Murder on the Beach! Long Beach in 1899

Old‑timey Long Beach in 1899 was booming with bicycles, electricity, tent cities, and tasty waves—not to mention a headline‑grabbing murder that stunned the tiny new town. Join us as we explore the wild early days of the “Queen of the Beaches” and the murder that shook it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, and welcome again to Don't Know Beach About History. Short histories of Long Beach, brought to you by the Long Beach Public Library. I'm Jeff Whalen, local history librarian with the Billie Jean King Main Library, and today we're going to talk about murder on the beach. Old-timey murder on the beach in beautiful old-timey Long Beach, California, 1899. Joining me again today is professional librarian and debonair man of the world, Josh Sanchez. Welcome back, Josh!

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hey, it's so good to be back. Been a while.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

It's good to have you back, man. Um, so Josh, today we're gonna talk about one of the first ever murders committed in Long Beach. The shooting of Dorothy McKee, the baker's daughter, gunned down by the cobbler, the much older E. V. meth ever in a drunken fit of besotted limerence during a morning bike ride on the beach.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Are these like McDonald's characters? About the cobbler and the baker's daughter and everything? It seems like a fairy tale. It does, yeah. Like a grim situation.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

What is a better way of saying a drunken fit of besotted limerence?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Um.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

Because the other one I had was a booze-soaked haze of unrequited love-struck madness.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

I like that one better.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

I just didn't know if everybody knew what limerence was. But it's a pretty hip term these days.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Now it is, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

So we're gonna talk about that, but mostly we're gonna talk about Long Beach. Old timey turn of the century Long Beach. Sound good, Josh?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

That's what I'm here for.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

Alright. So Long Beach in 1899. Let's set the scene, Josh. Beautiful old timey Long Beach. The city was just getting rolling, having been officially incorporated in 1897. This baby was in its short pants, population right around 2000 and exploding like a frozen soda. Bright blue water, big blue baby, not the gray green we got going today, because this was the days before the breakwater, the breakwater being completed in 1949.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Never forget what they took from us.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

According to the Surf Rider Foundation, before the Long Beach Breakwater, the natural flow of ocean currents and waves kept the beach and waters in Long Beach blue and aquamarine and clean and free and beautiful and super surfy. Long Beach was known as the Waikiki of Southern California, they say. They even held the first national surfing championship here in 1938. Hang ten, Josh.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Will do.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

They said that Long Beach had among the tastiest waves in the Southland.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

The surf fighters then that?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Um, no, they. I have it just as they said that. You know they.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

They say a lot of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

And also before the breakwater, the sand on the beach was different. It was finer, more silty. And when there was low tide, the gently sloping beach would be smooth and hard. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Is it like that now, Josh? No. The 1899 Long Beach City Directory describes it thusly. Quote. Did you want to read it?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

I can if you want.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Josh, why don't you read what uh the Long Beach City Directory described the beach as, starting from this quote here and ending there.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Do you want me to do a voice?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Do this, Josh, you just read it. Just read it.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Read what the City Directory, how it described the beach. Here it goes. There are beaches and beaches. But on the entire North American coast, it can be truly said there is not another like the magnificent 12-mile beach that spreads out so invitingly in front of this rapid growing town and justly popular resort. The slope is scarcely perceptible, and the surface is as hard and as smooth as a floor, which stretches away in fine perspective towards San Pedro on the one side and Alamitos Bay on the other. As a driveway, it has no rival, and as a bathing beach is all one could wish, being equally safe and delightful for persons of all ages.

unknown 3:56

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

That was hard. That was reading is hard. I'll normally do okay with those kinds of things, but you do some VO work on the side.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

I do some audiobooks. Yeah. How can it be hard and good for using as a beach?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Yeah, that part I don't understand. Um they they describe it as a floor, which for outside that doesn't sound great.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

