A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (9 page)

In the days prior to the killings Plunkett had been, according to differing accounts, only “slightly nervous” or “almost completely unhinged.” His state of mind, anyway, was subject for concern. He’d been taking Veronal and Dial, addictive barbiturates, to help him sleep. He’d bought clothes and serviced his car, perhaps in readiness for the trip to Camarillo. “The one thing that appeared to be constantly on his mind was the upcoming criminal trial,” said Mrs. George Johnson, Lucy Doheny’s personal secretary. For the exhausted Plunkett, the options looked grim: give false testimony at Fall’s trial, perjuring himself; tell the truth, betraying his friends and risking jail; or head off to the insane asylum. He had Doheny interests so much at heart he would lie awake thinking of them. Such was the background.

10

Cover-Up

L
eslie White’s job, as forensics investigator, was to put together a picture of the crime strictly from the physical evidence. For more than two hours he took photos and fingerprints and combed the room, making a minute study of every article of furniture and every inch of wall and floor space. When done, he gathered his gear and walked back down the long corridor. In Greystone’s lofty hallway he reported to Lucien Wheeler.

Plunkett, it seemed, had come to Greystone at about 9:30 P.M. the previous night, letting himself in with his own key. By then Ned and Lucy were already in their own bedroom, getting ready to sleep, so Ned put on a dressing gown and told Plunkett they’d talk in the guest apartment. The conversation lasted more than an hour and grew heated. Plunkett—emotional, unwell, apparently almost hysterical—was digging in his heels and refusing to check himself into the sanatorium at Camarillo. Ned Doheny tried to change his mind. Plunkett grew enraged, produced a revolver, and shot his friend. Others heard the noise; they said it was like “furniture banging.” They came to investigate, whereupon Plunkett shot himself. This happened at about 10:55 P.M. It was a case of murder and suicide: Plunkett killed Doheny and then took his own life.

“It was a crazed man instead of the trusted secretary who sent the death-dealing bullet into the young Doheny’s brain as the oil king’s son pleaded with him,” the Times would report.

This version depended almost entirely on the statements of Ernest Clyde Fishbaugh, a doctor who’d been treating the Doheny family for seven or eight years by then. Fishbaugh told how he’d been summoned from his seat at a Hollywood theater with the news that Plunkett was at Greystone and acting crazy. The call had come from Ned Doheny, via Fishbaugh’s message service. Fishbaugh hurried from the theater and had his chauffeur drop him off at Greystone, where Lucy Doheny met him at the door and led him toward the room where Ned Doheny and Plunkett were arguing.

“Plunkett stepped to the door and surprised us by saying, quite gruffly, ‘Don’t come in here!’ or words to that effect,” Fishbaugh told the Times, varying and cleaning up a little what he’d told the
Examiner
a few minutes before—when he’d described the door shutting softly, as if blown by a ghostly wind.

“As I recall it, he shut the door hard,” Fishbaugh went on in his Times interview. “And it seemed that he had no more done that than there was a shot fired. I told Mrs. Doheny not to come in, but went in myself. I found Plunkett lying on the floor a few feet inside the door, his feet toward the door. He was shot through the head. He was not breathing. I quickly stepped into the guest room and saw Mr. Doheny stretched out on the floor near the foot of one of the twin beds. An overturned chair was near him. A pool of blood was near his head. He had been shot through the head.”

Fishbaugh said that Plunkett must have shot Doheny as Fishbaugh was coming up the driveway. Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Fishbaugh said, he’d been with Ned and Lucy Doheny while they all tried to persuade Plunkett to check himself into Camarillo.

Fishbaugh told how, in recent months, he’d treated Plunkett for abscessed teeth, sleeplessness, and chronic nervous disorders. The swiftly adopted idea that Plunkett had been on the verge of breakdown, or already insane, stems almost entirely from Fishbaugh’s statements. Others, even at the time, flatly contradicted the insanity notion, saying that Plunkett, while under strain, was well enough. But Fishbaugh hammered his line: “We all urged Plunkett to take a rest. He simply sat there. Hands clenched. Jaws set at times. He said he would come out of it all right. I could see it was no use to push him further.”

This was how the story was shaping up, and Lucien Wheeler was too cool and experienced to venture an opinion at this point about whether he believed it or not. He did suggest, though, that something was odd in the testimony he’d heard from the maid, the nanny, the guards, the night watchman, and the liveried butler (whose splendid name was Albert Doar). Their tellings had grooved too neatly, as though all the staff had been schooled in a story and ordered to stick to it. He told White to go with the meat wagon and learn as much as he could from a detailed examination of the corpses.

