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
Two's Company, Four's a Murder
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A love quadrangle unraveled in 1929 Pasadena, after prominent automobile salesman Victor Cooley was found bludgeoned with a hammer in his apartment.
And we are back with another little old murder from Pasadena.
SPEAKER_00:I'm the historian Elise, and I'm here with my co-host Victor Cass, a retired police sergeant with over 30 years experience, all with the Pasadena California Police Department.
SPEAKER_01:Today we have a murder from April 16th of 1929. It occurs on a street that no longer exists. 220 North Vernon Avenue. There was an apartment building there. It's now what? Freeway?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so a lot of our Pasadena history buffs may know of this little part of the city. Vernon Avenue was a north-south street that bisected Colorado and Walnut, right around where uh Pasadena Avenue, Colorado, Walnut are today. You'll know that there's a um in this area of town, uh the freeways crisscross this area, the 710 stub, uh the 134 and 210 interchange, and there's some car dealerships. Uh but yeah, there was a whole little area, uh a whole little neighborhood in that part of the city that was destroyed uh to make way for these freeways and the new developments. So a lot of streets they've no longer exist, like Vernon Avenue.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So this apartment is where Victor Alan Cooley was living when he was murdered. I think this was a sort of a temporary apartment for him because he was in the process of separating from his wife. His wife lived in another part of town, I think, in a home that they owned together on Las Lunas. So she was staying there, and Victor was staying at the apartment on North Vernon, and on April 16th, his roommate and employee walked in and found him in a puddle of blood, essentially, and called the police.
SPEAKER_00:That's correct. Um, but let's let's talk about Victor Cool here for a second. He was kind of a prominent Pasadenian, wasn't he?
SPEAKER_01:He was. He was an automobile salesman. Uh, I think he also rented out cars too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, he's a big car guy in Pasadena.
SPEAKER_01:And his uh car lot or garage or whatever it was was at 180 West Colorado, which is now at like the very beginning of Old Town where there's now a freeway.
SPEAKER_00:That's correct. It'd be kind of right where I think True Foods Kitchen is today in that area on the south side of the street. Um, yeah. So Passian police uh get a call, a frantic call from uh Howard. Um, and he basically says, Hey, send some cops over here. I got a guideline in blood. He's dead.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he says there a man's been murdered here. He's dead. He's certain that he's dead. Um, and so the officers show up and they find Victor all bloody and they take him to the hospital. He is not yet dead.
SPEAKER_00:In fact, I think he was maybe conscious even for a little bit when they arrived, right?
SPEAKER_01:Wasn't he still kind of like he was he was a little conscious, yeah, but uh not speaking. He was never able to say what had happened to him.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Maybe in and out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so he's at the hospital. I think they had to do like a spinal tap to relieve pressure on his brain, and it wasn't great. And he ended up dying four days later.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. In the meantime, Chief Kelly and the Pasadena Police Department are scrambling around to try to interview uh as many persons of interest they can come up with.
SPEAKER_01:And also crossing his fingers that Victor's gonna wake up in the hospital. He never does, but you know, he assigns, I think, two officers to just stay by his bed just in case he gains consciousness and is able to say who did this.
SPEAKER_00:That's correct. Uh, we in the police world would have called that a dying declaration in case he were to wake up. The chance that the hope is that he could have named his killer and what happened briefly before he lost consciousness again in case he died.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And uh Chief Kelly is immediately suspicious about basically everything that is going on. The apartment, Victor Cooley's apartment, looks like it has been ransacked, stuff is like all thrown around, but nothing really seems to have been taken. Nothing of value has been taken. He also found it very fishy that it was the roommate, an employee of Victor Cooley, who found him and placed the call. The call that he made was a little suspicious. And he found a love letter inside the apartment. So there's I'm sure like a million different things running through his head.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, and Howard's not helping himself by initially giving a statement that it was a robbery gone bad.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Um, which the police clear quickly rule that out.
SPEAKER_01:So going back to this uh love letter that they found, Victor had been separated from his wife, Mrs. Pearl Cooley, uh, for some time. He had since started dating a woman named Mrs. Evelyn Merritt Hanan. She was the daughter of like a millionaire mining man. Um, and so when Victor is found, the wife, Mrs. Pearl Cooley, says, Hey, my husband had since been dating this woman. Um, and so the officers try to track her down, and this woman happens to be in Reno, Nevada, because she's there to secure a divorce from her husband, Rolf Hanan, who was a former chauffeur for the family.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And uh our murder victim, Vic, was planning on moving to Reno, possibly to help expedite this divorce and get with his new lover.
SPEAKER_01:He was excited to get out of town. He was talking about selling the automobile business that he owned so that he can move away and get married.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. But getting back to Howard, Howard potentially has a little love interest of his own, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, apparently, John Howard, uh, who was from Boulder, Colorado, I believe, and moved to Pasadena not too long before this. He started working for Victor Cooley in the garage, and apparently got like a super big crush on Mrs. Pearl Cooley. Yes, Victor's wife.
