What stories the grimy, peeling, cracked walls...

What stories the grimy, peeling, cracked walls of the old Hall of Justice might tell if their aged stone and mortar could be given voice.

Many people went forth from the Hall’s courtrooms to Death Row. Many more were sent to prison. A few walked out the doors, free.

Now, after 70 years at the heart of the county’s justice system, the building at Temple and Spring streets stands abandoned after January’s earthquake, with only movie makers and historians interested in seeing it remain.

Inside, on the 15 floors behind the Italian Renaissance facade of gray granite, ghostly voices of the famous and infamous might still drift down the long corridors: Actor Errol Flynn, car-bombing Police Lt. Earl Kynette, gangster Bugsy Siegel, perjuring Dist. Atty. Buron Fitts, Red Light Bandit Caryl Chessman, and Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.

Courtroom dramas were plentiful there in the half-century when the building was practically a second home to judges, famed attorneys, reporters and police officers. Here, thousands of prisoners paced and sweated in the 520 cells or at defense tables:

1926--Supporters crowded in to cheer on Aimee Semple McPherson--radio evangelist and charismatic lightning rod of a Los Angeles church--who was on trial for filing a false police report after her mysterious disappearance from Venice Beach. Dist. Atty. Asa Keyes dropped the misdemeanor charges in mid-trial. (It was rumored that Keyes took $30,000 to withdraw the charges.)

1927--Hundreds of courtroom-watchers almost rioted when a judge began to issue reserved seats to political cronies for the trial of William Edward Hickman, who kidnaped a 12-year-old girl and then returned her, apparently alive, for ransom. Afterward, it was found that he had sewn her eyes open to make her appear alive and deceive rescuers.

1929--Within days of each other, and with the same judge and defense attorney, theater magnate Alexander Pantages was tried for statutory rape, and his wife was tried for vehicular manslaughter. So great was the curiosity that carpenters built barricades outside the courtroom to keep people in line.

Eunice Pringle, 17, in ponytail and little-girl clothes, testified about how Pantages had raped her. Ordered to come to court the next day in the clothes she wore the day of the alleged rape, she appeared as a seductive woman. The jury convicted Pantages. He appealed and another jury acquitted him. Pringle admitted on her deathbed that she was paid to frame him.

Days before, Lois Pantages was convicted of killing another motorist, a Japanese gardener. She was sentenced to 10 years probation and a $78,500 fine. She collapsed at the verdict; all five women jurors burst into tears.

1931--Ice cream vendors sold their wares to hundreds who cooled their heels waiting to get into the murder trial of a man who would normally be at the prosecution table: Deputy Dist. Atty. Dave Clark, accused of shotgunning top crime boss Charles Crawford and former newspaperman Herbert Spencer. He was acquitted of Spencer’s death, and charges were dropped in the Crawford case. Clark was running for municipal judge while awaiting his murder trial and got 60,000 votes.

1940-1941--Crowds flocked in when actor George Raft testified for his friend, hoodlum Bugsy Siegel, on trial for the murder of Harry (Big Greeny) Greenburg, a witness to a mob killing. Siegel was freed after two star witnesses were shot, gangland-style. Years later, a friend of Siegel’s willed $10,000 to Dr. Benjamin Blank, the jail physician, for supposedly giving Siegel special privileges behind bars. Siegel was back in the old Hall in 1944 on gambling charges. He pleaded guilty and paid a $250 fine.

1942--Movie fans jammed the Hall as renowned defense attorney Jerry Geisler got Flynn acquitted of statutory rape charges involving two teen-age girls aboard his yacht.

1943--Authorities fearing a “zoot suit” riot guarded the courtroom where 22 pachucos stood trial for the murder of fellow pachuco Jose Diaz. Diaz was found dead after a fight at a party near an abandoned Eastside quarry--a site the press dubbed “Sleepy Lagoon” after a song. Twelve of them were convicted of murder, five were convicted of lesser charges and five more were acquitted. All the convictions were reversed in 1944.

1943--The unlikely attraction was matronly but alluring Louise Peete, a woman who had been married four times, with each husband committing suicide when she rejected them. Previously convicted of murdering a boyfriend, she was on trial for robbing and murdering a woman who had believed in her innocence. Peete was executed in the gas chamber in 1947.

1957--During L. Ewing Scott’s trial for the murder of his wealthy wife, who disappeared from their Bel-Air home, his lawyer argued that no body had been found and that the victim “might walk through this courtroom door at any time.”

“Aha,” he said as the jurors looked expectantly toward the door. “That shows you are not convinced ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that she is dead.” Then came the prosecutor’s turn. “Every head in this courtroom turned toward that door just now,” J. Miller Leavy noted. “Except one--that of the defendant. And he didn’t bother to look because he knows she’s not going to walk through that door--he killed her.” Scott received a life sentence, was paroled in 1978 and died in 1987.

1968--To try Sirhan in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the county built a high-security courtroom on the 13th floor, just a few paces from his cell.

1970-1971--When the Manson family was on trial for killing actress Sharon Tate and six others, Manson’s “girls” kept vigil outside. The barefoot young women carved Xs into their foreheads and promised to remain “until our father is released.” Inside, Manson was barred from the courtroom after he leaped to within a few feet of Judge Charles Older.

Two years later, the new Criminal Courts Building opened across the street.