Murder Case Photographs: #1

Murder Case Photographs: #1
1957

A few years ago the state Supreme Court ordered that a shift worn by a rape victim and introduced into evidence at the 1967 trial be found, if it could, so that DNA testing could be done. The case irked (almost half of) the Court which split down the middle. Four of the nine justices joined in an exasperated dissent.

The court's order went to the prosecutor's office where the trial was held and, randomly within that office, the irksome task devolved to me.

I went over to the office of the Clerk of court where the garment, if it existed, would be. I and the single deputy clerk who had been assigned the task in his office that I had been in mine spent...I don't know how long, but a long time looking for the dress. We eventually were able to determine that it had been destroyed years ago in a purging of non-capital case evidence that was taking up space in the clerk's office.

Along the way I discovered a part of the history of this magnificent city that I love so much, a city that was made infamous then glamorous by crime, patchily captured in the oldest remaining photographs of 1950's murder cases. I have tried murder cases all of my career, first as a prosecutor, now as a defense attorney. It is fitting that this be done.

The photographic evidence presented and preserved here was destined for the incinerator, just as the evidence from earlier decades--going back to the 1920's I was told--was destroyed years ago by the Clerk's office. Every month, to this day, the deputy district attorney's in the office got a blanket email from the clerk's office advising that evidence from the cases listed will be destroyed unless someone wants them.

I wanted them and so got hundreds of manilla envelopes containing evidence, almost all documentary, most photographic, from murder trials held in the 1950's. It was from one of these envelopes that I discovered the O'Malley Christmas day triple murder of 1956, the saddest case that ever was, last published here on December 13, 2004.

With this post I finally begin to publish the photographs. Some of them. You will see little blood and gore here. You will see this city as it was in a time that no longer exists and which few even remember. You will also see those photographs that moved me personally in some way, by their poignancy, their (unintended) artistry, even their (unintended) humor.

The first of these photographs above is a 1957 mugshot of a young, handsome murder suspect with period hair style and tropical shirt. Maybe a tourist. The photograph can be enlarged.

Part of the allure of these evidence folders is trying to piece together the whole from a very small part. You know only as much about the case as the physical evidence tells. I don't know anything about this case--or the suspect's "past" as we say (his prior criminal record if any)--but he looks...innocent, not in the legal sense, but in the sense of being callow.