A Court Battle Fought With Real Bombshells

It wasn’t the trial of the century, but for sheer headline-grabbing significance, it makes the O.J. Simpson trial look like a fight over a traffic ticket.

The year was 1919, and the trial was a tabloid-style saga of infidelity, divorce, attempted murder, a bitterly contested will, blackmail and suicide. And it wasn’t what happened inside the Los Angeles courtroom so much as the mayhem the case unleashed outside the halls of justice that caused such a stir.

Maud Kafitz was no ordinary housewife. She was young and beautiful, a German-born U.S. citizen and a disgruntled litigant who was married to a man three times her age. Embittered after losing a fortune in a battle over a hotly contested will, she let her uncommon greed get the best of her. According to records, Kafitz decided to take matters into her own hands and began weaving a wide web of terror.

The sequence of violence that followed, including an accomplice’s bizarre suicide leap from the 11th floor of the old Hall of Records building, shocked Angelenos and created a gnawing mystery for law enforcement. Investigators believed that all the crimes were linked to Kafitz and her boyfriend, but when they tried to prove it, he jumped from a window, killing himself.

Kafitz, in turn, stopped investigators cold by threatening to make public her tell-all “little black book.” She never was prosecuted.

Adultery Discovered

The story begins near the end of World War I in 1918, when Joseph Kafitz, a wealthy German-born U.S. citizen and longtime resident of Los Angeles, arrived home unexpectedly and found evidence of his young wife’s numerous sexual affairs.

Before confronting her, he quickly changed his will, leaving everything to his niece and nephew.

Angry and upset, he presented his newly found evidence to his wife, who smugly admitted her many adulterous affairs. After several angry exchanges, Kafitz began to walk out, saying he would see her in court.

But before he could make his exit, violence ensued.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!” screamed Maud, as her husband ran from the house fearing for his life. She fired two shots: The first hit a wall, the second pierced her husband’s shoulder.

Kafitz survived, and the next time he saw his wife was in divorce court.

Maud argued that she shot him in self-defense, when he became enraged and assaulted her for buying Liberty Bonds. She said “his mind was unbalanced with pro-German sentiments.”

But the court didn’t buy it, especially when Kafitz’s star witness took the stand.

The couple’s former maid painted a grim portrait of Maud, giving lurid details of all her sexual encounters in the couple’s Gramercy Place home in the then-posh West Adams district.

The divorce was granted. However, Kafitz died of natural causes before it became final. But the only thing his death laid to rest was his body.

Legal Fight Over Will

Back in court, this time with boyfriend Charles “Cholly” McGwire in tow, Maud contrived to have him made a special administrator of her late husband’s will.

It was a clash of wills and legal titans when Kafitz’s niece and nephew, the beneficiaries of the then-lavish $100,000 estate, hired attorney Oscar Lawler to argue their case and have McGwire removed as the will’s executor. Lawler was famous for helping prosecute the McNamara brothers in the sensational 1910 bombing of The Times building. Little did he know he would soon be involved in another explosion.

Maud hired prestigious lawyer Joseph Scott, who also worked with Lawler on the McNamara case.

But her plan backfired when she tried to prove that her husband was mentally unstable at the time he changed his will.

From the witness stand, Dr. J.C. Solomon, Joseph Kafitz’s physician, testified that Maud had threatened him with blackmail, saying she would accuse him of sexually assaulting her if he did not testify that her husband was insane.

A jury of 10 women and two men found that Kafitz was mentally sound at the time he signed his will and that its bequests were valid. The court removed Maud’s paramour McGwire as the administrator.

Although both attorneys were friends, it was Lawler who emerged from the courtroom triumphantly. Maud silently promised revenge and McGwire openly threatened Lawler, saying, “I’ll put your eyes out, so you’ll never be able to try another case in court.”

With their dream of wealth shattered, the disgruntled lovers began unleashing their rage on the witnesses who had testified against them, beginning with the family minister.

Beginning on July 2, 1919, within days of the verdict, Maud and McGwire blew up the Pico Heights Congregational Church of the Rev. Schaeffle, a witness; set fire to the garage of Nathan Newby, whose sons also were witnesses against them; leaked gas into the home of the former maid, nearly asphyxiating her; and then planted a bomb in the Lawler home at New Hampshire Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. Lawler and his wife survived the explosion, though both were seriously scarred for life.

The police launched an investigation that created something of an explosion itself.

Investigators found that the bomb-making paraphernalia discovered from the Lawler bombing were identical to those used in the blast at the church, linking Maud and McGwire to the two bombings.

Distraught when confronted with the evidence against him, McGwire jumped through the window of Dist. Atty. Thomas Lee Woolwine’s office in the Hall of Records, injuring a detective who tried to stop him and falling 11 stories to his death.

When investigators confronted Maud with the evidence of her complicity in the terror campaign, she claimed that she only went along with McGwire’s plans because she feared for her life. But when that didn’t work, she presented trembling city officials with her tell-all “little black book” filled with names of prominent male Angelenos, who she said had been among her numerous lovers.

She was never prosecuted, left town soon after and dropped from sight forever.

In an interview before his death in 1966, Lawler said he believed city officials got caught up in a sleazy bribery scheme that proved just too embarrassing for many prominent men of the time.