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.”
new video loaded: Jan. 6 Rioter Hired by Pentagon
transcript
transcript
Jan. 6 Rioter Hired by Pentagon
Elias Irizarry, who pleaded guilty to climbing through a broken window at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, now works for an office responsible for uncovering and defending against terrorism plots at the Pentagon.
-
“Full pardon or commutation?” “Full pardon.”
By Alisa Shodiyev Kaff
June 4, 2026
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Democrats splintered over a resolution seeking to block the U.S. from assisting Israel’s war against Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group, on Thursday.
The measure, offered by progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., would require President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Lebanon. For months, Israel and Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group and Iranian proxy, have been at war in southern Lebanon, but the United States has not joined the conflict.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., rejected the measure. Critics argued the resolution could aid Hezbollah and potentially hamstring U.S. military operations in the country.
Tlaib’s resolution failed 92-324, with more than half of House Democrats joining nearly all Republicans to vote it down.
The Lebanon war powers resolution divided Democrats, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., joining Republicans in rejecting the measure. (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg)
REP RASHIDA TLAIB MOVES TO BLOCK US OPERATIONS IN LEBANON BUT IGNORES HEZBOLLAH
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., an Israel critic, was the lone Republican to support Tlaib’s measure. Meanwhile, Reps. Derek Tran, D-Calif., and Betty McCollum, D-Minn., voted present.
House Democratic leaders said shortly before the vote they would oppose Tlaib’s resolution and work with the progressive lawmaker on a narrower measure exempting some U.S. military operations in the country. Their statement also denounced Hezbollah as a “violent terrorist organization” and a “sworn enemy of the United States.”
Tlaib, who has accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing” in Lebanon, did not mention Hezbollah in her resolution. She and other proponents of the measure also avoided discussing the Iranian proxy force during heated floor debate over the measure.
Republicans highlighted the omission and accused the legislation’s supporters of serving as “proxies for Hezbollah.”
“Apparently they don’t want to see Israel killing Hezbollah, even though it’s Hezbollah that is killing Israeli children, Israeli adults, Israeli elders,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., said Wednesday, referring to his Democratic colleagues.
Tlaib asserted that her resolution would only affect U.S. forces actively engaged in hostilities. Republicans, however, disputed that claim and suggested it would hurt U.S. efforts to counter Hezbollah.
“It doesn’t say anything about [whether] you can keep the Marines that are in the embassy,” Mast said, referring to the U.S. embassy in Beirut. “That’s a pretty big oversight. It doesn’t say anything about whether we can keep United States armed forces that are training missions with the LAF [Lebanese Armed Forces]. Again, pretty big oversight.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, attempted to bar U.S. forces from joining Israel’s war in Lebanon. (Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg)
RASHIDA TLAIB HIT WITH HOUSE CENSURE THREAT, ACCUSED OF ‘CELEBRATING TERRORISM’ IN PRO-PALESTINIAN SPEECH
The debate turned personal when Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, linked Tlaib to Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah is a terrorist organization … and its members are butchers that you like to hang out with to a certain extent,” the Ohio lawmaker said, referring to Tlaib.
A shouting match between the two then broke out, with Tlaib demanding that Miller’s remarks be stricken from the record.
The presiding chair ultimately complied with her request, but Miller doubled down on his remarks.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
“Yes, I said it. I own it, and I stand by it,” Mast said on behalf of Miller on the floor.
Tlaib’s failed war powers resolution comes as Iran has sought to tie Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to its ceasefire negotiations with the United States.
Hezbollah, which has long helped Iran project power in the region, rejected a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon’s government Thursday.
WASHINGTON — Initial efforts in the Senate failed Thursday to block the $1.8-billion fund that the Trump administration has sought to establish to pay people who claim the government wronged them, though further attempts were likely to come Thursday afternoon.
Republicans narrowly voted down a Democratic amendment to ban the payout fund and then Democrats killed a Republican amendment, which would have prohibited the use of federal money for the fund but would have sent $1.7 billion to the Justice Department’s fraud division.
It was the second effort in Congress to rebuke President Trump in two days, following the House vote Wednesday to rein in Trump’s war powers in Iran.
The dueling amendments were proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). They were attached to the reconciliation bill that would fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, a high priority for Republicans.
The votes came as the Senate began a “vote-a-rama,” during which lawmakers were expected to propose a stream of amendments to the immigration bill on various topics.
