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.”
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
FBI Director Kash Patel said Saturday that the agency is ramping up its use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to counter domestic and international threats.
In a post on X, Patel said the FBI has been advancing its technology, calling AI a “key component” of its strategy to respond to threats and stay “ahead of the game.”
“FBI has been working on key technology advances to keep us ahead of the game and respond to an always changing threat environment both domestically and on the world stage,” Patel wrote. “Artificial intelligence is a key component of this.”
‘PEOPLE WOULD HAVE DIED’: INSIDE THE FBI’S HALLOWEEN TAKEDOWN THAT EXPOSED A GLOBAL TERROR NETWORK
Kash Patel, director of the FBI, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. ( Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Patel said the bureau is developing an AI initiative aimed at supporting investigators and analysts working in the national security space.
“We’ve been working on an AI project to assist our investigators and analysts in the national security space — staying ahead of bad actors and adversaries who seek to do us harm,” he said.
Patel added that FBI leadership has established a “technology working group” led by outgoing Deputy Director Dan Bongino to ensure the agency’s tools “evolve with the mission.”
EXCLUSIVE: FBI CONCLUDES TRUMP SHOOTER THOMAS CROOKS ACTED ALONE AFTER UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL INVESTIGATION
The bureau is ramping up its use of AI tools to counter domestic and international threats. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP )
“These are investments that will pay dividends for America’s national security for decades to come,” Patel said.
A spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital it had nothing further to add beyond Patel’s X post.
The FBI currently uses AI for tools such as vehicle recognition, voice-language identification, speech-to-text analysis and video analytics, according to the agency’s website.
DAN BONGINO TO RESIGN FROM FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR ROLE IN JANUARY
Patel credited outgoing Deputy Director Dan Bongino for his leadership with the AI initiative. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Earlier this week, Bongino announced he would leave the bureau in January after speculation rose concerning his departure.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
“I will be leaving my position with the FBI in January,” Bongino wrote in an X post Wednesday. “I want to thank President [Donald] Trump, AG [Pam] Bondi, and Director Patel for the opportunity to serve with purpose. Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you. God bless America, and all those who defend Her.”
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers unhappy with Justice Department decisions to heavily redact or withhold documents from a legally mandated release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein threatened Saturday to launch impeachment proceedings against those responsible, including Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general.
Democrats and Republicans alike criticized the omissions, while Democrats also accused the Justice Department of intentionally scrubbing the release of at least one image of President Trump, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggesting it could portend “one of the biggest coverups in American history.”
Trump administration officials have said the release fully complied with the law, and that its redactions were crafted only to protect victims of Epstein, a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender accused of abusing hundreds of women and girls before his death in 2019.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), an author of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the release of the investigative trove, blasted Bondi in a social media video, accusing her of denying the existence of many of the records for months, only to push out “an incomplete release with too many redactions” in response to — and in violation of — the new law.
Khanna said he and the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), were “exploring all options” for responding and forcing more disclosures, including by pursuing “the impeachment of people at Justice,” asking courts to hold officials blocking the release in contempt, and “referring for prosecution those who are obstructing justice.”
“We will work with the survivors to demand the full release of these files,” Khanna said.
He later added in a CNN interview that he and Massie were drafting articles of impeachment against Bondi, though they had not decided whether to bring them forward.
Massie, in his own social media post, said Khanna was correct in rejecting the Friday release as insufficient, saying that it “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”
The lawmakers’ view that the Justice Department’s document dump failed to comply with the law echoed similar complaints across the political spectrum Saturday, as the full scope of redactions and other withholdings came into focus.
The frustration had already sharply escalated late Friday, after Fox News Digital reported that the names and identifiers of not just victims but of “politically exposed individuals and government officials” had been redacted from the records — which would violate the law, and which Justice Department officials denied.
Among the critics was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who cited the Fox reporting in an exasperated post late Friday to X.
“The whole point was NOT to protect the ‘politically exposed individuals and government officials.’ That’s exactly what MAGA has always wanted, that’s what drain the swamp actually means. It means expose them all, the rich powerful elites who are corrupt and commit crimes, NOT redact their names and protect them,” Greene wrote.
Senior Justice Department officials later called in to Fox News to dispute the report. But the removal of a file published in the Friday evening release, capturing a desk in Epstein’s home with a drawer filled of photos of Trump, reinforced bipartisan concerns that references to the president had been illegally withheld.