No, I mean it sounds for your den. Yeah, it's good for your den, but not good for like using it as a beach. Right. Putting your towel down. No. Okay. Yeah, Long Beach in 1899 was happening. We were getting a sewer and a fire apparatus. Is that like a fire hydrant? No, it's like a horse-drawn fire truck type deal. You've seen them in pictures. I'm sure I have. In other local 1899 news, local resident R. E. Masters was fishing and caught a tiger shark. A six foot four inch tiger shark, which sounds pretty scary, six foot four, and it probably was, but I found out that adult tiger sharks are usually 11 to 15 feet long. So not an adult. So I maybe just like baby shark d doot-do-do-do. Mm-hmm. Grandpa shark. Yeah.

unknown 4:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

And Long Beach got its first city hall in 1899. Boom, baby, count it.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Big things are happening.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

And the Long Beach Public Library was on the second floor, the library making its big kid debut in a real city building. The library had started humbly a couple of years before in a punk rock DIY kind of way in a wooden shack on the bluffs. And though in 1899 it still wasn't quite a real city department yet, but it was at least out of the shack and into City Hall. Baby steps. The City Hall building, by the way, was in the intersection of Pacific and Broadway. And I mean in the intersection. Do you know what I'm talking about, Josh?

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Like in the middle of the street.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

It's in the middle of the street. You look at old pictures and you go like, where is this? You go, oh my goodness, it's in the middle of the street. Why would they put the city hall in the middle of the street? It's convenient. And you know what? You'll peep this. They were wiring the city electric. Long Beach had gotten electricity in 1895 when a woman named Iva Tut, that's Tut. T-U-T-T. That's a king tut, but with like an extra T. Double T. Double T. Well, three T's total. And she formed the Long Beach Electric Light Company and started putting up street lights. Power lines were just strung here and there, willy-nilly, all through the town, which caused problems, Josh.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Like fire problems.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

And another problem. One of those problems was related to the fact that back then in Long Beach, when people wanted to move, they wouldn't pack up their stuff and move to a new building. They'd just keep their stuff there and move the whole building. It's true.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Okay, I believe you. That's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:29

I'm sure that happened. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

House moving, as it was called, was super important in Southern California back then. Because growing cities would change shape almost overnight. You'd be living in a house out in the sticks, and then a week later, all of a sudden you wake up and your house is in the middle of downtown. You gotta move.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

That seems so inefficient.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

I know, to move the whole house? Yeah. But here's the thing: there's no houses to move to, right? Yeah. Back then building materials and whatnot were hard to come by.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

So you just move your whole house down the street.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Move the whole house? What am I talking about? Okay, here's how you do it. First, you separate the house from the foundation. Done? Got it? Um, okay. Done. Done. Okay, then you get a bunch of people and you get a bunch of screw jacks wedged in there between the bottom of the house and the foundation, and then in unison, everybody all at once, while engaging their core, everybody cranks their screwjack up and the house very slowly goes up. Then you get some crossbeams underneath, right? And these will kind of work like skis, and then you get a makeshift conveyor belt type roller thing out of a bunch of logs, you know what I'm talking about? Like you get a whole bunch of logs on the street and you push the house on the logs.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yep, like they did with the pyramids.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Like they did with the pyramids. Did they do that with the pyramids? Yeah. Yeah. That's just basically like that. And then you roll the house down the street on top of the logs. And there's more to it than that, but basically that's it.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

That sounds so easy.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

It sounds easy and fun, but it did cause problems, Josh.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

I couldn't have possibly predicted that.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

It caused problems, Josh, with the wires. The willy-nilly wires all through the town. House movers would be rolling some building down the street, and the house would be too tall and get caught up in all the wires. The electric company and the phone company both complained to City Hall in 1899 about the house movers, saying that the houses would get caught in the wires and the movers would just climb up and cut through the wires willy-nilly, and then move the house through and get on with their wires, leaving the cut wires just to dangle in there willy-nilly.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

A lot of willy-nilly happening in this era.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Yeah, what a mess, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Ooh boy.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Where's City Hall?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

