A few days before Gov. Brown's reprieve of Caryl Chessman, the Mexico City newspaper Novedades carried the front-page headline:

   

   

    Translated, it said Novesdades had discovered a witness who could save Caryl Chessman's life.

 

    Unfortunately for the condemned man, however, the facts of the story didn't bear out the headline.

 

    A Novedades reporter had interviewed an ex-schoolmate of Mary Alice Meza, the girl whom Chessman is repeatedly accused of having driven insane.

 

    The schoolmate — now living in Mexico City — told the reporter that Mary Alice was mentally ill long before Chessman's assault on her, supporting the statement with some rambling, incoherent letters she had received from her onetime close friend.

 

    Apparently the editors, having heard the cry that Chessman "drove a girl to the insane asylum" so often, felt that by disproving the claim they had significant new legal evidence to aid the condemned man.

 

    Of course, they didn't.

 

     All they did was disprove a piece of misinformation which had been disproved several times before, but which — because of both ignorance and its value as anti-Chessman propaganda — has been repeatedly revived as fact.

 

    The Novedades story is a perfect example of the hysteria — local and international — the case has caused.

 

    The facts have long since been buried in an avalanche of phony charges, false clues and invented issues. Charges, clues, and issues dragged out of the basement not just by those who want to see Chessman die — but also by those who have become so unrealistically and emotionally involved in the case that they'll take it as a personal family loss if he is executed.

 

    Last week, a frantic woman telephoned me from Ft. Worth, Tex., pleading that I publish information which could "save Chessman's life." She knew the real story — she said — "about the man they say Chessman beat up. I can get him as a witness."

 

    Some of Chessman's avid followers are more cunning. Also last week one sent me an intriguing anonymous letter detailing his association with an transient named Franky at the time of the Red Light Bandit's attacks.

 

    During the time, he said, he has unsuspectingly lent his car to Franky, who — he pointed out carefully — was always trying to engage him in conversation about the Red Light Bandit's activities.

 

    It was after the transient had left town, he continued, in studied bad English, that he discovered Franky had replaced his white spotlight with a red one.

 

    "My wife and I found our clear spotlight in the trunk," he added, "and some things belonging to difren womans in the car besides some papers with the red light bandit stories."

 

    He didn't go to the police, he said, because he had a record and didn't want to become a suspect. Instead, he waited 12 years to tell the press — anonymously.

 

    Even the foreign press, which has cried loud and long over Chessman, took Brown on because it didn't like the reasons he gave for the reprieve.

 

 

    Personally, I'm as tired as anyone of having the half-informed foreign press tell us how to handle the Chessman affair.

 

    I'm also inclined to agree with State Atty. Gen. Mosk that our own State Department might spend its time more effectively by informing the foreign press of the true facts of the Chessman case, than by trying to crawl out from under the unjust criticism by sending implied recommendations to Sacramento.