Note: This is an encore post from 2008.

Testimony in the murder trial was so graphic that spectators became ill
and fled the courtroom, The Times said.

Have pity for the Spinelli family. Virgilio Spinelli, 97 pounds, said he killed his wife, Rose, because she was going to run off with another man. He dismembered her, burned her remains in a backyard incinerator and scattered the ashes along the driveway. He was convicted and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on May 17, 1940.

On April 22, 1948, the nude bodies of his divorced daughter Helen and a married co-worker, Travis Webb, were found floating in the surf off Malibu Beach. They were evidently caught in a riptide and drowned. The Times said Helen’s 18-year-old daughter had vanished eight months before.

The neighborhood of the Spinelli home, 305 N. Mountain View.