From Kleptomaniac Maid to Maternity Hospital Matron: A Press Photo of Etta Bell Heil, Los Angeles, 10 September 1925

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

We just recently published a 12-part post regarding the August 1924 killing of Theresa Weinstein Moers by her lover, ex-boxing champion Kid McCoy (Norman Selby), in which the question of insanity and criminal behavior figured largely and for which the featured artifact from the Homestead’s collection was a press photo of Moers taken just before her death.

This post also concerns mental illness and criminal justice, as well as highlights a press photo from the Museum’s holdings, this one, date stamped 10 September 1925 (but likely taken earlier), is of a defendant in a criminal inquiry, Etta Bell Heil. While Heil was probably photographed in 1921 or 1922 with regard to alleged crimes, her story takes on other notable aspects covering about 15 years in Los Angeles from the early 1920s to mid 1930s.

Etta (1879-1944) was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, located in that state’s northern panhandle and between Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio. At 17, she married a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad engineer, Samuel Martin, and as the 20th century came to a close, the couple, a son and a daughter resided, with Etta’s parents in Knottsville, southeast of Wheeling. The marriage foundered, however, and Etta ended up in Chicago where, in late August 1914, she wedded a successful foreign exchange broker, Joseph S. Heil, with whom she had two children (he had a son by a prior marriage).

In November 1918, Etta filed a suit of separation accusing Joseph of physical abuse, threatening her life and demanding custody of their son Joseph. A judge granted her a restraining order and $500 a month support, though she wanted more. The couple, however, reunited and soon welcomed a daughter. On 20 May 1921, however, Etta was arrested at their home on suspicion of six residential robberies involving the theft of valuables totaling more than $25,000. Doctors told the press that she “is the victim of kleptomania—the result of an automobile accident” and added that she was pregnant.

More strange was the report that Etta, despite her husband’s wealth, took jobs as a maid, with forged references, to carry out her crimes, and, after committing one of these, was followed to an apartment building owned by her husband where she stashed her ill-gotten gains. When Joseph arrived at the police station and she confirmed what she’d done, he told reporters that, since her accident three months prior Etta was under the care of a nurse, but snuck away and then explained the stolen goods as the result of spending her “more than liberal” allowance.

Etta was sent to a sanitarium and Joseph told the Windy City media that he’d reimburse all of her victims with cash, with the amount stolen said to be in excess of $40,000 after more persons came forward. Joseph also stated, “she was irresponsible” and “she did not know what she was doing.” In May, a Chicago paper recorded that Etta was recently the wife of Cyril Perry and that he went bankrupt, followed by her insolvency petition showing that she owed almost $200,000 to creditors but had assets of an engagement and wedding ring worth all of $50. At the end of June, Etta pled guilty to four counts of grand larceny and, in a plea agreement, was given a year probation—one wonders what an actual maid without her wealth, connections and ability to get top-notch legal representation would have been handed for a sentence?

About three weeks after this, Joseph filed for divorce, with it reported that “this action was taken after he had made good the $90,000 she stole from wealthy people,” but it also followed the fact that “she will recover from the poison she swallowed last week after she had been caught in the act of kidnapping her two children,” meaning those she shared with Joseph, including Joseph H., who went on to be a listed painter and collagist. He added, “I intend to do everything I can for Mrs. Heil, but to continue as her husband is impossible.”

In short order, Etta left Chicago and ended up in Los Angeles, though why she chose the Angel City for her new home is not known—her ex-husband bought her a house there. Soon, though, she wound up in legal hot water again. The 2 December 1921 edition of the Los Angeles Express reported that she was arrested the prior evening for burglarizing the house of well-known film director, Sam Wood, whose pictures included several with ill-fated star Wallace Reid, who died from the flu while battling a morphine addiction, and, recently, a new talent, Gloria Swanson. Repeating her ruse from Chicago, Etta was hired as a maid and stole about $1,000 in jewelry, lingerie and a pistol from Wood’s residence in the Larchmont neighborhood.

Etta’s attorney, Homer C. Millsap, told the paper that he and partner Newton Kendall were concerned she might try to commit suicide in jail and added that she was in litigation over a house she rented and during which he “noticed that she has daily been suffering greatly from nervous trouble.” He continued that, if she was guilty as charged, “she did so while suffering from some delusion” and posited that “the woman is ill and in need of medical attention and should not be held responsible for her acts.”

