| The Naked City | Dec 30 2022 |
The never ending quest for the ultimate shot.
Back during the heyday of on-scene crime reporting, mayhem-chasing news photographers were a standard sight at situations in progress, and they got very close to the action. The photos above were taken today in 1957 after police responded to a robbery, trapping the bandits inside a Los Angeles bar, where they were holed up with hostages. In the zoom, just above, note the photographers angling for a good shot. This in a situation in which bullets were likely to fly. They were a different breed of lensmen back then.
The police teargassed the bar, stormed the premises, rescued the patrons, and conducted the malefactors to jail. You see the aftermath below, courtesy of the numerous photographers on hand. The images came from the collection of the Los Angeles Examiner, which is held by the University of Southern California. We've mined their crime photo stash many times. You can see all those images by clicking the Examiner's keywords at bottom, but if you're very interested we recommend visiting USC's website. Just be careful—you could spend all day there.
| The Naked City | Sep 26 2021 |
You're the lawyer, not me, but listen—I have an idea for a defense strategy. First, let me introduce my mother-in-law.
The above photo from the University of Southern California archive of Los Angeles Examiner crime photos shows an L.A. homemaker named Karen Jacobsen in the midst of a pre-trial conference with public defendant Victor S. Baker today in 1961. Jacobsen needed a lawyer for the most important of reasons—to beat a murder charge. She had stabbed her husband Lawrence to death while they were in his car. She said it happened after a terrorizing ride, and claimed it was in self defense of both herself and her two daughters. She was arrested but freed on bail, and this conference occurred during her pre-trial release period.
When she was tried later in the year a jury acquitted her, but we knew that before even reading about the trial, and you wanna know how? That's her mother-in-law Edith sitting next to her in the photo below, offering emotional support. Her attorney: “Your honor, I'd like to enter into evidence defense exhibit A, the deceased's mom, who's obviously fine with his death, so, like... defense rests.” If your own mom isn't in your corner when your killer is on trial, forget it. Probably Lawrence never visited her, so she'd been thinking of him for years as dead already.
Los AngelesUniversity of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles ExaminerKaren JacobsenLawrence Jacobsenmurder
| The Naked City | May 14 2021 |
We get to the beach so rarely, shame to waste the trip. Who's up for a swim before we haul this stiff to the morgue?
Today in 1954 a man named Nathaniel Smith who was walking on Venice Beach in Los Angeles spotted something floating in the surf behind the breakwater of the old Venice Pier. He waded into the ocean and discovered the something was a person. Smith pulled him to shore, but the man was already dead, a victim not of drowning but of a gunshot wound to the head. Was he a murder victim or a suicide? There's no info available on that, nor on his identity. Whoever he was, we bet he never could have imagined thousands of people would be looking at photos of him nearly a lifetime later. We're doing that thanks to the University of Southern California, which holds these and tens of thousands of other images in its archive of Los Angeles Examiner press photos. You can see many more shots from the collection by clicking its keywords below.
| The Naked City | Sep 7 2020 |
Man tries to catch train, train catches him instead.
These photos show an unfortunate man named John Heldt, Jr. trapped under a Pacific Electric freight car in Gardena, California. Getty Images has this listed as happening August 7, 1951, but the USC digital film archive where the image is stored has the date as today. We trust USC over Getty, but whenever it happened, it was a bad day for Heldt, maybe not the worst of his life, but certainly in the top five, we can be sure. His rescuers had to bring in special equipment to lift the train off him, so he was probably pinned for hours, his indignity compounded by the fact that a Los Angeles Examiner photographer made these snaps of him. “Can you hold that pose? Heh heh, that's a joke, see, because you can't move at all, you poor, stupid sap!” There's no info on whether Heldt recovered, nor whether he lost any body parts. Still, as bad as this looks, it's better than flying Ryanair.
| The Naked City | Dec 3 2019 |
'Tis the season for generous giving—of prison time.
This unusual photo made today in 1953 shows a man named Edward Hallmark, aged seventy-three, being wheeled into a Pasadena courtroom to testify against twenty-four year old Donald Randazzo. Apparently, the previous September Randazzo kidnapped and beat Hallmark in an effort to rob him of his life savings. The shot is part of the large Los Angeles Examiner archive held by the University of Southern California, and which we've mined for interesting historical shots often.
