by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As the investigation over murders purported to have been committed at a Wineville, now part of Jurupa Valley near Riverside, ranch owned by the Northcott family continued in September 1928, the lead was taken by officials in Riverside County. On the 19th, the Riverside Press reported that “chemists in Los Angeles today who made an analysis of the bold-stained soil removed from one of the graves at the Northcott ‘murder farm,’ announced that the blood was that of a human being.”
Moreover, the paper continued, “a piece of a skull with a lock of blonde hair is also that of a human being . . . thus strengthening the murder case against Gordon Stuart Northcott and his mother [Louise], who are now fugitives from justice, in hiding in or near Vancouver [British Columbia, Canada.]” Gordon’s father, Cyrus, who’d remained at his Los Angeles house and was arrested and questioned as a material witness there, was transferred to the Riverside County jail by two investigators of the district attorney’s office working with Sheriff Clem Sweeters. It was added that Cyrus willingly did so, “but will not be permitted to talk to any one except those working on the case.”
For the first time since Sanford Clark, grandson of Cyrus and Louise and nephew of Gordon, revealed details of the alleged horrific crimes, scouring of the three-acre ranch located just east of today’s Interstate 15, was not conducted during that day and a guard was installed to keep the morbidly curious away. The 15-year-old Clark was also to be taken to Riverside after federal immigration officers agreed to the transfer and remanded to the jail, though he was to be permitted “liberty in custody of a trusty,” or trusted inmate at the facility.
Jim Quinn, working under District Attorney Albert Ford, told the paper “we are not showing our hand” when it came to evidence, but allowed that what was gathered to date “is dovetailing perfectly into that which is being held back.” At the proper time, he went on, there would be the revelation of “the evidence necessary to convict both the Northcotts.” Comparing the sole Northcott child to the notorious murder of young Marion Parker at the end of 1927, the investigator remarked,
To me Gordon Stuart Northcott is of the same stripe with Edward Hickman. He is a degenerate of the lowest stripe and we believe that when the screws are clamped down he will come through and confess to a series of the most cold-blooded murders that have ever been committed on the Pacific coast.
I have never known a degenerate who could stand up under the grilling, knowing in his heart he is guilty. Hickman confessed and I believe Gordon Stuart Northcott will break and tell all he knows.
In its article on the 19th, the Los Angeles Times published a photo of Sanford Clark with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies, all Latinos, at the Northcott cabin in the Mint Canyon area near modern Santa Clarita where Gordon, professing an interest in mining, was said to have assisted a miner in killing the latter’s partner. An article added that three pairs of boys’ shoes, one of which showed evidence of burning, were found in a nearby chicken house, while a well was apparently recently filled in and used as a fire pit and Clark, who was tested for veracity before it was entered and was said to have provided minute details to attest to his knowledge, told the deputies that the cabin, said to have a khaki jacket with possible blood stains on it, was used by his cousin within the prior several months.
There were other “outstanding developments” mentioned by the paper, including that Los Angeles Museum (now the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) paleontologists determined that bones from the Wineville ranch were “the ankle, finger, leg and skull bones of juvenile human beings.” It was also reported that handwriting expert Milton Carlson issued a statement that “the boy returned here” from Illinois “as Walter Collins is not the real boy.”
This was based on his review of four documents, including one from the real Walter before his disappearance and other from the youngster brought from the Midwest and who police insisted Walter’s mother, Christine, take home until she returned the child as not hers—whereupon she was taken to the county psychopathic ward for officers. Carlson, for example, pointed to spelling and the composition of letters in the missives, adding that the way an “r” was written was not taught in California schools.
Moreover, it was stated that Canadian police authorities believed that “Mrs. Northcott apparently is trying to catch a boat for Alaska and that the son is attempting to board a vessel going to South America.” This was determined by reports that Louise was in an Alberta town looking for passage to the American territory, while someone who looked like Gordon went to a steamship company and was referred to the captain of a ship docket in a port in the Puget Sound in Washington. Meanwhile, Sanford’s son Jessie was found in Vancouver with police wanting to speak to her about what she knew regarding the Wineville ranch.
As for Cyrus, it was stated that he was to be taken that day to the ranch. Then, there was a report that D.A. Ford issued murder complaints against Gordon and Louise Northcott in the matter of “John Doe,” meaning the unidentified youth, usually reported to be Mexican, though some sources speculated the victim was Filipino, whose body was found earlier in the year adjacent to the Homestead off today’s Hacienda Boulevard south of Valley Boulevard. The complaint, however, “will cover any murder that young Clark has told police Northcott committed.”
Under a big block headline of “POLICE CHASE NORTHCOTT,” the Los Angeles Express told its readers that Jessie Clark was “under protection of provincial police” in Vancouver as officers were on the hunt for her mother, uncle and grandmother. Additionally, it was stated that “twice the Clark girl has seen her uncle . . . and his mother . . . since coming to Vancouver. But each time she succeeded in evading them,” suggesting that they intended harm to her. A Vancouver ambulance driver told police that he saw a young man with a suitcase walking toward the city’s waterfront, while behind him was a woman who asked where a rowboat could be hired to go to a nearby inlet.
When it came to “unassailable proof bearing out the horrible story” told by Clark regarding his uncle’s “degenerate practices,” investigators cited the “discovery of enough human bones to fill half of a bushel basket,” the location of an aviation book from the Pomona Library that was checked out by the Winslow brothers prior to their disappearance and from which a page was torn an a letter sent to the youngsters’ parents, and the aforementioned chemical analysis of the dirt soaked in human blood.