Shortly before dawn White arrived at the Beverly Hills mortuary to which the bodies of both men were first taken. Already the corpses had been stripped and laid out on adjoining drainage tables in a room of sparkling tile. White took more pictures, flashbulbs fizzing in the silence. He put his face close to the flesh of the dead men. “I found powder burns around the bullet-hole in Doheny’s head, proving that the gun was less than three inches away at the moment it fired. I found no such markings on Plunkett’s head,” he wrote. However, according to Fishbaugh, whose evidence the Times relied upon to make an elaborate, cartoon-like reconstruction of the crime scene, Plunkett had shot Doheny from a distance of several feet, while both men sat on chairs. This theory, always a little bizarre, was thus disproved by White even as the Times went to press with it.

Other details nagged. Both victims had clearly been drinking, though Fishbaugh, Lucy Doheny, and the Greystone household staff had denied it. This was minor, though; the cigarette that had been between Plunkett’s fingers worried White more. He didn’t quite see that even an insane man would shoot his best friend, open a door, retreat from the people he saw approaching, and shoot himself in the head, all the while holding a cigarette as though he were a character in a drawing room comedy.

White was inspecting the corpses when a uniformed L.A. County sheriff sauntered in and perched on one of the drainage tables. This amiable dude with a moustache had been sent to check up on him, White realized. He thought of the discrepancy, the little crack that Lucien Wheeler said he’d noticed in the schooled Greystone tellings. According to Fishbaugh, the shots that Plunkett fired were spaced apart by several minutes; but one of the maids said she’d heard the shots fired all together, “One-two-three.” Now these various details bundled themselves together and White’s growing unease found a focus.

“Something’s warped about this case,” he said. “I don’t think Plunkett killed Ned Doheny.”

Silence fell. The deputy gave White a wry little so-what smile.

“We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” White said.

Now the sheriff’s man shook his head. “There’s no ‘we’ about it, kid,” he said. “Old man Doheny’s too big to monkey with.”

White left the morgue and drove away. He spent the rest of the night and the early part of the morning at the lab in the Hall of Justice, inspecting and firing the murder weapon. He found no fingerprints on the Bisley, not even partials or smudges. This was odd. Nor could White explain to himself why the gun had been hot when he removed it from beneath Plunkett; the leaking body warmth of the corpse didn’t account for it. White had no choice but to conclude that somebody had wiped clean the gun and otherwise tampered with it.

At 10 A.M., when White phoned Lucien Wheeler with his findings, Wheeler listened without comment and told him to report in person to Buron Fitts. So for White it was yet another ride in the Model T, back across the city, to Hollywood and leafy Marmont Lane, high above Sunset Boulevard where Fitts then kept his home.

“He was a young man, forceful and filled with a mixture of idealism and practicality. Few people really knew Buron Fitts, for his personality changed in direct ratio to the number of people in his presence. I liked him best when I met him alone,” White wrote.

On this Sunday morning White found Fitts with a Bible in his hand; he’d just come back from church. In WWI Fitts had been a marine officer. Shrapnel blew off part of his right knee at the Battle of the Argonne and he’d also suffered mustard gas burns, episodes he didn’t hesitate to rehash for the benefit of the press and additional column inches. Fitts had ridden to power on the back of his status as veteran and hero, supported by the American Legion and Harry Chandler. While running for D.A., Fitts had undergone surgeries resulting in the loss of his wounded leg and its replacement by an artificial one, a series of procedures reported daily in the Times as the campaign rolled on. Buron Fitts “limped noisily into office,” as one cynic put it.

“He was a fighter,” White wrote.

For White himself this had been the most extraordinary night in a youthful life that was already rich with incident. Though exhausted, he buzzed with adrenaline, certain he was on to something big. He took out the crime scene photographs that he’d developed and laid them out, telling Fitts he just didn’t believe that Plunkett had killed Doheny and then himself. At the very least, he said, the shootings couldn’t possibly have happened in the way claimed by Dr. E. C. Fishbaugh.

“The physical facts and the testimony of witnesses don’t jibe,” White said. He was tired and irritable and, as often, a little too eager. “I understand, too, that some people believe the Doheny family are too influential to tamper with.”

Now Fitts, in turn, grew testy. His sharp eyes glittered. “There isn’t a man in the United States big enough to stop me conducting a criminal investigation,” he said. “But if Plunkett didn’t kill Doheny, who did?”

That was the question. White said he didn’t know, but he did know that they hadn’t discovered the truth—yet.

