I haven't had much to say lately.
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Ever since Matt at eviliz posted the crime connections of the LaBianca piece and then the Skynyrd site picked it up I have been obsessing again about motive.
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This is an excerpt from a piece on the famous I WANT TO LIVE! murderess Barbara Graham. Please read it and then join us up above in the next post.
Night of the Murder
The five conspirators met the next night at the Smoke House
Restaurant in the San Fernando Valley and had dinner. Then, well after dark,
they drove in two cars to the home of Mabel Monohan. Shorter and Emmett were in
one car; Jack, John, and Mary followed in a second. Shorter and Emmett parked
just around the corner on the side of the house, where they could see the
porch. Jack parked across the street from the front door. The woman called Mary
was let out and went up to the front door. The bell was rung, the porch light
came on, and there was muted conversation through the door for two or three
minutes. Finally the door was opened and Mary went inside. A couple of minutes
later, John went up to the door and went in; he was followed at short intervals
by Emmett, then Jack, so all of them would not be crowding in at one time.
Baxter Shorter waited in the car for them to find the safe
After a few minutes, Jack came out to the car where Shorter
waited. "Come on in," he said to Shorter. "We can't find
nothing."
Shorter followed Jack into the house. Inside, Shorter saw
Mabel Monohan on the floor of a hallway, lying half in and half out, badly
bleeding about the head and face, blood all over the rug, moaning loudly
through a gag over her mouth, with her hands tied behind her back. John was
kneeling beside her, Mary bending down over her.
"Knock her out!" Mary said. She handed a
nickel-plated revolver to Emmett, who began slugging the woman in the temple.
Shorter claimed at that point that he grabbed Emmett and
threw him down on the floor, yelling, "What the hell are you doing' This
isn't the way it was supposed to be! This is no good!" The woman appeared
to Shorter to be choking from the gag. "Jesus Christ, this is no
good!" he continued to protest. "This woman's in bad shape! Take that
gag off her so she can breathe!"
John looked up to Jack for instructions. "Shall I do
what he says'"
Jack shrugged. "What's the difference'"
John opened a pocketknife and cut the gag off Mabel
Monohan's mouth.
Jack gestured around the ransacked house and said to
Shorter, "I called you in here to show you there's no safe. The
information you gave us was wrong."
"John was the one who came down here with Scherer and
the shoebox full of money," Shorter defended.
"Sure," said John, "but he didn't bring it
here."
They all stared at each other, realizing they had bungled
the whole thing.
"Look," Shorter said, trying to regroup,
"we've got to get some help for this woman. She's in bad shape." Shorter
quickly searched the ransacked house until he found a utility bill with the
street address on it. "I'm going to call and get some help for this
woman," he announced. By now Mabel Monohan was lying very still and a
pillowcase had been put over her head.
A few minutes later, Emmett, John, and Mary left the house
and went to the car across the street. Jack said to Shorter, "I'll ride
with you this time. Take me back to where we met tonight."
On the drive back, Shorter again said he was going to
telephone for help for the woman in the house. "I don't give a damn what
you do," Jack said. "That woman stopped breathing before we
left."
"Jesus Christ, that's murder then!" Shorter
exclaimed.
"So what'" said Jack.
When Shorter dropped Jack off, Jack said to him,
"You're not much of a man, are you'"
"Not when it comes to a thing like this, I'm not,"
the professional burglar replied.
"Well, don't forget we know how to get in touch with
you," Jack said. It was clearly a threat.
As soon as he let Jack off, Shorter found a service station
with an outdoor phone booth. Dialing the operator, he told her it was an
emergency call, that a woman needed an ambulance immediately, and he read the
address, 1718 Parkside Drive, off the utility bill he had taken from the house.
Then he hung up and fled.
There was a record of the call Baxter Shorter made. The
operator attempted to dispatch an ambulance, but no such address could be found
in Los Angeles. Shorter had been so nervous that he had neglected to tell her
it was in Burbank.
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AND-
Preliminary investigation revealed that the victim's
daughter, Iris, had once been married to a Las Vegas gambler named Luther
Scherer, and that the Scherers had once occupied the house. When Iris and the
gambler divorced, Iris got the house as part of her settlement. Iris later
remarried, a wealthy importer named Robert Sowder, and gave the house to her
widowed mother when the Sowders went to live in New York.
Investigators also learned that Mabel Monohan and her former
son-in-law maintained a close, affectionate relationship that continued even
after Iris and Luther divorced. Scherer still had a closet full of suits and
personal effects in the house that he used when visiting the area. And once,
when Scherer was seriously ill with cirrhosis of the liver, he came home to
Mabel and she nursed him back to health, cooking and caring for him so he would
not have to hire a stranger.
There were rumors among numerous people that the police
interviewed that Luther Scherer even had a safe somewhere in the house, and was
believed to leave large amounts of cash there with Mabel for safekeeping.
With that information, police believed they might have found
the motive for Mabel Monohan's vicious murder.
