July 17, 2023 • 41 mins
When a powerful businessman in Alaska is murdered in his bed in 1953, the police believe that it might have been a break-in gone wrong. But as details about his personal life made headlines, investigators turned to several new suspects. Author James T. Bartlett discusses the potential motives at the center of this story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
His grandchildren, even great grandchildren, they all just said to me.
No one ever talked about it. We never knew what happened.
It was never sold, no one ever discussed it. It
was just a family secret. I don't know what happened.
I can't help you. Please tell me if you find
out anything.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold War Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold War
Wicked presents Wicked Words is at the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. When a powerful businessman in Alaska is
murdered in his bed in nineteen fifty three, the police
(01:14):
believe it might have been a break in gone wrong,
but as details about his personal life make headlines. Investigators
turned to several new suspects. Author James T. Bartlett tells
us the story at the center of his book The
Alaskan Blonde set the scene for me, where are we?
What is this time period?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Like? This was nineteen fifties Alaska nineteen fifty three nineteen
fifty four specifically, And the first thing that I found
out that I didn't know was that Alaska was a
territory then, it wasn't a state. I didn't know that
it didn't become a state until nineteen fifty nine. And
that pretty much meant that, as most Alaskans kind of
still think today, they were kind of ignored. Most Americans,
(01:57):
as I found out, really don't know a lot about
itsa even now they know it's a very very long
way away. It's way up north, past Canada, very cold,
very cold. Most people would have just said, Alaska, that's
way up north, isn't it. Aren't they trying to become
part of the US. That's really all that people knew.
And so the fifties in Alaska was very much a
(02:18):
place that we might recognize in other parts of the world.
You know, it was still very strong, sort of society
rules and expectations. You know, the man was the bread
winner and the woman was the homemaker. They were very
common things as well. But Alaska is a very separate
place to America. You know, they didn't consider themselves to
be really American. They were Alaskans first.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So let's get into the story. Tell me about the couple.
Cecil and his wife, Diane Wells. They're in Fairbanks, Alaska, right.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yes, that's right. They've been married a few years by
this time. They have a young son, Mark. They've been
in Fairbank. Cecil is he's in his early fifties. He's
a very successful businessman what they called in those days.
He was a pioneer of Alaska. He was very well
known as especially Anchorage as well, which is the biggest
town by far in alask He was very well known there.
He had come up to Fairbanks. He's very well known
(03:06):
for his car dealerships. He had mining interests, he had
real estate interests. He was a very rich, successful man.
He'd also been married four times, so he had a
number of children already, some who were adult children already.
And Diane was twenty years younger. She was young and blonde,
and she was the fifth wife, and as members of
the family told me, she was very different from all
(03:29):
his other wives. That's what they said, because she was
much younger. She was the trophy wife, and as such,
he bought a lots of furs and jewelry, and you know,
they lived very well, but in that same sort of
a gilded cage element. I think, to an extent, you
were expect to behave in a certain way. You were
the attractive young wife, you were the glamorous hostess. You know,
(03:50):
you stayed at home, you looked after the children. It
was kind of the deal. And I believe their relationship
was genuine enough. I'm absolutely sure they had genuine feelings
for each other. For sure. They traveled a lot, and
they were a glam couple. They were like sort of
a list couple.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
How are they an alest couple in Alaska? Though? It
just seems like both of these people would feel trapped
in an environment that you have described as being sort
of rough and rugged.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It is very much a challenge. Cecil had been an
anchorage previously. He'd been in Alaska for a number of
years two and fourth. He was well aware of how
that worked, and he was seemed to be very comfortable
with it. It would have been a big change for
her to come there. And it was true that when
she came, Cecil asked, believe it or not, his former
sister in law to sort of be a consort for
(04:37):
Diane when she arrived in Fairbanks, because he knew it
was going to be a challenge. It was going to
be a challenge. You know, this is months of winter
where you could be stuck in the house because of
the snow. The weather's really difficult. It's going to be
very much a lifestyle change. I mean, I've been up
to Fairbanks a couple of times. It's a lifestyle to
live in Alaska in any level. And I think also
the culture there. It's very much a drinking culture, very
(04:59):
much male dominated culture, massively dominated because of the army
bases nearby, so there are enormous amounts of men in
town rather than a sort of even an equitable parity.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Does that equal high crime in this time period, Yeah, a.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Lot of the problems were like we would expect in
a town, you know, alcohol, gambling, fighting, that kind of thing.
There was a lot of crime, robbery, there's a lot
of money around, there's a lot of people working there,
who you know, not necessarily with gold dust in their pockets,
but a lot of people are working. They have money
and are getting paid and can't necessarily do a lot
with it. You know, during the winter, you can't get out,
(05:36):
you can't really go to many places. So there's a
lot of people with a lot of money. And there
was violent crime as well, especially of a domestic variety.
But again that's the case for everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Tell me about Diane before she meets Cecil. Did you
find a lot of information about what her life was like,
what her relationships were like.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Initially, I thought I was going to be laughing when
I tried to look into the story of Diane, because
I did, like everybody does these days, a Google search
for her to try and find out the story of her,
and I came across a hit immediately, for obviously her
son that she had had with Cecil, and a daughter
that she'd had from a previous marriage from her first marriage.
I did eventually manage to contact Cecil and Diane's son,
(06:18):
because I managed to find Diane's second daughter, her eldest
daughter that wasn't mentioned in any of the newspaper articles
at the time. Diane had two daughters already, and it
turned out she was estranged from them after her first
marriage ended. She never saw her children again, which was
extremely sad. I don't think she was allowed to have
much contact with her children. So when she met Cecil,
(06:41):
it's likely she never discussed that she had two children.
Maybe she felt she didn't.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Okay, So let me summarize. We've got two people, Diane
and Cecil, who are not from Alaska, but they are
living in Fairbanks, which is not a very large city
by American standards in the nineteen fifties, very conservative area.
This bombshell blonde who seems to really love her husband,
even though there's quite a big age difference. And then
(07:07):
you've got a man on his fifth marriage who is
very very successful. This seems on the surface like a
good situation going into what turns out to be a very,
very big tragedy.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah. The night when it all started was nineteen fifty three,
October seventeenth. Early in the morning that morning, actually Diane
bashed on the door of her neighbor. They lived in
the north of the building which is still there in
downtown Fairbanks. It was considered to be the most fancy
building of the time. I guess it's what we would
call now, like a service building. So early in that
morning she banged on the door of a neighbor and
(07:41):
she was crying. She was hysterical, and she said two
men broke into the apartment and shot Cecil and beat
me up. The police were called. They came round. Cecil
was dead in his bed, shot while he was asleep.
Diane had like a big puffy face, like a split lip,
a black eye. She was taken to the hospital and
the police investigation began. There was a new chief of police,
(08:03):
he'd only been in the job a few months. There
was a new district attorney. But what happened within twenty
four hours, you know, there'd been the inquest and the autopsy,
and it was established that he'd been shot in the
head at relatively close range.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
One shot.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
They found two bullets. Actually, okay, they found two bullets.
One was still in his head and one was in
the bedding. That was her talk, and she said that
two men had broken in. She woke up in bed,
there was two men standing there and one had almost
immediately shot him. She'd run for the hall or for
the front room. He'd grabbed her hit her over the
head with like a flower pot, which I guess was
the nearest thing to hand, and when she woke up
(08:38):
she went into the bedroom he was dead.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Signs of a break in or now, well, I.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Mean you would think a break in maybe you know,
the chain on the door would be broken, or there'd
be some sort of big mark or some kick through
of the door. Unfortunately, the couple lived on the eighth floor,
the top floor of the building, which was unusual. People
who are thieving don't usually go to the top floor
of a building to steal. They'll usually go to the
ground floor because that's the quickest exit.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Something easier, much easier.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
There had been a number of home invasion burglaries recently
that had happened, and they had also been a home
invasion burglaries of rich businessmen. Diane said that what had
happened was they had must have got a spare key
in some way and come through an adjoining door. They
had two apartments together, you know, like you get adjoining
hotel rooms and sometimes there's a door between them. They
had had two apartments, not knocked together, but they owned two.
(09:25):
She said that they had gone into one of the
other apartments gone through the adjoining door, and that's how
they got into the apartment, so there wasn't any break
in per se. But of course people were then thinking, well, wait,
so how did they get into the first apartment?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
All right?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
How did they get keys? Or you know, people were saying, well,
in that case, were they let it? It didn't seem
necessarily that much money or jewelry had been taken. The
house didn't seem to have been particularly roughed up or
anything for someone searching, as two burglars might have done.
There were some fingerprints, some bloody fingerprints, but again this
is the fiftieth so all they managed to get was
(09:58):
a blood group. They never link any of the fingerprints
to any person. There was obviously Cecil and Diane's in
the apartment, but no one else is. They had one
other set, but they were never able to find who
that third set of fingerprints was. And then within a
few days the police got a tip that she'd been
having an affair, and that was when Johnny Warren came
into the picture, and of course so the police wanted
(10:19):
to talk to him immediately, and it emerged that morning
in the early ears of that that he'd left town.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Okay, so we have Cecil and Diana sleep. Cecil is
shot dead by two men. Diane is beaten up as
she's trying to run away, and there is no sign
of a break in. She's theorizing that maybe they came
through an apartment, didn't rummage through that apartment to get
into another apartment, when it's likely that many people in
the building had as much money as Cecil did, I
(10:45):
would assume, I mean, this is a wealthier building. Yeah,
And the police have picked up a couple of sets
of prints, but nothing that's been particularly useful, as is
the blood evens is not very useful either. And then
she has a lover. What is the situation with Johnny
that makes him controversial in this story?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
In this particular story, the controversial element is that he's
a black guy. He lived there and was married. He
was married to a white woman, Clara. They've been married
for quite a few years. He was a traveling musician.
