End of Watch: A Reward Poster For the Murderers of Burbank Deputy Marshal Robert L. Normand, 9 August 1920

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

A prior post here featured a 1926 poster from the Homestead’s collection offering a reward for the killers of San Gabriel Police Officer Elmer Griffin, who died trying to secure the arrest of bootleggers in the midst of Prohibition. Griffin and fellow officer Robert Bence stood on the running boards of the vehicle they commandeered and ordered it driven to the city police station when both were shot—Bence survived his injuries, while Griffin died not long after being admitted to the Alhambra Hospital.

Today’s post concerns an incident with somewhat similar circumstances, though was from a half-dozen earlier, and the featured artifact from the collections is also a reward poster. Issued on 9 August 1920 by Los Angeles County Sheriff John C. Cline (who was removed the following year by a court on misconduct charges), the document offered an $800 reward from the Board of Supervisors and Burbank city trustees for the arrest or information leading to the apprehension of Dominico Gays and Nick Torrillo.

The two (the reward was for $400 each) were sought for the murder of Burbank Deputy Marshal Robert Leslie Normand and the wounding of Deputy Sheriff Henry Purrier, though Cline erroneously listed the crime as having occurred on 4 August, when it actually took place on 30 July. Notably, the poster stated that the wanted men “are members of Italian societies who will protect them” and warned other law enforcement officers to “take no chances in making [an] arrest as they are well armed and will shoot on [the] least provocation.”

The murder of Deputy Marshal Normand took place near the intersection of 3rd Street and Angeleno Avenue and came after a theft at a tire shop a few days ago. Normand, who served as a night-watch officer, kept a close eye on the area over the following days apparently believing the burglars would return. As reported in the Burbank Review of 6 August, Normand observed a vehicle driving through town with its headlights off and tried calling City Marshal William E. Catlin, who held that position and then as chief of police for almost four decades, but could not reach him:

He then phoned Purrier, who responded at once. Purrier picked up Normand and started pursuit. At a point near the corner of Tujunga and Third the machine was seen and Purrier commanded the men to stop, which they did.

Normand followed by Purrier, a lighted [sic] from the machine and stepped on the running board of the bandit car and ordered the men out. A wordy battle followed and Normand, who had a pair of handcuffs in one hand and his club in the other reached for one of the men. The shooting began and Normand’s body rolled into the street. Purrier began firing . . .

As the criminals’ vehicle took off, the wounded deputy drove to a hospital for treatment and, after Catlin arrived in short order, a bulletin was put out to the Sheriff’s Department and the hunt began for the wanted men. Meanwhile, Normand’s body was taken to a mortuary and an inquest conducted.

Notably, little was known about him in Burbank. While some sources state he joined the small constabulary there in 1914, he actually did not become an officer there until just several months before his murder. The 47-year old was born in April 1873, but all that was known to the Review was that, in 1912, he was assistant manager of a café in the small railroad hamlet of Owenyo, northeast of Lone Pine in the Owens Valley of Inyo County. A couple residing in Burbank in 1920 knew Normand then and that seems the likeliest explanation for how he wound up in the San Fernando Valley town.

When Normand registered for the draft as World War I was coming to a close in 1918, he was living in Winnemucca, Nevada in remote Humboldt County in the northwestern part of the Silver State and worked for a store in McDermitt, which sits on the border with Oregon. His listed nearest relative was May Normand, perhaps a sister, living in the Florence district of South Los Angeles, so that could be another reason why headed south after leaving Nevada sometime in 1919 or early the following year.

The Review published a story about Normand and his dog, Happy, who was distraught at his master’s death and left in the care of a Burbank resident. Otherwise, nothing else could be found about the murdered officer, though some sources suggest he was from the East Coast and worked with the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police.

As for the search for the killers, there was an immediate arrest as Raphael Dalo (who’d been in Los Angeles since about 1912, worked for the Southern Pacific railroad for a time and was briefly in Chester, Pennsylvania, south of Philadelphia, as well as in Seattle) was captured at a ranch near Redondo Beach and immediately confessed to Sheriff Cline and his chief deputy Al Manning that he was with Gays and Torrillo when the murder took place.

