Politics
In postwar California, the Red Light Bandit pricked a governor's conscience
By the time 38-year-old Caryl Chessman was executed on the morning of May 2, 1960, he had been on California’s death row for 12 years. His brooding, rough-hewn features were recognizable worldwide, his name a rallying cry from South America to the Vatican.
He was mid-century America’s foremost tough-hooligan intellectual, a high school dropout and autodidact who wrote and published four books while waiting to die. He bragged colorfully about his prolific crime sprees, but swore he was innocent of the charges that made him infamous.
He inspired literary admiration, hunger strikes, protest songs, diplomatic crises and a crisis of conscience for the state’s Catholic governor.
He is mostly forgotten today. But Chessman’s case dominated the debate about capital punishment for years. Apart from his skill as a writer, his gift for publicity and the length of his stay on death row — a record at the time — his case was unusual because he had not been convicted of murder or even charged with it.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
He became notorious, however, as the terror of lovers’ lanes. During a four-day stretch in late January 1948, the Red Light Bandit — so-called because his late-model Ford was equipped with a police-style flashing light to deceive victims — robbed couples at gunpoint in Malibu and Laurel Canyon, on hills and secluded roads above L.A. and Pasadena.
In one attack, the gunman forced a woman to accompany him to his car — a distance of 22 feet made arduous, a prosecutor would say, by the effects of polio — and forced her to perform oral sex. Two nights later, the gunman abducted a 17-year-old girl, drove her around the city for hours, and again demanded oral sex. Those two incidents would bring charges under the state’s Little Lindbergh Law, which permitted the death penalty in kidnapping with bodily injury.
After a high-speed chase, police caught Chessman at Sixth Street and Vermont Avenue in a stolen Ford linked to a Redondo Beach stickup. During interrogation, Chessman implicated himself in the bandit’s crimes, though he claimed police beat the confession out of him.
Disastrously for Chessman, whose arrogance and hunger for the spotlight were among his most striking traits, he insisted on acting as his own attorney. He cross-examined the sexual assault victims, who identified him as their attacker. The teenage girl looked at him directly and said, “I know it was you.”
Caryl Chessman in 1958, on the 10th anniversary of his arrest. By then, he was a bestselling author.
(Los Angeles Times)
“He liked to boast about being a great criminal, but great criminals don’t keep getting caught,” Theodore Hamm, who wrote a book about Chessman, told The Times in a recent interview. “He thought he was the smartest guy in the room and he could outwit any prosecutor and win over the jury. It obviously didn’t work out in his favor.”
Jurors convicted him of 17 counts for a month-long crime spree. He was 26 years old, and smiling defiantly, when the judge handed down two death sentences. His 12-year legal battle to avoid San Quentin’s gas chamber — what he called “that ugly green room” — attracted worldwide attention, as did his prison writings.
His 1954 memoir, “Cell 2455, Death Row: A Condemned Man’s Own Story,” became a bestseller.
He described his face, with its battered nose and large features, as one “that has seen too much, a young-old face, scarred by violence… a predatory face that seemingly has found its rightful place in the gallery of the doomed.”
Born in Michigan and raised in Glendale by devout Baptists, he became conscious of “the shame and the degradation” of poverty when his father’s business ventures flopped.
He wrote of a childhood in which he learned to scorn society and its codes, concluding that “you got away with anything you were smart enough to get away with.” He spent years in juvenile detention, reform school and jail.
Caryl Chessman’s case inspired petitions and protests, from Los Angeles to South America. At the time, his 12-year stretch on California’s death row was the longest on record.
(Ray Graham / Los Angeles Times)
He loved “the game of cops and robbers,” he recounted, and became an expert prevaricator. Arrested for theft on his 17th birthday, he told police “one glib lie after another” and developed “a fool-proof technique: tell near-truths, half-truths, but never the whole truth.”
He described himself as having been “a grinning, brooding young criminal psychopath in defiantly willing bondage to his psychopathy.” With “hate and guile the tools of his trade,” he held up bordellos, liquor stores and gas stations. In a gunfight with police, he yelled, “Come on, you dirty bastards, let’s play!”
His long criminal record was never in dispute, but it’s easy to suspect he embellished some of his outlaw exploits. His stories had a self-dramatizing flair. He understood the tug of crime for the attention-hungry — and society’s weakness for outlaw heroes.
“All you have to do is be a violent, robbing, murderous bastard and your fame is assured,” he wrote. “One of the peculiarities of squares is their screwy propensity to glorify rogues and scoundrels.”
