Ernest Granville Booth (1898-1959): The Double Life of a Convict Author

Plot 5, Grave 63, S 1/2

Ernest Granville Booth lived as if he were one of his own characters—half in shadow, half in print, always one bad decision away from the bars closing behind him again. Born in 1898, Booth became one of the strangest literary success stories of the Depression era: a man who robbed banks by day, broke bones trying to escape by night, and wrote with such clarity and bite that America briefly forgot he was doing it all from inside Folsom and San Quentin.

He entered prison young and stayed long. In 1924, the same day he married Valverda, a former San Francisco schoolteacher, Booth robbed an Oakland bank. The honeymoon never happened. Within hours he was arrested, sentenced to twenty-five years, and sent into California’s hardest institutions. What should have been the beginning of domestic life became instead a long correspondence conducted through bars, censors, and parole boards. Thirteen years later, when he finally walked free, newspapers called it a “belated honeymoon,” as if time itself had merely been paused rather than destroyed.

Butte County arrest notice

Prison broke Booth physically before it refined him intellectually. In 1928, attempting to escape over the wall at San Quentin, he shattered both legs and lay immobilized in casts. It was there, staring at a ceiling and his own limits, that Booth decided he was finished going nowhere fast. He began to write seriously—short stories, essays, and prison sketches hammered out after quarry work and by dim lights at night. What he produced was unsparing and exact: prison not as melodrama, but as bureaucracy, boredom, cruelty, and absurdity.

Editors noticed. Most notably, Henry L. Mencken took Booth seriously enough to publish him in The American Mercury, a stamp of legitimacy few inmates ever received. Mencken admired Booth’s prose for its lack of sentimentality and its refusal to moralize. Booth wrote as a man who knew exactly how easy it was to fall, and how hard it was to stand back up when the system preferred you prone.

Booth's book "Stealing Through Life"

Booth’s major works followed a consistent theme: crime stripped of romance and prison stripped of illusion. His best-known works included We Rob a Bank and Ladies of the Mob, both published in The American Mercury, and the books Stealing Through Life and With Sirens Screaming. These were not confessions so much as anatomies—cool dissections of criminal logic, prison routine, and the thin line between competence and catastrophe. Ladies of the Mob attracted Hollywood attention and was adapted into a motion picture starring Clara Bow, turning Booth, briefly, into a profitable commodity rather than a state expense.

Booth's book With Sirens Screaming

That success helped him win parole in 1937. He walked out of Folsom a famous man, greeted by Valverda, who had waited since 1924 and served as his typist, editor, and anchor. The terms of his release were cruelly ironic: Booth was forbidden for two and a half years from writing about prisons, prison officials, or parole boards—the very subjects that had made his name. Still, he complied, settled in California’s mountain country to recover from tuberculosis, and tried to live like someone who would never hear a cell door close again.

It did not last. Booth’s life followed a pattern familiar to parole officers and noir novelists alike: reform, recognition, relapse. In the 1940s he drifted back into crime, serving both state and federal sentences for theft and bank robbery. By 1947 he was again in San Quentin, and later at Terminal Island Hospital, his lungs failing where his resolve already had. Newspapers that once celebrated his freedom now ran headlines about “new trouble,” as if trouble had ever truly left him.

Even in decline, Booth retained his acid clarity. In 1957, long after parole boards and publishers alike had tired of him, he made a small splash by complaining—almost cheerfully—about Los Angeles smog. He admitted he had once pleaded guilty to a federal charge because he preferred prison air to the brown haze hanging over the city. Later, he changed his mind. The smog, he said, was “not so bad” after all. It was a line that could have come straight from one of his books: dry, resigned, amused by the absurdity of choosing between poisons.

Article on prison authors including Booth

Booth died in 1959, worn down by illness, confinement, and the long erosion of second chances. His career places him among a small, unsettling fraternity: criminals whose intelligence and talent flourished in mainstream culture even as their lives collapsed outside it. Like the forger and memoirist Edward Bunker, or the brilliant con man Charles Ponzi, Booth proved that genius does not redeem character, and talent does not guarantee escape. Skill can sharpen the fall as easily as prevent it.

What remains is the work—lean, unsentimental, and steeped in the moral fog of its time. Booth wrote crime the way film noir would soon film it: with sympathy but no illusions, style without forgiveness. He understood prisons because he lived them, understood criminals because he was one, and understood freedom only as something briefly tasted, then lost. In the end, Ernest Granville Booth did what few men behind bars ever manage. He made himself heard. He just never learned how to stop listening to the voice that kept calling him back inside.

Sources: contemporary newspaper coverage (Associated Press, United Press, INS, Oakland Tribune, Long Beach Independent, Ogden Standard-Examiner, South Haven Daily Tribune, Corona Daily Independent, Star-News, 1917–1957); Wikipedia entry on Ernest Granville Booth; Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland) burial and interment records; California Department of Corrections historical files (Folsom Prison and San Quentin); American Mercury magazine archives; Alfred A. Knopf publication records; contemporary film and literary trade reporting. 

Russ Westover (1886-1966): Cartoonist who Drew the Rise of the Working Girl

Tillie the Tailor and Russ Westover

Main Mausoleum

Russell Channing Westover was an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running comic strip Tillie the Toiler, one of the most successful and influential newspaper features of the twentieth century. Born in Los Angeles on August 3, 1886, Westover developed an early aptitude for drawing that repeatedly brought him into conflict with employers and instructors, but ultimately shaped his professional life. His career traced the evolution of American newspaper cartooning from local sports illustration to international syndication, and his work helped define the modern “working girl” comic strip at a moment of profound social change.

Born on August 3, 1886, in Los Angeles, the son of Channing Clisson Westover and Alice Aldrich, Westover grew up in California and attended high school in Oakland. His earliest professional break came when his refusal to stop doodling finally worked in his favor. The San Francisco Bulletin hired him as a sports illustrator, recognizing that his quick hand and sharp eye could animate box scores and ballfields. From there he moved through a carousel of Bay Area newspapers—the Oakland Herald, the Globe, the Chronicle, and the San Francisco Post—producing editorial cartoons, show-business caricatures, and his first comic strip, a baseball feature called Daffy Dan.