In the photos below you see the defendant Randazzo conferring with his lawyer Edward S. Cooper. Randazzo is being shown a page from an edition of Advance California Reports. Advance reports or advance sheets are legal aids—specifically, pamphlets containing recently decided opinions of federal courts or state courts of a particular region. So basically Cooper is informing Randazzo of something relevant to their court appearance.
And we know exactly what that relevant something is—a standard in California case law stating that when the chief prosecution witness is trundled into court on a stretcher the defendant is seriously screwed. We have a feeling a wheelchair would have worked fine for Hallmark, but when you're facing your kidnapper you play your best card. The bedridden victim card beats everything king and below. Cooper is doubtless saying to his client, “As you can see here in Advance California Reports, Donald, legally you're fucked.”
Los AngelesPasadenaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles ExaminerEdward HallmarkDonald RandazzoEdward S. Cooper
| The Naked City | Apr 3 2019 |
Yep, this guy's dead as hell. Too bad. He could sue the beer company for false advertising.
This photo, which is part of the archive of mid-century Los Angeles Herald press shots maintained by the University of Southern California, shows a suicide at the front entrance of Temple M.E. Church at 14th and Union in Los Angeles. The man was named Robert Palmer, and you can see that the poor guy shot himself in the middle of the forehead. You can also see that he bled profusely, which suggests his heart pumped for a bit before he finally died. L.A.P.D. detective Hugh Palmer (no relation) stands over him. Like many suicides Robert Palmer had a final drink before doing the deed. His choice? As you see in the zoom below, it was Lucky Lager, which conferred no benefits whatsoever. Maybe a rabbit's foot or a horseshoe would have been more effective. Or not. The photo is from today in 1957.
| The Naked City | Dec 31 2018 |
L.A. man ends the holidays with a bang.
We've always been fascinated by splatter shots from the mid-century period. When did someone finally decide people had a right to privacy even in death? We don't know, but we think it was a good idea. Before that change came about press photographers routinely tramped around crime scenes documenting mayhem for profit. These images show the aftermath of a murder-suicide that took place today in 1951. Pictured are L.A. cops Detective Lieutenant George A. Encinas and Detective Lieutenant Bill Cummings, along with the bodies of Charles Sullivan and his wife, identified only as Mrs. Charles Sullivan. Maybe a new year would have brought new hope to this household, but we'll never know, nor will we know exactly why Sullivan shot his wife and himself. The images are part of the always compelling collection of Los Angeles Examiner photos maintained by the University of Southern California.
| The Naked City | Jun 18 2018 |
Did I make it in time for happy hour?
The above image, which is from the collection of Los Angeles Examiner photos archived by the University of Southern California, shows an accident at a bar located at 5th and Figueroa in Los Angeles. It happened when two autos collided in the intersection outside, and one of the drivers lost control and careened into the Ole King Cole Room of the Monarch Hotel (we have a photo of the exterior from some years earlier below). Luckily for patrons the bar had closed. Unluckily for the driver, he missed half priced drinks. But maybe he'd already reached his limit. The photo is from today in 1957.
| Mondo Bizarro | Jun 1 2018 |
He says he remembers nothing, sir, except he needs to return the dress within 72 hours to get a full refund.
There's nothing new under the sun. And there's certainly nothing new under the Los Angeles moon, as proved by this photo of a man who was arrested late at night in Hollywood. He can hide his face but he can't hide the fact that he's wearing a dress. We're thinking prank, costume party, activities along those lines, but really anything is a possibility. We know because we've personally explored most of them ourselves, and ending up in a dress was also one of the results. Still though, it's sad we'll never know precisely what happened here. No details were provided with the shot except that it comes from the collection of Los Angeles Herald photos held by the University of Southern California, and the year on this one was 1948.
| The Naked City | May 27 2018 |
L.A. woman comes to a dead end.
The images above come from the collection of digitized Los Angeles Examiner photographs curated by the University of Southern California, and they show murder victim Patricia Steel in a passageway between two garages in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. The case left barely a ripple. Other than the photos and skeletal biographical facts we found online, no detailed information exists about this killing in any archive we checked. That's the way it sometimes goes in the naked city, that the most critical moment of a person's life occurs, passes, and is forgotten. Today, 1952.