He'd been a musician for years since his teens, so
it wasn't unusual he was there. Alaska and Fairbanks especially
was quite not a party town. But there were a
(11:22):
couple of streets. Second Avenue especially well known for all
being bars and restaurants, and so he played a lot.
He was a well known local musician, and it turned
out that they maybe had had an affair. There was
a great photo which is in the book of a
Big Fancy Dinner where Johnny is playing the drums in
the background on the stage. There's a band on the
stage and you can see all the people sitting at
(11:42):
the long tables, and there's Cecil and Diana on one side.
And that's supposed to have been the night Labor Day,
the Labor Day dinner where they met for the first time,
and he realizing where things were going, he had gone
down to Oakland.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
This is Johnny, right, Johnny.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yes, Johnny had gone down to Oakland in California. That
was where he traveled to. And he'd gone with two
other people. Actually, he'd gone with his young daughter and
someone else, so he wasn't on the run. He probably
got a call or probably read about it or heard
about it, and he voluntarily went to the police in Oakland,
and he basically talked to them for a long stretch
of time, many many pages of interview, and basically it
(12:17):
was very clear reading from it anyway, that they had
been having an affair. There was definitely an intimacy between them.
He said that they had met a number of times
at the Wells's apartment. Even he even had some love letters.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So when this person calls in or reports to the
police that Diane is having an affair with a black man,
Johnny who's a musician, what is her response.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Oh, she denied it all the way through. I mean,
she denied the relationship all the way through. And she
also said it was two men who broke in and
shot Cesla and beat me up. She said that all
the way through, right till the end.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
But she couldn't identify these men.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That was the thing. She said. They were all dressed
in black. The lights were out. I couldn't even see
even a scrap of that. You know, they had at
kato around their neck, not a mask. And as I
found out, as I'm sure we all know, it's a
very common trope that when you know, two men or
one man breaks in and kills someone unexpectedly out of nowhere,
(13:13):
the person who's the witness or who was there at
the time can never identify them. They always just say
it's a stranger. It was a complete stranger and I
couldn't tell you anything. It was probably just a guy.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, and you know what's complicating about that is that
we know now from people who are victims of trauma
survivors of trauma, they often can't identify the person because
they're being traumatized. So it's a mixed bag. You have
to be very careful about the way you judge the
reaction that people have during a crime, because yes, this
person could be evasive and giving a vague answer because
(13:45):
they've done something wrong, But they also could be so
beyond traumatized from being beaten by two strange men and
a dead husband that you legitimately can't remember anything.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, and that's very much the case. Because if you
see pictures of which I put a couple of because
in the book After the Morning of the Murder used
to the picture of her, she's got two massive black eyes.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah. Do they think that self inflicted? All of these
injuries that you've listed off? I mean, what do they
think happened?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
As I did the investigating and talking to people about it,
I heard a number of theories about it, and you know,
one of them was like, well, you know, she got
someone to do that to her, you know, as coverage
or no, she got a friend to beat her up,
And I said, like, guess that's possible, But it takes
a lot for someone who knows someone well to really
hurt a friend of theirs. It's a lot. She had
(14:33):
two big black eyes and a swarm face and a
cut lip. Someone had definitely beaten her. I mean, who
beat her up if it wasn't a burglar, because you know,
you look at her face and you're like, oh my goodness,
that poor woman. No, she has been badly beaten.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
How much did they investigate Cecil's business dealings because he
was successful and we know that oftentimes that happens through
some avenues that might piss people off. Did they investigate
whether he had any prof personal or personal acrimony between people?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
They did look into it a little. I managed to
get the private memoirs of a Deputy Marshall who was
involved in the case at the time. Obviously he's passed
on now, but his daughter gave them to me, and
he suggested, perhaps at the time that a business partner
of Cecils might have wanted him killed for the life insurance,
which was one hundred grand. But I looked into that,
(15:23):
and it just didn't make any sense. He was worth
more alive than dead. He wasn't involved in nightclubs or bars,
or alcohol or anything that might have attracted a criminal element.
So I was never convinced that it had been something
that was like a hit, or that it was some
business rival. And neither were the police. But then, you know,
police can glets it little, you know, a little bit focused.
(15:45):
And once once they had the idea that the young
wife was having an affair. The rich husband is dead,
She's going to get all his money.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Is that what happens? She gets all his money?
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Well, of course the never turns out to be that way.
She is, of course the executor of his will. She
gets the most of it. His children get a lot
of money, and so she was executive. But of course
within two weeks of the murder, she was arrested for
it herself.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
So she never had anything to do with any of
the administration. And in fact, she was broke because you know,
again in the fifties, you know, she's never a job.
The credit cards, right, sure, we didn't even have her
own bank account.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
What's difficult for me, James, is I keep coming back
to the crime scene and thinking about, Okay, if there
are two men there and they're robbing and that's their goal,
and you have the main threat, you know, like if
I talk to Paul Holes, who's my co host on
Buried Bones, and he talks about eliminating the main threat,
and the main threat would be Cecil. But you said
that Cecil's found. It sounds like he was shot while
(16:40):
he was laying their sleeping. Is that the impression you got?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
That's right? Yeah, I mean I put the picture in
the book. I mean he's asleep. You look at the
picture and it looks like he's asleep.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
To me, it makes no sense to shoot the guy
who's asleep, you know, if you're a professional robber and
you know how to get in and out. And were
these other home invasions happening around Fairbanks? Were they deadly
home invasions or were they people getting in and getting out?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
That's an excellent question. Yes they were, is the answer
to that. There had been a murder earlier in the
year of another successful businessman. Two men had come into
the house while he and his wife were out, sat
there waiting for him to get back, drinking his whiskey,
and when he'd come back they confronted them. They said,
we want the money. They've been a struggle and the
guy had been shopped and then they'd run away. Now,
(17:21):
these two people who Diane said broke into the house,
they had whiskey when they were there, because that's what
the fingerprints were found, and of course they were looking
for money. And it happened afterwards. There was another attack
on that a guy who'd been actually the mayor of Fairbanks.
People came around to his house wanted him to take
him to his office to open his safe, and they said,
if you don't help us, we kill you, like we
(17:42):
did Cecil and Tommy Wright. Police did obviously search the
Wells's apartment for weapons, and they did find two guns,
but they weren't the guns that obviously had fired the
fatal bullet. There were two guns in the apartment. It's
very common gun ownership and Alaska, extremely common. So the
two robbers, if you might have come in, might have
come in. They might have heard Cecil grunt awake, you know,
(18:05):
or shift in his bed, and thought, good god, he
could have a gun right to hand. I'll get him
before he gets me.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well, let's get into the trial. What happens. They've arrested
Johnny Warren, They've arrested Diane Wells. He's admitting to an affair,
but saying I didn't do any of this. She's not
admitting to anything. So they're not tried together, are there?
They tried separately.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Well, that was part of the thing was that Johnny's
lawyers argued, how can my client and Diane Wells both
be charged with first degree murder because they both can't
have pulled the trigger. So that was the first thing. Obviously,
they took separate lawyers and the trial was set for
into the next year. Johnny came back to Fairbanks, he
was brought back, he was extradited, and he came back
(18:46):
and he couldn't afford There was a bail five grand.
You had bail, and you could stay within Alaska. Ten
grand bail you could leave Alaska. Now Johnny didn't have
ten grand, so he stayed in Fairbank, you with his
wife and actually married on working. He carried on working
as a musician. He carried on working in the local
grocery store was his day job.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And his wife stayed with him. Even though he is
admitted to this affair.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
They did get divorced a few years later, perhaps unsurprisingly,
but she said she's going to stand by him.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
He continued living and working locally, and it seemed locally
people did not blame him or think that, you know,
that he wasn't ostracized or you know, made a pariah.
That very much seemed to not be the case at all. Now,
whereas Diane, she did have the money for full bail,
she left Fairbanks and she came down to La some friends,
some family friends. Well, I'm sure said, look, come down here,
(19:36):
get away from like that hornet's nest. Come down here
for a while. We've got a few months for the trial.
Bring Mark. We'll put him into school for a few months.
We'll see how it goes. So she came down to
Los Angeles with Mark. She enrolled Mark in school and
was trying to sort of wait before the trial, which
was going to be in April. But alas, of course,
as any good story I guess has to be, it
(19:57):
didn't turn out that way. This is when the third
suspect in the story really comes into prominence.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
A third person. How is the third person involved with
the story?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
A third suspect yes, as I said, I got them,
managed to get the notes, the private notes from a
Deputy marshal at the time, and he at the time,
he was the guy who was sent down to get
Johnny from Oakland and bring him back up to face
the charges.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Is this a Frank Worth? Is that who this is?
Speaker 2 (20:36):
That's it? Frank Worth is his name? Yes, And there's
a picture of him in the book. It's an extraordinary
picture that I got from the family. Is Frank Worth
and Johnny Warren standing next to each other. He's got
handcuffs on still and they're laughing like two old friends.
