A House That Love and Death Made Famous

Just as O.J. Simpson’s Brentwood estate has drawn a sprawling array of curious onlookers, another once-fabled mansion, populated with mysteries of an unsolved double-murder aboard a yacht, brought a crowd of 2,000 to the auction block half a century ago.

Never mind that the wealthy couple were not even murdered at the Mediterranean-style Flintridge mansion in the 1947 case. Just the sheer fascination with the macabre--and the possibility of buying a piece of it--made the place an instant landmark.

And just like the Simpson trial, this case made for what was then the longest criminal trial in the nation--19 months.

The slayings exploded across the front pages of newspapers, like the dynamite that had sent the victims to their deaths, allegedly at the hands of their own daughter and her beau.

The newspapers of the Ides of March were full of the story: On March 14, a blast aboard the 47-foot yacht Mary E in Newport Harbor killed furniture mogul Walter E. Overell, 62, and his wife, Beulah, 57. Their only child, Beulah, 17, and her ex-Navy boyfriend, George “Bud” Gollum, 21, were charged with bludgeoning her parents to death then blowing up the boat with the bodies on board.

Like the Simpson trial, the case mixed explosive elements of wealth, death and jealousy. But unlike the Simpson matter, the young lovers who kissed at the arraignment and turned their backs on each other at their acquittal drifted almost immediately into obscurity.

In the sensational murder trial at the Santa Ana courthouse, attorneys battled over every bit of evidence, including a stream of shockingly passionate love letters secretly exchanged between the jailed lovers.

At one point, Beulah’s attorney, Otto Jacobs, pulled a handful of screws out of his pocket and showered them over the courtroom to refute the prosecutor’s argument about the rarity of certain clock parts used in the bomb.

And special prosecuting attorney Eugene Williams contended that the couple coldbloodedly killed her parents because the Overells were bitterly opposed to their marriage plans, then covered up the crime by dynamiting the victims’ yacht.

The defense countered by tearing apart autopsy findings, disputing whether the victims had been beaten at all, and at one point suggesting that Walter Overell set off the dynamite himself.

In 1947, Angelenos, rebounding from the war, were rededicating themselves to home and family. So it was with special horror that they latched onto the melodrama of possible parricide.

Beulah, a young woman whose USC classmates called her “stone face,” and her handsome, premed-student fiance testified that the day before the explosion, she had driven with Bud to the Trojan Powder Company in Chatsworth to buy 170 sticks of dynamite at her father’s request, signing a fake name to the receipt, also at his behest.

The couple then dropped it off at her Flintridge house. Neither of them asked or knew why Overell wanted the dynamite, only that he asked them not to tell anyone about it.

The next morning, Beulah and her parents drove to their boat in Newport and met Bud there. Later that day, Bud and Beulah left to get dinner. They testified that Beulah’s father sent them ashore to get something to eat and to bring back hamburgers for the Overells.

As Beulah and Bud munched on burgers, the Mary E exploded in 18 feet of water. (They later said they didn’t hear the blast because the burger joint was next to a bowling alley.)

At first, investigators suspected gas fumes. But authorities soon found 31 sticks of unexploded dynamite on the boat.

Another 30 sticks had been set off by a clock attached to the boat’s battery. In Bud’s car, police also found coils of detonating wire, a roll of tape and what they claimed was an “unusual screw” from the clock used in the bomb.

On this evidence, the two were taken into custody, without bail.

Even before the trial, the public was titillated by the sensational press coverage of leaked “love letters” that somehow passed between the two defendants separated by bars.

“Would you still marry me if I were broke? Oh Pops darling, please promise you will marry me,” Beulah wrote in one letter. In another: “I dream of your beautiful chest. My wonderful, beautiful, gorgeous Pops. . . . You’re an uplifted human being. You’re the most intelligent person I ever heard of. Einstein was a moron compared to you.”

Bud’s letters were more on the pornographic side and therefore more heavily edited by the judge (who personally deleted lurid words and then ordered the letters burned after the trial):

“If you ever leave me or are unfaithful to me or stop loving me, I will take that overdose of sleeping pills. After I have killed the man you turned to from me. That is a promise . . . I’ll make passionate and violent love to you.”

None of the hundred letters mentioned the crime or the trial.

Beulah had tried to arrange their marriage in jail, but after the letters became public, her attitude toward Bud turned cool.

Defense attorney Jacobs sizzled over the Los Angeles Examiner’s running the letters. He argued that the couple had been trapped into corresponding just so the letters would discredit them. Indeed, one prosecutor said to the jury who had been allowed to see the letters: “We find lust, lust and more lust . . . greed, greed and more greed . . . perversion and continuing perversion . . . money . . . jealousy . . . thoughts of suicide and jailbreak.

“We find a passion so strong that it transcends all morals. But do we find any expression whatever of innocence? Any expression whatever of horror? No!”

Who leaked the letters? Journalist Jim Richardson wrote in his 1954 memoirs, “For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor,” that his friend, California Atty. Gen. Fred Howser, personally smuggled to him copies of the searing love letters in repayment of a favor owed to Richardson.

The Examiner scored big, scooping its competitors. The day that four pages of excerpts of the letters appeared, the newspaper that ordinarily sold for a nickel went for a dollar.

In all, 99 witnesses appeared, 395 exhibits were presented and 5,570 pages of testimony were taken. Jurors deliberated for 48 hours, and 5,000 people gathered around the courthouse for the verdict that they would greet with cheers: not guilty.

The lovers parted almost instantly. Beulah inherited her parents’ $500,000 estate, married twice and died in 1965, at 36. Her body was found in bed in her Las Vegas home with two empty vodka bottles nearby and a loaded, cocked--but unfired--.22-caliber rifle at her feet.

Bud never went to medical school. He served nine months in a Florida prison for riding in a stolen car and afterward married twice, eventually returning to college, earning a doctorate in biophysics and working in nuclear energy. He was last believed to be living in a small town not far from Lake Tahoe.

Less than three weeks after the trial, spectators and bidders shuffled through the Overells’ 14-room mansion, which would eventually be auctioned off for $56,000. Looky-loos soiled Oriental rugs as they nibbled on cheese sandwiches and ogled the 1,200 articles for sale, including diamond bracelets and rings, furniture, paintings and the mink coat Beulah wore to her parents’ funeral.

Locals still point the place out; scandal-branded venues like the Overells’ estate and Simpson’s Tudor mansion never really fade from public consciousness.