Killer’s Novel Defense Went Up in Smoke

More than 80 years ago--long before addiction became unassailably fashionable and smokers became social pariahs--a Highland Park teenager burned his way into the city’s consciousness with a brutal crime and his novel claim that an irrepressible urge for cigarettes drove him to it.

The story gripped Los Angeles, in part because it was the first juvenile homicide ever committed in the rustic, hilly neighborhood, and in part because it set off what was then called the “biggest manhunt in the West.”

On a drizzly, moonless December night in 1913, Louis Bundy, a 17-year-old high school dropout, already on probation for theft and in need of money to buy a Christmas present for a girl with whom he was infatuated, called Thurston’s Drugstore at Avenue 39 and North Figueroa Street and ordered 50 cents’ worth of magnesia water and change for a $20 bill.

Before taking off with the order, delivery boy Harold Ziesche, who would have turned 16 on Christmas Day, was busy showing other children the new flashlight his father had bought him as protection against the automobiles that were beginning to fill Los Angeles’ streets.

Strapping it to the handlebars of his bike, Ziesche took off and headed north for Bundy’s house, at Avenue 42 and Marmion Way.

Suddenly, Ziesche’s new flashlight illuminated an alarming sight--Louis Bundy, well known as the neighborhood bully, leaping from the bushes in front of him.

With no warning, Bundy kicked Ziesche off his bike and began beating him with an ax handle and, finally and fatally, a rock. Bundy grabbed Ziesche’s pouch containing $19.50 and fled.

When Ziesche hadn’t returned 30 minutes later, his employer went looking for him. Stumbling across the bike, he found the boy unconscious in a nearby ravine at the side of the road. He rushed the battered boy to the receiving hospital that stood at police headquarters at 1st and Hill streets. Three hours later, the ambitious honor student, who had aspired to become a pharmacist, died in his mother’s arms.

Investigators worked around the clock, crisscrossing Highland Park in search of the killer, while residents mourned the loss of the kindhearted and popular boy. The community’s only policeman, William B. White, searched even harder for clues, determined to catch Ziesche’s killer.

Crime Scene’s Clues

White’s substation was located in Charlie Green’s hardware store at Avenue 57 and Figueroa Street. There, the patrolman mixed plaster of Paris, then took it to the crime scene and poured it into the muddy shoe prints. White took the best cast to a local shoemaker, who said the print had come from a Cat’s Paw brand rubber heel that he had put on Bundy’s shoes a week earlier.

White knew Bundy well. He had arrested him a few months earlier for stealing $200 worth of merchandise from a department store. He also suspected that Bundy had beaten and robbed a local Japanese vegetable gardener, though that never was proven.

Bundy, furious at his impending arrest, enlisted two friends to help him stretch a heavy wire across the Avenue 60 bridge, then called in a fake report that the post office in the Herman district had been robbed. They hoped that White would rush to respond and get knocked off his motorcycle. But the patrolman had been tipped off by a friend who overheard the boy’s plan, and avoided the trap.

With the theft and attempted mayhem as background, White arrested Bundy and listened as he confessed at the Lincoln Heights jail to Ziesche’s murder.

Puffing nervously on a cigarette, Bundy confessed that he felt compelled to kill Ziesche because of the flashlight, whose illumination would have allowed the delivery boy to identify him as the robber.

Money was his motive. He needed $20 to buy a gift for Charlotte Treadway, the girl he

hoped to marry. Neither she nor her suitor was sympathetically portrayed in contemporary news accounts. The press labeled her a “teaser,” who could never make up her mind whether she wanted Bundy--an indecision that allegedly infuriated Bundy. He, meanwhile, was described as a social misfit who was a master mechanic of his own emotions, detached, strong, unemotional and self-confident, though boiling with rage.

Whoever he really was, Angelenos wanted Bundy’s blood.

Coming to his rescue was the city’s most famous defense lawyer, Earl Rogers, the architect of a unique defense that ultimately would go up in smoke.

After three state doctors pronounced Bundy sane, responsible for his acts and competent to stand trial, the district attorney did not hesitate. The D.A. wanted Bundy convicted, and executed when he turned 18.

The jurors agreed. As the Ziesche family quietly wept, Bundy was pronounced guilty and sentenced to hang. It was the first capital case Rogers had lost.

Rogers pressed a last-ditch appeal.

“From the age of 13, he was addicted to the excessive use of cigarettes,” Rogers argued to the state Supreme Court. “You have the word of the physician of the Juvenile Court that the excessive and inordinate use of cigarettes, the smoking of three packs a day, by a boy whose brain is still growing had an effect of deterioration and traumatic disturbance . . . “

Rogers told the justices that, as a young child, Bundy had been hit on the head with a baseball bat and knocked unconscious for two days, and continued to have dizzy spells throughout his short life.

Rogers customarily allowed clients accused of murder to take the witness stand in their own defense. But Bundy was the one exception. As Rogers recalled it, the boy antagonized everyone. He made people feel like they wanted to shoot him, as if he were a “mad dog.”

A Lawyer’s Torment

Tormented by that decision, Rogers agonized ever after that if he had put Bundy on the stand, the jurors would have seen the youth’s rage and madness and found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

In 1914, the same year Highland Park’s first juvenile murderer was hanged at San Quentin, White was promoted to lieutenant for solving the case--and the Los Angeles Police Department organized the world’s first juvenile crime prevention program, calling it the City Mother’s Bureau.

Rogers never lost another client to the executioner.