Part 1Cold Open: The Barbecue Supper
La Crescenta, California. August fifth, 1935.
A Monday evening, end of summer, still warm. Three people come up Verdugo Road after dark — a husband home from his shop in the city, and two friends invited out for a barbecue supper.
The house is dark. No lamp. No radio. No wife.
There's a note pinned to the front door. It's been hanging there since five o'clock — the afternoon before. "Why don't you stay home? Hope Mary is feeling better."
Mary is the wife.
The husband gets flashlights. The three of them spread out across the yard — the garage, the garden, the shrubbery along the back.
It's the friend who finds her.
The fish pond behind the house holds maybe fourteen inches of water. Mary is face down in it.
They pull her out — the friend does most of it. The husband can't. His knees are shaking. He is crying so hard the two of them have to help him into the house.
A neighbor's telephone. A substation up the road in Montrose. A deputy with a spotlight, and a long night starting.
Years afterward, the friend put that evening into a single sentence, and I can't do better: "Either James was genuinely affected — or he was a consummate actor."
Part 2Introduction
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.
Now — the title of this episode has a rattlesnake in it, and I can't take that back. The snake is the reason anybody wrote this story down at all. The snake is the part they kept.
Here's what they didn't keep. Nobody remembers the woman in the fish pond — a manicurist from Champaign, Illinois, twenty-seven years old, whose name the papers couldn't even spell the same way twice. Nobody remembers the note pinned to her front door. And almost nobody remembers that for a long time — longer than you're going to believe — this wasn't a murder case at all.
The usual reminder before we start: everything you're about to hear comes from the record — the newspapers, the court files, the sworn testimony — and where the record fights with itself, and on this one it fights about everything right down to the man's own name, I'll tell you it's fighting.
All of it is up at Section29.com — the front pages, the photographs, the court record. I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes, so go and look for yourself. Links in the description.
And one more thing — a promise kept. A while back I told you about Down in the Cellar — the case from Episode 2 that became a book — and I said I'd let you know the moment it was available. It's available. It's on Amazon right now — Kindle or paperback. The link is in the description.
But, before we talk about the book. Let's start this story, and this story starts with Mary.
Part 3Mary
Mary Busch was born on the twenty-eighth of February, 1907, on a rented farm in Burt Township — Kossuth County, Iowa, up near the Minnesota line. Flat, black-dirt country: corn, hogs, and winter. Her father, Oscar, had come over from Germany as a boy in 1885, learned English, become a citizen, and worked his way up to a farm of his own to rent — which, in that country, in those years, is what working your way up looked like. Her mother, Anna, was Illinois-born, German on both sides. Farm people, twice over.
In the spring of 1910, a census man walked that township with his big ruled sheets, and the Busch family went down on one page, a line apiece: Oscar. Anna. Lawrence, fourteen. Ella, twelve. Martha, ten. Adolf, eight. Clifford, five. Mary — three years old. And the baby, Gracie.
And in the next column, because 1910 had a column for everything, the census man wrote two numbers beside Anna's name. Children born: eight. Children living: seven.
Nobody in that farmhouse could have guessed which of the seven the country would one day know by name — or why.
When Mary was five, the family moved north into Minnesota — Alexandria, the lake country in the middle of the state — and that's where she grew up: fifteen years, all her schooling, a resort town of lakes and summer people and German farm families like her own. In 1926 they moved again, down to Geneseo, Illinois, where her mother's people had roots. Mary was nineteen. She stayed two years.
Then, in 1928, she did the thing that tells you the most about who she was. Twenty-one years old, she left alone — for Wyoming, of all places. Not to family. Not to a husband. West, on her own, with a trade in her hands. The winter after she left, her father died back in Geneseo. And the family scattered the way big families scattered in those years: the three boys stayed up in Alexandria; Martha married into Luverne, Iowa; Grace married in Geneseo; and Ella went farthest — all the way to Las Vegas, Nevada.