Daffy Dan was a modest, loosely drawn strip, but it revealed the direction Westover was headed. It was rooted in everyday American life, populated by ordinary figures with exaggerated impulses, and driven more by character than by punchline. The strip never achieved the fame of his later work, but it trained him to tell a story in panels and to find humor in routine occupations. Even as he struggled to sell gag cartoons to national magazines like Life, Judge, and Collier’s—mostly without success—Westover was quietly developing the observational style that would define his career.

In 1908 he married Genesta Grace DeLancey, who would remain his wife for nearly six decades and quietly shape his most famous creation. Five years later, when the San Francisco Post merged with the Call, Westover joined the westward migration of ambitious cartoonists and moved to New York City. There he found steady work at the New York Herald, drawing a Sunday feature called Betty, an early example of the “girl strip,” a form still finding its footing in American newspapers. Readers responded warmly. The Herald gave him a daily strip as well, Fat Chance, and soon after he launched Snapshot Bill, his first nationally syndicated feature, about an aspiring photographer whose enthusiasm routinely exceeded his talent.

Then, once again, the ground shifted beneath him. When the Herald merged with the Tribune in 1924, Westover was out of a job. This time, however, he had a reputation. He freelanced successfully for national magazines that had once rejected him, refining his line and building confidence in his instincts. In 1920, sensing that American life itself had changed, he approached King Features Syndicate with an idea that would transform his career.

The war was over. Skirts were shorter. Offices were filling with women who earned their own wages. Westover proposed a strip about a working girl—not a society debutante or a domestic cipher, but a self-supporting office employee navigating modern life. The concept was not entirely new, but the character was. King Features accepted the strip, retitled it Tillie the Toiler, and on January 3, 1921, it debuted in the New York American.

Tillie Jones was a stenographer, a sometime fashion model, and a figure of startling modernity. She flirted, schemed, and dressed impeccably, managing to keep both her job and her independence with minimal visible “toil.” Early versions of Tillie leaned toward girlish frivolity, but she quickly evolved into a competent, capable worker who understood how to maneuver within a male-dominated workplace. Westover later acknowledged that her appearance was modeled on Genesta, though Tillie’s confidence and appetite for independence reflected a broader cultural shift rather than a single muse.

 Tillie the Toiler was not the first comic-strip working woman, but it was the first to celebrate the office girl as a social type worth admiring. At its height, the strip ran in more than six hundred newspapers worldwide. Readers wrote in asking where Tillie bought her clothes; Westover responded by creating a dress-pattern service. The strip spawned collected volumes, comic books, a novel, and two feature films—one silent, starring Marion Davies in 1927, and another in 1941. Through all of it, Tillie remained Tillie: stylish, self-supporting, and quietly subversive.

Westover supplemented Tillie with other work, including The Van Swaggers, a strip that skewered high-society pretensions, but his legacy rested firmly on Miss Jones. Offers came from rival syndicates promising more money, but he stayed with King Features. In 1951 he entered semiretirement, turning much of the daily labor over to his assistant, Bob Gustafson. By 1954 Westover withdrew entirely, allowing Gustafson to sign the strip. Tillie the Toiler continued until 1959, closing out a remarkable thirty-eight-year run.

That same year Westover and Genesta left New Rochelle, New York, where they had lived for decades, and moved to Ross, California. They had married in 1908 and celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1958, with Mount Tamalpais rising behind their home. In retirement, Westover returned to the habit that had never left him: drawing. He spent long hours at the board, sketching without deadlines or syndicates, just as he had when he was young and unemployable.

Russ Westover

Russell C. Westover died on March 6, 1966, in San Rafael, California, after a short illness. He was seventy-nine years old. Newspapers remembered him as the creator of Tillie the Toiler, an internationally known strip that once ran in hundreds of papers from Spain to Japan. His earlier work—Daffy Dan, Snapshot Bill, the years of anonymous freelancing—was largely forgotten, absorbed into the prehistory of a medium he helped define.

Westover’s career traced the arc of American cartooning itself: from newspaper sports pages to mass syndication, from local humor to global circulation, from hand-drawn panels to a fully industrialized cultural form. Yet his story also carries a quieter irony. The man repeatedly fired for drawing on the job ultimately created one of the most enduring images of American working life—a woman who made her living with style, wit, and just enough mischief to keep things interesting.

Sources: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, March 7, 1966; New York Times obituary, March 7, 1966; Martin Sheridan, Comics and Their Creators (1942); Coulton Waugh, The Comics (1947); Stephen D. Becker, Comic Art in America (1959); Ron Goulart, The Funnies (1995); Wikipedia entry on Russ Westover.; Find a Grave; Mountain View Cemetery records; Wikipedia

 

Addie GIlmour (1865-1893); Cut to Pieces and Cast into the Bay: The Terrible Death of Addie Gilmour

Strangers Plot, Grave 676

 

Addie Regent Gilmour was twenty-eight years old when she left Colusa for San Francisco in the late summer of 1893. She was a milliner by trade, a careful young businesswoman, engaged to be married, and accustomed to carrying cash for her work. To her family she said she was going to purchase stock for her shop. What she did not say—what she likely could not say—was that she was pregnant and desperate.

San Francisco was a city where such secrets could be kept, at least for a time.

When Addie failed to return home and her letters stopped abruptly, her family began to worry. Days passed, then weeks. Her sister Emma and her father searched first in Colusa, then farther south. By early September, the search had spread to San Francisco, where rumors began to circulate of a missing young woman last seen entering a doctor’s office on Turk Street.

Then the Bay began to speak.

Near Sausalito, a human head surfaced—stripped of flesh, unrecognizable except by teeth and general shape. A few days later, boys playing along the Oakland waterfront discovered a five-gallon coal-oil can half buried in the sand. When the coroner forced it open, he began pulling out what remained of a woman: thighs, calves, portions of the torso, internal organs, all compressed tightly into the can and weighted down. The remains were badly decomposed and bore unmistakable signs of dismemberment.

