by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A few posts on this blog have featured wanted posters from the Homestead’s collection with no shortage of unusual stories, easily categorized under the heading of “truth is stranger than fiction,” and this latest entry seems to invite the same description. It is a 17 January 1927 circular issued by Los Angeles County Sheriff William I. Traeger seeking a quartet of suspects wanted for burglary and safe blowing and which added that “these are very dangerous men” for which the sheriff held felony warrants and requested that they be arrested and held and Traeger wired so that he could send deputies to bring them back to the Angel City.
Of the four men, one, Edgar W. Lewis, was not mentioned in any media accounts related to the other three, so we’ll dispense with the ex-con, who’d served time in Washington State, and move on to the rest. These are [Tom] Valentine Niohus, Alvah E. Clow and Clow’s son Elton and the story that follows not involved the father-and-son, but Niohus as a sort of relation through a prison “family” at San Quentin, not to mention other Crow-related relations.
Niohus is a bit of a mystery and about all that is known about him is that he was born about 1888 in Missouri and was nabbed after an attempted safe breaking by five men at the Bon Ton dance hall in the coastal town of Venice, which was independent in those days though soon annexed to Los Angeles, in early August 1923. The suspect, who was shot in the arm by a police officer, was subjected to a preliminary hearing in late September and tried to explain that he was a “victim of circumstances having been decoyed into the job” and that “he was compelled, by threats of violence, to open the door for the robber[s] and help move the safe.”
The defense proved to be of no avail and Niohus, whose occupation was given as a cabinet-maker, was convicted of second-degree burglary at the Superior Court and sentenced to 1-15 years, the actual term subject to the state prison board, at San Quentin, arriving there at the end of February 1924. He served exactly two years and was paroled on 1 March 1926, at which time he was released into the custody of young Elton Clow, who had just turned 21 years old and was barely eligible for such a responsibility. Why he was chosen was because of a strange decision by the parole board to transfer Niohus to the son of one the latter’s San Quentin “family” members: Clow’s father Alvah.
The elder Clow was born in 1880 in Memphis, Missouri, in the northeast corner of the Show Me State, and who migrated to the Central Valley of California with his farming family while he was a young teen of thirteen. The Clows settled at the Lucerne, just north of the town of Hanford and, in 1905, Alvah married Katharine Carpenter, who’d lived in Los Angeles for several years but previously resided in Hanford. The Angel City connection, however, is an important one, as we shall soon see.
While Alvah Clow continued farming, he tried other endeavors including being a founder of an oil company as that industry was booming in the region at the time, though it doesn’t appear to have found any success. In fact, sources indicate that Clow had some financial struggles over the years, including the assumption of mortgages and loans and assignments of crops to cover debts, as well as an abandonment of a homestead.
In 1918, perhaps seeking some steady income amid uncertainty about what farming could bring in, Clow, who was considered an honest, reliable and steady citizen, successfully secured election as a constable for the Lucerne township and was able to win two subsequent contests in 1920 and 1922. While his name appeared in local papers for the expected reasons of his tracking down wanted suspects, nabbing speeders and making arrests for a variety of crimes, though he and another officer were sued in 1921 for exceeding their authority when they ransacked a home while conducting a search, it was quite a shock to Hanfordians (if that’s the right term) when he and Hanford deputy marshal Manford S. Reed were arrested and the latter confessed to thefts of stores in the city over a period of months and was sent to San Quentin.
At first, Clow, who was said to have thrown his weight around and “made idle boasts during election[s] against his enemies,” while also purportedly engaged in side bootlegging for a local pool hall, vehemently denied involvement and then issued threats to “tell all I know and start something” that were vague and, while he initially pled not guilty, he decided to change his plea and admit his role in the crimes.
The disgraced officer was handed that typical indeterminate sentence of 1-15 years by a Kings County judge and the prison board, in March 1924, set his term at four years with eligibility for parole in eighteen months. As noted above, Clow became close to Niohus while at San Quentin and, somehow, the state agreed to release the latter to the custody of the former’s son, perhaps based on the former constable’s assurances that the pair of cons would walk the straight and narrow.
That pledge, not surprisingly, did not last long. On 24 November 1926, the Los Angeles Record, with a blaring headline of “Armed Posses Hunt Yegg Gang,” the term “yegg” referring to a burglar and/or safecracker, reprinted part of a bulletin that noted that a Shell Oil Company safe, taken from a company location in the city of San Fernando, was found abandoned and unopened in the foothills of what is now Sylmar, and that it was dumped because the criminals were being hounded by deputy sheriffs hot on their trail.
The paper added,
Posses of city police and deputy sheriffs tramped the rain-soaked hills near San Fernando this afternoon, heavily armed and expecting a deadly battle with the three gunmen they sought [if Lewis was involved with the incident, he was not part of this aspect].
The hunted trio early this morning fired a volley of revolver shots at Policeman S.L. Rich of San Fernando as he escorted them to San Fernando police headquarters with a stolen safe he had found in their automobile.
It was believed that the trio of suspects absconded with the safe and were headed towards the San Gabriel Mountains to blow it with material that was also found when the safe was abandoned, when Rich drove up to the auto and confronted the men. He allowed them to drive behind him, for some reason, as they headed back to town when shots were fired and the driver of the car in which the suspects were situated turned off and drove toward the mountains.
Rich was uninjured, though several bullets hit his vehicle as he chased the suspects and then abandoned the pursuit because of the close call, radioing for help with dozens of police and sheriff personnel heading out to track the wanted men down. The rain appeared to have aided the burglars, however, as they soon escaped and the car was found abandoned, apparently near a county-run tuberculosis hospital in Sylmar.