In the middle of the street. Ooh boy, what a mess, Josh. And not only that, but moving houses could also do damage to the streets. These beautiful oiled streets. So the city made a rule that you had to put planks down if you were moving a house. You had to plank it, man.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah, my dad had that rule too.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yeah. But yeah, man, lots of folks were trying to come out to Long Beach to live, come out here to holiday on the beach, just kick it on the coast, drink in your hand, toes in the sand. But there just weren't enough buildings and they couldn't build them fast enough.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

Yeah. Yeah, it was harder.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Things were harder back then.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

So they built tent cities out by the beach. These tents were semi-permanent deals with thick canvas, usually with wooden frames erected on wooden floors. You rent them out by the week or month. People vacationed there. People lived there. It seemed like it was pretty fun. There'd be concerts and entertainment for the nice people. Food mongers, like breadmongers and fruit mongers and vegetable mongers, would stroll the grounds mongering their wares, and there'd be places to eat and whatnot. Seems like a festival kind of vibe, kind of like I imagined a fire festival if it was run by the Apple Dumpling Gang. Yeah. That's great. Tent communities. Long Beach had 'em, Catalina had 'em, Dondo had 'em, and there was a big tent city deal set up in Coronado down by San Diego. They were a summer months kind of scene from June to September. The main Long Beach tent community was just west of town, on the beach.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

You mentioned all these mongers, but you didn't mention a cheesemonger.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

I I I don't have any evidence that there was a cheesemonger.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yeah, no, it was you z you zigged when I thought you were gonna zag.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

I d I saw no evidence of of of cheesemongering.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

I I think the world would want that to be addressed.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

I think we can assume there was cheesemongers. I just didn't want to state it.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Right. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

No, no, no, I was waiting for it. I was excited. Also fish mongers. Right, yeah. And and I didn't see any evidence of that. I wanted to be as as you know, I want to be as factual.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yes, yeah, that's important.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Because a lot of a lot of like people come here for their news. Right. Okay, so anyway, that kind of sets the scene for Long Beach in 1899. Queen of the beaches, they called it. Because that beach was the king. You take your horse and buggy down there, no problem, ride your bike on it, land your plane down there a few years later after the airplane was invented, because it was like a flat road.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yeah, like we discussed. Like a floor.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Yeah, like a floor, like in your den. And people were totally using the beach as a bike path. Because, brother, bikes were blown up at the turn of the century. Bikes were off the chain. And I don't know if you're imagining those old timey bikes with the big front wheel, but unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know your feelings about the big front wheel, Josh.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Penny farthing.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Yeah, I was trying to avoid saying that. Yeah. Why I don't like that term. Why not?

SPEAKER_01 11:23

It's stupid. Like it has like it feels like it has more whimsy than the bike deserves to have.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

It's it's like enforced whimsy.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

It's like imposed whimsy. So I just call it old timey bikes with the big front wheel.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

I think that's better. You're not gonna alienate people.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

I don't want to. No. I want to invite them.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Yeah, that's what this is all about.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah. Um, what was I saying? Oh yeah. But turn of the century bikes were regular bikes with regular sized front wheels. The old timey bikes with the big front wheel had come and gone in the 1870s and 1880s, replaced by the so-called safety bikes we know today. They had inflatable tires, and inflatable tires were blown up too.

