Caryl Chessman Kidnapper & Killer

By Jessi Dixon

 Five minutes before he entered the death chamber,  Caryl Chessman insisted to Warden Fred Dickson that they had the wrong man – he wasn't the "Red Light Bandit" who had kidnapped and sexually abused two young women in Los Angeles in January, 1948. Chessman had been convicted of 17 felonies, but the counts of kidnapping and sexual abuse earned him a death sentence. But if he didn't do it, who did?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201596811

Book preview

CARYL CHESSMAN, KIDNAPPER & KILLER

JESSI DIXON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CARYL CHESSMAN

THE BONDAGE MURDERS

DONNA YAKLICH

SO DAMN EVIL

SHEILA LABARRE

BETTY LOU WILL KILL YOU

MICHELLE THEER

KATHERINE KNIGHT

SUSAN WRIGHT

AUDREY MARIE HILLEY

TRACEY GRISSOM

CARYL CHESSMAN

JESSI DIXON

The wrong man

Tell Rosalie I said goodbye. It’s all right.

Caryl Chessman’s last words, on May 2, 1960, were for Rosalie Asher, a Sacramento attorney who had spent more than a decade fighting to save him from execution. Just ten minutes earlier, she’d lost one last legal battle at the California Supreme Court – and Chessman was put to death in the San Quentin penitentiary gas chamber.

Since 1948, nine different execution dates had been set. Stays were granted seven times, permitting new appeals at the very last minute, and on the eighth appeal, Governor Edmund G. Brown offered a reprieve. Chessman, 38 years old at the time of his death, had spent more than twenty years behind bars.

Still, not five minutes before he entered the death chamber, Chessman insisted to Warden Fred Dickson that they had the wrong man – he wasn’t the Red Light Bandit who had kidnapped and sexually abused two young women in Los Angeles in January, 1948. Chessman had been convicted of 17 felonies, but the counts of kidnapping and sexual abuse earned him a death sentence.

Around 60 people attended Chessman’s execution. An article by Seymour Korman, which ran in the May 3, 1960 issue of the Chicago Tribune, described him as erect, firm-jawed, wearing a white shirt and blue trousers.

According to Korman, Chessman was led into the chamber by two guards, who strapped into one of the two chairs located in the room before giving him reassuring pats on the back. He smiled at them, and his lips moved.

He couldn’t be heard through the thick glass, but he was talking to Mrs. Eleanor Garner Black, one of the two women among reporters watching the execution, Korman’s article read. The message for Miss Asher was obvious and agreed on by those who watched his lips.

At 10:03 a.m., a guard pulled a lever outside the chamber, tipping a small back of cyanide pellets into a vat of sulphuric acid tucked below Chessman’s chair. Together, the substances form lethal hydro-gas – and Chessman started breathing deeply to accelerate unconsciousness.

His face was contorted, his head dropped back as if for a shave in a barber chair, his hands strained at their bonds, wrote Korman. In 30 seconds, according to Dr. Herman Gross, prison physician who was watching outside, Chessman was unconscious.

Chessman was proclaimed officially dead at 10:12, when Dr. Gross was able to verify, through a tube connected to a stethoscope strapped to Chessman’s chest, that the criminal’s heart had stopped.

I’m satisfied, said one of the witnesses, a Los Angeles police sergeant who married one of the women Chessman had been accused of violating.

But Chessman’s ninth appointment with death shouldn’t have been his last. His attorneys, Rosalie Asher and George T. Davis, had been successful in their final plea for writ. Federal Judge Louis Goodman in San Francisco had listened briefly before reaching for the phone to place a call to Warden Dickson – with the intent to order a one-hour stay of execution to continue hearing the lawyers’ arguments.

Through a quirk of fate, Goodman’s secretary obtained a wrong number on the first try, read a newspaper article by Times Staff reporter Walter Ames. His second try was too late. The deadly fumes had already placed convicted kidnap-rapist Caryl Chessman beyond the reach of any further judicial edict.