The trade was the beauty trade — a beauty operator, the papers back home called her. Hair, hands, nails. It was honest work and it was portable work — hair keeps growing, even in a Depression — and Los Angeles was where a portable trade went. That city had spent thirty years doubling — oil, oranges, pictures — and when the rest of the country broke, people didn't stop coming. They came faster.
By March of 1935, Mary was there. Twenty-eight years old, blonde, seven years gone from home and a thousand miles from every one of her people. They kept up the way scattered families kept up: they wrote letters. Mary and Ella especially — Las Vegas was the nearest of them, just across the desert. Hold on to the letters. They're the only thing in this whole story that's gentle.
In March of 1935, Mary took the manicurist's chair in a barber shop in Los Angeles.
The shop had a proprietor.
Part 4The Barber
His name — the name on the shop, the name he gave everybody — was Robert S. James.
He was about thirty-eight. That's the papers' number, and I'll tell you now: hold every number in this story loosely. A red-headed, green-eyed man who dressed better than a barber had to — good suits, careful about his person. Not much formal schooling, but nobody ever called him slow; the people who dealt with him came away saying the same two things: intelligence, and business sense. And he owned the shop outright — a real shop, big enough to keep help — and in 1935, that sentence did a lot of work. Six years into the Depression, with a quarter of the country broke and barbers everywhere cutting hair on credit, here was a man with his own business, employees, regulars, money in his pocket. A man doing well in 1935 was a pleasant thing to be around, and nobody asks a pleasant man many questions.
He hired Mary in March.
He married her that spring.
And I wish the record kept courtships — I'd give you the flowers, the first drive, whatever it was he said to her across the manicure table. It doesn't. The record keeps dates: hired in March, married by late spring. Six weeks, maybe eight, from the chair by the window to a wedding. All I can tell you is that it was fast — and that from where Mary stood, it may not have felt fast at all. She was twenty-eight. She'd been making her own way since she was twenty-one. And here was a settled, prosperous, well-dressed man — the man who owned the shop — who wanted her.
He had a place north of the city: 1329 Verdugo Road, La Crescenta. Foothill country, up under the mountains above Glendale, where Los Angeles thins out into ranch lots and chicken yards and scrub — the kind of road where people knew each other's cars. Not a rich man's neighborhood; a comfortable one. A house with ground around it: a garden Mary watered, a garage, shrubbery along the back, and a little concrete fish pond.
You've seen the fish pond.
She kept her chair at the shop — rode in with him, worked beside him. The papers back home would put it simply: she "was in business with her husband." And she wrote her letters — a husband, a house, a garden. And by midsummer, a baby coming. After seven years out there on her own, Mary Busch had landed somewhere.
Part 5The Household
So who came up that road to the house?
Friends, for one. A couple named Pemberton — Jim Pemberton ran a cement gun on construction jobs, a working man; he and his wife were the kind of friends you had up for supper on a summer evening. That was the household's social speed: supper, the yard, a drive. Ordinary people, around an ordinary couple.
And there was the other kind of company. A man out of the shop's orbit — an ex-sailor, hard-jawed, beached by the times, out of steady work the way millions of men were out of steady work. The barber found things for him to do. Odd jobs, errands, a ride here and there — he was around the place often enough that the neighbors would have stopped seeing him. Nobody had any particular reason to learn his name.
Now — some paperwork, and one old fact, and I'm going to hand you both the way the summer of 1935 handed them to everybody else: as nothing at all.
The paperwork. In late May and June, insurance got written on Mary's life. Picture how easily that happens — because this part is real: an insurance man settles into the chair for his haircut. He's a regular; the barber knows him. And the barber mentions, the way new husbands did, that he's just married — and steers the man over to the manicurist's chair. To his wife. A policy gets written. Around the same time there's paper from a second company, too. Ordinary policies, ordinary sums — the kind of thing a responsible married man arranged, back when the insurance man still came to the house and everybody had a little paper on everybody. The beneficiary was the husband.
That's who the beneficiary usually was.
