Word: senteney
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Dates: during 1951-1951
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...clumsy a first-rate state highway cop could be when it came to investigating a murder. The thin body of 20-year-old Margaret Senteney, bruised and 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...
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...
They did. One was a school chum of Margaret Senteney's who had taken a walk on the night of the murder. She had seen Margaret get into a car. "It was Mr. Kirkes' grey car," she said. Another witness, an aged Italian truck farmer, swore to watching the patrolman drive down out of the foothills early on the morning after the murder...
...after listening to Sheriff Ross's evidence and Kirkes' denials, a jury found Kirkes guilty of second-degree murder and recommended no leniency (mandatory penalty: five years to life). John Ross went back to his office in Santa Barbara's stucco courthouse and locked up the Senteney file, which he and Len Kirkes had begun eight years before...