According to Warden Dickson, Chessman had spent his last night on earth composing personal letters, and was calm and resigned when doctors came in the next morning to begin preparing him for the execution.

At 9:30, I informed him that the state Supreme court had turned down, by a four to three vote, his petition for a writ of habeas corpus and a stay of execution, Dickson said. Twenty minutes later, at 9:50, I told him the state court had refused a delay in execution for an appeal to the United States Supreme court in Washington.

Dickson added that Chessman thanked him for everything before specifically stating again that he was not the Red Light Bandit who was responsible for the kidnapping and sexual abuse.

With that, California enacted capital punishment for crimes that did not lead to anyone’s death except, eventually, the man found guilty of them, read one report.

The controversy surrounding the decision remains – suggesting that the state’s execution of Caryl Chessman is one that may have been very, very wrong. 

I can’t explain his death and I can’t understand why he hasn’t been forgotten, either, said Davis. Every capital punishment case that comes up has echoes of Chessman in it.

A justice-mocking, lawless legal Houdini.

Over the course of his twelve years on death row, Chessman attracted plenty of attention and media exposure. Not only did Chessman present himself as an innocent man, he showed that he had rehabilitated from the crimes of his past.

Protests were organized to protest his execution, and his fight was supported by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, writers Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Dwight MacDonald, William Inge, Christopher Isherwood, Carey McWilliams, and even Evangelist preacher Billy Graham.

Chessman is guilty of other crimes, to wit, robbing bordellos and gambling dens operating in California, said Wenzell Brown, Chairman of the American Writers Committee. However, justice cannot be served by convicting a man of one crime because he committed another.

Many of these supporters were convinced of Chessman’s innocence, thanks to the inmate’s talent for writing. In 1954, Chessman penned his first work, Cell 2455 Death Row. An autobiographical account of his own life behind bars, the book demonstrated Chessman’s intellect – and revealed that he had put his prior criminality behind him.

A cat, I am told, has nine lives. If that is true, I know how a cat feels when, under the most hair-raising conditions, it has been obliged to expend the first eight of those lives in a chamber-of-horrors battle for survival, and the Grim Reaper gets it into his head that it will be great sport to try to bag the ninth, Chessman once said. All pussy can do is spit. Homo sapiens can write books.

He continued to release books from prison, including Trial by Ordeal and The Kid Was A Killer. His final book, The Face of Justice, was secretly completed just hours before his death. In it, Chessman claimed that to the authorities, he was a justice-mocking, lawless legal Houdini and agent provocateur assigned by the Devil (or was it the Communists?) to foment mistrust of lawfully constituted Authority.

The book detailed the conditions of the penal system at the time, and was well-received. Now, however, all four of Chessman’s books are out of print, but according to Chessman’s lawyer George T. Davis, the exposure they brought to the case helped bring the issue of capital punishment to the forefront of American politics.

Public opinion mobilized against Chessman, wrote Theodore Hamm in his book Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1974, (marking) the beginning of a larger popular backlash by the New Right against an essentially technocratic campaign to eliminate capital punishment in California.

Davis was fond of Chessman, but noted that his client had a somewhat difficult attitude – hard-headed and unyielding – that was frequently mistaken for arrogance. The media presented him as a monster, Davis said, or a psychopathic wild beast.

A more likely assessment would have determined Chessman to be a brilliant sociopath who struggled with feeling empathy – but no matter how he was viewed, he had become a source of constant embarrassment for the government, the authorities, and the judicial system.

The state of California’s attitude then is like President Bush’s now, said Davis, 41 years later at the age of 94. That is, ‘well, he got his trial, so let’s carry out the sentence.’ No matter what. Expediency is all they were interested in.

Chessman had already, in his own words, won the dubious distinction of having existed longer under death sentence than any other condemned man in the nation’s then 179-year history by the time Davis got involved in the case. He’d read about Chessman, followed the case, and at that point in his career, was only taking capital punishment cases.

We say taking a life is wrong and then set the example, he said. No case is good enough to justify capital punishment.

