Tiring of cops and robbers, I kept flipping pages. De Witt, a San Berdoo native with three pimping priors, kept yelping that the Siegel mob or the police had framed him: the mob because he sometimes ran cooze in Siegel territory, the cops because they needed a patsy for the Boulevard-Citizen job. He had no alibi for the day of the heist, and said he didn’t know Chick Geyer, Max Ottens or the still-at-large fourth man. He went to trial, and the jury didn’t believe him. He was convicted on all counts, and drew a ten-to-life jolt at San Quentin.
Kay finally appeared in a June 21 human interest piece titled “Gang Girl Falls In Love–With Cop! Going Straight? To Altar?” Beside the story there were photographs of her and Lee Blanchard, along with a mug shot of Bobby De Witt, a hatchet-faced guy sporting a greasy pompadour. The piece started with a recounting of the Boulevard-Citizens job and Blanchard’s part in solving it, then segued to sugar:
. . . and at the time of the robbery, De Witt was providing shelter for an impressionable young girl. Katherine Lake, 19, came west from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1936, not seeking Hollywood stardom, but seeking a college education. What she got was a degree in the college of criminal hard knocks.
“I fell in with Bobby because I had no place to go,” “Kay” Lake told _Herald Express_ reporter Aggie Underwood. “It was still the Depression, and jobs were scarce. I used to take walks near this awful boarding-house where I had a cot, and that was how I met Bobby. He gave me my own room at his house, and he said he’d enroll me at Valley J.C. if I kept the house clean. He didn’t do that, and I got more than I bargained for.”
Kay thought Bobby De Witt was a musician, but he was really a dope peddler and procuror. “At first he was nice to me,” Kay said. “Then he made me drink laudanum and stay home all day to answer the telephone. After that it got worse.”
Kay Lake declined to state how it “got worse,” and she was not surprised when police arrested De Witt for his part in the bloody February 11 robbery. She found lodging at a career girl’s residence in Culver City, and when called by the prosecution to testify at De Witt’s trial, she did–even though she was terrified of her former “benefactor.”
“It was my duty,” she said. “And of course at the trial I met Lee.”
Lee Blanchard and Kay Lake fell in love. “As soon as I saw her I knew she was the girl for me,” Officer Blanchard told crime scribe Bevo Means. “She has that waiflike beauty I’m a sucker for. She’s had a rough life, but now I’m going to set it straight.”
Lee Blanchard is no stranger to tragedy himself. When he was 14, his 9-year-old sister disappeared, never to be seen again. “I think that’s why I quit fighting and became a policeman,” he said. “Catching criminals gives me a sense of order.”
So out of tragedy, a love story has begun. But where will it end? Kay Lake says: “The important things now are my education and Lee. Happy days are here again.”
And with Big Lee Blanchard on Kay’s case, it looks like they’re here to stay.
I closed the scrapbook. Except for the kid sister, none of it surprised me. But all of it made me think of big wrong moves: Blanchard blowing the juice from his glory case by refusing to fight smokers; a little girl obviously snuffed and dumped somewhere like garbage; Kay Lake shacking on both sides of the law. Opening the book again, I stared at the Kay of seven years before. Even at nineteen she looked way too smart to speak the words Bevo Means put in her mouth. And seeing her portrayed as naive made me angry.
I gave the scrapbooks back to the clerk and walked out of the Hearst building wondering what I’d been looking for, knowing it was more than just evidence to prove Kay’s come-on was legit. Driving around aimlessly, killing time so I’d be exhausted and able to sleep through to the afternoon, it hit me: with the old man taken care of and Warrants dead, Kay Lake and Lee Blanchard were the only interesting prospects in my future, and I needed to know them past wisecracks, insinuations and the fight.