Ford.”

Judge Murray interrupted here. “At any time, Mr. Clark, did you see a weapon on Spencer?” he asked.

“I did not,” Clark said.

This was a key admission, and Ford let it sink in for a few seconds before asking Clark why, if he’d shot the two men in self-defense as he claimed, he then fled and hid his own gun rather than call the authorities.

Again Clark paused. “I don’t know, Mr. Ford,” he said. “I panicked. I behaved like a ten-year-old kid.”

After more than eleven hours of fierce cross-examination, Ford finally let Dave Clark down from the stand. Clark later said he’d never been so glad to see anything finished in his life. Exhausted, he wobbled a little as he walked toward the counsel table. Then he turned to Nancy and she fell into his arms. “He clung for an unusually long minute to his wife,” wrote Gene Coughlin.

“You know, I feel sorry for Mrs. Clark,” said Joe Ford, musing out loud.

“You needn’t be,” Nancy shot back, with the court in uproar and tears of anger and grief filling her eyes.

25

Verdicts

J
udge Stanley Murray gave the case to the jury at 3:15 P.M. on Thursday, August 20, 1931. His instructions seemed to lean toward the prosecution, emphasizing that when it came to a plea of self-defense, “The law will not tolerate the killing of one person by another unless such killing is necessary for the preservation of life.” And, once the fact of the killings had been admitted, the onus of proving their “absolute necessity” passed to the defense. “Motive becomes unimportant if you believe the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.

The jurors filed out of the court and, with bailiffs clearing a way through the crowds, walked up a flight of stairs to the jury room on the floor above. There, with the court exhibits assembled in front of them, they began their deliberations. The small stuffy jury room was connected to the court below by a buzzer with which the jury signaled that, for instance, a verdict had been reached, or one or more of the jurors required something. At 5:45 P.M. the buzzer rang for the first time, bringing bailiff Richard Gilmore to his feet. Gilmore raced up to the ninth floor to see what was required. Reporters and spectators crowded back into the courtroom, rushing and jostling and overturning chairs. “Women were shoved aside,” the Times noted, shaking its editorial head. For a few minutes the atmosphere was tense while everybody anticipated the verdict. Bailiff Gilmore burst back in with the news: “The jury wants to know, when do they eat?”

Judge Murray agreed that the jury could leave the building for dinner. They were loaded onto a bus and taken to a nearby hotel with teams of reporters in pursuit. Dave Clark had been hoping for a swift acquittal and his confidence appeared to fade. A tearful Nancy did her best to keep up his spirits. “In the courtroom, in the adjoining corridors, and in front of the Hall of Justice, a human tide swirled and laughed and wagered on the verdict,” wrote Gene Coughlin. “While the men and women who must decide his future were handling the bloodstained clothing of the men he killed, Clark and his wife, Nancy, held hands in the attorney room of the county jail, and tried bravely to laugh and chat of other things, of happier evenings.”

The jury, having taken dinner, returned to their deliberations. A little before 9 P.M. the raucous buzzer sounded for a second time. Again, Bailiff Gilmore sprang to his feet and scurried upstairs. Again the courtroom, lit now by the electric bulbs in the chandelier, filled with eager spectators. Gilmore, who seemed to have been assigned the sort of comic-relief role that Shakespeare gave the porter at the castle gates in Macbeth, came back this time with the message: “One of the ladies has indigestion and wants some bicarbonate of soda. They ate heavy.”

A pattern was set. Hours of mounting emotion and tension were relieved or punctured by moments of frank human absurdity. After thirty-one hours of debate, the jury was deadlocked. One juror asked if, on the next day (which happened to be a Sunday), he and his comrades could go see a movie. Murray denied the request, and rumors filtering from the smoky confines of the jury room suggested that tempers ran high. “They’re beginning to hate each other,” said one observer. “Anything is liable to happen.”

Four of the exhibits, the four remaining bullets from Dave Clark’s Colt, were taken and hidden in a restroom by juror Judd Wilson, who was worried that one of the others might be taken with the idea of putting the bullets back in the gun for purposes of more efficient persuasion. Occasionally the buzzer rang downstairs, snapping everybody to attention, but it would be one of the twelve, calling for ice water or some other refreshment. At mealtimes the jurors trooped out, got into the bus, and went to the hotel where reporters, controlled by Gilmore and the other bailiffs, were allowed to watch them from a distance of fifty feet, studying their faces and trying to read their minds. Who was the holdout? Was it Juror No. 5? Or more likely, Juror No. 8, the stout old man with the moon-like face who sat apart from the others? “The signature tune of this jury,” wrote Coughlin, “is ‘WE WANT TO EAT.’” Time dragged on, while the late-August temperatures soared above 100 degrees and the city sweltered through its worst heat wave in five years. When Juror John Langdale collapsed from stress and exhaustion, an ambulance rushed him to the Georgia Street Receiving Hospital, scene of Crawford’s death.