And Frank Worth in his private notes and publicly said,
I don't think Johnny Warren did this. Well, I don't
think Johnny Warren killed Cecil. There's another man I'm looking at.
(21:01):
There's another man who lives in Fairbanks. He's a local businessman.
I'm looking very much into him. And the third suspect
was perhaps the most mysterious of all the people involved
in this. His name was William Barres Columbany, born in Guatemala.
Came into the US followed his mother. He had an
older sister. He was an anchorage for a while. He
was a boreroom dance instructor and a boreroom dancing school.
(21:23):
He came up to Fairbanks in the early fifties, about
a year year or two after Diane and Cecil were
up there, and he lived in the Northwold building. He
gave broom dancing lessons, and Cecil and Diane took lessons
from him well, so they got to know him. So
he was a friend. They knew him from the building,
they knew him socially. He had dinner with them. He
was a friend, and he and Diane seemed to be friends.
(21:43):
But what happened was when Diane got out on bail
and went down to Los Angeles a couple of months after,
William Calumbery moved down to Los Angeles as well. Of course,
his mother and his sister lived there, so that was fine.
Of course he might go down and see them. But
what happened was he and Diane was sort of inseparable
from then on. He was very involved in her life.
He seemed to be what I would call like a
(22:05):
super friend. He was really friendly. He had helped her
after the murder had happened. He'd been there, he'd been helping,
Ai'd been helping get some money together for her. He
tried to help her with childcare for her. They were
best friends, they were obviously close, but that of course
puts him in a frame somewhat for what was going on,
and that was how he ended up sort of becoming
the third suspect. And so she was still writing home
(22:28):
and calling home, and people were writing to her friends
of her, going, look what is going on with this
William Columbanny guy. Like, I know he's a friend and everything,
but you know, people are saying that, like you're married,
people say that you're living together. I mean, what's going
on there? This is where some other factors came into
it that again a lot more understood in a contemporary
manner rather than they were at the time. Dan was
(22:50):
taking barbiturates for depression, pretty heavy dosages, and William Columbny
and the very nice couple that Diane was staying with
were starting to get really worried about her, that she
was starting to seem very depressed and seemed to have
given up all hope. And in February, actually on Valentine's Day,
she left the house where she'd been staying with her
(23:10):
friends and she checked into a hotel in Hollywood, and
she stayed there for about three weeks. Now why she
checked into a hotel, Perhaps she felt she'd outstayed her
welcome with her friends. Yeah, I mean she'd been there
for months. I mean it's a little match, you know,
and she had a son. They were sort of all
sharing the care of him. She didn't disappear. Maybe she
just wanted some privacy. Anyway, the trial was in April.
(23:32):
She'd made it quite clear she wasn't looking forward to
the trial. She was really upset about Mark, her son.
What was going to happen to him, the trial, the humiliation,
the embarrassment. She was really upset about that. And then
on March the eighth March, the night she left that hotel,
just left her stuff at the hotel, went around the
corner to Hollywood and Vine booked into what was then
a very very nice hotel there. But she only booked
(23:54):
him for the night. She snuck a load of her
barbitrious with her, wrote a couple of suicide notes and
took all the pills and kills up wow, which was
tragic in every way that you can imagine. And she
left several suicide notes that were significant in the fact
that two of them were to this William columbany one
of them was thanking him for being a good friend.
(24:15):
It's so sad. She had a little Sin Christopher medallion.
She said, you know, I've left the St. Christpher medallion.
I won't need it where I'm going. But the important
point of the note she left for him reading them,
they weren't to a lover. They seem very much notes
to a friend. She left a note regarding her son,
asking some family friends to hopefully adopt him, take him
on as their own child, and then she left. Kind
(24:37):
of maybe it was the last one she wrote, because
it's quite difficult to read. It's sort of a rambling,
somewhat kind of guilty admission type note.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
What does that mean, Well, it's not clear.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It wouldn't do as illegal document, but it kind of says,
you know, I realized that, you know, Cecil is dead,
and if I'm guilty for him being dead, then I
guess you know I'm guilty for having seen Johnny Warreck. Basically,
she admitted I think that she had had an affair
and that, if nothing else, she certainly blamed herself for
Cecil's death. Now, whether that means she thinks she did
it because, like I say, all the way through, she
always stuck the idea that two people are broken in But.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
She connected his death to her affair with Johnny Warren.
So where does that leave you?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It reads more like she feels guilty that he's dead,
that he died, rather than that she did it. They
did the autopsy, you know, she'd been very heavily medicated,
but they also realized that she had recently had either
an abortion or a.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Miscarriage recently, as in Johnny Warren.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Recently, no, quite recently before her suicide. Oh, of course
at the time that was illegal. You could not do that.
So she would have had to find somewhere illegally to
get that procedure done. And who knows how well that
would have been done. And so whether she had any
health is she from that, whether she had the trauma
from either an a termination or a miscarriage wish are
(25:55):
both traumatic.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Who would the father be.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well, that was the other question about it, because I thought, well,
let's look at it in a purely cynical way. If
it was Cecil's child, which it could have been, because
this was still, you know, less than nine months after
the murder. Surely, if she was so concerned about her
son at least and the child that she was carrying,
she would have had that child. She would have gone
to trial at least several months showing presumably, this is
(26:19):
my husband's child. I did not kill him, don't separate us. Now,
if it had been Johnny's child, which again was possible,
it wasn't nine months after they had last seen each other.
It's possible, of course that the birth of the child,
you might be able to tell the heritage of the child. Also,
the fact that she turned up at the trial might
have people going, oh, look, she's even pregnant by the guy.
(26:42):
Or there was the third alternative that maybe she had
met someone you know in Los Angeles and had got
pregnant and had thought, I don't want another child. I
also don't want to go to trial pregnant or become
pregnant because people are going to judge me.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Terrible position to be in.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
It's a terrible position to be in, and you know,
and plus you know, children are what was she going
to do for money?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah? And ultimately, when you now have the main suspect
who is dead, what happens to the case against Johnny
Warren is William released at some point.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I'll deal with the William carbery first. Yes, he was
briefly arrested in early nineteen fifty four, so when he
would have been down in LA in relation to Cecil's murder,
he was in the mix. He was arrested briefly. The
US deputy Frank Worth came down and they arrested him
actually up in Hollywood. They questioned him, let him go.
He was also questioned after Diane's suicide, mainly because he
(27:34):
was the person who identify the body. It was looking
extremely bad for all the law enforcement agencies, like, we
have to get somebody, someone has to go to prison
in relation to this. In some way, they couldn't get
Johnny Warren because Johnny Wyren, they never really had any
evidence against him that I could ever find, there was
anywhere even near circumstantial. That didn't mean that the police
(27:55):
didn't leave him alone, though, the FBI and the Fairbanks
PD they sent four guns to the FBI for testing
up until like nineteen sixty because they had the bullets,
they just didn't have the gun, and they kept that
for four years. And there were a couple of times
again if nineteen fifty six was one of them where
they announced that they were going to try Johnny Warren
for the murder, and then they canceled it, so that
(28:16):
poor guy, he would have been living on tenderhooks until
October nineteen sixty, that was when he was officially exonerated.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
So what do you think happened what happened to Cecil
Wells that night?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Well, I think based on my interviews with the family,
and this would be grandchildren and children of Cecil Wells
and Diane's children and other people who are around at
the time. There are still some people who are still
alive mercifully, and they talked to me about it, and
they said Cecil was a very jealous man. They gave
me several examples, specific of examples of his jealousy, and
(28:50):
he could turn quite nasty when he'd had a few drinks.
Several people told me that I guess he was what
we would call in the fifties, like a man's man.
He went out to work, he came home, expected dinner
on the table and a cocktail. He didn't really do
a lot of nappy changing. Now that was very common
in the fifties. That was very much the societal structure
in many ways, and it's still common today. He's a
(29:10):
bit of a man's man. He was the breadwinner. He
could turn a little bit nasty after a drink. And
I did get a couple of eyewitness accounts from people
who had seen him hit her and be abusive to
her and other people. And so what I think happened
on the night without going into all the details, I mean,
the last chapter of the book, I kind of do
a fictionalized version of what I think happened because I
laid the bookout chronologically, and then the last chapter is
(29:33):
the one where I go right based on all the
evidence I found. I'm going to make this a bit
of a story in the last chapter of what I
think happened on the last night. And what I think
happened was they had been out, they had a big
day the next day, a big social event. They had
a late guest for supper, which was really late. They'd
been drinking in the Northward bar, they'd been drinking in
the apartment. Dang got up in the middle of night
(29:54):
and were sick in the toilet, sit down a pajamas.
You know, we've all done that. And I think probably
cecil wasn't too amused, angry that she'd woken him up.
And I think either at that time or earlier, probably earlier,
they had had an alter casey and he had hit her.
And I think when she got up in the middle
of the night to be sick, or later in the morning,
she went into the bathroom and she looked and she
(30:16):
had two black eyes or one black eye, and she
was like, well, obviously I'm not going out today, or
I'm obviously not going out of the house for the
next few days, because you know, she had apparently tried
to cover marks on her face with makeup before. And
I think she was angry, and I think there was
possibly a gun in the house. Maybe. I think she
probably meant to just scare him, you know, to shoot
(30:37):
him and come up and scare the rejusus out of him.