In some circles, his death row writing was greeted with rapture. It was a “sparkling contribution” to criminology, according to the New York Times, and evidence of “salvation of the self,” as Partisan Review magazine put it.
“He impressed the New York intellectuals,” Hamm said. In a postwar period teeming with optimism about the possibilities of reform, “he came to stand for a rehabilitated prisoner, and the evidence of his rehabilitation was his articulate explanation of things that wove in pop psychology about reform.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley signed pleas to spare Chessman. Petitions poured into the office of Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown, a Democrat who believed Chessman guilty but abhorred the death penalty on religious grounds. In 1959, he denied Chessman clemency, saying he’d shown no contrition but rather “steadfast arrogance and contempt for society and its laws.”
Caryl Chessman, being escorted back to his death row cell in San Quentin, insisted on representing himself at trial.
(Los Angeles Times)
Chessman made the cover of Time, and around the world, from the Vatican newspaper to the Daily Mail in London, editorials weighed in on his side.
Ronnie Hawkins recorded a protest song, “The Ballad of Caryl Chessman,” with lyrics that captured the sentiment among many sympathizers: What they’re saying may be true, but what good would killin’ him do? Let him live, let him live, let him live. I’m not sayin’ forget or forgive…If he’s guilty of his crime, keep him in jail a long, long time, but let him live, let him live, let him live…
The Los Angeles Times was not among the sympathetic voices. An editorial denounced the “save-Chessman madness,” arguing that the real outrages were the drawn-out legal maneuvering and political weakness that had delayed his execution.
“Grinning, arrogant, sharp-witted — and alive — Chessman, committer of indescribable crimes, is a heavy reproach to the state’s conscience,” The Times argued, saying his supporters were ignorant of the gravity of his crimes “because the newspapers dare not publish the horrible details.”
In his memoir, Caryl Chessman described himself as having “a predatory face that seemingly has found its rightful place in the gallery of the doomed.”
(Edward Gamer / Los Angeles Times)
The U.S. State Department warned Brown that Chessman’s execution might inflame protesters during an upcoming trip President Eisenhower planned in Uruguay, where the prisoner was a cause célèbre. And Brown got a call from his 21-year-old son, Jerry, a recent seminarian and future governor, who pleaded with his father to spare Chessman’s life.
The governor ordered a reprieve, but when he asked lawmakers for a death penalty moratorium, they refused. Anti-Chessman crowds burned Brown in effigy and booed him and his family in public.
Prison officials tried to muzzle Chessman, but he kept writing and had pages smuggled out. Eight times, he was assigned dates with the green room, and eight times he won delays.
In the end, Brown claimed he was powerless to stop the execution, because the state Supreme Court had ruled against Chessman.
Until his death, Chessman denied he was the Red Light Bandit. He suggested he knew who the “real” Bandit was, but refused to say. One of his last comments was, “I hope my fate has contributed something toward ending capital punishment.”
The circumstances of his execution gave further ammunition to critics who saw the system as capricious and absurd. That day, Chessman’s lawyers had persuaded a judge to issue a brief stay, but the judge’s secretary misdialed the prison to relay the news — and by the time the call went through, Chessman was dead.
Chessman wanted his remains deposited alongside his parents’, but Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale refused on the grounds that he had been “unrepentant.”
The case galvanized opponents of the death penalty, and reformers used it to press for modified kidnapping statutes. California executed another inmate under the Little Lindberg Law in 1961, the last for a nonlethal crime, and the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty 11 years later (though it was reinstated). In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in California.
The case haunted Brown’s political career. When Ronald Reagan defeated him as governor, Brown knew his opposition to the death penalty played no small role. Brown believed Chessman a nasty and arrogant man, yet his failure to do more to save him would prove a source of deep regret.
There were political calculations “for an elected official with programs he hoped to implement for the common good,” Brown would say, decades later. “I firmly believe all that. I also believe that I should have found a way to spare Chessman’s life.”
Politics
Trump takes unusual step, lets bipartisan housing bill become law unsigned amid SAVE pressure campaign
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A bipartisan housing bill became law Saturday at midnight after President Donald Trump declined to sign it, capping a weeks-long saga over whether the president would veto the measure amid frustrations with Congress over his stalled agenda.
Trump refused to sign the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — legislation aimed at expanding the nation’s housing stock and lowering costs — in an attempt to pressure Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, despite the housing bill clearing both chambers with overwhelming majorities.