The Los Angeles Record of the following day ran a headline of “PROBE SOCIETY RAFFLES’ SANITY,” the reference being to a popular series of mystery novels by Ernest W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, in which A.J. Raffles was a “gentleman thief,” and the inference here was that Etta was a “gentlewoman” burglar. The paper added that there was a second identified victim, who hired her as a maid, while an investigation was looking into other possible crimes. Subsequently, it was recorded by the Record that two doctors, formerly members of a municipal lunacy commission, were observing her closely for signs of insanity.

In its number of the 6th, the paper informed readers that Etta’s 9-year-old son, Richard, told reporters “she’s sick and that is the reason she acted as she did” as he added, “she’s the best mother in the world.” He then wrapped his arms around his maternal grandmother and told her not to cry. On the 19th, the paper remarked that,

Acting on the belief that Mrs. Etta Belle [sic] Heil, alleged society “Raffles,” and former wife of a Chicago millionaire banker, is not criminally responsible for her action, Deputy District Attorney Buron R. Fitts [who went on to become lieutenant governor and District Attorney] is expected to ask dismissal of burglary charges.

While Millsap and Kendall were preparing an insanity defense, Wood ended up deciding not to be willing to prosecute Etta and Chief Deputy District Attorney William C. Doran “investigated and finally concluded that she was mentally unresponsible.” In late spring 1922, Chicago authorities professed interest in having her extradited there to face further burglary charges and she was held at the county jail for several weeks as her sanity again underwent examination.

The Express of 12 June noted,

At the time Mrs. Heil was placed in the psychopathic ward of the county hospital she maintained that she had stolen various articles from time to time but that the inclination to take things not her own was due to kleptomania. She pointed out that she was wealthy in her own name and in reality had no need for the “trinkents” she had stolen.

The next day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times referred to Etta as “handsome and refined in appearance, has a comfortable income; a fine home in this city and furniture worth $12,000.” The account added that she migrated to the Angel City just four days after the divorce from Heil was finalized and that she brought her 9-year old son with her (adopted children Joseph and Frances remained with Heil).

It was added that “she became hysterical, she said, when Mr. Heil threatened to have somebody adopt one of the children, and she returned to Chicago several weeks ago.” The new charges referred to above stemmed from an alleged burglary committed on her trip back, as she, once again, presented as a maid and took some $15,000 in jewelry and other items. Etta took the loot in a trunk back to Los Angeles and Millsap and Kendall gave the case to authorities.

When questioned, Etta “said she did not know why she masqueraded as a maid and stole things,” though she added that she was obsessed with having enough to live on following her divorce. Moreover, “tears would course down her cheeks when she mentioned her children” and the paper remarked that “as a thieving maid, she had her children in mind” because she stole items kids might use. The Times called her a “female Raffles” and cited Etta and her mother in averring that the auto accident injuries from the prior year.

While Chicago police officers arrived in town with an arrest warrant, Etta’s mother Rebecca, known by her middle name of Jane, applied for guardianship on the grounds of incapacity or incompetency. It was added that, by the terms of the divorce settlement with Heil, Etta was to receive $1,500 yearly (another source stated it was $300 monthly, or $3,600 annually) for life or until she married again, while she was not to incur any further debts under Heil’s name.

On 23 June, a probate judge ruled that Etta was incompetent and her estate to be managed by a trust company. This followed an appearance in front of the lunacy commission at which proceeding she was “adjudged mentally deranged but not dangerously insane.” Millsap and Kendall told the Express that she was at a private sanitarium and, apparently, the extradition to and prosecution at Chicago was abandoned.

By April 1923, a remarkable reinvention was realized. Under a new name of Donna E. Bell, Etta opened the Sylvan Lodge, which advertised under “Sanatoriums,”

ACCOMODATIONS FOR A LIMITED NUMBER OF PATIENTS; MASSAGE AND VIOLET RAY. CAREFULLY PLANNED AND BALANCED DIET. OUR PATIENTS ARE UNDER THE CARE OF THEIR OWN PHYSICIANS. LARGE GROUNDS.

The structure was a bungalow located at the southeast corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Hoover Street, that side of Hoover being in East Hollywood and the opposite in Silver Lake. By the end of the year, “therapeutic light treatments” were added, while “scientific treatment [is] given to obsetric [sic] cases in a separate building,” in which there was an “A-1 operating room.” Within a relatively short period of time, however, a major project was undertaken with the bungalow replaced by a large edifice that became the Sylvan Lodge maternity hospital.

