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The Little Old Murder From Pasadena
A retired police sergeant and a historian discuss history and true crime in the City of Roses.
The Little Old Murder From Pasadena
"Get Me Gladys!"
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Gladys Towles Root, one of the first female attorneys in California, arrived in Pasadena in 1932 to defend her client, Moses Cabansag, who was charged with murdering fellow Filipino Bernardo Asistin.
Music credits to Fesilyan Studios.
Welcome back to The Little Old Murder from Pasadena. I am the historian Elise, and I am one cocktail ahead of my co-host.
SPEAKER_00:This is Victor Cass, a retired uh police sergeant.
SPEAKER_01:And we did bring you a case from 1930, 1932 this year.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. We are going back into the archives after last week's uh more modern-esque episode. You want to tell us about uh what we're discussing today?
SPEAKER_01:So today we are discussing a man named Moses Tejada Cabinsag. I apologize in advance for mispronouncing his name because I'm sure that I have.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's Gabanthog.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Sounds better than mine. Uh he was born in 1910 in the Philippines. Uh so he is a Filipino living here in Pasadena. Um, and all the description that I have of him is that he is a waiter.
SPEAKER_00:Apparently, he's a waiter, and you know, he's probably hanging out at this time in the 30s in Pasadena, you know, in whatever kind of little Filipino community he knew of, whether it was friends, family, you know, um here in the city.
SPEAKER_01:I'm sure there were certain neighborhoods in Pasadena where he was allowed to live. It was not most of them.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um but I don't know where that would have been in Pasadena in the 30s.
SPEAKER_00:I know each neighborhood had their own little It did, and by this time, you know, in the 1930s, Pasadena is starting to get, you know, a little more diverse. There's Japanese people living, you know, in parts of the Northwest.
SPEAKER_01:Um shortly within a decade.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And as we already know from our Pasadena history, that uh Chinese people did have a difficult time in the late 1800s in Pasadena in Old Town.
SPEAKER_01:Um Right, there was the laundromat incident.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Kind of a fire riot. Um so that's just to give you guys a background of kind of the experience of Asians.
SPEAKER_01:We should do an episode on that, by the way.
SPEAKER_00:We should. That'd be a good one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we should. Um, okay, so living at the same time is what is his name? Bernard Bernardo, either Bernardo or Bernardino. The sources for this episode are a little iffy because we're going off of um some newspapers, including a Spanish language one that I had to translate. Um, and the newspapers contradict themselves sometimes. So Bernardo, Bernardino Asistin or Asisto?
SPEAKER_00:Assistin, Asistino, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:One of those two.
SPEAKER_00:Who's also Filipino?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, also Filipino. So on April 13th of 1932, Bernardo Bernardino and Moses Cabinsag are somewhere in Pasadena. Uh Bernardo is a violin player, and so he is playing the violin. Again, there's not too many details about this incident, but he is playing the violin. Moses decides that he doesn't like it. He covers his ears and then starts to complain about the violin music that he's playing.
SPEAKER_00:So apparently Moses didn't like the solo that's going on.
SPEAKER_01:He's complaining about the infernal racket in quotation marks, that this guy's making an infernal racket with his violin. The guy playing the violin, Bernardo, gets very offended by this, because of course he would, I would too. Um, but he does something that I would not do, and he draws a knife and goes after Moses.
SPEAKER_00:Didn't know musicians had it in them.
SPEAKER_01:They did. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Apparently. Apparently so.
SPEAKER_01:Moses had it in him too. He starts fighting with Bernardino. I think they're like fighting over the knife. And then Moses grabs a chair, bashes it over Bernardo's head, it splinters, and then I think in this commotion is when Moses is able to grab the knife from Bernardo and then ends up stabbing him to death. By the way, Moses was also stabbed. Um, and he was injured and taken to, they just call it the General Hospital.
SPEAKER_00:Right. This was a hospital, by the way, that was adjacent to the old Pasadena Police Building, which was on a street called Broadway Avenue. Broadway became a Royal Parkway. For those of you who know your kind of old town area, the old Pasadena Police Building uh was on uh the end of uh a Royal Parkway. In fact, the building still exists today.