And the old fact. The barber had been married before. He was a widower — that's the word he used, on the rare occasions it came up. A wife who had died, some years back, somewhere else, before La Crescenta. A man pushing forty who'd buried a wife wasn't unusual — not in those years — and he didn't dwell on it, and nobody made him. It was the kind of fact that sat in the back of a drawer, in the dark, with the insurance papers.
So that's the household, in the first days of August, 1935. A barber with a good shop, doing well in a bad year. A young wife — an Iowa farm girl who'd gone the whole way west and landed — with a baby coming, a garden to water, letters to write to Las Vegas. Friends up the road, a supper table, a working man with a cement gun and his wife. A hard-jawed fellow who helped out around the place. Some paperwork in a drawer, and an old sorrow nobody asked about.
The kind of house where you'd have friends up for a barbecue supper.
Part 6August Fourth Was a Sunday
August fourth was a Sunday.
I'm going to show you that weekend from the outside — from the road, the way a neighbor on Verdugo Road might have seen it. What happened inside is coming. I promise you it's coming. But it comes later, because that's how it came to everybody: later.
Saturday evening, the friend's car came up to the house, and the hard-jawed man did some carrying — boxes, into the garage. Nothing strange there. He was always hauling something for the barber.
Sunday, the house stayed shut. No drive, no visitors, no barbecue smoke. If you'd walked past, you might not have noticed anything at all — except that late in the afternoon, right around five o'clock, somebody pinned a note to the front door. A neighborly little note, the kind you leave out for expected company: "Why don't you stay home? Hope Mary is feeling better."
Hope Mary is feeling better.
The note hung there all Sunday night.
Monday morning, the barber drove into the city and put in a full day at the shop — customers, small talk, scissors. The manicurist's chair by the window sat empty.
And Monday evening, he came home up Verdugo Road with two friends invited for a barbecue supper — and you were there for that part. The dark house. The flashlights. Jim Pemberton at the fish pond.
The note was still on the door. It had been hanging there for more than a day.
Deputy Jack Toohey came down from the Montrose substation at eight-thirty with his partner and a spotlight. Fourteen inches of water. Mary face down at the edge of it, her head and shoulders under. Her left leg was swollen — badly, the skin gone dark — and on her left foot there was a small wound. Like a cut. Or a puncture. Or a bite.
And in the house, on the desk, the deputies found a letter. Unfinished, unmailed, addressed to her sister Ella in Las Vegas.
Remember the letters.
Part 7What the Town Woke Up To
Tuesday morning, August sixth, Los Angeles read about Mary over breakfast. "MARY JAMES A SUICIDE? OFFICERS ASK." "L.A. WOMAN DIES IN MYSTERY FISH POND DROWNING." The sheriff's office announced a full investigation.
And the husband's account was right there on day one, all of it: the supper party, the note on the door, the flashlights. He'd started to pull her out himself, he said, and thought better of it — you're not supposed to move them. And the first theory in print wasn't even his. It came from the investigators themselves: perhaps Mary, who'd been having fainting spells, had fainted at the edge of the pond and gone in. Keep your eye on that theory. It was born on day one, in the sheriff's own shop, and it never really died.
But here's the thing I need you to sit with. That same day-one wire story carried one more line. It said this was the second time a drowning had robbed James of a wife. A sidebar out of Colorado Springs filled it in: three years earlier, a wife named Winona. A bathtub.
The old fact from the drawer — the dead wife, the widower's quiet sorrow — was in the Los Angeles papers on the first morning. The town knew. The deputies knew. Everybody knew, on day one, that the crying man by the fish pond had already lost one wife in water.
Hold that. Watch what the machine does with it. Because the answer is: nothing. Not for a long time.
The autopsy came the same day. Dr. A. F. Wagner, the county autopsy surgeon — a man who had opened more bodies than maybe anyone in America — found her lungs nearly full of water. Mary drowned; that much was certain. But the swollen leg, and the puncture on her left big toe, and an angry infection spreading up from it — that, he couldn't place. It looked like the work of something venomous. He refused to sign a cause of death. He ordered a chemical analysis of her organs and sat back to wait for the science.
