The Ability to Kill (6 page)

Four years after that, in 1951, Ware went into a Bristol police station and reported that he had killed a woman. He added: ‘I don’t know what is the matter with me. I keep on having an urge to hit women on the head.’

This time he was believed. That woman, however, recovered, and he was tried for attempted murder. He was found guilty but insane, and committed to Broadmoor.

Of Rowland’s case Mr Silverman wrote: ‘What is certain is that no reasonable jury would convict him on the whole evidence as it stands today. On that evidence he is entitled to acquittal. That will not help him now. He is dead. That is the iniquity of the death penalty; its hopeless, ineluctable finality.’

West Covina is a residential suburb in the eastern section of the county of Los Angeles, California. Bisecting this wilderness of long streets, dusty palm trees, small houses, kidney-shaped swimming pools, dichondra lawns, and sprinkler systems, is the San Bernardino freeway. You may drive to the downtown business area of Los Angeles in thirty minutes. Economically, West Covina is plump; not portly, as is Brentwood, nor bloated, as is Beverly Hills; just respectably plump.

About a mile from the freeway is the South Hills Country Club. On the arid slopes beyond are houses belonging to some of the more prosperous members of the community. Until 1960, the home of Dr Raymond Bernard Finch on Lark Hill Drive was one of them. It is in the modern Californian ‘ranch house’ style and stands on the flattened top of a scrub-covered eminence with a commanding view over the Country Club car park. A steep, curving driveway leads down to the road. There is a heated swimming pool and a four-car garage. Early in 1959 Dr Finch is said to have refused an offer of $100,000 for the place. He would have done better to have accepted.

Shortly before midnight on Saturday, July 18 of that year, the West Covina police were called to the house. They found there a terrified and incoherent Swedish maid, and, at the foot of some narrow steps leading down from the side of the driveway, the dead body of Mrs Barbara Jean Finch, the doctor’s
wife. She was lying on the edge of a lawn belonging to the adjoining house where her husband’s father lived. She had been shot in the back.

At 10.30 the following morning, and three hundred miles away in Las Vegas, Nevada, police officers entered an apartment a few blocks away from the Desert Inn Hotel and found Dr Finch asleep in bed. They wakened him, told him to dress and then placed him under arrest. At headquarters, they booked him on suspicion of murder, and waited for the West Covina police to come and get him.

Dr Finch, the son of a retired optometrist, was a graduate of the College of Medical Evangelists at Loma Linda, California, a surgeon, and part owner of the busy West Covina Medical Center.
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I spoke with him during the trial. He was forty-two then, lean and tanned. The eyes were alert and intelligent; the close-cropped, greying hair made no attempt to conceal the bald patch on the crown of his head. He was a good tennis player and looked it. His manner was forthright. ‘Call me Bernie,’ he would say. The accompanying smile was muscular and confident.

He and Barbara Finch were married in 1951, both for the second time. She had formerly been his secretary and their extramural relationship had furnished evidence for both divorces. Both, too, had had children by their first marriages. Barbara’s daughter, Patti, had gone with her when she had married the doctor.

Barbara Finch was eight years his junior and an attractive woman. She shared his enthusiasm for tennis and they were active and popular members of the Los Angeles Tennis Club. The birth of their son Raymond in 1953 might have been expected to cement their relationship satisfactorily. It did not. By 1957, he was complaining of her coldness, she of his
infidelities. That year they decided that, although they would continue to occupy the same house, they would, as far as their emotional lives were concerned, ‘go their separate ways.’

Dr Finch’s way took him promptly to a small furnished apartment in Monterey Park, another suburb five miles nearer town. He leased it, for $70 a month, in the name of George Evans. There was a ‘Mrs Evans,’ too; young and auburn-haired. They used to meet at the apartment every few days and spend two or three hours in one another’s company. Sometimes it would be in the morning, sometimes the afternoon, depending on the doctor’s professional commitments for the day.

Mrs Evans’ real name was Mrs Carole Tregoff Pappa.