SPEAKER_01:Does it?
SPEAKER_00:That general hospital when it's not that general hospital. The old Pasadena Police, they call it the Hall of Justice. In fact, it is still referred to the Hall of Justice building. It's part of the Holly Street apartments and their apartments now. Um I actually went to a little uh soiree once inside one of the large rooms that had a concrete floor. Interesting. They still talked about how the jail was on the top floor, and it is very interesting. But yes, so that adjacent to that old Pasina Police Building, um which is now part of the Holly Street apartments, was the general hospital.
SPEAKER_01:And this was before Huntington Memorial, I'm assuming.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Huntington Memorial by this time existed.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00:This old general hospital was kind of a subsidiary hospital.
SPEAKER_01:Gotcha.
SPEAKER_00:Um that the police often used.
SPEAKER_01:Um why do I feel like um, you know, the better off Pasadena citizens were taken to Huntington, whereas were Pasadena police officers sometimes uh who were injured were taken to this general hospital. Oh, were they?
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So papers say that Moses himself, the other guy died, but Moses himself had been stabbed in the stomach, face, and hands, so he was taken to the general hospital. Uh and the paper, La Opinion in LA, which is a Spanish language paper, says, provided that if he survives the tragedy, he will be tried for the murder.
SPEAKER_00:Now, just from a legal standpoint, yeah, I have questions from a legal standpoint. One has to ask, being that his wounds were so kind of severe, I mean, if you're stabbed in the stomach and all these other places, how is this not a righteous self-defense?
SPEAKER_01:That's what I'm wondering.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So who knows? I mean, this is the 1930s.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Who knows if, you know, Filipino on Filipino crime.
SPEAKER_01:Mm-hmm. And that's the other thing about this case that I should mention. It's it was really hard to find things on him. Um, looking through the papers, it's like no one wanted to talk about them, about what had happened.
SPEAKER_00:Right. You know, uh keep in mind that at this time in the 1930s, the police department was all white, judges would be all white, juries would be all white, um, and all male. Um, you know, and this isn't to claim that like, you know, everything's racial, um, but Filipino and Filipino crime did mainstream Casting in Society even really care. Like, hey, he killed somebody, let's throw him on the docket for murder.
SPEAKER_01:Right. That's the feeling that I'm getting. It's a Filipino man killed another Filipino man, and at that time they didn't really care too much to print anything about it, really.
SPEAKER_00:Right. There's one, you know, one article, I think, in an English newspaper. Who knows? I mean, on the face of it, could have been self-defense, but maybe they had information that we don't have, but that maybe he went too far.
SPEAKER_01:Right. You know, yeah, that could be. Um, and so the woman defending him is sort of the centerpiece of this episode. Gladys Towel's root. She is very interesting because at this time women were not lawyers really.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, even though she graduated with her law degree, um, they kind of didn't expect her to have a career as a lawyer.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So she could get her degree and certification. You know, women could do that, but the thing was that the LA board, uh, what's it called? The lawyers bar, the bar association. The LA Bar Association just wasn't admitting women uh basically because they said that they though they could get the certifications and the degrees, they would never actually be hired as lawyers, so it was pointless to admit them to the bar.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:And And Gladys did have this problem, by the way, when she was looking for jobs. It she couldn't find anything.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that's yes, and that's that's kind of crucial to the story because she almost made her name and reputation defending the marginalized, the poor, you know, other Filipinos, you know, African Americans, defendants who maybe wouldn't have had great defense attorneys. And she already had uh priors, as we say, in the police department for defending some Filipino um interracial marriage cases, yeah, which I think is kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_01:She did. And she would, uh, throughout her life, she was sort of seen as like the defender of the underdog. A lot of people would say, or I've I've read some people saying that Gladys being a woman at that time, she just had to take what whatever cases she got, which happened to be people who could not really afford to pay for the lawyers' fees and that sort of thing, you know, the the lower rungs of society. And that may have been partly untrue, but I think that she did have the heart for it.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00:Well, she also had going for her the fact that there were many um several defendants that she represented, then told other inmates and prisoners about her, and so her business kind of was built on word of mouth.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I read the first man that she married was a sheriff, I believe, at the prison. And so it was through him, you know, he would be in contact with these criminal defendants, and then he would hook them up with his wife, Gladys, and then Gladys would start to take up their cases.