Inside the can were personal effects that told a quieter, more devastating story—hair, fragments of clothing, buttons, ornaments, a purse. These small domestic objects, far more than the mutilated flesh, convinced investigators and family alike that the dead woman was Addie Gilmour.

Emma Gilmour was summoned to view the items. She collapsed in grief and had to be led from the room. “Those poor Addie’s,” she cried, according to one account, before being taken away.

At first, uncertainty lingered. Witnesses came forward claiming they had seen Addie alive days after the head was found—walking through San Francisco shops, attending the State Fair in Sacramento, pale and thin, as if recovering from illness. Newspapers fed on these sightings, printing them eagerly. But physical evidence outweighed rumor. The body parts, the clothing, and the timing told a different story.

Suspicion soon focused on Dr. Eugene F. West, a physician with offices at 132 Turk Street. Addie had been in his care shortly before her disappearance. West admitted she had visited him and acknowledged performing a medical operation. What he did not do—according to prosecutors—was report her death.

Instead, the state argued, he cut her body apart, removed identifying features, packed the remains into a can, and consigned them to the Bay.

West was charged not merely with performing an illegal abortion, but with murder.

The trial transfixed San Francisco. Jurors heard how Addie had sought relief from her condition, how the operation ended in death, and how the doctor responded not with confession or aid, but with concealment. The prosecution argued that intent could be read not only in the operation itself, but in the calculated destruction of her body afterward. No innocent man, they said, dismembers a woman and throws her into the sea.

The defense countered that West had not intended to kill Addie Gilmour, that the operation was undertaken to help her, and that panic—not malice—guided his actions once she died. Witnesses were disputed. Testimony was excluded. Legal arguments tangled with medical ones.

Judge Wallace ultimately ruled that West had not acted with intent to murder. But the law was unforgiving. Because Addie Gilmour died during the commission of a criminal act—an illegal abortion—West was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in San Quentin.

It was not the end of the case.

On February 12, 1894, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in People v. West, 106 Cal. 89, 39 P. 207 (Supreme Court docket no. 21162). The court held that the trial judge had erred by excluding testimony on the grounds of physician–patient privilege, a rule that did not apply in criminal prosecutions. The evidentiary error was deemed sufficiently serious to require reversal of the conviction and a remand for a new trial. The case remains historically significant and is still cited in discussions of privilege under California law.

The conviction was set aside.

Whether the state retried West, reached a plea, or failed to secure another conviction is not conclusively established in surviving published court opinions.

What is certain is that Addie Gilmour never received a second chance.

Her body had been torn apart and scattered in the Bay, her private life laid bare in court, her death debated as a legal abstraction. She became one of San Francisco’s early symbols of what could happen to young women who vanished into the city seeking secrecy and mercy. Decades later, when the Bay yielded other bodies—most famously that of Laci Peterson and her unborn child—Californians would again be reminded that the water keeps its own grim archives.

Addie Gilmour’s story is not only about violence, or law, or scandal. It is about a world in which silence was safer than survival, and about how the dead can be argued over long after their voices are gone.

Sources: Sacramento Daily Record-Union, September 1893–February 1894; San Francisco Morning Call, 1894–1895; Woodland Daily Democrat, September 1893; California Supreme Court, People v. West (1894); Find a Grave memorial 216177643.

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Legal context: abortion penalties in California, 1893

Under California Penal Code §§ 274–275 (in force at the time), performing an abortion was a felony, punishable by two to five years in state prison, unless necessary to save the woman’s life. If the woman died as a result of the procedure, the act could elevate to manslaughter or murder, depending on intent and circumstances. In Addie Gilmour’s case, the death occurring during an illegal operation formed the basis for the second-degree murder conviction that was later reversed on evidentiary grounds.

Anthony Azoff (1863-1895): Executed for Role in Murder of Railroad Detective

San Quentin photos of Anthony Azoff

Plot 4, Grave 94

Anthony Azoff entered California’s criminal record through a murder that was at once sordid, confused, and fiercely contested, and he left it on the gallows at San Quentin in the summer of 1895, insisting to the end that he was not the man who fired the fatal shot.

Azoff was convicted of the murder of Len Harris, a detective employed by the Southern Pacific Company, who was killed near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County* in May 1894. Harris had been involved in investigating a planned robbery of the Boulder Creek railroad station. The prosecution’s theory was that Azoff, working with George Sprague and others, helped plan the crime and was present when Harris was shot. Sprague fired the revolver, according to Azoff’s own later account, but the state argued that Azoff was an active participant in a conspiracy that led directly to Harris’s death. Under California law at the time, that was enough to condemn him to hang.

From the moment of his conviction, Azoff maintained that while he had associated with Sprague, he neither fired the shot nor intended that anyone be killed. In a lengthy confession published shortly before his execution, he described himself as drawn into the affair by promises of money and by Sprague’s assurances that no violence would occur. When Harris appeared unexpectedly, Azoff claimed, events spiraled beyond his control. He admitted moral weakness and poor judgment, but not murder. “I did not fire that shot,” he repeated in interview after interview, swearing “before God and man” that he was innocent of the killing itself.

Azoff’s case quickly became a magnet for public fascination. Newspapers portrayed him as calm, articulate, and strangely cheerful for a condemned man. Reporters noted that he was a “star boarder” on Murderers’ Row at San Quentin, courteous to guards and fellow prisoners, willing to discuss almost anything except his own inner life and the precise moment of the crime. This demeanor fed both sympathy and suspicion: some readers saw stoic resignation; others saw a chilling lack of remorse.

One persistent misconception about Azoff was his supposed identity as a “raw and ignorant Russian nihilist,” a label that circulated widely in the press. Several papers went out of their way to correct the record. Anthony Azoff, they emphasized, was an American by birth, descended from old Virginia stock, and of more than ordinary intelligence. The foreign-sounding surname, combined with the era’s anxieties about anarchists and nihilists, had turned him into a convenient caricature. In reality, nothing in his background supported the image of a foreign radical bent on violence.