Having said that, it doesn't matter if it was the
first or the fiftieth time he'd hit her, I have
sympathy if she'd gone and said he Ba staid, you're
never doing that to me again.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Well, and the other point is she's shut twice.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Well, that's the thing. He might have made some sort
of noise when she first shot. The first shot might
have missed, and then she thought, oh my god, if
he gets up, he's not just going to hit me
in the face, you know, he's going to beat me
to death. I mean, domestic abuse was not even a term.
Didn't even know what that was in the fifties. And
again it's a very small city. Everyone knew each other's business,
and as I found out at the time, alcoholism especially
(31:11):
and domestic abuse was very much something considered to be
behind closed doors. You didn't get involved in it, even
the police didn't. And so I think she probably meant
to frighten him and shot him, and then she's like,
why isn't he getting up, or why isn't he saying something?
Or Oh what have I done? And then she's like,
oh my god, he's dead. And then I think she
probably made a couple of calls, probably to William Clumberley
(31:32):
would have been one of them, because he lived in
the building and he was a good friend of theirs.
She probably called another couple of friends of theirs. They
came round and they said, look, what are we going
to do? And I think it was amongst them where
the gun ended up, because that was again the big
revelation from the private journal of the Deputy Marshal Frank Worth.
He said in the journal that he thought the gun,
(31:54):
the murder weapon, ended up in the river. The Gina
is the name of the river that runs sort of
through Fairbanks and around it. It's like a block and
a half from the northward building. And he thinks that
what happened, and it makes sense. They left. She went
next door, called the police, called the ambulance. She was hysterical,
she was upset, that's certainly true. They call an ambulance.
(32:15):
They put her in the ambulance. She insists that Cecil
goes first, and then the doctor says, you need to go.
Cecil's already gone. She gets in the ambulance. The two
friends turn up, a husband and a couple, and the
wife says, I'll go with her to hospital, but she
walks to hospital. She doesn't go in the ambulance. She
walks to hospital across the bridge to the hospital, which
(32:35):
I thought, that's odd. I mean, maybe the ambulance is
really small and they couldn't fit her in, you know.
But then I'm like, I don't know what kind of
ambulance that is where they couldn't fit you know more
than two people in it. But what Frank Worth, the
Deputy Marshal, said is that he thinks, and he doesn't
name her by name, but there's no other person that
could be. He thinks that possibly they said, look, take
this with you, walk across the bridge, drop it over. Wow,
(32:59):
And she dropped it into the river.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's a big conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It's a bit of a conspiracy because they never found
the gun. Well, and when I was in Fairbanks in
October giving some talks about the book, I mentioned this
idea and soon put the hat up and said, oh, yes,
I knew that lady. She would never have walked anywhere.
He never walked anywhere. She was very proven proper. She
never walked anywhere. She would never have walked to the hospital.
(33:24):
I mean, this is seven o'clock in the morning in October.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Didn't you say, though, that cecil had guns? But the
gun that killed him was not one of those guns.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
No, there were two guns in the house and it
was not one of those guns.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
So did he have a gun that they said, wait,
there's a gun that's missing.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
There's no way to know because you didn't have to
register guns in those days. Okay, didn't need a license, didn'
need a register.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Maybe she bought a gun without him knowing it for
protection from him.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
She might have had one herself. I mean, that was
one of the things that Johnny said earlier. One when
he was arrested. He said he carried a gun, and
people said why do you carry a gun? He did say,
you know, well, if I ever got caught by in
a difficult situation, I would probably want some protection. And
you think, oh, oh really, then perhaps he did you
to Perhaps Cecil caught the mino in a compromising situation
(34:10):
and there was a struggle in he you know what
I mean, or something like that.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, And actually you were just reminding me. I was
just talking about a case with Hall's about a musician
who always had a gun on these late night gigs
because he was getting out at three in the morning
and walking around by himself with money in his pocket.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
That's exactly what it is. I mean, he was a
gigging musician. He'd been out there at night. You have
to remember, these aren't areas that are you know, fully paid,
fully lit. He could get stuck in the middle of
the night somewhere. He's coming out at two o'clock in
the morning. I've been to Fairbanks, Like the downtown is
really small and it's quite compact, and you can walk
around it because it's quite small, but most people, almost
everybody lives out and you get out there at nighttime,
(34:49):
it's completely dark and.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
You're completely on your own. There wasn't an almost out of
street light. So it wasn't unusual that he would have
a gun. It wasn't unusual that anybody would have a gun.
Women in the same don't necessarily carry a gun. And
there was some talk at the time of this particular
pistol that they thought it was like they called it,
like it's a woman's pistol dainty. I was like, that
does look dainty to me?
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Do you think if she had said and had people testify,
if she said I did it, he was abusive? Look
what he did in my face. This was self defense
in Anchorage. Beautiful white woman who is very Hollywood esque,
do you think that she would have gotten off on
this idea of domestic violence leading to self defense.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
The problem is he said she said, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
She's got two black eyes though, and you've got people
saying she's being abused they've seen it, you know she has.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
But it's always a he says, she said. And secondly,
very important, influential rich man as her husband. Yeah, very
very important. He was head of like Alaska's Chamber of Commerce.
I mean he was like a big player in it.
And not just in Fairbanks, like he was well known
in Anchorage, he was well known across Alaska. So you
bring that up as a court case. Dead, but let's
assume he had survived, or even if he had died,
(36:01):
if it had got to trial. She said, no, no, no,
he was beating me up. Those black eyes were from him,
and they'd have gone okay, but you still I didn't
shot him there? Yeah, oh well he'd abuse me. It'd
been the tenth time it had happened, like any witnesses
for that.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Why didn't you call the police?
Speaker 2 (36:14):
And you know, because the police would have come around
like often happens today. They've gone this is a domestic issue,
really needs to be something that he's sort of amongst yourselves.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
What is the moral of the story as we wrap
this up? What's the takeaway?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
The takeaway, I'm afraid is that I found which was
how it affected me. I guess the most because again,
you know, I was I was what they called, like
a stranger journalist to this. I didn't have any family connection.
I'm not Alaska, I'm not American. I'd never been to Alaska.
Is generational trauma, you know, traumas goes through the generations
(36:48):
with something like this. Everyone I spoke to here, everyone,
whether they were friends, where they were family, whether they
were grandchildren. Every one of them they'd been affected by
it in some way, and always negatively. It's not just
the one moment. Let's say it was a domestic abuse,
violence issue that turned into her murder. It happens very frequently.
(37:09):
But the spider web that comes out of it, the
family members, the friends, all the things that it affects,
it affects all of them. All of them. It affected
them in a different way, either directly because it's like,
well my father was killed by my mother, or someone says,
you know, well I had a grandfather who you know.
I looked him up and he had a really important,
interesting life. My family never talked about him. I have
a daughter now and she asked me about my dad,
(37:30):
and I'll go, I don't know. We haven't really talked
for thirty years. You know, he doesn't talk about his life.
It affected everybody, and like I say, I wasn't connected.
But there were definitely times when I was sitting down
talking to these people, and to Diane's children, who were
both still alive. You know, I was talking to them
and I was just thinking, what am I doing here?
Why am I asking them all of these things and
bringing up all these unhappy memories. But it was because
(37:52):
they were all saying to me, well, we don't know.
This is just like a gap in our lives.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Sandra, who was Diane's eldest child, she said, I was
about five or six years old and my mother dropped
me off at school and I never saw again. And
the next thing I knew was she was dead.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Do they believe your theory? You know?
Speaker 2 (38:08):
That was the thing I was most terrified about, was
that when the book came out, that they would read it,
and they would read it and disagree. Now, obviously it's
very difficult for a child to say of a mother,
you know, I think my mother was a murderer, or
I think, in Diane's case, I think my mother killed herself.
But the people who have replied to me in depth
have said you know, it's really rational and reasonable, and
(38:29):
I understand it, and it makes a lot of sense,
and you've assembled a lot of information, and I really
apprecience really helped for all that Uari we put around closure.
A couple of people did say that to me, and
I said, look, you know, I'm so sorry. You know,
I know this stuff in here you probably don't want
to read, and I know it doesn't really bring anybody back,
but hopefully it might make you at least have some
(38:49):
sort of idea of what happened or what you think happened,
why it happened, because everyone had all these different ideas
and different theories, and I'd say, look, honestly, that was
not what happened. You know, I was talking to people
who are younger than I am. Johnny had a child
very late in life, in his sixties, and was only
around for about fifteen years before he died. And he
(39:10):
was about the only person I talked to who was like,
I had a really good time with my dad. You know,
he was really nice to me. He never talked about
what happened in Alaskaa, never never mentioned why would you,
But he said that when his father died, they found
a copy of the Life magazine that had the peace
about murdering it. So he kept it being never talked
about it. Why would you? But he was the only
(39:31):
person connected this who said, you know, I had a
good time with my dad, Like I like my dad,
We got on well, you know, the rest of them
were all like, you know, my dad was difficult. My
dad disappeared from my life and was never talked about again.
I thought my mother was a murderer. You know, it
was never talked about, and who knows how much it helped,
but it was just like say, you know, you know what,
it wasn't like that. You know, your mother had a
very difficult life and you know it ended really sadly
(39:53):
for her.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(40:28):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(40:49):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
His grandchildren, even great grandchildren, they all just said to me.
No one ever talked about it. We never knew what happened.
