CONFIDENTIAL FILE
Red Tape Frequently Chokes Logic, Justice
Postscript to a tragedy:
Two and a half years ago, a young Norwalk housewife returned from the home of a neighbor to find her husband sprawled dying across his bed. He had been shot through the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
There was no mystery to the fatal shooting. Within minutes after they arrived at the scene, County Sheriff’s Department detectives had three suspects in custody, and detailed confessions from each.
And it was those confessions which turned the killing into one of the most bizarre tragedies ever to take place in Southern California.
The story was headlines, not only here, but all across the nation. Continue reading
And so we complete our journey through the official documents telling the unfortunate saga of Walter and Christine Collins. I heard from a number of Daily Mirror readers who enjoyed the trek (scanning all these documents was more labor than I expected), one author working on a Collins project who was not terribly pleased that I was posting them on the Internet and from at least one reader asking “who cares?” 
January 10, 1909: If you strip away the moralistic tone used by the anonymous Times reporter, the problems of the young men caught up in gambling (in this case horse racing) a century ago are quite modern.
Monday at 6:30 a.m., as Marvin Hanks of East L.A. walked from his home to his garage to drive to work, he observed that the full moon in the western sky was green–grass green.”What goes on here?” he asked himself. Later in the day, he referred his wonderment here.
