Crime bill the bay area with author bob calhoun. I would like to acknowledge the Historical Society has had in sanford disco in the unseeded territory. Its our job here to not only remember this but also to make california possible rich, complicated, and diverse past a meaningful part of contemporary life. We do that through Public Programs like this one, through the Research Library collections and by hosting exhibitions. We currently have two exhibitions on view. Chinese politics chinese pioneers and from the gold rush to the earthquake. Our galleries at Mission Street are open wednesday through saturday, please visit us. We have a San Francisco bay author area and journalist, hes a former punk wrestler peep show mc. From 2015 to 2000 19 he recounted San Francisco past most gruesome and lurid events in his regular weekly column yesterdays rhymes, which led to his latest book, the murders that made us, how vigilantes, hoodlums, mob bosses and cult leaders the San Francisco bay area. His punk wrestling memoir is a national asked seller that wired called breezy and hilarious. Calhouns work has appeared in the San Francisco chronicle, robert ebert. Com, daca, and the bold italic. Its available at the chs bookstore if you would like to purchase a copy. Welcome, mr. Calhoun. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Hello. Can you hear me . Is everything good . Yeah. Ok, ok. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone attending tonight into the california Historical Society for having me. Its a big honor and more that i thought might pulpy little book could handle or deserve, but if everybody is ready for it, let me share my screen. This is always a little arduous, as people who use zoom may know, here we go. Share. Lets, lets run the slideshow, folks. Ok, can everyone see the slideshow ok . Yes, youre good. Ok, thank you. We have title screens integrate introduction from erin, i can skip some of this stuff. The book is wrong button. The book is murders that made us. There i am. Over a very vertigo shop. I am not fishing kim novak out of the bay. But that is where Jimmy Stewart fished her out of the bay and vertigo, for a point there. Great shot. There is the book cover. Murders that made us is a journey through San Francisco history through crime, the most brutal acts through history from the vigilante days to the current century. Im telling the history of the bay area. I do go out to the south bay, oakland, other places here and there. Telling a through crime, mostly murders. Sometimes there is a little bit of larceny, scams, and other things. You know, murder, murder is intriguing, violence is intriguing, but it can wear on you once in a while and sometimes you just want a good little scam or larceny. If you want to know how i got started with true crime, how did this happen, why did i go from being a punk wrestler and writing about that in reviewing movies and other things to writing about very, very, very violent acts . My fascination with crime and writing about im started with my mother. There she is, jackie calhoun. There she is in the early 50s in front of my families house before i was in the picture in the proper amazon neighborhood of San Francisco. According to my dad the house had a San Francisco street address but the rear of the house was in daly city. A common arrangement in that corner of the city. They paid daly city utilities. It was in, if you had your foot in one room into San Francisco and the other was daly city. There she is. My fascination with crime started with a revelation from my dad, backing up a bit, my mother passed away in 2009 and there was a revelation from my father that my mother had once been a suspect in a very, very brutal murder in 1959. So, here we go. Police hunt, multiple shop murder. I would like to read from the book here. This is probably my only reading during this, but i want to read from the first chapter, titled my mother the murder suspect. My mother only talked about the murder sparingly enter hushed tones stood in sharp contrast to how she spoke of everything else. Tales of a fight at the laundromat over the dryers or the time that the doctor through a pen at her hypochondriac friend were retold often and in excruciating detail. My mother loved to gossip and though the murder was her juiciest story by far, this was different. It was serious. The details of the murder that she told me were muddled in my memory by the names of friends and acquaintances that she knew before i was born. From what i knew, a friend of the family was shot in his truck by a crazy woman he picked up somewhere. He called her either a stupid fool or a stupid bitch depending on the telling. That my mom could know this detail did accents because the murder took lace in a Suburban Woods of the bay area peninsula but there was one other detail of the murders that really stuck out in my mind. My mom spoke of growing suspicion among her clique of suburbanites as the Murder Investigation dragged on unsolved for weeks. You started to suspect everybody. Friends, neighbors. You didnt know to trust. You wondered who could have done it. I always meant to write an article were given a novel out of all of that backyard paranoia but i never thought of asking my mother to retell the story of the murder until the was too late. She passed away in october of 2009 after cancer shrinker down to almost nothing. Shrunk her down to almost nothing. My last conversation with her was about her hallucinations brought on by painkillers or my pleading with her to drink her damp ensure. I have never drank it, but it must people, elderly people would rather die than drag it. During the final days i never asked her about the murder anything