SPEAKER_00:Clearly, they didn't have conflict of interest laws back in those days.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but I wanted to read a quote. She really had a heart for it. This is the quote. My mother told me when I was a young girl that I must be broad-minded toward unusual behavior. She told me to think of those people as loose spokes on the wheel of life.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that that definitely um sums her up. And like many people in her position who are trailblazers or having to make a name for themselves alternatively, uh, why don't you tell our listeners about her unusual style? Because that was a prominent aspect of her character and the personality.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so here's what's interesting is that back then, when Gladys was an attorney, it was still not legal for lawyers to go about advertising themselves in the traditional way, the way that they do now. I think that law was passed in the 70s or something. So the way that Gladys got around it was by dressing very flamboyantly. Uh, there was this one, I think she would dress in like head-to-toe fuchsia for uh Frank Sinatra Jr.'s kidnapping trial. Um, she was just always known for her flamboyant dress, her fancy hats.
SPEAKER_00:The colors of her dress, and sometimes even they're a little provocative.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Gladys, she graduated from law school in 1929. And so that's when she started to look for a job. She's not finding anything. And that's when she begins to start her own practice with help from her first husband, who starts to hook her up with these positions. Um, according to a PBS article that I found, she ended up handling 1,600 cases a year and made about 75 court appearances a month.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's a lot.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, she was a busy lady. But she always talked about how her favorite cases, the one where her heart was in it the most, were the miscegenation cases.
SPEAKER_00:And for our listeners who may not know what miscegenation is. That is when a white person, uh, male or female, marries someone of another race, usually an African American, or a lot of times in her defense cases, uh Filipino.
SPEAKER_01:And there were two white Filipino couples that wanted to marry during this time that she represented. Um and the law, I heard you chuckling about it earlier, the 1905 California law. I'm gonna read it to you uh verbatim. All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, or mulattoes are illegal and void.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they definitely used some terms that are um really outdated. And uh the fact that they even classified Filipinos as quote unquote Mongolians or later people of Malay backgrounds was unusual for this time period.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was the 1905 law that they were still going off of in 32.
SPEAKER_00:Uh but she was, I mean, in all fairness, she was a capable attorney. I mean, if you look at talking about the Filipinos that she represented, if you look at one of her first clients, and I think I believe it was her first client, was a Filipino named Lewis Osuna, who was uh arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting enough, who she caught who he caught in bed with another man. And uh, you know, she shows up in his jail cell to interview Mr. Osuna and you know asks him about you know what happens, and he says that he shot his wife, and she asks, what's the extent of her wounds? And he's all too big extent, and he goes, How big? She says, and he goes, to extent she now dead. So I mean, this guy could have got death. Yeah, he could have been sent to San Quentin and you know, would have ridden the uh ridden the electric chair there, but you know, she defends this guy, and he gets convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 months.
SPEAKER_01:She was really good at what she did.
SPEAKER_00:And this guy, Osuna, tells his fellow prisoners about her. This is that word of mouth we were talking about, and she had like 15 new clients within a month.
