Story of D.A.’s Office Gets Wall-to-Wall Coverage

In a place where public murals are usually obscured by graffiti, Los Angeles’ newest and largest indoor mural is about as safe as a work of public art can be.

It’s also a little hard to get to see: First, you must pass guards and metal detectors. Then, you have to make your way up to the top floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Building--more popularly known as downtown’s Criminal Courts Building.

Once there, you can stroll along the length of the 2,300-square-foot collage of words and 625 images, which sprawls over two floors and details the evolution of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

This chronological pictorial history book stretches almost the length of a football field, beginning on the 18th floor and continuing on the 17th with illustrated tales of horse thieves and desperadoes, rioters and vigilantes, mobsters, assassins, and cult killers, as well as the 36 district attorneys who worked to bring the miscreants to justice.

The mural was commissioned by former Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, after he saw a similar collage in the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. The project cost about $50,000, money donated by Los Angeles law firms and Garcetti himself.

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, citing the “thousands and thousands” of employees, not just prosecutors, who have worked in the offices over the decades, said that “in chronicling the history of this office, this mural serves as a tribute to the dedicated employees who served this county over the past 150 years.”

It includes not only some of the most famous trials to come through the nation’s most renowned criminal courtrooms--the trials of O.J. Simpson, Charles Manson and his followers, and Robert F. Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan--but many other “trials of the century” of their day.

Since the district attorney’s office opened in 1850, it has left an indelible mark on the City of Angels. Courtroom dramas have always played to packed houses in L.A. In 1854, two years before defense attorney Cameron Thom was elected to serve in the combined post of city and district attorney, he helped to defend Dave Brown, a well-known gambler accused of killing a man in a stable during an argument over money.

A lynch mob was set to string up Brown, but Mayor Stephen Foster persuaded the vigilantes to give the court a chance to act. Foster vowed that if justice wasn’t done, he would resign and lead a lynch mob himself.

Brown was found guilty. But when Thom got a last-minute stay of execution, Foster, true to his word, resigned and gathered a mob.

What is not in the collage is a story that appeared in a weekly newspaper called Southern California by a reporter who wrote an account of the hanging before it happened.

Local readers got their hands on the paper and, acting as if it were a script, played out the drama as the reporter wrote it.

In the decades after the Civil War, Angelenos packed the old “Clocktower Courthouse” where City Hall now stands to watch crime-of-passion trials, which prosecutors often lost. In 1881, Dist. Atty. Thomas B. Brown, the first district attorney to be paid a salary instead of by the case, tried a beautiful singer for the murder of a womanizer who bedded her and then refused to marry her. She was acquitted by reason of menstrual madness, arguably the first such verdict on record.

Five years later, Dist. Atty. George S. Patton--father of the famed “Blood and Guts” World War II general--indicted Hattie Woolsteen, whom newspapers dubbed the “repellent she-devil,” for killing the dentist who drugged and seduced her. She too was acquitted, in what one reporter called “a tale of a young girl’s sorrow and a man’s lustful brutality.”

In 1910, the year before Dist. Atty. John Fredericks would gain fame for convicting two brothers in the Los Angeles Times bombing, he persuaded 61-year-old Clara Shortridge Foltz to become the county’s first woman deputy district attorney. The lawyer, a divorced mother of five, would later bill herself as “the only female prosecutor in the world.” The criminal courthouse bears her name.

Paving the way for many women who followed, Foltz earned multiple firsts in the profession: the first woman admitted to the state’s first law school, Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, and the first woman admitted to the California bar.

(What is not in the collage is that Foltz endured sneering insults from her male colleagues. When an opposing attorney contemptuously referred to her throughout a trial as “a lady attorney,” she said she could not return the compliment, for she “never heard anybody call him any kind of lawyer at all.” Her client, an immigrant accused of arson, was acquitted by a jury that didn’t even leave the box to deliberate.)

In 1919, Dist. Atty. Thomas Woolwine led an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan for attempted murder, and--in a case not detailed in the mural--matched wits with a femme fatale named Maud Kafitz.

Kafitz and her boyfriend, Cholly McGwire, had contested Kafitz’s late husband’s will, which left Kafitz nothing. After they lost their case, the couple went on a vengeance spree against witnesses, blowing up a church, setting fire to a garage and setting a bomb in a lawyer’s house. When Woolwine had McGwire brought into his office for questioning, McGwire realized it looked bad for him and jumped out the office window, falling 11 stories to his death. Kafitz, who then gave Woolwine her “little black book” naming prominent Angelenos as her lovers, was never prosecuted.

Asa Keyes would send plenty of men to prison, including the psychopathic William Hickman, who called himself “The Fox,” who kidnapped and murdered a banker’s 12-year-old daughter, and world middleweight and welterweight champion Kid McCoy, who killed his girlfriend.

But in 1928, Keyes was convicted of taking huge bribes in the massive Julian Petroleum Co. swindle. The man elected in his place, Buron Fitts, sent Keyes to prison, as he soon did former theater magnate Alexander Pantages, convicted of statutory rape, and serial killer “Rattlesnake” James. Yet Fitts too would follow his boss into the dock, where he was acquitted of bribery. He had been accused of receiving an inflated price for the sale of land from an employee of a rich man he was prosecuting.

Dist. Atty. John F. Dockweiler, for whose family the county beach was named, prosecuted the notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel for the murder of a fellow gangster in Hollywood. The case was dismissed after Dockweiler’s star witness fell to his death from a New York hotel room window.

One of the most contentious district attorneys was Fred N. Howser, who sparred with one mayor over gambling and vice in Los Angeles. He beat future governor Pat Brown when he and Brown ran for attorney general, and the governor himself, Earl Warren, accused Howser of not investigating the old Al Capone gang’s takeover of bookmaking operations.

It was during Howser’s tenure that 22 members of a Chicano gang were tried for murder in the controversial Sleepy Lagoon case, and a dozen were convicted. The convictions were all overturned because of the judge’s conduct.

In 1946, Howser led the legal charge that ended the high-seas, high-stakes gambling empire of Tony Cornero’s sleek $1-million gambling ship, the Lux, then operating off Long Beach.

One of the rare capital punishment prosecutions involving a woman was the murder case against good-time girl Barbara Graham. In the movie “I Want To Live,” actress Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her portrayal of a woman wrongly convicted of killing a crippled widow. However, after Graham was executed, Los Angeles prosecutors said she had been properly convicted.

The first big trial of the TV age in Los Angeles was the 1971 prosecution by Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent Bugliosi of Charles Manson and his “family” in the cult murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others. A Supreme Court ruling overturning the nation’s death penalty altered the five “family” death sentences to life in prison. Bugliosi ran for the district attorney job but lost.