Morey Boogies: A Wanted Poster From Los Angeles County Sheriff William I. Traeger, 2 April 1927

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

Several posts on this blog have highlighted 1920s wanted posters from the Homestead’s holdings for greater Los Angeles criminals, including one concerning the bizarre story of Harold J. Whitaker, sought in September 1927 by Los Angeles County Sheriff William I. Traeger after escaping from the newly opened county jail after confinement for grand larceny and then having plastic surgery to prevent him from being identified and recaptured.

That post, however, stated that Whitaker could not be located after his dramatic break from the new hoosegow, but it turns out that he was later apprehended and this relates to another wanted poster from the Museum’s collection, dating to 2 April 1927 and advertising for the apprehension of two men: Daniel Webb, arrested at the end of 1926 for violating the Wright Act—meaning he was a bootlegger during Prohibition—and sentenced to six months at a county road camp, and Dwight L. Morey, nabbed in late June 1926 on a burglary and assault with a deadly weapon wrap and handed a two-year term at the same camp.

Webb and Morey, however, staged an escape on 10 March 1927, with the Pomona Bulletin of three days later reporting,

Deputy sheriffs were reported last night to still be hot on the trail of the two convicts, Dwight L. Morley [sic], 26, and Daniel Webb, 24, who escaped early Friday morning from the San Antonio prison camp with a truck load of dynamite.

The paper added that local ranchers near the camp, where prisoners were at work on mountain roads, “reported seeing the truck with the sign on the rear, ‘Dynamite! Danger!’, race down the canyon highway. The account continued that the escape was planned well in advance and carefully and that Webb and Morey chose an opportune time “when they would be least likely to attract attention” when they commandeered the vehicle and drove away.

Webb, who at 6’3″ and 217 would obviously stand out at a time when men were generally considerably shorter and lighter, may well have succeeded in avoiding capture as nothing could be located about his whereabouts following the break. Morey, more typical in stature at a half foot shorter and nearly 70 pounds lighter than his confederate, however, had quite a story that involved another daring escape from law enforcement.

Born in Boston in October 1901 to a hot house florist and a housewife, Morey appears to have served in the Army at the end of the teens and as he was at the end of his teenage years. In 1920, he looks to have been working as a machinist in New Haven, Connecticut, but, a couple of years later, he migrated west and joined his older brother, Richard, in Tulare County. While the elder Morey was a respected Studebaker automobile dealer in Visalia, he secured a position for his sibling at a garage and dealership in Lindsay, about 20 miles to the southeast.

In early 1923, Morey married a high school student in nearby Porterville, where they lived near her mother, and a 13 May article in the Visalia Times featured the brothers and their work in their various Studebaker locations. In addition to mentioning his brother’s work as the county agent for the car-maker, the piece observed that Morey ran the Lindsay territory for a year-and-a-half to date. Soon, however, the situation soured quickly, as, by the end of the year Morey and his young bride separated and she later filed for an annulment, stating she was 15 years old when they married, though published announcements gave her age as 18.

Because the young woman had relations in Hollywood and the couple may have visited there, Morey drifted south and got into trouble in Tinsel Town. The 22 June 1926 edition of the Los Angeles Express, with a headline blaring “Hollywood Movie Lot in Panic as Police and Bandit Stage Gun Fight,” reported,

Scores of horrified spectators narrowly escaped instant death, the Lasky motion picture studio was thrown into a panic verging on riot and the fashionable intersection of Argyle street and Hollywood boulevard was turned into a battleground when an alleged bandit and two police detectives staged a thrilling gun battle which ended only when the bandit was knocked insensible by one of the officers.

Within moments, the unconscious Morey was fingered as “one of two men who attempted to rob and then ‘shoot it out'” with the owner of a radio store near Exposition Park and then purportedly forced a doctor to treat gunshot wounds while training his own weapon on the medico. Two detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division recognized the wanted man from a police bulletin as he and a young woman drove past them.

Forcing the car to the curb, one of the officers leapt out and ordered his quarry to raise his hands, to which the response was “hands up be damned!” Pulling a gun from his coat, Morey fired five shots with the detectives taking cover behind their vehicle and then returned fire, causing the ruckus among bystanders and those at the Lasky studio. “With the coolness of an experienced gunman,” Morey reloaded and peeled off more shots, while his companion “sat calmly in the machine.”

Morey then jumped in the car and headed south on Argyle and, near Selma Avenue, reached a bungalow court, at which point, he stopped and turned to fire at the pursuing officers. The detectives, however, got to Morey, with one knocking the weapon away and the other applying a blackjack to the head. The woman, 20-year old Tillie, or Billie, Brock, then sped off in the car and was apprehended several blocks away, though she claimed that, while she knew Morey, she’d met him after leaving a hospital and knew nothing of why he was wanted.

With respect to the prisoner, it was found that he had bullet wounds on his right foot and shoulder, evidently from the shootout with the radio shop owner and then treated by the doctor under duress. The daylight street battle received national press attention with photos of Morey and Brock printed as far away as Washington, D.C. Dubbed the “Radio Burglar,” Morey was charged (Brock was apparently let go) with three counts of burglary and one of assault to commit murder. After it was testified to that Morey tried robbing three radio stores before he was injured at the fourth, the defendant admitted to one of these.