SPEAKER_00:Or his strange wife, or Sunda Bido, who knows what's going on.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Now keep in mind for police, all these angles tend to complicate the web of motives. You know, is John Howard working in cahoots with Pearl Cooley? Is it over love? Is it over money? Is it who knows what's going on?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, and so John Howard changes his story a bunch of times, which is problematic.
SPEAKER_00:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so at first he says he was hanging out in the garage earlier that evening and then went to the apartment just after midnight and found him there dead.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:There are some witnesses. A Mrs. Cora Gurky was in bed in a bungalow near the apartment just below Cooley's uh window, and she heard a scream just before 11 and then a dull thud.
SPEAKER_00:Right. However, John Howard later changes his story uh to a police interrogation confession whereby he claims he got into an argument with Cooley about his work product.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he starts telling this story about how he's been drinking in the garage. There's a lot of alcohol involved.
SPEAKER_00:He's working on a car.
SPEAKER_01:He's working on a car, and he runs out of alcohol. So he goes up to the apartment to get more alcohol.
SPEAKER_00:Who hasn't been there before?
SPEAKER_01:And his friend and boss, Victor, is there and says, What the hell are you doing? Drinking, you should be working, and basically, you know, nags him for it. And they start to argue.
SPEAKER_00:Some might say, even a little tussle, as Howard claims Victor tries to grab him and looked like he was reaching for his revolver in a nearby drawer.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh. And so him apparently looking like he was reaching for a revolver causes Howard to start grabbing for Victor, and that turns into a fight, which leads to Howard reaching into his pocket, pulling out a hammer and smashing him in the head with it.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:So here's the problem with Howard's story. He called for help. And he says, For God's sake, hurry, a man's been murdered. And in the 911 call, they say, Are you sure he is dead? And Howard says, Yes, he is dead. But when the two police officers arrive at the apartment, they find Cooley sitting up in bed, kind of like moaning and holding his head. As we said, he's not, you know, fully unconscious yet.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And just on a side note, we're using the term 911 uh loosely here because obviously they did not have 911 in 1949.
SPEAKER_01:So basically, Howard is saying that they got into this drunken fight and he hits him on the top of the head. Um, and then he thinks that he has killed him because Victor's you know falling backward and is completely still. So he decides to stage the scene to make it look like a robbery or something like that, so that no one suspects him. He turns off the light, leaves the doors unlocked, and then leaves. The problem is that when he comes back, he's so confident and cocky that like Victor actually is dead that he stops below to use the phone before even going upstairs to the apartment to see that Victor is still alive up there. Uh, and so that's why he sent that or he gave that phone call saying that he was sure that a man had been murdered because he thought that he had murdered him.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:They apparently did some digging around at the apartment and found like 20 empty whiskey bottles. I don't know what that was about, but a lot of people who were around them and at the uh garage that night said that there were no uh they weren't drinking, the officers didn't really find whiskey bottles or anything like that, which makes them suspicious.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, there really was no evidence that Howard was drunk at all. No on the night in question.
SPEAKER_01:So they're thinking, you know, is like were they drunkenly fighting, or did he just want to kill Victor to get to Pearl? And if so, was Pearl involved in any of this? Did she know?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the police must have put the heat to Pearl to some degree that it inspired Howard to outrageously confess that he did it all on his own and no one else was involved. No woman was in on it, basically, possibly protecting Pearl or trying to.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, he said, and I quote, I just did it in a crazy moment. You can't rope a woman into this, so you might as well not try. So he's trying to like take the brunt of it so that Pearl's not getting thrown into this. But she is, and she is questioned at length. He eventually ends up calling a detective Thomas and tells him exactly where to find the machinist's hammer that he used to kill Vic with. And they show it to him, and he's like, Yep, that's the hammer I killed Vic with.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And if the confusing nature and moving parts of this murder weren't enough, some drama appears over the investigations between the Pastina Police Department and the DA's office. They kind of get into it a little bit. Apparently, um Chief Kelly, there he is again. I think he holds the record for most appearances in our podcast. Yeah. Um, Chief Kelly was very uh up in arms that the he felt the DA's office had kind of hamstrung his detectives by not letting them question um several witnesses, especially uh Pearl Cooley by herself without her attorney present.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, that's true.
SPEAKER_00:And uh it became a very public uh spat between the DA's office and Chief Kelly. Um, the chief claiming that the DA's office uh went to the press first, and so now he's gonna go to the press and they're gonna argue their case to the press about you know which investigative body is being more professional and you know, following the constitution and whatnot. So a little sidebar drama between the investigative agencies. At the time then, and still today, uh DA's offices have their own investigative section. Um, these are today we call them the DA investigators. A lot of times they're former detectives with police departments, and they retire and they get a job as a detective with the DA's office to do follow-up uh investigative work for the DA's office. And so there's a little stepping on toes involved in this case, a little back and forth uh between Chief Kelly and the uh LA district attorney.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Thankfully, they got that all cleared up in time for the uh subsequent trial.