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Well, hopefully not.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

But bikes, the whole world was going bike crazy. Safety bikes were not only easier and safer to ride, but as the century approached, they were getting way cheaper too. Whereas the old-timey bikes with the big wheel in front could cost $100 or some such, which was like a few grand today. By 1899, you could get a new safety bike for 30 bucks, or a used one for five or ten bucks, which would only be a few hundred dollars today. Which still seems kind of expensive.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

But people back then didn't care. Bikes were just too cool. Bicycles were the Macarena or the Rachel's haircut of the 1890s. But there were rules. People loved rules back then. Still do. Josh, you care not for rules, I know.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

No, you can't hear it, but I'm rolling my eyes.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

But there were rules about cycling, social rules. These are all laid out in a piece that ran in the Women in Home section of the LA Times in 1895, in an article called Wheel Etiquette. It said that a young woman should ride only when accompanied by an older married woman friend or sister, and she should only ride in the morning. This is a quote from it. It says, The maiden who is a stickler for Forum does all her cycling in the hours which come before noon. Unless there be a special meat, a bicycle tea, for instance, or a spin by moonlight. It continues. As to the furnishings of the bicycle, to be really swagger, it must be fitted out with a clock and a bell, luggage carrier, and a cyclometer. Cyclometer? I want to say cyclometer, even though it's probably cyclometer. Yeah. But it ha that cyclometer seems like it measures how many cyclopses are in the room.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Which is helpful. Yeah, it can be. Can be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

Not always. A cyclometer. The latter being an absolute sine qua nam to the woman who cares for records. And I know you care not for records, Josh. No. So that's the context in which 25-year-old Dorothy McKee found herself on the morning of Tuesday, July 25th, 1899, riding along the flat, asphalt-type sand of Long Beach. Dorothy was the daughter of a local baker, and she was accompanied that morning, as social etiquette required, by a married friend, Mrs. Anna Scudder of Los Angeles. Little did anyone know the beach would shortly be the setting for murder. Oh no. Oh yeah. Though I guess one person knew the beach would shortly be the setting for murder, the killer himself. That was one E. V. Methever, a 52-year-old cobbler who was a crusty dude with white hair and what the newspaper described as a bristle-like grisly grey mustache. And he had an obsession with young Dorothy. Methever was married, but he had left /abandoned his wife in Northern California when he came to Long Beach in 1897. He opened a shoe shop on Pine Avenue and he lived there in the building. The McKee family had their bakery in that same building and they lived there too. So everybody in one building, there wasn't a lot of privacy. We were talking earlier about the lack of building materials in town. Check this out. Dorothy's bedroom and Meth Ever's shop were right next to each other and shared a wall, though it wasn't really a wall, but just a thin corrugated metal partition. And at night, while Dorothy was in her bed, she could hear MethEver moving around as if he were in the room with her.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

That sounds awful.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah. Now Dorothy had a beau, a young grocer's clerk who went by the name of Isaac Baker. No relation. Her family were bakers.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Mm-hmm. Do you think that's why she liked him?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

I I mean I can't imagine it hurt.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Yeah. Their relationship was starting to get serious. And in fact, the night before the murder, Dorothy and Isaac spent the evening in her room talking about their future together, and E. V. was in the room next door. They could hear him cough a couple times as they discussed their happy plans. This was reported by Dorothy's merry friend Anna, who was in the room too as chaperone Josh, in case you were wondering about the propriety of Dorothy and Isaac in her room together alone.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

That's good. I was pretty concerned. Were you?

SPEAKER_00 15:58

I was worried about it too. Anna lived in Los Angeles and was out visiting for a couple days. In the morning, Dorothy and Anna got dressed to go for a spin on their bikes. As they were getting dressed, Anna saw Meth Ever pass outside their window. She later testified that she thought to herself, I don't like him. Fair? Yeah, I think it's more than fair. So Dorothy and Anna head off down the beach to the west, coming from Pine down towards the tent colony. It was a lovely morning for a ride, and at some point past the tents, they decided that's far enough and they turned around and started heading back home. As they were passing the tents again, Anna testified that they saw Methever riding towards them on the beach. Wordlessly, Methever rammed his bike directly into Dorothy's, knocked her down, and then shot at her three times, hitting her twice, killing her more or less on the spot. Good God. At first Anna just kept riding, her brain telling her that it was some kind of prank, certainly not real. But then she turned and saw Dorothy falling off her bike and onto the sand, with MethEver now pointing the gun at himself. As Anna hurried back to where Dorothy was lying, Meth Ever shot himself in the right temple and fell. Several witnesses at the tent colony heard the commotion and came running. G. C. Smith described himself as being only a few rods away from the shooting as it happened. Any guesses, John? Rod?