So at the end of day one, the town knew this: a young wife, drowned in fourteen inches of water, with something's bite on her foot; a husband with a dead wife already behind him; a coroner's man who wouldn't sign; and a sheriff's office already floating a fainting spell.
It is all right there. On day one.
Part 8The Week of Theories
Wednesday, the deputies got openly skeptical. "QUESTION MATE AGAIN IN FISH POND DEATH." A deputy named Hutchinson had found bumps on the top of Mary's head — the top, which is a hard place to hit falling face-first into a shallow pond, and the investigators said so in print. A real-estate man came forward about the note: he'd seen it pinned to the door at five o'clock Sunday afternoon — which meant it had hung there a full day before the supper party, while Mary was somewhere inside. And the Times printed the unfinished letter from the desk, word for word, and I'll read it to you: "I am feeling sick. My leg is all swollen. Something bit me while watering my flowers this a.m. Also cut my toe yesterday—"
It breaks off on the dash.
The garden she watered. Something bit me while watering my flowers. And one detail the deputies logged quietly: the handwriting didn't look like her other letters.
That same day, Ella came in from Las Vegas. She grieved beside her brother-in-law at a family friend's home — beside him — and she told two sheriff's deputies, Killion and Grey, remember those names, that Mary had written her three letters in that last week. Three. And every one of them mentioned fainting spells. The headline the next morning: "VICTIM'S KIN SUBSTANTIATES FISH POND DEATH THEORY."
Stop and look at what just happened. The letters — the gentle thing, the thread home — had become the accident theory's best evidence. The grieving sister, honestly repeating what her sister had honestly written her, propped up the fainting story better than the husband ever could. Whoever wanted Mary's death to read as an accident hadn't just staged a pond. Somebody had gotten the story into the mail, in Mary's own hand, a week ahead of her death.
Nobody said that out loud in August of 1935. I'm saying it now so you'll know what you're looking at.
Thursday brought theory number three: a burglar. Bruises had turned up on Mary's arms now — read them as a struggle with an intruder, the papers said. Three days, three theories: suicide, a faint, a burglar. None of them was the husband.
And Thursday also brought a stranger to the story: a beauty operator named Esther Templeton, twenty-four, whose picture ran in the Times. The barber had once asked her to marry him, she said. They'd been engaged — and she'd broken it off after doing a little checking on his past. What she found, the paper put at "two previous" marriages.
A woman who checked. She was still alive.
Part 9The Name
Friday, August ninth, they brought him in and grilled him all day. And by the end of it, two things the town thought it knew had come apart in one afternoon.
The husband admitted he had been married not twice but five times.
And he admitted that his name was not Robert James. His real name — the name he was born under, the name he'd shed somewhere along the way — was Major Lisenba.
Sit with the town on that one for a second. The barber on Verdugo Road, the pleasant man with the good suits, had been operating under an assumed name the whole time. The papers scrambled. They printed the wife lists as fast as the deputies leaked them — a wife in Alabama, a wife in Kansas, the dead wife in Colorado, a marriage annulled in New Orleans, and Mary — and they printed money figures next to the names: thirteen thousand collected on dead wives, they said; sixteen thousand four hundred riding on Mary. I give you those numbers with a standing warning: no two papers in this case ever agreed on a dollar figure, not once, start to finish. Don't hold the arithmetic. Hold the shape. Wives, money collected, more money pending.
That Friday night, Captain Norris Stensland of the sheriff's homicide detail looked at the day's haul — the false name, the five marriages, the money — and ordered James held.
He was in custody. August ninth, 1935. Four days after Mary died.
And on Saturday, August tenth, the chief criminal deputy of the sheriff's office — a man named William J. Bright, Stensland's superior — peremptorily ordered him released. That's the paper's word, peremptorily. The investigators, Bright declared, had found nothing to warrant taking James into custody. An open fight between two ranking officers, on page one, over whether the widower of a four-day-old drowning should be in jail. The captain said hold him. The chief deputy said let him go.
