Police Chief William H. Parker immediately announced that Goldsworth's death was a mob killing and turned the investigation over to Chief of Detectives Thad Brown.
In tracing Goldsworth's last movements, detectives interviewed Rue, 34, who told them that the bookie left the shop after being paid the $4,200 gambling debt.
Under further questioning, Rue admitted killing Goldsworth. He said that he had offered the bookie $200, but that Goldsworth had drawn a gun and demanded the entire amount. Rue said he grabbed a hammer and hit Goldsworth, took the bookie's gun and shot him with it and then hit him again with the hammer.
Rue said he wrapped the body with dropcloths that some painters had left in the back of the dress shop and hauled it out to the car.
He planned to dump the body in the desert but got lost on Rhodes, which is a dead-end street, and abandoned the car. He walked back to the shop, burned the dropcloths and painted the floor red when he couldn't clean Goldsworth's blood off the concrete.
While he was being questioned, Rue apparently pried a piece of metal molding from a desk and later that day, while in jail, he tried to kill himself by slashing his neck with it. The next day, police took him back to the dress shop and filmed him reenacting the killing. Investigators searched the route from the dress shop to where the car was parked, but never found the gun.
According to grand jury testimony, the bullets recovered from Goldsworth's body had no marks from the rifling in the gun barrel. LAPD ballistics expert Sgt. William Lee said the bullets must have been too small for the gun and were therefore fired "with insufficient force."
Coroner's investigator Dr. Frederick Newbarr said that Goldsworth died from the hammer blows and that the gunshot wounds were only superficial.
Rue was convicted of second-degree murder on Feb. 27, 1959.
Although The Times didn't report the term of his sentence, Rue may have been released from prison. California death records say a man named Clifford Rue died in Los Angeles on July 24, 1972, at the age of 48. A 1972 Times story refers to a company called Credit Security Insurance, which was reorganized after the death of its former president, Clifford Rue.
Despite Rue's confession that the killing was over a gambling debt, the police chief continued to see the Mafia's influence in Goldsworth's death and some websites include it in a list of mob killings.
And as for the answers to queries put to Rue's Sports Information Results: The biggest football score was 222-0 (Georgia Tech over Cumberland University, 1916), a college football record that stands today. The maximum speed of a duck? It depends on the wind.
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larry.harnisch@latimes.com
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latimes.com
/thedailymirror
Harnisch reflects on Los Angeles history on his blog.