It was never sold, no one ever discussed it. It
was just a family secret. I don't know what happened.
I can't help you. Please tell me if you find
out anything.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold War Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold War
Wicked presents Wicked Words is at the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. When a powerful businessman in Alaska is
murdered in his bed in nineteen fifty three, the police
(01:14):
believe it might have been a break in gone wrong,
but as details about his personal life make headlines. Investigators
turned to several new suspects. Author James T. Bartlett tells
us the story at the center of his book The
Alaskan Blonde set the scene for me, where are we?
What is this time period?
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Like? This was nineteen fifties Alaska nineteen fifty three nineteen
fifty four specifically, And the first thing that I found
out that I didn't know was that Alaska was a
territory then, it wasn't a state. I didn't know that
it didn't become a state until nineteen fifty nine. And
that pretty much meant that, as most Alaskans kind of
still think today, they were kind of ignored. Most Americans,
(01:57):
as I found out, really don't know a lot about
itsa even now they know it's a very very long
way away. It's way up north, past Canada, very cold,
very cold. Most people would have just said, Alaska, that's
way up north, isn't it. Aren't they trying to become
part of the US. That's really all that people knew.
And so the fifties in Alaska was very much a
(02:18):
place that we might recognize in other parts of the world.
You know, it was still very strong, sort of society
rules and expectations. You know, the man was the bread
winner and the woman was the homemaker. They were very
common things as well. But Alaska is a very separate
place to America. You know, they didn't consider themselves to
be really American. They were Alaskans first.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So let's get into the story. Tell me about the couple.
Cecil and his wife, Diane Wells. They're in Fairbanks, Alaska, right.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yes, that's right. They've been married a few years by
this time. They have a young son, Mark. They've been
in Fairbank. Cecil is he's in his early fifties. He's
a very successful businessman what they called in those days.
He was a pioneer of Alaska. He was very well
known as especially Anchorage as well, which is the biggest
town by far in alask He was very well known there.
He had come up to Fairbanks. He's very well known
(03:06):
for his car dealerships. He had mining interests, he had
real estate interests. He was a very rich, successful man.
He'd also been married four times, so he had a
number of children already, some who were adult children already.
And Diane was twenty years younger. She was young and blonde,
and she was the fifth wife, and as members of
the family told me, she was very different from all
(03:29):
his other wives. That's what they said, because she was
much younger. She was the trophy wife, and as such,
he bought a lots of furs and jewelry, and you know,
they lived very well, but in that same sort of
a gilded cage element. I think, to an extent, you
were expect to behave in a certain way. You were
the attractive young wife, you were the glamorous hostess. You know,
(03:50):
you stayed at home, you looked after the children. It
was kind of the deal. And I believe their relationship
was genuine enough. I'm absolutely sure they had genuine feelings
for each other. For sure. They traveled a lot, and
they were a glam couple. They were like sort of
a list couple.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
How are they an alest couple in Alaska? Though? It
just seems like both of these people would feel trapped
in an environment that you have described as being sort
of rough and rugged.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It is very much a challenge. Cecil had been an
anchorage previously. He'd been in Alaska for a number of
years two and fourth. He was well aware of how
that worked, and he was seemed to be very comfortable
with it. It would have been a big change for
her to come there. And it was true that when
she came, Cecil asked, believe it or not, his former
sister in law to sort of be a consort for
(04:37):
Diane when she arrived in Fairbanks, because he knew it
was going to be a challenge. It was going to
be a challenge. You know, this is months of winter
where you could be stuck in the house because of
the snow. The weather's really difficult. It's going to be
very much a lifestyle change. I mean, I've been up
to Fairbanks a couple of times. It's a lifestyle to
live in Alaska in any level. And I think also
the culture there. It's very much a drinking culture, very
(04:59):
much male dominated culture, massively dominated because of the army
bases nearby, so there are enormous amounts of men in
town rather than a sort of even an equitable parity.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Does that equal high crime in this time period, Yeah, a.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Lot of the problems were like we would expect in
a town, you know, alcohol, gambling, fighting, that kind of thing.
There was a lot of crime, robbery, there's a lot
of money around, there's a lot of people working there,
who you know, not necessarily with gold dust in their pockets,
but a lot of people are working. They have money
and are getting paid and can't necessarily do a lot
with it. You know, during the winter, you can't get out,
(05:36):
you can't really go to many places. So there's a
lot of people with a lot of money. And there
was violent crime as well, especially of a domestic variety.
But again that's the case for everywhere.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Tell me about Diane before she meets Cecil. Did you
find a lot of information about what her life was like,
what her relationships were like.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Initially, I thought I was going to be laughing when
I tried to look into the story of Diane, because
I did, like everybody does these days, a Google search
for her to try and find out the story of her,
and I came across a hit immediately, for obviously her
son that she had had with Cecil, and a daughter
that she'd had from a previous marriage from her first marriage.
I did eventually manage to contact Cecil and Diane's son,
(06:18):
because I managed to find Diane's second daughter, her eldest
daughter that wasn't mentioned in any of the newspaper articles
at the time. Diane had two daughters already, and it
turned out she was estranged from them after her first
marriage ended. She never saw her children again, which was
extremely sad. I don't think she was allowed to have
much contact with her children. So when she met Cecil,
(06:41):
it's likely she never discussed that she had two children.
Maybe she felt she didn't.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Okay, So let me summarize. We've got two people, Diane
and Cecil, who are not from Alaska, but they are
living in Fairbanks, which is not a very large city
by American standards in the nineteen fifties, very conservative area.
This bombshell blonde who seems to really love her husband,
even though there's quite a big age difference. And then
(07:07):
you've got a man on his fifth marriage who is
very very successful. This seems on the surface like a
good situation going into what turns out to be a very,
very big tragedy.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah. The night when it all started was nineteen fifty three,
October seventeenth. Early in the morning that morning, actually Diane
bashed on the door of her neighbor. They lived in
the north of the building which is still there in
downtown Fairbanks. It was considered to be the most fancy
building of the time. I guess it's what we would
call now, like a service building. So early in that
morning she banged on the door of a neighbor and
(07:41):
she was crying. She was hysterical, and she said two
men broke into the apartment and shot Cecil and beat
me up. The police were called. They came round. Cecil
was dead in his bed, shot while he was asleep.
Diane had like a big puffy face, like a split lip,
a black eye. She was taken to the hospital and
the police investigation began. There was a new chief of police,
(08:03):
he'd only been in the job a few months. There
was a new district attorney. But what happened within twenty
four hours, you know, there'd been the inquest and the autopsy,
and it was established that he'd been shot in the
head at relatively close range.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
One shot.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
They found two bullets. Actually, okay, they found two bullets.
One was still in his head and one was in
the bedding. That was her talk, and she said that
two men had broken in. She woke up in bed,
there was two men standing there and one had almost
immediately shot him. She'd run for the hall or for
the front room. He'd grabbed her hit her over the
head with like a flower pot, which I guess was
the nearest thing to hand, and when she woke up
(08:38):
she went into the bedroom he was dead.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Signs of a break in or now, well, I.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Mean you would think a break in maybe you know,
the chain on the door would be broken, or there'd
be some sort of big mark or some kick through
of the door. Unfortunately, the couple lived on the eighth floor,
the top floor of the building, which was unusual. People
who are thieving don't usually go to the top floor
of a building to steal. They'll usually go to the
ground floor because that's the quickest exit.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Something easier, much easier.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
There had been a number of home invasion burglaries recently
that had happened, and they had also been a home
invasion burglaries of rich businessmen. Diane said that what had
happened was they had must have got a spare key
in some way and come through an adjoining door. They
had two apartments together, you know, like you get adjoining
hotel rooms and sometimes there's a door between them. They
had had two apartments, not knocked together, but they owned two.
(09:25):
She said that they had gone into one of the
other apartments gone through the adjoining door, and that's how
they got into the apartment, so there wasn't any break
in per se. But of course people were then thinking, well, wait,
so how did they get into the first apartment?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
All right?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
How did they get keys? Or you know, people were saying, well,
in that case, were they let it? It didn't seem
necessarily that much money or jewelry had been taken. The
house didn't seem to have been particularly roughed up or
anything for someone searching, as two burglars might have done.
There were some fingerprints, some bloody fingerprints, but again this
is the fiftieth so all they managed to get was
(09:58):
a blood group. They never link any of the fingerprints
to any person. There was obviously Cecil and Diane's in
the apartment, but no one else is. They had one
other set, but they were never able to find who
that third set of fingerprints was. And then within a
few days the police got a tip that she'd been
having an affair, and that was when Johnny Warren came
into the picture, and of course so the police wanted
(10:19):
to talk to him immediately, and it emerged that morning
in the early ears of that that he'd left town.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Okay, so we have Cecil and Diana sleep. Cecil is
shot dead by two men. Diane is beaten up as
she's trying to run away, and there is no sign
of a break in. She's theorizing that maybe they came
through an apartment, didn't rummage through that apartment to get
into another apartment, when it's likely that many people in
the building had as much money as Cecil did, I
(10:45):
would assume, I mean, this is a wealthier building. Yeah,
And the police have picked up a couple of sets
of prints, but nothing that's been particularly useful, as is
the blood evens is not very useful either. And then
she has a lover. What is the situation with Johnny
that makes him controversial in this story?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
In this particular story, the controversial element is that he's
a black guy. He lived there and was married. He
was married to a white woman, Clara. They've been married
for quite a few years. He was a traveling musician.
