Woman gets police to put cold case on ice

Somebody should pin a detective’s badge on Collene Thompson Campbell.

For the third time, the 78-year-old San Juan Capistrano woman has helped solve a murder mystery — this one a 1933 shooting of an officer considered a cold case by Alhambra police.

Like the other two homicides she played a role in resolving, this was one Campbell took personally.

Officer James H. Nerison was killed on Jan. 3, 1933, by shotgun-wielding robbers who were attempting to blow open a safe at the Alhambra Theater. A second officer, Glenn Wasson, was wounded. Campbell’s late father, Alhambra Police Capt. Marion L. Thompson, closed the case three years later.

But Nerison’s death was still viewed as an open case when Campbell bumped into an Alhambra police sergeant in Sacramento two years ago.

Campbell, a former mayor of San Juan Capistrano, is an appointed public member of the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. She was attending one of the panel’s triannual meetings when she encountered Sgt. Joe Flannigan.

“I asked him how things were going in my old hometown,” Campbell recalls. “He said things were great, that they only had one unsolved murder of a police officer, one back in 1933.”

Campbell’s jaw dropped. “I said, ‘You mean the shooting at the Alhambra Theater? I know about that incident. That’s a solved case.’ I came home thinking that he hadn’t believed me.”

Campbell knew that her father had taken part in a 1936 shootout when police confronted a trio of bank robbers in El Monte. He had killed one of the stick-up men — Clarence Smith, 43, of Glendale. A few days later, witnesses to the earlier shooting identified Smith as the gunman who had killed Nerison.

Back home, Campbell dug out newspaper clippings from the 1930s that her mother had saved. A Feb 9, 1936, Pasadena Star-News article headlined “Bandit’s Death Avenges Slain Peace Officer” was among the yellowed papers.

The article explained how Thompson, then a sergeant on the Alhambra force, had been attending a meeting of law enforcement pistol team members in El Monte at the time of the bank robbery. When the alarm was sounded, the eight pistol competitors raced half a block to the Southern County Bank where they confronted Smith and two other robbers.

In the exchange of gunfire, Smith and another robber were fatally shot and the third was captured. A shotgun blast fired by Smith wounded El Monte Officer Joseph Fritsch.

The 1936 story gives a hint of why Nerison’s murder remained open even after Smith’s identification. It quoted the lead detective on the case saying the identification was “99% perfect,” but noting that the investigation “would not stop until the shotgun used” to kill Nerison was found so authorities could compare it to shotgun shells found at the theater.

When Campbell shared her information with Alhambra police, they decided that the 1933 investigation was over. They plan to recognize Campbell and her father at a 9 a.m. ceremony Thursday at police headquarters.

“We had the case solved since 1936,” said Sgt. Brian Black. “It just had never been cleared, for whatever reason. There’s a distinction between ‘solved’ and ‘cleared.’ ‘Cleared’ means ‘closed,’ no further investigation.”

Campbell knows the importance of a thorough investigation. She assisted authorities in solving the murders of her brother and her son.

Her brother, race car legend Mickey Thompson, was gunned down along with his wife outside their Bradbury home in 1988. Campbell eventually posted a $1-million reward and helped investigators track down evidence used to convict her brother’s former business associate of arranging the murders. Michael Goodwin, who was locked in a bitter feud with Mickey Thompson, was sentenced in 2007 to two life terms in prison.

In 1982, Campbell’s 27-year-old son, Scott, disappeared.

When authorities’ investigation into his disappearance lagged, Campbell and her husband, Gary, found a friend who remembered Scott mentioning that he was going flying. They searched airport parking lots until they found his car, then found a flight log that led them to the rented plane he had been in.

The couple searched the plane and found blood on a rear seat and on a window curtain. They hired undercover investigators to secretly record a confession from the pilot and a passenger. Scott Campbell had been thrown out of a small airplane 2,000 feet up, a mile from Catalina Island.

Donald P. DiMascio was sentenced to life in prison without parole and Lawrence Raymond Cowell was sentenced to 25 years to life following several trials that ended in 1990.

Scott Campbell’s body was never recovered. Authorities say the murder was tied to a drug deal, but Campbell believes her son was killed because of a dispute over his expensive sports car.

The deaths of her son and brother prompted her career as a citizen criminal justice advocate, she said. Along with the Peace Officers Standards and Training Commission, she has served on six other national and state boards and panels.

“I feel strongly about guilty people being brought to justice,” she said.

bob.pool@latimes.com