“We’ll damn soon find out,” said Fitts, the fighter, the “soldier prosecutor.” He got Lucien Wheeler on the phone, ordering him to get all the Doheny witnesses down to the Hall of Justice for further questioning. Leslie White sat in, and when E. C. Fishbaugh came into the interview room, he seized his chance.

“Doctor, you were approaching the house at the time the shooting took place and you rushed into the bedroom within a matter of seconds,” he said. “Is that correct?”

Fishbaugh nodded.

“Doheny was dead when you arrived?”

Again, a nod.

“And the body was not disturbed in any way?”

Fishbaugh was defensive. “It was not disturbed in any way.”

“Then, Doctor, as an experienced physician, will you kindly explain how blood could run up from the ears and cross back and forth over the face of a man who never moved off his back?”

This was White’s coup, his big moment in the Doheny investigation. Blood had streaked in a crisscross pattern on Ned Doheny’s face. White’s crime scene photographs show the covering, dried, and in places thick. This wasn’t conjecture, but hard evidence. The patterns made by Ned Doheny’s blood flatly contradicted Fishbaugh’s story.

Fishbaugh was trapped and he knew it. In a low voice he admitted that young Doheny had lived for approximately twenty minutes after the shooting. His pulse had been faint and he was bleeding from both sides of the head with blood trickling from his mouth. Fishbaugh tried to save him by moving him on his side and clearing his breathing passages—to no avail.

Buron Fitts slammed his fist on a table. If Fishbaugh had lied about this, and he had, he might have lied about other things too. Yet his story had already been peddled to the scrum of newsmen at Greystone and accepted wholesale. Fitts didn’t like the smell of it. Still angry, he told Fishbaugh to get out of his sight, promising there would be “a sweeping investigation.”

White saw reason to be satisfied. An inexperienced forensics man, he’d nonetheless done a thorough and competent job. Now he was happy to turn the whole thing over to the older and wiser brains of Lucien Wheeler and Buron Fitts. But within hours a different Buron Fitts—Fitts the survivor, Fitts the politician who knew where his bread was buttered, Fitts the man who was already plotting a run at the governorship of California—called a press conference, declaring that county authorities had already signed death certificates for both men, labeling the tragedy as a murder and a suicide. “My office has concluded beyond all doubt that Hugh Plunkett, while insane, shot Ned Doheny and then turned the gun on himself,” Fitts announced.

No inquest would be held, and Ned Doheny’s body would undergo no autopsy.

The case was closed.

It was a staggering turnaround.

E. C. Fishbaugh modified his story about how he found Ned Doheny, telling the Times: “He was breathing but unconscious. A telephone directory was lying on the bed opened to the page where my name is listed.” A Doheny attorney added further spin, suggesting that Plunkett had arrived at Greystone intent on suicide and Ned Doheny had nobly tried to talk him out of it.

One moment the “sweeping investigation” had been about to step up several gears; the next, it was over. “The newspapers dropped the Doheny story as if it burned their fingers,” White wrote. This was the most sensational of the many murders in L.A.’s history up to that time, and for twenty-four hours the press handled it as such: screaming headlines, pages of photographs and crime scene constructions and character artwork—thousands of column inches. Then silence. Coverage stopped dead.

White would believe until the end of his life that Doheny’s power killed the story. Certainly Doheny knew how to use the media. He’d spent time and money in the assemblage of his own myth, that of the free-spirited, free-roaming frontiersman who made good through adventure and luck and ceaseless striving. More recently he’d been chasing Cecil B. DeMille to turn selected episodes of his life into a movie and offset the damaging publicity generated by Teapot Dome. He was a calculating and autocratic man. Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst, owners of the city’s most influential papers, were close friends and had been, at various times and in different ventures, business partners. To study the press treatment of the Greystone tragedy is to be stunned by the speed with which a massive story went away.

Only the publishers of underground rags (there were scores of them in L.A. at the time, short-lived and energetic, often scandalous) questioned the official version. “DEATH TRAGEDY CONNECTS TO TEAPOT DOME,” reported the editors of The Truth, a fortnightly whose ill-printed and disintegrating pages are categorized as “California Ephemera” in the Special Collections department at UCLA. “District Attorney Buron Fitts would have us think that a chauffeur went mad and killed a rich man and then himself at the Doheny’s palatial home last Saturday night,” The Truth noted in its issue for March 2, 1929. “We are not satisfied that this is the whole, or accurate story—and we call upon Mr. Fitts to tell us THE TRUTH about Hugh Plunkett and his role as a $100,000 bagman in the famed Teapot Dome affair. Did Hugh Plunkett’s mind really ‘go suddenly mad.’ Or was he himself murdered by a ruthlessly applied death-dealing bullet?”