In a release of documents from the Epstein family estate by the House Oversight Committee this fall, Trump’s name was featured over 1,000 times — more than any other public figure.
“If they’re taking this down, just imagine how much more they’re trying to hide,” Schumer wrote on X. “This could be one of the biggest coverups in American history.”
Several victims also said the release was insufficient. “It’s really kind of another slap in the face,” Alicia Arden, who went to the police to report that Epstein had abused her in 1997, told CNN. “I wanted all the files to come out, like they said that they were going to.”
Trump, who signed the act into law after having worked to block it from getting a vote, was conspicuously quiet on the matter. In a long speech in North Carolina on Friday night, he did not mention it.
However, White House officials and Justice Department leaders rejected the notion that the release was incomplete or out of compliance with the law, or that the names of politicians had been redacted.
“The only redactions being applied to the documents are those required by law — full stop,” said Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche. “Consistent with the statute and applicable laws, we are not redacting the names of individuals or politicians unless they are a victim.”
Other Republicans defended the administration. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, said the administration “is delivering unprecedented transparency in the Epstein case and will continue releasing documents.”
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He’d been convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution in Florida, but served only 13 months in custody in what many condemned as a sweetheart plea deal for a well-connected and rich defendant.
Epstein’s acts of abuse have attracted massive attention, including among many within Trump’s political base, in part because of unanswered questions surrounding which of his many powerful friends may have also been implicated in crimes against children. Some of those questions have swirled around Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years before the two had what the president has described as a falling out.
Evidence has emerged in recent months that suggests Trump may have had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes during their friendship.
Epstein wrote in a 2019 email, released by the House Oversight Committee, that Trump “knew about the girls.” In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to help him sexually abuse girls, Epstein wrote that “the dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him … he has never once been mentioned.”
Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
The records released Friday contained few if any major new revelations, but did include a complaint against Epstein filed with the FBI back in 1996 — which the FBI did little with, substantiating long-standing fears among Epstein’s victims that his crimes could have been stopped years earlier.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the president’s most consistent critics, wrote on X that Bondi should appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain under oath the extensive redactions and omissions, which he called a “willful violation of the law.”
“The Trump Justice Department has had months to keep their promise to release all of the Epstein Files,” Schiff wrote. “Epstein’s survivors and the American people need answers now.”
Politics
Sen Murphy warns ‘people are going to die’ as Congress punts on expiring Obamacare subsidies
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
A bipartisan Obamacare fix remains out of reach in the Senate, for now, and lawmakers can’t agree on who is at fault.
While many agree that the forthcoming healthcare cliff will cause financial pain, the partisan divide quickly devolved into pointing the finger across the aisle at who owns the looming healthcare premium spikes that Americans who use the healthcare exchange will face.
Part of the finger-pointing has yielded another surprising agreement: Lawmakers don’t see the fast-approaching expiration of the Biden-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies as Congress failing to act in time.
“Obviously, it’s not a failure of Congress to act,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told Fox News Digital. “It’s a failure of Republicans to act. Democrats are united and wanting to expand subsidies. Republicans want premium increases to go up.”
Partisan rancor over Obamacare has seeped into how lawmakers view the effect that expiring subsidies will have on their constituents. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., argued that it was a “life or death” situation, while Republicans contended that Democrats set up the very cliff they maligned. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
DEMOCRATS’ LAST-MINUTE MOVE TO BLOCK GOP FUNDING PLAN SENDS LAWMAKERS HOME EARLY
Senate Republicans and Democrats both tried, and failed, to advance their own partisan plans to replace or extend the subsidies earlier this month. And since then, no action has been taken to deal with the fast-approaching issue, guaranteeing that the subsidies will lapse at the end of the year.
A report published last month by Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit healthcare think tank, found that Americans who use the credits will see an average increase of 114% in their premium costs.
The increase can vary depending on how high above the poverty level a person is. The original premium subsidies set a cap at 400% above the poverty level, while the enhanced subsidies, which were passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, torched the cap.
For example, a person 60 years or older making 401% of the poverty level, or about $62,000 per year, would on average see their premium prices double. That number can skyrocket depending on the state. Wyoming clocks in at the highest spike at 421%.
