by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Exactly one century ago, the Halloween patrol was ready to hit the streets. And with fifteen extra officers on duty that night, no crime would go unpunished.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Forty-eight hours before he was murdered, Percy Williams was living large on the last night of September, 1890.
The favorite son of a former Attorney General of California, Williams was all of 26 years old, wealthy, married, with an infant already in the ground, since the previous February—but here he was at the Palace, Stockton’s premier bordello, cozying up to madam Dora Russell on El Dorado Street…only several blocks from the mansion where his young wife Bessie slept alone in their cold marital bed.
Cradling the rose quartz pendulum in the palm of my hand, I gingerly picked my way across the dusty, uneven terrain of Sanger’s Bethel Cemetery, my darting eyes peeled for gopher holes. It was a beautiful day for a séance in a deserted country graveyard: a breezy, cloudless summer afternoon, unseasonably cool for the middle of a Central California July. And yet my palm was sweaty, sticking to the pendulum, and I felt oddly self-conscious.
If you were asked to name something you’d find in the Central San Joaquin Valley, historic movie theaters probably wouldn’t be the first thing that would come to mind, but from Merced to Visalia and Hanford, there are at least eight. They were all built between the mid-1920s and late 1940s and function primarily as entertainment venues today.
Forty-nine feet was all she had. From the moment he put two bullets in her boyfriend’s brain, Pauline Grass had only 49 steps left to take.
A balmy summer night out on the town in Alex’s new auto, cruising the countryside under a full, white-hot moon, slipping out to that secluded spot by Haig Tusoosian’s vineyards. Climbing into the backseat to christen upholstery so new it squeaked, and steaming up the glass in a heady potpourri of sweat, smeared lipstick, and Alex’s aftershave. Losing herself in his kiss…
That first night opened the door … to what, exactly, she wasn’t quite sure. But that was the night it all began—the rappings on the walls, the floorboards that creaked under invisible feet.
The man crept down the long hall. Passing doors, he tried not to look in, knowing how much he guarded what little privacy he had. The hospital in Los Angeles was too far away from his home in Georgia for any of his friends and most of his family to ever come visit. This was one of the largest military hospitals in the country and, in 1944, was full of combat injuries or mental problems. He knew he was getting the best of care and wondered if it would be enough.
Blood was not on the menu the night of Thursday, April 5, 1962, as far as Kings County Deputy Jailer Raymond Van Dyke was concerned. But the spray of crimson erupting in the steely wake of a razor could never have been mistaken for ketchup.
Heavy footsteps shook the hot, dusty air, jolting us out of our downstairs vigil; all eyes shot up to the Bastille’s second-floor VIP section — what had once been the women and children’s ward of the former Kings County Jail.
As he approached the gallows on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1923, Gull Mohammed’s step was light. He nodded and smiled at the spectators he passed on his final stroll up the 13 steps that would launch the convicted murderer into Eternity.