As noted above, Morey was convicted and received his two-year sentence, though why he was kept under county confinement and not sentenced to state prison is an interesting question. In any case, after he and Webb skedaddled from the road work camp, Morey remained on the lam until the end of 1929, when he was located across the country in Miami. That city’s Herald of 29 December reported,

D. Lester Murray [clever!], who also is known as Dwight L. Morey was arrested yesterday . . . on suspicion of having a stolen automobile in his possession. He confessed a few hours later that he had escaped from the road gang of Los Angeles county, California, where he was serving a two-year sentence for burglary and assault with a deadly weapon, police reported.

When nabbed, Morey pulled a gun after an officer with the city’s Motor Car Theft Bureau drew his weapon and he and the police sergeant reached for Morey’s pistol—the Bureau man’s finger was caught in the hammer as Morey fired, jamming the weapon. Morey reached in his car for another gun, but was pulled away by the authorities.

A house search in another part of town revealed a box with an apparatus for changing the serial numbers of cars with metal dies and engraving tools, as well as blank bills of sale and notary public seals. The material came from New York and New Jersey and there were also federal money order blanks and a post office stamping machine, likely counterfeit. Morey admitted to forging a trio of $50 money orders and these latter items were handed over to federal agents.

It was added that Morey specialized in stealing Buicks and then changing the serial numbers and license plates when selling the cars. Moreover, when he was arrested and first gave his name as Murray, the officers confronted him with his real name, leading Morey to utter, “there is no use trying to fool you fellows. That’s me, all right.” Flashing a smile at the officer whose finger was cut when jamming the pistol, he added “I was just a little slow on the draw, or you wouldn’t have gotten me.”

Morey initially insisted that the Los Angeles County charges were dropped, but a record was shown of his escape and he admitted he was a wanted man. It was then stated that “he was nonchalant and discussed with the officers his chances of being held here for charges against him, or being sent to California, New York or the Atlanta federal penitentiary.” There was further conversation about the substance of his Los Angeles bust as well as the fact that a woman with him in Miami was said to be his wife. When Morey was taken to jail, “special precaution was taken . . . to prevent any efforts by him to escape” and he sought to bargain with officers for revealing information.

Because he had federal material in his possession, Morey was held on $10,000 bail, tried in federal court for having stolen money orders, pled guilty so that the car theft charges would be dropped and was sentenced in early February 1930 to a year at Atlanta. A judge cautioned the convict, however, that the disposition of the case did not affect other charges against Morey in several states, including New Jersey (where he was wanted for a restaurant holdup in late October), New York and California.

As he was being transported by an assistant federal marshal by train to Atlanta, however, Morey managed to escape. The Herald of 9 February reported that the criminal “escaped through a washroom window of a pullman car after kicking the window out while the train was in motion” near Jacksonville, near the Georgia state line. Nearly two years later, the Los Angeles Times of 28 December 1932 observed that Morey and Harold Whitaker, the latter being on the run for almost a half-dozen years, were arrested in New York City, albeit separately and for different reasons.

Morey’s next stop was Attica State Prison, recently opened east of Buffalo and which is widely known for its 1971 riot/rebellion/massacre with nearly three dozen inmates and ten institution staff killed in what remains the deadliest such instance in American prison history. He served four years there and, in September 1937, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle noted that, as he was transferred to a county jail pending further proceedings against him elsewhere, Morey took with him a model car that the “suave and resourceful” prisoner constructed out of pieces of metal, with the rubber tires being the only material he secured elsewhere.

The report continued that he served his time at Attica on a gun possession charge in New York City, but that he faced a charge of transporting stolen cars over state lines, another for the Florida escape, a third for the New Jersey robbery, and the last being his fleeing from California more than a decade prior. The feds ended up sending Morey to Atlanta and he was there until July 1938 when, on Los Angeles County’s request, he was shipped back on the escape charge.

It appears Morey was jailed and served time for the 1927 break from the road camp. When the 1940 census was taken, he was residing in a still-extant apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard near Vermont Avenue and his occupation was as a machinist for a machine parts manufacturer. Registering two years later for the draft during World War II, he lived in West Hollywood and worked at what was stated as the “Huston” Corporation, but this was actually Howard Hughes’ aircraft business. Then, he and his brother formed their own tool-and-die business, also in Hollywood, for wartime production.

In the postwar years, Morey continued in that line of work, residing at Fairfax and Jefferson near Culver City in the 1950 census and, the following year, opening his Morey Drilling Company, situated adjacent to the Burbank Airport. Married again during that decade, Morey appears to have continued with his business until he retired and he lived until 1989, residing in a mobile home park in San Diego when he died at nearly 88 years old.

As is so often the case, an artifact from the Museum’s collection can yield a great many surprises beyond any assumptions of the supposed surface value of the object. This is certainly true here, as Dwight Morey’s crimes, his several prison stints and his two audacious escapes could obviously not be known until some poking around was done about his criminal career. After paying his considerable debts, though, he settled into a rather mundane life as a business owner and lived a half-century after his last term was served.