Inside his cell, Azoff passed the time with small acts of order and invention. The walls were decorated with paper birds, baskets, flowers, pendants, and grotesque pencil sketches, all fashioned by his own hands. He devised a crude pendulum from rolled tin foil suspended on a string, using its swings to guess the time of day. Above his bunk, he printed a motto in large letters that reporters faithfully transcribed:

What need have I to fear so soon to die?
’Tis but a lifetime, and the end is nigh.

The verse captured the fatalism that marked his final months. “If I must hang, what use is there to cry about it?” he remarked at one point, smiling. “A sudden drop, a moment’s struggle, and all is over.”

Despite his apparent composure, serious efforts were made to save his life. Appeals for clemency were directed to Governor James H. Budd, including personal pleas from Belle Dorner, a woman who became convinced of Azoff’s innocence and visited him repeatedly at San Quentin. Dorner argued that Azoff had been swept up by Sprague and that executing him would be a grave injustice. Azoff himself claimed to have influential friends both in California and in the East and believed, at least early on, that his sentence might be commuted to life imprisonment.

One dramatic twist came when Azoff asserted that a letter existed proving his innocence, allegedly written by the man who actually fired the fatal shot. The letter was said to have been mailed in Oakland and delivered to Sheriff McElroy of San Mateo County. Azoff insisted that he had been shown the letter but could not identify the handwriting with certainty. His attorney pursued the matter, hinting at altered signatures and missing evidence, but nothing sufficient to halt the execution ever materialized. Governor Budd ultimately declined to intervene.

Azoff’s connection to Oakland appears fleeting but significant. Contemporary accounts state that his wife and young child were living in Oakland during his imprisonment, and that he was deeply concerned about sparing his daughter the shame of knowing her father had been confined in San Quentin. He spoke of Oakland as a place of domestic life now irretrievably lost to him, a quiet counterpoint to the notoriety of his case. After his execution, reports indicated that his body was to be interred in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, fulfilling what was described as one of his last wishes.

On June 7, 1895, Anthony Azoff was hanged at San Quentin alongside Emilio Garcia and Patrick J. Collins, the three men condemned for separate murders. Witnesses remarked on Azoff’s steadiness as he walked to the scaffold. He sang briefly in his cell earlier that day, wrote farewell letters, and gave away his few possessions. When the trap was sprung, he died quickly.

Whether Anthony Azoff was a willing conspirator who escaped full moral responsibility in his own mind, or a lesser figure caught in a crime that ended in death, remains unresolved. The courts decided his fate, but doubt lingered in the public imagination long after his body was cut down from the gallows. His case sits uneasily in California’s nineteenth-century history of capital punishment—a story of circumstantial guilt, contested truth, and a man who went to his death clinging to the belief that history might yet judge him differently.

Current view of shooting site

*The current location of the shooting site is identified as the vacant lot behind the Boulder Creek Pizza & Pub. 

Sources: Sacramento-Record-Union-June,8-1895; San Francisco Morning Call, issues from March–June 1895; contemporary news accounts; San Quentin prison reports; Mountain View Cemetery records; Find a Grave

 

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors (1837-1884): Double-Murder Mastermind Lynched for Crime

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors

Strangers' Plot, Plot 41

Lloyd Leadbetter Majors was one of the most unlikely architects of a nineteenth-century California murder. A Civil War veteran, trained lawyer, Methodist minister, temperance advocate, and hotel keeper, Majors cultivated the appearance of moral reform even as he quietly planned a crime of extraordinary brutality. His downfall followed the murders that shocked Los Gatos and the Santa Cruz Mountains in March of 1883, a crime remembered locally as the “Lexington murders.”

Majors was born in Ohio around 1837, near the town of Garfield, and was educated at Ann Arbor, where he studied law. He practiced briefly before abandoning the profession for the ministry, becoming a traveling Methodist preacher in the Midwest. Those who later testified about him described a man of intelligence and ambition, but also of restlessness and contradiction. He preached against alcohol while operating saloons, spoke publicly about virtue while privately displaying a capacity for deception, and styled himself a reformer even as his life moved steadily toward criminality.

By the late 1870s Majors had drifted west and settled in Los Gatos, where he operated a hotel and saloon and was well known in the small town. He was regarded as articulate, intense, and persuasive, a man who could command attention in conversation and bend others to his will. Behind the scenes, however, he was deeply in debt and increasingly obsessed with the idea that an elderly mountain recluse possessed hidden gold.

That man was William Peter Renowden, who lived in a remote cabin in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. Renowden was known to neighbors as a solitary figure, rumored to have money but living simply. In early March 1883, Majors devised a plan to rob him and recruited two men to carry it out while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean.

John Showers & Joseph Jewell

The accomplices were John Franklin Showers and Joseph Jewell, men of sharply contrasting personalities. Jewell was a small, soft-spoken English immigrant, a painter by trade, new to the area and largely unnoticed. Showers, by contrast, was notorious. He arrived in Los Gatos in 1876 with his widowed mother and cultivated a reputation as a violent braggart, referring to himself as a “bad man from Bodie” and rarely appearing unarmed. Newspapers portrayed him as crude, volatile, and eager for notoriety.

Majors supplied the plan, the weapons, and the tools. According to trial testimony, he gave Jewell and Showers pistols and a pair of pincers, instructing them to use the latter to pull out Renowden’s fingernails if he refused to surrender his gold. The instructions were explicit, chilling, and deliberate. Majors remained in Los Gatos while the two men rode into the mountains under cover of darkness.

On the night of March 11, 1883, Jewell and Showers reached Renowden’s cabin. Inside they found not only Renowden but also Archibald McIntyre, a friend visiting him. What followed was a scene of prolonged violence. Both men were beaten, tortured, and ultimately shot. Their bodies were left inside the cabin, which was then set on fire in an effort to conceal the crime.

Double-Murder Scene in Los Gatos

The next morning, smoke rising from the mountains drew attention. The burned cabin was discovered, along with the charred remains of the two victims. The brutality of the murders, combined with the attempt to destroy the evidence, horrified the region. Los Gatos was thrown into alarm, posses formed, and the search for the killers began almost immediately.

