Word: carpinteria
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...garroted, lay sprawled face upward in the sagebrush, when Undersheriff John Ross and Highway Patrolman Leonard Kirkes got to the scene one day in August 1942. The place was a desolate corner of Maestro Leopold Stokowski's rambling foothill estate, high above Margaret's home town of Carpinteria on the Southern California coast. The only clues were a couple of big footprints and a tire track -and despite Undersheriff Ross's warnings, Patrolman Kirkes managed to trample all over them...
Nonetheless, Ross was glad to have his old friend as a partner on such a tough police case. Kirkes, a handsome, strapping fellow, knew everybody in Carpinteria, where his father had been pastor of the Community Church. Patrolman Kirkes was himself a good churchman, the father of a six-year-old youngster, a helper in Boy Scout activities, and member of the Lions Club. He was pretty bright, too: a Vanderbilt University graduate (letterman in football and basketball), he had been top man in his examination for the California state highway patrol...
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...
...days after 18-year-old Oona O'Neill had described her eight-month acquaintance with Charles Chaplin as "entirely on the esoteric side," the comedian packed sleek, sloe-eyed Oona into a car, picked up the certificate and a case of champagne at Santa Barbara, sped to coastal Carpinteria, nervously found the finger for her first and his fourth wedding ring,* hid himself and his bride somewhere in Montecito...