A new and better life

Carol Chessman was born May 27, 1921. His name (the spelling of which he would later change to Caryl) was more common among American girls, but was at that time a popular name for boys of Danish descent. Since Chessmna’s father Serl had a Danish name, his mother Hallie wanted the same for their new son.

The family moved to California about a year after Chessman was born, confident that the move would bring more opportunities. As Hallie recovered from her pregnancy and Chessman gained some strength of his own, the family lived frugally – eventually saving enough money to purchase a 1918 Model-T Ford that they drove all the way to Los Angeles.

Serl found work with United Artists, a brand-new motion picture company that needed hard working men to build elaborate and expensive movie sets. After just a few years, Serl was taking regular contracts with United Artists, and the family was able to move to a larger house in Pasadena.

Chessman grew up surrounded by other kids in the friendly, comfortable neighbourhood, active and healthy – until the summer of 1928, when he and some other boys ventured a little too far down the Devil’s Gate Reservoir. By the time Chessman returned home at the end of the day, he was running a fever and, too tired to even eat his dinner, he was put to bed early.

After a misdiagnosis of the flu, Chessman’s fever continued to worsen. When Serl and Hallie finally took him to the hospital, he was diagnosed with encephalitis. Fortunately, since Hallie had insisted Chessman see another doctor, he was still in the early stages.

The doctor’s recommended course of treatment was to recover in a dark room. Encephalitis is a viral infection that can cause enlarged pupils, headaches, double vision, severe, and stiffness in the neck and limbs. After some time, Chessman recovered from the illness – but Hallie soon began to notice that her son continued to be listless and fatigued.

Instead of playing with his friends down by the reservoir, Chessman opted to stay home and read – or, occasionally, just stare at an open book without even turning the pages. While Serl reassured Hallie that Chessman would grow out of it, as the months went by, even he began to have his doubts.

The Great Depression hit the family hard that year. Movie studios were no longer in need of massive sets – and Serl became one of the eight million Americans to find himself without a job. While he did manage to find work as a handyman, the family was forced to give up their beautiful home and relocate in a cheaper neighbourhood.

Chessman didn’t mind leaving his friends and his school behind – he was moody, preoccupied, and inactive. And as the Depression worsened, Serl had to turn to welfare to continue supporting his family. Dejected, he began to think of himself as a failure, and eventually, became just as dispirited and disinterested as his son.

After an accident in the summer of 1931 left Hallie paralyzed from the waist down and Chessman with a broken nose and jaw, Serl struggled to cover their medical expenses. Chessman’s face healed, but his nose remained crooked and his jaw maintained a forward thrust. Hallie returned home with a wheelchair and would never walk again.

One night, Serl tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven with the gas on. His small life insurance policy would provide his wife and son with more money than he could – they’d be better off without him, he decided. However, Hallie found him in the kitchen and yelled for Chessman, who dragged his father out to the porch before he sustained any serious damage.

When Chessman started his freshman year at Glendale High School in 1935, he was one of the poorest kids at school – but pride kept him from standing in line for a free lunch. He earned himself the nickname Hooknose and spent most of his time avoiding the other students. No matter how stressful his life was at school, though, Chessman managed to earn good grades.

But he eventually fell in with the wrong crowd. There were other boys at school who were in a similar situation – outsiders, who just didn’t belong. One of Chessman’s new friends knew how to hot-wire cars, and started showing him how to do it. After just a few days, Chessman was hot-wiring while his friend Tom taught him how to drive. Years later, Chessman said stealing cars gave him a distinct thrill to be able to get into someone else’s car and drive off in it.

Along with his band of teenage misfits, Chessman graduated from joyriding in stolen cars to petty thievery. These small crimes weren’t about financial gain – often, they wouldn’t even keep the items they swiped from houses and garages around the neighbourhood. Eventually, though, Chessman got caught driving a stolen Cord Model 810, and experienced his first arrest.

Even though it was his first time at Juvenile Hall, Chessman wasn’t afraid. Instead, he calmly hot-wired himself an unguarded vehicle, drove himself over to the outer wall of the complex, climbed on top of the car, scaled