He walked. And on his way out, he gave the press a sentence: "My conscience is clear. I had nothing to do with Mary's death."
Sunday, Captain Stensland — overruled, twenty-four hours humiliated — planted his flag in the Times: the circumstances, he said, were such that an inquest will be necessary. If he couldn't hold the man, he could at least force the county to look at the body in public.
That was the state of things one week in: a false name, five marriages, a money trail, an arrest — and a release. Remember that both of those happened. It matters for everything that comes after.
Part 10The Inquest, the Funeral, and the Silence
The inquest was set for Thursday morning, August fifteenth. And on Wednesday — inquest eve — William J. Bright, the man who had ordered James released, now formally in charge of the investigation, told the press two things: that the chemical analysis had found no poison, and that he expected the coroner's jury to find accidental drowning. The man running the case forecast its verdict a day early. The headline obliged: "MISHAP RULING PREDICTED."
Now — fairness, both directions, because this show owes you that. The chemistry really had come back clean. No poison in the vital organs; every test the science of 1935 could run said so. If you were Bright, you had a drowned woman, negative toxicology, letters in her own hand describing fainting spells, and a coroner's surgeon talking about insect bites. Reasonable men could read that as an accident. What you had to do, to read it that way, was decline to weigh the note pinned a day early, the bumps on the top of the head, the bruises on the arms, the false name, the five wives, and the drowned wife in Colorado. The town's machine declined.
Thursday, 9:30 a.m. Dr. Wagner unsealed the autopsy: drowning, plus an acute cellulitis from the sting of something venomous — "possibly a black widow spider," he offered. His own belief: a swoon at the pond's edge. And one finding more, said plainly into a public room: Mary was six weeks pregnant.
The deputies testified they'd found no evidence of anything other than accidental death. The head bumps and the arm bruises — so loud in print a week earlier — were not mentioned. They simply left the record, and they never came back into it.
Jim Pemberton told about pulling Mary from the pond, and gave the room its one laugh: asked his occupation, he said "gunman" — a cement-gun operator. James was identified, and dismissed from the stand.
And then the jury refused the script. Five of the seven could not determine — accident, suicide, or homicide. Only that Mary James drowned. Two voted accident. Bright's predicted mishap ruling never came. Homicide stayed open, on the record, in the file.
And the deputy district attorney announced there were no plans for further investigation.
Understand what that means. The case was never closed. Nobody ever ruled it an accident. It was simply — abandoned.
Mary was buried at Forest Lawn two weeks after she died. The funeral notice in the Los Angeles papers listed her survivors: "her husband, Robert S. James, and one sister, Mrs. Ella Stuart." Two names. Her mother's town, back in Illinois, had already printed the truth on the day of the autopsy: a mother, three sisters, three brothers, scattered over four states. Los Angeles buried a woman with one sister. Geneseo mourned a daughter with a family. Somebody supplied Los Angeles its shorter version.
And then — nothing. September. October. Winter. The file sat.
Part 11The Hinge, the Friend, and the Story
What woke it up? The record tells it two ways, and per the house rules, you get both.
The federal version is about money. James filed his claims — double indemnity, drowning being accidental death — and the insurance companies refused to pay. So he sued them. And one company settled — thirty-five hundred dollars, paid to the widower. It was the lawsuits, says that version, that drew fresh eyes onto the file: a man suing three insurance companies over a death the coroner's jury couldn't call an accident.
The California version is uglier, and I'll say it once, plainly, because you deserve the record and not a wink: in April of 1936, James came under investigation for incest, involving his teenage niece, who lived in his house. He was later convicted of it. That is all the detail this show needs. But that charge — not the murder — is what put him under official eyes again.