SPEAKER_01:So the interesting thing, she would take not just cash as payment, but she would take like livestock and deeds to houses, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Cash cheese, even ill-gotten gains from the criminals that she defended.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes illegal illegal goods. But I mean, that's what I mean when I say that her heart was in it. She wasn't just doing it for the money, she was doing it because she really believed in these things. Something interesting also is her mom wanted her to be an actress when she was young. Her dad was a lawyer, and he never got to be, I think, because there was a lack of money. And so he sort of got to live out his dreams through his daughter, Gladys. So what's interesting is that she actually did get to sort of become an actress in the courtroom. Like she was in the court so often, and she put forth such um moving orations, and she put forth such a show that it's almost like she was an actress there in the courtroom, but just working on behalf of her clients.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Um, and getting back to this, getting back to this past unit case. I mean, she wasn't always successful. Our guy, uh our guy Moses Um Kabansang, the Filipino, uh, when he went to trial, she defends him. Um, he gets convicted.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so they go to trial. They only took about 16 minutes, I think it was.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this wasn't a long deliberation by this jury.
SPEAKER_01:No, sixteen minutes, and then it says that they they found him guilty of manslaughter.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Which you think, I mean, that other guy that we talked about Osuna earlier got 10 months in prison for the shooting of his wife. This guy stabbed some guy, which could have been, like I said before, a self-defense case.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00:And they get the name of San Quentin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and again, the only reason I can think is because he was Filipino.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And the victim was Filipino. Yeah. You know, who cares?
SPEAKER_01:And this guy, he's only some papers say that he's 28, 29, others say that he's 23, 24. But he ends up sentenced to San Quentin, and it looks like he's executed there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but he dies there, right? Like at an early age, like just a few years or so.
SPEAKER_01:Is he executed or does he die?
SPEAKER_00:We don't know. That's that's the that's the interesting question. Is the guy died at San Quentin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But the the details are murky as to whether he was ex- Again, because no one really cares enough to record this information, which is really sad. Yeah. Another curious thing about this case, and you and I were talking about this, was in the scant news articles uh from the 1930s, it mentions that this was the first murder trial held in Pasadena.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I was a little skeptical about that.
SPEAKER_01:I was too. I read that, I read it several times when I saw it. I'm like, do you really mean that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because I mean people had been murdered before in Pasadena, but yeah, this is the wild west out here.
SPEAKER_01:People are murdered left and right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I mean, the only thing I can think of, and we talked about this, was that maybe prior to this trial, the the murders that happened in Pasadena were maybe tried in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so maybe this was, you know, the first murder trial completed in Palestinian history. Who knows?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um that could be an explanation for that. But then again, we were talking about how Pasadena did have its own courthouse at the time. We did. You know, we had our own police station, our own court, we had judges and so why would we be trying our murder trials all the way in LA?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, it it would be an interesting thing for all you sleuths out there to figure out was this the first murder trial in Pasadena or was it not? Who knows?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But again, this case was interesting for a lot of reasons, not just because it involved, you know, a Filipino and another Filipino, it involved a prominent defense attorney who really made a name for herself through her flamboyant conduct. Um and it was an early murder. I mean, you know, often Pasadenas don't hear about a lot of murders from the 1930s and you know, or before.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And the other interesting thing about this is the lack of information. Because you know that if these guys were white, we would have all the details about exactly what happened.
SPEAKER_00:It would be, you know, it would have been national news at the time. Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It would all be recorded, it would all be detailed, and just the fact that we know so little about Pasadena's first murder trial, as they say, is uh pretty insane. I don't believe that it was Pasadena's first murder trial.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think that we had other trials in Pasadena for murder. Um, again, that's from a newspaper article. Sometimes the newspapers don't get it totally accurate.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, right. I mean, she did other work in Pasadena too. Um her office was in downtown LA, but she was back in Pasadena in 1937. I found she was representing a Charles Miller on an appeal for a robbery charge.
SPEAKER_00:And wasn't she involved in a court case involving a judge?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. The mysterious case of the austere Pasadena judge. That's what it's called, the case of the austere Pasadena judge. It has a very Mysterious title, but I can't find anything about it. I don't I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I guess he was so austere and powerful he kept it out of the media and the papers. But um I'm surprised that a judge of such austere stature uh was she defending him or prosecuting who knows? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:So the little scrap of other scrap of information I got was that she was held in contempt of court in 19 forget when, in the 30s, somewhere. She was held in contempt of court for arguing with a Pasadena judge who believed in castration. Castration as a panacea for, I don't know, I'm gonna fill in the blanks and assume that he just liked to cut the balls off of criminals he didn't like.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Probably that were involved with sex crimes, perversions of some sort, um, that he felt you know castration was. I mean, these I mean, we all know that back in the 1920s, 30s, even in California or parts of the United States, there were still some barbaric ideas in for criminal justice.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Um and I can see uh her uh making a spectacle of herself in the court.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Gladys, the underdog.
