Sleuths, Scribes Give High-Profile Cases Catchy Names

Criminal history is rich with wrongdoers who might have died in obscurity if someone had not bestowed on them such flashy monikers as the Squash Patch Murderer, Bat Man, Tiger Woman or the Torso Murderer--all dreamed up by cops or cop reporters.

Thus, with a well-schooled observation and a quick turn of phrase, investigators and reporters in the newspaper age have transformed unknown suspects and crime scenes into virtual household names--and elevated their crimes to headline news.

In the 1920s, L.A.’s press gave the world the Tiger Woman after Clara Phillips attacked her husband’s lover with a claw hammer, earning her the dramatic sobriquet.

For eight years, in the 1920s and ‘30s, brassy headlines reflected the cutthroat newspaper competition in recounting the story of secret love and death in the “Bat Man” murder case; the killer was a 5-foot-2-inch man who lived in his lover’s attic for more than a decade before emerging to kill the woman’s husband.

The sensational 1928 “White Flame Murder” was so called because the murderer said he saw a white flame explode in his head when he saw his wife making love to his best friend on a piano bench. He shot and killed both of them.

A decade later, Rattlesnake James earned that name after he bought two snakes and set them on his pregnant wife. When she didn’t die fast enough, he drowned her in the bathtub. His luck ran out in 1942, when he became the last man to be hanged in California.

In the 1930s, after years of bucking male reporters and scooping rival newspapers, Los Angeles Herald reporter Aggie Underwood prided herself on christening murder cases with catchy names.

In a moment of inspiration--and calculation--she dropped a white carnation on the body of a waitress who had been stabbed to death. She gave the homicide a name: “The White Carnation Murder.” When she told a photographer to take a picture of her creation, a cop objected--and Underwood smacked him with her purse.

Other Los Angeles daily newspapers boasted of naming murder cases. The Herald-Express named the “White Orchid Murder” and the “Red Hibiscus Murder.” It was an age of floral patterns and florid names.

Among the best known was the 1942 beating death of 21-year-old Jose Diaz at a Los Angeles swimming hole. A Los Angeles Examiner reporter dubbed the killing the “Sleepy Lagoon” murder after the title of a song by trumpeter Harry James. The case became even more notorious for judicial misconduct and racial stereotypes.

In 1947, Los Angeles Daily News reporter Jack Smith--who would later become a much-loved Times columnist--had what he later called “my finest hour as a newspaperman.”

The body of a nude woman, cut in half, was found in a vacant lot near USC. Working the phones, Smith found a Long Beach pharmacist who remembered the victim, Elizabeth Short. “They called her the Black Dahlia--on account of the way she wore her hair,” the pharmacist said. Voila--the slaying of the “Black Dahlia” remains unsolved to this day, and still holds the power to fascinate.

In the mid-1940s, wealthy, 42-year-old Van Nuys nurseryman Fred Hills caught the public’s attention after he strangled his wife, Doris, 42, and buried her next to their house, 10 feet beneath a squash patch.

The “Squash Patch Murderer,” as he came to be known, had learned his wife was planning to divorce him and take her half of their community property, so he killed her. Later, he said he never would have confessed if “policemen hadn’t pulled my hair, slapped my face and punched me in the stomach.”

As for her body, he said, “I figured no one would ever find her that deep, what with all the plants growing on top of her.”

Three days before Hills was to be executed, Gov. Earl Warren commuted his sentence to life in prison; he was paroled in 1960.

“Torso Murderer” Art Lewis Eggers, 52, wasn’t so fortunate. Just weeks after Hills’ crime, Eggers beat his wife and shot her three times, then cut off her head and hands so no one could identify her body. He believed he was being cuckolded; she often stepped out at dance halls.

Eggers, a mild-mannered wannabe cop who worked as a clerk for the Temple City sheriff’s station, filed a missing persons report on his 42-year-old wife, Dorothy. But the tactic backfired when co-workers became suspicious and found discrepancies in his report.

Within a few days, a headless and handless body was found in the San Bernardino Mountains. Reporters took to calling Hills the “Torso Murderer.”

It took a Temple City doctor and Dorothy’s bespectacled dance partner--whom the Herald-Express dubbed “dancing daddy”--to identify the torso by a scar on her shin and by her unsightly bunions.

Eggers eventually admitted killing her. But, even until the last, he denied cutting off her head and hands. He was executed in the gas chamber on Oct. 15, 1948. The body parts were never found.

Code nicknames for bank robbers go back a long way. Lloyd E. Sampsel gained notoriety as the “yacht bandit” because he and members of his gang used a yacht as a hide-out after robbing several gambling ships off the California coast in the 1920s and ‘30s.

While Sampsel was serving a life sentence at Folsom Prison in 1943, four unauthorized visits with his wife in San Francisco--with the help of bribed prison guards--touched off a sensational investigation of the prison administration. His moniker stuck for almost three decades. After his release, he killed a Chula Vista man in a bank robbery. He was executed on May 25, 1952.

For the last several decades, veteran FBI agent and gangster buff Bill Rehder has spent several minutes each day dreaming up nicknames for the cast of characters who once made the Southland the bank robbery capital of the world.

The “Clearasil Bandit,” a robber with a bad complexion, made noises about suing the FBI for libel for the humiliating dig at his acne. His attorney, David Bartick, refused to handle that suit, saying: “It could have been worse. He could have been called the B.O. Bandit”--a reference to another bank robber with that name and condition.

Consider the holdup artist who crafted atrociously spelled demand notes announcing: “This is a rabbry,” and warning bank tellers not to “pull anytrix.” He was sarcastically dubbed the “Post-Graduate Bandit.”

“Large Marge” was a foulmouthed woman who shouted obscenities as she robbed more than 30 banks, and “Miss Piggy” was a 5-foot-4, 200-pound-plus woman who made her getaways in a Volkswagen Beetle.

The man dubbed the “Polite Bank Robber” often waited patiently in line, letting others cut in front of him, before holding up the teller. He never displayed a gun or injured anyone, but still got 15 years to brush up on his manners.

Star-conscious Los Angeles also has had its share of celebrity look-alikes: Tina Turner and Groucho Marx Bandits. Other nicknames bestowed on Southern California holdup artists include the Nerd, Baby Huey, the Mummy Bandit, the Troll, the Shamu Bandit, Miss America--for a pretty woman--the Pervert and the Pistol-Packin’ Priest.