Word: carpinteria
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When handsome Highway Patrolman Leonard Kirkes was convicted of second-degree murder at Carpinteria, Calif, (pop. 2,864), many of his fellow citizens felt that justice had triumphed over long odds. Kirkes was not brought to trial until eight years after the death of his supposed victim, 20-year-old Margaret Senteney, and the trial took place then only because Sheriff John Ross had painfully gathered up snippets and scraps of circumstantial evidence and had fitted them into a damning whole (TIME...
...prisoner at San Quentin, Kirkes set out doggedly to get a new trial-even though he would soon be eligible for parole and was exposing himself to a risk of being sent to the gas. chamber by a second jury. His request was finally granted. Once more citizens of Carpinteria crowded the courtroom. Once more bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence were fitted into place. But this time they sounded oddly different. Example: one key prosecution witness (who swore in 1950 that she had seen Margaret Senteney get into Kirkes's car the night of the murder) had since...
Died. Max C. Fleischmann, 74, heir to the Fleischmann yeast and gin companies: by his own hand (he shot himself after learning he was afflicted with an incurable disease); in Carpinteria, Calif. In 1929, he sold the business his father had built in Ohio to the House of Morgan for a reported $20 million worth of shares in Standard Brands. After that, he helped round up lawbreakers in Nevada, where he built a mansion and became an honorary cop, roamed the world in a succession of 22 luxury yachts. In 1941, he infuriated Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones by being...
Whisky & Coke. The two of them worked together on the Senteney murder until they ran out of hunches. Then one night Undersheriff Ross's telephone rang. A scared and breathless Carpinteria liquor dealer had something to tell him: "It was a cop that did the murder. I know which one. It was Leonard Kirkes." Kirkes had bought a pint of whisky and two Cokes from him on the afternoon of the day Margaret disappeared, said the dealer...
...year after Len Kirkes got back to Carpinteria, John Ross was elected sheriff of Santa Barbara county. He and Kirkes would chat together whenever they met, but Ross never took the Senteney murder file off the top of his desk. One day last September, a woman reported that Kirkes had tried to molest her ten-year-old son. The sheriff jailed Kirkes and prayed that some timid murder witnesses might turn up, now that the big ex-cop was locked...