Both versions are the record. They fit together easily enough: the insurance suits drew the attention; the other charge opened the door. However it happened, on Sunday morning, April 19, 1936 — eight and a half months after the fish pond — deputies arrested the barber at his home.
They questioned him in relays for some forty-two hours. He denied everything, all of it, the whole time. Then eleven quiet days in jail.
And on May first, they arrested the friend.
The hard-jawed ex-sailor from the yard on Verdugo Road — the man nobody had any reason to name, the man who hauled boxes. His name was Charles Hope. And Charles Hope talked.
What he told them, I'm going to give you the way the deputies got it — all at once, the floor dropping.
In June of 1935 — while Mary was writing happy letters home — the barber had asked him, across the shop, whether he knew anything about rattlesnakes. A friend of his, he said, wanted a wife killed. A hundred dollars and expenses. Through July they went shopping: snake dealers in Long Beach, a man with a jar of crystallized venom, the Ocean Park Snake Pit — "that is the one I want." Snakes were tested in the barber's garage, on chickens and rabbits. None was deadly enough. In late July, at a cabinet shop, two wooden boxes were made to order, with sliding glass tops.
The boxes.
On Saturday, August third, Hope bought two diamondback rattlesnakes from a Pasadena dealer called Snake Joe. Three dollars. They spent the night in the garage.
And on Sunday, August fourth — the day the house stayed shut and the note went up on the door — Mary was inside, believing a doctor was coming. She was six weeks pregnant; her husband had talked her into an operation. There was no doctor. There was the kitchen table, and adhesive tape, and a box with a snake in it, and her bare left foot.
That is as far as I'm taking that scene.
The bite did not kill her. She lay through the afternoon and into the night, her leg swelling, while the two men drank in the kitchen. And at half past one in the morning, the husband said the sentence Hope would repeat, word for word, for the rest of the case: "I am going in and drown her."
The bathtub. Then, near dawn, the fish pond — arranged.
And Monday, the barber went in and cut hair.
They dug Mary up. A snake specialist examined the toe: the work of a venomous creature — probably a snake. Wagner's black widow spider became a diamondback rattlesnake. The deputies who took James's own statement, over a midnight supper on May second, were Killion and Grey — the same two deputies Ella had told about the letters, nine months before. The circle closed on the men who'd been there all along.
On May sixth, 1936, the grand jury indicted two men, jointly, for the murder of Mary Emma James: Charles Hope, the friend.
And Major Lisenba, alias Robert S. James, the husband.
Part 12The Snakes Come to Court
The trial opened in June of 1936, in Judge Charles Fricke's courtroom in Los Angeles, and it ran five weeks. Ten men and two women in the box. The State asked for the gallows in its first breath — Deputy District Attorney Eugene Williams pointed at James exactly once in a twenty-minute opening and called him a cold-blooded murderer who killed for money by means of torture. And he made the room a promise: "The snakes … are living still. We'll bring them into this courtroom and show them to you."
On June twenty-ninth, they kept it. A box with two hissing diamondback rattlesnakes went onto the evidence table, in front of twelve jurors the papers described, in a word, as jittery — next to a vial of concentrated venom, which the defense handled and passed and held up to the light all afternoon, arguing the wound on Mary's toe was an artificial cut, dosed from a jar. James's lawyer dictated the scene into the record — excitement, sensationalism, alarm on the faces of the spectators — building himself an appeal out of courtroom panic. Judge Fricke answered him in six words: "The court does not agree with you."
And then the dealer who sold the snakes — Snake Joe, out of Pasadena — was asked whether he recognized the man who bought them. He looked at James, and grinned, and said: "I never saw him before in my life."
True. Every snake, every box, every purchase had run through Hope. The barber's hands had touched none of it. Hold that thought. The defense certainly did.
Part 13Winona
Then the State called its witnesses from Colorado, and the drawer came all the way open.
Her name was Winona Wallace. In the summer of 1932, James had taken her to an insurance man before he married her — he wanted policies on her life, payable to himself, and was told a beneficiary like that ought to be a husband. So he became one. Twelve weeks later she was dead.