Suspicion quickly fell on Jewell and Showers, whose movements before and after the murders aroused notice. Within days they were arrested. Under questioning, Showers confessed and implicated Jewell and Majors. Jewell, confronted with the evidence, also confessed, confirming Majors as the mastermind who had planned the robbery and supplied the means.

Majors was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree. His trial, held in Alameda County, became one of the most closely watched criminal proceedings in California. The prosecution portrayed him as the calculating brain behind the crime, a man who cloaked himself in religion and respectability while directing others to commit murder. The defense attempted to cast doubt on the testimony of confessed killers, but the evidence was overwhelming.

In November 1883, Lloyd L. Majors was convicted and sentenced to death. A series of appeals and a temporary reprieve delayed the execution, but the outcome was never seriously in doubt. While awaiting death in the Oakland jail, Majors made a dramatic and violent attempt to escape, overpowering guards and seizing keys before being confronted by firemen drawn by the noise. In the struggle his arm was broken, ending the attempt and leaving him badly injured.

Majors maintained his innocence to the end. On the morning of May 23, 1884, he was led from his cell to the gallows in Oakland. Witnesses noted his composure despite his injuries. He refused to make a final speech. The trap was sprung shortly after noon, and he died with his neck broken. Within minutes his body was cut down and placed in a coffin, the execution carried out in near silence inside the jail yard.

Majors was the first person legally lynched in Oakland and the third in Alameda County (the other two being in San Leandro). 

The lynching of Lloyd Majors

The men who carried out the killings fared little better. Jewell and Showers were convicted and sentenced to long terms in San Quentin. Showers died in prison; Jewell eventually disappeared from the historical record after serving his sentence. Majors alone paid with his life, executed not for pulling a trigger himself, but for planning, directing, and enabling a crime whose savagery shocked even a violent era.

The Lexington murders lingered in local memory as a cautionary tale about appearances and hypocrisy. Lloyd Leadbetter Majors, preacher and saloonkeeper, reformer and arsonist, embodied the contradictions of the Gilded Age West. His life demonstrated how intelligence and respectability could mask greed and cruelty, and how the distance between moral posturing and moral collapse could be terrifyingly short.

Footnote about the site of the crime: Renowden’s cabin was located in the Lexington district of the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of Los Gatos. The exact cabin site no longer exists; the area was later transformed by the creation of Lexington Reservoir. The murders occurred in what is now part of the Lexington Hills area near Alma Bridge Road, beneath or adjacent to land inundated or reshaped by the reservoir and surrounding parklands. 

Sources: San Francisco Call, Sacramento Daily Record-Union, Atchison Globe, Quincy Daily Whig, Omaha Daily Bee, and other contemporary California and national newspaper accounts, 1883–1884; Facebook: San Francisco Bay Area Memories; Find a Grave; Ancestry.com

Walter Parrish (1876-1918): Husband at Center of Courtroom Brawl Over Divorce

 

San Francisco Call rendering of courtroom brawl

Walter Noble Parrish lived a conventional civic life for his era, serving in key government roles and moving through the city without attracting much historical attention. His name survives not because of any great achievement or notorious failing, but because a single day in 1899 thrust him and his family into one of the most chaotic divorce hearings the city had seen. It was one of the few moments in his life that history bothered to record in any detail.

Walter married Maud Shafer with expectations of a quiet domestic life. Maud had hoped for something more. She longed for travel and adventure, believing her husband’s family connections in South America might open opportunities to see the world. Instead, she found herself confined to a routine existence in San Francisco, a marriage marked—according to her later testimony—by neglect, drinking, and disappointment. What Walter regarded as ordinary married life, she experienced as a suffocating restraint.

Their marriage unraveled in Judge Hebbard’s courtroom, where Maud sought a divorce and Walter resisted the accusations. What should have been a contained proceeding erupted almost instantly into mayhem. Maud’s mother, Mrs. D. M. Shafer, arrived already strained by months of marital discord and, upon hearing heated arguments about who had struck whom earlier in the day, suddenly lunged at her son-in-law. Striking Walter in the face, she ignited a chain reaction that sent the room into complete disorder.

The elderly Parrish father tried to intervene and was himself pulled into the commotion. Women screamed and fainted. Witnesses shoved one another. Clerks, litigants, and reporters found themselves scrambling out of the way as the chaos spilled into the hallway. Walter, his family members, Maud’s supporters, and even uninvolved citizens in the corridor were swept into a tangle of pushing, shouting, and blows before police and the bailiff could begin pulling people apart.

The violence continued outside the courtroom. Parrish’s father was hurled against a railing. Mrs. Shafer hurled insults and threats at Walter, going so far as to shout, “You coward! You are afraid of me—and right you are, for I will be revenged!” More women fainted as the commotion grew. Judge Hebbard emerged briefly from his chambers, saw the disorder, and retreated again until the officers restored some degree of control.

When the testimony resumed, Maud accused her husband of drunkenness, neglect, and cruelty. Walter denied it all. The judge ultimately refused to grant the divorce, determining that Maud had failed to meet the legal threshold required for dissolution. But the ruling did not seal the fate of the marriage in practice. Maud had already had enough.

Maud's 1921 passport photo and 1941 Brazilian travel visa

Not long after the court denied her petition, she left her husband, her parents, and San Francisco behind. Without telling a soul, she boarded a ship for Nome, Alaska, carrying little more than a banjo and the determination to reclaim her life. What had been denied her in marriage—movement, independence, possibility—she seized for herself with startling resolve.

In the Yukon, she supported herself by performing in mining towns with her banjo, and from there she began to travel the world. In 1939 she published her memoir, "Nine Pounds of Luggage," recounting her extraordinary path from a failed San Francisco marriage to a life defined by curiosity and adventure. In the book, she tells of working as a saloon girl in the Klondike, running gambling dens in China, and exploring places like South America, India, and Nazi Germany, all while carrying minimal belongings. She claimed to have circled the globe sixteen times and lived to the age of 98. Maud never remarried and is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.