SENATE MULLS NEXT STEPS AFTER DUELING OBAMACARE FIXES GO UP IN FLAMES
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., doesn’t want to blow up Obamacare or get rid of Obamacare subsidies, but he does want to provide Americans with more options for healthcare. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
In Murphy’s home state of Connecticut, premiums under the same parameters would hike in price by 316%.
“When these do lapse, people are going to die,” Murphy said. “I mean, I was talking to a couple a few months ago who have two parents, both with chronic, potentially life-threatening illnesses, and they will only be able to afford insurance for one of them. So they’re talking about which parent is going to survive to raise their three kids. The stakes are life and death.”
Both sides hold opposing views on the solution. Senate Republicans argue that the credits effectively subsidize insurance companies, not patients, by funneling money directly to them, and that the program is rife with fraud.
Senate Democrats want to extend the subsidies as they are, and are willing to negotiate fixes down the line. But for the GOP, they want to see some immediate reforms, like income caps, anti-fraud measures and more stringent anti-abortion language tied to the subsidies.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who produced his own healthcare plan that would convert subsidies into health savings accounts (HSAs), argued that congressional Democrats “set this up to expire.”
SENATE REPUBLICANS LAND ON OBAMACARE FIX, TEE UP DUELING VOTE WITH DEMS
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., panned Senate Democrats’ Obamacare subsidy proposal as “obviously designed to fail.” (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)
But he doesn’t share the view that the subsidies’ expected expiration is a life-or-death situation.
“I’m not taxing somebody who makes 20 bucks an hour to pay for healthcare for somebody who makes half a million dollars a year, that’s what they did,” he told Fox News Digital. “All they did was mask the increase in healthcare costs. That’s all they did with it.”
Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., similarly scoffed at the notion, and told Fox News Digital, “The Democrat plan to extend COVID-era Obamacare subsidies might help less than half a percent of the American population.”
“The Republican plan brings down healthcare costs for 100% of Americans,” he said. “More competition, expands health savings accounts. That needs to be the focus.”
Democrats are also not hiding their disdain for the partisan divide between their approaches to healthcare.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told Fox News Digital that the idea that this “is a congressional failure and not a Republican policy is preposterous.”
“They’ve hated the Affordable Care Act since its inception and tried to repeal it at every possible opportunity,” he said, referring to Obamacare. “The president hates ACA, speaker hates ACA, majority leader hates ACA, rank-and-file hate ACA. And so this is not some failure of bipartisanship.”
While the partisan rancor runs deep on the matter of Obamacare, there are Republicans and Democrats working together to build a new plan. Still, it wouldn’t deal with the rapidly approaching Dec. 31 deadline to extend the subsidies.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., predicted that the Senate would have a long road to travel before a bipartisan plan came together in the new year, but he didn’t rule it out.
“It’s the Christmas season. It would take a Christmas miracle to execute on actually getting something done there,” he said. “But, you know, I think there’s a potential path, but it’ll be heavy lift.”
College Football Playoff first-round winners and losers include ACC, Kalen DeBoer
National Championship Betting Odds After Oregon’s Win Over James Madison
Pennsylvania Lottery Powerball, Pick 2 Day results for Dec. 20, 2025
RI Lottery Powerball, Lucky For Life winning numbers for Dec. 20, 2025
South Carolina Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 results for Dec. 20, 2025
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Video: ‘It Didn’t Have to Happen This Way:’ U.Va. Faculty Call for Review of Police Response to Protests
Video: First Batch of Epstein Files Provides Few Revelations
FBI Director Kash Patel says bureau ramping up AI to counter domestic, global threats
Podcast: Brussels is broke and has no government
Apple, Google tell workers on visas to avoid leaving the U.S. amid Trump immigration crackdown
Sen Murphy warns ‘people are going to die’ as Congress punts on expiring Obamacare subsidies
-
Iowa6 days agoAddy Brown motivated to step up in Audi Crooks’ absence vs. UNI
-
Iowa1 week agoHow much snow did Iowa get? See Iowa’s latest snowfall totals
-
Maine4 days agoElementary-aged student killed in school bus crash in southern Maine
-
Maryland6 days agoFrigid temperatures to start the week in Maryland
-
Technology1 week agoThe Game Awards are losing their luster
-
South Dakota7 days agoNature: Snow in South Dakota
-
New Mexico4 days agoFamily clarifies why they believe missing New Mexico man is dead
-
World1 week agoCoalition of the Willing calls for transatlantic unity for Ukraine