She was twenty then. A Pasadena girl, she had for a while been a photographic model. Model agency ‘cheesecake’ photographs taken at that time showed her posing in ‘Baby Doll’ nighties for a scent advertiser. She was startlingly pretty. At eighteen she had married James J. Pappa, a twenty-one-year-old cement mason and amateur ‘body-building devotee.’
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It had been he who had decided that she should give up modelling. Dutifully accepting his decision, she had taken a job as a receptionist. It had not lasted long. A month or so later she had gone to work at the West Covina Medical Center. She had become Dr Finch’s secretary.

In 1958, Mr and Mrs George Evans leased a more expensive apartment for their meetings, and furnished it themselves. In January 1959, Carole Tregoff divorced James Pappa. In the same month, Mrs Finch went to a lawyer, and discussed the possibility of divorcing the doctor.

At that point in the story it looked as if events were proceeding in a commonplace way towards a commonplace conclusion.
Then, the character of the relationship between the doctor and his wife changed. The indifference, or passive dislike, of the ‘separate ways’ understanding was suddenly replaced by a bitter hostility.

There is little doubt of the reason for it. The community property laws of the State of California call for an equitable division, in case of divorce, of all assets acquired by either or both partners during the marriage. However, when the divorce is granted for adultery, extreme cruelty, or desertion, the court has discretion to grant the innocent party the lion’s share of the property. California judges have in general regarded it as mandatory to do so.

Rightly or wrongly—presumably she was acting on her lawyer’s advice—Mrs Finch was taking advantage of this situation to claim the
whole
of the community property, including all the doctor’s assets in the West Covina Medical Center, and the eight corporations which composed it, then estimated to be worth $750,000. In addition she was asking for $18,000 legal expenses, plus alimony of $1640 a month, plus child support of $250 a month.

If she succeeded in even 80% of her claim, and there was little reason to suppose that she would not, the doctor would be virtually penniless.

She
had
to be persuaded to accept a less punitive property settlement agreement.

However, his arguments and appeals failed to impress her. As the weeks went by, his attempts at persuasion became more urgent.

In February, a nineteen-year-old Swedish exchange student, Marie Ann Lindholm, had been employed as a maid in the Lark Hill Drive home. One Sunday, Mrs Finch showed her a blood-stained sheet and said that the doctor had tried to kill her in bed. There was a bandage on her head. Apparently, the
doctor had relented, stitched up the wound and dressed it; but he had threatened to ‘hire people in Las Vegas’ to kill her if she reported the incident to the police.

After two days in bed recuperating, Mrs Finch moved out and took refuge in the apartment of a woman friend in the Hollywood Hills. She was, she told this friend, afraid of her husband. But not afraid enough, apparently, to change her mind about the community property claim. She went back to her lawyer, a Mr Forno, and on May 18 signed the divorce papers. Three days later, Mr Forno obtained a restraining order enjoining the doctor to refrain from molesting his wife, touching any of the community property or withdrawing bank funds beyond those needed for normal business and living expenses.

He was too late to secure all the bank funds. Two days previously the doctor had given the Medical Center business manager a cheque for $3000, drawn on his wife’s account and apparently signed by her, and told him to cash it. The bank, after questioning the cheque, had paid over the money. However, in the light of what happened later, it is doubtful if an earlier restraining order would have been of much help. Dr Finch was in no mood to exercise restraint.

By now he was registered at a West Covina motel. Mrs Finch had moved back to Lark Hill Drive, so as to be with the two children. But he was a frequent visitor. During the weeks that followed, her friends at the tennis club and elsewhere heard tales of persecution.

To one of those friends, a television actor named Mark Stevens, she reported that the doctor would not only pick up pieces of ‘bric-a-brac’ and hit her with them, but that on one occasion he had ‘sat on her chest’ from nine o’clock in the evening until one in the morning—surely a record for this method of coercion. Mr Stevens, incensed at such ungentlemanly
behaviour, offered her a revolver for her protection and a course of instruction in its use. Mrs Finch, saying that she was scared to death of guns, declined. Mr Stevens then got the jack handle from the back of her car and urged her to ‘wallop’ the doctor with that. She thought enough of this suggestion to keep the jack handle under her bed.