The crowds never lessened in number. Thousands came every day, swarming in the corridors. The case made the pages of the distant New York Times every day that week, sandwiched between stories about Charles Lindbergh’s flying to Japan, Al Capone facing arrest in Chicago, and the call being made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then the governor of New York but already touted as a presidential candidate, to tax high-income earners and so provide $20 million in nationwide unemployment relief. In Los Angeles, Coughlin and his friends and rivals raced and scrambled for fresh angles on the Dave Clark story. Waiting drove people half-mad with anticipation, anxiety, and boredom. It was hot, and Coughlin sat in the press room at the Hall of Justice, picking his teeth and fanning himself. The bailiffs tried to persuade some of the mob to go to another court, where a man was about to be sentenced to hang. Somehow that murder didn’t catch the imagination the way this one did. Everybody wanted a glimpse of Dave Clark, or his lovely wife Nancy, or Clark’s mother and father who were showing their support, or the top lawyer Gilbert, or crafty old Joe Ford, or the jurors—some of them red-eyed and shambling like zombies from lack of sleep.

“This was a cold-blooded murder or it was a shooting in self-defense,” Gilbert had said in his final argument, gambling because he thought his case was strong. “Manslaughter or second degree murder cannot be the verdict. Hang Dave Clark or free him.” Gilbert had referred frequently to Spencer and Crawford as “habitual gun-toters.” He’d said the prosecution was asking the jury to believe the extraordinary coincidence that neither of these men had been armed on May 20, the day of the shootings. The fact that no weapon had been found on either was easily explicable, Gilbert claimed—Crawford had been “dressed” alright, but his weapons had been removed by one of his flunkies and hidden before the police arrived.

Joe Ford had scoffed at this. He’d scorned, too, the notion that because Crawford had been “king of the underworld,” it had been somehow acceptable to kill him. “Murder is murder,” he’d said in his closing argument, an oratorical performance that filled four hours and fifteen minutes, not counting the time-outs Ford called when he needed to fix his teeth, his “artificial grinders,” as the Times called them. Ford declared flatly that Dave Clark was a liar. “Look at me, I’m fifty-four years old, Charlie Crawford’s exact age,” he said, playing up his own infirmities to emphasize the improbability of Crawford having been able to put up much of a struggle against the athletic Clark. “He has been calm and collected, always—too calm and collected,” said the prosecutor, assessing the defendant. “He’s shown no sign of nerves or perturbation. I tell you, friends, that he shot Herbert Spencer because Spencer was the only living witness to the murder of Crawford—and for no other reason.”

Clark’s story may well have seemed a little too pat and prepared, but Ford hadn’t been able to put a dent in it. After months of investigation the D.A.’s office could offer no persuasive and coherent alternative version of what had happened. Rather, Ford and Fitts were still awash with possibilities. Had blackmail been involved, and scandalous photographs dating back to Clark’s prosecution of Albert Marco? Was Guy McAfee behind it all? Had Clark been planning to kill Crawford and Spencer, hence arriving with the gun in the waistband of his pants, or had he drunk whiskey with them and killed them in a blind rage during some argument about campaign funds or another electoral issue?

“Dave Clark killed those two men and only he knew why and he never told anybody,” Leslie White wrote. “I don’t think he was bad all along. I think he was a decent man who got mixed up in the rackets and yanked into situations he couldn’t control. Maybe his friend June Taylor knew what happened—and maybe she didn’t. I’ll never know.”

Judge Murray said that, from the strict point of the law, motive wasn’t really at issue here; but in people’s minds, it mattered—if Clark wasn’t telling the truth, then what was the truth?

In the end the trial came down to a stark and fascinating question: Who was Dave Clark? Was he “a fine and upright young man,” as Gilbert argued, or, in Joe Ford’s words, “cruel and cold, a calculating killer”? The Times compared Clark not only to John Barrymore but to Clark Gable, who in the very weeks that the trial unfolded was becoming a major star. “GABLE FEVER SOARS HIGHER. GABLE MADNESS!” said the Times. Was Dave Clark really like Gable—confident, a little dangerous while being essentially goodhearted, an image of manly cool? Or did devils wrestle inside him? The ultimate unknowability of events that had occurred in a small back room reflected a still darker mystery, that of a man’s character.

“The truth is that none of us would show to advantage in the dock. It is a trying situation in which nobody looks their best,” wrote William Roughead, the Scottish lawyer and gourmet of murder. Oddly, Clark had looked his best. During Joe Ford’s final argument, when Ford subjected him to savage attack, Clark kept his eyes not on the ground or the ceiling or on Ford, but on the jury—a reaction, or performance, that impressed reporters and spectators with its apparent openness and honesty.

It was eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when the buzzer sounded yet again and this time the jurors did appear, filing into the jury box they’d left on Thursday afternoon. “Have you reached a verdict?” asked Judge Murray.

“We have not, Your Honor,” said Alice Thomas, the jury forewoman. After fifteen ballots the jury was deadlocked, eleven for acquittal, one for guilty.

