EXTRACT: San Francisco _Examiner_, March 1:
MURDER VICTIMS LINKED TO CELEBRATED
LOS ANGELES CRIME
Peter and Barter Englekling, murder victims killed in Gaitsville, California, on February 25, were material wimesses in the famous Nite Owl murder case that occurred in Los Angeles in April 1953, Mann County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Eugene Hatcher revealed today.
“We got an anonymous tip on it yesterday,” Lieutenant Hatcher told the _Examiner_. “A man just called in the information, then hung up. We verified it with the D.A.’s Bureau down in L.A., and they said it was true. I don’t think it has anything to do with our case, but I called the Los Angeles Police Department anyway and ran it by them. They gave me the brush-off, so I say the heck with them.”
EXTRACT: L.A. _Daily News_, March 6:
NITE OWL REDIVIVUS–SHOCKING NEW
REVELATIONS POINT TO INNOCENT MEN
KILLED
This is an ugly story. The _Daily News_, frankly Los Angeles’ only exposé-oriented newspaper and the only Southland paper proud to call itself “muckraking,” does not shy away from such stories. This story punctures the hero image of a man considered by many to be a perfect exemplar of law-and-order righteousness, and when heroes possess feet of clay, we at the _Daily News_ believe that it is our duty to expose their shortcomings to public scrutiny. The issues here are great, as notable as the crime that spawned them, so we are frankly sending up a muckraking hue and cry. That hue and cry: the infamous Nite Owl murder case–six people brutally robbed and shotgunned to death at a Hollywood coffee shop in April 1953–was solved incorrectly, at a great cost to justice. We want to see the case reopened and true justice achieved.
Raymond Coates, Leroy Fontaine and Tyrone Jones–do you recall those names? They were the three Negro youths, criminals and sex offenders to be sure, who were railroaded by the Los Angeles Police Department. Arrested shortly after the Nite Owl murders, they offered a heffish alibi: they could not have committed the killings because they were engaged in the kidnap and gang rape of a young woman named Inez Soto. They abused Miss Soto at a deserted building in South Los Angeles, then confessed that they drove her around and “sold her out” to their friends for more sexual abuse. They left Miss Soto with a man named Sylvester Fitch, and an LAPD officer shot and killed him while effecting the brave young woman’s escape.
Miss Soto refused to cooperate with the police investigation, which at the time centered on the imperative of establishing where Coates, Jones and Fontaine were at the time of the Nite Owl killings. Were they with her and the other alleged rapists (none of whom, besides Fitch, were ever identified)? Did they have time to drive from South Los Angeles to Hollywood, commit the Nite Owl killings, then return to heap more abuse upon her? Was she conscious throughout the total sum of her degradation?
Unanswered questions–until now.
The police investigation spread into two forks: searching for evidence to corroborate Jones, Coates and Fontaine as the killers; searching for general evidence, standard police work based on the supposition that the three youths were guilty only of kidnap and rape, but not murder. Miss Soto still refused to cooperate. Both investigatory forks proved moot when Coates, Jones and Fontaine escaped from jail and were gunned down by our aforementioned hero: LAPD Sergeant Edmund Exley.
College man, World War II hero, son of the illustrious Preston Exley, Ed Exley used the Nite Owl case as a springboard for his ruthless personal ambition. He was promoted to captain at age 31 and as of this writing will soon become an inspector–at 36, the youngest in LAPD history. He is mentioned as a potential Republican office-seeker almost as often as his construction-king father. A few persistent rumors surround him: that the men killed were unarmed, that D.A. Ellis Loew dreamed up the Nite Owl confession that Coates, Jones and Fontaine allegedly made before they escaped. What is not generally known is that Ed Exley was in love with Inez Soto and condoned her lack of cooperation during the investigation, later bought her a house and has been intimately involved with her for close to five years.