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Uh thirty feet.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

It's sixteen and a half feet. Another witness from the tent community ran up and saw the gruesomely injured, but not dead, Methever lying on the sand. Methever slowly was reaching into his coat pocket, apparently to grasp a second fully loaded gun, presumably to shoot himself again. The witness was able to take the second gun from Methever, who was thinking of whiskey and mumbling something about God. Sounds like one of my stepdads on a Saturday night when I was a kid. So Methever had shot himself in the temple, and the bullet had come out of his eye. But other than that, he was okay. At first they thought he was gonna die any minute, so they put him in a grocery wagon and took him home so he could die there. But then he didn't die. So the doctor came over and said, Well, I guess we should take him to the hospital. So they took him to the county hospital in LA.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Sorry, that's that's a that's a fun uh chain of events.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah, right? And he survives. But the medical profession at the time dealt with severe head injuries, apparently, by just wrapping your whole head up in a big ball of bandages. So that's how he appeared at his arraignment. And the newspaper described it as a rag ball. MethEver pleaded not guilty and hired Earl Rogers, the famous turn-of-the-century LA lawyer, known for defending obviously guilty people and usually getting them acquitted. Attorney Rogers was the real life inspiration for the character Perry Mason. Although Perry Mason in books and TV defended people who only looked guilty but were actually innocent. If you're guilty, hire Earl Rogers, was supposedly the saying in legal circles back then. Indeed, in his career, Rogers won 183 acquittals against fewer than 20 convictions. Rogers had Meth Ever plead not guilty by reason of temporary insanity due to his drinking. He said he was crazed with drink. Is that a good excuse for doing something bad?

SPEAKER_01 19:08

That doesn't seem like a great excuse.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

Crazed with drink?

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah. Feels like that shouldn't hold up.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

Temporary insanity?

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Due to alcohol?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

No.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

But witnesses talked about Methever's obsession with Dorothy. They said that Metheber and Dorothy had been kind of friendly for a while before. He'd even taught her to ride her bike. But that she had thought he was just the older neighbor fella, not a romantic suitor pitching woo. When she started going with the grocer's clerk Isaac, Metheber started to get sulky and irritable and started saying weird stuff, like he came into their bakery a couple days before the murder and said to Dorothy, Your mother will live longer than you will, and then he left. And then other stuff like that. The jury was sequestered. The judge said that they had to remain under the constant surveillance of the sheriff during the entire trial, which meant the jury had to sleep on cots in the courtroom. Does that sound like fun?

SPEAKER_01 20:02

No.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Just for nine days. For meals, it says they were marched double file out to restaurants under the watchful eye of an officer. Doesn't that sound kind of fun? Oh. Anyways, the jurors rejected all the defense arguments and convicted Meth Ever of murder in the first degree. When the verdict was read, Meth Ever's right hand, quick as a flash, went to the wounded side of his head, and he uttered a loud sigh of despair. There were a few appeals and attempts to get a new trial, but Meth Ever was hanged at San Quentin Prison in May 1901, becoming the first Long Beacher ever executed. Shortly before his execution, he gave his first interview to the press. In the interview, he blamed his attorneys and the press and his neighbors and his doctors and everybody you can imagine for his situation. The article says, quote, he still points with pride to his business career and to the fact that his credit and reputation in Long Beach were the best until the very last. And that's the story of Long Beach in 1899 and one of Long Beach's first ever murders, Josh. Wow. Josh, what's your takeaway?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Never trust a cobbler. Never trust a cobbler? I think so. Yeah. Let's go with that one.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Well, that's it. Thank you for joining us today. And Josh, thank you for coming with me on this journey to 1899.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

No, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

All right, everybody. Bye.