else. I didnt get the story of how she moved from oklahoma to San Francisco in the 40s, divorced my dad in the 70s, or that time in the 50s when she went to the black cat, seminole gave our, with my dad and uncle and all the med men hit on them and ignored her. I know these stories well enough to tell you about them but i only have recollections of her recollection, usually delivered from her favorite chair as she lit a smoke. Details are scant and murky. My dad, leo calhoun is in health but is she 80. I asked him about the murder while we were having lunch at a vm restaurant in the city, a once workingclass suburb being gobbled up by silicon valley. Remember the murder mom used to talk about, i asked . I think it happened when you were in redwood city or san south San Francisco . I got the impression it happened in the woods somewhere but not too far out there. August nor eight, he answered, letting the name of the victim hang in the air for a while the elaborating. You know, your mother was questioned in the Murder Investigation. She matched the suspect description. A blonde was seen leaving the scene of the murder in his car. Your mother was blonde and we lived next door to them back then. They were looking for someone who was having an affair with him. He added. This was a shock to say the least. My mom never mentioned being braced by homicide dicks. I would remember that. Anyone would remember that. Police hunt for a blonde, august was a Arthur Murray dance instructor. Here he is. At the errol flynn mustache going. The thought was he was dumping lawn clippings on san bruno mountains just to the south of San Francisco. It is still pretty much undeveloped because it is a rare butterfly habitat. There are like houses and rushing on it but there is a lot even today, there is a lot of open space there. Old horse trails. People in the 50s just dumb to anywhere, im afraid. He had some gardening jobs and he was dumping like lawn clippings and tree trimmings off on the mountain and he runs into a blonde. So here we go. She shoots him 18 times. That means with a six shooter. Meaning she had to reload the gun twice if you brought it up there fully loaded. Then she takes his car and she almost runs over a couple of kids coming back down the mountain. The kids described the woman as a young blonde and as my dad said in the earlier passage my mom matches the description and she knew the norrys and some daly city or San Bernardino county detectives russian her. This was like the detail that i was never told. Like maybe i dont know why, maybe it was too real and like i said, my mom did really, stories that werent as interesting i mom would tell in excruciating detail, going on and on the fights about the fights at the laundry mat. I can recall them like frazier all leave. But this was different, she kind of trickled out details. From there we can see august norry and there im pointing to my screen and thats the crime scene. I have seen this picture, have seen the negatives at the uc Berkeley Bancroft library. Its far more gruesome than here. Luckily its very depicts a late it. You can see they let reporters and everybody just trample all over the scene then. To get an idea this was a pretty big story in the bay area newspapers. To get an idea of how big the story was at the time, it pushed the day the music died, the death of buddy holly, the big bopper and ritchie balance, push that down kind of below the fold. You know, its like seeks blonde in hate slaying and three rock n roll icons killed. The biggest thing of february at 19 59 is the death of those icons but in the bay area the big news was this crazy murder of august norry. Very brutal murder. Let me back up with that, continuing. Ok, so, i can probably cheat it little bit like my mom didnt do it, but i will leave it up to you if you want to read the book to find out the ending of that, they are. Yes, it haunted the family for a while. My dad talked about being followed by police like everywhere he went for months until the case was cracked. They would be followed by like there is our friend and when they went to the funeral of august norry you could see the oculars poking through the blinds lost the street. Police were evidently tailing everyone in that inner circle and looking for who had killed august norry. It was a personal story that got me started with true crime. But then jeremy at sf week he asked me if i would do a call him and that was yesterdays rhymes. I had pretty free reign, which was amazing. I could just find weird stories from the past of San Francisco and write about them. Almost like those old true detective magazines that maybe some of you remember. The pull he magazines. A chance to do that. After a while i had collected enough of these stories that i started to think of a book or a collection and i got the idea to arrange the stories in a kind of chronology through San Francisco history because after a year i had stories from the 19th century, from the victorian era, the 1970s, kind of Zodiac Killer type stuff, stories from the 50s and 40s and i could line them up and i could see a narrative arc of the bay area into the city forming through these lurid little rhyme stories. You can probably do this with any city. You could definitely do it with chicago or new york but i still think that San Francisco is unique for a true crime history because we have an origin story, you know . Like batman. And it is time tied to crime and punishment. I chose this picture of this picture, neal adams, great batman artist, i wanted to use one of his images, he just passed away a few weeks ago and i wanted to use this image for this cheeky slide. We have the joker. Who is kind of the Zodiac Killer. Like