SPEAKER_01:And uh by the way, Victor's uh mistress, girlfriend, whoever he was seeing, uh Mrs. Hanan Merritt, she was cleared. They determined that she didn't have anything to do with it. She was, I I guess, really cooperative and willing to fly in from uh Reno.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and there was also a 19-year-old son of Cooley's that kind of uh was involved a little bit as a possible person of interest, but again, they quickly discarded him as a suspect as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And so Pearl, as you can imagine, is not wanting to say much, but she does admit that she has been able to infer that Howard had a crush on her and was in love with her. And she was reported to be in a hysterical condition ever since the murder was committed. She's portraying herself as kind of still in love with her husband, and apparently had told Howard that she could never love another man as long as Victor was alive. So to Chief Kelly, that is the real reason why Victor was murdered. Because Howard wanted Pearl, and Pearl was swearing that she could never love another man if Victor was still alive.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, see, it wasn't enough that Victor was gonna divorce Pearl. In Howard's mind, she wouldn't love him as long as he was still alive, whether they were still legally married or not. So kind of a twisted little motive uh to commit murder and possibly face the gallows at San Quentin Prison because that's what he did face. The gallows.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he was found guilty of murder in the first degree. And by the way, that whole drinking drunk story, he came up with that. I'm assuming, because if he was found guilty of that, then it could just be manslaughter and he wouldn't have to die.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And he was totally willing to plead guilty to manslaughter.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Um, but you know, everyone saw through it, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and uh sentenced to hang. Now, I don't know what happened to him after this because they appealed it and he has missing to history from from my perspective.
SPEAKER_00:Right. The last we hear of this case uh comes from uh December 1930. Uh, the California Supreme Court, people versus Howard, they basically quote the judgment of the lower court of murder of the first degree is modified. The cause is remanded to the trial court with directions to enter a judgment against defendant finding him guilty of murder of the second degree, and to thereupon pronounce judgment upon him as prescribed by law. So apparently they it got uh reversed and they went for the second degree murder. You know, first degree murder is um is very specific charge. Um, and usually in California um this involves what is known as murder with malice of forethought. That means premeditated murder, where you actually had to do some actions that show planning to commit this murder, line and wait is an example of first-degree murder. Um multiple murder is an example of first-degree murder when you kill multiple people because the theory being that the multiple, each murder victim is malice or forethought. You are actually planning to murder people. Um this isn't a in the heat of the moment. You can't, you know, a love a jealous lover suddenly killing his wife or hug her husband. That's not gonna rarely is that ever gonna be first degree murder.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it wasn't the drunken crime of passion, like he was trying to explain.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right. Uh well, apparently that's what the courts did eventually determine was that they're saying it this like. More of a crime of passion.
SPEAKER_01:Um, which is odd because and here's the other thing Pearl Cooley's home was on the other side of town on uh Los Lunas. Apparently, that very night there was like a bridge party there, and Pearl was there. She had a friend named Ida King who was there. Howard was also there. He apparently, you know, hit Victor and then left, drove across town, was at Pearl's house for this bridge game or whatever, and then he left again. So I don't know. Is it had she said something to him to trigger him? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Who knows? I mean, there's no doubt when you when you look at the details of this case, there's no doubt in my mind that Howard intended to kill Cooley.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, whether that idea to kill Cooley came up at any time before that night, history will never know. There's no documentary evidence to that. Um, all we know is that, you know, based upon the confession we know from Pearl, for whatever reason, Howard thought the only way he would ever have his lover is if Cooley was out of the picture.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. He had the love motive, but he also had a financial motive in that uh Cooley was getting ready to sell the business and leave. Howard before this was just uh like a cook at some restaurant.
SPEAKER_00:So maybe Howard thought he'd lose his job.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean he got a pretty good job with Cooley. Cooley was doing really well with his business. He managed to make a lot of money for himself. So, you know, it's possible that he was not wanting to lose out on his job or thinking that maybe he could like, you know, and and on a uh, you know, to play devil's advocate that could go in his favor for a second degree murder.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, why am I gonna kill my employer? You know, I depend on him for money.
SPEAKER_01:Because his money would go to his wife and he would get to marry his wife.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe. Yeah, I mean you never know. But apparently, as we found out in 1930, the courts didn't see it that way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know. He was so certain that he had murdered somebody that he placed that call before even going upstairs to check that the body was cold. You know, I think that he had planned it and he wanted him to be dead.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm sure. You know, like I said, sometimes as I've said before in previous episodes, there are no criminal masterminds.
SPEAKER_01:No. Um But my question is, did Pearl know? Did she put him up to it?
SPEAKER_00:What does she have, you know, if anything, to do with I mean, in a way, she's kind of a woman scorn because her husband's gonna leave and run off with some other lady, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And there was reports that like she, you know, she was at his bedside until he died, and she's like, now you can never leave me. So was she angry? Did she have something to do with it? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:Who knows? I mean, we'll never know. Cooley's gonna run off and marry the richer lady. I mean, yeah, who knows what's going on. So, you know, again, another kind of uh domesticky murder, love triangle-esque type case. Yeah. Uh back from the archives. Um, what are we gonna do for them our modern case next week?
SPEAKER_01:You're asking me.
SPEAKER_00:That's right, I'm the one who's supposed to find him.
SPEAKER_01:It's your job, buddy.
SPEAKER_00:I think I got something good for us next week. So, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, we will be back next week with another Little Old Murder from Pasadena.