“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” he declared on Truth Social Friday morning.
The Trump-backed election measure, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and impose voter ID requirements, has struggled to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
Meanwhile, the House has not passed a version of the bill that includes the president’s proposed crackdown on mail-in voting and banning men from women’s sports.
President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, June 3, 2026, in Washington. (Alex Brandon/AP)
HOUSE CONSERVATIVES DERAIL GOP AGENDA IN SAVE AMERICA ACT SHOWDOWN
Under the U.S. Constitution, Trump had 10 days, not including Sundays, to sign or veto the housing measure after the House formally transmitted the legislation to the White House in late June. The president ultimately chose neither option, allowing the measure to become law without his signature.
Though Trump declined to veto the legislation, he sharply criticized elements of the bill and argued it should not have been a legislative priority in recent weeks.
“It’s so unimportant … compared to the SAVE America Act,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in late June. “I think the SAVE America Act is exactly what it says. It’s saving America from crooked elections.”
Trump went on to call the housing bill “a yawn,” adding, “compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
It would have taken a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a veto — a margin the House and Senate exceeded when they passed the legislation. However, it remains unclear whether so many Republicans would have defied the president had he vetoed the bill.
Trump also appeared to criticize the bill over a provision restricting Wall Street investors from purchasing single-family homes — a policy he first proposed during his January State of the Union address and later urged Congress to pass. Trump previously argued the investor ban would give individual homebuyers a leg up against private equity firms in the housing market.
“I don’t want to hurt people that own houses, too,” Trump later told reporters, appearing to reference the provision. “These people, for the first time in their lives, they have valuable houses. They’ve become rich. I don’t want to hurt them either. What you want to do is what’s good for everyone, get the interest rates down.”
The law also aims to boost housing supply by streamlining federal environmental reviews, loosening rules around the construction of factory-built homes, and incentivizing local governments to modify their zoning laws to allow more housing, among roughly 60 provisions.
Trump’s souring on the legislation created headaches for Republicans, who touted the bill as an affordability win as voters grapple with high housing costs.
“It’s irresponsible to postpone signing the Housing bill due to the SAVE Act,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a retiring lawmaker who lost re-election to a Trump-backed challenger, wrote on social media. “We need to start delivering relief to people for the high cost of housing ASAP!!”
Construction workers stand on the roof of homes under construction at a new housing development on June 24, 2026, in Valencia, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
WARREN TELLS TRUMP TO ‘SIGN THE DAMN BILL’ AS BIPARTISAN HOUSING PACKAGE REMAINS STALLED IN WASHINGTON
Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for the legislation at the U.S. Capitol in June with GOP leaders. The stage had already been set, with at least one senior Republican arriving unaware the president had called off the event shortly before it was scheduled to begin.
The president then declared he would not sign the legislation until Congress passed the SAVE America Act, despite Senate GOP leaders insisting the votes do not exist to advance the measure.
Trump has also expressed frustration with the Republican-controlled Senate for declining to weaken the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to advance most legislation in the upper chamber.
“GET SMART REPUBLICANS, IF YOU DON’T, YOU WON’T BE IN OFFICE FOR LONG!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Sunday.
Before Trump came out against the bill, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history” and said it included an array of policies “long championed” by Trump.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15, 2025. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Trump political operative James Blair touted the legislation for including the president’s Wall Street investor ban, which he referred to as a “signature commitment.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has argued that Republicans will still promote the landmark housing bill ahead of November.
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“We’ll still celebrate it, but he’s trying to make a point, and I think he’s making it very effectively,” the speaker recently told reporters, referring to Trump. “And the fact that you all ask me every three steps down the hallway illustrates that he has achieved the desired objective, and that is to make SAVE America the number one thing, because if we don’t get that right, everybody’s concerned about what happens next.”
The Trump administration has signed off on a company’s plan to convert an oil and gas pipeline to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert to thirsty California cities for the first time, a lucrative venture that critics say threatens natural springs and wildlife.
The federal Bureau of Land Management released documents Thursday saying that Cadiz Inc.’s plan to repurpose 162 miles of the pipeline to transport water “will not significantly affect” the environment.
“We’re excited to achieve this pivotal milestone. After many years of planning and environmental review, the project has now reached the construction stage,” said Susan Kennedy, chair and chief executive of Cadiz.
Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes, who have been fighting the project, criticized the decision.