a Zodiac Killer joker if you have seen the movie on hbo max. Hes even got a zodiac symbol going. This is how i know that the Zodiac Killer is dead, by the way. If he was still alive, so many letters will be going to the chronicle in the herald right now about this movie. Im pretty sure that that guy is no more because he is not launching a big Media Campaign over this film. We have an origin story, the city of San Francisco has an origin story is like batman, it is an origin story of vigilantes. Tied up with crime and punishment and who meets out justice and when justice is meted out. It is almost like a superhero story because it is a vigilante story and here is a painting by and tan anton [indiscernible] and im not sure im pronouncing that right and im sure somebody at the society can correct me. It is in a post office and asked merely embarcadero annex off the embarcadero. All of this San Francisco history, it is warts and all. If it is open to the public right now, you should go see it. It might not have been for a while during the pandemic. So, gold is discovered at sutter mill in 1848. Then in 1849, the city that would come, sleepy little euro buena yerba buena would become San Francisco within weeks. All of these boats flood into the bay, the harbor. People get off the boats, the crew gets off the boat, the ships. They run for the fields to pan for gold and they leave the ships behind. The ships become the landfill that the wobbly, the Millennium Tower. The wobbling Millennium Tower is like resting or sitting on a bed of old derelict ships. Thanks to my wife for helping me remember the Millennium Tower. How could one forget . There is a photo of San Francisco harbor in 1850 or 1851. The city is growing, it doesnt necessarily have a really good police or fire service or much in the way of organization. Its pretty much, you know, its pretty laissezfaire at that moment. Pretty disorganized, chaotic, and archaic. So everything, like a lot of the buildings are built from like tobacco crates and, you know, pieces of ships. They are kind of ramshackle holdings lit with oil lamps and fires. Things burned down a lot in those early days. So theres like some, even though a lot of these buyers might be accidental there are evidence or a perception that there was a gang of australian, people come from all over the world, chileans, chinese, they all come to make their fortunes. And the xenophobia of americans, of u. S. Citizens at the time, the u. S. Citizens there, its almost kind of very, very today, very mock. Maga. When they talk about native americans they are talking about people who emigrated from the east coast and they call the australians english. Its kind of confusing when you read through these old articles. Really the blame starts to be pinned on the australians, a gang called the sydney ducks. It is a wellknown fact that some of the most desperate scoundrels of england who have been serving the queen of sydney would stop at nothing to obtain money by any diabolical crime. Our citizens are at their mercy in their mercy is such as the wolf gives the lamb. So, the native californians, the u. S. People, usa people, saying the sydney ducks are burning down the city to silverware and things out of the wreckage. That did happen but i think in my mind, my readings, that was maybe a bit overblown and that sometimes buildings just burned it down and of course desperate to them if there is a bit of definite planned arson, there is a lot of fire and catastrophe on and. So thats just accidental but everything after a while, the sydney. Lou large and they get blamed for everything. You have these different factions of San Francisco powerbrokers. So on the left is sam brandon. Hes a Brigham Young man in california. He is taking the tithes for Brigham Young and the Mormon Church but somehow all of that tithe money from mormons doesnt really make it back to Brigham Young in utah. It somehow stays with sam brandon. On the opposite side, sam brandon is one of the vigilante leaders. There is a feeling that the police in the courts are being too lenient on people. That there is a revolving door, people get charged and they get off for these crimes. Whether it is arson or robbery or whatever. Things are too chaotic, too violent. Might sound like the way the National Media describes San Francisco now. You will see these patterns reassert themselves through my talk and in general. Sam brandon is the law order guy. Hes wanting to send the cops into the tender going to crackdown on everything. On the other cited things is david roderick. He is later a state senator from california. Irish or irishamerican, comes from new york, brings a lot of his tammany hall types with him. He makes his fortune by selling 10 gold coins with only seven dollars or eight dollars of gold in them. Kind of like the ads you see on like digital broadcast tv or on the back of the national enquirer, get gold coins now. Shore up your fortune. Hes kind of running those scams and hes also not about using, you know, false bottom to ballot boxes and rigging elections. Hes definitely kind of, kind of, you know, hes fast and loose there. Again, a little bit of larceny in his heart. So, like i said, there is this perception that its the courts are too lenient. If you are rigging elections and get connected, you never get charged or let go right away. This is a theme in the San Francisco history as well. They are after a sydney dock called the english jim. The vigilantes are not rabble. They are merchants. They are top citizens in San Francisco. They are, they are Business Leaders and those types. Day, they stormed the San Francisco county jail to get lish jim at one point. Hes not there. There are a cou