Oakland Tribune picture of Walter Parrish and Gravesite

Walter Parrish ended up working as the Deputy County Clerk in San Joaquin County, as a deputy in the San Joaquin County courts and by 1911 he was Secretary of the California State Senate. He rests today at Mountain View Cemetery. 

Sources: San Francisco Call, January 31, 1899; Wikipedia: Maud Parrish; Kirkus Reviews on Nine Pounds of Luggage: Brazilian Embassy; US Passport Agency; Wikipedia; Find a Grave; Oakland Tribune, January 25, 1911

Wilson De La Roi (1918-1946): Double Murderer Who Escaped Gas Chamber 11 Times!

Wilson De La Roi mugshot and Last Words

Plot 54 Grave 356

Wilson Melvin De La Roi’s short, violent life became one of California’s most extraordinary examples of a condemned man repeatedly pulled back from the brink. 

Born in 1918, he entered the state prison system as a teenager after being convicted in 1939 of murdering Randolph “Randy” Wertz, an elderly prospector near Redding. The killing was frenzied—Wertz was struck more than thirty times with a five-cell flashlight—and De La Roi compounded the brutality of the crime by bolting for the courtroom door the moment the jury returned its verdict. In a burst of panic, he sprinted down a stairway and into a hallway that, to his astonishment, led him straight into the county jail. Deputies caught him before he could double back. His youth spared him then; the jury recommended life imprisonment, and at just twenty-one years old he entered San Quentin a lifer.

Within two years he was transferred to Folsom, where long-term inmates and repeat offenders were typically assigned. On July 15, 1942, violence again erupted—this time inside the prison laundry. William Deal, a fellow inmate, staggered out bleeding from stab wounds inflicted with a handmade knife. Witnesses identified De La Roi as the assailant, and investigators recovered a bundle he had discarded moments after the attack. Deal died quickly, and the incident set in motion one of the most protracted and dramatic series of death-row reprieves in California history.

The state sought the death penalty for Deal’s murder, and a Sacramento County jury agreed. Yet from the moment he was sentenced, De La Roi’s path to execution became a revolving door. Between 1942 and 1946 he moved on and off San Quentin’s death row eleven times, each reprieve or stay extending his life by days, weeks or months. Some came from state courts reviewing petitions and writs of habeas corpus; others were temporary reprieves from Governor Earl Warren, who examined the case repeatedly and ultimately concluded that it did not qualify for executive clemency. By mid-1946 even hardened prison officials remarked that De La Roi, still in his twenties, had now “bettered the cat’s proverbial nine lives.”

Much of the legal maneuvering centered on a habeas corpus petition asserting that key witnesses at the Folsom murder trial had committed perjury at the behest of a prison official. The California Supreme Court took the unusual step of appointing a referee to hear testimony. Months of interrogations and hearings followed, with inmates James Allen and Stanley Robinson alternately recanting and reaffirming their trial statements. The court ultimately rejected De La Roi’s claim, finding that the trial testimony was credible and the recantations were inconsistent, fear-driven, and unsupported by the wider evidence. With that ruling, his last legal lifeline snapped.

In October 1946 the twelfth scheduled execution date was set, and this time no court intervened. Governor Warren declined to act, state and federal courts refused new appeals, and the warden began the final preparations. Reporters noted that De La Roi remained oddly buoyant. He spent the evening before his execution in his death-row cell playing popular tunes on his guitar and listening to records with a Salvation Army chaplain. One of the songs he chose was “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You,” a darkly comic selection given the events to come.

On the morning of October 25, 1946, he ate a breakfast of ham and eggs and was visited by his two sisters. Witnesses described him as calm and even cheerful. A few minutes before 10:02 a.m., he walked into San Quentin’s gas chamber, grinned, and asked for antacid tablets. “You see,” he quipped, “I think I’m going to get gas on my stomach.” They were among the most memorable final words recorded in the prison’s history.

Eight minutes after the cyanide pellets dropped, Wilson De La Roi was pronounced dead at age twenty-one. His life had spanned two murders, eleven reprieves, years of frantic legal battles, and a final moment of gallows humor that fixed him in the public imagination. He was buried quietly, far from the front-page headlines that had chronicled his long dance with death.

Unmarked grave of Wilson De La Roi (photo Michael Colbruno)

He is buried in an unmarked grave between the Main Mausoleum and cemetery main office. 

Sources: San Mateo Times; Bakersfield Californian; Berkeley Daily Gazette; Idaho Falls Post-Register; Associated Press reporting; California Supreme Court, In re De La Roi (1945); Find a Grave

Samuel Bugbee (1811-1877): Gilded Age Architect of "Big 4" Mansions on Nob Hill

Bugbee Family Plot & Crocker and Colton homes

Lot 12  Plot 80

 Samuel Charles Bugbee’s life traced the arc of a 19th-century builder who helped invent the architectural character of San Francisco before fading quietly from public memory, leaving only fragments of documentation and the ghostly afterlives of the mansions and civic buildings he designed. 

Born on January 20, 1811, in New Brunswick, Canada, Bugbee grew up in a region where British colonial forms still shaped the built environment. Although little is recorded about his early training, he emerged as an architect in Boston, a city whose blend of Federal, Greek Revival, and emerging Victorian styles offered a broad laboratory for a young designer. The architectural culture of that period emphasized apprenticeships and hands-on craft, and Bugbee’s later work reflects the solid, slightly conservative tendencies of someone who had matured amid Boston’s restrained but skillful building traditions.

Sometime around 1862, in his early fifties, Bugbee followed the magnetic pull of opportunity west to San Francisco. The city was booming from Gold Rush wealth, railroad expansion, and the rise of a mercantile elite hungry to express its status through architecture. Bugbee arrived at a moment when San Francisco needed trained East Coast architects who could bring sophistication to a city still shedding the makeshift character of the 1850s. He quickly established himself and opened an office in the famed Montgomery Block, a building that housed artists, writers, politicians, and lawyers—a kind of civic brain trust. For an architect, having an office there was both practical and symbolic, placing him at the center of the city’s cultural and political energies.