He'd been a musician for years since his teens, so
it wasn't unusual he was there. Alaska and Fairbanks especially
was quite not a party town. But there were a
(11:22):
couple of streets. Second Avenue especially well known for all
being bars and restaurants, and so he played a lot.
He was a well known local musician, and it turned
out that they maybe had had an affair. There was
a great photo which is in the book of a
Big Fancy Dinner where Johnny is playing the drums in
the background on the stage. There's a band on the
stage and you can see all the people sitting at
(11:42):
the long tables, and there's Cecil and Diana on one side.
And that's supposed to have been the night Labor Day,
the Labor Day dinner where they met for the first time,
and he realizing where things were going, he had gone
down to Oakland.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
This is Johnny, right, Johnny.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yes, Johnny had gone down to Oakland in California. That
was where he traveled to. And he'd gone with two
other people. Actually, he'd gone with his young daughter and
someone else, so he wasn't on the run. He probably
got a call or probably read about it or heard
about it, and he voluntarily went to the police in Oakland,
and he basically talked to them for a long stretch
of time, many many pages of interview, and basically it
(12:17):
was very clear reading from it anyway, that they had
been having an affair. There was definitely an intimacy between them.
He said that they had met a number of times
at the Wells's apartment. Even he even had some love letters.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
So when this person calls in or reports to the
police that Diane is having an affair with a black man,
Johnny who's a musician, what is her response.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Oh, she denied it all the way through. I mean,
she denied the relationship all the way through. And she
also said it was two men who broke in and
shot Cesla and beat me up. She said that all
the way through, right till the end.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
But she couldn't identify these men.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That was the thing. She said. They were all dressed
in black. The lights were out. I couldn't even see
even a scrap of that. You know, they had at
kato around their neck, not a mask. And as I
found out, as I'm sure we all know, it's a
very common trope that when you know, two men or
one man breaks in and kills someone unexpectedly out of nowhere,
(13:13):
the person who's the witness or who was there at
the time can never identify them. They always just say
it's a stranger. It was a complete stranger and I
couldn't tell you anything. It was probably just a guy.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Well, and you know what's complicating about that is that
we know now from people who are victims of trauma
survivors of trauma, they often can't identify the person because
they're being traumatized. So it's a mixed bag. You have
to be very careful about the way you judge the
reaction that people have during a crime, because yes, this
person could be evasive and giving a vague answer because
(13:45):
they've done something wrong, But they also could be so
beyond traumatized from being beaten by two strange men and
a dead husband that you legitimately can't remember anything.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, and that's very much the case. Because if you
see pictures of which I put a couple of because
in the book After the Morning of the Murder used
to the picture of her, she's got two massive black eyes.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah. Do they think that self inflicted? All of these
injuries that you've listed off? I mean, what do they
think happened?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
As I did the investigating and talking to people about it,
I heard a number of theories about it, and you know,
one of them was like, well, you know, she got
someone to do that to her, you know, as coverage
or no, she got a friend to beat her up,
And I said, like, guess that's possible, But it takes
a lot for someone who knows someone well to really
hurt a friend of theirs. It's a lot. She had
(14:33):
two big black eyes and a swarm face and a
cut lip. Someone had definitely beaten her. I mean, who
beat her up if it wasn't a burglar, because you know,
you look at her face and you're like, oh my goodness,
that poor woman. No, she has been badly beaten.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
How much did they investigate Cecil's business dealings because he
was successful and we know that oftentimes that happens through
some avenues that might piss people off. Did they investigate
whether he had any prof personal or personal acrimony between people?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
They did look into it a little. I managed to
get the private memoirs of a Deputy Marshall who was
involved in the case at the time. Obviously he's passed
on now, but his daughter gave them to me, and
he suggested, perhaps at the time that a business partner
of Cecils might have wanted him killed for the life insurance,
which was one hundred grand. But I looked into that,
(15:23):
and it just didn't make any sense. He was worth
more alive than dead. He wasn't involved in nightclubs or bars,
or alcohol or anything that might have attracted a criminal element.
So I was never convinced that it had been something
that was like a hit, or that it was some
business rival. And neither were the police. But then, you know,
police can glets it little, you know, a little bit focused.
(15:45):
And once once they had the idea that the young
wife was having an affair. The rich husband is dead,
She's going to get all his money.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Is that what happens? She gets all his money?
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Well, of course the never turns out to be that way.
She is, of course the executor of his will. She
gets the most of it. His children get a lot
of money, and so she was executive. But of course
within two weeks of the murder, she was arrested for
it herself.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
So she never had anything to do with any of
the administration. And in fact, she was broke because you know,
again in the fifties, you know, she's never a job.
The credit cards, right, sure, we didn't even have her
own bank account.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
What's difficult for me, James, is I keep coming back
to the crime scene and thinking about, Okay, if there
are two men there and they're robbing and that's their goal,
and you have the main threat, you know, like if
I talk to Paul Holes, who's my co host on
Buried Bones, and he talks about eliminating the main threat,
and the main threat would be Cecil. But you said
that Cecil's found. It sounds like he was shot while
(16:40):
he was laying their sleeping. Is that the impression you got?
Speaker 2 (16:43):
That's right? Yeah, I mean I put the picture in
the book. I mean he's asleep. You look at the
picture and it looks like he's asleep.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
To me, it makes no sense to shoot the guy
who's asleep, you know, if you're a professional robber and
you know how to get in and out. And were
these other home invasions happening around Fairbanks? Were they deadly
home invasions or were they people getting in and getting out?
Speaker 2 (17:01):
That's an excellent question. Yes they were, is the answer
to that. There had been a murder earlier in the
year of another successful businessman. Two men had come into
the house while he and his wife were out, sat
there waiting for him to get back, drinking his whiskey,
and when he'd come back they confronted them. They said,
we want the money. They've been a struggle and the
guy had been shopped and then they'd run away. Now,
(17:21):
these two people who Diane said broke into the house,
they had whiskey when they were there, because that's what
the fingerprints were found, and of course they were looking
for money. And it happened afterwards. There was another attack
on that a guy who'd been actually the mayor of Fairbanks.
People came around to his house wanted him to take
him to his office to open his safe, and they said,
if you don't help us, we kill you, like we
(17:42):
did Cecil and Tommy Wright. Police did obviously search the
Wells's apartment for weapons, and they did find two guns,
but they weren't the guns that obviously had fired the
fatal bullet. There were two guns in the apartment. It's
very common gun ownership and Alaska, extremely common. So the
two robbers, if you might have come in, might have
come in. They might have heard Cecil grunt awake, you know,
(18:05):
or shift in his bed, and thought, good god, he
could have a gun right to hand. I'll get him
before he gets me.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well, let's get into the trial. What happens. They've arrested
Johnny Warren, They've arrested Diane Wells. He's admitting to an affair,
but saying I didn't do any of this. She's not
admitting to anything. So they're not tried together, are there?
They tried separately.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Well, that was part of the thing was that Johnny's
lawyers argued, how can my client and Diane Wells both
be charged with first degree murder because they both can't
have pulled the trigger. So that was the first thing. Obviously,
they took separate lawyers and the trial was set for
into the next year. Johnny came back to Fairbanks, he
was brought back, he was extradited, and he came back
(18:46):
and he couldn't afford There was a bail five grand.
You had bail, and you could stay within Alaska. Ten
grand bail you could leave Alaska. Now Johnny didn't have
ten grand, so he stayed in Fairbank, you with his
wife and actually married on working. He carried on working
as a musician. He carried on working in the local
grocery store was his day job.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
And his wife stayed with him. Even though he is
admitted to this affair.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
They did get divorced a few years later, perhaps unsurprisingly,
but she said she's going to stand by him.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
He continued living and working locally, and it seemed locally
people did not blame him or think that, you know,
that he wasn't ostracized or you know, made a pariah.
That very much seemed to not be the case at all. Now,
whereas Diane, she did have the money for full bail,
she left Fairbanks and she came down to La some friends,
some family friends. Well, I'm sure said, look, come down here,
(19:36):
get away from like that hornet's nest. Come down here
for a while. We've got a few months for the trial.
Bring Mark. We'll put him into school for a few months.
We'll see how it goes. So she came down to
Los Angeles with Mark. She enrolled Mark in school and
was trying to sort of wait before the trial, which
was going to be in April. But alas, of course,
as any good story I guess has to be, it
(19:57):
didn't turn out that way. This is when the third
suspect in the story really comes into prominence.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
A third person. How is the third person involved with
the story?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
A third suspect yes, as I said, I got them,
managed to get the notes, the private notes from a
Deputy marshal at the time, and he at the time,
he was the guy who was sent down to get
Johnny from Oakland and bring him back up to face
the charges.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Is this a Frank Worth? Is that who this is?
Speaker 2 (20:36):
That's it? Frank Worth is his name? Yes, And there's
a picture of him in the book. It's an extraordinary
picture that I got from the family. Is Frank Worth
and Johnny Warren standing next to each other. He's got
handcuffs on still and they're laughing like two old friends.
And Frank Worth in his private notes and publicly said,
I don't think Johnny Warren did this. Well, I don't
think Johnny Warren killed Cecil. There's another man I'm looking at.
(21:01):
There's another man who lives in Fairbanks. He's a local businessman.