To another friend she confided that the doctor had threatened to push her over a cliff in a car which would then explode. When, in June, the doctor proposed through his lawyer a reconciliation to halt the divorce proceedings, she was sure that it was a trick. If he could get back into the house, it would be that much easier for him to kill her.

Nevertheless, an attempt at reconciliation was made and the two were interviewed together by a court marriage counsellor. The doctor claimed that he had given up his ‘girl friend’ and begged for another chance. Mrs Finch modified her position only slightly. The outcome was a further restraining order directing that ‘all payments of income from the defendant’s medical practice’ were to be turned over to Mrs Finch ‘to be expended solely’ by her ‘for the joint benefit, including payment of living expenses for both.’

This was not at all what the doctor wanted, and he never made any attempt to comply with the order. Moreover, Mrs Finch soon had her doubts of his sincerity confirmed. A few days after the reconciliation plea, he came to the house, hit her with a revolver and again threatened to kill her. The Swedish maid called the police. Dr Finch left before they arrived.

Mrs Finch reported the incident to her lawyer. At one point, she said, the doctor had tried to force her to get into his car. She added that if the doctor came to the house again, she intended to run for protection to her father-in-law’s house, next door. On July 7 she signed a deposition to the effect that the doctor had failed to obey the order requiring him to turn over
all his income to her. A subpoena was then issued instructing him to appear on a charge of contempt of court.

This document was not served upon him until a week later; but it is unlikely that the delay was of any consequence. In Las Vegas, there had already been set in motion a train of events which, at that stage, no ordinary legal process could conceivably have brought to a halt.

Miss Tregoff—she had resumed her maiden name—had left Los Angeles in May and gone to Las Vegas, where she was staying with old family friends. She had taken this step, she later explained, in order to ‘get out of the triangle.’

She merely elongated it.

It was a trying time for the doctor. In addition to his exacting work as a surgeon at the Medical Center and the emotionally gruelling business of hurling bric-a-brac at his wife, he now had a lot of extra mileage to cover. With no good news for him to bring to them, even the Las Vegas meetings lacked the relieving gaiety he needed. As the weeks went by, and the tight-lipped reports and gloomy discussions of ways and means became repetitive, new elements of fantasy began to seep into his conferences with Miss Tregoff.

The family friends with whom she was staying had a twenty-one-year-old grandson named Donald Williams. A law student at the University of Nevada, he had been a childhood friend of hers. In June she asked him if he knew of any men in Las Vegas who were involved in crime.

He told her that a boy he went to college with had a friend from Minneapolis who was ‘in the rackets.’ Miss Tregoff said that she would like to meet him. Young Williams already knew of her relationship with Dr Finch, and that the doctor was being divorced. When she explained that she was interested in getting some man who would take Mrs Finch out and provide evidence to be used against her in the divorce action, he
understood perfectly. One statement she made, however, did make him a trifle uneasy. Miss Tregoff said that she ‘would be quite happy when Mrs Finch would be out of the picture permanently.’ It made him ‘develop an idea’ that there might be violence involved in the plan. But he shrugged off his misgivings and agreed to arrange the meeting.

The go-between was a disagreeable delinquent named Richard Keachie. Later he was indicted in Las Vegas for violations of the Mann Act and the rooming-house ordinances
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and for being a fugitive from justice. He disappears from the scene. Left in the foreground, with a polite leer on his faceand a bottle of bourbon at his elbow, is the man from Minneapolis to whom he introduced her, John Patrick Cody.

He was born in Minneapolis in 1930. His police record, dating from 1946 when he was doing time in the State Reformatory at Red Wing, included nineteen arrests. They covered charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct (5), suspicion of robbery (2), assault and battery (3), careless driving and other traffic offences of a more or less serious nature (9), and an A.W.O.L. charge from the Marine Corps. The record of convictions told a story of short-term sentences, fines and placings-on-probation. In 1958, however, his public nuisance value had increased, and he had been sentenced to a year in the Minneapolis Workhouse on a charge of passing a bad cheque. Three weeks later, he had escaped from the Workhouse and made his way south to Las Vegas.