Where the funds were derived for the significant expansion was not explained, though it may be that Joseph Heil provided support or perhaps Donna garnered money from supporters. In any case, she showed significant savvy in publicizing the project, including an appearance on the KNX radio station and offering a bed to the local chapter of the Red Cross dedicated to the wives of veterans of the recent First World War.

The 8 March 1925 edition of the Los Angeles Times published an architectural rendering of the impressive edifice and stated that Donna “has long experience in hospital construction and management in the East,” though nothing was found for this post that confirmed that statement. The paper added that she purchased the property two years prior for $45,000 including the ten-room house in which Sylvan Lodge began.

Two additions meant that the completed edifice offered 22 private rooms, three wards also referred to as sun rooms, a dozen utility spaces for reception and for doctors and nurses. Prior to the most recent work, the paper observed, Bell was offered $150,000, though she pegged the value at publication as $225,000. She told the paper she didn’t expect to get her investment back for several years, but the fine architecture, lush grounds and “costly electrical hospital devices” were undertaken “to satisfy an ambition of many years standing.”

The Times commented that,

The institution offers to mothers of culture and refinement a maternity hospital in every way equivalent to their own homes, but with the added advantage of the very best scientific equipment. Besides this equipment, Mrs. Bell has brought from medical and surgical centers of Europe and the East, the very newest devices and instruments that have to do with the practice of obstetrics. With respect to prenatal care, no scientific point having to do with the psychology and effect, of color and atmosphere and surroundings have been overlooked, and the hospital gives promise of taking rank as one of the best of its kind in America.

Cynthia Grey in the Record of the 11th lauded the effort, writing, “a word of comment may be of interest in regard to the recently established Sylvan lodge.” The columnist continued,

Though not a charity institution, it will be run, it is declared, so that moderately financed families may take advantage of it.

It is a new maternity hospital, founded by Mrs. Donna E. Bell, who for years has had before her eyes an ideal institution to help motherhood at the crisis of life.

The Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News two days later called Sylvan Lodge “in many ways the most remarkable of maternity hospitals in Southern California” as the 70-person capacity facility “is said to represent the last word in maternity care and treatment and to make available for Los Angeles mothers the latest devices in science in pre-natal and post-natal care.”

The Times of the 16th published photos of nurses with their infant charges and it separately mentioned that $200,000 was spent on the newly opened institution, which included radios and telephones for each bed. The paper commented that “the ‘institution’ aspect has been submerged and the tone of Sylvan Lodge is rather than of a quiet, home-like hotel,” while the landscaping was such that “there are nooks and shady retreats for convalescents.” Later, the Times reported that Bell spent a year looking at maternity hospitals in large American and European cities.

A remarkable feature about the “Astonishing Transformation of the ‘Model Maid Burglar,” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle of 7 June as Delphine Arnold chronicled the turbulent life of Donna Bell, including another marriage, in between those to Charles Martin and Cyril Perry, to George Brown, which produced a son, George Raymond (Moncell), who later went by his mother’s maiden name. The piece went into great detail about the Chicago scandal, the Los Angeles controversy and the reinvention culminating in the opening of Sylvan Lodge, with Arnold concluding:

So she sits at the desk of the executive office—the one-time “Model Maid Burglar”—greeting assistants with her charming smile, finding, perhaps, a new thrill in serving the world she once preyed upon. And scientists in Los Angeles and Chicago, who investigated her case, are wondering whether the “compulsion,” as they call it, which caused her to become a thief, has disappeared never to return. They are hoping her transformation will prove permanent.

More problems followed by Donna and her facility, including an end of 1925 arrest because, though she deposited $1,200 at her bank, she wrote checks to pay bills at more than amount, though she claimed it was a mere oversight and not a matter of fraud. She was released to the custody of the county’s psychopathic parole officer, reflective of her legal status. In mid-January 1926, however, charges were dismissed as the claims of employees affected by her overdrafts were considered satisfied.

By summer, though, a notice was issued in the press by Los Angeles County Sheriff William I. Traeger, in which the Rodeo Land and Water Company, which sold Bell the land, filed for a judgment on nearly $9,000 that was in arrears. A sheriff’s sale was to be held on 13 September, but some arrangement was made by which she continued to operate Sylvan Lodge through the remainder of the decade.