Bugbee’s integration into public life extended beyond architecture. He served on San Francisco’s Board of Education, a role that reflected the city’s mid-century push to establish stable civic institutions. His civic engagement deepened when he represented San Francisco in the California Legislature from 1866 to 1867. His legislative service coincided with California’s growing pains as it transitioned from frontier tumult to organized statehood, and Bugbee’s engagement signaled a belief that building a city required investment both in its physical structures and its civic foundations.

During these same years, he expanded his architectural practice by bringing his son, Charles, into the business. The firm of S. C. Bugbee and Son became known for its breadth, taking on residential, commercial, and civic projects. Their portfolio included plans for the city Almshouse and contributions to the House of Correction—serious public projects typically entrusted to responsible, steady architects. But it was Bugbee’s residential work for the city’s wealthy elite that ultimately shaped his reputation.

Crocker Mansion atop SF's Nob Hill

In this period, the United States was entering what later historians called the Gilded Age—roughly the 1870s to early 1900s—a time characterized by rapid industrialization, enormous fortunes, opulent displays of wealth, and profound inequality beneath the glittering surface. In San Francisco, the Gilded Age found its most dramatic expression on Nob Hill, where railroad magnates, bankers, and prominent families sought to build mansions that rivaled the grand homes of New York and Boston. Bugbee became one of the architects tapped to design these palatial residences for figures associated with two of the Big 4, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker. These homes were architectural proclamations—assertions of power and permanence perched atop the city’s most commanding vantage point.

Yet, as later chroniclers have noted, the fate of these mansions turned them into something more than architectural symbols of prosperity. Many were destroyed or damaged in the 1906 earthquake and fire; others succumbed to changing tastes, financial reversals, or redevelopment. The Crocker estate, once an emblem of railroad-era wealth, ultimately became the site of Grace Cathedral, while the Stanford mansion gave way to what is now the Stanford Court Hotel—each transformation underscoring how the landscape of Nob Hill was rebuilt atop the ashes of its former grandeur. 

SF's Wade's Opera House (later Grand Opera House)

Bugbee’s architectural legacy extended beyond Nob Hill. He designed the California Theatre and Wade’s Opera House, two major cultural institutions that once defined the artistic landscape of San Francisco. Though neither survives, contemporary descriptions portray them as ornate and lively spaces, reflecting the city’s hunger for public entertainment and civic identity. Bugbee belonged to the generation that helped transform San Francisco into a major American metropolis, blending New England craftsmanship with the exuberant eclecticism of the rapidly growing West.

Despite the scale of his professional contributions, Bugbee’s personal life remains thinly documented. He appears to have been a steady, hardworking figure who continued designing well into his sixties. Later in life he relocated to Oakland, likely drawn by the growth of the East Bay and possibly by family ties or business opportunities. Oakland at the time was becoming a desirable residential alternative to the bustle of San Francisco, attracting many professionals and business leaders.

His death came suddenly on September 2, 1877, while he was traveling aboard a ferry crossing San Francisco Bay. Reports indicate he suffered a heart attack during the trip. The Sacramento Daily-Union mourned the “sudden death of a prominent architect.” 

The buildings he crafted have largely vanished, but his imprint persists in the city’s historical anecdotes attached to the grand Nob Hill mansions that once made San Francisco famous. He is buried at Mountain View Cemetery near many of the people associated with the Big 4 railroad magnates, including Charles Crocker, David Colton, Jefferson Shannon, Horace Seaton and their nemesis James Bassett. 

Sources: PCAD entry on Samuel Charles Bugbee; historical accounts of Nob Hill’s Gilded Age mansions; Ancestry.com; KQED; Find a Grave

Eugene Robert “Bob” Wallach (1934–2022): Brilliant Bay Area Lawyer Embroiled in Reagan Administration Scandal

Bob Wallach and gravemarker

Plot 76

E. Robert “Bob” Wallach was one of California’s most accomplished and enigmatic trial lawyers, a courtroom virtuoso whose career intersected with national politics, personal upheaval, and a dramatic public fall followed by exoneration. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he developed an early love of argumentation through competitive debate at the University of Southern California. At Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, he excelled academically and formed a lifelong friendship with fellow law student Edwin Meese III, later U.S. Attorney General under Ronald Reagan. 

Their moot-court partnership would eventually draw Wallach—reluctantly, and at significant personal cost—into the political orbit of the Reagan administration and Attorney General Ed Meese. [In an Oakland connection of note, members of the Meese family are interred at Mountain View Cemetery. Learn more HERE. As of the date of this post, Edwin Meese III is still alive.]

Wallach began his legal career at the respected San Francisco litigation firm Walkup Downing. His talent was immediately recognized: in one of his earliest cases, a railroad-crossing wrongful-death trial, he defeated two of California’s leading trial lawyers. The win helped establish his reputation as a brilliant young litigator whose poise, preparation, and instinctive connection with juries set him apart. He rose quickly to become a name partner. But in the early 1970s, because of significant domestic challenges—his wife’s serious physical and mental-health struggles—he left the firm and restarted his career as a sole practitioner working from his Piedmont home. The shift was dramatic, but it reinforced his independence and his ability to thrive under pressure.

Across five decades, Wallach accumulated a trial record that bordered on mythic: 222 cases tried to verdict, with only 12 losses. Colleagues described him as elegant, perceptive, analytical, and deeply attuned to human behavior—qualities that juries responded to. He served as a mentor to generations of lawyers and co-founded the Hastings College of the Law Center for Trial and Appellate Advocacy, serving as its dean and chairman. His dedication to professional standards made him a model of courtroom decorum in an increasingly mediated legal culture.

His high-profile clients reflected his wide-ranging practice and intellectual curiosity. Wallach represented the Fang family during their controversial purchase of the San Francisco Examiner and served for fourteen years as advisor and counsel to The Sharper Image, whose founder had been one of his students. He preferred complex, high-stakes personal-injury litigation but was equally known for his willingness to advise on unusual or sensitive matters.