It was soon understood that the trio were Niohus, to whom the car was registered, and the Clows and arrest warrants were issued for the men, while 17-year old Vivian Clow, daughter of Alvah and sister of Elton, was arrested with a friend under the belief that they were somehow involved in shielding the criminals.
The three wanted men, however, vanished, leading Sheriff Traeger to issue his wanted notice and it was some four months before the situation changed. In the meantime, there were allegations that the suspects were wanted for possible crimes committed in Ventura County and Pasadena—this involving the robbery of $2,000 from the safe of the Crescent Creamery—during the fall of 1926.
A major reason for the involvement of Alvah Clow may be that he was a facing a foreclosure on a mortgage in Hanford and he may have had trouble, as a recently paroled felon, finding employment and supporting his wife and family. Whatever the case, the Clows were arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma in mid-March, after it was asserted that they and Niohus returned to Hanford from Los Angeles in December and laid low in an abandoned cabin several miles from town, receiving food and gasoline as local and Los Angeles authorities scoured the area for them. There were reports that the Clows went to northern California and Oregon, though what connection they may have had in the Sooner State was not stated.
The Ventura Free Press of 18 March remarked that there were thoughts that Niohus killed the Clows, threatening to do so if they showed signs of weakening in the face of the widespread manhunt, and it also commented that the trio engaged in “a career of crime that is not equaled in the annals of the state since the early days of wild west badmen.” Some of the reporting, however, included claims of more widespread crimes by the men as well as assertions that Vivian Crow and her girlfriend “have also blown many safes,” allegations that proved to be unfounded.
By April, Niohus was located and nabbed in Chicago, so it seems that the trio made it to Oklahoma and then split up. Unlike in 1924, Alvah Clow not only did not wait to enter a guilty plea for second-degree burglary, but he convinced a judge that his son had only a very minor, unspecified role in the crime spree. So, while the elder Clow was handed another 1-15 year stint, this time at Folsom State Prison, the younger was able to secure a sentence of two years’ probation and was given a job working for Southern California Edison at the Big Creek hydroelectric facility in the Sierra Nevada Mountains northeast of Fresno
Niohus pled not guilty on more serious charges of burglary for the Pasadena and San Fernando heists and assault in firing at the San Fernando police officer, but, in summer 1927, he was found guilty and handed three concurrent sentences of that included five years to life and he was shipped off to Folsom, where, presumably, he met up again with Alvah Clow. There was, however, another figure involved in the incidents in greater Los Angeles and who was convicted and sent to prison at the same time as Niohus.
This was Alberto D. Acevedo, the brother of the late husband of Alvah Crow’s wife’s sister, Corine Carpenter. Acevedo was born to Leonidas Emiliano Acevedo, a native of Baja California who migrated as a child to Los Angeles during the 1849 Gold Rush, and Mercedes Alvarado, from a prominent Californio family that included a governor and for whom Alvarado Street in Los Angeles is named. Alberto’s younger brother, Pablo, who was a well-known Angel City boxer under the “ring name” of “Billy Martin” in the late 19th century, married Katharine Carpenter Clow’s sister. After Pablo died in a car crash in 1919, Alberto resided with the widow.
He, however, had an extensive criminal career as a young man, including a conviction in 1892 for robbing a doctor in the Angel City’s Chinatown, before which he escaped the county jail and was later apprehended in Arizona and for which he served a term at San Quentin. After getting involved in a fight with a Chinese man in 1896, his attorney managed to secure a release, conditional on Acevedo’s leaving town for México, apparently arranged by his well-respected father, who was a barber for decades.
Yet, Acevedo was instead given a position as a nurse at the city hospital, which he held for a short time before finding employment as a boiler maker. In 1897 and 1899, he was arrested for being in a Chinese-owned opium joint and then for disturbing the peace. In 1900, rancher Joseph Wolfskill got in a tussle with Acevedo at a bar and the latter got the better of it (leading Wolfskill to grouse that “the damned greaser” gave him, a scion of a prominent family, his father being William Wolfskill, unwanted publicity), but it appears that, for nearly three decades, he kept a clean record.
Acevedo and his wife were arrested just before Christmas 1926 on suspicious of harboring the Clows and Niohaus, but he was then convicted of second-degree burglary in the Crescent Creamery heist and one wonders if he was forced to join Niohus in the caper as the latter claimed he was with the Bon Ton safecracking attempt in 1923. Whatever the situation, Acevedo was given that same 1-15 year sentence.
The 1930 census at Folsom enumerated all three men. Acevedo was working as a server in the prison mess hall, Clow worked in the carpenter shop and Niohus, given his stiffer sentences and the fact that a summer 1928 escape was thwarted when the warden discovered the convict hiding in a creek up to his neck, did hard labor at a quarry.
It is unknown what happened with Niohus, including whether he died at Folsom or was released and vanished. Acevedo probably served a few years and was paroled and he died in Los Angeles in 1947. The younger Clow married twice, had two sons, worked in construction-related jobs and died in 1963 at age 58. As for Alvah E. Clow, he was identified by witnesses as being part of a 1932 robbery in Ventura and willingly surrendered, with it being determined that he had an air-tight alibi as he was said to be pouring concrete in Hanford at the time the crime was committed.
In late January 1940, Clow was working for a local water company and left with a fellow employee and was to head for dinner at a son’s house, but never made it. After ten days, he was found dead in a canal and his car was located, as well, with evidence showing that he tried to avoid driving into the watercourse on making a turn and then managed to extricate himself from the vehicle but was carried away by the current and drowned.
It was assumed when this poster was acquired that there was probably a notable story involving the wanted men and their burglary and safe blowing crimes, but it could not be imagined that this would extend to a disgraced peace officer, a repeat offender from Los Angeles County and a native Latino Angeleno with a troubled past as a young man.
This just goes to show that you never know what an artifact can tell us beyond its surface content and value!