He added that his compatriots were at a ranch near [Rancho] Cucamonga and this led to a massive encircling of the Guasti vineyard where Ontario International Airport is today. A foreman of the Italian Vineyard Company, founded by Secondo Guasti, told authorities that two men sought gasoline, but were heading towards Los Angeles.

Dalo, meanwhile, fingered Gays as the murderer of Normand and that he was the driver, using his father’s vehicle, while Gays fired from the back seat. Purrier’s firing wounded Dalo, who leapt from the car and ran into a nearby alley. The others then picked him up in the car and drove to San Fernando where they remained the night before heading south to Los Angeles, with Gays then dropping Dalo off at the Redondo ranch.

The Los Angeles Times of 7 August, which provided the detail noted here, added that the 20-year old Dalo, a butcher and macaroni maker by trade, was involved in an incident in a downtown Los Angeles hotel, in which, he said a quarrel over change for a $20 bill led to the landlady, Marie Esposito, shooting him twice in the torso and once in the leg before he wrested the weapon from her and shot her. A subsequent trial, however, led to Dalo’s acquittal, though on what grounds was not learned.

What was not mentioned was that, in February, Dalo and Gays went on an Orange County spree passing bad checks in Anaheim, Fullerton and La Habra before being apprehended, during which booking photos were taken—these are the ones on the poster. Yet, in both cases the two men were released for reasons unknown and then came the Burbank murder, while Dalo was also accused of the robbery, the day after the Burbank killing, of $600 from a senior Italian couple.

The Los Angeles Record, also of the 7th, reported that Dalo took officers to Venice and the Ocean Park area of Santa Monica under the assumption that Gays and Torrillo might be there, but there was no luck there while the Guasti search also proved to be fruitless and Los Angeles Police Deparment chief George Home stated the Dalo mislead officers about a purported plan for the three criminals to reunite there. Home added that, as worded by the paper, “Italians have assisted the fugitives in every way” and refused to aid authorities, which may explain Cline’s wording on the post about “Italian societies.”

Another notable account came in the 30 July edition of the Los Angeles Express, in which it was asserted, in addition to the report that the three wanted men burglarized the tire store, that

Norman [sic] was known to have incurred the bitter enmity of certain Italian illicit wine venders [sic] in the neighborhood of Burbank. It is believed that certain of these vendors, knowing that the officers were watching the tire shop, lay in wait for them and overpowered them when opportunity offered.

In its edition of the 9th, the Times passed along a report that Gays and Torrillo were spotted in a car heading toward the Mexican border and it was confidently asserted that, should it be true, they would be arrested before crossing because of a large police presence there. Whatever the accuracy of the news item, what was apparently not known to local authorities until mid-August is that Gays had a long history of an area not far from the Mexican border, but in Arizona, not California.

Gays was born about 1893 in Rivara, north of Turin in the northwestern corner of the country. His father, Hipolito, left when Domenico was six years old and ended up as a miner in the copper boom town of Morenci. In early 1909, the young man sailed from Le Havre, France to join his father and to work in the mines, as well (Lucinda Temple, her husband Manuel and her brother Charles, were residing during that era in the nearby Clifton.)

While it is not known when Gays left Morenci for the Los Angeles area, it was hardly a surprise, as many criminals on the lam do this, that he headed back while evading the authorities. While in Clifton, he was recognized by local officers who saw “descriptive circulars,” which sounds very much like the reward poster featured here, and the Express of 28 August observed that “a gun battle resulted when Gays was ordered to surrender” and a consequence of which was his received a leg wound.

Notably, when the Times of 1 December reported further on the capture, it was noted that the deputy sheriff, William H. Mershon, was tasked with the arrest and the paper observed that Mershon and Gays served together in the Army a few years prior—while the account stated they were together in France during the First World War, Gays was actually in the military from 1917 to 1919, but at the nearby Mexican border where skirmishes occurred with figures like Pancho Villa.

Gays told his friend, when nabbed at a mine where he’d returned to work, that he shot Normand while “seeing red” after the deputy marshal fired at him once he leapt on the running board of Dalo’s automobile. Moreover, he requested the opportunity to end his life by poison in Arizona and, after returning by train to Los Angeles and asked to be allowed to kill himself by leaping from the passenger car.