Sunday, NY Times feature on Meese and Wallach

The turning point in Wallach’s public life came during the 1980s, after his friend Ed Meese called on him to join the Reagan administration. Wallach, a lifelong Democrat, accepted a presidential appointment to the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and performed informal advisory roles for the administration. The decision cost him socially and professionally—he later said that both Democrats and Republicans distrusted him—but he believed he was answering a civic calling.

This move, however, placed him squarely in the pathway of the Wedtech scandal. In 1987 he was indicted on racketeering, fraud, and conspiracy charges for allegedly helping the Wedtech Corporation secure federal contracts through his Washington contacts, including Meese. After a lengthy trial, he was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to six years in prison, fines, and forfeitures. But the case quickly unraveled when key prosecution witnesses admitted giving false testimony. In 1991, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. A retrial in 1993 ended with a hung jury, and the government dropped all remaining charges. Wallach, in the eyes of the law, was fully exonerated.

The ordeal devastated him financially and professionally. He later said the case removed him from his practice for four years, and his seven-year odyssey through trials, appeals, and waiting periods left him economically “starting over from scratch.” Yet he returned to San Francisco determined to rebuild. His resilience—what he called the “Icarus fallen” arc of American public life—became an essential part of his personal narrative. Having spent decades representing catastrophically injured clients, he often noted that nothing he endured compared with the adversity he had witnessed in their lives.

In the years after the scandal, Wallach slowly reconstituted a thriving practice. Referrals from other attorneys—who trusted his judgment even when the political world had turned against him—remained his lifeline. He continued to try cases, mentor younger lawyers, and speak publicly about the realities of litigation. His philosophy emphasized both humility and rigor: that trial lawyers should not romanticize the profession, that courtroom experience is irreplaceable, and that civility is a professional obligation. His personal style, from his sartorial formality to his insistence on dining with a tablecloth, became part of his lore.

Wallach died at his home in Alameda on May 15, 2022, at age 88. His life embodied the contradictions of American legal and political experience—meteoric success, public humiliation, vindication, and renewal. 

Sources: New York Times obituary (May 29, 2022); Sunday, NY Times, June 19, 1988; Plaintiff Magazine profile (June 2010); National Registry of Exonerations; Mountain View Cemetery historical materials (Meese family); Lives of the Dead; Yuma Daily Sun

Frank Epperson (1894-1983): Inventor of the Popsicle®

A young Frank Epperson and Vintage Popsicle® Ad

Frank Epperson’s life changed on a frigid Oakland night in 1905, when the temperature dropped to record lows and the eleven-year-old accidentally created one of America’s most enduring treats. He had mixed powdered soda with water in a glass and left it on the porch with a wooden stir stick still inside. By morning, the mixture had frozen solid. Curious, he tugged on the stick, pulled the flavored ice free, and tasted it. Delighted, he dubbed it the “Epsicle,” combining his last name with the word “icicle.” He began making homemade versions for neighborhood children, unaware that this childhood accident would become a cultural icon.

As a young man, Epperson continued experimenting with molds and materials, ultimately determining that glass produced the best results. In 1923, he decided to sell the treats commercially and began offering his Epsicles at Alameda’s Neptune Beach, a sprawling waterfront amusement park at Crab Cove where Bay Area residents flocked to picnic, dance, barbecue, or ride the Ferris wheel and roller coaster. The treats were an immediate hit. Encouraged by the success, he applied for a patent in 1924 for what he described as a “frozen confection of attractive appearance” designed to be eaten easily “without contamination by contact with the hand.” His patent illustration even specified the ideal woods for the stick—basswood, birch, or poplar.

Portion of Patent Application

Epperson’s children urged him to rename the Epsicle to what they and their friends were already calling it: “Pop’s ’Sicle.” The new name—Popsicle®—stuck. By 1928, he was earning royalties as Popsicles grew in popularity, with some accounts noting he earned more than $60,000 in royalties before the Great Depression forced him to sell the rights to the Joe Lowe Company. He later said the decision haunted him: “I was flat and had to liquidate all my assets. I haven’t been the same since.” Lowe turned the Popsicle® into a national brand, launching the famous two-stick version during the Depression so two children could share one treat for a nickel.

As demand soared, Popsicle® and Good Humor battled over what constituted ice cream versus sherbet, with the court ultimately assigning Popsicle® the territory of water-based frozen treats. Despite the legal wrangling, the product thrived for decades. In later years, companies introduced entire families of Popsicle®-brand products, including Fudgsicle, Creamsicle, and Dreamsicle varieties. By the mid-20th century, the Popsicle® was firmly established as an American classic. The Chicago Heights Star reported in 1998 that more than 30 variations existed, and families routinely stocked freezers with multi-packs that emerged in the 1950s. In 1989, Unilever purchased the Popsicle® brand and eventually also acquired Good Humor, ending the historic feud and expanding Popsicle® production worldwide. Today, more than 2 billion Popsicles are sold each year, with orange long remaining one of the most popular flavors.

Vintage Popsicle® Ad

Although Epperson never became wealthy from the invention that brought joy to millions, he did live to see the Popsicle’s golden anniversary celebrated in his honor. Newspaper accounts over the years show him enjoying Popsicles with his grandchildren and receiving a plaque to commemorate his original patent.  

Children's Book about Epperson's invention

His story has since circulated widely in popular histories, corporate lore, and even children’s books. Locally, Epperson is celebrated as part of Oakland’s culinary legacy; he is buried at Mountain View Cemetery, where his inventive spirit is often highlighted alongside fellow Bay Area food pioneers such as Domingo Ghirardelli, the Folger Coffee family, "Yukon Jack" McQuesten, Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron, and Freda Ehmann who is considered "the mother of the California olive industry." There is an annual "Food Tour" at the cemetery. Check the website for dates. 

Sources: Greenville Record-Argus, Oct. 14, 1986; Marysville Appeal-Democrat, Mar. 16, 1973; Nampa Idaho Free Press, Mar. 21, 1973; Chicago Heights Star, Sept. 3, 1998; CBS Sunday Morning; US Patent Office; Amazon.com; Wikipedia