The 20 February 1930 issue of the Hollywood Citizen reported that, when Sylvan Lodge was incorporated in 1925, Superior Court Judge Sidney Reeves was a key figure and, after his death, another jurist from that court, Thomas C. Gould took his place on the board of directors. It was added that “although the hospital is self-supporting, Mrs. Bell has instituted a drive for 128 new rooms to be donated exclusively to charity” and she’d been operating with “a special system of promissory notes” for some young or poor patients.

In the Citizen of 12 April, it was stated that a six-story edifice was to replace the 56-bed facility, with it said that over 150 people were on a waiting list for admission, and a fundraising program with a goal of $150,000 announced. The cost of 50 cents per treatment was noted, as well. Yet, by the end of May, Sylvan Lodge was closed (it became a place for celebrities to have more secluded hospitalizations, including actors Clara Bow and Joan Blondell and horse racing jockey, Tod Sloan, while it also was where adults injured in a car crash caused by Lois Pantages, wife of the theatre mogul, Alexander, were taken for treatment) and more controversy surrounded Bell, this time with another marriage, consummated by the 50-year-old at the end of January with 80-year-old North Hollywood farmer, Charles F. Harris.

The couple’s maid and an attorney, later determined to representing a nephew of Harris, filed a complaint with the district attorney’s office charging Donna with keeping her elderly husband essentially a prisoner. The matter was referred to Judge Charles W. Fricke, who ordered Sheriff Traeger to take custody of Harris and send him to the county general hospital pending a hearing. But, when deputies arrived at the home, located between Silver Lake and Griffith Park, they left him there based on his statements that he was well and content with the care of his new wife.

It was reported that Harris, who asserted that all he asked from Donna was that she would “serve as his companion for the rest of his lifetime,” revised his will so that she became the sole heir of his estate of north of $300,000, most of it in San Fernando Valley ranchland. The Harrises then appeared in court, with Charles on a stretcher, and he plainly, if barely above a whisper, told another judge that he was well treated and he was promptly released.

Charles lived another 15 years, dying in 1946 at age 96, but his marriage to Donna did not last. In 1932, when Sylvan Lodge reopened under a new owner, though it closed for good a couple of years later, she wedded Dr. Victor Parkin, a well-known psychiatrist who conducted examinations and testified at high-profile criminal trials, including that of Norman Selby (Kid McCoy), who was a key figure in a recent multi-part post on this blog, in Las Vegas.

Donna’s fifth marriage turned out to be fraudulent, as Parkin discovered that there was no divorce from Donna, so, in April 1935, he was granted an annulment. A half-year later, she was arrested on another charge of writing checks on insufficient funds, with the News reporting that Parkin “has made reimbursements on several checks written by” his ex-wife, these presented at several Angel City banks. The Record of 5 December stated that Donna pled guilty on one charge and five others were summarily dismissed, with the result that she was sentenced to a year in the Los Angeles County jail.

She may have returned to Chicago after her release, as this is indicated in the 1940 census, which found her in San Francisco and managing what was recorded as the “Villa Don Ra Dae Hospital,” though that facility opened in August 1936 as the Bayview and advertised for the HALCO treatment system of aversion therapy for alcoholism, which promised results in just three days, as well as maternity services and obstetrics.

By 1939, the facility was called a nursing home, but the name “Don Ra Dae Hospital” was used later. She was assisted by her sons Moncell (George Raymond) and David Victor, who was adopted in 1923, until her death at the end of 1944. Moncell took over the operation, which continued into the 1950s, after which he ran the Federal Ambulance Service from the building, which still stands, as does the adjacent house he owned. David joined the Navy, serving during World War II and Korea and retiring after three decades, after he which he was a university hospital executive in Kansas.

This is another example of the “truth is stranger than fiction” post frequent found in this blog, as Etta Bell Heil, reconfigured as Donna E. Bell, metamorphosed in multiple ways during her 65 years. Obvious questions stand out, principally, was she insane and, if so, was this caused by the car accident cited in 1921? Was her reinvention as the proprietor of Sylvan Lodge an example of how a person can change, even though she lost the facility in the early years of the Great Depression? Was her reemergence with the Bayview/Don Ra Dae Hospital, helped by her sons, a late in life redemption of sorts? Whatever the answers, this press photo is a window into a truly remarkable story in Los Angeles and elsewhere.