“Have You Seen This Boy?”: A Press Photo of the Missing Walter Collins, 19 April 1928, Part Three

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

With the disappearance of nine-year-old Walter Collins nearing four weeks with little indication of finding him, media coverage continuing to alluding to a few major possibilities for his whereabouts, but little additional clues or evidence surfaced, with the Los Angeles Times of 8 April 1928 observing that “the mystery . . . yesterday appeared to defy all efforts of police of the State at solution.”

Yet, a pair of Los Angeles Police Department investigators continued to believe that claims by the boy’s father that the incident was connected to “former convicts of the [Folsom] prison whose enmity he had incurred” and that they kidnapped young Walter “in revenge.” Moreover, it was stated that “several of those convicts, said to be degenerates,” presumably meaning that they were imprisoned for sex crimes, “are sought.”

The next day’s edition of the paper added,

The mysterious disappearance . . . may go down in police records as one of the strangest missing-person cases ever handled by local officers. Yesterday those in charge of the search for the boy, admitted they were baffled.

In a shift from the previous day’s comments, it was reported that “the most promising clew the officers had has failed” as investigations of the Folsom feud “angle of the case have been unfruitful.” This was despite the deployment of about 100 officers who “have been unable to unearth the slightest clew to his whereabouts.”

As to Walter’s mother Christine, it was remarked that she had no idea what happened to her only child and, while “she has kept grief well under control for the past weeks,” it was clear that “the anxious hours of waiting are beginning to tell on her” as “she has been almost sleepless since her boy disappeared.”

In its edition of the 9th, the Los Angeles Express remarked that “police captains, representing every department of the force which has had any part in the widespread hunt . . . held a conference today to plan a recheck of every possible clew.” Notably, the Collins case was compared to the abduction and murder of Marion Parker several months prior.

The paper observed that Mrs. Collins and her sister Agnes Dunne, who came down from Seattle to be with her sibling, were called in to meet with Herman Cline, the LAPD’s detectives chief. A new area of concentrated search was to be the Arroyo Seco, a little north of the Collins residence in the Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles. It was added, however, that the possibility that a couple of former Folsom prison mates of Walter’s father took the child in retribution “was still the most tenable” possibility, even if there was no “clew as to the whereabouts of the two former prisoners.”

The Los Angeles Record of the 10th informed readers that “two hundred police officers prepared to enter the northeastern section of the city today . . . to make an intensive search of the district” in hopes of finding Walter. It commented, however, that “on the heels” of the vanishing of the boy, “police were confronted with a wave of [reported] disappearances including two women and four boys.” This was suggestive of something of a psychological phenomenon sweeping through the area, while it was added that a 10-year-old reported missing was found at a beach and was not abducted as suspected.

A related element were frequent contacts made to police of claims by persons that “they had seen a boy who looked like Walter Collins and the Express, also of the 10th, enlarged the number of searchers to 250 who “continued doggedly to comb the nooks and crannies of the Arroyo Seco and Elysian park—for the body.” For the first time, there was a statement of resignation like that uttered by the captain of the Lincoln Heights station of the LAPD:

We have just about concluded that the boy is dead. We are beginning to believe that little Walter has been murdered, and we are systematically covering every possible place where his body may have been hidden by his abductors and killers.

Among the alleged recent sightings was one in Glendale, where a prior report of a child’s body in the back of an automobile led to naught, but this one involved a claim that he was seen applying for a job at an ice cream factory. The Burbank police chief, meanwhile, was following a tip that someone looking like Walter was seen at an oil field in Santa Maria in northern Santa Barbara County.

Why it was only after all this time elapsed is unclear, but an LAPD captain was dispatched to the Avenue 20 School, where Walter attended, “to ascertain if the boy had shown any inclination to run away from home.” As for the scouring of Elysian Park, the Express noted that, “in quiet voices the searchers talked of Killer [William] Hickman and of the cases of [Collins and Parker] had traits in parallel. Also mentioned was the 1924 incident involving the Martin sisters, a tragedy covered in a previous post on this blog.

A strange development was mentioned by the paper in that Christine Collins bought clothes for his vanished son a few days prior and, when questioned about it, she answered that a psychic she consulted told her “her boy would come back to her on Easter morn.” There were a series of questions posed, including why, despite all of the interviews and tips, there were no proven sightings of Walter once he left the house or that he reached Lincoln Park, his reported destination.

It was added that federal immigration officials at the Mexican border were requested to keep an eye out for the boy, while police in Canada were given descriptions of Walter “and certain suspects,” probably the two Folsom ex-cons, “which have already been distributed throughout the [United States.]” The account ended with,

At first there were many clews. Today there are few.