It went like this. In September, on the Pikes Peak Highway, their car went a hundred and fifty feet down the mountainside. The next day's papers printed the husband's version as plain fact — bride drives car off road — she at the wheel, he admiring the scenery through field glasses. What the 1936 jury heard was the rest of it: her body on the passenger side. Blood on the passenger cushion. A bloody hammer on the floorboards. Two blows to her skull that a doctor attributed to a hard, moving object. And a husband who had "rolled down the mountainside" after the wreck and come up with barely a scratch, in clothes a highway superintendent remembered as neat.
Winona didn't die on that mountain. She spent three weeks in a hospital, getting better. Her husband checked her out early — before the doctors were finished — and moved her to a rented cottage at Manitou Springs. And on October the fourteenth, 1932, she was found drowned in a half-filled bathtub. Washing her hair, the story went, against doctor's orders. The coroner suggested an autopsy; James couldn't permit anything of that sort. Afterward he wrote the coroner letters, nudging the cause of death toward the crash — and collected his insurance. Double indemnity.
A method that fails. A wife who survives it. And then the wife drowns anyway — quietly, in water, close to home.
If that shape sounds familiar to you, it sounded familiar to the prosecutors too. Their phrase for the whole design became the case's epitaph: insure, marry, and murder.
Part 14The Talker
And how had the State ever gotten to Charles Hope? The verdict-day papers finally printed it, and it is almost too perfect: after the murder, the hard-jawed ex-sailor wound up running a hot-dog stand on a beach highway. And one night he got garrulous — that's the paper's word — and told somebody he "knew all about the James case." That's the thread the whole case hung from. Not the bumps, not the bruises, not the dead wife in the day-one papers. A talker, talking.
Hope pled guilty and went to the stand against James while still awaiting his own sentence — "clumped to the witness chair," one reporter wrote, to tell the story he'd already told "again and again."
The defense fought the confession. James took the stand — jury out — to kill it: he'd been beaten, he said, terrifically beaten. And here the record does something remarkable: Captain Jack Southard, from the same stand, admitted the slap — and told the room why. James, he said, had called his dead wife "nothing but a little—" and "I got mad … and slapped him." The confession stayed in. The appeal was born in that ruling, and it would travel farther than anyone in the room guessed.
As for James's own story, when he finally told it: Mary cut her foot on a tin can. She fainted, and fell into the pond.
Listen to that. The fainting theory — born in the sheriff's own shop on day one, mailed ahead in Mary's own hand, blessed at the inquest — came back at the end as the defense. August of 1935 had written his alibi for him.
One more thing came out, and then the jury got the case. Remember the Sunday when Captain Stensland was fighting to force an inquest? That same day, in a hotel room, James was coaching a woman named Madge Reed — a script on a card, two thousand dollars promised — to be his surprise witness. While the captain fought for a hearing, the widower was manufacturing evidence for it.
Part 15First Degree or Nothing
On July twenty-fourth, after five weeks, Judge Fricke sent the case out with an all-or-nothing charge: no manslaughter, no second degree — "this case … is either first degree or nothing." Death, life, or acquittal. Long-time listeners have heard a jury face that exact gamble before — Episodes 8 and 9, Murder or Nothing. That jury acquitted.
This one didn't. Nine hours and nine minutes, four ballots — nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and never a single not-guilty vote; the last holdout wanted life, not innocence. At 8:09 in the evening: guilty, first degree, no recommendation — which under California law made the sentence automatic. Death.
And then the foreman, F. T. Allen, gave the papers a sentence that should stop you cold: "We relied on testimony of Hope — but didn't place much faith in the Colorado murder story." The jury discounted Colorado. The mountain, the hammer, the bathtub — set aside. What convicted the barber, in the end, was the talker from the hot-dog stand.
The same day, in a brief hearing, Fricke found Hope guilty of first-degree murder too. Life. He went to Folsom asking for any prison but the one that held James — the man, Hope said, had a hypnotic influence over him. In September, Fricke pronounced the rest: hanged by the neck until dead.