I'm looking very much into him. And the third suspect
was perhaps the most mysterious of all the people involved
in this. His name was William Barres Columbany, born in Guatemala.
Came into the US followed his mother. He had an
older sister. He was an anchorage for a while. He
was a boreroom dance instructor and a boreroom dancing school.
(21:23):
He came up to Fairbanks in the early fifties, about
a year year or two after Diane and Cecil were
up there, and he lived in the Northwold building. He
gave broom dancing lessons, and Cecil and Diane took lessons
from him well, so they got to know him. So
he was a friend. They knew him from the building,
they knew him socially. He had dinner with them. He
was a friend, and he and Diane seemed to be friends.
(21:43):
But what happened was when Diane got out on bail
and went down to Los Angeles a couple of months after,
William Calumbery moved down to Los Angeles as well. Of course,
his mother and his sister lived there, so that was fine.
Of course he might go down and see them. But
what happened was he and Diane was sort of inseparable
from then on. He was very involved in her life.
He seemed to be what I would call like a
(22:05):
super friend. He was really friendly. He had helped her
after the murder had happened. He'd been there, he'd been helping,
Ai'd been helping get some money together for her. He
tried to help her with childcare for her. They were
best friends, they were obviously close, but that of course
puts him in a frame somewhat for what was going on,
and that was how he ended up sort of becoming
the third suspect. And so she was still writing home
(22:28):
and calling home, and people were writing to her friends
of her, going, look what is going on with this
William Columbanny guy. Like, I know he's a friend and everything,
but you know, people are saying that, like you're married,
people say that you're living together. I mean, what's going
on there? This is where some other factors came into
it that again a lot more understood in a contemporary
manner rather than they were at the time. Dan was
(22:50):
taking barbiturates for depression, pretty heavy dosages, and William Columbny
and the very nice couple that Diane was staying with
were starting to get really worried about her, that she
was starting to seem very depressed and seemed to have
given up all hope. And in February, actually on Valentine's Day,
she left the house where she'd been staying with her
(23:10):
friends and she checked into a hotel in Hollywood, and
she stayed there for about three weeks. Now why she
checked into a hotel, Perhaps she felt she'd outstayed her
welcome with her friends. Yeah, I mean she'd been there
for months. I mean it's a little match, you know,
and she had a son. They were sort of all
sharing the care of him. She didn't disappear. Maybe she
just wanted some privacy. Anyway, the trial was in April.
(23:32):
She'd made it quite clear she wasn't looking forward to
the trial. She was really upset about Mark, her son.
What was going to happen to him, the trial, the humiliation,
the embarrassment. She was really upset about that. And then
on March the eighth March, the night she left that hotel,
just left her stuff at the hotel, went around the
corner to Hollywood and Vine booked into what was then
a very very nice hotel there. But she only booked
(23:54):
him for the night. She snuck a load of her
barbitrious with her, wrote a couple of suicide notes and
took all the pills and kills up wow, which was
tragic in every way that you can imagine. And she
left several suicide notes that were significant in the fact
that two of them were to this William columbany one
of them was thanking him for being a good friend.
(24:15):
It's so sad. She had a little Sin Christopher medallion.
She said, you know, I've left the St. Christpher medallion.
I won't need it where I'm going. But the important
point of the note she left for him reading them,
they weren't to a lover. They seem very much notes
to a friend. She left a note regarding her son,
asking some family friends to hopefully adopt him, take him
on as their own child, and then she left. Kind
(24:37):
of maybe it was the last one she wrote, because
it's quite difficult to read. It's sort of a rambling,
somewhat kind of guilty admission type note.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
What does that mean, Well, it's not clear.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
It wouldn't do as illegal document, but it kind of says,
you know, I realized that, you know, Cecil is dead,
and if I'm guilty for him being dead, then I
guess you know I'm guilty for having seen Johnny Warreck. Basically,
she admitted I think that she had had an affair
and that, if nothing else, she certainly blamed herself for
Cecil's death. Now, whether that means she thinks she did
it because, like I say, all the way through, she
always stuck the idea that two people are broken in But.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
She connected his death to her affair with Johnny Warren.
So where does that leave you?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It reads more like she feels guilty that he's dead,
that he died, rather than that she did it. They
did the autopsy, you know, she'd been very heavily medicated,
but they also realized that she had recently had either
an abortion or a.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Miscarriage recently, as in Johnny Warren.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Recently, no, quite recently before her suicide. Oh, of course
at the time that was illegal. You could not do that.
So she would have had to find somewhere illegally to
get that procedure done. And who knows how well that
would have been done. And so whether she had any
health is she from that, whether she had the trauma
from either an a termination or a miscarriage wish are
(25:55):
both traumatic.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Who would the father be.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well, that was the other question about it, because I thought, well,
let's look at it in a purely cynical way. If
it was Cecil's child, which it could have been, because
this was still, you know, less than nine months after
the murder. Surely, if she was so concerned about her
son at least and the child that she was carrying,
she would have had that child. She would have gone
to trial at least several months showing presumably, this is
(26:19):
my husband's child. I did not kill him, don't separate us. Now,
if it had been Johnny's child, which again was possible,
it wasn't nine months after they had last seen each other.
It's possible, of course that the birth of the child,
you might be able to tell the heritage of the child. Also,
the fact that she turned up at the trial might
have people going, oh, look, she's even pregnant by the guy.
(26:42):
Or there was the third alternative that maybe she had
met someone you know in Los Angeles and had got
pregnant and had thought, I don't want another child. I
also don't want to go to trial pregnant or become
pregnant because people are going to judge me.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Terrible position to be in.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
It's a terrible position to be in, and you know,
and plus you know, children are what was she going
to do for money?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah? And ultimately, when you now have the main suspect
who is dead, what happens to the case against Johnny
Warren is William released at some point.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I'll deal with the William carbery first. Yes, he was
briefly arrested in early nineteen fifty four, so when he
would have been down in LA in relation to Cecil's murder,
he was in the mix. He was arrested briefly. The
US deputy Frank Worth came down and they arrested him
actually up in Hollywood. They questioned him, let him go.
He was also questioned after Diane's suicide, mainly because he
(27:34):
was the person who identify the body. It was looking
extremely bad for all the law enforcement agencies, like, we
have to get somebody, someone has to go to prison
in relation to this. In some way, they couldn't get
Johnny Warren because Johnny Wyren, they never really had any
evidence against him that I could ever find, there was
anywhere even near circumstantial. That didn't mean that the police
(27:55):
didn't leave him alone, though, the FBI and the Fairbanks
PD they sent four guns to the FBI for testing
up until like nineteen sixty because they had the bullets,
they just didn't have the gun, and they kept that
for four years. And there were a couple of times
again if nineteen fifty six was one of them where
they announced that they were going to try Johnny Warren
for the murder, and then they canceled it, so that
(28:16):
poor guy, he would have been living on tenderhooks until
October nineteen sixty, that was when he was officially exonerated.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
So what do you think happened what happened to Cecil
Wells that night?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Well, I think based on my interviews with the family,
and this would be grandchildren and children of Cecil Wells
and Diane's children and other people who are around at
the time. There are still some people who are still
alive mercifully, and they talked to me about it, and
they said Cecil was a very jealous man. They gave
me several examples, specific of examples of his jealousy, and
(28:50):
he could turn quite nasty when he'd had a few drinks.
Several people told me that I guess he was what
we would call in the fifties, like a man's man.
He went out to work, he came home, expected dinner
on the table and a cocktail. He didn't really do
a lot of nappy changing. Now that was very common
in the fifties. That was very much the societal structure
in many ways, and it's still common today. He's a
(29:10):
bit of a man's man. He was the breadwinner. He
could turn a little bit nasty after a drink. And
I did get a couple of eyewitness accounts from people
who had seen him hit her and be abusive to
her and other people. And so what I think happened
on the night without going into all the details, I mean,
the last chapter of the book, I kind of do
a fictionalized version of what I think happened because I
laid the bookout chronologically, and then the last chapter is
(29:33):
the one where I go right based on all the
evidence I found. I'm going to make this a bit
of a story in the last chapter of what I
think happened on the last night. And what I think
happened was they had been out, they had a big
day the next day, a big social event. They had
a late guest for supper, which was really late. They'd
been drinking in the Northward bar, they'd been drinking in
the apartment. Dang got up in the middle of night
(29:54):
and were sick in the toilet, sit down a pajamas.
You know, we've all done that. And I think probably
cecil wasn't too amused, angry that she'd woken him up.
And I think either at that time or earlier, probably earlier,
they had had an alter casey and he had hit her.
And I think when she got up in the middle
of the night to be sick, or later in the morning,
she went into the bathroom and she looked and she
(30:16):
had two black eyes or one black eye, and she
was like, well, obviously I'm not going out today, or
I'm obviously not going out of the house for the
next few days, because you know, she had apparently tried
to cover marks on her face with makeup before. And
I think she was angry, and I think there was
possibly a gun in the house. Maybe. I think she
probably meant to just scare him, you know, to shoot
(30:37):
him and come up and scare the rejusus out of him.
Having said that, it doesn't matter if it was the
first or the fiftieth time he'd hit her, I have
sympathy if she'd gone and said he Ba staid, you're
never doing that to me again.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
Well, and the other point is she's shut twice.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Well, that's the thing. He might have made some sort
of noise when she first shot. The first shot might
have missed, and then she thought, oh my god, if
he gets up, he's not just going to hit me
in the face, you know, he's going to beat me
to death. I mean, domestic abuse was not even a term.