“This groundwater mining proposal would drain the desert and rob the Mojave of its rare springs and wildlife habitat,” said Chance Wilcox, California desert associate director of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “It’s indefensible that the Trump administration would once again try to revive the pointless Cadiz project, by defying decades of scientific warnings and refusing to conduct an environmental review of the groundwater mining.”
The application for the federal authorization was filed by the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co. The documents say the company plans to build seven pump stations, three of them located on federal land managed by the agency.
The 30-inch steel pipeline runs underground from Cadiz’s desert property, near the town of Amboy, northward to the town of Mojave.
The BLM said in its authorization that repurposing the pipeline for water “would comply with all applicable statutes and regulations.” The agency said it has “reasonably determined that the impacts of groundwater withdrawal associated with Cadiz’s groundwater extraction project are outside the scope of analysis.”
Cadiz’s attempts to export water from its property 200 miles east of Los Angeles have drawn controversy for decades.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires the project to undergo scientific study and gain approval from the State Lands Commission before it can take water from the Mojave and sell it to California cities.
Activists opposing the company’s plans include civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.
“Cadiz spells destruction for water, sacred lands, and the desert economy,” Huerta said in a statement. “It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”
Leaders of nearby tribes have also objected to Cadiz’s plans to pump from the desert aquifer near the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve.
“It is the living heart of the desert,” said Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. “To drain it would be to drain the life out of the entire desert. No profit is worth such desecration.”
Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”
“Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.
For years, while pursuing its plan to sell water far away, the company has been using wells on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland growing lemons, grapes and other crops. It has drilled more wells in anticipation of being able to export water once the government approved its pipeline.
The company intends to pipe water to communities in San Bernardino County and says it’s “expected to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of new water in the drought-plagued Southwest.” It says the federal permit “marks a key milestone as we finalize project financing with prospective investors.”
Cadiz bought the 220-mile pipeline from El Paso Natural Gas in 2020. Once construction is completed, the company says the pipeline will be able to transport up to 25,000 acre-feet of water per year — about 5% of what Los Angeles uses each year.
The Los Angeles-based corporation is also seeking to build a new pipeline along a railroad right-of-way to transport water to the south.
Environmental groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the project.
Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the Trump administration’s decision “a green light for environmental destruction.”
She said six of the proposed pumping stations slated to be built are in the habitat of desert tortoises, a species in decline.
“We’ve successfully fended off this project before and we’ll continue to fight to stop this zombie from coming back,” Anderson said.
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed a Trump administration decision that had cleared the way for Cadiz to pipe water across public land. In 2022, a federal judge scrapped the pipeline permit that the Trump administration had issued.
But during President Trump’s second term, the company has again made headway on its plans. In February, Cadiz announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had invited it to submit an application for a $194-million low-interest loan for the northern pipeline project.
The company said in May that it reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation to provide funding for a review of its potential role in “augmenting water supplies” along the shrinking Colorado River.
The company has also been lobbying the Trump administration. The group Public Citizen said in a recent report that Cadiz, through its nonprofit Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co., enlisted former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s new lobbying firm, the Bernhardt Group, and has spent at least $330,000 on lobbying in 2025 and 2026.
Records show lobbyist Luke Johnson has repeatedly accompanied Kennedy at meetings with Interior Department officials.
“The extensive influence of David Bernhardt’s boutique lobbying firm on the agency he formerly led highlights how insider firms staffed with former Trump officials have grown in recent years,” said Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen. He said Bernhardt and his lobbyists “have learned how to master influence-peddling in the anything-goes era of Trump 2.0.”
Earlier this month, an Arizona water agency announced it signed an initial “memorandum of understanding” agreement to buy up to 10,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz’s Mojave Groundwater Bank. The Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District provides water to farmlands in Pinal County, where growers are dealing with water cutbacks.
The company said that for this to happen, it would need to build pipelines and reach deals to exchange water across state lines.
Members of California’s congressional delegation have raised concerns. In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla called for a thorough environmental review, saying that federal agencies and peer-reviewed scientific analyses have “warned of the significant and irreversible impacts that Cadiz’s project could have on federal lands and surrounding communities.”
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) said in a letter to Burgum that he is concerned about the company’s long-standing effort to extract and export groundwater.
“The area I represent cannot afford to absorb the long-term costs of a commercially driven groundwater export scheme,” Ruiz said.
President Trump has promoted a chain of newly rebranded gas stations across the Philadelphia area with lower gas prices. The New York Times has not been able to get detailed information about who is behind the stations. The Trump administration says it did not fund or subsidize the company.
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