Then the long road. In 1939, the Supreme Court of California affirmed — two justices dissenting; one dissent ran fifty-four pages. And that October, Charles Hope — three years into his sentence — swore out affidavits recanting everything: his testimony had been false, he said now, coerced by threats, bought with promises of leniency. The spine of the case, calling itself a lie. You should know that. And you should know what the courts did with it: they set the affidavits against five weeks of corroborated trial record, and they did not believe them. Both of those things are true, and I won't pretend the record resolves it any cleaner than that.
The United States Supreme Court heard the case twice. The first time, the justices split four to four — a tie, which affirms. They granted a rehearing; by then the State's brief carried the name of California's Attorney General — Earl Warren. Reargued in October of 1941, the case came down on December eighth, 1941 — the day after Pearl Harbor. While the country read war headlines, an inside page carried the death of James's last appeal. The officers' conduct, wrote Justice Roberts, "took them close to the line" — but the confession stood. Justice Black dissented, Justice Douglas with him, in a line that outlived the case: "I would rather die than to have gone back to that house."
May first, 1942. San Quentin. He ate ham and eggs, slept soundly, and climbed the gallows steps with his lips fixed — one wire man wrote — in a set smile, a chaplain he'd said he wouldn't need walking beside him. The trap opened at a minute and a half past ten. He was pronounced dead at ten-fourteen — twelve and a half minutes, longer than the gas chamber down the hall took. He hanged at all only because his crime predated California's switch to lethal gas. Robert S. James — Major Lisenba — was the last man the State of California ever hanged.
His last words: "I know I have led a bad life but I've asked for God's forgiveness. I'm sure He'll forgive me. I'm only worried now about my family."
He died still insisting he was innocent of what Governor Olson, denying clemency, called "a most abhorrent murder."
Part 16Close
So what do I do with this one?
Here's where I landed. Everything was there on day one. The dead wife in Colorado was in the Los Angeles papers on the first morning. The note had hung on the door for a day. The bumps, the bruises, the false name, the five wives — the town's machine held all of it inside a week, looked at the pleasant man with the good shop, and set it down. It took a lawsuit, an uglier crime, and a man who couldn't stop talking at a hot-dog stand to pick it back up. The system didn't solve this case. It tripped over it.
And there are two sheets of ruled paper I can't stop thinking about. A census page from Alabama, 1900: a farm boy, six years old, named Major. A census page from Iowa, 1910: a farm girl, three years old, named Mary. The country wrote them both down exactly the same way — farm families, a line apiece. One of those children grew up and erased the other from her own funeral notice: a husband and one sister.
So the least this show can do is put the family back. Mary Busch, of Burt, Iowa. Daughter of Oscar and Anna. Sister of Lawrence, Ella, Martha, Adolf, Clifford, and Grace.
Remembered.
Part 17Sign-off
Thank you for spending this time with me.
Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.
First — the book. Down in the Cellar began as Episode 2 of this show, and when that episode ended, I wasn't done with it. There was too much the hour couldn't hold. So I went back into the records and wrote the whole story, start to finish.
It's out now. You can get Down in the Cellar on Amazon today — Kindle or paperback, whichever you like. The link is right there in the description.
If you've ever wondered what one of these cases looks like when you give it a whole book instead of an hour — this is the one. And if you read it and it was worth your time, an Amazon review does for a book what a podcast review does for this show.
Everything for this episode is at Section29.com — the front pages, the photographs, the court record. Go and look at it. That's where the real work is.
Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast. There is no network, no studio, no staff — it's one man doing the research, the writing, the recording, the editing and the promotion. So if this was worth your time, the best thing you can do is tell somebody about it. Share an episode. Post it. Leave a review wherever you're listening. It takes thirty seconds and for a show like this one it matters more than you know.
Music is by TrackTribe.
I'm Trevor Shelby. Thank you for listening.