Didn't even know what that was in the fifties. And
again it's a very small city. Everyone knew each other's business,
and as I found out at the time, alcoholism especially
(31:11):
and domestic abuse was very much something considered to be
behind closed doors. You didn't get involved in it, even
the police didn't. And so I think she probably meant
to frighten him and shot him, and then she's like,
why isn't he getting up, or why isn't he saying something?
Or Oh what have I done? And then she's like,
oh my god, he's dead. And then I think she
probably made a couple of calls, probably to William Clumberley
(31:32):
would have been one of them, because he lived in
the building and he was a good friend of theirs.
She probably called another couple of friends of theirs. They
came round and they said, look, what are we going
to do? And I think it was amongst them where
the gun ended up, because that was again the big
revelation from the private journal of the Deputy Marshal Frank Worth.
He said in the journal that he thought the gun,
(31:54):
the murder weapon, ended up in the river. The Gina
is the name of the river that runs sort of
through Fairbanks and around it. It's like a block and
a half from the northward building. And he thinks that
what happened, and it makes sense. They left. She went
next door, called the police, called the ambulance. She was hysterical,
she was upset, that's certainly true. They call an ambulance.
(32:15):
They put her in the ambulance. She insists that Cecil
goes first, and then the doctor says, you need to go.
Cecil's already gone. She gets in the ambulance. The two
friends turn up, a husband and a couple, and the
wife says, I'll go with her to hospital, but she
walks to hospital. She doesn't go in the ambulance. She
walks to hospital across the bridge to the hospital, which
(32:35):
I thought, that's odd. I mean, maybe the ambulance is
really small and they couldn't fit her in, you know.
But then I'm like, I don't know what kind of
ambulance that is where they couldn't fit you know more
than two people in it. But what Frank Worth, the
Deputy Marshal, said is that he thinks, and he doesn't
name her by name, but there's no other person that
could be. He thinks that possibly they said, look, take
this with you, walk across the bridge, drop it over. Wow,
(32:59):
And she dropped it into the river.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's a big conspiracy.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
It's a bit of a conspiracy because they never found
the gun. Well, and when I was in Fairbanks in
October giving some talks about the book, I mentioned this
idea and soon put the hat up and said, oh, yes,
I knew that lady. She would never have walked anywhere.
He never walked anywhere. She was very proven proper. She
never walked anywhere. She would never have walked to the hospital.
(33:24):
I mean, this is seven o'clock in the morning in October.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Didn't you say, though, that cecil had guns? But the
gun that killed him was not one of those guns.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
No, there were two guns in the house and it
was not one of those guns.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
So did he have a gun that they said, wait,
there's a gun that's missing.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
There's no way to know because you didn't have to
register guns in those days. Okay, didn't need a license, didn'
need a register.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Maybe she bought a gun without him knowing it for
protection from him.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
She might have had one herself. I mean, that was
one of the things that Johnny said earlier. One when
he was arrested. He said he carried a gun, and
people said why do you carry a gun? He did say,
you know, well, if I ever got caught by in
a difficult situation, I would probably want some protection. And
you think, oh, oh really, then perhaps he did you
to Perhaps Cecil caught the mino in a compromising situation
(34:10):
and there was a struggle in he you know what
I mean, or something like that.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, And actually you were just reminding me. I was
just talking about a case with Hall's about a musician
who always had a gun on these late night gigs
because he was getting out at three in the morning
and walking around by himself with money in his pocket.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
That's exactly what it is. I mean, he was a
gigging musician. He'd been out there at night. You have
to remember, these aren't areas that are you know, fully paid,
fully lit. He could get stuck in the middle of
the night somewhere. He's coming out at two o'clock in
the morning. I've been to Fairbanks, Like the downtown is
really small and it's quite compact, and you can walk
around it because it's quite small, but most people, almost
everybody lives out and you get out there at nighttime,
(34:49):
it's completely dark and.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
You're completely on your own. There wasn't an almost out of
street light. So it wasn't unusual that he would have
a gun. It wasn't unusual that anybody would have a gun.
Women in the same don't necessarily carry a gun. And
there was some talk at the time of this particular
pistol that they thought it was like they called it,
like it's a woman's pistol dainty. I was like, that
does look dainty to me?
Speaker 1 (35:10):
Do you think if she had said and had people testify,
if she said I did it, he was abusive? Look
what he did in my face. This was self defense
in Anchorage. Beautiful white woman who is very Hollywood esque,
do you think that she would have gotten off on
this idea of domestic violence leading to self defense.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
The problem is he said she said, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
She's got two black eyes though, and you've got people
saying she's being abused they've seen it, you know she has.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
But it's always a he says, she said. And secondly,
very important, influential rich man as her husband. Yeah, very
very important. He was head of like Alaska's Chamber of Commerce.
I mean he was like a big player in it.
And not just in Fairbanks, like he was well known
in Anchorage, he was well known across Alaska. So you
bring that up as a court case. Dead, but let's
assume he had survived, or even if he had died,
(36:01):
if it had got to trial. She said, no, no, no,
he was beating me up. Those black eyes were from him,
and they'd have gone okay, but you still I didn't
shot him there? Yeah, oh well he'd abuse me. It'd
been the tenth time it had happened, like any witnesses
for that.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Why didn't you call the police?
Speaker 2 (36:14):
And you know, because the police would have come around
like often happens today. They've gone this is a domestic issue,
really needs to be something that he's sort of amongst yourselves.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
What is the moral of the story as we wrap
this up? What's the takeaway?
Speaker 2 (36:27):
The takeaway, I'm afraid is that I found which was
how it affected me. I guess the most because again,
you know, I was I was what they called, like
a stranger journalist to this. I didn't have any family connection.
I'm not Alaska, I'm not American. I'd never been to Alaska.
Is generational trauma, you know, traumas goes through the generations
(36:48):
with something like this. Everyone I spoke to here, everyone,
whether they were friends, where they were family, whether they
were grandchildren. Every one of them they'd been affected by
it in some way, and always negatively. It's not just
the one moment. Let's say it was a domestic abuse,
violence issue that turned into her murder. It happens very frequently.
(37:09):
But the spider web that comes out of it, the
family members, the friends, all the things that it affects,
it affects all of them. All of them. It affected
them in a different way, either directly because it's like,
well my father was killed by my mother, or someone says,
you know, well I had a grandfather who you know.
I looked him up and he had a really important,
interesting life. My family never talked about him. I have
a daughter now and she asked me about my dad,
(37:30):
and I'll go, I don't know. We haven't really talked
for thirty years. You know, he doesn't talk about his life.
It affected everybody, and like I say, I wasn't connected.
But there were definitely times when I was sitting down
talking to these people, and to Diane's children, who were
both still alive. You know, I was talking to them
and I was just thinking, what am I doing here?
Why am I asking them all of these things and
bringing up all these unhappy memories. But it was because
(37:52):
they were all saying to me, well, we don't know.
This is just like a gap in our lives.
Speaker 3 (37:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Sandra, who was Diane's eldest child, she said, I was
about five or six years old and my mother dropped
me off at school and I never saw again. And
the next thing I knew was she was dead.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
Do they believe your theory? You know?
Speaker 2 (38:08):
That was the thing I was most terrified about, was
that when the book came out, that they would read it,
and they would read it and disagree. Now, obviously it's
very difficult for a child to say of a mother,
you know, I think my mother was a murderer, or
I think, in Diane's case, I think my mother killed herself.
But the people who have replied to me in depth
have said you know, it's really rational and reasonable, and
(38:29):
I understand it, and it makes a lot of sense,
and you've assembled a lot of information, and I really
apprecience really helped for all that Uari we put around closure.
A couple of people did say that to me, and
I said, look, you know, I'm so sorry. You know,
I know this stuff in here you probably don't want
to read, and I know it doesn't really bring anybody back,
but hopefully it might make you at least have some
(38:49):
sort of idea of what happened or what you think happened,
why it happened, because everyone had all these different ideas
and different theories, and I'd say, look, honestly, that was
not what happened. You know, I was talking to people
who are younger than I am. Johnny had a child
very late in life, in his sixties, and was only
around for about fifteen years before he died. And he
(39:10):
was about the only person I talked to who was like,
I had a really good time with my dad. You know,
he was really nice to me. He never talked about
what happened in Alaskaa, never never mentioned why would you,
But he said that when his father died, they found
a copy of the Life magazine that had the peace
about murdering it. So he kept it being never talked
about it. Why would you? But he was the only
(39:31):
person connected this who said, you know, I had a
good time with my dad, Like I like my dad,
We got on well, you know, the rest of them
were all like, you know, my dad was difficult. My
dad disappeared from my life and was never talked about again.
I thought my mother was a murderer. You know, it
was never talked about, and who knows how much it helped,
but it was just like say, you know, you know what,
it wasn't like that. You know, your mother had a
very difficult life and you know it ended really sadly
(39:53):
for her.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis Amerosi. Our associate
producer is Alex chi. This episode was mixed by John Bradley.
Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by Nick Toga. Executive
(40:28):
produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgariff and Danielle Kramer. Follow
Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked
and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you know
of a historical crime that could use some attention from
the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info
at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for
(40:49):
true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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