The third degree grilling of Cyrus Northcott included an all-night session during which he was “allowed to sleep only a few minutes at a time,” though he was adamant that he was unaware of any murders, while saying that if there were killings “it is probably the bodies were disposed of in the dry river bed.” The Santa Ana River runs east and south of the ranch location and this statement led to the deployment of a trio of Army aircraft from March Field, now the March Air Reserve Base, southeast of Riverside to “cover an area 20 miles in extent in the vicinity of the abandoned chicken ranch,” though the hope was that the craft would locate an automobile abandoned by Gordon.
When questioned in the Riverside jail, Cyrus made a notable remark about his son and his upbringing:
Stuart always wanted to be like Tarzan of the Apes. He was kept playing with dolls and dressed in girl’s [sic] clothing until he was 16 years old and after that he became very wild and vicious.
Returning to the Walter Collins debacle, the Express observed that “today authorities were more puzzled than ever over the announcement that Walter Collins—claimed on one hand to have been one of Northcott’s murder victims and on the other to have been found in De Kalb, Ill., and returned here—was not the Walter Collins who left his home months ago. With Carlson’s report, however, it was evidently made clear that it “gives new weight to young Clark’s story that Walter was hacked to pieces by Northcott.” Not only this, but it was related that Walter witnessed the killing of the miner, referred to earlier, and “was killed later . . . because Northcott feared he ‘knew too much.'”
The paper added that it was the Mint Canyon cabin where Walter was first taken and “in this shack Northcott is said to have practiced his human butchery . . . but on a more restricted scale than at the Wineville ‘murder ranch,’ where four boys were hacked to pieces and then, according to Clark, buried.” Also deemed of significance was that a criminologist took shoes found at the cabin and took them to the Winslow house in Pomona and found that they were worn down the same as others owned by young Nelson. As reported by the Times, as well, the Express noted that portion of a mattress, said to be blood-stained, were cut from it and found in a stove firebox.
In its number of the 19th, the Los Angeles Record, under the heading of “BLOOD ON FARM THAT OF HUMANS,” exclaimed “human blood and human bones!” as it cited that “positive evidence, verified by science” showed that Gordon “committed at least some of the half dozen fiendish murders attributed to him by his [nephew]” and that these revelations “speeded up the search for the missing youth and for the bodies of his victims.”
The paper reviewed the aforementioned forensic reports regarding blood and bones that meant that “positive pronouncements establish the truth of the weird, unbelievable story” related by Clark. It also commented that an automobile sold by Gordon to an Ontario used car dealer was found to have blood stains on the spare tire cover at the back and in the rear compartment. Police were reportedly searching for Mr. and Mrs. C.N. Scott, who’d lived in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and in Burbank because “they can give valuable information concerning the Northcotts.” Moreover, as noted before here, Mrs. Scott wrote letters that showed a close relationship to Gordon, while their son was apparently a target for Northcott.
A separate article, however, concerned Christine Collins, Walter’s mother, with the piece beginning with a remark by Carlson that “three specimens of handwriting, all alleged to have been executed by ten-year-old Walter Collins are from the hands of three different individuals.” He elaborated that the documents “are as different as red, white and blue.” Los Angeles Police Department Juvenile Division Captain Joseph J. Jones, however, “insists that the boy is the Walter Collins who was kidnaped six months ago” and then incarcerated Christine when, after several weeks with the boy, averred that he was not her son.
The Record, though, noted that she “has just been released from the psychopathic ward where Captain Jones had her placed for five days ‘because she didn’t know her own boy.'” To this, Christine, who ward officials determined was “perfectly sane,” asserted,
Because I have refused to accept another boy as substitute for my own son, Captain Jones has been trying to railroad me to the insane asylum . . .
The police department evidently declared that it was time their records were cleared of the Walter Collins matter. They discovered that this boy looked somewhat like my boy. Then they coached him about his home and matters here and he was smart enough to catch on quick so they have been trying to pass him off as mine.
Captain Jones first said that he would have me locked up as insane as a threat. Then when he found I knew the boy wasn’t mine he had me locked up anyway. I anybody knows her own son, certainly it is the mother.
Because I wept at night and tried to be cheerful and calm during the day when I see people and work, he says I am insane. I am just as sane as everybody else as the records prove. Even after five days and nights in the midst of insane persons I am sane.
Christine added that a claim of that the strange child was hers was his recognition of a dog by name, but she noted that “I told him while were down at the juvenile division,” while she added that there were differences in teeth with Walter’s wider apart, that he was two inches taller and that their eye shapes were different. Moreover, she remarked “this boy is boisterous and wild, mine was shy and bashful” and in a reference that is redolent of our own time, she said that the impostor child was vaccinated, while Walter was not. Other differences concerned Walter loving music and books, being neat and clean, having another tone of voice and straight hair.
Described as “calm and collected and firm in the belief that this is not her son,” Christine told the paper, “my boy will come back some day I hope” and was convinced that Clark was wrong that Walter was murdered by Gordon Northcott. Mary Baker, who resided with Mrs. Collins, informed the Record that there was “no thinking about it, that boy and Walter are as different as black white. His looks and actions and talk—oh, everything is different. He’s not our Walter.” She added the police never spoke to her about the boy or the Wineville murders and Baker added,
I went down and talked with Sanford Clark, after I read the story in the papers, and from his description of the boy there I am quite sure that it is not Walter.
We’ll return soon with more on the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, the name by which this is generally known, so check back in with us as the story further develops.