Maybe it was murder. Maybe it never happened at all. Was she telling the truth or was it all a lie?

Early on the morning of Nov. 20, 1953, acting on a tip, LAPD Detectives John Olsen and P.R. Brooks visited a room on the fourth floor of a Main Street hotel, where they found a young woman named Annie Margarite Rube. When they came into the room, Rube tried to destroy a greeting card that read “Do you know that Annie has killed Joe, poor Joe.”

As they searched the room, Rube tried to jump to her death, The Times said.

Rube, identified by The Times as a 23-year-old redhead, said she shot a man named Joe Madrix or Manricks (the spellings vary) to death  in Mexico because he cut her with a knife and pistol-whipped her. And because the two men helping her smuggle drugs were afraid to kill him.

“The others didn’t have enough nerve to kill Joe, but I did,” she told The Times. “I took the gun and shot him once in the leg, just for fun.”

” ‘You’ll fry for this!’ he screamed. So I put the next one through his heart,” she said.

She told detectives that in early November, she and two men named Joe Largo and Ray Vaca, went from Albuquerque to Mexico City to buy drugs. At some point they met with Manricks and there was an argument, apparently over about $2,000 from their various drug deals. Rube said Manricks pistol-whipped her and slashed her, and showing detectives wounds on her  shoulder and stomach.

She somehow managed to get the gun and as Largo and Vaca held Manricks in the backseat of their car, she shot him. Rube said the three of them poured gasoline on the body and set it on fire, along with her bloodstained clothes. Afterward, she came to Los Angeles while Largo and Vaca left for New Mexico. At least that was her story.

According to a United Press account, her name was Marguerita Anita Rube, who said one of her companions jabbed a hypodermic needle into Manricks and dragged him from the car, then “she pumped shots into him.”

But was there really a killing?

In one version of her story, Rube said that after the body was burned, they scattered the bones, but a body found Nov. 10 by laborers in cane field south of Tijuana was intact, according to news reports. In fact, it was still burning, according to The Times.

Homicide Detectives Harry Hansen and Gilbert Encinas questioned Rube, but said they wouldn’t know for certain whether her story was true until they received more information from investigators in Mexico.

And with that, the story vanishes from the pages of The Times.