And with the vanishing of the clews vanishes also the last shreds of hope that Walter Collins is still alive.

The hunt now is tacitly understood to be a hunt for a fiend—and a body.

Perhaps a mutilated body.

The coverage of the Times on that day only offered one additional tidbit concerning the report by a doctor that, while he was recently in Long Beach, quite a bit south of Lincoln Heights, “he saw an automobile with a boy 10 or 12 years old of age lying in the back seat.” The physician followed the car for a time and took down the license plate number, which was forwarded to the police.

The next day, the paper updated readers on the Glendale tip, with some modifications to prior reporting. It was stated that employees of California Dairies, Inc. “partially identified his photograph,” though what exactly constituted a “partial” identification is an obvious question, “as that of a boy who called at the plant on March 23, begging for money,” this being just under two weeks since his disappearance. Two men and a woman stated that the beggar “strongly resembles” the image of Walter.

Meanwhile, 100 LAPD officers were sent to comb the neighborhood surrounding the Collins residence, but why this was done a month later was not explained. As for the distraught mother, she “still clings to the belief that her boy was taken in a prisoner’s revenge plot aimed at her husband.” The piece concluded that, while “score of clews have been worked by police without results,” there were others “being given close attention.”

The Express of the 11th, in addition to publishing a purported note written by Marion Parker to her father while being held by Hickman, reported on yet another area of interest for searchers of Walter. It noted that “Baldwin Hills, in southwest Los Angeles, was being swarmed over by a police posse today as another of the many belated ‘clews’ . . . was being run down.”

It was added that “the sudden shifting of the searching posses from the northeast sector of the city to the southwest” came from a tip provided by another medico, who said he saw a car with a male driver and woman passenger speeding with a bundle tied to the front fender “which he believed probably held the body of a child.” The vehicle was traveling so fast, however, that no license plate number could be obtained.

The Express ended the piece by reiterating previous information with a slight amendment, in mentioning that “little hope is retained by detectives that the boy will be alive when found, and the nation-wide search now is tacitly understood to be the search for a body—and for another killer of Hickman “temperament.”

The next day’s reporting was even more dire, as the Express recorded that

With the failure yesterday of posses combing Baldwin Hills to find any trace of the boy, detectives today admitted that their last forlorn hope had vanished and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of 9-year-old Walter Collins bids fair to go down in police records as “unsolved.”

The paper listed the various “clews” traced by the police in searching the Arroyo Seco, Baldwin Hills, Elysian Park, the lake at Lincoln Park and Griffith Park not to mention the Folsom Prison ex-cons and, not only were the police discouraged and resigned to the case being consigned to the cold case files, but the Express ended its coverage of the matter—at least for a while.

The Times, in its number of the 12th, informed its readers that the California Dairies lead in Glendale evaporated when a LAPD officer located an 11-year-old runaway who confessed that he went to the plant to beg for money. With regard to the report of the purported body strapped to a car near the Baldwin Hills, that, too, led to nothing, but there was another strange addition to the collection of clues involving contacts made in Seattle, where it was thought Walter went to seek out his father, because Christine told her son that was where he lived instead of letting the boy know that the elder Collins was at Folsom. Lastly, the search for two released prisoners from there was still being pursued despite the unlikelihood of any tie to the child’s abduction.

The Seattle angle was mentioned by the Record in its edition of the 16th, but with an added twist as it was reported that a taxi driver there told local police officers that “he saw a boy he identified from newspaper photographs as young Collins.” The cabby went up to the youngster, who ran off into a nearby structure and disappeared and then was quoted as saying “I hardly believe I could have been wrong” because “I had a picture of him in my hand.”

Despite the despair in recent articles, however, the Times of the same day felt that the news from the Washington metropolis meant that “Collins Boy’s Trail [Is] Warmer.” It cited the taxi driver’s account as observing that the boy, wearing overalls and a blue shirt, that he saw “appeared to be drawn and weary, as if he had spent many sleepless nights.”

Warm as the trail may have seemed at that moment, however, the search for Walter definitely went cold and nothing of substance was reported on his disappearance for a considerable time, though, in mid-June, it was rumored that the child, and perhaps his abductors, perished in the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which took place two days after he vanished and the flooding from which killed hundreds including many who went unidentified, though this was quickly discounted by authorities.

In early August, however, a stunning report came from Illinois that the youngster was found alive and well in that state. We’ll however, halt here, and return in mid-September to pick up that thread and to return to the unsolved case involving the murder of a Latino teenager whose headless body was found adjacent to the Homestead at the beginning of February, about five weeks prior to Walter Collins’ disappearance. Be sure to check back with us in just under five months as we carry the story forward!