The Trump administration’s plan for the payment fund — widely seen as a way for Trump to compensate his political allies, including those who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — set off particular ire from some GOP lawmakers.
The plan has fueled growing unrest within parts of Trump’s party over his governance, compounded by the president’s endorsement of primary challengers to Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), as well as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), which angered some Republican senators.
Cassidy, who lost his primary and has since voiced strong opposition to Trump’s $1.8-billion fund, became a key player in the Thursday votes, voting down Schumer’s amendment but supporting Tillis’.
On Wednesday, Cassidy joined with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) to argue in a court filing that the $1.8-billion fund circumvents Congress’ authority and violates the Constitution’s spending and appropriations clauses.
“It is an unconstitutional attempt to spend the People’s money without Congressional approval,” Cassidy and Booker wrote in an amicus brief filed in the federal court case challenging the fund.
The fund was created by the Justice Department to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. Trump and his sons agreed to drop their personal lawsuit against the government in exchange for the creation of the $1.776-billion fund. Critics immediately questioned the plan, and it drew a rare backlash from Republicans.
In late May, GOP senators derailed plans to vote on the immigration bill over their displeasure with the payout fund and with Trump’s desire to use taxpayer funds for his planned White House ballroom. Senate Republicans removed the ballroom funding from the immigration package Wednesday, another setback for Trump.
The Trump administration sought to back away from its plans for the fund this week, following bipartisan outcry and a federal court ruling that temporarily blocked any payouts from the fund. Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche said Tuesday the administration would end its plans to move ahead with the concept.
But Trump on Wednesday told reporters he didn’t know whether the fund was dead, calling it “a beautiful thing.”
After Schumer proposed the first amendment to ban the fund Thursday morning, the Senate came to a standstill as three key Republican senators deliberated. Schumer framed his effort to ban the fund Thursday as a way to force a referendum on Trump’s plan.
The amendment “offers Republicans a choice: Do you support Donald Trump’s $2 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund, or do you want to protect the American people and their paychecks?” Schumer said on the Senate floor before the vote.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) urged Republicans to reject the amendment, saying Democrats were planning to “play so many games” on Thursday during the marathon session.
“We are going to fund immigration enforcement and border patrol, and I urge my Republican colleagues to stay united on that singular mission,” Moreno said.
The amendment failed after Cassidy voted against it. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Husted of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted in favor.
Schumer’s amendment was uniformly supported by Democrats, including California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla.
Tillis, who also voted against Schumer’s amendment, immediately proposed his amendment. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) urged Democrats to oppose it, saying that the proposal would create “a new slush fund” by giving the money to the Justice Department.
“We heard over the last 48 hours that the acting attorney general said that this fund’s not moving forward. All this amendment does is codify what I believe the policy of the DOJ is,” Tillis said on the floor before voting began on his amendment. “This [fund] is unpopular, this administration has said they’re not moving forward with it; this is an opportunity for us to put it to bed.”
Responded Merkley: “Taking one slush fund and eliminating it and then creating a new slush fund still under control of the attorney general is not the way to go. The way to go is to get rid of these slush funds altogether.”
Trump has faced a recent string of failures, including the House vote Wednesday, a court ruling to remove his name from the Kennedy Center and a record-low approval rating among Americans as concern rises about economic issues, gas prices and Trump’s war with Iran.
On Wednesday, Trump lashed out against the four Republicans who backed the House war powers resolution, calling it “an unpatriotic thing” to do and calling the vote “meaningless.”
“They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves. MAGA!!! President DJT,” Trump wrote.
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos, in Washington, contributed to this report.
-
Montana2 minutes agoMontana Republican Party called on to end GOP fighting • Daily Montanan
-
Nebraska14 minutes agoNebraska Basketball To Renew Missouri Rivalry in Kansas City for Non-Conference Matchup
-
Nevada17 minutes agoWashoe DA GOP primary is winner-take-all because of 2015 law signed by Gov. Sandoval
-
New Hampshire22 minutes agoMore businesses would be exempt from a key state tax under a proposal heading to Ayotte’s desk
-
New Jersey29 minutes agoNew details on plane collision on New Jersey Turnpike
-
New Mexico32 minutes agoNew Mexico sues Kalshi over allegedly allowing unlawful sports betting
-
North Carolina37 minutes agoMom driving 111 mph crashes car with 3 kids inside, 2 killed, one in critically injured, NCSHP says
-
North Dakota44 minutes agoArmstrong applauds federal funding for upgrading coal infrastructure, including Antelope Valley Station
