A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner
Authors: Richard Rayner
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the estate surrounded—not by the police but by private detectives, another of Doheny’s armies. A Times photo taken later that morning shows the men still in place around Greystone, toting pistols and shotguns.
“It would be simpler to crash Buckingham Palace,” wrote White, making the joke that Chandler would later tweak and polish. Three of the guards stopped White at the gatehouse, barring his entry until word came down and they waved him on. “I drove up to the house and was admitted by one of those frozen-faced butlers, properly and immaculately garbed despite the hour and the tragedy.”
Once inside White set down his camera and equipment for a moment, took off his spectacles and polished them. He was struck by the silence as Greystone’s hushed solid-stone splendor heightened the weird reality, almost surreality, that attends murder’s official aftermath. Whole teams of law enforcement spoke to each other in whispers. This, as it happened, was the first murder the newly formed Beverly Hills Police Department had faced, though neither the Beverly Hills cops nor the L.A. County Sheriffs’ Department deputies, who were also there, showed any desire to claim jurisdiction over a case that was clearly explosive and filled with career-ending potential. So the D.A.’s office had taken over, in the commanding shape of Lucien Wheeler.
While at Notre Dame, Lucien Wheeler had been on the rowing crew and had played in the brass band. He was a handsome, powerful man of medium height. He had large, shrewd eyes, a small mouth, and huge skills. As head of the U.S. Secret Service’s presidential guard, he’d ridden on the running boards of automobiles, keeping a watchful eye for anybody who might step out of a crowd and try to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He’d visited Los Angeles as early as 1911, as the advance man for President Taft, meeting the railroad people, the police, the organizers of the parades, and the managers and bellboys of the hotels where the president would stay. He arranged the guards and plotted the routes and the guest lists. In 1929, at age fifty-three, this subtle and unflappable man was the most experienced and accomplished law enforcement guy in L.A. The brash young Leslie White was a little in awe of Lucien Wheeler.
“He met me in Greystone’s huge hallway and calmly briefed me,” White wrote. “He told me to do my work and report back only to him.”
White, small and intrepid, lugged his gear down a long, dim corridor, and went through a door into a guest suite. On the floor he saw not one corpse, but two. “They were just as dead as any of the score or more ‘bindle-stiffs’ I had found in the jungles,” White wrote. He used the term “bindle-stiff,” slang for the victim of a drug overdose, to give the impression that he’d seen scores of corpses, and he had; nonetheless, beneath the tough-guy pose, he was shaken. Here was violent death, frightening and intimate. “In a luxurious bedroom lay the corpse of Doheny, clad only in his underwear and a silk bathrobe. There was a hole through his skull from ear to ear and he lay on his back. Blood was crisscrossed in a crazy pattern over his finely chiseled face.”
White set about his work.
The second corpse was that of Hugh Plunkett, Ned Doheny’s secretary. Spread-eagled on his stomach, Plunkett lay face down in a pool of blood that welled from a hole in his head. His brains had spattered the wall, and the rug at his feet had been shoved sideways as he fell. His right arm was stretched out, empty; the fingers of the left hand, lying at his side, had been burned by the half-smoked cigarette they still held.
White wondered about the cigarette, the first of a number of details he would find strange. He located the bullet that had passed through Ned Doheny’s brain. It was buried in an exterior wall at a height of six feet. Carefully, with tweezers and the blade of a penknife, he eased the bullet out of the
“It would be simpler to crash Buckingham Palace,” wrote White, making the joke that Chandler would later tweak and polish. Three of the guards stopped White at the gatehouse, barring his entry until word came down and they waved him on. “I drove up to the house and was admitted by one of those frozen-faced butlers, properly and immaculately garbed despite the hour and the tragedy.”
Once inside White set down his camera and equipment for a moment, took off his spectacles and polished them. He was struck by the silence as Greystone’s hushed solid-stone splendor heightened the weird reality, almost surreality, that attends murder’s official aftermath. Whole teams of law enforcement spoke to each other in whispers. This, as it happened, was the first murder the newly formed Beverly Hills Police Department had faced, though neither the Beverly Hills cops nor the L.A. County Sheriffs’ Department deputies, who were also there, showed any desire to claim jurisdiction over a case that was clearly explosive and filled with career-ending potential. So the D.A.’s office had taken over, in the commanding shape of Lucien Wheeler.
While at Notre Dame, Lucien Wheeler had been on the rowing crew and had played in the brass band. He was a handsome, powerful man of medium height. He had large, shrewd eyes, a small mouth, and huge skills. As head of the U.S. Secret Service’s presidential guard, he’d ridden on the running boards of automobiles, keeping a watchful eye for anybody who might step out of a crowd and try to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He’d visited Los Angeles as early as 1911, as the advance man for President Taft, meeting the railroad people, the police, the organizers of the parades, and the managers and bellboys of the hotels where the president would stay. He arranged the guards and plotted the routes and the guest lists. In 1929, at age fifty-three, this subtle and unflappable man was the most experienced and accomplished law enforcement guy in L.A. The brash young Leslie White was a little in awe of Lucien Wheeler.
“He met me in Greystone’s huge hallway and calmly briefed me,” White wrote. “He told me to do my work and report back only to him.”
White, small and intrepid, lugged his gear down a long, dim corridor, and went through a door into a guest suite. On the floor he saw not one corpse, but two. “They were just as dead as any of the score or more ‘bindle-stiffs’ I had found in the jungles,” White wrote. He used the term “bindle-stiff,” slang for the victim of a drug overdose, to give the impression that he’d seen scores of corpses, and he had; nonetheless, beneath the tough-guy pose, he was shaken. Here was violent death, frightening and intimate. “In a luxurious bedroom lay the corpse of Doheny, clad only in his underwear and a silk bathrobe. There was a hole through his skull from ear to ear and he lay on his back. Blood was crisscrossed in a crazy pattern over his finely chiseled face.”
White set about his work.
The second corpse was that of Hugh Plunkett, Ned Doheny’s secretary. Spread-eagled on his stomach, Plunkett lay face down in a pool of blood that welled from a hole in his head. His brains had spattered the wall, and the rug at his feet had been shoved sideways as he fell. His right arm was stretched out, empty; the fingers of the left hand, lying at his side, had been burned by the half-smoked cigarette they still held.
White wondered about the cigarette, the first of a number of details he would find strange. He located the bullet that had passed through Ned Doheny’s brain. It was buried in an exterior wall at a height of six feet. Carefully, with tweezers and the blade of a penknife, he eased the bullet out of the
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