“Do you believe you can reach agreement?” said Murray.

“I do not,” said Thomas.

Each juror was then asked individually if there was any chance of agreement, and each said “no.” Murray had no choice but to dismiss the jury and abort proceedings.

Joe Ford, nettled and apparently a little dazed, at once called for a retrial, saying: “I am unable to imagine eleven normal minds arriving at such a ridiculous conclusion.”

Nancy Clark, on the other hand, said: “It’s tragic, a travesty of justice. It’s almost unbelievable that one man, and one man alone, could do this to us.”

Eagerly talkative jurors spilled their stories to the hungry press. All the women, it turned out, had been in favor of acquittal from the very first ballot. Indeed, most of them said their minds had been made up before the trial began. “You played me like a piano,” one juror said to Gilbert; “I loved you from the first moment,” another told Nancy Clark.

“Shucks, fellows, Clark isn’t any Sunday school boy,” said William Weller, the lone holdout, a seventy-three-year-old former Midwesterner whose no-nonsense puritan values were scarcely softened by his folksy air.

During jury selection Nancy Clark had apparently said, “I don’t trust that mean old man,” but Dave had waved aside her fears.

“Oh, those women on the jury! You should have heard them,” Weller said. “They didn’t want to talk about the evidence. It was, ‘Clark was a clean-cut boy. He’d been a flyer. He had a nice family.’ Rot! Shucks, I just voted the way I saw it. I never believed him to be innocent. I’ve never seen a guiltier man.”

Somebody got mad, or wanted to get even, and threw a bomb at Weller’s house on Carmelina Avenue in West L.A. Weller and his wife were lucky. “INFERNAL MACHINE TOSSED AT HOUSE FAILS TO EXPLODE,” said the Santa Monica Outlook.

Clark deplored the incident, saying he admired any man who stood by his beliefs. Clark faced retrial but was now granted freedom on bail of $30,000. As he stepped outside County Jail, Nancy reached up and fixed both the treasured Royal Flying Corps pin and a pert pink rose on his lapel. “He’s never coming back,” she told reporters, and she was right. Clark never did go back, not to that jail anyway.

The second trial fizzled, even though Joe Ford was armed with exact knowledge of Clark’s story. Ford didn’t look well. He’d lost weight and was ghostly pale. The frailty no longer seemed like a performance to woo the jury, and though he tripped up Clark on a couple of minor inconsistencies, he himself made mistakes, misremembering names and situations. In other ways, too, life’s way of just happening conspired to swipe the prosecution. Star witness Mildred Rohrback, now an actress, had during the course of the first trial met and fallen in love with Ed Dudley, an investigator from the D.A.’s office and a colleague of Leslie White’s. She and Dudley had married, giving the wily Gilbert an easy handle that he seized to destroy the credibility of Rohrback’s testimony. The outcome of this second trial was never in doubt, and the jury acquitted Clark after only a few hours’ deliberation. Clark, the brilliant prosecutor, had known that trials can turn into tests of endurance, and he crossed the finish line of this marathon a victor.

“Nancy, the defendant’s pretty wife, became almost hysterical with joy, throwing her arms around his neck,” wrote the Times.

“It certainly is a grand and glorious feeling,” Clark told reporters. Not for Joe Ford, who made a point of turning away when Clark offered his hand. Ford resigned immediately as special prosecutor and Buron Fitts saw no point in pursuing the case any further. Clark was never again tried for the killing of Crawford.

Soon after, Joe Ford was at home in Glendale when he was struck down by a heart attack and died. He’d been much loved; this was never more clear than when rich and poor, high and low, office holders and people from the poorer sections of the city crowded St. Vibiana’s Cathedral downtown on the occasion of his requiem mass. Dave and Nancy Clark, meanwhile, were out of town, getting away from it all, camping in Yosemite.

Clark shot Crawford and Spencer on May 20, 1931, and by the middle of October he was a free man. His arrest and trial were book-ended by the release of The Public Enemy and Scarface, two classic Warner Bros. films that were ripped from the headlines. Both are downbeat and brutal films set in the Jazz Age but reflective of the gathering gloom of the Depression. The Public Enemy made a star of James Cagney, who shoved a cut grapefruit in his moll’s face and whose dangerous, natural, and graceful performance pushed film-acting in a whole new direction. These films still shock even today, though their moral straightforwardness—charting the gangster’s rise from the streets and his inevitable downfall—was perhaps even then starting to become outmoded. The Public Enemy features an Irish saloon-keeper and “political” boss and big-time bootlegger named Paddy Ryan—in other words a character in some ways like Charlie Crawford. Crawford was readily comprehensible in terms of the violent but simple worlds of The Public Enemy and Scarface. Dave Clark, whose story offered multiple layers of ambiguity and unknown motive, wasn’t at all comprehensible. He was a hero, or a villain, for the coming time—not for the boom era whose funeral rites these early mob films enacted.