The same day’s edition of the Venice Vanguard reported that, strangely, Dalo and Gays “were desirous of co-ordinating their stories of the Burbank shooting” while in the lockup, but did so while in cells on opposite parts of the ward, so resorted to having this confab for a good 10-15 minutes “in vociferous tones,” perhaps in Italian. The jailer then placed both men in solitary confinement.

Gays maintained a self-defense argument through the Grand Jury investigation and indictment and his resulting early 1921 trial, which resulted in a first-degree murder conviction and a life sentence at San Quentin State Prison. Dalo, seeing the result of his compatriot’s trial and facing a similar prospect, decided to plead guilt to a lesser change of manslaughter and was handed a term at the same prison of up to 10 years.

Torrillo, who once lived on the same street, Bunker Hill Avenue, as Dalo, however, eluded capture and was thought to be hiding in México, with Gays telling authorities that the trio separated after stopping in Main Street in downtown Los Angeles (Dalo’s brother evidently his the car in a garage in what is now Chinatown, but which then had a large Italian population) and that he took the train to get back to Arizona.

Because Gays sought a new trial and an appeal, neither of which went anywhere, it was Dalo who was sent up to San Quentin first, being registered on 20 February. The information stated that the 20-year old convict was born in South America (Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, though the Dalos moved to Adelfia near Bari near the heel of the “boot” that is part of the south before migrating to America when he was 13 years old) and was a macaroni maker.

His mug shot entry stated that he was “paroled and deported” in October 1924, though there is also a notation that he was discharged at the end of 1927, so whether he was sent back to Uruguay, made his way back to the U.S., was rearrested and sent back to prison or not, is unknown. His whereabouts thereafter could not be located, though his family remained in Los Angeles.

Gays was registered at San Quentin on 1 March and his occupation was given as a shoemaker. He remained in the big house for nearly two decades, with the 1930 census recording him as “Herman” Gays and working as a prison gardener. On 17 January 1939, the 45-year old died at San Quentin and was interred in the prison cemetery, under a headstone provided for him because he was a military veteran.

As for Torrillo, it appeared he was one of the few who literally got away with murder, but, in December 1942, more than twenty years later, that changed. Wherever he wound up in the short term after the murder of Normand and the resulting captures and trials of his compatriots, the fugitive made his way to St. Louis, where a cousin resided. Torrillo worked in a shoe factory and would perhaps have never been caught had the firm not received a military contract to supply soldiers fighting in World War II.

That was because the arrangement required all employees to be fingerprinted and, when these were sent to the FBI, as usual, Torillo was flagged. When arrested, he professed relief and waived extradition to Los Angeles. Purrier was still with the Sheriff’s Department, though had left Burbank for the Altadena station and resided in that community when he was called to identify the fugitive in a preliminary hearing. In the courtroom, reported the Times of 30 December, Purrier testified,

That’s the man who shot me more than 22 years ago. I was in the hospital for five months, thinking about it. I’ll never get over the events of that night. That’s why it is so clear in my mind after all these years.

Notably, Torrillo told authorities that he, Dalo and Gays were involved in bootlegging, not, evidently, the tire shop burglary, when they were flagged down by Normand. It was also reported that he went to New York City for some undetermined time before settling in St. Louis. The trial took place early in 1943 and, on 1 March, the defendant was found guilty of 2nd-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon and he was handed concurrent sentences of 5 years to life and 1 to 14 years, respectively.

Torrillo arrived at San Quentin on 10 April and, after 16 months, was transferred to Chino, which opened a couple of years before. In September 1948, after about four-and-a-half years, he was paroled and returned to St. Louis where he lived for another two decades, dying there in February 1969 at age 71.

Henry Evans Purrier, who was born on Christmas Day 1886 in Belgrade, Minnesota, northwest of the Twin Cities, migrated to Burbank with his parents and siblings after the turn of the 20th century and the Purriers had a farm. Sometime around 1910, he joined the Sheriff’s Department and, said to be the most shot-at deputy in its history, retired in summer 1946 with the rank of sergeant. He moved to Laguna Beach in Orange County, but only lived a short time after retirement, dying in November 1947 and was lauded for his dedicated service for so long a tenure.