One OF the most notorious crimes of Jazz Age Los Angeles began quietly enough with a lost boy.
But the Walter Collins case would end up becoming the O.J. Simpson drama of its day, a horrifying crime that inspired a media frenzy and captivated the Southland. What started as the real-life tale of a missing child would eventually take on a much larger significance in the then-burgeoning city. Though the details may have faded into the miasma of time, its commentary on corruption and abuse of authority, on female empowerment and on the ultimate price of justice, continues to echo throughout the canyons of L.A.'s collective memory.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, October 19, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 24 words Type of Material: Correction
Clint Eastwood: An article in today's Calendar section about Clint Eastwood's newest film, "Changeling," says the actor-director has three children. Eastwood has seven children.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, October 26, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 23 words Type of Material: Correction
Clint Eastwood: An article last Sunday about Clint Eastwood's latest film, "Changeling," stated that the actor-director has three children. Eastwood has seven children.
In the middle of it all was Christine Collins, Walter's mother, a victim turned unlikely heroine.
On March 10, 1928, Collins gave 9-year-old Walter a dime to see a movie. Collins, who lived in a middle-class Mount Washington neighborhood, was an anomaly for an era when women were still considered to suffer from the vapors. A handsome woman with prominent features, she was a single mom whose ex-husband sat in jail for helping to run a speak-easy. She was also a professional woman who worked at the telephone company and apparently prided herself on maintaining a nonemotional, businesslike manner when dealing with men in authority.
Walter disappeared that day, a fact that was chronicled in the Los Angeles Times several days later. Within weeks, the police (with the press watching) were conducting a massive manhunt and dragging Lincoln Park lake for Walter's body. Tips poured in, with people claiming to have seen the boy in a Glendale gas station, sitting in a back seat of a car, wrapped in newspaper -- and even as far away as San Francisco. The boy's father, Walter J.S. Collins, floated the theory that some of his former inmates kidnapped his son, perhaps out of revenge.
In August, the LAPD delivered a boy to Christine Collins, her putative son who'd been found in Illinois. It was an apparent coup for the Los Angeles Police Department, which had routinely suffered bad press and whose chief, James Davis, was famous (now infamous) for having created only two years before a 50-man "gun squad" to go after the city's criminal element with the express command to bring in the purported crooks "dead, not alive."
