make this look like suicide-murder, planned by ol’ Walter?”
Bud whirled, the eyes wild in the boyish face. “What…who…?”
“It won’t play, kid. The dynamite didn’t do its job-the fractured skulls omb in the autopsy. You’re about two seconds away from being arrested.”
That was when he hurled the tape and the wire at me, and took off running, toward his parked convertible. I batted the stuff away, and ran after him, throwing a tackle that took us both roughly down onto the gravel.
“Shit!” I said, getting up off him, rubbing my scraped forearm.
Bud scrambled up, and threw a punch, which I ducked.
Then I creamed him with a right hand that damn near broke his jaw-I don’t remember ever enjoying throwing a punch more, though my hand hurt like hell afterward. He dropped prayerfully to his knees, not passing out, but whimpering like a little kid.
“Maybe you aren’t smart enough for pre-med, at that,” I told him.
Ambling up with two uniformed officers, the chief-who had already taken Louise into custody-personally snapped the cuffs on Bud Gollum, who was crying like a little girl-unlike Louise, whose stone face worked up a sneery pout, as she was helped into the backseat of a squad car.
All in all, Bud was pretty much a disappointment as a Boy Scout.
The case was huge in the California press, the first really big crime story since the Black Dahlia. A grand jury convicted the young lovers, and the state attorney general himself took charge of the prosecution.
My wife was delighted when we spent several weeks having a real summer’s vacation, at the expense of the state of California, thanks to me being a major witness for the prosecution.
I didn’t stay for the whole trial, which ran well into October, spiced up by steamy love letters that Louise and Bud exchanged, which were intercepted and fed to the newspapers and even submitted to the jury, after Bud’s “filth” (as the late Mrs. Overell would have put it) had been edited out.
The letters fell short of any confession, and the star-crossed couple presented themselves well in court, Louise coming off as intelligent, mature and self-composed, and Bud seeming boyishly innocent, a big, strangely likable puppy dog.
The trial took many dramatic twists and turns, including a trip to the charred hulk of the
Not unexpectedly, toward the end of the trial, the respective lawyers of each defendant began trying to place the blame on the other guy, ultimately requesting separate trials, which the judge denied.
After my wife and I had enjoyed our court-paid summer vacation, I kept up with the trial via the press and reports from Fred Rubinski. All along we had both agreed we had never seen such overwhelming, unquestionably incriminating evidence in a murder case-or such a lame defense, namely that Walter Overell had committed suicide, taking his wife along with him.
Confronted by the testimony of handwriting experts, Bud had even admitted buying the dynamite, claiming he had done so at Walter Overell’s request! Medical testimony established that the Overells had died of fractured skulls, and a receipt turned up showing that Bud had bought the alarm clock used in the makeshift time bomb-a clock d given Louise as a gift. Blood on Bud’s effects was shown to match that of the late Overells.
And on, and on…. I had never seen a case more open and shut.
“Are you sitting down?” Fred’s voice said over the phone.
“Yeah,” I said, and I was, in my office in the Loop.
“After deliberating for two days, the six men and six women of the jury found Bud and Louise not guilty.”
I almost fell out of my chair. “What the hell?”
“The poor kids were ‘victims of circumstance,’ so says the jury-you know, like the Three Stooges? According to the jury, the Overells died due to ‘the accident of suicidal tampering with dynamite by Walter Overell.’”
“You’re shitting me….”
“Not at all. Those two fresh-faced kids got off scott free.”
I was stunned-flabbergasted. “How could a jury face such incontestable evidence and let obvious killers go free?”
“I don’t know,” Fred said. “It’s a fluke-I can’t imagine it ever happening again…not even in California.”
The trial took its toll on the lucky pair, however-perhaps because their attorneys had tried to pit Bud and Louise against each other, the girl literally turned her back on the Boy Scout, after the verdict was read, scorning his puppy-dog gaze.
“I’m giving him back his ring,” she told the swarming press.
As far as anybody knows, Louise Overell and Bud Gollum never saw each other again.
Nine months after her release, Louise married one of her jailers-I wondered if he’d been the guy who passed the love letters along to the prosecution. The marriage didn’t last long, though the couple did have a son. Most of Louise’s half million inheritance went to pay for her defense.
Bud flunked out of pre-med, headed east, married a motor-drome rider with a travelling show. That marriage didn’t last long, either, and eventually Bud got national press again when he was nabbed in Georgia driving a stolen car. He did two years in a federal pen, then worked for a radio station in the South, finally dropping out of public view.
Louise wound up in Las Vegas, married to a Bonanza Air Lines radio operator. Enjoying custody of her son, she had a comfortable home and the security of a marriage, but remained troubled. She drank heavily and was found dead by her husband in their home on August 24, 1965.
The circumstances of her death were odd-she was naked in bed, with two empty quart-sized bottles of vodka resting near her head. A loaded, cocked .22 rifle was at her feet-unfired. And her nude body was covered with bruises, as if she’d been beaten to death.
Her husband explained this by saying, “She was always falling down.” And the Deputy Coroner termed her cause of death as acute alcoholism.
I guess if Walter Overell dynamited himself to death, anything is possible.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case and uses the real names of the involved parties, with the exception of Heller and his partner Fred Rubinski (the latter a fictionalization of real-life private eye, Barney Ruditsky). I would like to acknowledge the following works, which were used as reference:
SHOOT-OUT ON SUNSET
The Sunset Strip-the center of Hollywood’s nightlife-lay near the heart of Los Angeles, or would have if L.A. had a heart. I’m not waxing poetic, either: postwar L.A. (circa late summer 1949) sprawled over some 452 square miles, but isolated strips of land within the city limits were nonetheless not part of the city. Sunset Boulevard itself ran from downtown to the ocean, around twenty-five miles; west on Sunset, toward Beverly Hills-roughly a mile and a half, from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Doheny Drive-the Strip threaded through an unincorporated area surrounded by (but not officially part of) the City of Angels.
Prime nightspots like the Trocadero, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, and the Crescendo shared the glittering Strip with smaller, hipper clubs and hideaway restaurants like Slapsy Maxie’s, the Little New Yorker and the Band Box. Seediness and glamour intermingled, grit met glitz, as screen legends, power brokers and gangsters converged in West Hollywood for a free-spirited, no-holds-barred good time.
