Obituary : J. Miller Leavy; Legendary Prosecutor

J. Miller Leavy, a legend in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office who sent 12 men and one woman to the gas chamber during his 41 years as a prosecutor, was remembered Wednesday for his compassion as well as for his ringing convictions of cold-blooded killers.

Leavy, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease and arthritis, died on New Year’s Day at the Amberwood Convalescent Hospital in Highland Park. The 89-year-old prosecutor retired from the district attorney’s office in 1973.

Leavy went down in criminal justice history in 1957 when he won the first murder conviction in the United States based solely on circumstantial evidence. The case, also called California’s first “no-body” case because the body of the victim was never found, ended in the murder conviction of L. Ewing Scott.

Despite Leavy’s efforts, Scott escaped the gas chamber, was released from state prison in 1978 and died peacefully in Silver Lake eight years ago at the age of 91.

The missing body was that of Scott’s socialite wife, Evelyn Scott, which many believed Scott had buried in the concrete supports of the San Diego Freeway, then under construction. Scott claimed his wife had sent him out to buy tooth powder and that when he returned to their Bel-Air home she had disappeared.

Although more than two dozen murder cases without bodies were later prosecuted in the country, the Scott case--and Leavy--set the legal precedent. According to folklore, Scott’s defense attorney told jurors that the victim “might walk through this courtroom door at any minute,” prompting jurors to glance at the door and thus reveal doubt about the suspect’s guilt.

“Every head in this courtroom turned toward that door just now,” Leavy purportedly countered. “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.”

“It didn’t happen that way at all,” Leavy chuckled in discussing the case with The Times late in his life. “What we did was prove ‘the suddenly interrupted life pattern’ of Evelyn Scott.” He said he showed that while she had no reason to run away, her husband did have a reason to do away with her--her money.

Colleagues admiringly recalled Leavy’s talents as they mourned him Wednesday.

“He was so good in front of a jury that they wanted to give the death penalty before the trial even started,” said Maurice Harwick, a past president of the Criminal Courts Bar Assn. of Los Angeles. “He had a ring of truth about him that jurors respected and admired. . . . (But) when it came to giving somebody a break on less than a death penalty case, he had a big heart.”

The woman Leavy sent to the gas chamber was Barbara Graham, whose story became the basis of a popular 1958 film, “I Want to Live,” starring Susan Hayward. The film was somewhat ambiguous about Miss Graham’s guilt and theatergoers were invited to write essays stating whether they believed she was truly guilty.

“The people I prosecuted were guilty and deserved to die,” Leavy told The Times in 1990. “I didn’t prosecute to deter. I prosecuted to punish. Barbara Graham tied Mabel Monahan’s hands behind her back, pistol-whipped her and left her to die. Sending her (Miss Graham) to the gas chamber didn’t bother me at all.”

His colleague, Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay, recalled Wednesday that, on the witness stand, Graham had tearfully testified to her innocence. Leavy waited patiently for her to finish, then pulled a tape recorder out from underneath the prosecutor’s table. The tape contained Graham’s previous confession, Kay said.

A small man built like a piece of granite, Leavy was known for pounding on the rails of jury boxes to make his points and for ridiculing defendants who elected not to testify.

“He was the epitome of the hard-drinking, savvy, ethical, driven trial lawyer and he really trained a whole generation (of replacements),” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Genelin.

Genelin said that Leavy regularly made himself available to junior prosecutors, often pulling a bottle of bourbon out of his desk at the end of the day to ease the discussion of trial strategy in a case.

Leavy is survived by his wife, Jacqueline Collett Leavy, and a brother, Zadoc H. Leavy.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be made to the UCLA athletic programs to benefit the Bruins.