SPEAKER_00:I can see her, you know, standing up outfit with a see-through top in her fuchsia. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:No castration.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So save the balls.
SPEAKER_00:You know, so she was kind of a flamboyant character, um, kind of maybe ahead of her time for female lawyers. Um way ahead of her time. You know, this is definitely not uh sweet James or called Jacob.
SPEAKER_01:No, it was get me glad as well. I swear that really no, it really was. Oh wow, okay. Everyone would say Gladys. You know, all the people, all of the um criminals or the people of color, you know, people, all of the underdogs, they would always say, get me gladys. Get me gladis. Because she was the one who could get them off.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's like called Jake. You know, for all you female would-be ambulance chasers out there, don't remember Gladys and her slogan, Get Me Gladys.
SPEAKER_01:Get me Gladys.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Get Me Gladys. She was also known as the Lady in Purple.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, the lady in purple. I like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I was curious about that Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping case. I I want to look more into that. I had not heard of that before. But she represented him and got in some trouble for it, too.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe the mom. Who knows? It's interesting that that she apparently had reached some sort of stature, like reputationally, maybe financially, that Sinatra family hired her.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Who knows how much they paid her?
SPEAKER_01:No, she got to be very well known. That's why she was always in court and took on so many cases. She was a busy lady. Everyone wanted to get Gladys.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Hmm. Whatever happened to Gladys ultimately.
SPEAKER_01:Gladys, I forget the year, but she was in court. She was defending one of her brothers, I believe, who was, I think, accused of rape or sexual assault. I don't know all the details behind that case, but I know that she went to court in Pomona, I want to say. And while she was at the courthouse, she had a heart attack and then ended up dying. Yeah. But there were tons of articles about her and her legacy and everything that she had done for people living in LA.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, her her her little legacy with Pasadena. I'm surprised that we don't have more of a you know, kind of a monument or remembrance or some kind of legal at the courthouse or something display involving Gladys because she was such a uh prominent uh figure locally in the courts and judicial system here in Los Angeles County.
SPEAKER_01:I think she's just forgotten, just like Cabin Sag and Bernardo have been forgotten. It's just one of those things that haven't been recorded, and so people don't even really remember that it's part of our past at this point.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's why we're here on um the little murder from Pasadena to bring these stories from the past back to the forefront, um, back for Pasadena's to learn about their heritage and history. And uh maybe, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm not done with this case. I don't know about you, but I want to know more about what happened. I want to know where they were when this happened. I want to know all the details about it. I'm not satisfied until I know everything.
SPEAKER_00:You all hear that out there? There could be a part two in the future.
SPEAKER_01:There could be a part two. If you want to join me, I would love some help.
SPEAKER_00:Junior sleuths linked to uh help out historian Elise.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, let me know if you want to help me.
SPEAKER_00:Some law clerks or something. I'm a law clerk downtown.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, law clerks. I need I need legal people.
SPEAKER_00:Um what are we gonna do next week?
SPEAKER_01:Damn it. I swear this week I was gonna beat you two and mask you.
SPEAKER_00:I got you.
SPEAKER_01:You got me again. Okay, well, I'm gonna throw it back to you and say that we need to do a more modern one.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes, I agree. Um, I think we should go back to the like 80s or 90s, um, where more modern uh murder with a lot more. Or at least have knowledge about from participants. Umis Hayrow.
SPEAKER_01:Should we do that?
SPEAKER_00:I think we should do that one. Um, so you guys uh be sure to tune in uh next week for some more true crime and murder.
SPEAKER_01:And you ruined my tagline. We'll see you next week for another little old murder from Pasadena.